In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (47 page)

     
I believe Julie and his father possessed a knowledge about us that we did not possess about ourselves. They knew we were for sale.

      Julie finally went down, but in a way that no one expected—in a beef with the IRS. No, that's not quite right, either. That ubiquitous federal agency, the bane of the mob, was only a minor footnote in Julie's denouement. The seed of Julie's undoing was Julie. And I guess Julie in his grandiosity would not have had it any other way.

      He should have done easy time, a three-year waltz on a federal honor farm in Florida, with no fences or gunbulls, with two-man rooms rather than cells, tennis courts, and weekend furloughs. But while in federal custody in New Orleans he spit in a bailiff's face, tore the lavatory out of his cell wall, and told an informant planted in his cell that he was putting a hit out on Cholo Manelli, who he believed had turned over his books to the IRS (which I heard later was true).

      So they shipped Baby Feet up to a maximum-security unit at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a place that in the wintertime makes you believe that the earth has been poisoned with Agent Orange and the subzero winds blow from four directions simultaneously.

      Most people are not aware of who comprises the population of a maximum-security lockup. They are usually not men like Baby Feet, who was intelligent and fairly sane for a sociopath. Instead, they are usually psychotic meltdowns, although they are not classified as such, otherwise they would be sent to mental institutions from which they would probably be released in a relatively short time. Perhaps they have the intelligence levels of battery-charged cabbages, housed in six-and-one-half-foot bodies that glow with rut. Often they're momma's boys who wear horn-rimmed glasses and comb their hair out on their frail shoulders like girls, murder whole families, and can never offer more in the way of explanation than a bemused and youthful smile.

      But none was a match for Julie. He was a made guy, connected both on the inside and outside, a blockhouse behemoth whose whirling feet could make men bleed from every orifice in their bodies. He took over the dope trade, broke heads and groins in the shower, paid to have a rival shanked in the yard and a snitch drowned in a toilet bowl.

      He also became a celebrity wolf among the punk population. They ironed his clothes, shampooed his hair, manicured his nails, and asked him in advance what kind of wigs and women's underthings they should wear when they came to his bunk. He encouraged jealousies among them and watched as an amused spectator while they schemed and fought among themselves for his affections and the reefer, pills, and prune-o he could provide to his favorites.

      Perhaps he even found the adoration and submission that had always eluded him from the time he used to visit Mabel White's mulatto brothel in Crowley until he had Cherry LeBlanc murdered.

      At least the psychologist at Fort Leavenworth who told me this story thought so. He said Julie actually seemed happy his first and final spring on the yard, hitting flyballs to his boys in the outfield, ripping the bat from deep in the box with the power and grace of a DiMaggio, the fine black hair on his shoulders glazed with sweat, his black silk shorts hanging on his hips with the confident male abandon of both a successful athlete and lover, snapping his wrists as he connected with the ball, lifting it higher into the blue sky than anyone at Leavenworth had ever done before, while all around him other cons touched themselves and nodded with approval.

      Maybe he was still thinking about these things on the Sunday evening he came in from the diamond, showered, and went to the empty cell of his current lover to take a nap under a small rubber-bladed fan with the sheet over his head. Maybe in his dreams he was once again a movie producer on the edge of immense success, a small-town boy whose story would be recreated by biographers and become the stuff of legends in Hollywood, a beneficent but feared mogul in sunglasses and a two-thousand-dollar white tropical suit who strolled with elegance and grace through the bougainvillea and palm trees and the clink of champagne glasses at Beverly Hills lawn parties.

      Or maybe, for just a moment, when a pain sharper than any he had ever thought possible entered his consciousness like a red shard of glass, he saw the face of his father contorted like a fist as the father held him at gunpoint and whipped the nozzle end of a garden hose across Julie's shivering back.

      The Molotov cocktail thrown by a competitor for Julie's affections burst on the stone wall above the bunk where Julie was sleeping and covered his entire body with burning paraffin and gasoline. He erupted from the bunk, flailing at the air, the sheet dissolving in black holes against his skin. He ran blindly through the open cell door, wiping at his eyes and mouth, his disintegrating shape an enormous cone of flame now, and with one long bellowing cry he sprang over the rail of the tier and plunged like a meteor three stories to the cement floor below.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TWINKY HEBERT LEMOYNE?

      Nothing. Not externally. He's still out there, a member of a generation whose metamorphosis never quite takes place.

      Sometimes I see his picture on the business page of the Lafayette newspaper. You can count on him to be at fundraiser kick-off breakfasts for whatever charity is in fashion with the business community. In all probability he's even sincere. Once or twice I've run into him at a crab boil or fish fry in New Iberia. He doesn't do well, however, in a personal encounter with the past. His manners are of course gentlemanly, his pink skin and egg-shaped head and crinkling seersucker suit images that you associate with a thoughtful and genteel southern barrister, but in the steady and trained avoidance that his eyes perform when you look into his face, you see another man, one whose sense of self-worth was so base that he would participate in a lynching because he had been made a cuckold by one of his own black employees.

      No, that's not quite fair to him.

      Perhaps, just like Julie Balboni, Twinky Hebert is us. He loathed his past so much that he could never acknowledge it, never expiate his sin, and never forgive himself, either. So, like Proteus rising from the sea and forever reshaping his form, Twinky Hebert Lemoyne made a contract of deceit with himself and consequently doomed himself to relive his past every day of his life.

      At the crab boil in the park on Bayou Teche he inadvertently sat down at a wooden table under the pavilion not three feet away from me, Bootsie, and Alafair. He had just started to crack the claws on a crab when he realized who sat across from him.

      "What are
you
doing here?" he asked, his mouth hanging open.

      "I live in New Iberia. I was invited to attend."

      "Are you trying to harass me?"

      "I closed the file on the summer of 1957, Mr. Lemoyne. Why don't you?"

      There was a painful light, like a burning match, deep in his eyes. He tried to break open a crab claw with a pair of nutcrackers, then his hand slipped and sprayed juice on his shirt front.

      "Tell a minister about it, tell a cop, get on a plane and tell somebody you never saw before," I said. "Just get rid of it once and for all and lose the Rotary Club doodah."

      But he was already walking rapidly toward the men's room, scrubbing at his palms with a paper towel, his change rattling in his pants' pockets, twisting his neck from side to side as though his tie and stiff collar were a rope against his skin.

WE TOOK OUR VACATION THAT YEAR IN CALIFORNIA AND stayed with Elrod in his ranch home built on stilts high up on a cliff in Topanga Canyon, overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean that was covered each morning with a thick bluish-white mist, inside which you could hear the waves crashing like avalanches into the beach.

      For two weeks Alafair acted in a picture out at Tri-Star with Mikey Goldman and Elrod, and in the evenings we ate cherrystone clams at Gladstone's on the beach and took rides in Mikey Goldman's pontoon plane out to Catalina Island. As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific's watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trcilises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun's afterglow.

      Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

      I thought in the morning mists that rolled up the canyon I might once again see the noble and chivalric John Bell Hood. Just a glimpse, perhaps, a doff of his hat, the kindness of his smile, the beleaguered affection that always seemed to linger in his face. Then as the days passed and I began to let go of all the violent events of that summer, I had to accept the fact that the general, as Bootsie had said, was indeed only a hopeful figment of my fantasies, a metaphorical and mythic figure probably created as much by the pen of Thomas Malory or Walter Scott as the LSD someone had put in my drink out at Spanish Lake.

      Then two nights before we returned home, Alafair was sitting on the coral wall that rimmed Elrod's terrace, flipping the pages in one of the library books Bootsie had checked out on the War Between the States.

      "What you doing in here, Dave?" she said.

      "In what? What are you talking about, little guy?"

      She continued to stare down at a page opened in her lap.

      "You're in the picture. With that old man Poteet and I saw in the corn patch. The one with B.O.," she said, and turned the book around so I could look at it.

      In the photograph, posed in the stiff attitudes of nineteenth-century photography, were the general and seven of his aides and enlisted men.

      "Standing in the back. The one without a gun. That's you, Dave," she said. Then she stared up at me with a confused question mark in the middle of her face. "Ain't it?"

      "Don't say 'ain't,' little guy."

      "What are you doing in the picture?"

      "That’s not me, Alf. Those are Texas soldiers who fought alongside John Bell Hood. I bet they were a pretty good bunch," I said, and rubbed the top of her head.

      "How do you know they're from Texas? It doesn't say that here."

      "It's just a guess."

      She looked at the photograph again and back at me, and her face became more confused.

      "Let's get Elrod and Bootsie and go down to the beach for some ice cream," I said.

      I slipped the book from her hand and closed it, picked her up on my hip, and walked through the canopy of purple trumpet vine toward the patio behind the house, where Bootsie and Elrod were clearing off the dishes from supper. Down the canyon, smoke from meat fires drifted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I squinted my eyes in the sun's setting, I could almost pretend that Spanish soldiers in silver chest armor and bladed helmets or a long-dead race of hunters were encamped on those hillsides. Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history—gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours.