In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "What are you doing?" Rosie said.

  I ripped the paneling away to expose the sliding frame and mechanism on which the window glass had been mounted.

  "Let me show you something," I said and did the same to the inside panel on the driver's door. "See, both windows on this side of the car were rolled partially up. That's why my first rounds blew glass all over the place."

  "Yes?"

  "Why would the shooter try to fire through a partially opened window?"

  "Good question."

  I walked around to the passenger side of the Buick. The carpet had a dried brown stain in it, and a roach as long and thick as my thumb was crawling across the stiffened fibers.

  "But this window is all the way down," I said. "That doesn't make any sense. It had already started to rain. Why would this woman sit by an open window in the rain, particularly in the passenger seat of her own car?"

  "It's registered to Amber Martinez?"

  "That's right. According to Lou Girard, she was a hooker trying to get out of the life. She also did speedballs and was ninety pounds soaking wet. Does that sound like a hit artist to you?"

  "Then why was she in the car? What was she doing here?"

  "I don't know."

  "What did the homicide investigator have to say last night?"

  "He said, 'A .45 sure does leave a hole, don't it?' "

  "What else?"

  "He said, 'Did you have to come over to Lafayette to fall in the shithouse?' "

  "Look at me," she said.

  "What?"

  "How much sleep did you get last night?"

  "Two or three hours."

  I threw the tire iron on the front seat of the Buick.

  "What do you feel now?" she said.

  "What do you mean?" I was surprised at the level of irritation in my voice.

  "You know what I mean."

  My eyes burned and filmed in the haze. I saw the three oaks in the vacant lot go out of focus, as though I were looking at them inside a drop of water.

  "Everyone thinks I killed an unarmed woman. What do you think I feel?" I said. I had to swallow when I said it.

  "It was a setup, Dave. We both know it."

  "If it was, what happened to the gun? Why aren't there any holes in the bar?"

  "Because the guy behind this is one smart perp. He got a woman, probably a chippy, to make calls to your dispatcher to give the impression your fly was open, then he got you out of your jurisdiction and involved you in another hooker's death. I think this guy's probably a master at control."

  "Somehow that doesn't make me feel a lot better, Rosie."

  I looked at the stain on the Buick's carpet. The heat was rising from the ground now and I thought I could smell a salty odor like dead fish. I closed the passenger door.

  "I really walked into it, didn't I?" I said.

  "Don't worry, we're going to bust the guy behind this and lose the key on him." Her eyes smiled, then she winked at me.

  I had brought a garden rake from home. I took it out of Rosie's car and combed a pile of mud and soggy weeds from the bottom of the ditch next to the Buick. Then Rosie said, "Dave, come over here and look at this."

  She stood next to the vegetable patch that was located on the edge of the vacant lot. She pointed at the ground.

  "Look at the footprints," she said. "Somebody ran through the garden. He broke down the tomato stakes."

  The footprints were deep and wide-spaced in the soft earth. The person had been moving away from the street toward the three oak trees in the center of the lot. Some of the tomato and eggplant bushes were crushed down flat in the rows.

  A wrecker came around the corner with two men in it and stopped behind the Buick. The driver got out and began hooking up the rear end of the Buick. A middle-aged plain-clothes detective in short sleeves with his badge on his belt got out with him. His name was Doobie Patout, a wizened and xenophobic man, with faded blue tattoos on his forearms; some people believed he'd once been the official executioner at Angola.

  He didn't speak. He simply stared through the heat at me and Rosie.

  "What's happening, Doobie?" I said.

  "What y'all doin' out here?" he said.

  "Looking for a murder weapon," I said.

  "I heard you were suspended."

  "Word gets around."

  "You're not supposed to be messin' 'round the crime scene."

  "I'm really just an observer."

  "Who's she?" He raised one finger in Rosie's direction.

  "Special Agent Gomez," Rosie said. "This is part of an FBI investigation. Do you have a problem with that?"

  "You got to coordinate with the city," he said.

  "No, I don't," she said.

  The driver of the wrecker began winching the Buick's weight off its back wheels.

  "I wouldn't hang around here if I was you," Doobie said to me.

  "Why not?" Rosie said.

  "Because he don't have legal authority here. Because he made a mistake and nobody here'll probably hold it against him. Why piss people off, Robicheaux?"

  "What are you saying, Doobie?"

  "So you got to go up against Internal Affairs in your own department. That don't mean you're gonna get indicted in Lafayette Parish. Why put dog shit on a stick and hold it under somebody's nose?"

  Behind us, an elderly fat mulatto woman in a print dress came out on her porch and began gesturing at us. Doobie Patout glanced at her, then opened the passenger door to the wrecker and paused before getting in.

  "Y'all can rake spinach out of that ditch all you want," he said. "I ran a metal detector over it last night. There's no gun in it. So don't go back to New Iberia and be tellin' people you got a bad shake over here."

  "Y'all gonna do somet'ing 'bout my garden, you?" the woman shouted off the porch.

  The wrecker drove off with the Buick wobbling on the winch cable behind it. At the corner the wrecker turned and a hubcap popped off the Buick and bounced on its own course down the empty dirt road.

  "My, what a nasty little man," Rosie said.

  I looked back at the footprints in the vegetable patch. They exited in the Johnson grass and disappeared completely. We walked into the shade of the oaks and looked back at the road, the bits of broken glass that glinted in the dirt, the brilliant glare of sunlight on the white shell parking lot. I felt a weariness that I couldn't find words for.

  "Let's talk to some of the neighbors, then pack it in," I said.

  We didn't have to go far. The elderly woman whom we had been ignoring labored down her porch steps with a cane and came toward us like a determined crab. Her legs were bowed and popping with varicose veins, her body ringed with fat, her skin gold and hairless, her turquoise eyes alive with indignation.

  "Where that other one gone?" she said.

  "Which one?" I said.

  "That policeman you was talkin' to."

  "He went back to his office."

  "Who gonna pay for my li'l garden?" she asked. "What I gone do wit' them smush tomato? What I gone do wit' them smush eggplant, me?"

  "Did you see something last night, auntie?" I said.

  "You ax me what I seen? Go look my li'l garden. You got eyes, you?"

  "No, I mean did you see the shooting last night?"

  "I was in the bat'room, me."

  "You didn't see anything?" Rosie said.

  The woman jabbed at a ruined eggplant with her cane.

  "I seen that. That look like a duck egg to you? They don't talk English where y'all come from?"

  "Did you see a woman in a white car outside your house?" I said.

  "I seen her. They put her in an ambulance. She was dead."

  "I see," I said.

  "What you gone do 'bout my garden?"

  "I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said.

  "He can put his big feet all over my plants and I cain't do nothin' 'bout it?"

  "Who?" I said.

  "The man that run past my bat'room. I just tole you. You har
d of hearin' just like you hard of seein'? I got up to go to the bat'room."

  My head was swimming.

  "Listen, auntie, this is very important," I said. "You're telling me you saw a man run past your window?"

  "That's right. I seen him smush my li'l plants, break down my tomato pole, keep on runnin' right out yonder t'rough them tree, right on 'cross the tracks till he was gone. I seen the light on that li'l gun in his hand, too."

  Rosie and I looked at each other.

  "Can you describe this fellow, auntie?" I said.

  "Yeah, he's a white man who don't care where he put his big muddy feet."

  "Did the gun look like this one?" Rosie said, opened her purse, and lifted out her .357 magnum.

  "No, it mo' li'l than that."

  "Why didn't you tell this to the police last night?" I asked.

  "I tole them. I be talkin' and they be carryin' on with each other like I ain't here, like I some old woman just in they way. It ain't changed, no."

  "What hasn't?" I said.

  "When the last time white people 'round here ax us what we t'ink about anyt'ing? Ain't nobody ax me if I want that juke 'cross from my li'l house, no. Ain't nobody worried 'bout my li'l garden. Black folk still black folk, livin' out here without no pave, with dust blowin' off the road t'rough my screens. Don't be pretendin' like it ain't so."

  "You've helped us a great deal, auntie," I said.

  She leaned over on her cane, wrapped a tangle of destroyed tomato vines around her hand, and flung them out into the grass. Then she began walking back toward her porch, the folds of skin in her neck and shoulders creasing like soft tallow.

  "Would you mind if we came to see you again?" I asked

  "Waste mo' of my day, play like you care what happen down here on the dirt road? Why you ax me? You comin' when you want, anyway, ain't you?"

  Her buttocks swelled like an elephant's against her dress when she worked her way up the steps. On the way out of town we stopped at a nursery and I paid cash to have a dozen tomato plants delivered to her address.

  "Not smart giving anything to a potential witness, Slick," Rosie said when we were back on the highway.

  "You're used to operating in the normal world, Rosie. Did you hear what Doobie Patout said? Lafayette Homicide has given that girl's death the priority of a hangnail. Welcome to the New South."

  When I got back home I turned on the window fan in the bedroom, undressed, and lay down on top of the sheets with my arm across my eyes. The curtains, which were printed with small pink flowers, lifted and fell in the warm breeze, and I could hear Tripod running back and forth on his chain in the dead leaves under the pecan trees.

  In my sleep I thought I could feel the .45 jumping in my palm, the slide slamming down on a fresh cartridge, the recoil climbing up my forearm like the reverberation from a jackhammer. Then, as though in slow motion, I saw a woman's face bursting apart; a small black hole appeared right below the mouth, then the fragile bone structure caved in upon itself, like a rubber mask collapsing, and the back of her head suddenly erupted in a bloody mist.

  I wanted to wake from my dream, force myself even inside my sleep to realize that it was indeed only a dream, but instead the images changed and I heard the ragged popping of small-arms and saw the border of a hardwood forest in autumn, the leaves painted with fire, and a contingent of Confederate infantry retreating into it.

  No, I didn't simply see them; I was in their midst, under fire with them, my throat burning with the same thirst, my hands trembling as I tried to reload my weapon, my skin twitching as though someone were about to peel it away in strips. I heard a toppling round throp close to my ear and whine away deep in the woods, saw the long scarlet streaks in the leaves where the wounded had been dragged behind tree trunks, and was secretly glad that someone else, not me, had crumpled to his knees, had cried out for his mother, had tried futilely to press his blue nest of entrails back inside his stomach.

  The enemy advanced across an open field out of their own cannon smoke, their bayonets fixed, their artillery arching over their heads and exploding behind us in columns of dirt and flame. The light was as soft and golden as the season, but the air inside the woods was stifling, filled with dust and particles o'f leaves, the smell of cordite and bandages black with gangrene, the raw odor of blood.

  Then I knew, even in sleep, what the dream meant. I could see the faces of the enemy now, hear the rattle of their equipment, their officers yelling, "Form up, boys, form up!" They were young, frightened, unknowledgeable of politics or economics, trembling as much as I was, their mouths too dry now even to pray, their sweaty palms locked on the stocks of their rifles. But I didn't care about their innocence, their beardless faces, the crimson flowers that burst from their young breasts. I just wanted to live. I wanted every round we fired to find a target, to buckle bone, to shatter lungs and explode the heart; I wanted their ranks to dissolve into a cacophony of sorrow.

  My head jerked erect on the pillow. The room was hot and close and motes of dust spun in the columns of weak light that shone through the curtains. My breath rasped in my throat, and my chest and stomach were slick with perspiration.

  The general sat in a straight-backed chair by the foot of my bed, with his campaign hat resting on one knee. His beard was trimmed and he wore a brushed gray coat with a high gold collar. He was gazing out the window at the shifting patterns of light made by the pecan and oak trees.

  "You!" I said.

  "I hope you don't mind my being here."

  "No, I—you simply surprised me."

  "You shouldn't have remorse about the kinds of feelings you just experienced, Mr. Robicheaux. A desire to live doesn't mean you lack humanity."

  "I opened up on the Buick too soon. I let off the whole magazine without seeing what I was shooting at."

  "You thought your life was at risk, suh. What were you supposed to do?"

  "They say I killed an unarmed woman, general."

  "Yes, I think that would probably trouble me, too." He turned his hat in a circle on his knee. "I have the impression that you were very fond of your father, the trapper."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Didn't he once tell you that if everyone agrees on something, it's probably wrong?"

  "Those were his words."

  "Then why not give them some thought?"

  "General, somebody has done a serious mind fuck on me. I can't trust what I see or hear anymore."

  "I'm sorry. Someone has done what?"

  "It's the same kind of feeling I had once in Golden Gloves. A guy hooked me after the bell, hard, right behind the ear. For two or three days I felt like something was torn loose from the bone, like my brain was floating in ajar."

  "Be brave."

  "I see that woman, the back of her head . . . Her hair was glued to the carpet with her own blood."

  "Think about what you just said."

  "What?"

  "You're a good police officer, an intelligent man. What does your eye tell you?"

  "I need some help, general."

  "You belong to the quick, you wake in the morning to the smell of flowers, a woman responds to the touch of your fingers, and you ask help of the dead, suh?"

  He lifted himself to his feet with his crutch.

  "I didn't mean to offend you," I said.

  "In your dream you saw us retreating into a woods and you saw the long blue line advancing out of the smoke in the field, didn't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Were you afraid?"

  "Yes."

  "Because you thought time had run out for you, didn't you?"

  "Yes, I knew it had."

  "We should have died there but we held them. Our thirst was terrible. We drank rainwater from the hoof prints of livestock. Then that night we tied sticks in the mouths of our wounded so they wouldn't cry out while we slipped out of the woods and joined the rest of our boys."

  The wind began blowing hard in the trees outside the window. Last fall's leaves swirled o
ff the ground and blew against the house.

  "I sense resentment in you," he said.

  "I already paid my dues. I don't want—"

  "You don't want what?" He pared a piece of dirt from under his fingernail.

  "To be the only man under a flag."

  "Ah, we never quit paying dues, my friend. I must be going now. The wind's out of the south. There'll be thunder by this afternoon. I always have a hard time distinguishing it from Yankee cannon."

  He made a clucking sound with his tongue, fitted his campaign hat on his head, took up his crutch, and walked through the blades of the window fan into a spinning vortex of gold and scarlet leaves.

  When I finally woke from my sleep in midafternoon, like rising from the warm stickiness of an opium dream, I saw Alafair watching me through the partly opened bedroom door. Her lips were parted silently, her round, tan face wan with incomprehension. The sheets were moist and tangled around my legs. I tried to smile.

  "You okay, Dave?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine."

  "You were having a dream. You were making all kinds of sounds."

  "It's probably not too good to sleep in the daytime, little guy."

  "You got malaria again?"

  "No, it doesn't bother me much anymore."

  She walked into the room and placed one hand on the bedstead. She looked at the floor.

  "What's the matter, Alf?" I said.

  "I went to the grocery down at the four-corners with Bootsie. A man had the newspaper open on the counter and was reading something out loud. A lady saw us and touched the man on the arm. Then both of them just stared at us. Bootsie gave them a real mean look."

  "What was the man saying?"

  "A lady got shot." Her palm was cupped tightly on the knob of the bedstead. She stared at the floor, and there were small white discolorations in her cheeks like slivers of ice. "He said you shot the lady. You shot the lady, Dave."

  I sat up on the edge of the bed.

  "I had some trouble last night, Alafair. Somebody fired a pistol at me and I shot back. I'm not sure who fired at me or what this lady was doing there. But the situation is a lot more complex than maybe some people think. The truth can be real hard to discover sometimes, little guy."