In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "No, he wouldn't have been the supervising officer. He wouldn't have had the opportunity."

  "What's my status this morning?"

  He brushed at a nostril with one knuckle.

  "I don't know how to say this," he said. "We messed up. No, I messed up."

  I waited.

  "I did wrong by you, Dave," he said.

  "People make mistakes. Maybe you made the best decision you could at the time."

  He held out his hands, palms front.

  "Nope, none of that," he said. "I learned in Korea a good officer takes care of his men. I didn't get this ulcer over Rufus Arceneaux's stupidity. I got it because I was listening to some local guys I should have told to butt out of sheriff's department business."

  "Nobody's supposed to bat a thousand, sheriff."

  "I want you back at work today. I'll talk to Rufus about his new status. That old black woman is part my responsibility. I don't know why I made that guy plainclothes. You don't send a warthog to a beauty contest."

  I shook hands with him, walked across the street to a barbecue stand in a grove of live oaks, ate a plate filled with dirty rice, pork ribs, and red beans, then strolled back to the office, sipping an ice-cold can of Dr Pepper. Rufus Arceneaux was gone. I clipped my badge on my belt, sat in the swivel chair behind my desk, turned the air-conditioner vents into my face, and opened my mail.

  ROSIE WAS BEAMING WHEN SHE CAME THROUGH THE OFFICE door an hour later.

  "What's that I see?" she said. "With a haircut and a shoe shine, too."

  "How's my favorite Fed?"

  "Dave, you look wonderful!"

  "Thanks, Rosie."

  "I can't tell you how fine it is to have you back."

  Her face was genuinely happy, to such an extent that I felt vaguely ill at ease.

  "I owe you and Lou Girard a lot on this one," I said.

  "Have you had lunch yet?"

  "Yeah, I did."

  "Too bad. Tomorrow I'm taking you out, though. Okay?"

  "Yeah, that'd be swell."

  She sat down behind her desk. Her neck was flushed and her breasts rose against her blouse when she breathed. "I got a call this morning from an old Frenchman who runs a general store on Highway 35 down in Vermilion Parish. You know what he said? 'Hey, y'all catch the man put dat young girl in dat barrel?' "

  I filled a water glass for her and put it on her desk.

  "He knows something?" I said.

  "Better than that. I think he saw the guy who did it. He said he remembers a month or so ago a blond girl coming in his store at night in the rain. He said he became worried about her because of the way a man in the store was watching her." She opened her notebook pad and looked at it. "These are the old fellow's words: 'You didn't need but look at that man's face to know he had a dirty mind.' He said the girl had a canvas backpack and she went back out in the rain to the highway with it. The man followed her, then he came back in a few minutes and asked the old fellow if he had any red balloons for sale."

  "Balloons?"

  "If you think that sounds weird, how about this? When the old fellow said no, the man found an old box of Valentine candy on the back shelf and said he wanted that instead."

  "I'm not making connections here," I said.

  "The store owner watched the man with the candy box through the window. He said just before he pulled out of the parking lot he threw the candy box in the ditch. In the morning the old fellow went out and found it in the weeds. The cellophane wrapping was gone." She watched my face. "What are you thinking?"

  "Did he see the man pick up the girl?"

  "He's not sure. He remembers the man was in a dark blue car and he remembers the brake lights going on in the rain." She continued to watch my face. "Here's the rest of it. I looked around on the back shelves of the store and found another candy box that the owner says is like the one the man in the blue car bought. Guess what tint the cellophane was."

  "Red or purple."

  "You got it, slick," she said, and leaned back in her chair.

  "He wrapped it around a spotlight, didn't he?"

  "That'd be my bet."

  "Could the store owner describe this guy?"

  "That's the problem." She tapped a ballpoint pen on her desk blotter. "All the old fellow remembers is that the man had a rain hood."

  "Too bad. Why didn't he contact us sooner?"

  "He said he told all this to somebody, he doesn't know who, in the Vermilion Parish Sheriff's Department. He said when he called again yesterday, they gave him my number. Is your interagency cooperation always this good?"

  "Always. Does he still have the candy box?"

  "He said he gave the candy to his dog, then threw the box in the trash."

  "So maybe we've got a guy impersonating a cop?" I said.

  "It might explain a lot of things."

  Unconsciously I fingered the lump behind my ear.

  "What's the matter?" she said.

  "Nothing. Maybe our man is simply a serial killer and psychopath after all. Maybe he doesn't have anything to do with Julie Balboni."

  "Would that make you feel good or bad?"

  "I honestly can't say, Rosie."

  "Yeah, you can," she said. "You're always hoping that even the worst of them has something of good in him. Don't do that with Balboni. Deep down inside all that whale fat is a real piece of shit, Dave."

  Outside, a jail trusty cutting the grass broke the brass head off a sprinkler with the lawnmower. A violent jet of water showered the wall and ran down the windows. In the clatter of noise, in the time it takes the mind's eye to be distracted by shards of wet light, I thought of horses fording a stream, of sun-browned men in uniform looking back over their shoulders at the safety of a crimson and gold hardwood forest, while ahead of them dirty puffs of rifle fire exploded from a distant treeline that swarmed with the shapes of the enemy.

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

  "Are you all right?" she said.

  "Yeah, it's a fine day. Let's go across the street and I'll buy you a Dr Pepper."

  That evening, at sunset, I was sprinkling the grass and the flower beds in the backyard while Elrod and Alafair were playing with Tripod on top of the picnic table. The air was cool in the fading light and smelled of hydrangeas and water from the hose and the fertilizer I had just spaded into the roots of my rosebushes.

  The phone rang inside, and a moment later Bootsie brought it and the extension cord to the back screen. I sat down on the step and put the receiver to my ear.

  "Hello," I said.

  I could hear someone breathing on the other end.

  "Hello?"

  "I want to talk to you tonight."

  "Sam?"

  "That's right. I'm playing up at the black juke in St. Martinville. You know where that's at?"

  "The last time I had an appointment with you, things didn't work out too well."

  "That was last time. I was drinkin' then. Then them womens was hangin' around, made me forget what I was supposed to do."

  "I think you let me down, partner."

  He was quiet except for the sound of his breathing.

  "Is something wrong?" I said.

  "I got to tell you somet'ing, somet'ing I ain't tole no white man."

  "Say it."

  "You come up to the juke."

  "I'll meet you at my office tomorrow morning."

  "What I got to say can put me back on the farm. I sure ain't gonna do it down there."

  Elrod picked Tripod up horizontally in his arms, then bounced him up and down by tugging on his tail.

  "I'll be there in an hour or so," I said. "Don't jerk me around again, Sam."

  "You might be a policeman, you might even be different from most white folks, but you still white and you ain't got no idea 'bout the world y'all give people of color to live in. That's a fact, suh. It surely is," he said, and hung up. />
  I should have known that Hogman would not be outdone in eloquence.

  "Don't pull his tail," Alafair was saying.

  "He likes it. It gets his blood moving," Elrod said.

  She sighed as though Elrod were unteachable, then took Tripod out of his arms and carried him around the side of the house to the hutch.

  "Can you take yourself to the meeting tonight?" I asked Elrod.

  "You cain't go?"

  "No."

  "How about I just wait till we can go together?" He rubbed the top of the table with his fingers and didn't look up.

  "What if I drop you off and then come back before the meeting's over?"

  "Look, this is a, what do you call it, a step meeting?"

  "That's right."

  "You said it's about amends, about atoning to people for what you did wrong?"

  "Something like that."

  "How do I atone for Kelly? How do I make up for that one, Dave?" He stared out at the late red sun over the cane-field so I couldn't see his eyes.

  "You get those thoughts out of your head. Kelly's dead because we have a psychopath in our midst. Her death doesn't have anything to do with you."

  "You can say that all you want, but I know better."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  I could see the clean, tight line of his jaw and a wet gleaming in the corner of his eye.

  "Tell me, did you respect Kelly?" I asked.

  He swiveled around on the picnic bench. "What kind of question is that?"

  "I'm going to be a little hard on you, El. I think you're using her death to feel sorry for yourself."

  "What?" His face was incredulous.

  "When I lost my wife I found out that self-pity and guilt could be a real rush, particularly when I didn't have Brother Jim Beam to do the job."

  "That's a lousy fucking thing to say."

  "I was talking about myself. Maybe you're different from me."

  "What the hell's the matter with you? You don't think it's natural to feel loss, to feel grief, when somebody dies? I tried to close the hole in her throat with my hands, her blood was running through my fingers. She was still alive and looking straight into my eyes. Like she was drowning and neither one of us could do anything about it." He pressed his forehead against his fist; his flexed thigh trembled against his slacks.

  "I got four of my men killed on a trail in Vietnam. Then I got drunk over it. I used them, I didn't respect them for the brave men they were. That's the way alcoholism works, El."

  "I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me be for a while."

  "Will you go to the meeting?"

  He didn't answer. There was a pained light in his eyes like someone had twisted barbed wire around his forehead.

  "You don't have to talk, just listen to what these guys have to say about their own experience," I said.

  "I'd rather pass tonight."

  "Suit yourself," I said.

  I told Bootsie where I was going and walked out to the truck. The cicadas droned from horizon to horizon under the vault of plum-colored sky. Then I heard Elrod walking through the leaves and pecan husks behind me.

  "If I sit around here, I'll end up in the beer joint," he said, and opened the passenger door to the truck. Then he raised his finger at me. "But I'm going to ask you one thing, Dave. Don't ever accuse me of using Kelly again. If you do, I'm going to knock your teeth down your goddamn throat."

  There were probably a number of things I could have said in reply; but you don't deny a momentary mental opiate to somebody who has made an appointment in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  The black jukejoint in St. Martinville was set back in a grove of trees off a yellow dirt road not far from Bayou Teche. It was one of those places that could be dropped by a tornado in the middle of an Iowa cornfield and you would instantly know that its origins were in the Deep South. The plank walls and taped windows vibrated with noise from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night. Strings of Christmas-tree lights rimmed the doors and windows year round; somebody was barbecuing ribs on top of a tin barrel, only a few feet from a pair of dilapidated privies that were caked under the eaves with yellow jacket and mud-dauber nests; people copulated back in the woods against tree trunks and fought in the parking lot with knives, bottles, and razors. Inside, the air was always thick with the smell of muscatel, smoke, cracklings, draft beer and busthead whiskey, expectorated snuff, pickled hogs' feet, perfume, body powder, sweat, and home-grown reefer.

  Sam Patin sat on a small stage with a canopy over it hung with red tassels and miniature whiskey bottles that clinked in the backdraft from a huge ventilator fan. His white suit gleamed with an electric purple glow from the floor lamps, and the waxed black surfaces of his twelve-string guitar winked with tiny lights. The floor in front of him was packed with dancers. When he blew into the harmonica attached to a wire brace on his neck and began rolling the steel picks on his fingers across an E-major blues run, the crowd moaned in unison. They yelled at the stage as though they were confirming a Biblical statement he had made at a revival, pressed their loins together with no consciousness of other people around them, and roared with laughter even though Hogman sang of a man who had sold his soul for an ox-blood Stetson hat he had just lost in a crap game:

  Stagolee went runnin'

  In the red-hot boilin' sun,

  Say look in my chiffro drawer, woman,

  Get me my smokeless .41.

  Stagolee tole Miz Billy,

  You don't believe your man is dead,

  Come down to the barroom,

  See the .41 hole in his head.

  That li’l judge found Stagolee guilty

  And that li’l clerk wrote it down,

  On a cold winter morning,

  Stagolee was Angola bound.

  Forty-dollar coffin,

  Eighty-dollar hack,

  Carried that po' man to the burying ground,

  Ain't never comin' back.

  Two feet away from me the bartender filled a tray with draft beers without ever looking at me. He was bald and had thick gray muttonchop sideburns that looked like they were pasted on his cheeks. Then he wiped his hands on his apron and lit a cigar.

  "You sho' you in the right place?" he said.

  "I'm a friend of Hogman's," I said.

  "So this is where you come to see him?"

  "Why not?"

  "What you havin', chief?"

  "A 7 Up."

  He opened a bottle, placed it in front of me without a glass, and walked away. The sides of the bottle were warm and filmed with dust. Twenty minutes later Hogman had not taken a break and was still playing.

  "You want another one?" the bartender said.

  "Yeah, I would. How about some ice or a cold one this time?" I said.

  "The gentleman wants a cold one," he said to no one in particular. Then he filled a tall glass with cracked ice and set it on the bar with another dusty bottle of 7 Up. "Why cain't y'all leave him alone? He done his time, ain't he?"

  "I look like the heat?" I said.

  "You are the heat, chief. You and that other one out yonder."

  "What other one? What are you talking about, partner?"

  "The white man that was out yonder in that blue Mercury."

  I got off the stool and looked into the parking lot through the Venetian blinds and the scrolled neon tubing of a Dixie beer sign.

  "I don't see any blue Merc," I said.

  " 'Cause he gone now, chief. Like it's a black people's club, like he figured that out, you understand what I'm sayin'?"

  "What'd this guy look like?" I said.

  "White. He look white. That he'p you out?" he said, tossed a towel into the tin sink, and walked down the duck-boards toward the far end of the bar.

  Finally Hogman slipped his harmonica brace and guitar strap off his neck, looked directly at me, and went through a curtained door into a back storage room. I followed him inside. He sat on a wood chair, among stacks of beer cases, and had alread
y started eating a dinner of pork chops, greens, and cornbread from a tin plate that rested on another chair.

  "I ain't had a chance to eat today. This movie-star life is gettin' rough on my time. You want some?" he said.

  "No, thanks." I leaned against a stack of beer cartons.

  "The lady fix me these chops don't know how to season, but they ain't too bad."

  "You want to get to it, Sam?"

  "You t'ink I just messin' with you, huh? All right, this is how it play. A long time ago up at Angola I got into trouble over a punk. Not my punk, you understand, I didn't do none of that unnatural kind of stuff, a punk that belong to a guy name Big Melon. Big Melon was growin' and sellin' dope for a couple of the hacks. Him and his punk had a whole truck patch of it behind the cornfield."

  "Hogman, I'm afraid this sounds a little remote."

  "You always know, you always got somet'ing smart to say. That's why you runnin' around in circles, that's why them men laughin' at you."

  "Which men?"

  "The ones who killed that nigger you dug up in the Atchafalaya. You gonna be patient now, or you want to go back to doin' it your way?"

  "I'm looking forward to hearing your story, Hogman."

  "See, these two hacks had them a good bidness. Big Melon and the punk growed the dope, cured it, bagged it all up, and the hacks sold it in Lafayette. They carried it down there themselves sometimes, or the executioner and another cop picked it up for them. They didn't let nobody get back there by that cornfield. But I was half-trusty then, livin' in Camp I, and I used to cut across the field to get to the hog lot. That's how come I found out they was growin' dope back there. So Big Melon tole the hack I knowed what they was doin', that I was gonna snitch them off, and then the punk planted a jar of julep under my bunk so I'd lose my trusty job and my good-time.

  "I tole the hack it ain't right, I earn my job. He say, 'Hogman, you fuck with the wrong people in here, you goin' in the box and you goin' stay in there till you come out a white man.' That's what the bossman say. I tole him it don't matter how long they keep me in there, it still ain't right. They wrote me up for sassin' and put me to pickin' cotton. When I get down in a thin patch and come up short, they make me stand up all night on an oil barrel, dirty and smellin' bad and without no supper.

  "I went to the bossman in the field, say I don't care what Big Melon do, what them hacks do, it ain't my bidness, I just want my job back on the hog lot. He say, 'You better keep shut, boy, you better fill that bag, you better not put no dirt clods in it when you weigh in, neither, like you tried to do yesterday.' I say, 'Boss, what's I gonna do? I ain't put no dirt clods in my bag, I ain't give nobody trouble, I don't be carin' Big Melon want to grow dope for the hacks.' He knock me down with a horse quirt and put me in the sweat-box on Camp A for three days, in August, with the sun boilin' off them iron sides, with a bucket between my knees to go to the bat'room in."