In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 38

"I've heard they make an ordinary p.o.r.no movie for about five grand and get a six-figure return. I don't know about one like this."

"I'd like to lock up Cholo Manelli as a material witness."

"Even if we could do it, Rosie, it'd be a waste of time. Cholo's got the thinking powers of a cantaloupe but he doesn't roll over or cop pleas."

"You seem to say that almost with admiration."

"There're worse guys around."

"I have difficulty sharing your sympathies sometimes, Dave."

"Look, the film was made around New Orleans somewhere. Those were the docks in Algiers in the background. I'd like to make a copy and send it to N.O.P.D. Vice. They might recognize some of the players. This kind of stuff is their bailiwick, anyway."

"All right, let's get a print for the Bureau, too. Maybe Balboni's going across state lines with it." Then she picked up her purse and I saw a dark concern come into her face again.

"I'll buy you a drink," I said.

"Of what?"

"Whatever you like."

"I'm all right, Dave. We don't need to go to any bars."

"That's up to you. How about a Dr Pepper across the street or a spearmint s...o...b..ll in the park?"

"That sounds nice."

We drove in my truck to the park. The sky was filling with afternoon rain clouds that had the bright sheen of steam. She tried to pretend that she was listening to my conversation, but her eyes seemed locked on a distant spot just above the horizon, as though perhaps she were staring through an inverted telescope at an old atrocity that was always aborning at the wrong moment in her mind.

I HAD TRIED SEVERAL TIMES THAT DAY TO PURSUE HOGMAN'Speculiar implication about the type of work done by DeWitt Prejean, the chained black man I had seen shot down in the Atchafalaya marsh in 1957. But neither the Opelousas chief of police nor the St. Landry Parish sheriff knew anything that was helpful about DeWitt Prejean, and when I finally reached the old jailer at his house he hung up the phone on me as soon as he recognized my voice.

Late that afternoon the sleeplessness of the previous night finally caught up with me, and I lay down in the hammock that I had stretched between two shade trees on the edge of the coulee in the backyard. I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sound of the water coursing over the rocks and to forget the images from Lou's apartment that seemed to live behind my eyelids like red paint slung from a brush. I could smell the ferns in the coulee, the networks of roots that trailed in the current, the cool odor of wet stone, the periwinkles that ruffled in the gra.s.s.

I had never thought of my coulee as a place where members of the Confederate Signal Corps would gather for a drink on a hot day. But out of the rain clouds and the smell of sulfur and the lightning that had already begun to flicker in the south, I watched the general descend, along with two junior officers, in the wicker basket of an observation balloon, one that looked sewn together from silk cuttings of a half-dozen colors. Five enlisted men moored the basket and balloon to the earth with ropes and helped the general down and handed him a crutch. By the mooring place were a table and chair and telegraph key with a long wire that was attached to the balloon's basket. The balloon tugged upward against its ropes and bobbled and shook in the wind that blew across my neighbor's sugarcane field.

One of the general's aides helped him to a canvas lawn chair by my hammock and then went away.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" he said.

"It surely is," I said.

"Ladies from all over Louisiana donated their silk dresses for the balloon. The wicker basket was made by an Italian pickle merchant in New Orleans. The view's extraordinary. In the next life I'm coming back as a bird. Would you like to take a ride up?"

"Not right now, thanks."

"A bad day for it?"

"Another time, general."

"You grieve for your friend?"

"Yes."

"You plan revenge, don't you ? "

"The Lafayette cops are putting it down as a suicide."

"I want you to listen to me very carefully, lieutenant. No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circ.u.mstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative."

"The times you lived in were different, general. This afternoon I watched a film that showed young women being beaten and tortured, perhaps even killed, by s.a.d.i.s.ts and degenerates. This stuff is sold in stores and shown in public theaters. The sonsofb.i.t.c.hes who make it are seldom arrested unless they get nailed in a mail sting."

"I'm not quite sure I follow all your allusions, but let me tell you of an experience we had three days ago. My standard-bearer was a boy of sixteen. He got caught in their crossfire in a fallow cornfield. There was no place for him to hide. He tried to surrender by waving his shirt over his head. They killed him anyway, whether intentionally or by accident, I don't know.

"By evening we retook the ground and recovered his body. It was torn by minies as though wild dogs had chewed it. He was so thin you could count his bones with your fingers. In his haversack was his day's ration-a handful of black beans, some roasted acorns, and a dried sweet potato. That's the only food I could provide this boy who followed me unto the death. What do you think I felt toward those who killed him?"

"Maybe you were justified in your feelings."

"Yes, that's what I told myself throughout the night or when I remembered the bloodless glow that his skin gave off when we wrapped him for burial. Then an opportunity presented itself from aloft in our balloon I looked down upon a copse of hackberry trees. Hard by a surgeon's tent a dozen federals were squatting along a latrine with their breeches down to their ankles. Two hundred yards up the bayou, unseen by any of them, was one of our boats with a twelve-pounder on its bow. I simply had to tap the order on the telegrapher's key and our gunners would have loaded with grape and raked those poor devils through their own excrement. But that's not our way, is it?"

"Speak for yourself."

"Your pretense as cynic is unconvincing."

"Let me ask you a question, general. The women who donated their dresses and petticoats for your balloon . . . what if they were raped, sodomized, and methodically beaten and you got your hands on the men who did it to them?"

"They'd be arrested by my provost, tried in a provisional court, and hanged."

"You wouldn't find that the case today."

His long, narrow face was perplexed.

"Why not?" he said.

"I don't know. Maybe we have so much collective guilt as a society that we fear to punish our individual members."

He put his hat on the back of his head, crossed his good leg across his cork knee, and wet the end of a cheroot. Several of his enlisted men were kneeling by my coulee, filling their canteens. Their faces were dusty, their lips blackened with gunpowder from biting through cartridge papers. The patchwork silk balloon shuddered in the wind and shimmered with the silvery light of the coming rainstorm.

"I won't presume to be your conscience," the general said. "But as your friend who wishes to see you do no harm to yourself, I advise you to give serious thought about keeping your dead friend's weapon."

"I have."

"I think you're making a serious mistake, suh. You disappoint me, too."

He waved his hand impatiently at his aides, and they helped him to his feet.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," I said.

But the general was not one given to debate. He stumped along on his crutch and cork leg toward the balloon's basket, his cigar clenched at an upward angle in his teeth, his eyes flicking about at the wind-torn clouds and the lightning that trembled whitely like heated wires out on the Gulf.

The incoming storm blew clouds of dust out of my neighbor's canefield just as the general's balloon lifted him and his aides aloft, their telegraph wire flopping from the wicker basket like an umbilical cord.

When I woke from my dream, the gray skies were filled with a dozen silken hot-air balloons, painted in the outrageous colors of circus wagons, their dim shadows streaking across barn roofs, dirt roads, clapboard houses, general stores, clumps of cows, winding bayous, until the balloons themselves were only distant specks above the summer-green horizon outside Lafayette.

On Monday morning I went to Lou Girard's funeral in Lafayette. It was a boiling green-gold day. At the cemetery a layer of heat seemed to rise off the spongy gra.s.s and grow in intensity as the white sun climbed toward the top of the sky. During the graveside service someone was running a power mower behind the brick wall that separated the crypts from a subdivision. The mower coughed and backfired and echoed off the bricks like someone firing rounds from a small-caliber revolver. The eyes of the cops who stood at attention in full uniform kept watering from the heat and the smell of weed killer. When the police chief and a captain removed the flag from Lou's casket and folded it into a military square, there was no family member there to receive it. The casket remained closed during the ceremony. Before the casket was lowered into the ground, the department chaplin removed a framed picture of Lou in uniform from the top and set it on a folding table under the funeral canopy. Accidentally he tipped it with the back of his hand so that it fell face down on the linen.

I DROVE BACK HOME FOR LUNCH BEFORE HEADING FOR the office. It was cool under the ceiling fan in the kitchen, and the breeze swayed the baskets of impatiens that hung on hooks from the eave of the back porch. Bootsie set a gla.s.s of icedtea with mint leaves and a plate of ham-and-onion sandwiches and deviled eggs in front of me.

"Where's Alafair?" I said.

"Elrod took her and Tripod out to Spanish Lake," she said from the sink.

"To the movie location?"

"Yes, I think so."

When I didn't speak, she turned around and looked at me.

"Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

"Julie Balboni's out there, Boots."

"He lives here now, Dave. He's lots of places. I don't think we should start choosing where we go and don't go because of a man like that."

"I don't want Alafair around him."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd object."

"Boots, there's something I didn't tell you about. Sat.u.r.day a hood named Cholo Manelli gave me a p.o.r.nographic video that evidently Balboni and his people made. It's as dark as dark gets. There's one scene where it looks like a woman is actually beaten to death."

Her eyes blinked, then she said, "I'll go out to Spanish Lake and bring her home. Why don't you finish eating?"

"Don't worry about it. There's no harm done. I'll go get her before I go to the office."

"Can't somebody do something about him?"

"When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily."

"Where did you get that piece of Puritan theology?"

"It's not funny. The morons on the Chamber of Commerce who brought this guy here would screw up the recipe for ice water."

I heard her laugh and walk around behind me. Then I felt her hands on my shoulders and her mouth kiss the top of my head.

"Dave, you're just too much," she said, and hugged me across the chest.

I LISTENED TO THE NEWS ON THE RADIO AS I DROVE OUT TOSpanish Lake. A tropical storm off Cuba was gaining hurricane status and was expected to turn northwest toward the Gulf Coast. I glanced to the south, but the sky was bra.s.sy and hot and virtually free of clouds. Then as I pa.s.sed the little watermelon and fruit stand at the end of West Main and headed out into the parish, my radio filled with static and my engine began to misfire.

The truck jerked and sputtered all the way to the entrance of the movie location at the lake. I pulled off the dirt road onto the gra.s.s by the security building where Murphy Doucet worked and opened the hood. He stepped out the door in his gray uniform and bifocals.

"What's wrong, Dave?" he asked. His gla.s.ses had half-moons of light in them. His blue eyes jittered back and forth when he looked at me.

"It looks like a loose wire on the voltage regulator." I felt at my pants pocket. "Do you have a knife I could use?"

"Yeah, I ought to have something."

I followed him inside his office. His work table was covered with the balsa-wood parts of an amphibian airplane. In the middle of the blueprints was a utility knife with a detachable blade inset in the aluminum handle. But his hand pa.s.sed over it and opened a drawer and removed a black-handled switchblade knife. He pushed the release b.u.t.ton and the blade leaped open in his hand.

"This should do it," he said. "A Mexican pulled this on me in Lake Charles."

"I didn't know you were a cop in Lake Charles."

"I wasn't. I was out on the highway with the State Police. That's what I retired from last year."

"Thanks for the loan of the knife."

I trimmed the insulation away from the end of the loose wire and reattached it to the voltage regulator, then returned the knife to Murphy Doucet and drove into the grove of oaktrees by the lake. When I looked in the rearview mirror Doucet was watching me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

The cast and crew were just finishing lunch by the water's edge at picnic tables that were spread with checkered cloths and buckets of fried chicken, potato salad, dirty rice, cole slaw, and sweating plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Alafair sat on a wood bench in the shade, next to Elrod, the lake shimmering behind her. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century street urchin.

"What happened to your clothes?" I said.

"I'm in the movie, Dave!" she said. "In this scene with Hogman and Elrod. We're walking down the road with a plantation burning behind us and the Yankees are about to take over the town."

"I'm not kidding you, Dave," Elrod said. He wore a collarless gray shirt, officer's striped trousers, and black suspenders. "She's a natural. Mikey said the same thing. She looks good from any camera angle. We worked her right into the scene."

"What about Tripod?" I said.

"He's in it, too," Alafair said.

"You're kidding?"

"We're getting him a membership in the Screen Actors Guild," Elrod said.

Elrod poured a paper cup of iced tea for me. The wind blew leaves out of the trees and flapped the corners of the checkered table covers. For the first time that day I could smell salt in the air.

"This looks like the good life," I said.

"Don't be too quick to judge," Elrod said. "A healthy lifestyle in southern California means running three miles on the beach in the morning, eating bean sprouts all day, and shoving five hundred bucks' worth of c.o.ke up your nose at night."

The other actors began drifting away from the table to return to work. Tripod was on his chain, eating a drumstick by the trunk of a tree. On the gra.s.s next to him was a model of a German Messerschmitt, its wooden fuselage bright with silver paint, its red-edged iron crosses and n.a.z.i swastikas as darkly beguiling as the light in a serpent's eye.

"I gave her that. I hope you didn't mind," Elrod said.

"Where'd you get it?"

"From Murph, up there at the security building. I'm afraid he thinks I can get him on making props for Mikey or something. I think he's kind of a lonely guy, isn't he?"

"I don't know much about him."