DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  On the floor was an open cooler filled with cracked ice, long-necked bottles of Dixie, soda pop, and tonic water.

  "I can outfit you with some fly rods and popping bugs," I said. "Why not wait until the rain quits and then try for some bass and goggle-eye perch?"

  "When's the last time you caught fresh-water fish right after a rain?" He smiled crookedly at me.

  "Suit yourself. But I think what you're doing is a bad idea," I said. I looked at Kelly.

  "El, we don't have to go today," she said. "Why don't we just drive down to New Orleans and mess around in the French Quarter?"

  "I planned this all week."

  "Come on, El. Give it up. It looks like Noah's flood out there."

  "Sorry, we've got to do it. You can understand that, cain't you, Mr. Robicheaux?"

  "Not really. Anyway, watch the bend in the channel about three miles south. The water's been low and there're some snags on the left."

  "Three miles south? Yeah, I'll watch it," he said, his eyes refocusing on nothing. His suntanned, taut chest was beaded with water. His feet were wide spread to keep his balance, even though the boat was not moving. "You sure you don't want a tonic?"

  "Thanks, anyway. Good luck to you all," I said.

  Before I went out the cabin door, Kelly made her eyes jump at me, but I closed the door behind me and stepped up on the gunwale and onto the dock.

  I began pushing huge balloons of water out of the awning with a broom handle and didn't hear her come up behind me.

  "He'll listen to you. Tell him not to go out there," she said. There was a pinched indentation high up on her right cheek.

  "I think you should tell him that yourself."

  "You don't understand. He had a big fight with Mikey yesterday about the script and walked off the set. Then this morning he put the boat on Mikey's credit card. Maybe if we take the boat back now, the man'll tear up the credit slip. You think he might do that?"

  "I don't know."

  "El's going to get fired, Mr. Robicheaux."

  "Tell Elrod you're staying here. That's about all I can suggest."

  "He'll go anyway."

  "I wish I could help you."

  "That's it? Au revoir, fuck you, boat people?"

  "In the last two days Elrod told both me and my wife he'd like to go to an AA meeting with me. Now it's ten in the morning and he's already ripped. What do you think the real problem is—the boat, your director, the rain, me, or maybe something else?"

  She turned around as though to leave, then turned back and faced me again. There was a bright, painful light in her green eyes, the kind that comes right before tears.

  "What do I do?" she said.

  "Go inside the shop. I'll try again," I said.

  I climbed back down into the boat and went into the cabin. He had his elbows propped on the instrument panel, while he ate a po'-boy sandwich and stared at the rain dancing in a yellow spray on the bayou.

  His face had become wan and indolent, either from fatigue or alcoholic stupor, passive to all insult or intimidation. The more I talked, the more he yawned.

  "She's a good lady, El," I said. "A lot of men would cut off their fingers with tin snips to have one like her."

  "You got that right."

  "Then why don't you quit this bullshit, at least for one day, and let her have a little serenity?"

  Then his eyes focused on the cooler, on an amber, sweating bottle of Dixie nestled in the ice.

  "All right," he said casually. "Let me borrow your fly rods, Mr. Robicheaux. I'll take good care of them."

  "You're not going out on the salt?"

  "No, I get seasick anyway."

  "You want to leave the beer box with me?"

  "It came with the boat. That fellow might get mad if I left it somewhere. Thanks for your thoughtfulness, though."

  "Yeah, you bet."

  After they were gone, I resolved that Elrod Sykes was on his own with his problems.

  "Hey, Dave, that man really a big movie actor?" Batist said.

  "He's big stuff out in Hollywood, Batist. Or at least he used to be."

  "He rich?"

  "Yeah, I guess he is."

  "That's his reg'lar woman, too, huh?"

  "Yep."

  "How come he's so unhappy?"

  "I don't know, Batist. Probably because he's a drunk."

  "Then why don't he stop gettin' drunk?"

  "I don't know, partner."

  "You mad 'cause I ax a question?"

  "Not in the least, Batist," I said, and headed for the back of the shop and began stacking crates of canned soda pop in the storeroom.

  "You got some funny moods, you," I heard him say behind me.

  A half hour later the phone rang.

  "Hello," I said.

  "We got a problem down here," a voice said.

  There was static on the line and rain was throbbing on the shop's tin roof.

  "Elrod?"

  "Yeah. We hit some logs or a sandbar or something."

  "Where are you?"

  "At a pay phone in a little store. I waded ashore."

  "Where's the boat?"

  "I told you, it's messed up."

  "Wait until the water rises, then you'll probably float free."

  "There's a bunch of junk in the propellor."

  "What are you asking me, Elrod?"

  "Can you come down here?"

  Batist was eating some chicken and dirty rice at the counter. He looked at my face and laughed to himself.

  "How far down the bayou is the boat?" I said.

  "About three miles. That bend you were talking about."

  "The bend I was talking about, huh?"

  "Yeah, you were right. There're some dead trees or logs in the water there. We ran right into them."

  "We?"

  "Yeah."

  "I'll come after you, but I'm also going to give you a bill for my time."

  "Sure thing, absolutely, Dave. This is really good of you. If lean—"

  I put the receiver back on the hook.

  "Tell Bootsie I'll be back in about an hour," I said.

  Batist had finished his lunch and was peeling the cellophane off a fresh cigar. The humor had gone out of his face.

  "Dave, I ain't one to tell you what to do, no," he said. "But there's people that's always gonna be axin' for somet'ing. When you deal with them kind, it don't matter how much you give, it ain't never gonna be enough."

  He lit his cigar and fixed his eyes on me as he puffed on the smoke.

  I put on my raincoat and hat, hitched a boat and trailer to my truck, and headed down the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees toward the general store where Elrod had made his call. The trailer was bouncing hard in the flooded chuck-holes, and through the rearview mirror I could see the outboard engine on the boat's stern wobbling against the engine mounts. I shifted down to second gear, pulled to a wide spot on the road, and let a car behind me pass. The driver, a man wearing a shapeless fedora, looked in the opposite direction of me, out toward the bayou, as he passed.

  Elrod was not at the general store, and I drove a quarter mile farther south to the bend where he had managed to put the cabin cruiser right through the limbs of a submerged tree and simultaneously scrape the bow up on a sandbar. The bayou was running high and yellow now, and gray nests of dead morning-glory vines had stuck to the bow and fanned back and forth in the current.

  I backed my trailer into the shallows, then unwinched my boat into the water, started the engine, and opened it up in a shuddering whine against the steady clatter of the rain on the bayou's surface.

  I came astern of the cabin cruiser and looped the painter on a cleat atop the gunwale so that my boat swung back in the lee of the cruiser. The current was swirling with mud and

  I couldn't see the propeller, but obviously it was fouled. From under the keel floated a streamer of torn hyacinth vines and lily pads, baited trotline, a divot ripped out of a conical fish net, and even the Clorox marker bottle t
hat went with it.

  Elrod came out of the cabin with a newspaper over his head.

  "How does it look?" he said.

  "I'll cut some of this trash loose, then we'll try to back her into deeper water. How'd you hit a fish net? Didn't you see the Clorox bottle?"

  "Is that how they mark those things?"

  I opened my Puma knife, reached as deep below the surface as I could, and began pulling and sawing away the flotsam from the propeller.

  "I 'spect the truth is I don't have any business out here," he said.

  I flung a handful of twisted hyacinths and tangled fishline toward the bank and looked up into his face. The alcoholic shine had gone out of his eyes. Now they simply looked empty, on the edge of regret.

  "You want me to get down in the water and do that?" he asked. Then he glanced away at something on the far bank.

  "No, that's all right," I said. I stepped up on the bow of my boat and over the rail of the cabin cruiser. "Let's see what happens. If I can't shake her loose, I'll tie my outboard onto the bow and try to pull her sideways into the current."

  We went inside the dryness of the cabin and closed the door. Kelly was sleeping on some cushions, her face nestled into one arm. When she woke, she looked around sleepily, her cheek wrinkled with the imprint of her arm; then she realized that little had changed in her and Elrod's dreary morning and she said, "Oh," almost like a child to whom awakenings are not good moments.

  I started the engine, put it in reverse, and gave it the gas. The hull vibrated against the sandbar, and through the back windows I could see mud and dead vegetation boiling to the bayou's surface behind the stern. But we didn't move off the sandbar. I tried to go forward and rock it loose, then I finally cut the engine.

  "It's set pretty hard, but it might come off if you push against the bow, Elrod," I said. "You want to do that?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  "It's not deep there. Just stay on the sandbar, close to the hull."

  "Put on a life jacket, El," Kelly said.

  "I swam across the Trinity River once at flood stage when houses were floating down it," he said.

  She took a life jacket out of a top compartment, picked up his wrist, and slipped his arm through one of the loops. He grinned at me. Then his eyes looked out the glass at the far bank.

  "What's that guy doing?" he said.

  "Which guy?" I said.

  "The guy knocking around in the brush out there."

  "How about we get your boat loose and worry about other people later?" I said.

  "You got it," he said, tied one lace on his jacket, and went out into the rain.

  He held on to the rail on the cabin roof and worked his way forward toward the bow. Kelly watched him through the glass, biting down on the corner of his lip.

  "He waded ashore before," I said, and smiled at her. "He's not in any danger there."

  "El has accidents. Always."

  "A psychologist might say there's a reason for that."

  She turned away from the glass, and her green eyes moved over my face.

  "You don't know him, Mr. Robicheaux. Not the gentle person who gives himself no credit for anything. You're too hard on him."

  "I don't mean to be."

  "You are. You judge him."

  "I'd like to see him get help. But he won't as long as he's on the juice or using."

  "I wish I had those kinds of easy answers."

  "They're not easy. Not at all."

  Elrod eased himself over the gunwale, sinking to his chest, then felt his way through the silt toward the slope on the sandbar.

  "Can you stand in the stern? For the weight," I said to Kelly.

  "Where?"

  "In the back of the boat."

  "Sure."

  "Take my raincoat."

  "I'm already sopped."

  I restarted the engine.

  "Just a minute," I said, and put my rain hat on her head. Her wet blond curls were flattened against her brow. "I don't mean to be personal, but I think you're a special lady, Ms. Drummond, a real soldier."

  She used both her hands to pull the hat's floppy brim down tightly on her hair. She didn't answer, but for the first time since I had met her, she looked directly into my eyes with no defensiveness or anger or fear and in fact with a measure of respect that I felt in all probability was not easily won.

  I waved at Elrod through the front glass, kicked the engine into reverse, and opened the throttle. The exhaust pipes throbbed and blew spray high into the air at the waterline, the windows shook, the boards under my feet hummed with the vibrations from the engine compartment. I looked over my shoulder through the back glass and saw Kelly bent across the gunwale, pushing at the bottom of the bayou with a tarpon gaff; then suddenly the hull scraped backward in the sand, sliding out of a trench in a yellow and brown gush of silt and dead reeds, and popped free in the current.

  Elrod was standing up on the sandbar, his balled fists raised over his head in victory.

  I cut the gas and started out the cabin door to get the anchor.

  Just as the rain struck my bare head and stung my eyes, just as I looked across the bayou and saw the man in the shapeless fedora kneeling hard against an oak tree, his shadowed face aimed along the sights of a bolt-action rifle, the leather sling twisted military style around the forearm, I knew that I was caught in one of those moments that will always remain forever too late, knew this even before I could yell, wave my arms, tell him that the person in the rain hat and Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name on the back was not me. Then the rifle's muzzle flashed in the rain, the report echoing across the water and into the willow islands. The bullet cut a hole like a rose petal in the back of Kelly's shirt and left an exit wound in her throat that made me think of wolves with red mouths running through trees.

  Chapter 10

  It was a strange week, for me as well as the town. Kelly's death brought journalists from all over the country to New Iberia. They filled all the motels, rented every available automobile in Lafayette, and dwarfed in both numbers and technical sophistication our small area news services.

  Many of them were simply trying to do their jobs. But another kind came among us, too, those who have a voyeuristic glint in their eyes, whose real motivations and potential for callousness are unknown even to themselves.

  I got an unlisted phone number for the house.

  I began to be bothered by an odor, both in my sleep and during the late afternoon when the sun baked down on the collapsed barn at the back of our property. I noticed it the second day after Kelly's death, the day that Elrod escorted her body back to Kentucky for the burial. It smelled like dead rats. I scattered a bag of lime among the weeds and rotted boards and the smell went away. Then the next afternoon it was back, stronger than before, as invasive as a stranger's soiled palm held to your face.

  I put our bedroom fan in the side window so it would draw air from the front of the house, but I would dream of turkey buzzards circling over a corrugated rice field, of sandflecked winds blowing across the formless and decomposing shape of a large animal, of a woman's hair and fingernails wedging against the sides of a metal box.

  On the seventh morning I woke early, walked past the duck pond in the soft blue light, soaked the pile of boards and strips of rusted tin with gasoline, and set it afire. The flames snapped upward in an enormous red-black handkerchief, and a cottonmouth moccasin, with a body as thick as my wrist, slithered out of the boards into the weeds, the hindquarters of an undigested rat protruding from its mouth.

  The shooter left nothing behind, no ejected brass, no recoverable prints from the tree trunk where he had fired. The pocket knife Rosie had found on the levee turned out to be free of prints. Almost all of our work had proved worthless. We had no suspects; our theories about motivation were as potentially myriad as the time we were willing to invest in thinking about them. But one heart-sinking and unalterable conclusion remained in front of my eyes all day long, in my conversations with Rosie, the sheriff
, and even the deputies who went out of their way to say good morning through my office door—Kelly Drummond was dead, and she was dead because she had been mistaken for me.

  I didn't even see Mikey Goldman walk into my office. I looked up and he was standing there, flexing the balls of his feet, his protruding, pale eyes roving about the room, a piece of cartilage working in his jaw like an angry dime.

  "Can I sit down?" he said.

  "Go ahead."

  "How you doing?"

  "I'm fine, thanks. How are you?"

  "I'm all right." His eyes went all over me, as though I were an object he was seeing for the first time.

  "Can I help you with something?" I said.

  "Who's the fucking guy who did this?"

  "When we know that, he'll be in custody."

  "In custody? How about blowing his head off instead?"

  "What's up, Mr. Goldman?"

  "How you handling it?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "How you handling it? I'm talking about you. I've been there, my friend. First Marine Division, Chosin Reservoir. Don't try to bullshit me."

  I put down my fountain pen on the desk blotter, folded my hands, and stared at him.

  "I'm afraid we're operating on two different wavelengths here," I said.

  "Yeah? The guy next to you takes a round, and then maybe you start wondering if you aren't secretly glad it was him instead of you. Am I wrong?"

  "What do you want?"

  He rubbed the curly locks of salt-and-pepper hair on his neck and rolled his eyes around the room. The skin around his mouth was taut, his chin and jaw hooked in a peculiar martial way like a drill instructor's.

  "Elrod's going to go crazy on me. I know it, I've seen him there before. He's a good kid, but he traded off some of his frontal lobes for magic mushrooms a long time ago. He likes you, he'll listen to you. Are you following me?"

  "No."

  "You keep him at your place, you stay out at his place, I don't care how you do it. I'm going to finish this picture."

  "You're an incredible man, Mr. Goldman."

  "What?" He began curling his fingers backward, as though he wanted to pull words from my chest. "You heard I got no feelings, I don't care about my actors, movie people are callous dipshits?"