DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

  "You might be a little careful about your vocabulary when you're around those guys."

  "Boy, I wonder what my grandpa would say if he saw me working with the likes of that bunch. I told you he was a Texas ranger, didn't I?"

  "You surely did."

  "You know what he once told me about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? He said—"

  "I have to get back to the office. How about I pick you up at your place at seven-thirty?"

  "Sure. Thanks for coming out, Mr. Robicheaux. I'm sorry about my bad manners on the phone. I'm not given to using profanity like that. I don't know what got into me." He picked up his soda can off the hood of his Cadillac and started to drink out of it. "It's just Coca-Cola. That's a fact."

  "You'd better drink it then."

  He smiled at me.

  "It rots your teeth," he said, and emptied the can into the dirt.

  That night I sat alone in the bait shop, a glass of iced coffee in my hand, and tried to figure the connection between Kelly's death and the pursuit of a serial killer who might also be involved with prostitution. Nothing in the investigation seemed to fit. Was the serial killer also a pimp? Why did his crimes seem to be completely contained within the state of Louisiana? If he had indeed mistaken Kelly for me, what had I discovered in the investigation that would drive him to attempt the murder of a police officer? And what was Baby Feet Balboni's stake in all this?

  Equally troubling was the possibility that Kelly's death had nothing to do with our hunt for a serial killer. Maybe the rifleman in the fedora had had another motivation, one that was connected with a rat's nest of bones, strips of dried skin, rotted clothing, and a patch of kinky hair attached to a skull plate. Did someone out there believe that somehow that gaping mouth, impacted with sand, strung with green algae, could whisper the names of two killers who thought they had buried their dark deed in water thirty-five years ago?

  We live today in what people elect to call the New South. But racial fear, and certainly white guilt over racial injustice, die hard. Hogman Patin, who probably feared very little in this world, had cautioned me because of my discovery of the lynched black man out in the Atchafalaya. He had also suggested that the dead man had been involved with a white woman. To Hogman, those events of years ago were still alive, still emblematic of an unforgiven and collective shame, to be spoken about as obliquely as possible, in all probability because some of the participants were still alive, too.

  Maybe it was time to have another talk with Hogman, I thought.

  When I drove out to his house on the bayou, the interior was dark and the white curtains in his open windows were puffing outward in the breeze. In the back I could hear the tinkling of the Milk of Magnesia bottles and the silver crosses that he had hung all over the branches of a live oak.

  Where are you, Hogman? I thought. I wedged my business card in the corner of his screen door.

  The moon was yellow through the trees. I could smell the unmistakable odor of chitterlings that had been burned in a pot. Out on the blacktop I heard a car engine. The headlights bounced off the tree trunks along the roadside, then the driver slowed and I thought he was about to turn into the grove of trees at the front of Hogman's property. I thought the car was probably Hogman's, and I started to walk toward the blacktop. Then the driver accelerated and his headlights swept past me.

  I would have given no more notice to the driver and his vehicle, except that just as I started to turn back toward my truck and leave, he cut his lights and really gave it the gas.

  If his purpose had been to conceal his license number, he was successful. But two other details stuck in my mind: the car looked new and it was dark blue, the same characteristics as the automobile that two witnesses had seen on the levee in Vermilion Parish where the asphyxiated girl had been stuffed nude into a metal barrel.

  Or maybe the car had simply contained a couple of teenage neckers looking for a little nocturnal privacy. I was too tired to think about it anymore. I started my truck and headed home.

  The night was clear, the constellations bursting against the black dome of sky overhead. There was no hint of rain, no sudden drop or variation in temperature to cause fog to roll off the water. But two hundred yards down from Hogman's house the road was suddenly white with mist, so thick my headlights couldn't penetrate it. At first I thought a fire was burning in a field and the wind had blown the smoke across the road. But the air smelled sweet and cool, like freshly turned earth, and was almost wet to the touch. The mist rolled in clouds off the bayou, covered the tree trunks, closed about my truck like a white glove, drifted in wisps through my windows. I don't know whether I deliberately stopped the truck or my engine killed. But for at least thirty seconds my headlights flickered on and off, my starter refused to crank, and my radio screamed with static that was like fingernails on a blackboard.

  Then as suddenly as it had come, the mist evaporated from the road and the tree trunks and the bayou's placid surface as though someone had held an invisible flame to it, and the night air was again as empty and pristine as wind trapped under a glass bell.

  In the morning I made do with mechanical answers in the sunlight and cleaned the terminals on my truck battery with baking soda, water, and an old toothbrush.

  Hogman called the next afternoon from the movie set out on Spanish Lake.

  "What you want out at my house?" he said.

  "I need to talk with you about the lynched black man."

  "I done already tole you what I know. That nigger went messin' in the wrong place."

  "That's not enough."

  "Is for me."

  "You said my father helped your mother when you were in prison. So now I'm asking you to help me."

  "I already have. You just ain't listen."

  "Are you afraid of somebody, Sam? Maybe some white people?"

  "I fear God. Why you talkin' to me like this?"

  "What time will you be home today?"

  "When I get there. You got your truck?"

  "Yes."

  "My car hit a tree last night. It ain't runnin' no mo'. Come out to the set this evenin' and give me a ride home. 'Bout eight or nine o'clock."

  "We'll see you then, partner," I said, and hung up.

  The sun was red and half below the horizon, the cicadas droning in the trees, when I drove down the lane through the pecan orchard to the movie set on Spanish Lake. But I soon discovered that I was not going to easily trap Hogman Patin alone. It was Mikey Goldman's birthday and the cast and crew were throwing him a party. A linen-covered buffet table was piled with catered food, a huge pink cake, and a bowl of champagne punch in the center. The tree trunks along the lake's edge were wrapped with paper bunting, and Goldman's director's chair must have had two dozen floating balloons tied to it.

  It was a happy crowd. They sipped punch out of clear plastic glasses and ate boiled shrimp and thin slices of boudin off paper plates. Mikey Goldman's face seemed to almost shine in the ambiance of goodwill and affection that surrounded him.

  In the crowd I saw Julie Balboni and his entourage, Elrod Sykes, the mayor of New Iberia, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, a couple of Teamster officials, a state legislator, and Twinky Hebert Lemoyne from Lafayette. In the middle of it all sat Hogman Patin on an up-ended crate, his twelve-string guitar resting on his crossed thighs. He was dressed like a nineteenth-century Negro street musician, except he also wore a white straw cowboy hat slanted across his eyes. The silver picks on his right hand rang across the strings as he sang,

  Soon as day break in the mornin' I gone take the dirt road home. 'Cause these blue Monday blues Is goin' kill me sure as you're born.

  "You ought to get yourself a plate."

  It was Murphy Doucet, the security guard. He was talking to me but his eyes were looking at a blond girl in shorts and a halter by the punch bowl. He ate a slice of boudin off a toothpick, then slipped the toothpick into the corner of his mouth and sucked on it.

  "It doesn't look like everybody's b
roken up about Kelly Drummond's death, does it?" I said.

  "I guess they figure life goes on."

  "You're in business with Mr. Lemoyne over there, Murph?"

  "We own a security service together, if that's what you mean. For me it's a pretty good deal, but for him it's nothing. If there's a business around here making money, Twinky's probably got a piece of it. Lord God, that man knows how to make money."

  Lemoyne sat by the lake in a canvas chair, a julep glass filled with bourbon, shaved ice, and mint leaves in his hand. He looked relaxed and cool in the breeze off the water, his rimless glasses pink with the sun's afterglow. His eyes fixed for a moment on my face, then he took a sip from his glass and watched some kids waterskiing out on the lake.

  "Get something to eat, Dave. It's free. Hell, I'm going to take some home," Murphy Doucet said.

  "Thanks, I've already eaten," I said, and walked over to where Hogman sat next to two local black women who had been hired as extras.

  "You want a ride?" I said.

  "I ain't ready yet. They's people want me to play."

  "It was your idea for me to come out here, Sam."

  "I'll be comin' directly. That's clear, ain't it? Mr. Goldman fixin' to cut his cake." Then he began singing,

  I ax my bossman, Bossman, tell me what's right.

  He whupped my left, said, Boy, now you know what's right.

  I tole my bossman, Bossman, just give me my time.

  He say, Damn yo' time, boy,

  Boy, you time behind.

  I waited another half hour as the twilight faded, the party grew louder, and someone turned on a bank of floodlamps that lit the whole area with the bright unnatural radiance of a phosphorus flare. The punch bowl was now empty and had been supplanted by washtubs filled with cracked ice and canned beer, a portable bar, and two white jacketed black bartenders who were making mint juleps and martinis as fast as they could.

  "I've got to head for the barn, Hogman," I said.

  "This lady axin' me somet'ing. Give me ten minutes," he said.

  A waiter came by with a tray and handed Hogman and the black woman with him paper cups streaming with draft beer. Then he handed me a frosted julep glass packed with shaved ice, mint leaves, orange slices, and candied cherries.

  "I didn't order this," I said.

  "Gentleman over yonder say that's what you drink. Say bring it to you. It's a Dr Pepper, suh."

  "Which gentleman?"

  "I don't rightly remember, suh."

  I took the cup off the tray and drank from it. The ice was so cold it made my throat ache.

  The lake was black now, and out in the darkness, above the noise of the revelers, I could hear somebody trying to crank an outboard engine.

  I finished my drink and set the empty glass on the buffet table.

  "That's it for me, Sam," I said. "You coming or not?"

  "This lady gonna carry me home," he said. His eyes were red from drinking. They looked out at nothing from under the brim of his straw cowboy hat.

  "Hogman—" I said.

  "This lady live down the road from my house. Some trashy niggers been givin' her trouble. She don't want to go home by herself. That's the way it is. I be up to yo' office tomorrow mornin'."

  I tried to look into his face, but he occupied himself with twisting the tuning pegs on his guitar. I turned and walked back through the shadows to my pickup truck. When I looked back at the party through my windshield, the blond girl in shorts and a halter was putting a spoonful of cake into Mikey Goldman's mouth while everyone applauded.

  It rained hard as I approached the drawbridge over the bayou south of town. I could see the bridge tender in his lighted window, the wet sheen and streaks of rust on the steel girders, the green and red running lights of a passing boat in the mist. I was only a few minutes from home. I simply had to cross the bridge and follow the dirt road down to my dock.

  But that was not what I did or what happened.

  A bolt of lightning exploded in a white ball by the side of the road and blew the heart of a tree trunk, black and smoking, out into my headlights. I swallowed to clear my ears, and for just a second, in the back of my throat, I thought I could taste black cherries, bruised mint leaves, and orange rind. Then I felt a spasm go through me just as if someone had scratched a kitchen match inside my skull.

  The truck veered off the shoulder, across a collapsed barbed-wire cattle gate, onto the levee that dissected the marsh. I remember the wild buttercups sweeping toward me out of the headlights, the rocks and mud whipping under the fenders, then the fog rolling out of the dead cypress trees and willow islands, encircling the truck, smothering the windows. I could hear thunder crashing deep in the marsh, echoing out of the bays, like distant artillery.

  I knew that I was going off the levee, but I couldn't unlock my hands from the steering wheel or move my right foot onto the brake pedal. I felt myself trembling, my insides constricting, my back teeth grinding, as though all my nerve endings had been severed and painted with iodine. Then I heard lightning pop the levee and blow a spray of muddy water across my windshield.

  Get out, I thought. Knock the door handle with your elbow and jump.

  But I couldn't move.

  The mist was as pink and thick as cotton candy and seemed to snap with electric currents, like a kaleidoscopic flickering of snakes' tongues. I felt the front wheels of the truck dip over the side of the levee, gain momentum with the weight in the rear end, then suddenly I was rumbling down an incline through weeds and broken cane, willow saplings and cattails, until the front wheels were embedded up to the axle in water and sand.

  I don't know how long I sat there. I felt a wave of color pass through me, like nausea or the violent shudder that cheap bourbon gives you when you're on the edge of delirium tremens; then it was gone and I could see the reflection of stars on the water, the tips of the dead cypress silhouetted against the moon, and a campfire, where there should have been no fire, burning in a misty grove of trees on high ground thirty yards out from the levee.

  And I knew that was where I was supposed to go.

  As I waded through the lily pads toward the trees, I could see the shadows of men moving about in the firelight and hear their cracker accents and the muted sound of spoons scraping on tin plates.

  I walked up out of the shallows into the edge of the clearing, dripping water, hyacinth vines stringing from my legs. The men around the fire paid me little notice, as though, perhaps, I had been expected. They were cooking tripe in an iron pot, and they had hung their haversacks and wooden canteens in the trees and stacked their rifle-muskets in pyramids of fives. Their gray and butternut-brown uniforms were sunbleached and stiff with dried salt, and their unshaved faces had the lean and hungry look of a rifle company that had been in the field a long time.

  Then from the far side of the fire a bearded man with fierce eyes stared out at me from under a gray hat with gold cord around the crown. His left arm was pinned up in a black sling, and his right trouser leg flopped loosely around a shaved wooden peg.

  He moved toward me on a single crutch. I could smell tobacco smoke and sweat in his clothes. Then he smiled stiffly, the skin of his face seeming almost to crack with the effort. His teeth were as yellow as corn.

  "I'm General John Bell Hood. Originally from Kentucky. How you do, suh?" he said, and extended his hand.

  Chapter 11

  "Do you object to shaking hands?" he said.

  “No. Not at all. Excuse me."

  The heel of his hand was half-mooned with calluses, his voice as thick as wet sand. A holstered cap-and-ball revolver hung on his thigh.

  "You look puzzled," he said.

  "Is this how it comes? Death, I mean."

  "Ask them."

  Some of his men were marked with open, bloodless wounds I could put my fist in. Beyond the stacked rifles, at the edge of the firelight, was an ambulance wagon. Someone had raked a tangle of crusted bandages off the tailgate onto the ground.

 
"Am I dead?" I said.

  "You don't look it to me."

  "You said you're John Bell Hood."

  "That's correct."

  His face was narrow, his cheeks hollow, his skin grained with soot.

  "I've read a great deal about you."

  "I hope it met your approval."

  "You were at Gettysburg and Atlanta. You commanded the Texas Brigade. They could never make you quit."

  "My political enemies among President Davis's cabinet sometimes made note of that fact."

  "What's the date?" I asked.

  "It's April 21,1865."

  "I don't understand. "

  "Understand what?"

  "Lee has already surrendered. The war's over. What are you doing here?"

  "It's never over. I would think you'd know that. You were a lieutenant in the United States Army, weren 't you?"

  "Yes, but I gave my war back to the people who started it. I did that a long time ago."

  "No, you didn't. It goes on and on."

  He eased himself down on an oak stump, his narrow eyes lighting with pain. He straightened his artificial leg in front of him. The hand that hung out of his sling had wasted to the size of a monkey's paw. A corporal threw a log into the campfire, and sparks rose into the tree branches overhead.

  "It's us against them, my friend," he said. "There're insidious men abroad in the land." He swept his crutch at the marsh. "My God, man, use your eyes."

  "The federals ? "

  "Are your eyes and ears stopped with dirt? "

  "I think this conversation is not real. I think all of this will be gone with daylight."

  "You're not a fool, Mr. Robicheaux. Don't pretend to be one."

  "I've seen your grave in New Orleans. No, it's in Metairie. You died of the yellowjack."

  "That's not correct. I died when they struck the colors, suh." He lifted his crutch and pointed it at me as he would a weapon. The firelight shone on his yellow teeth. "They'll try your soul, son. But don't give up your cause. Occupy the high ground and make them take it foot by bloody foot."

  "I don't know what we're talking about."