James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"I can't help that."

"The bad news is I don't know what did this to you. But according to the medics you said some strange things, Dave."

I looked away from his face.

"You said there were soldiers out there in the marsh. You kept insisting they were hurt."

The wind began gusting, and rain and green leaves blew against the window.

"The medics thought maybe somebody had been with you. They looked all over the levee," he said. "They even sent a boat out into those willow islands."

"I'm sorry I created so much trouble for them."

"Dave, they say you were talking about Confederate soldiers."

"It was an unusual night."

He took a breath, then made a sucking sound with his lips.

"Well, you weren't drunk and you're not crazy, so I've got a theory," he said. "When I was an intern at Charity Hospital in New Orleans back in the sixties, I treated kids who acted like somebody had roasted their brains with a blowtorch. I'm talking about LSD, Dave. You think one of those Hollywood characters might have freshened up your Dr Pepper out there at Spanish Lake?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"It didn't show up in the tests, but that's not unusual. To really do a tox screen for LSD, you need a gas chromatograph. Not many hospitals have one. We sure don't, anyway. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?"

"When my wife was killed, I got drunk again and became delusional for a while."

"Why don't we keep that to ourselves?"

"Is something being said about me, doc?"

He closed his black bag and stood up to go.

"When did you start worrying about what people say?" he said. "Look, I want you to stay in here a couple of days."

"Why?"

"Because you didn't feel any gradual effects, it hit you all at once. That indicates to me a troubling possibility. Maybe somebody really loaded you up. I'm a little worried about the possibility of residual consequences, Dave, something like delayed stress syndrome."

"I need to get back to work."

"No, you don't."

"I'll talk with the sheriff. Actually I'm surprised he hasn't been up yet."

Dr. Landry rubbed the thick hair on his forearm and looked at the water pitcher and glass on my nightstand.

"What is it?" I said.

"I saw him a short while ago. He said he talked with you for a half hour this morning."

I stared out the window at the gray sky and the rain falling in the trees. Thunder boomed and echoed out of the south, shaking the glass in the window, and for some reason in my mind's eye I saw rain-soaked enlisted men slipping in the mud around a cannon emplacement, swabbing out the smoking barrel, ramming home coils of chain and handfuls of twisted horseshoes.

I couldn't sleep that night, and in the morning I checked myself out of the hospital and went home. The doctor had asked me how I felt. My answer had not been quite accurate. I felt empty, washed-out inside, my skin rubbery and dead to the touch, my eyes jittering with refracted light mat seemed to have no source. I felt as if I had been drinking sour mash for three days and had suddenly become disconnected from all the internal fires that I had nourished and fanned and depended upon with the religious love of an acolyte. There was no pain, no broken razor blades were twisting inside the conscience; there was just numbness, as though wind and fleecy clouds and rain showers marching across the canefields were a part of a curious summer phenomenon that I observed in a soundless place behind a glass wall.

I drank salt water to make myself throw up, ate handfuls of vitamins, made milkshakes filled with strawberries and bananas, did dozens of pushups and stomach crunches in the back yard, and ran wind sprints in the twilight until my chest was heaving for breath and my gym shorts were pasted to my skin with sweat.

I showered with hot water until there was none left in the tank, then I kept my head under the cold water for another five minutes. Then I put on a fresh pair of khakis and a denim shirt and walked outside into the gathering dusk under the pecan trees. The marsh across the road was purple with haze, sparkling with fireflies. A black kid in a pirogue was cane fishing along the edge of the lily pads in the bayou. His dark skin seemed to glow with the sun's vanishing red light. His body and pole were absolutely still, his gaze riveted on his cork bobber. The evening was so quiet and languid, the boy so transfixed in his concentration, that I could have been looking at a painting.

Then I realized, with a twist of the heart, that something was wrong-there was no sound. A car passed on the dirt road, the boy scraped his paddle along the side of the pirogue to move to a different spot. But there was no sound except the dry resonance of my own breathing.

I went into the house, where Bootsie was reading under a lamp in the living room. I was about to speak, with the trepidation a person might have if he were violating the silence of a church, just to see if I could hear the sound of my own voice, when I heard the screen door slam behind me like a slap across the ear. Then suddenly I heard the television, the cicadas in the trees, my neighbor's sprinkler whirling against his myrtle bushes, Batist cranking an outboard down at the dock.

"What is it, Dave?" Bootsie said.

"Nothing."

"Dave?"

"It's nothing. I guess I got some water in my ears." I opened and closed my jaws.

"Your dinner is on the table. Do you want it?"

"Yeah, sure," I said.

Her eyes studied mine.

"Let me heat it up for you," she said.

"That'd be fine."

When she walked past me she glanced into my face again.

"What's the deal, Boots? Do I look like I just emerged from a hole in the dimension?" I said, following her into the kitchen.

"You look tired, that's all."

She kept her back to me while she wrapped my dinner in plastic to put it in the microwave.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"Nothing, really. The sheriff called. He wants you to take a week off."

"Why didn't he tell me that?"

"I don't know, Dave."

"I think you're keeping something from me."

She put my plate in the microwave and turned around. She wore a gold cross on a chain, and the cross hung at an angle outside her pink blouse. Her fingers came up and touched my cheek and the swelling over my right eye.

"You didn't shave today," she said.

"What did the sheriff say, Boots?"

"It's what some other people are saying. In the mayor's office. In the department."

"What?"

"That maybe you're having a breakdown."

"Do you believe I am?"

"No."

"Then who cares?"

"The sheriff does."

"That's his problem."

"A couple of deputies went out to the movie location and questioned some of the people who were at Mr. Goldman's birthday party."

"What for?"

"They asked people about your behavior, things like that."

"Was one of those deputies Rufus Arceneaux?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Boots, this is a guy who would sell his mother to a puppy farm to advance one grade in rank."

"That's not the point. Some of those actors said you were walking around all evening with a drink in your hand. People believe what they want to hear."

"I had blood and urine tests the next morning. There was no alcohol in my system. It's a matter of record at the hospital."

"You beat up one of Julie Balboni's hoods in a public place, Dave. You keep sending local businessmen signals that you just might drive a lot of big money out of town. You tell the paramedics that there're wounded Confederate soldiers in the marsh. What do you think people are going to say about you?"

I sat down at the kitchen table and looked out the back screen at the deepening shadows on the lawn. My eyes burned, as though there were sand under my eyelids.