In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "What's to take? Your father used to beat you with a garden hose. I didn't make that up. You burned down his nightclub."

  "It's starting to rain. I think it's time for you to go." He picked up another ball and bounced it in his palm.

  "I tried, partner."

  "Oh, yeah? What's that mean?"

  "Nothing."

  "No, you mean you came out here and gave me a warning."

  "Why do you think every pitch is a slider, Julie?"

  He looked away at the outfield, then back at me.

  "You've made remarks about my family. I don't like that," he said. "I'm proud to be Italian. I was even proud of my old man. The people who ran this town back then weren't worth the sweat off his balls. In New Iberia we were always 'wops,' 'dagos,' and 'guineas' because you coonasses were too fucking stupid to know what the Roman Empire was. So you get your nose out of the air when you talk about my family, or about my problems, or anything about my life, you understand what I'm saying, Dave?"

  "Somebody made you become a dope dealer? That's what you're telling me?"

  "I'm telling you to stay the fuck away from me."

  "You don't make a convincing victim, Julie. I'll see you around. Tell your man out there not to spit on the ball."

  "What?"

  "Isn't that your porno star? I'd be careful. I think AIDS is a lot more easily transmitted than people think."

  I saw the rain pattering in the dust as I walked away from him toward the bleachers behind first base. Then I heard a ball ring off the aluminum bat and crash through the tree limbs overhead. I turned around in time to see Julie toss another ball into the air and swing again, his legs wide spread, his torso twisting, his wrists snapping as the bat bit into the ball and laced it in a straight white line toward my face.

  When I opened my eyes I could see a thick layer of black clouds stretched across the sky from the southern horizon to a silken stretch of blue in the north. The rain had the warm amber color of whiskey, but it made no sound and it struck against my skin as dryly as flower petals in a windstorm.

  The general sat on the bottom bench in the bleachers, coatless, the wind flowing through his shirt, a holstered cap-and-ball revolver hanging loosely from his right shoulder. The polished brass letters CSA gleamed softly on the crown of his gray hat. I could smell horses and hear teamsters shouting and wagons creaking in the street. Two enlisted men separated themselves from a group in the oak trees, lifted me to my feet, and sat me down on the wood plank next to the general.

  He pointed toward first base with his crutch. My body lay on its side in the dirt, my eyes partially rolled. Cholo and the pornographic actor were running toward home plate from the outfield while Julie was fitting the aluminum bat back in the canvas ball bag. But they were all moving in slow motion, like creatures that were trying to burst free from an invisible gelatinous presence that encased their bodies.

  The general took a gold watch as thick as a buttermilk biscuit from his pants pocket, snapped open the cover, glanced at the time, then twisted around in his seat and looked at the soldiers forming into ranks in the street. They were screwing their bayonets on the ends of their rifles, sliding their pouches of paper cartridges and minié" balls to the centers of their belts, tying their haversacks and rolled blankets across their backs so their arms would be unencumbered. I saw a man put rolls of socks inside his coat and over his heart. I saw another man put a Bible in the same place. A boy not over sixteen, his cap crimped tightly on his small head, unfurled the Stars and Bars from its wooden staff and lifted it popping into the wind.

  Then in the north, where the sky was still blue and not sealed by storm clouds, I saw bursts of black smoke, like birds with ragged wings, and I heard thunder echoing in the trees and between the wooden buildings across the street.

  "What's that?" I asked him.

  "You've never heard that sound, the electric snap, before ? "

  "They're air bursts, aren't they?"

  "It's General Banks's artillery firing from down the Teche. He's targeted the wrong area, though. There's a community of darkies under those shells. Did you see things like that in your war?"

  "Yes, up the Mekong. Some villagers tried to run away from a barrage. They got caught out in the rice field. When we buried them, their faces all looked like they had been inside a terrible wind."

  "Then you know it's the innocent about whom we need to be most concerned?"

  Before I could answer I saw Cholo and the man without a shirt staring down at my body, their faces beaded with rain. Julie pulled the drawstring tight on the ball bag and heaved it over his shoulder.

  "Get in the Caddy, you guys," he said.

  "What happened, Julie?" Cholo said. He wore tennis shoes without socks, a tie-dyed undershirt, and a urine-yellow bikini knotted up tightly around his scrotum. Hair grew around the edges of his bikini like tiny pieces of copper wire.

  "He got in the way of the ball," Julie said.

  "The guy's got a real goose egg in his hair," the shirtless man said. "Maybe we ought to take him to a hospital or something."

  "Leave him alone," Julie said.

  "We just gonna leave him here?" Cholo said.

  "Unless you want to sit around out here in the rain," Julie said.

  "Hey, come on, Feet," Cholo said.

  "What's the problem?" Julie said.

  "He's not a bad guy for a cop. Y'all go back, right?"

  "He's got diarrhea of the mouth. Maybe he learned a lesson this time," Julie said.

  "Yeah, but that don't mean we can't drop the guy off at the hospital. I mean, it ain't right to leave him in the fucking rain, Julie."

  "You want to start signing your own paychecks? Is that what you're telling me, Cholo?"

  "No, I didn't say that. I was just trying to act reasonable. Ain't that what you're always saying? Why piss off the locals?"

  "We're not pissing off anybody. Even his own department thinks he's a drunk and a pain in the ass. He got what he deserved. Are you guys coming or not?" Julie said.

  He opened the trunk of the purple Cadillac limousine and threw the ball bag clattering inside. The porn actor followed him, wiping his chest and handsome face with his balled-up shirt. Cholo hesitated, stared after them, then pulled the first-base pad loose from its anchor pins and rested it across the side of my face to protect it from the rain. Then he ran after the others.

  The blue strip of sky in the north was now filled with torn pieces of smoke. I could hear a loud snap each time a shell burst over the distant line of trees.

  "What were you going to tell me?" I said to the general.

  "That it's the innocent we need to worry about. And when it comes to their protection, we shouldn't hesitate to do it under a black flag."

  "I don't understand."

  "I feel perhaps I've deceived you."

  "How?"

  "Perhaps I gave you the indication that you had been chosen as part of some chivalric cause."

  "I didn't think that, general."

  His face was troubled, as though his vocabulary was inadequate to explain what he was thinking. Then he looked out into the rain and his eyes became melancholy.

  "My real loss wasn't in the war," he said. "It came later." He turned slowly and looked into my face. "Yellowjack took not only my life but also the lives of my wife and daughter, Mr. Robicheaux."

  He waited. The rain felt like confetti blowing against my skin. I searched his eyes, and my heart began to beat against my ribs.

  "My family?" I said.

  "If you're brave and honorable and your enemies can't destroy you personally, they'll seek to destroy what you love."

  He gestured with his crutch to a sergeant, who led a saddled white gelding around the side of the bleachers.

  "Wait a minute, general. That's not good enough," I said.

  "It's all I have," he answered, now seated in the saddle, his back erect, the reins wrapped around his gloved fist.

  "Who would try to hurt them? What woul
d they have to gain?"

  "I don't know. Keep the Sykes boy with you, though. He's a good one. You remember what Robert Lee once said: 'Texans move them every time.' Good day to you, lieutenant. It's time we go give Bonnie Nate Banks his welcome to southwestern Louisiana." Then he cut the spur on his left boot into his horse's flank, galloped to the head of his infantry, and hollered out brightly, "Hideeho, boys! It's a fine day for it! Let's make religious fellows of them all!"

  Sometime later, I sat up on the ground in the rain, my clothes soaked, the base pad in my lap, a knot as hard and round as a half-dollar throbbing three inches behind my ear. An elderly black yardman bent over me, his face filled with concern. Down the street I could see an ambulance coming toward me through the rain.

  "You okay, mister?" the black man said.

  "Yes, I think so."

  "I seen you there and t'ought you was drunk. But it look like somebody done gone upside yo' head."

  "Would you help me up, please?"

  "Sho. You all right?"

  "Why, yes, I'm sure I am. Did you see a man on horseback?"

  "The Popsicle man gone by. His li'l cart got a horse. That's what you talkin' about?"

  The black man eased me down on the bottom plank of the bleachers. It was starting to rain hard now, but right next to me, where the general had been sitting, was a pale, dry area in the wood that was as warm to the touch as living tissue.

  Chapter 15

  The sky was clear when I woke in the morning, and I could hear gray squirrels racing across the bark of the trees outside the window. The icebag I had put on the lump behind my ear fell to the floor when I got out of bed to answer the phone.

  "I called your office and found out you're still suspended," Lou Girard said. "What's going on over there?"

  "Just that. I'm still suspended."

  "It sounds like somebody's got a serious bone on for you, Dave. Anyway, I talked to this FBI agent, what's her name, Gomez, as well as your boss. We vacuumed the Buick. Guess what we found?"

  "I don't know."

  "Paper wadding. The kind that's used to seal blank cartridges. It looks like somebody fired a starter's gun at you. He probably leaned down through the passenger window, let off a couple of rounds, then bagged out."

  "What'd the sheriff have to say when you told him?"

  "Not much. I got the feeling that maybe he was a little uncomfortable. He doesn't look too good, right, when one of his own men has to be cleared by a cop and a pathologist in another parish? I thought I could hear a little Pontius Pilate tap water running in the background."

  "He's always been an okay guy. He just got too close to a couple of the oil cans in the Chamber of Commerce."

  "Your friends don't stand around playing pocket pool while civilians kick a two-by-four up your butt, either."

  "Anyway, that's real good news, Lou. I owe you a red-fishing trip out to Pecan Island."

  "Wait a minute, I'm not finished. That Gomez woman has some interesting theories about serial killers. She said these guys want control and power over people. So I got to thinking about the LeBlanc girl. If your FBI friend is right and the guy who killed her is from around here, what kind of work would he be in?"

  "He may be just a pimp, Lou."

  "Yeah, but she got nailed on a prostitution charge when she was sixteen, right? That means the court gave somebody a lot of control over her life. What if a probation or parole officer had her selling out of her pants?"

  "I saw the body. I think the guy who mutilated her has a furnace instead of a brain. I think he'd have a hard time hiding inside a white-collar environment."

  "It was the pencil pushers who gave the world Auschwitz, Dave. Anyway, her prostitution bust was in Lafayette. I'll find out if her P.O. or social worker is still around."

  "Okay, but I still believe we're after a pimp of some kind."

  "Dave, if this guy's just a pimp, particularly if he's mobbed-up, he would have been in custody a long time ago. These are dumb guys. That's why they do what they do. Most of them couldn't get jobs cleaning gum off movie seats."

  "So maybe Balboni's got a smart pimp working for him."

  "No, this guy knows how things work from the inside. He sucked us both in on that deal at Red's Bar."

  Lou had never gotten along with white-collar authority, in fact, was almost obsessed about it, and I wasn't going to argue with him.

  "Let me know what you come up with," I said.

  But he wasn't going to let it drop that easily.

  "I've been in law enforcement for thirty-seven years," he said. "I've lost count of the lowlifes I've helped send up the road. Is Louisiana any better for it? You know the answer to that one. Face it. The real sonsofbitches are the ones we don't get to touch."

  "Don't be too down, Lou." I told him about Julie line-driving a ball off the side of my head. Then I told him the rest of it. "I asked the paramedics who called in the report. They said it was anonymous. So I went down later and listened to the 911 tapes. It was a guy named Cholo Manelli. He's a—"

  "Yeah, I know who he is. Cholo did that?"

  "There's no mistaking that broken-nose Irish Channel accent."

  "He owes you or something?"

  "Not really. But he's an old-time mob soldier. He knows you don't antagonize cops unnecessarily. Maybe Julie's starting to lose control of his people."

  "It's a thought. But stay away from Balboni till you get your shield back. Stay off baseball diamonds, too. For a sober guy you sure have a way of spitting in the lion's mouth."

  After I hung up the phone I showered, dressed in a pair of seersucker slacks, brown loafers, a charcoal shirt with a gray and red striped tie, and got a haircut and a shoe shine in town. My scalp twitched when the barber's scissors clipped across the lump behind my ear. Through the front window I saw Julie Balboni's purple limo drive down Main Street. The barber stopped clipping. The shop was empty except for the shoe-shine man.

  "Dave, how come that man's still around here?" the barber said. His round stomach touched lightly against my elbow.

  "He hasn't made the right people mad at him."

  "He ain't no good, that one. He don't have no bidness here."

  "I think you're right, Sid."

  He started clipping again. Then, almost as a casual afterthought, he said, "Y'all gonna get him out of town?"

  "There're some business people making a lot of money off of Julie. I think they'd like to keep him around awhile."

  His hands paused again, and he stepped around the side of the chair so I could see his face.

  "That ain't the rest of us, no," he said. "We don't like having that man in New Iberia. We don't like his dope, we don't like his criminals he bring up here from New Orleans. You tell that man you work for we gonna 'member him when we vote, too."

  "Could I buy you a cup of coffee and a doughnut this morning, Sid?"

  A little later, with my hair still wet and combed, I walked out of the heat into the air-conditioned coolness of the sheriff's department and headed toward the sheriff's office. I glanced inside my office door as I passed it. Rosie was not inside but Rufus Arceneaux was, out of uniform now, dressed in a blue suit and tie and a silk shirt that had the bright sheen of tin. He was sitting behind my desk.

  I leaned against the door jamb.

  "The pencil sharpener doesn't work very well, but there's a pen knife in my drawer that you can use," I said.

  "I wasn't bucking for plainclothes. The old man gave it to me," he said.

  "I'm glad to see you're moving on up, Rufe."

  "Look, Dave, I'm not the one who went out and got fucked up at that movie set."

  "I hear you were out there, though. Looking into things. Probably trying to clear me of any suspicion that I got loaded."

  "I got a GED in the corps. You're a college graduate. You were a homicide lieutenant in New Orleans. You want to blame me for your troubles?"

  "Where's Rosie?"

  "Down in Vermilion Parish."

  "What
for?"

  "How would I know?"

  "Did she say anything about Balboni having legal troubles with Mikey Goldman?"

  "What legal—" His eyes clouded, like silt being disturbed in dark water.

  "When you see her, would you ask her to call me?"

  "Leave a message in her box," he said, positioned his forearms on my desk blotter, straightened his back, and looked out the window as though I were not there.

  When I walked into the sheriff's office he was pouring a chalky liquid from a brown prescription bottle into a water glass. A dozen sheets of paper were spread around on his desk. The "hold" light was flashing on his telephone. He didn't speak. He drank from the glass, then refilled it from the water cooler and drank again, his throat working as though he were washing out an unwanted presence from his metabolism.

  "How you doin', podna?" he said.

  "Pretty good now. I had a talk with Lou Girard this morning."

  "So did I. Sit down," he said, then picked up the phone and spoke to whoever was on hold. "I'm not sure what happened. When I am, I'll call you. In the meantime, Rufus is going to be suspended. Just hope we don't have to pass a sales tax to pay the bills on this one."

  He hung up the phone and pressed the flat of his hand against his stomach. He made a face like a small flame was rising up his windpipe.

  "Did you ever have ulcers?" he asked.

  "Nope."

  "I've got one. If this medicine I'm drinking doesn't get rid of it, they may have to cut it out."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "That was the prosecutor's office I was talking to. We're being sued."

  "Over what?"

  "A seventy-six-year-old black woman shot her old man to death last night, then killed both her dogs and shot herself through the stomach. Rufus in there handcuffed her to the gurney, then came back to the office. He didn't bother to give the paramedics a key to the cuffs either. She died outside the emergency room."

  I didn't say anything.

  "You think we got what we deserved, huh?" he said.

  "Maybe he would have done it even if he hadn't been kicked up to plainclothes, sheriff."