James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"Then he's about to put in for some overtime."

She straightened her shoulders, slung her purse on her shoulder, and walked out the door into the corridor. A deputy with a girth like a hogshead nodded to her deferentially and stepped aside to let her pass.

When I was helping Batist clean up the shop that evening I remembered that I hadn't called Elrod Sykes about his invitation to go fishing out on the salt. Or maybe I had deliberately pushed it out of my mind. I knew that Bootsie was probably right about Elrod. He was one of the walking wounded, the kind for whom you always felt sympathy, but you knew eventually he'd rake a whole dustpan of broken glass into your head.

I called up to the house and got the telephone number that he had left with Bootsie. While Elrod's phone was ringing, I gazed out the screen window at Alafair and a little black girl playing with Tripod by the edge of a corn garden down the road. Tripod was on his back, rolling in the baked dirt, digging his claws into a deflated football. Even though there was still moisture in the root systems, the corn looked sere and red against the late sun, and when the breeze lifted in the dust the leaves crackled dryly around the scarecrow that was tilted at an angle above the children's heads.

Kelly Drummond answered the phone, then put Elrod on.

"You cain't go?" he said.

"No, I'm afraid not."

"Tomorrow's Saturday. Why don't you take some time off?"

"Saturday's a big day for us at the dock."

"Mr. Robicheaux… Dave… is there some other problem here? I guess I was pretty fried when I was at your house."

"We were glad to have you all. How about I talk with you later? Maybe we'll go to a meeting, if you like."

"Sure," he said, his voice flat. "That sounds okay."

"I appreciate the invitation. I really do."

"Sure. Don't mention it. Another time."

"Yes, that might be fine."

"So long, Mr. Robicheaux."

The line went dead, and I was left with the peculiar sensation that I had managed both to be dishonest and to injure the feelings of someone I liked.

Batist and I cleaned the ashes out of the barbecue pit, on which we cooked sausage links and split chickens with a sauce piquante and sold them at noon to fishermen for three-ninety-five a plate; then we seined the dead shiners out of the bait tanks, wiped down the counters, swept the grained floors clean, refilled the beer and soda-pop coolers, poured fresh crushed ice over the bottles, loaded the candy and cigarette machines, put the fried pies, hard-boiled eggs, and pickled hogs' feet in the icebox in case Tripod got into the shop again, folded up the beach umbrellas on the spool tables, slid back the canvas awning that stretched on wires over the dock, emptied water out of all our rental boats, ran a security chain through a welded ring on the housing of all the outboard engines, and finally latched the board flaps over the windows and turned keys in all the locks.

I walked across the road and stopped by the corn garden where Alafair and the black girl were playing. A pickup truck banged over the ruts in the road and dust drifted across the cornstalks. Out in the marsh, a solitary frog croaked, then the entire vault of sky seemed to ache with the reverberation of thousands of other frogs.

"What's Tripod been into today?" I said.

"Tripod's been good. He hasn't been into anything, Dave," Alafair said. She picked Tripod up and thumped him down on his back in her lap. His paws pumped wildly at the air.

"What you got there, Poteet?" I said to the little black girl. Her pigtails were wrapped with rubber bands and her elbows and knees were gray with dust.

"Found it right here in the row," she said, and opened her hand. "What that is, Mr. Dave?"

"I told you. It's a minié ball," Alafair said.

"It don't look like no ball to me," Poteet said.

I picked it out of her hand. It was smooth and cool in my palm, oxidized an off-white, cone-shaped at one end, grooved with three rings, and hollowed at the base. The French contribution to the science of killing people at long distances. It looked almost phallic.

"These were the bullets that were used during the War Between the States, Poteet," I said, and handed it back to her.

"Confederate and federal soldiers fought all up and down this bayou."

"That's the war Alafair say you was in, Mr. Dave?"

"Do I look that old to you guys?"

"How much it worth?" Poteet said.

"You can buy them for a dollar at a store in New Orleans."

"You give me a dollar for it?" Poteet said.

"Why don't you keep it instead, Po'?" I said, and rubbed the top of her head.

"I don't want no nasty minié ball. It probably gone in somebody," she said, and flung it into the cornstalks.

"Don't do that. You can use it in a slingshot or something," Alafair said. She crawled on hands and knees up the row and put the minié ball in the pocket of her jeans. Then she came back and lifted Tripod up in her arms. "Dave, who was that old man?" she said.

"What old man?"

"He got a stump," Poteet said.

"A stump?"

"That's right, got a stump for a leg, got an arm look like a shriveled-up bird's claw," Poteet said.

"What are y'all talking about?" I said.

"He was on a crutch, Dave. Standing there in the leaves," Alafair said.

I knelt down beside them. "You guys aren't making a lot of sense," I said.

"He was right up there in the corn leaves. Talking in the wind," Poteet said. "His mouth just a big hole in the wind without no sound coming out."

"I bet y'all saw the scarecrow."

"If scarecrows got B.O.," Poteet said.

"Where'd this old man go?" I said.

"He didn't go anywhere," Alafair said. "The wind started blowing real hard in the stalks and he just disappeared."

"Disappeared?" I said.

"That's right," Poteet said. "Him and his B.O."

"Did he have a black coat on, like that scarecrow there?" I tried to smile, but my heart had started clicking in my chest.

"No, suh, he didn't have no black coat on," Poteet said.

"It was gray, Dave," Alafair said. "Just like your shirt."

"Gray?" I said woodenly.

"Except it had some gold on the shoulders," she said.

She smiled at me as though she had given me a detail that somehow would remove the expression she saw on my face.

My knees popped when I stood up.

"You'd better come home for supper now, Alf," I said.

"You mad, Dave? We done something wrong?" Alafair said.

"Don't say 'we done,' little guy. No, of course, I'm not mad. It's just been a long day. We'll see you later, Poteet."

Alafair swung on my hand as she held on to Tripod's leash, and we walked up the slope through the pecan trees toward the lighted gallery of our house. The thick layer of humus and leaves and moldy pecan husks cracked under our shoes. Behind the house the western horizon was still as blue as a robin's egg and streaked with low-lying pink clouds.

"You're real tired, huh?" she said.

"A little bit."

"Take a nap."

"Okay, little guy."

"Then we can go to Vezey's for ice cream," she said. She grinned up at me.

"Were they epaulets?" I said.

"What?"

"The gold you saw on his shoulders. Sometimes soldiers wear what they call epaulets on the shoulders of their coats."

"How could he be a soldier? He was on a crutch. You say funny things sometimes, Dave."

"I get it from a certain little fellow I know."

"That man doesn't hurt children, does he?"

"No, I'm sure he's harmless. Let's don't worry about it anymore."

"Okay, big guy."

"I'll feed Tripod. Why don't you go inside and wash your hands for supper?"

The screen door slammed after her, and I looked back down the slope under the overhang of the trees at the corn garden in the fading twilight. The wind dented and bent the stalks and straightened the leaves and swirled a column of dust around the blank cheesecloth visage of the scarecrow. The dirt road was empty, the bait shop dark, the gray clouds of insects hovering over the far side of the bayou almost like a metamorphic and tangible shape in the damp heat and failing light. I stared at the cornstalks and the hot sky filled with angry birds, then pinched the moisture and salt out of my eyes and went inside the house.