In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (38 page)

     
"Maybe you were justified in your feelings."

     
"Yes, that's what I told myself throughout the night or when I remembered the bloodless glow that his skin gave off when we wrapped him for burial. Then an opportunity presented itself from aloft in our balloon I looked down upon a copse of hackberry trees. Hard by a surgeon's tent a dozen federals were squatting along a latrine with their breeches down to their ankles. Two hundred yards up the bayou, unseen by any of them, was one of our boats with a twelve-pounder on its bow. I simply had to tap the order on the telegrapher's key and our gunners would have loaded with grape and raked those poor devils through their own excrement. But that's not our way, is it?"

     
"Speak for yourself."

     
"Your pretense as cynic is unconvincing."

     
"Let me ask you a question, general. The women who donated their dresses and petticoats for your balloon . . . what if they were raped, sodomized, and methodically beaten and you got your hands on the men who did it to them?"

     
"They'd be arrested by my provost, tried in a provisional court, and hanged."

     
"You wouldn't find that the case today."

      His long, narrow face was perplexed.

     
"Why not?"
he said.

     
"I
don't know. Maybe we have so much collective guilt as a society that we fear to punish our individual members."

     
He put his hat on the back of his head, crossed his good leg across his cork knee, and wet the end of a cheroot. Several of his enlisted men were kneeling by my coulee, filling their canteens. Their faces were dusty, their lips blackened with gunpowder from biting through cartridge papers. The patchwork silk balloon shuddered in the wind and shimmered with the silvery light of the coming rainstorm.

     
"I
won't presume to be your conscience,"
the general said.
"But as your friend who wishes to see you do no harm to yourself, I advise you to give serious thought about keeping your dead friend's weapon."

     
"I have."

     
"I think you're making a serious mistake, suh. You disappoint me, too."

      He waved his hand impatiently at his aides, and they helped him to his feet.

     
"I'm sorry you feel that way,"
I said.

      But the general was not one given to debate. He stumped along on his crutch and cork leg toward the balloon's basket, his cigar clenched at an upward angle in his teeth, his eyes flicking about at the wind-torn clouds and the lightning that trembled whitely like heated wires out on the Gulf.

      The incoming storm blew clouds of dust out of my neighbor's canefield just as the general's balloon lifted him and his aides aloft, their telegraph wire flopping from the wicker basket like an umbilical cord.

      When I woke from my dream, the gray skies were filled with a dozen silken hot-air balloons, painted in the outrageous colors of circus wagons, their dim shadows streaking across barn roofs, dirt roads, clapboard houses, general stores, clumps of cows, winding bayous, until the balloons themselves were only distant specks above the summer-green horizon outside Lafayette.

      On Monday morning I went to Lou Girard's funeral in Lafayette. It was a boiling green-gold day. At the cemetery a layer of heat seemed to rise off the spongy grass and grow in intensity as the white sun climbed toward the top of the sky. During the graveside service someone was running a power mower behind the brick wall that separated the crypts from a subdivision. The mower coughed and backfired and echoed off the bricks like someone firing rounds from a small-caliber revolver. The eyes of the cops who stood at attention in full uniform kept watering from the heat and the smell of weed killer. When the police chief and a captain removed the flag from Lou's casket and folded it into a military square, there was no family member there to receive it. The casket remained closed during the ceremony. Before the casket was lowered into the ground, the department chaplin removed a framed picture of Lou in uniform from the top and set it on a folding table under the funeral canopy. Accidentally he tipped it with the back of his hand so that it fell face down on the linen.

I DROVE BACK HOME FOR LUNCH BEFORE HEADING FOR the office. It was cool under the ceiling fan in the kitchen, and the breeze swayed the baskets of impatiens that hung on hooks from the eave of the back porch. Bootsie set a glass of iced tea with mint leaves and a plate of ham-and-onion sandwiches and deviled eggs in front of me.

      "Where's Alafair?" I said.

      "Elrod took her and Tripod out to Spanish Lake," she said from the sink.

      "To the movie location?"

      "Yes, I think so."

      When I didn't speak, she turned around and looked at me.

      "Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

      "Julie Balboni's out there, Boots."

      "He lives here now, Dave. He's lots of places. I don't think we should start choosing where we go and don't go because of a man like that."

      "I don't want Alafair around him."

      "I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd object."

      "Boots, there's something I didn't tell you about. Saturday a hood named Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic video that evidently Balboni and his people made. It's as dark as dark gets. There's one scene where it looks like a woman is actually beaten to death."

      Her eyes blinked, then she said, "I'll go out to Spanish Lake and bring her home. Why don't you finish eating?"

      "Don't worry about it. There's no harm done. I'll go get her before I go to the office."

      "Can't somebody do something about him?"

      "When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily."

      "Where did you get that piece of Puritan theology?"

      "It's not funny. The morons on the Chamber of Commerce who brought this guy here would screw up the recipe for ice water."

      I heard her laugh and walk around behind me. Then I felt her hands on my shoulders and her mouth kiss the top of my head.

      "Dave, you're just too much," she said, and hugged me across the chest.

I LISTENED TO THE NEWS ON THE RADIO AS I DROVE OUT TO Spanish Lake. A tropical storm off Cuba was gaining hurricane status and was expected to turn northwest toward the Gulf Coast. I glanced to the south, but the sky was brassy and hot and virtually free of clouds. Then as I passed the little watermelon and fruit stand at the end of West Main and headed out into the parish, my radio filled with static and my engine began to misfire.

      The truck jerked and sputtered all the way to the entrance of the movie location at the lake. I pulled off the dirt road onto the grass by the security building where Murphy Doucet worked and opened the hood. He stepped out the door in his gray uniform and bifocals.

      "What's wrong, Dave?" he asked. His glasses had half-moons of light in them. His blue eyes jittered back and forth when he looked at me.

      "It looks like a loose wire on the voltage regulator." I felt at my pants pocket. "Do you have a knife I could use?"

      "Yeah, I ought to have something."

      I followed him inside his office. His work table was covered with the balsa-wood parts of an amphibian airplane. In the middle of the blueprints was a utility knife with a detachable blade inset in the aluminum handle. But his hand passed over it and opened a drawer and removed a black-handled switchblade knife. He pushed the release button and the blade leaped open in his hand.

      "This should do it," he said. "A Mexican pulled this on me in Lake Charles."

      "I didn't know you were a cop in Lake Charles."

      "I wasn't. I was out on the highway with the State Police. That's what I retired from last year."

      "Thanks for the loan of the knife."

      I trimmed the insulation away from the end of the loose wire and reattached it to the voltage regulator, then returned the knife to Murphy Doucet and drove into the grove of oak trees by the lake. When I looked in the rearview mirror Doucet was watching me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

      The cast and crew were just finishing lunch by the water's edge at picnic tables that were spread with checkered cloths and buckets of fried chicken, potato salad, dirty rice, cole slaw, and sweating plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Alafair sat on a wood bench in the shade, next to Elrod, the lake shimmering behind her. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century street urchin.

      "What happened to your clothes?" I said.

      "I'm in the movie, Dave!" she said. "In this scene with Hogman and Elrod. We're walking down the road with a plantation burning behind us and the Yankees are about to take over the town."

      "I'm not kidding you, Dave," Elrod said. He wore a collarless gray shirt, officer's striped trousers, and black suspenders. "She's a natural. Mikey said the same thing. She looks good from any camera angle. We worked her right into the scene."

      "What about Tripod?" I said.

      "He's in it, too," Alafair said.

      "You're kidding?"

      "We're getting him a membership in the Screen Actors Guild," Elrod said.

      Elrod poured a paper cup of iced tea for me. The wind blew leaves out of the trees and flapped the corners of the checkered table covers. For the first time that day I could smell salt in the air.

      "This looks like the good life," I said.

      "Don't be too quick to judge," Elrod said. "A healthy lifestyle in southern California means running three miles on the beach in the morning, eating bean sprouts all day, and shoving five hundred bucks' worth of coke up your nose at night."

      The other actors began drifting away from the table to return to work. Tripod was on his chain, eating a drumstick by the trunk of a tree. On the grass next to him was a model of a German Messerschmitt, its wooden fuselage bright with silver paint, its red-edged iron crosses and Nazi swastikas as darkly beguiling as the light in a serpent's eye.

      "I gave her that. I hope you didn't mind," Elrod said.

      "Where'd you get it?"

      "From Murph, up there at the security building. I'm afraid he thinks I can get him on making props for Mikey or something. I think he's kind of a lonely guy, isn't he?"

      "I don't know much about him."

      "Alafair, can you go find Hogman and tell him we need to do that scene again in about fifteen minutes?" Elrod said.

      "Sure, El," she said, swung her legs over the bench, scooped Tripod over her shoulder, and ran off through the trees.

      "Look, El, I appreciate your working Alafair into your movie, but frankly I don't want her out here as long as Julie Balboni's around."

      "I thought you heard."

      "What?"

      "Mikey's filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. He's eighty-sixing the greaseballs out of the corporation. The last thing those guys want is the court examining their finances. He told off Balboni this morning in front of the whole crew."

      "What do you mean he told him off?"

      "He said Balboni was never going to put a hand on one of Mikey's people again. He told him to take his porno actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his ass back to New Orleans. I was really proud of Mikey. . . What's the matter?"

      "What did Julie have to say?"

      "He cleaned his fingernails with a toothpick, then walked out to the lake and started talking to somebody on his cellular phone and skipping rocks across the water at the ducks."

      "Where is he now?"

      "He drove off with his whole crew in his limo."

      "I'd like to talk with Mr. Goldman."

      "He's on the other side of the lake."

      "Ask him to call me, will you? If he doesn't catch me at the office, he can call me at home tonight."

      "He'll be back in a few minutes to shoot the scene with me and Hogman and Alafair."

      "We're not going to be here for it."

      "You won't let her be in the film?"

      "Nobody humiliates Julie Balboni in front of other people, El. I don't know what he's going to do, but I don't want Alafair here when he does it."

      The wind had turned out of the south and was blowing hotly through the trees when we walked back toward my truck. The air smelled like fish spawning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were massing in a long, low humped line on the southern horizon.

LATER, AFTER I HAD TAKEN ALAFAIR HOME AND CHECKED IN AT the office, I drove to Opelousas to talk once again with the old jailer Ben Hebert. A black man raking leaves in Hebert's yard told me where I could find him on a bayou just outside of town.

      He sat on top of an inverted plastic bucket under a tree, his cane pole extended out into the sunlight, his red bobber drifting on the edge of the reeds. He wore a crushed straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a hand-rolled saliva-soaked cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth. The layers of white fat on his hips and stomach protruded between his shirt and khakis like lard curling over the edges of a washtub.

      Ten feet down from him a middle-aged mulatto woman with a small round head, a perforated dime tied on her ankle, was also fishing as she sat on top of an inverted bucket. The ground around her was strewn with empty beer cans. She spit snuff to one side and jigged her line up and down through a torn hole in a lily pad.

      Ben Hebert pitched his cigarette out onto the current, where it hissed and turned in a brown eddy.

      "Why you keep bothering me?" he said. There was beer on his breath and an eye-watering smell in his clothes that was like both dried sweat and urine.