In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (7 page)

      "She worked here, ain't she?" She squinted her eyes against the water spray bouncing off the glass.

      "Do you know if she had a boyfriend,
tante?”

      "If that's what you want to call it."

      "What do you mean?" I asked, already knowing the answer that I didn't want to hear.

      "She in the bidness."

      "Full time, in a serious way?"

      "What you call sellin' out of your pants?"

      "Was Mr. Trajan involved?"

      "Ax him."

      "I don't think he was, otherwise you wouldn't be telling me these things,
tante."
I smiled at her.

      She began refilling the bucket with clear water. She suddenly looked tired.

      "She a sad girl," she said. She wiped the perspiration off her round face with her palm and looked at it. "I tole her they ain't no amount of money gonna he'p her when some man make her sick, no. I tole her a pretty white girl like her can have anything she want—school, car, a husband wit' a job on them oil rig. When that girl dress up, she look like a movie star. She say, 'Jennifer, some people is suppose' to have only what other people let them have.' Lord God, her age and white and believing somet'ing like that."

      "Who was her pimp, Jennifer?"

      "They come here for her."

      "Who?"

      "The mens. When they want her. They come here and take her home."

      "Do you know who they were, their names?"

      "Them kind ain't got no names. They just drive their car up when she get off work and that po' girl get in."

      "I see. All right, Jennifer, this is my card with my telephone number on it. Would you call me if you remember anything else that might help me?"

      "I don't be knowin' anything else, me. She wasn't goin' to give the name of some rich white man to an old nigger."

      "What white man?"

      "That's what I tellin' you. I don't know, me."

      "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying."

      "You don't understand English, you? Where you from? She say they a rich white man maybe gonna get her out of sellin' jellyroll. She say that the last time I seen her, right befo' somebody do them awful t'ings to that young girl. Mister, when they in the bidness, every man got a sweet word in his mouth, every man got a special way to keep jellyroll in his bed and the dollar in his pocket."

      She threw the bucket of clear water on the glass, splashing both of us, then walked heavily with her brushes, cleaning rags, and empty bucket down the alley next to the bar.

THE RAIN FELL THROUGH THE CANOPY OF OAKS AS I DROVE down the dirt road along the bayou toward my house. During the summer it rains almost every afternoon in southern Louisiana. From my gallery, around three o'clock, you could watch the clouds build as high and dark as mountains out on the Gulf, then within minutes the barometer would drop, the air would suddenly turn cool and smell like ozone and gun metal and fish spawning, the wind would begin to blow out of the south and straighten the moss on the dead cypress trees in the marsh, bend the cattails in the bayou, and swell and ruffle the pecan trees in my front yard; then a sheet of gray rain would move out of the marsh, across the floating islands of purple hyacinths in the bayou, my bait shop and the canvas awning over my boat-rental dock, and ring as loud on my gallery as marbles bouncing on corrugated tin.

      I parked the truck under the pecan trees and ran up the incline to the front steps. My father, a trapper and oil-field roughneck who worked high on the derrick, on what they called the monkey board, built the house of cypress and oak back in the Depression. The planks in the walls and floors were notched and joined with wooden pegs. You couldn't shove a playing card in a seam. With age the wood had weathered almost black. I think rifle balls would have bounced off it.

      My wife's car was gone, but through the screen door I could smell shrimp on the stove. I looked for Alafair, my adopted daughter, but didn't see her either. Then I saw that the horse lot and shed were empty and Alafair's three-legged coon, Tripod, was not in his cage on top of the rabbit hutches or on the chain that allowed him to run along a clothesline between two tree trunks.

I started to go inside, then I heard her horse paw the leaves around the side of the house.

      "Alafair?"

      Nothing.

      "Alf, I've got a feeling somebody is doing something she isn't supposed to."

      "What's that, Dave?" she said.

      "Would you please come out here and bring your friends with you?"

      She rode her Appaloosa out from under the eave. Her tennis shoes, pink shorts, and T-shirt were sopping, and her tanned skin glistened with water. She grinned under her straw hat.

      "Alf, what happened the last time you took Tripod for a ride?"

      She looked off reflectively at the rain falling in the trees. Tripod squirmed in her hands. He was a beautiful coon, silver-tipped, with a black mask and black rings on his thick tail.

      "I told him not to do that no more, Dave."

      "It's 'anymore.' "

      "Anymore. He ain't gonna do it anymore, Dave."

      She was grinning again. Tex, her Appaloosa, was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots on his rump. Last week Tripod had spiked his claws into Tex's rump, and Alafair had been thrown end over end into the tomato plants.

      "Where's Bootsie?"

      "At the store in town."

      "How about putting Tex in the shed and coming in for some ice cream? You think you can handle that, little guy?"

      "Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, Dave," she said, as though both of us had just thought our way through a problem. She continued to look at me, her dark eyes full of light. "What about Tripod?"

      "I think Tripod probably needs some ice cream, too."

      Her face beamed. She set Tripod on top of the hutches, then slid down off her horse into a mud puddle. I watched her hook Tripod to his chain and lead Tex back to the lot. She was eleven years old now. Her body was round and hard and full of energy, her Indian-black hair as shiny as a raven's wing; when she smiled, her eyes squinted almost completely shut. Six years ago I had pulled her from a wobbling envelope of air inside the submerged wreckage of a twin-engine plane out on the salt.

      She hooked Tripod's chain on the back porch and went into her bedroom to change clothes. I put a small amount of ice cream in two bowls and set them on the table. Above the counter a telephone number was written on the small blackboard we used for messages. Alafair came back into the kitchen, rubbing her head with a towel. She wore her slippers, her elastic-waisted blue jeans, and an oversized University of Southwestern Louisiana T-shirt. She kept blowing her bangs out of her eyes.

      "You promise you're going to eat your supper?" I said.

      "Of course. What difference does it make if you eat ice cream before supper instead of after? You're silly sometimes, Dave."

      "Oh, I see."

      "You have funny ideas sometimes."

      "You're growing up on me."

      "What?"

      "Never mind."

      She brought Tripod's pan in from the porch and put a scoop of ice cream in it. The rain had slackened, and I could see the late sun breaking through the mist, like a pink wafer, above the sugarcane at the back of my property.

      "Oh, I forgot, a man called," she said. "That's his number."

      "Who was it?"

      "He said he was a friend of yours. I couldn't hear because it was real noisy."

      "Next time have the person spell his name and write it on the blackboard with his number, Alf."

      "He said he wanted to talk with you about some man with one arm and one leg."

      "What?"

      "He said a soldier. He was mixing up his words. I couldn't understand him."

      "What kind of soldier? That doesn't make too much sense, Alf."

      "He kept burping while he talked. He said his grandfather was a Texas ranger. What's a Texas ranger?"

     
Oh, boy,
I thought.

      "How about Elrod T. Sykes?" I said.

      "Yeah, that's it."

      Time for an unlisted number, I thought.

      "What was he talking about, Dave?"

      "He was probably drunk. Don't pay attention to what drunk people say. If he calls again like that when Bootsie and I aren't here, tell him I'll call him and then hang up."

      "Don't you like him?"

      "When a person is drunk, he's sick, Alafair. If you talk to that person while he's drunk, in a funny way you become like him. Don't worry, I'll have a talk with him later."

      "He didn't say anything bad, Dave."

      "But he shouldn't be calling here and bothering little people," I said, and winked at her. I watched the concern in her face. The corners of her mouth were turned down, and her eyes looked into an empty space above her ice-cream dish. "You're right, little guy. We shouldn't be mad at people. I think Elrod Sykes is probably an all-right guy. He probably just opens too many bottles in one day sometimes."

      She was smiling again. She had big, wide-set white teeth, and there was a smear of ice cream on her tan cheek. I hugged her shoulders and kissed her on the top of her head.

      "I'm going to run now. Watch the shrimp, okay?" I said. "And no more horseback rides for Tripod. Got it, Alf?"

      "Got it, big guy."

      I put on my tennis shoes and running shorts and started down the dirt road toward the drawbridge over the bayou. The rain looked like flecks of spun glass in the air now, and the reflection of the dying sun was blood-red in the water. After a mile I was sweating heavily in the damp air, but I could feel the day's fatigue rise from my body, and I sprang across the puddles and hit it hard all the way to the bridge.

      I did leg stretches against the rusted girders and watched the fireflies lighting in the trees and alligator gars turning in the shadows of a flooded canebrake. The sound of the tree frogs and cicadas in the marsh was almost deafening now.

      At this time of day, particularly in summer, I always felt a sense of mortality that I could never adequately describe to another person. Sometimes it was like the late sun was about to burn itself into a dead cinder on the earth's rim, never to rise again. It made sweat ran down my sides like snakes. Maybe it was because I wanted to believe that summer was an eternal song, that living in your fifty-third year was of no more significance than entering the sixth inning when your sidearm was still like a resilient whip and the prospect of your fork-ball made a batter swallow and step back from the plate.

      And if it all ended tomorrow, I should have no complaint, I thought. I could have caught the bus any number of times years ago. To be reminded of that fact I only had to touch the punji-stick scar, coiled like a flattened, gray worm, on my stomach; the shiny, arrow-shaped welts from a bouncing Betty on my thigh; the puckered indentation below my collarbone where a .38 round had cored through my shoulder.

      They were not wounds received in a heroic fashion, either. In each case I got them because I did something that was careless or impetuous. I also had tried to destroy myself in increments, a jigger at a time.

      Get outside your thoughts, partner, I told myself. I waved to the bridge tender in his tiny house at the far end of the bridge and headed for home.

      I poured it on the last half mile, then stopped at the dock and did fifty pushups and stomach crunches on the wood planks that still glowed with the day's heat and smelled of dried fish scales.

      I walked up the incline through the trees and the layer of moldy leaves and pecan husks toward the lighted gallery of my house. Then I heard a car behind me on the dirt road and I turned and saw a taxicab stop by my mailbox. A man and woman got out, then the man paid the driver and sent him back toward town.

      I rubbed the salt out of my eyes with my forearm and stared through the gloom. The man drained the foam out of a long-necked beer bottle and set the empty behind a tree trunk. Then the woman touched him on the shoulder and pointed toward me.

      "Hey, there you are," Elrod Sykes said. "How you doin', Mr. Robicheaux? You don't mind us coming out, do you? Wow, you've got a great place."

      He swayed slightly. The woman, Kelly Drummond, caught him by the arm. I walked back down the slope.

      "I'm afraid I was just going in to take a shower and eat supper," I said.

      "We want to take y'all to dinner," he said. "There's this place called Mulate's in Breaux Bridge. They make gumbo you could start a new religion with."

      "Thanks, anyway. My wife's already fixed supper."

      "Bad time of day to knock on doors, El," Kelly Drummond said, but she looked at me when she said it, her eyes fixed directly on mine. She wore tan slacks, flats, and a yellow blouse with a button open that exposed her bra. When she raised her hand to move a blond ringlet off her forehead, you could see a half-moon sweat stain under her arm.

      "We didn't mean to cause a problem," Elrod said. "I'm afraid a drunk-front blew through the area this afternoon. Hey, we're all right, though. We took a cab. Did you notice that? How about that? Look, I tell you what, we'll just get us some liquids to go down at the bait shop yonder and call us a cab."

      "Tell him why you came out, El," Kelly Drummond said.

      "That's all right. We stumbled in at a bad time. I'm real sorry, Mr. Robicheaux."

      "Call me Dave. Would you mind waiting for me at the bait shop a few minutes, then I'll shower and drive y'all home."

      "You sure know how to avoid the stereotypes, don't you?" the woman said.

      "I beg your pardon?" I said.

      "Nobody can ever beat up on you for showing off your southern hospitality," she said.