by Lewis Perdue
Everybody, especially Talmadge, knew the conviction was a greased rail to the gas chamber, which is why he secretly flushed his medicine down the toilet before the sentencing hearings.
There, his mind freed from the chemical handcuffs that had kept him silent for so long, he stood up in open court and declared it a frame-up to keep him quiet about Project Enduring Valor and began to rattle off names and dates and places he had mostly forgotten until the seizures started.
A contingent of Army officers and MPs conveniently in court that day hustled him out of the courtroom in record time, then bundled him off to the mental ward at the VA hospital, where he had remained ever since. The judge sentenced Talmadge to death in the gas chamber at Parchman, then sealed the court records and threatened anyone present with serious jail time if they talked about what had proceeded.
"Y'all got a tough row to hoe, now don'tcha?" Talmadge addressed the camera. "Y'all want me dead so I can't remem'buh things no mo'." He looked up at the camera and nodded his head for good measure.
Then he gingerly increased the weight on both legs. Despite the arthritis pain in his knees and hips that had ended his career as a hunting guide, Talmadge ignored the walker and shuffled over to the window. He parted the curtains and squinted through his reflection in the window glass. Southwest through the darkness he caught a glimpse of the very top of the Capitol dome above the trees. Talmadge imagined himself free out there with real fresh air to breath and grass and dog shit to avoid stepping in. Anger filtered into his chest, dark, hot, and sharp.
Then he turned back toward the camera and the red light that never went out. "Fuck you all, 'specially you Mr. High-and-Mighty, General dog-fucker Braxton and all them clap-rotten horses you rode in on."
Sweat beaded up on Talmadge's face and his pulse throbbed along the neat surgical scar that ran like railroad tracks from the bridge of his nose up past his right eyebrow and into his thinning hairline. Then his vision faded the way it always did when his medication wore off. A scintillating crescent of multicolored neon obliterated his peripheral vision, then spread.
The damn lights had started it all. That first day, he'd bent over a cup of coffee at the Delta Cafe in Itta Bena, talking with Dud Shackleford and Dooney Clark about how fishing at Mossy Lake had gone right to hell, and they all agreed it was thanks to all the crowds from as far away as Jackson with their fancy bass boats and million-dollar tackle that made too damn much noise for real fishermen to catch anything.
On the first day when the lights in his head had shattered his vision, Darryl Talmadge had dropped his coffee cup and spilled coffee all aver the table. Dooney called 911. Talmadge was sure he was having a stroke, but when he got to the hospital in Greenwood, the emergency room doctors diagnosed it as some sort of migraine aura, perhaps a reaction to the stress of his wife's death and the need to sell his house to pay her medical expenses. The doctor said the aura probably didn't mean anything serious, but if it came again, perhaps he needed to go to Jackson or Memphis to have his head scanned.
Then the flashbacks came cascading from his head right after Dud and Dooney settled him into his room at the Tallahatchie Manor Assisted Care Facility, where he'd lived since his wife, Dora, had died of cancer from all the cigarettes, right after his knees had gotten too arthritic for him to care for their little place on Highway 7, north of the Episcopal chapel outside Itta Bena, He still felt guilty for the relief that had mixed with his sorrow when Dora died. She had begun to slip into the cranky stages of Alzheimer's and was running him ragged when the cancer killed her. His depression had hit right after the Alzheimer's, back when he'd realized the woman he loved no longer lived inside the body he tended. Yet he used every shred of his swiftly eroding energy and money to do the best he could for her. Talmadge figured out a few months later that he had done it all to honor Dora's memory; it had been like living with a fresh gravesite in the house where feeding her and bathing her and keeping her from wandering off and getting hit by a tractor filled the same emotional need as placing flowers on a grave. He felt gratefully ashamed when the cancer finally took Dora.
But the really bad memories that landed him in hot water flooded from his head not long after Dooney and Dud had dropped him off at his room. The scintillating lights came back with a vengeance. As the neon rainbow crescendoed towards climax, he fumbled out the old cassette recorder and filled up all the tapes he could find with an avalanche of memories that had never scrolled through his consciousness before. He'd always thought the mortar shell that had separated his shoulder in Korea and laced his head with shrapnel had forever erased memories from those days. But here, to his astonishment, they flooded back, and along with them, memories of white coats and hypodermics and Project Enduring Valor. He babbled into the microphone until he lost consciousness.
The next day, after the lights had gone, he played the tapes and heard his voice as if for the first time and listened to his words relating strange tales of which he had no memory. Now certain this was the beginning of Alzheimer's like Dora's, he pulled out his old .12-gauge, the Remington automatic built on the Browning patent that had once made him a legendary wing shot in any season, loaded three cartridges with number four shot— the largest he had since duck hunting was his favorite—then with an old cassette of Dora singing in the background, he danced with the .12-gauge for the entire morning before calling Dooney.
Two hours later at the VA hospital in Jackson, they sat in the waiting room almost all day until a harried physician came out, listened to his story, pried the shoebox with the cassettes away from Talmadge, and arranged for his admittance.
If only he had left the freaking tapes at home, things would be so different now, as he shifted his focus to the television screen where one of CNN's artlessly untalented but sensuously full-lipped news girls filled the screen, droning on about some flood in Europe washing away priceless art treasures. She wore a sly smile on her face as she read this tragic story. Then she read something that cut through Talmadge's latest light storm.
"Eight Russian soldiers were gunned down and three others wounded yesterday by one of their comrades in the Caucasus Mountains on a remote crossing post on the border with Georgia," she said with that sly cynical smirk just below the surface. "A regional duty officer with Russia's branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry said the shooter was under the influence of some sort of hallucinogenic mushroom popular with conscripts in the remote border region. This is the second such shooting in the same region within the past four months as desertions, violence, and suicides continue to plague Russia's deteriorating military establishment.... And now with entertainment news about Paris, J.Lo, and Britney ..."
Through the scintillating lights that dominated his vision now, Talmadge concentrated all his anger on the video camera. "Russians're tryin' y'own damn shit, ain't they?" he began. "Fucking mushroom story makes a damn good cover-up, huh? Huh! Well, it's a shitload bettuh than that fuckin' combat stress crap y'all trotted out after all those killin's at Ft. Bragg when the boys came home from Afghanistan." His anger and the electrical storm in his brain began to merge. "You limpdicked cocksuckuhs hung those boys out t'dry ovuh My Lai an' all those other times when it was th' fucking drugs, y'drugs, y'fuckin' drugs, y'fuckin' drugs, y'fuckin' drugs, fuggingdrugs! Fuggingdrugs!"
He raged at the camera until the arcing neon rainbow filled his vision and his mind, clutched at the deepest parts of his entrails, and squeezed the breath from his chest.
Then Darryl Talmadge buckled face-first to the floor.
CHAPTER 18
I sat on the guano-frosted concrete riprap jetty and field-stripped my .45 and my cell phone. Either might save my life if my assailants had friends around. Shaking the water out of the gun and phone, drying off the .45 cartridges and battery, took me less than five minutes, about as long as it took the L.A. County Sheriff's Department Harbor Patrol to show up with two fiberglass-hulled boats and a bright orange inflatable. Behind came the Coast Guard's forty-foot multipu
rpose rescue and fire-suppression vessel. County Fire Department trucks made their way along the jetty running between Ballona Creek and the Marina's main jetty.
The Coast Guard vessel technically wasn't supposed to respond to incidents here in the sheriff's jurisdiction inside the marina. But tonight, the sheriff had obviously requested assistance under their mutual aid pact. I knew this because I had spent more than twelve years as a reserve with the Sheriff's Search and Rescue team and almost as long with the Coast Guard Auxiliary. I didn't get paid for any of that, and in fact, equipping the Jambalaya to serve as a Coast Guard Auxiliary facility took a fair amount of my personal cash. But I didn't mind. I told most people it was my way of giving back to the community, which was mostly true. Only, I could never decide whether that counterbalanced the sheer fun of testing myself against the ocean when no sane person would be out on it (those being the ones we usually had to rescue) or dangling from a line beneath a helicopter to rescue the equivalent fools in the mountains.
I thought about this as I sat on the stinking rocks and watched the Jambalaya and the Cigarette boat melt into one crumpling mass of gasoline, diesel fuel, and burning fiberglass resin that had gone up far quicker than I had ever seen before. I guessed it was the enormous amount of gasoline in the Cigarette boat's tanks.
The Harbor Patrol and the Coast Guard spotlights supplemented the already ample light from private watercraft, blasting the scene with stark, flat illumination from so many directions it bleached out shadows and washed away colors with a blue-white gesso that made it look like a virgin paint-by-numbers canvas. I squinted into the light, grateful to see all three passengers aboard the Cigarette boat being pulled aboard other boats.
The Jambalaya's aluminum mast softened from the heat, then wilted, sending the masthead anemometer and other instruments plunging into the water.
The Coast Guard vessel maneuvered gingerly in close to the wreckage to allow the crew to spray fire-suppressing foam. Abruptly the two burning boats made a noise oddly reminiscent of a flushing toilet, then sank immediately, propelled to the bottom, no doubt, by the massive lead weight in the Jambalaya's finned, torpedo-shaped keel.
Watching the Jambalaya's rigging disappear beneath the water sucked me under my own surface for a moment. Like the individual frames of a motion picture flashing by too quickly to focus on any single one the images of what I had lost aboard the Jambalaya created a deep, unified sense of loss.
I stood up straight and tall and tried to shake off the sadness. I focused instead on the Coast Guard scattering foam to quell the remaining fire on the surface; I teased the scene apart with my eyes, desperate to spot someone thrashing about. But as one of the Harbor Patrol's inflatables made its way toward me, I grew increasingly comfortable that my assailant had not made it out before the burning mass sizzled beneath the waves.
"What in hell've you gotten yourself into this time, Doc?" I recognized sheriff's sergeant Vince Sloane's gruff Brooklyn accent before I actually recognized his face through the glare. "It looked like the freaking Fourth of July out there." He was a beefy, powerful man with no tolerance for BS and an amazing capacity to keep his temper under control. He was a perp's nightmare, hell on wheels with a heart for the innocent that knew no natural bounds.
Sloane knelt amidships as the helmsman feathered the throttle and brought the craft within inches of the jetty and kept it there without actually touching the riprap. That had to be Lexus Guzman. She was the only deputy with such a deft hand on the helm.
"Hell if I can figure it out," I replied to Sloane as I climbed aboard the inflatable.
"Doc, you smell like manure," Lexus said as she moved the inflatable away from the jetty.
"Good evening to you too, Lexus," I replied. Her real name was Carolina; she'd come from a well-to-do family with a vineyard down near Ensenada and had shown up for work the first day in a bright, shiny new Lexus convertible. And while she had gone on to newer and fancier cars, the nickname Lexus stuck.
We made our way north in the main channel and I filled them in. Overhead, a sheriff's helicopter passed us heading west, then settled into a rock-solid hover above the accident scene at the mouth of the harbor.
"I should give you this," I said as I tugged the Colt .45 automatic from my Windbreaker, pulled out the magazine, and ejected the cartridge in the chamber. I held the .45 upside down dangling with one finger in the trigger guard. Vince made a question with his face.
"I think when they finally pull the wreckage up, they're going to find three bodies and one of them is going to be carrying a slug from this."
Sloane frowned deeply as he took all this in. Even without pay, I served as a sworn peace officer, which meant I would be placed on administrative leave while Internal Affairs investigated this officer-involved shooting.
"Okay," Sloane said, his voice heavy with resignation. "Tell me everything before I have to write it down officially." He nodded to Lexus, who slowed the inflatable and made a broad, sweeping circle. As I began, a television helicopter thwacked past overhead, the station's call letters prominently illuminated on the tail for maximum marketing impact. The door was open with the cameraman strapped in the opening. Another TV chopper followed close on its tail as we made lazy circles in the channel. Soon, the sky above and around the harbor breakwater looked like an aerial parking lot for giant mechanical dragonflies.
Ignoring the circus in the sky, I spilled everything, especially the part about how I thought it had been a botched drug rip-off and how professional my assailants had been.
"But not professional enough for you, eh, Doc?" Sloane gave me the same curiously wary look he wore whenever my military service came up. He had seen my DD214, the official discharge document issued by the Department of Defense summarizing my military service. A lot of stuff was too classified to put on it. I didn't talk about it and Sloane was too smart to pry. Guzman steered the craft slowly to the sheriff's dock.
"Just lucky," I said, and shrugged.
"Lucky!" Sloane scoffed. "If you'd've been lucky, the bastards would've hit the right boat and not yours." He mumbled, "You have any idea how much freaking paperwork this is going to be? Not to mention that bozo season is here and I can't afford to lose a good reserve officer."
I was about to make a sarcastic wisecrack about how sorry I was for his terrible evening when my cell made a fuzzy buzzing sound. The wet speaker had a hard time with Robert's Johnson's "Crossroad Blues," which I used as my ring tone, but I was amazed the phone still worked.
I answered and froze at the sound of a full, melodic, and all too familiar voice.
"Mr. Stone?"
I checked my watch. "Jasmine?"
"It's me. My flight was one of those very rare creatures that arrived early."
"Oh, jeez!" I blurted. "No, don't…I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Its just…I've been…my boat's been in an accident and—"
"You okay?"
"For now. But there's going to be a lot of paperwork and the usual hassles."
"Okay. Look, I booked a room at the Crown Plaza right near LAX. Why don't I check in and call you in the morning?"
Guzman brought the inflatable to soft landing at the dock. Sloane grabbed the inflatable's bow line, jumped out, and tied it to the nearest cleat. He took the stern line from Guzman and did the same.
"Look, it's okay." Jasmine's voice was warm and confident, like her mother's. I'm not a tourist here."
I had once clipped a Newsweek article on Vanessa with a sidebar on Jasmine. She'd graduated from USC, then Stanford law school, clerked for a justice on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, then went to work with her mother in New York. When Vanessa moved to Mississippi, Jasmine stayed up North with a multimegaton Manhattan law firm. I manipulated the dates of the articles in my head and figured that Jasmine was in her midor maybe late thirties.
Then six months ago, after Vanessa's murder, Jasmine had come home to continue her mother's legacy at the Advocacy Foundation for Mississippi Justice, a Delt
a powerhouse inspired by Martha Bergmark's Mississippi Center for Justice down in Jackson.
"Still—" I stuttered.
"Still nothing. Take care of business and call me in the morning." The confidence and generosity in her voice amazed me and fooled me again into believing for an instant that I was talking to Vanessa. The daughter's genes had fallen right close the source, I thought, at least the DNA from Vanessa had. No one actually knew about the other half.
I stood there with the phone in my hand, thinking about the mystery of DNA and how it encapsulated the strong and independent thinking that had made Vanessa so incorruptibly autonomous. I wondered whether Jasmine had the same stuff.
Most of what I knew about both of them came from magazine and newspaper articles about Vanessa I had occasionally clipped and thrown into an expandable file. Some I had read and reread until the edges frayed and carried the smudges of my fingers.
When I married Camilla, I put the file in storage, a symbolic putting away of all others.
After the accident when we knew Camilla's coma had no end and I could no longer face the ghosts in our house, I took to living aboard the Jambalaya three or four nights a week and the rest at a cot in my office. I dragged Vanessa's old file down to the Jambalaya. At first, I'd sit belowdecks and simply touch the file. Every time I tried to open it, I'd see Camilla wasting away on her motorized hospital bed with the panoramic view of the Pacific, which no one could tell if she saw or not. Legally we remained husband and wife, but the coma had evicted the real Camilla from the body. Still, I remained faithful to the memory of Camilla, to the idea of who she had been. My nondecision to remain poised without action haunted every part of my life.
The day Vanessa was buried, my heart told me I could read her file without the spirits of adultery reaching out for me. From that cold winter day until this very morning, I'd sit aboard the Jambalaya—in the cockpit on warm sunny days and down below in the main cabin at night—and reread the pieces written about her. I was surprised at how complete a record I had collected, going back almost thirty years. Sometimes I felt guilty when I read the pieces, wondering at first, then knowing in my heart that Camilla had always been my second choice.
