DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

  I worked the sheet away from the foot of the bed until I was staring at Tripod's silver-tipped rump and black-ringed tail.

  "I wonder how this fellow got in your bed, little guy," I said.

  "He probably got out of his cage on the back porch."

  "Yeah, that's probably it. He's pretty good at opening latched doors, isn't he?"

  "I don't think he should go back out there, do you, Dave? He gets scared in the thunder."

  "We'll give him a dispensation tonight."

  "A dis—What?"

  "Never mind. Let's go to sleep, little guy."

  "Goodnight, big guy. Goodnight, Tripod. Goodnight, Frogger. Goodnight, Baby Squanto. Goodnight, Curious George. Goodnight, Baby Orca. Goodnight, sea shells. Goodnight—"

  "Cork it, Alf, and go to sleep."

  "All right. Goodnight, big guy."

  "Goodnight, little guy."

  In my sleep I heard the storm pass overhead like freight trains grinding down a grade, then suddenly we were in the storm's eye, the air as still as if it had been trapped inside a jar; leaves drifted to the ground from the trees, and I could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead.

  The bedroom windows shine with an amber light that might have been aged inside oak. I slip on my khakis and loafers and walk out into the cool air that smells of salt and wet woods, and I see the general's troops forming into long columns that wind their way into other columns that seem to stretch over an infinitely receding landscape of hardwood forests fired with red leaves, peach orchards, tobacco acreage, rivers covered with steam, purple mountain ridges and valleys filled with dust from ambulance and ammunition wagons and wheeled artillery pieces, a cornfield churned into stubble by horses' hooves and men's boots, a meandering limestone wall and a sunken road where wild hogs graze on the bodies of the dead.

  The general sits on a cypress stump by my coulee, surrounded by enlisted men and his aides. A blackened coffeepot boils amidst a heap of burning sticks by his foot. The officers as well as enlisted men are eating honeycombs peeled from inside a dead oak tree. The general's tunic is buttoned over his bad arm. A civilian in checkered trousers, high-top shoes, braces, and a straw hat is setting up a big box camera on a tripod in front of the group.

  The general tips his hat up on his forehead and waves me toward him.

  "A pip of a storm, wasn't it?" he says.

  "Why are you leaving?"

  "Oh, we're not gone just yet. Say, I want to have your photograph taken with us. That gentleman you see yonder is the correspondent for the Savannah Republican. He writes an outstanding story, certainly as good as this Melville fellow, if you ask me."

  "I don't understand what's happening. Why did your wounds open, what were you trying to warn me of? "

  "It's my foolishness, son. Like you, I grieve over what I can't change. Was it Bacon that talked about keeping each cut green ? "

  "Change what?"

  "Our fate. Yours, mine. Care for your own. Don't try to emulate me. Look at what I invested my life in. Oh, we were always honorable—Robert Lee, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, A. P. Hill—but we served venal men and a vile enterprise. How many lives would have been spared had we not lent ourselves to the defense of a repellent cause like slavery?"

  "People don't get to choose their time in history, general."

  "Well said. You're absolutely right." He swings the flat of his right hand and hits me hard on the arm, then rises on his crutch and straightens his tunic. "Now, gentlemen, if y'all will take the honeycombs out of your faces, let's be about this photographing business. I'm amazed at what the sciences are producing these days."

  We stand in a group of eight. The enlisted men have Texas accents, powder-blackened teeth, and beards that grow like snakes on their faces. I can smell horse sweat and wood smoke in their clothes. Just as the photographer removes his straw hat and ducks his head under a black cloth at the back of the camera, I look down the long serpentine corridor of amber light again and see thousands of troops advancing on distant fields, their blue and red and white flags bent into the fusillade, their artillery crews laboring furiously at the mouths of smoking cannon, and I know the place names without their ever being spoken—Culp's Hill, Corinth, the Devil's Den, Kennesaw Mountain, the Bloody Lane—and a collective sound that's like no other in the world rises in the wind and blows across the drenched land.

  The photographer finishes and stoops under his camera box and lifts the tripod up on his shoulder. The general looks into the freshening breeze, his eyes avoiding me.

  "You won't tell me what's at hand, sir?" I say.

  "What does it matter as long as you stay true to your principles?"

  "Even the saints might take issue with that statement, general."

  "I'll see you directly, lieutenant. Be of good heart."

  "Don't let them get behind you," I say.

  "Ah, the admonition of a veteran." Then his aides help him onto his horse and he waves his hat forward and says, "Hideeho, lads," but there is no joy in his voice.

  The general and his mounted escort move down the incline toward my neighbor's field, the tails of their horses switching, the light arcing over them as bright and heated and refractive as a glass of whiskey held up to the sun.

  When I woke in the morning the rain was falling evenly on the trees in the yard and a group of mallards were swimming in the pond at the foot of my property. The young sugarcane in my neighbor's field was pounded flat into the washed-out rows as though it had been trampled by livestock. Above the treeline in the north I saw a small tornado drop like a spring from the sky, fill with mud and water from a field, then burst apart as though it had never been there.

  I WORKED UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O'CLOCK THAT EVENING. Power was still off in parts of the parish; traffic signals were down; a rural liquor store had been burglarized during the night; two convenience stores had been held up; a drunk set fire to his own truck in the middle of a street; a parolee two days out of Angola beat his wife almost to death; and a child drowned in a storm drain.

  Rosie had spent the day with her supervisor in New Orleans and had come back angry and despondent. I didn't even bother to ask her why. She had the paperwork on our case spread all over her desk, as though somehow rereading it and rearranging it from folder to folder would produce a different result, namely, that we could weld the cell door shut on Murphy Doucet and not have to admit that we were powerless over the bureaucratic needs of others.

  Just as I closed the drawers in my desk and was about to leave, the phone rang.

  "Dave, I think I screwed up. I think you'd better come home," Elrod said.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Bootsie went to town and asked me to watch Alafair. Then Alafair said she was going down to the bait shop to get us some fried pies."

  "Get it out, Elrod. What is it?" I saw Rosie looking at me, her face motionless.

  "I forgot Batist had already closed up. I should have gone with her."

  I tried to hold back the anger that was rising in my throat.

  "Listen, Elrod—"

  "I went down there and she was gone. The door's wide open and the key's still in the lock—"

  "How long's it been?"

  "A half hour."

  "A half hour?"

  "You don't understand. I checked down at Poteet's first. Then I saw Tripod running loose on his chain in the road."

  "What was she wearing?"

  "A yellow raincoat and a baseball cap."

  "Where's Bootsie?"

  "Still in town."

  "All right, stay by the phone and I'll be there in a few minutes."

  "Dave, I'm sorry, I don't know what to say, I—"

  "It's not your fault." I replaced the phone receiver in the cradle, my ears whirring with a sound like wind inside a sea shell, the skin of my face as tight as a pumpkin's.

  Before Rosie and I left the office I told the dispatcher to put out an all-car alert on Alafair and to contact the state police.

  All th
e way to the house I tried to convince myself that there was an explanation for her disappearance other than the one that I couldn't bear to hold in the center of my mind for more than a few seconds. Maybe Tripod had simply gotten away from her while she was in the bait shop and she was still looking for him, I thought. Or maybe she had walked down to the general store at the four-corners, had forgotten to lock the door, and Tripod had broken loose from the clothesline on his own.

  But Alafair never forgot to lock up the bait shop and she wouldn't leave Tripod clipped to the clothesline in the rain.

  Moments after I walked into the bait shop, all the images and fears that I had pushed to the edges of my consciousness suddenly became real and inescapable, in the same way that you wake from a nightmare into daylight and with a sinking of the heart realize that the nightmare is part of your waking day and has not been manufactured by your sleep. Behind the counter I saw her Astros baseball cap, where it had been flattened into the Buckboards by someone's muddy shoe or boot. Elrod and Rosie watched me silently while I picked it up and placed it on top of the counter. I felt as though I were deep under water, past the point of depth tolerance, and something had popped like a stick and pulled loose in my head. Through the screen I saw Bootsie's car turn into the drive and park by the house.

  "I should have figured him for it," I said.

  "Doucet?" Rosie said.

  "He was a cop. He's afraid to do time."

  "We're not certain it's Doucet, Dave," she said.

  "He knows what happens to cops inside mainline jails. Particularly to a guy they make as a short-eyes. I'm going up to talk to Bootsie. Don't answer the phone, okay?"

  Rosie's teeth made white marks on her bottom lip.

  "Dave, I want to bring in the Bureau as soon as we have evidence that it's a kidnapping," she said.

  "So far nothing official we do to this guy works. It's time both of us hear that, Rosie," I said, and went out the screen door and started up the dock.

  I hadn't gone ten yards when I heard the telephone ring behind me. I ran back through the rain and jerked the receiver out of the cradle.

  "You sound out of breath," the voice said.

  Don't blow this one.

  "Turn her loose, Doucet. You don't want to do this," I said. I looked into Rosie's face and pointed toward the house.

  "I'll make it simple for both of us. You take the utility knife and the photo out of the evidence locker. You put them in a Ziploc bag. At eight o'clock tomorrow morning you leave the bag in the trash can on the corner of Royal and St. Ann in New Orleans. I don't guess you ought to plan on getting a lot of sleep tonight."

  Rosie had eased the screen door shut behind her and was walking fast up the incline toward the house in the fading light.

  "The photo's a bluff. It's out of focus," I said. "You can't be identified in it."

  "Then you won't mind parting with it."

  "You can walk, Doucet. We can't make the case on you."

  "You lying sonofabitch. You tore up my house. Your tow truck scratched up my car. You won't rest till you fuck me up in every way you can."

  "You're doing this because your property was damaged?"

  "I'll tell you what else I'm going to do if you decide to get clever on me. No, that's not right. It won't be me, because I never hurt a child in my life. You got that?"

  He stopped speaking and waited for me. Then he said it again: "You got that, Dave?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "But there's a guy who used to work in Balboni's movies, a guy who spent eleven years in Parchman for killing a little nigger girl. You want to know how it went down?"

  Then he told me. I stared out the screen door at my neighbor's dark green lawn, at his enormous roses that had burst in the rain and were now scattered in the grass like pink tear drops. A dog began barking, and then I heard it cry out sharply as though it had been whipped across the ribs with a chain.

  "Doucet—" I broke in. My voice was wet, as though my vocal cords were covered with membrane.

  "You don't like my description? You think I'm just trying to scare you? Get a hold of one of his snuff films. You'll agree he's an artist."

  "Listen to me carefully. If you hurt my daughter, I'll get to you one way or another, in or out of jail, in the witness protection program, it won't matter, I'll take you down in pieces, Doucet."

  "You've said only one thing right today. I'm going to walk, and you're going to help me, unless you've let that affirmative-action bitch fuck most of your brains out. By the way, forget the trace. I'm at a phone booth and you've got shit on your nose."

  The line went dead.

  I was trembling as I walked up the slope to the house.

  Rosie opened the screen door and came out on the gallery with Bootsie behind her. The skin of Bootsie's face was drawn back against the bone, her throat ruddy with color as though she had a windburn.

  "He hung up too soon. We couldn't get it," Rosie said.

  "Dave, my God. What—" Bootsie said. Her pulse was jumping in her neck.

  "Let's go inside," I said, and put my arm around her shoulder. "Rosie, I'll be out in just a minute."

  "No, talk to me right here," Bootsie said.

  "Murphy Doucet has her. He wants the evidence that he thinks can put him in jail."

  "What for?" she said. "You told me yesterday that he'll probably get out of it."

  "He doesn't know that. He's not going to believe anybody who tells him that, either."

  "Where is she?"

  "I don't know, Boots. But we're going to get her back. If the sheriff calls, don't tell him anything. At least not right now."

  I felt Rosie's eyes on the side of my face.

  "What are you doing, Dave?" Bootsie said.

  "I'll call you in a little while," I said. "Stay with Elrod, okay?"

  "What if that man calls back?"

  "He won't. He'll figure the line's open."

  Before she could speak again, I went inside and opened the closet door in the bedroom. From under some folded blankets on the top shelf I took out a box of twelve-gauge shells and the Remington pump shotgun whose barrel I had sawed off in front of the pump handle and whose sportsman's plug I had removed years ago. I shook the shells, a mixture of deer slugs and double-ought buckshot, out on the bed and pressed them one by one into the magazine until I felt the spring come snug against the fifth shell. I dropped the rest of the shells into my raincoat pockets.

  "Call the FBI, Dave," Bootsie said behind me.

  "No," I said.

  "Then I'll do it."

  "Boots, if they screw it up, he'll kill her. We'll never even find the body."

  Her face was white. I set the shotgun down and pulled her against me. She felt small, her back rounded, inside my arms.

  "We've got a few hours," I said. "If we can't get her back in that time, I'm going to do what he wants and hope that he turns her loose. I'll bring the sheriff and the FBI in on it, too."

  She stepped back from me and looked up into my face.

  "Hope that he—" she said.

  "Doucet's never left witnesses."

  She wanted to come with us, but I left her on the gallery with Elrod, staring after us with her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

  It was almost dark when we turned off the old two-lane highway onto the dirt road that led to Spanish Lake. The rain was falling in the trees and out on the lake and I could see the lights burning in one trailer under the hanging moss by the water's edge. All the way out to the lake Rosie had barely spoken, her small hands folded on top of her purse, the shadows washing across her face like rivulets of rain.

  "I have to be honest with you, Dave. I don't know how far I can go along with this," she said.

  "Call in your people now and I'll stonewall them."

  "Do you think that little of us?"

  "Not you I don't. But the people you work for are pencil pushers. They'll cover their butts, they'll do it by the numbers, and I'll end up losing Alafair."
r />   "What are you going to do if you catch Doucet?"

  "That's up to him."

  "Is that straight, Dave?"

  I didn't answer.

  "I saw you put something in your raincoat pocket when you were coming out of the bedroom," she said. "I got the impression you were concealing it from Bootsie. Maybe it was just my imagination."

  "Maybe you're thinking too much about the wrong things, Rosie."

  "I want your word this isn't a vigilante mission."

  "You're worried about procedure. . .. In dealing with a man like this? What's the matter with you?"

  "Maybe you're forgetting who your real friends are, Dave."

  I stopped the truck at the security building, rolled down my window, and held up my badge for the man inside, who was leaned back in his chair in front of a portable television set. He put on his hat, came outside, and dropped the chain for me. I could hear the sounds of a war movie through the open door.

  "I'll just leave it down for you," he said.

  "Thanks. Is that Julie Balboni's trailer with the lights on?" I said.

  "Yeah, that's it."

  "Who's with him?"

  The security guard's eyes went past me to Rosie.

  "His reg'lar people, I guess," he said. "I don't pay it much mind."

  "Who else?"

  "He brings out guests from town." His eyes looked directly into mine.

  I rolled up the window, thumped across the chain, and drove into the oak grove by the lake. Twenty yards from Balboni's lighted trailer was the collapsed and blackened shell of a second trailer, its empty windows blowing with rain, its buckled floor leaking cinders into pools of water, the tree limbs above it scrolled with scorched leaves. To one side of Balboni's trailer a Volkswagon and the purple Cadillac with the tinted black windows were parked between two trees. I saw someone light a cigarette inside the Cadillac.

  I stepped out of the truck with the shotgun hanging from my right arm and tapped with one knuckle on the driver's window. He rolled the glass down, and I saw the long pink scar inside his right forearm, the boxed hairline on the back of his neck, the black welt like an angry insect on his bottom lip where I had broken off his tooth in the restaurant on East Main. The man in the passenger's seat had the flattened eyebrows and gray scar tissue around his eyes of a prizefighter; he bent his neck down so he could look upward at my face and see who I was.