"We're high achievers."
"What about Abshire?"
"Plays second base for the Dodgers, right? Take it easy, Robicheaux."
"You'll never win their hearts and minds."
"Before I hang up, let me add one thing. You didn't do half bad for a guy locked out in the cold. You were a good friend to Sam Fitzpatrick, too. We're not unappreciative of that. And finally, I hope this is the last conversation I ever have with you."
So I didn't know what plans, if any, they had for the general, but I knew I had to see him. I didn't like him, certainly, but I felt a peculiar kind of kinship with him. I felt I had learned something about him in the morgue at the Times-Picayune that most other people would not understand. Like those Confederate soldiers buried under the lawn of Jefferson Davis's home, some people share historical real estate that will always be their private country. And I also knew that to be free of the tiger you sometimes had to look right into the beaded orange light of his eye.
After lunch, I visited Jimmie in the hospital. He was out of intensive care now, and the blinds were open in his room and the sunlight struck across the vases of roses, carnations, and dahlias on the windowsill and dresser. The nurses had him propped up on pillows, and although one of his eyes was taped and his face was still gray, he was able to smile at me.
"In a few more weeks we're going to be stringing some green trout," I said.
He started to whisper something, and I had to sit on the edge of the bed and lean over him to hear his words.
"Je t'aime, frère," he said.
I didn't answer him right away. I didn't need to. He knew I loved him as much as he loved me, in the way that only two men can love each other. I picked up his water glass and glass straw and helped him drink.
"It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better," I said.
His mouth was like a bird's on the glass straw.
I left the hospital and drove my rental car back to the Hertz office downtown. I couldn't afford to keep it anymore. I figured if I was reinstated with the department, and hence with the credit union, I would buy a new automobile; and if I wasn't reinstated, it would probably be time to liquidate and look for new horizons, anyway. There were always options. I remembered the worst afternoon in my gambler's career. My wife and I had gone on a vacation to Miami, and by the end of the ninth race on our first day at Hialeah I had dropped six hundred dollars. I sat in the emptying grandstand, dozens of torn parimutuel tickets at my feet, a cold wind blowing paper across the track, and tried not to look at the disappointment and anger in my wife's face. Then I heard a small plane's straining roar overhead, and I looked up into the gray sky and saw a biplane towing a long canvas sign that read, Get even at Biscayne Dog Track Tonight. Even the loser had a future.
I took the streetcar down St. Charles Avenue to the Garden District. It was wonderful riding down the esplanade with the window open under the trees, the iron wheels clicking on the tracks, the sunlight and shadow flicking across my arm. At each stop, black and working-class white people and college students waited in the shade of the oaks and palm trees, and black teenagers sold ice-cream bars and snow cones out of bicycle carts, and the sidewalk cafés in front of the hotels had already started to fill with the early supper crowd. For some reason every day in New Orleans seems like a holiday, even when you have to work, and there is no better way to enjoy it than rattling down the esplanade in a breezy streetcar that has been running on those same tracks since the turn of the century. I watched the pillared and scrolled antebellum homes roll by, the spreading oaks hung with Spanish moss, the small courtyards with their iron gates and whitewashed brick walls, the palm fronds and banana trees that shaded the old, root-cracked sidewalks. Then we crossed Jackson Avenue and I got off at my stop, drank a lime Coke in Katz and Besthoff, and walked down the short, brick-paved street to the general's home on Prytania.
I paused at the front gate. Through the umbrella trees along the fence I saw him sitting at a white iron table in the side yard, peeling oranges and avocados into a bowl. He wore sandals and khaki shorts with no shirt, and his sun-browned skin and white hair were dappled with the light shining through the oak tree overhead. Under his arms were the wrinkled webs of tissue that old people have, but his physique was still robust, the movement of his hands strong and confident as he pared the fruit into the bowl. By his elbow were an ashtray with a cigarette holder in it and a corked bottle of wine. He unstoppered the bottle, poured into a small glass, and then his acetylene-blue eyes fastened on mine.
I unlatched the iron gate and walked across the lawn toward him. His face was empty, but his eyes watched me as they would a creature who had suddenly been released from a cage.
"Are there others with you?" he asked.
"Nope. I'm still operating on my own."
"I see." He looked up and down my body, watched my hands. He slipped the paring knife into an orange and peeled back the rind. "Do you want revenge?"
"They'll come for you. It's just a matter of time."
"Maybe. Maybe not."
"There's no maybe about it, General. If the feds don't, my supervisor will. He's a better cop than I am. He does it by the rules, and he doesn't mess things up."
"I don't understand why you're here."
"What were you doing out by my houseboat?"
"Sit down. Do you drink wine or do you want some fruit?"
"No, thank you."
He put a cigarette in his holder, but he didn't light it. His eyes looked across the yard where some gray squirrels were running up an oak tree.
"I wanted to apologize," he said.
"Oh?"
"For all the things that have happened to you. You shouldn't have been involved in it."
"Cops automatically become involved when you break the law."
"I've brought you serious grief, Lieutenant. Some of it was done without my knowledge, but ultimately I'm responsible. I offer you my apology now. I don't expect you to accept it."
"I came here for a personal reason, too. I won't be the one who comes up your walk with a warrant. Somebody else will do that. But I think I'm the only one who knows why you got into this Elephant Walk project, or whatever you call it."
"What makes you privy to my soul, Lieutenant?"
"You were a soldier's soldier. You're not a right-wing crazy. You have the reputation of an honorable man. I suspect that people like Wineburger, Julio Segura, and Philip Murphy make your skin crawl. But you went on the other side of the street with the lowlifes and the paranoids and started shipping arms down to Central America. A couple of innocent people are dead in this country, and God only knows what damage those guns have done in Guatemala and Nicaragua. So a man who probably doesn't respect politicians in the first place has become part of a political conspiracy. It doesn't fit, does it? I think it has to do with your son."
"Maybe you're well-intentioned, but you're being intrusive."
"I was over there, General. Your knowledge and mine won't go away. But you've got to look at it for what it is. You can't bury something awful inside yourself, then pretend it's not there while you fight another war that makes you break all your own rules."
"What do you mean?"
"The massacre at My Lai. You're blaming it on your son. Or you're blaming it on the VC that made him set those mines."
"No."
"Yes. Tear it out of yourself and look at it in the light. They captured him around Pinkville and made him string mines through those rice paddies. Then Calley's people got blown up by those same mines before they went into My Lai."
He set the orange and the paring knife down on the table. His hands were flat on the table's surface. His eyes blinked rapidly and I could see the pulse in his neck. His deeply tanned, smooth skin was spotted with the sunlight shifting through the oak leaves overhead.
"I've apologized to you. I'm deeply sorry for what's happened to you. But you haven't the right to do this."
"It wasn't your son's fa
ult. He was forced to set those mines, and you have to forgive him for it. Maybe you even have to forgive the people that made him do it."
"Do you know what they did to him?" One blue eye trembled at the edge.
"Yes."
"They put his head in a cage full of rats."
"I know."
"He didn't like the army. He was going to medical school. But he was never afraid of anything."
"I bet he was a fine young man, General. A friend of mine over on Magazine knew him. He said your kid was first-rate."
"I don't want to talk any more about this, if you don't mind."
"All right."
"Your supervisor… you say he's a good man?" He picked up the orange and pulled a piece of rind off it absently.
"Yes."
"Will he see that you're given back your position?"
"Probably."
"I'm sure that he's a man who keeps his word. How long before they'll be out here?"
"Today, tomorrow. Who knows? It probably depends on who takes jurisdiction. Why not walk in on them?"
"I don't think so."
"You must know by now they've got Wineburger. He'll turn you for the pennies on your eyes."
He lit his cigarette. The smoke curled around his holder. His eyes looked into the shade of the trees.
"Well, I guess it's not your style," I said, and got up from the table. "I'll go now. Read Saint John of the Cross. It's a long night, General. Don't try to get through it with apologies. They're all right between gentlemen, but they don't have much value for the dead."
I walked back to the streetcar stop on St. Charles. The esplanade was shady under the spreading oaks, and the wind blew pieces of newspaper through the intersection. The streetcar tracks were burnished the color of copper, and they trembled slightly from the rumbling weight of the car that was still far down the esplanade. The wind was dry, full of dust, the burnt-out end of a long, hot afternoon, and I could smell the acrid scorch in the air that the streetcars made when they popped across an electric circuit. Overhead, clouds that had the dull sheen of steam floated in from the Gulf, where the sun was already sinking into a purple thunderhead. An elderly black woman who waited at the stop with me carried a flowered umbrella hooked on her arm. She wore a pillbox hat clamped down on her small head.
"It gonna rain frogs by tonight," she said. "First it get hot and windy, then it smell like fish, then lightning gonna jump all over my little house."
She smiled at me with her joke. I helped her on the streetcar, which was crowded with black people who worked as servants in the Garden District. She and I shared a wooden seat in the back of the car as it rumbled along the esplanade under the trees, past the scrolled iron balconies, the sidewalk cafés in front of the hotels, the green-blue lawns that were now streaked with shadow, the marble-columned porches where Confederate officers once tethered their horses and drank bourbon with their ladies. Out over the Gulf I heard a long peal of thunder, like a row of ancient cannon firing in a diminishing sequence. The black lady shook her head gravely and made a wet, humming sound in the back of her throat.
* * *
EPILOGUE
I was reinstated in the department with no disciplinary action other than a letter of reprimand for punching out Nate Baxter. In two days a half-dozen cops called up to congratulate me. I had heard from none of them while I was on suspension. I discovered that I was not ready to return to work, that my file drawer of gargoyles and grief would have to remain in abeyance in that old Basin Street building that had once housed slave auctions and cockfights. I took two weeks of my vacation time, and Annie and I went to Key West, walked along the ficus-shaded streets by the bay where Ernest Hemingway and James Audubon had once lived, scuba-dived on Seven Mile Reef, where the water was so clear and green at thirty feet that you could count the grains of sand like fragments of diamond in your palm, fished for cobia, grouper, and wahoo, and ate trays of boiled shrimp and conch fritters down on the dock while the shrimp boats rose and knocked inside their mooring slips.
When it was time to return to work, I put in for my remaining week's vacation. Finally I had no days left. The summer had burnt itself out; the heat had lifted one day in a breeze off the Gulf, the sky turned a darker blue, the trees a deeper green. Stubborn boys still tried to hold on to baseball games in sand lots, but each morning was cooler now, the sunlight gold and warm at noon, and you could hear high-school marching bands thundering on afternoon practice fields. I walked into the First District at eight o'clock on the day I was to resume work, filled out a request for return of my retirement funds, and resigned.
It was time for somebody else to fight the wars. Captain Guidry argued with me and said that I had been vindicated. But vindication is of value only if you're interested in keeping score. I think by that time I had learned that the score takes care of itself. You just keep bearing down on the batter, then one day you look over your shoulder and you're pleasantly surprised at the numbers that are up on the board.
Clete blew Dodge like the town was burning down. He packed two suitcases, forged his wife's signature on a check against their joint account, and left his car double-parked in front of the airport with both front doors open. A month later I received a postcard from him that had been mailed in Honduras. The card showed a Mayan pyramid in Guatemala.
Dear Streak,
Greetings from Bongo-Bongo Land. I'd like to tell you I'm off the sauce and working for the Maryknolls. I'm not. Guess what skill is in big demand down here? A guy that can run through the manual of arms is an automatic captain. They're all kids. Somebody with a case of Clearasil could take the whole country.
See you in the next incarnation,
C.
P.S. If you run into Lois, tell her I'm sorry for ripping her off. I left my toothbrush in the bathroom. I want her to have it.
I used my retirement money to buy a boat-rental and bait business in New Iberia, and had my houseboat towed from New Orleans through Morgan City and up the Bayou Teche. Annie and I rode on the boat the last few miles into New Iberia, and we ate crawfish étouffée on the deck and watched our wake slip up into the cypress and oak trees along the bank, watched yesterday steal upon us—the black people in straw hats, cane-fishing for goggle-eye perch, the smoke drifting out through the trees from barbecue fires, the crowds of college-age kids at fish-fries and crab-boils in the city park, the red leaves that tumbled out of the sky and settled like a whisper on the bayou's surface. It was the Louisiana I had grown up in, a place that never seemed to change, where it was never a treason to go with the cycle of things and let the season have its way. The fall sky was such a hard blue you could have struck a match against it, the yellow light so soft it might have been aged inside oak.
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James Lee Burke, DR01 - The Neon Rain
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