In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  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.

  "Hey, it's okay," Elrod said, turning her by the arm toward the bait shop.

  I had gone only a short distance up the slope when I heard the woman's footsteps behind me.

  "Just hold on a minute, Dick Tracy," she said.

  Behind her I could see Elrod walking down the dock to the shop, where Batist, the black man who worked for me, was drawing back the canvas awning over the tables for the night.

  "Look, Ms. Drummond—"

  "You don't have to invite us into your house, you don't have to believe the stuff he says about what he sees and hears, but you ought to know that it took guts for him to come out here. He fucks up with Mikey, he fucks up with this film, maybe he blows it for good this time."

  "You'll have to excuse me, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department."

  She carried a doeskin drawstring bag in her hand. She propped her hand on her hip. She looked up at me and ran her tongue over her bottom lip.

  "Are you that dumb?" she asked.

  "You're telling me a mob guy, maybe Baby Feet Balboni, is involved with your movie?"

  "A mob guy? That's good. I bet y'all really send a lot of them up the road."

  "Where are you from, Ms. Drummond?"

  "East Kentucky."

  "Have you thought about making your next movie there?"

  I started toward the house again.

  "Wait a minute, Mr. Smart Ass," she said. "Elrod respects you. Did you ever hear of the Chicken Ranch in LaGrange, Texas?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know what it was?"

  "It was a hot-pillow joint."

  "His mother was a prostitute there. That's why he never talks about anyone in his family except his gran'daddy, the Texas ranger. That's why he likes you, and you'd damn well better be aware of it."

  She turned on her heel, her doeskin bag hitting her rump, and walked erectly down the slope toward the bait shop, where I could see Elrod opening a beer with his pocket knife under the light bulb above the screen door.

  Well, you could do a lot worse than have one like her on your side, Elrod, I thought.

  I TOOK A SHOWER, DRIED OFF, AND WAS BUTTONING ON A FRESH shirt in the kitchen when the telephone rang on the counter. Bootsie put down a pan on the stove and answered it.

  "It's Batist," she said, and handed it to me:

  "Qui t'as pr'estfaire?" I said into the receiver.

  "Some drunk white man down here done fell in the bayou," he said.

  "What's he doing now?"

  "Sittin' in the middle of the shop, drippin' water on my flo'."

  "I'll be there in a minute," I said.

  "Dave, a lady wit' him was smokin' a cigarette out on the dock didn't smell like no tobacco, no."

  "All right, podna. Thanks," I said, and hung up the phone.

  Bootsie was looking at me with a question mark in the middle of her face. Her auburn hair, which she had pinned up in swirls on her head, was full of tiny lights.

  "A man fell in the bayou. I have to drive him and his girlfriend home," I said.

  "Where's their car?"

  "They came out in a cab."

  "A cab? Who comes fishing in a cab?"

  "He's a weird guy."

  "Dave—" she said, drawing my name out in exasperation.

  "He's one of those actors working out at Spanish Lake. I guess he came out here to tell me about something."

  "Which actor?"

  "Elrod Sykes."

  "Elrod Sykes is out at the bait shop?"

  "Yep."

  "Who's the woman with him?"

  "Kelly Drummond."

  "Dave, I don't believe it. You left Kelly Drummond and Elrod Sykes in the bait shop? You didn't invite them in?"

  "He's bombed, Boots."

  "I don't care. They came out to see you and you left them in the shop while you took a shower?"

  "Bootsie, this guy's head glows in the dark, even when he's not on chemicals."

  She went out the front door and down the slope to the bayou. In the mauve twilight I could see her touching at her hair before she entered the bait shop. Five minutes later Kelly Drummond was sitting at our kitchen table, a cup of coffee balanced in her fingers, a reefer-induced wistfulness on her face, while Elrod Sykes changed into dry clothes in our bedroom. He walked into the kitchen in a pair of my sandals, khaki trousers, and the Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt, with my name ironed on the back, that Alafair had given me for Father's Day.

  His face was flushed with gin roses, and his gaze drifted automatically to the icebox.

  "Would you like a beer?" Bootsie said.

  "Yes, if you wouldn't mind," he said.

  "Boots, I think we're out," I said.

  "Oh, that's all right. I really don't need one," he said.

  Bootsie's eyes were bright with embarrassment. Then I saw her face set.
<
br />   "I'm sure there's one back in here somewhere," she said, then slid a long-necked Dixie out of the bottom shelf and opened it for him.

  Elrod looked casually out the back door while he sipped from the bottle.

  "I have to feed the rabbits. You want to take a walk with me, Elrod?" I said.

  "The rice will be ready in a minute," Bootsie said.

  "That's all it'll take," I said.

  Outside, under the pecan trees that were now black-green in the fading light, I could feel Elrod watching the side of my face.

  "Boy, I don't know quite what to say, Mr. Robicheaux, I mean Dave."

  "Don't worry about it. Just tell me what it is you had on your mind all day."

  "It's these guys out yonder on that lake. I told you before."

  "Which guys? What are you talking about?"

  "Confederate infantry. One guy in particular, with gold epaulets on his coat. He's got a bad arm and he's missing a leg. I think maybe he's a general."

  "I'll be straight with you. I think maybe you're delusional."

  "A lot of people do. I just didn't think I'd get the same kind of bullshit from you."

  "I'd appreciate it if you didn't use profanity around my home."

  "I apologize. But that Confederate officer was saying something. It didn't make sense to me, but I thought it might to you."

  I filled one of the rabbit bowls with alfalfa pellets and latched the screen door on the hutch. I looked at Elrod Sykes. His face was absolutely devoid of guile or any apparent attempt at manipulation; in fact, it reminded me of someone who might have just been struck in the head by a bolt of lightning.

  "Look, Elrod, years ago, when I was on the grog, I believed dead people called me up on the telephone. Sometimes my dead wife or members of my platoon would talk to me out of the rain. I was convinced that their voices were real and that maybe I was supposed to join them. It wasn't a good way to be."

  He poured the foam out of his bottle, then flicked the remaining drops reflectively at the bark of a pecan tree.