In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 6

She went out the front door and down the slope to the bayou. In the mauve twilight I could see her touching at her hair before she entered the bait shop. Five minutes later Kelly Drummond was sitting at our kitchen table, a cup of coffee balanced in her fingers, a reefer-induced wistfulness on her face, while Elrod Sykes changed into dry clothes in our bedroom. He walked into the kitchen in a pair of my sandals, khaki trousers, and the Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt, with my name ironed on the back, that Alafair had given me for Father's Day.

His face was flushed with gin roses, and his gaze drifted automatically to the icebox.

"Would you like a beer?" Bootsie said.

"Yes, if you wouldn't mind," he said.

"Boots, I think we're out," I said.

"Oh, that's all right. I really don't need one," he said.

Bootsie's eyes were bright with embarra.s.sment. Then I saw her face set.

"I'm sure there's one back in here somewhere," she said, then slid a long-necked Dixie out of the bottom shelf and opened it for him.

Elrod looked casually out the back door while he sipped from the bottle.

"I have to feed the rabbits. You want to take a walk with me, Elrod?" I said.

"The rice will be ready in a minute," Bootsie said.

"That's all it'll take," I said.

Outside, under the pecan trees that were now black-green in the fading light, I could feel Elrod watching the side of my face.

"Boy, I don't know quite what to say, Mr. Robicheaux, I mean Dave."

"Don't worry about it. Just tell me what it is you had on your mind all day."

"It's these guys out yonder on that lake. I told you before."

"Which guys? What are you talking about?"

"Confederate infantry. One guy in particular, with gold epaulets on his coat. He's got a bad arm and he's missing a leg. I think maybe he's a general."

"I'll be straight with you. I think maybe you're delusional."

"A lot of people do. I just didn't think I'd get the same kind of bulls.h.i.t from you."

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't use profanity around my home."

"I apologize. But that Confederate officer was saying something. It didn't make sense to me, but I thought it might to you."

I filled one of the rabbit bowls with alfalfa pellets and latched the screen door on the hutch. I looked at Elrod Sykes. His face was absolutely devoid of guile or any apparent attempt at manipulation; in fact, it reminded me ofsomeone who might have just been struck in the head by a bolt of lightning.

"Look, Elrod, years ago, when I was on the grog, I believed dead people called me up on the telephone. Sometimes my dead wife or members of my platoon would talk to me out of the rain. I was convinced that their voices were real and that maybe I was supposed to join them. It wasn't a good way to be."

He poured the foam out of his bottle, then flicked the remaining drops reflectively at the bark of a pecan tree.

"I wasn't drunk," he said. "This guy with the bad arm and one leg, he said to me, 'You and your friend, the police officer in town, must repel them.' He was standing by the water, in the fog, on a crutch. He looked right in my face when he said it."

"I see."

"What do you think he meant?"

"I'm afraid I wouldn't know, partner."

"I got the notion he thought you would."

"I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I think you're imagining all this and I'm not going to pursue it any further. Instead, how about your clarifying something Ms. Drummond said earlier?"

"What's that?"

"Why is it a problem to your director, this fellow Mikey, if you come out to my place?"

"She told you that?"

"That's what the lady said."

"Well, the way he put it was 'Stay out of that cop's face, El. Don't give him reason to be out here causing us trouble. We need to remember that a lot of things happened in this part of the country that are none of our business.' "

"He's worried about the dead black man you found?" I said. "That doesn't make too much sense."

"You got another one of these?" he said, and held up his empty bottle.

"Why is he worried about the black man?"

"When Mikey worries, it's about money, Mr. Robicheaux. Or actually about the money he needs to make the kind of pictures he wants. He did a mini-series for television on the Holocaust. It lost ten million dollars for the network. n.o.body's lining up to throw money at Mikey's projects right now."

"Julie Balboni is."

"You ever heard of a college turning down money from a defense company because it makes napalm?"

He opened and closed his mouth as though he were experiencing cabin pressure in an airplane. The moon was up now, and in the glow of light through the tree branches the skin of his face looked pale and grained, stretched tight against the bone. "Mr. Robicheaux . . . Dave . . . I'm being honest with you, I need a drink."

"We'd better go inside and get you one, then. I'll make you a deal, though. Maybe you might want to think about going to a meeting with me. I don't necessarily mean that you belong there. But some people think it beats waking up like a chainsaw every morning."

He looked away at a lighted boat on the bayou.

"It's just a thought. I didn't mean to be intrusive," I said. "Let's go inside."

"You ever see lights out in the cypress trees at night?"

"It's swamp gas. It ignites and rolls across the water's surface like ball lightning."

"No, sir, that's not what it is," he said. "They had lanterns hanging on some of their ambulances. The horses got mired in the bogs. A lot of those soldiers had maggots in their wounds. That's the only reason they lived. The maggots ate out the infection."

I wasn't going to talk any more about the strange psychological terrain that evidently he had created as a petting zoo for all the protean shapes that lived in his unconscious.

I put the bag of alfalfa pellets on top of the hutches and turned to go back to the house.

"That general said something else," Elrod said behind me.

I waved my hand negatively and kept walking.

"Well, I cain't blame you for not listening," he said. "Maybe I was drunk this time. How could your father have his adjutant's pistol?"

I stopped.

"What?" I said.

"The general said, 'Your friend's father took the revolver of my adjutant, Major Moss.' . . . Hey, Mr. Robicheaux, I didn't mean to say the wrong thing, now."

I chewed on the corner of my lip and waited before I spoke again.

"Elrod, I've got the feeling that maybe I'm dealing with some kind of self-manufactured mojo-drama here," I said. "Maybe it's related to the promotion of your film, or it might have something to do with a guy floating his brain in alcohol too long. But no matter how you cut it, I don't want anyone, and I mean anyone, to try to use a member of my family to jerk me around."

He turned his palms up and his long eyelashes fluttered.

"I don't know what to say. I apologize to you, sir," he said. Then his eyes focused on nothing and he pinched his mouth in his hand as though he were squeezing a dry lemon.

AT ELEVEN THAT NIGHT I UNDRESSED AND LAY DOWN ON THE bed next to Bootsie. The window fan billowed the curtains and drew the breeze across the streets, and I could smell watermelons and night-blooming jasmine out in the moonlight. The closet door was open, and I stared at the wooden foot-locker that was set back under my hangered shirts and trousers. Bootsie turned her head on the pillow and brushed her fingers along the side of my face.

"Are you mad at me?" she said.

"No, of course not."

"They seem to be truly nice people. It would have been wrong not to invite them in."

"Yeah, they're not bad."

"But when you came back inside with Elrod, you looked bothered about something. Did something happen?"

"He says he talks with dead people. Maybe he's crazy. I don't know, Boots, I-"

"What is it, Dave?" She raised herself on her elbow and looked into my face.

"He said this dead Confederate general told him that my father took his adjutant's revolver."

"He had too much to drink, that's all."

I continued to stare at the closet. She smiled at me and pressed her body against me.

"You had a long day. You're tired," she said. "He didn't mean any harm. He probably won't remember what he said tomorrow."

"You don't understand, Boots," I said, and sat up on the edge of the bed.

"Understand what?" She put her hand on my bare back."Dave, your muscles are tight as iron. What's the matter?"

"Just a minute."

I didn't want to fall prey to superst.i.tion or my own imaginings or Elrod Sykes's manipulations. But I did. I clicked on the table lamp and pulled my old footlocker out of the closet. Inside a half-dozen shoe boxes at the bottom were the memorabilia of my childhood years with my father back in the 1940s: my collections of baseball cards, Indian banner stones and quartz arrow points, and the minie b.a.l.l.s that we used to find in a freshly plowed sugarcane field right after the first rain.

I took out a crushed shoe box that was tied with kite twine and sat back down on the bed with it. I slipped off the twine, removed the top of the box, and set it on the nightstand.

"This was the best gift my father ever gave me," I said. "On my brother's and my birthday he'd always fix cush-cush and sausage for our breakfast, and we'd always find an unusual present waiting for us by our plate. On my twelfth birthday I got this."

I lifted the heavy revolver out of the box and unwrapped the blackened oil rag from it.

"He had been laid off in the oil field and he took a job tearing down some old slave quarters on a sugar plantation about ten miles down the bayou. There was one cabin separate from the others, with a brick foundation, and he figured it must have belonged to the overseer. Anyway, when he started tearing the boards out of the walls he found some flattened minie' b.a.l.l.s in the wood, and he knew there had probably been a skirmish between some federals and Confederates around there. Then he tore out what was left of the floor, and in a crawl s.p.a.ce, stuck back in the bricks, was this Remington .44 revolver."

It had been painted with rust and cobweb when my father had found it, the cylinder and hammer frozen against the frame, the wood grips eaten away by mold and insects, but I had soaked it for a week in gasoline and rubbed the steel smooth with emery paper and rags until it had the dull sheen of an old nickel.

"It's just an antique pistol your father gave you, Dave," she said. "Maybe you said something about it to Elrod. Then he got drunk and mixed it up with some kind of fantasy he has."

"No, he said the officer's name." I opened the nightstand drawer and took out a small magnifying gla.s.s. "He said it had belonged to a Major Moss."

"So what?"

"Boots, there's a name cut into the trigger guard. I haven't thought about it in years. I couldn't have mentioned it to him."

I rested the revolver across my thighs and looked through the magnifying gla.s.s at the soft glow of light off the bra.s.s housing around the trigger. The steel felt cold and slick with oil against my thighs.

"Take a look," I said, and handed her the gla.s.s and the revolver.

She folded her legs under her and squinted one eye through the gla.s.s."It says 'CSA,' " she said.

"Wrong place. Right at the back of the guard."

She held the pistol closer to the gla.s.s. Then she looked up at me and there were white spots in her cheeks.

"J. Moss." Her voice was dry when she said it. Then she said the name again. "It says J. Moss."

"It sure does."

She wrapped the blackened oil cloth around the pistol and replaced it in the shoe box. She put her hand in mine and squeezed it.

"Dave?"

"Yes?"

"I think Elrod Sykes is a nice man, but we mustn't have him here again."

She turned out the light, lay back on the pillow, and looked out at the moonlight in the pecan trees, her face caught with a private, troubled thought like the silent beating of a bird's wings inside a cage.