James Burke: In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"Few people standing before a judge ever expected to be there," I said, and started the engine.

He was quiet while I made a U-turn and headed for the city police station. He seemed to be thinking hard about something. Then he said: "Listen, I know where there's a body. I saw it. Nobody'd pay me any mind, but I saw the dadburn thing. That's a fact."

"You saw what?"

"A colored, I mean a black person, it looked like. Just a big dry web of skin, with bones inside it. Like a big rat's nest."

"Where was this?"

"Out in the Atchafalaya swamp, about four days ago. We were shooting some scenes by an Indian reservation or something. I wandered back in these willows to take a leak and saw it sticking out of a sandbar."

"And you didn't bother to report it until now?"

"I told Mikey. He said it was probably bones that had washed out of an Indian burial mound or something. Mikey's kind of hard-nosed. He said the last thing we needed was trouble with either cops or university archaeologists."

"We'll talk about it tomorrow, Mr. Sykes."

"You don't pay me much mind, either. But that's all right. I told you what I saw. Y'all can do what you want to with it."

He looked straight ahead through the beads of water on the window. His handsome face was wan, tired, more sober now, resigned perhaps to a booking room, drunk-tank scenario he knew all too well. I remembered two or three wire-service stories about him over the last few years-a brawl with a couple of cops in Dallas or Fort Worth, a violent ejection from a yacht club in Los Angeles, and a plea on a cocaine-possession bust. I had heard that bean sprouts, mineral water, and the sober life had become fashionable in Hollywood. It looked like Elrod Sykes had arrived late at the depot.

"I'm sorry, I didn't get your name," he said.

"Dave Robicheaux."

"Well, you see, Mr. Robicheaux, a lot of people don't believe me when I tell them I see things. But the truth is, I see things all the time, like shadows moving around behind a veil. In my family we call it 'touched.' When I was a little boy, my grandpa told me, 'Son, the Lord done touched you. He give you a third eye to see things that other people cain't. But it's a gift from the Lord, and you mustn't never use it otherwise.' I haven't ever misused the gift, either, Mr. Robicheaux, even though I've done a lot of other things I'm not proud of. So I don't care if people think I lasered my head with too many recreational chemicals or not."

"I see."

He was quiet again. We were almost to the jail now. The wind blew raindrops out of the oak trees, and the moon edged the storm clouds with a metallic silver light. He rolled down his window halfway and breathed in the cool smell of the night.

"But if that was an Indian washed out of a burial mound instead of a colored man, I wonder what he was doing with a chain wrapped around him," he said.

I slowed the truck and pulled it to the curb.

"Say that again," I said.

"There was a rusted chain, I mean with links as big as my fist, crisscrossed around his rib cage."

I studied his face. It was innocuous, devoid of intention, pale in the moonlight, already growing puffy with hangover.

"You want some slack on the DWI for your knowledge about this body, Mr. Sykes?"

"No, sir, I just wanted to tell you what I saw. I shouldn't have been driving. Maybe you kept me from having an accident."

"Some people might call that jailhouse humility. What do you think?"

"I think you might make a tough film director."

"Can you find that sandbar again?"

"Yes, sir, I believe I can."

"Where are you and Ms. Drummond staying?"

"The studio rented us a house out on Spanish Lake."

"I'm going to make a confession to you, Mr. Sykes. DWIs are a pain in the butt. Also I'm on city turf and doing their work. If I take y'all home, can I have your word you'll remain there until tomorrow morning?"

"Yes, sir, you sure can."

"But I want you in my office by nine a.m."

"Nine a.m. You got it. Absolutely. I really appreciate this."

The transformation in his face was immediate, as though liquified ambrosia had been infused in the veins of a starving man. Then as I turned the truck around in the middle of the street to pick up the actress whose name was Kelly Drummond, he said something that gave me pause about his level of sanity.

"Does anybody around here ever talk about Confederate soldiers out on that lake?"

"I don't understand."

"Just what I said. Does anybody ever talk about guys in gray or butternut-brown uniforms out there? A bunch of them, at night, out there in the mist."

"Aren't y'all making a film about the War Between the States? Are you talking about actors?" I looked sideways at him. His eyes were straight forward, focused on some private thought right outside the windshield.

"No, these guys weren't actors," he said. "They'd been shot up real bad. They looked hungry, too. It happened right around here, didn't it?"

"What?"

"The battle."

"I'm afraid I'm not following you, Mr. Sykes."

Up ahead I saw Kelly Drummond walking in her spiked heels and Levi's toward Tee Neg's poolroom.

"Yeah, you do," he said. "You believe when most people don't, Mr. Robicheaux. You surely do. And when I say you believe, you know exactly what I'm talking about."

He looked confidently, serenely, into my face and winked with one blood-flecked eye.

My dreams took me many places: sometimes back to a windswept firebase on the top of an orange hill gouged with shell holes; a soft, mist-streaked morning with ducks rising against a pink sun while my father and I crouched in the blind and waited for that heart-beating moment when their shadows would race across the cattails and reeds toward us; a lighted American Legion baseball diamond, where at age seventeen I pitched a perfect game against a team from Abbeville and a beautiful woman I didn't know, perhaps ten years my senior, kissed me so hard on the mouth that my ears rang.

But tonight I was back in the summer of my freshman year in college, July of 1957, deep in the Atchafalaya marsh, right after Hurricane Audrey had swept through southern Louisiana and killed over five hundred people in Cameron Parish alone. I worked offshore seismograph then, and the portable drill barge had just slid its iron pilings into the floor of a long, flat yellow bay, and the jugboat crew had dropped me off by a chain of willow islands to roll up a long spool of recording cable that was strung through the trees and across the sand spits and sloughs. The sun was white in the sky, and the humidity was like the steam that rises from a pot of boiled vegetables. Once I was inside the shade of the trees, the mosquitoes swarmed around my ears and eyes in a gray fog as dense as a helmet.

The spool and crank hung off my chest by canvas straps, and after I had wound up several feet of cable, I would have to stop and submerge myself in the water to get the mosquitoes off my skin or smear more mud on my face and shoulders. It was our fifth day out on a ten-day hitch, which meant that tonight the party chief would allow a crew boat to take a bunch of us to the levee at Charenton, and from there we'd drive to a movie in some little town down by Morgan City. As I slapped mosquitoes into a bloody paste on my arms and waded across sand bogs that sucked over my knees, I kept thinking about the cold shower that I was going to take back on the quarter-boat, the fried-chicken dinner that I was going to eat in the dining room, the ride to town between the sugarcane fields in the cooling evening. Then I popped out of the woods on the edge of another bay, into the breeze, the sunlight, the hint of rain in the south.

I dropped the heavy spool into the sand, knelt in the shallows, and washed the mud off my skin. One hundred yards across the bay, I saw a boat with a cabin moored by the mouth of a narrow bayou. A Negro man stepped off the bow onto the bank, followed by two white men. Then I looked again and realized that something was terribly wrong. One of the white men had a pistol in his hand, and the black man's arms were pinioned at his sides with a thick chain that had been trussed around his upper torso.