James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

I took the receiver off a pay phone by the men's room and let it hang by its cord.

A minute later the ticket salesman stared down at my badge that I had slid across the counter.

"You want me to do what?" he said.

"Announce that there's a call at the pay phone for Mr. Bob Brown."

"We usually don't do that."

"Consider it an emergency."

"Yes, sir."

"Wait at least one minute before you do it. Okay, podna?"

"Yes, sir."

I bought a soft drink from a vending machine and looked casually out the glass doors while a bus marked "Miami" was being loaded underneath with luggage. The ticket salesman picked up his microphone, and Bob Brown's name echoed and resonated off the depot walls.

Downtown Bobby Brown's face became quizzical, impish, in front of the girls, then momentarily apologetic as he explained that he'd be right back, that somebody at his shelter probably needed advice about a situation.

I dropped my soda can into a trash bin and followed him to the pay phone. Downtown Bobby was streetwise, and he turned around and looked into my face. But my eyes never registered his glance, and I passed him and stopped in front of the USA Today machine.

He picked up the telephone receiver, leaning on one arm against the wall, and said, "This is Bobby. What's happenin'?"

"The end of your career," I said, and clenched the back of his neck, driving his face into the restroom door. Then I pushed him through the door and flung him inside the room. Blood drained from his nose over his lip; his eyes were wide, yellow-white-like a peeled egg-with shock.

A man at the urinal stood dumbfounded with his fly opened. I held up my badge in front of him.

"This room's in use," I said.

He zipped his trousers and went quickly out the door. I shot the bolt into the jamb.

"What you want? Why you comin' down on me for? You cain't run a shake on somebody, run somebody's face into a do' just because you-"

I pulled my.45 out of the back of my belt and aimed it into the center of his face.

He lifted his hands in front of him, as though he were holding back an invisible presence, and shook his head from side to side, his eyes averted, his mouth twisted like a broken plum.

"Don't do that, man," he said. "I ain't no threat to you. Look, I ain't got a gun. You want to bust me, do it. Come on, I swear it, they ain't no need for that piece, I ain't no trouble."

He was breathing heavily now. Sweat glistened like oil on his temples. He blotted drops of blood off his nose with the backs of his fingers.

I walked closer to him, staring into his eyes, and cocked the hammer. He backed away from me into a stall, his breath rife with a smell like sardines.

"I want the name of the guy you're delivering the girls to," I said.

"Nobody. I ain't bringing nobody to nobody."

I fitted the opening in the barrel to the point of his chin.

"Oh, God," he said, and fell backward onto the commode. The seat was up, and his butt plummeted deep into the bowl.

"You know the guy I'm talking about. He's just like you. He hunts on the game reserve," I said.

His chest was bent forward toward his knees. He looked like a round clothespin that had been screwed into a hole.

"Don't do this to me, man," he said. "I just had an operation. Take me in. I'll he'p y'all out any way I can. I got a good record wit' y'all."

"You've been up the road for child molesting, Bobby. Even cons don't like a short-eyes. Did you have to stay in lockdown with the snitches?"

"It was a statutory. I went down for nonconsent. Check it out, man. No shit, don't point that at me no more. I still got stitches inside my groin. They're gonna tear loose."

"Who's the guy, Bobby?"

He shut his eyes and put his hand over his mouth.

"Just give me his name, and it all ends right here," I said.

He opened his eyes and looked up at me.

"I messed my pants," he said.

"This guy hurts people. Give me his name, Bobby."

"There's a white guy sells dirty pictures or something. He carries a gun. Nobody fucks wit' him. Is that the guy you're talking about?"

"You tell me."

"That's all I know. Look, I don't have nothin' to do wit' dangerous people. I don't hurt nobody. Why you doin' this to me, man?"

I stepped back from him and eased down the hammer on the.45. He put the heels of his hands on the rim of the commode and pushed himself slowly to his feet. Toilet water dripped off the seat of his khakis. I wadded up a handful of paper towels, soaked them under a faucet, and handed them to him.

"Wipe your face," I said.

He kept sniffing, as though he had a cold.

"I cain't go back out there."

"That's right."

"I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man."

"You're never coming back here, Bobby. You're going to treat this bus depot like it's the center of a nuclear test zone."

"I got a crib… a place… two blocks from here, man. What you-"

"Do you know who-is?" I used the name of a notorious right-wing racist beat cop from the Irish Channel.

His hand stopped mopping at his nose with the towels.

"I got no beef wit' that peckerwood," he said.

"He broke a pimp's trachea with his baton once. That's right, Bobby. The guy strangled to death in his own spit."

"What you talkin' 'bout, man? I ain't said nothing 'bout -I know what you're doin', man, you're-"

"If I catch you in the depot again, if I hear you're scamming runaways and young girls again, I'm going to tell -you've been working his neighborhood, maybe hanging around school grounds in the Channel."

"Who the fuck are you, man? Why you makin' me miserable? I ain't done nothing to you."

I unlocked the bolt on the door.

"Did you ever read the passage in the Bible about what happens to people who corrupt children?" I said.

He looked at me with a stupefied expression on his face.

"Start thinking about millstones or get into another line of work," I said.

I had seventeen dollars in my billfold. I gave twelve to the two runaway girls and the address of an AA street priest who ran a shelter and wouldn't report them.

Outside, the air tasted like pennies and felt like it had been superheated in an electric oven. Even the wind blew off the pavement like heat rising from a wood stove. I started my truck, unbuttoned my shirt to my waist, and headed toward I-10 and home.

When I passed Lake Pontchartrain, the moon was up and small waves were breaking against the rim of gray sandy beach by the highway. I wanted to stop the truck, strip to my skivvies, wade out to the drop-off, then dive down through the descending layers of temperature until I struck a cold, dark current at the bottom that would wash the last five hours out of my pores.

But Lake Pontchartrain, like the city of New Orleans, was deceptive. Under its slate-green, capping waves, its moon-glazed surfaces, its twenty-four-mile causeway glowing with electric light, waste of every kind lay trapped in the dark sediment, and the level of toxicity was so high that it was now against the law to swim in the lake.

I kept the truck wide open, the plastic ball on the floor stick shaking under my palm, all the way to the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge. Then I rolled down the elevated causeway through the Atchafalaya marsh and the warm night air that smelled of sour mud and hyacinths blooming back in the trees. Out over the pewter-colored bays, the dead cypress trunks were silhouetted against burning gas flares and the vast black-green expanse of sawgrass and flooded willow islands. Huge thunderclouds tumbled one upon another like curds of black smoke from an old fire, and networks of lightning were bursting silently all over the southern sky. I thought I could smell raindrops on the wind, as cool and clean and bright as the taste of white alcohol on the tip of the tongue.