James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"An investigation puts the right people in jail," he said. "You don't throw a rope around half the people in two or three parishes. And that's what you and that woman are doing."

"That's the problem, is it?"

"You damn right it is. Thirty minutes ago Agent Gomez marched into my office with all her findings." He touched the edge of the manila folder with his finger. "According to Agent Gomez, New Iberia has somehow managed to become the new Evil Empire."

I nodded.

"The New Orleans mob is laundering its drug money through Bal-Gold Productions," he said. "Julie Balboni is running a statewide prostitution operation from Spanish Lake, he's also having prostitutes killed, and maybe he laced your Dr Pepper with LSD when he wasn't cutting illegal deals with the Teamsters. Did you know we had all those problems right here in our town, Dave?"

"Julie's a walking shit storm. Who knows what his potential is?"

"She also called some of our local business people moral weenies and chicken-hearted buttheads."

"She has some eloquent moments."

"Before she left my office she said she wanted me to know that she liked me personally but in all honesty she had to confess that she thought I was full of shit."

"I see," I said, and fixed my eyes on a palm tree outside the window.

The room was quiet. I could hear a jail trusty mowing the grass outside. The sheriff turned his Southwestern class ring on his finger.

"I want you to understand something, Dave," he said. "I was the one who wanted that fat sonofabitch Balboni out of town. You were the one who thought he was a source of humor. But now we're stuck with him, and that's the way it is."

"Why?"

"Because he has legitimate business interests here. He's committed no crime here. In fact, there's no outstanding warrant on this man anywhere. He's never spent one day in jail."

"I think that's the same shuck his lawyers try to sell."

He exhaled his breath through his nose.

"Go home. You've got the week off," he said.

"I heard my leave might even be longer."

He chewed on a fingernail.

"Who told you that?" he said.

"Is it true or not?"

"You want the truth? The truth is your eyes don't look right. They bother me. There's a strange light in them. Go home, Dave."

"People used to tell me that in bars. It doesn't sound too good to hear it where I work, sheriff."

"What can I say?" he said, and held his hands up and turned his face into a rhetorical question mark.

When I walked back down the corridor toward the exit, I stuffed my mail back into my mailbox, unopened, and continued on past my own office without even glancing inside.

My clothes were damp with sweat when I got home. I took off my shirt, threw it into the dirty-clothes hamper, put on a fresh T-shirt, and took a glass of iced tea into the backyard where Bootsie was working chemical fertilizer into the roots of the tomato plants by the coulee. She was in the row, on her hands and knees, and the rump of her pink shorts was covered with dirt.

She raised up on her knees and smiled.

"Did you eat yet?" she asked.

"I stopped in Lafayette."

"What were you doing over there?"

"I went to Opelousas to run down a lead on that '57 lynching."

"I thought the sheriff had said-"

"He did. He didn't take well to my pursuing it."

I sat down at the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. On the table were a pad of lined notebook paper and three city library books on Texas and southern history.

"What's this?" I said.

"Some books I checked out. I found out some interesting things."

She got up from the row of tomato plants, brushing her hands, and sat down across from me. Her hair was damp on her forehead and flecked with grains of dirt. She picked up the note pad and began thumbing back pages. Then she set it down and looked at me uncertainly.

"You know how dreams work?" she said. "I mean, how dates and people and places shift in and out of a mental picture that you wake up with in the morning? The picture seems to have no origin in your experience, but at the same time you're almost sure you lived it, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"I looked up some of the things that, well, maybe you believe you saw out there in the mist."

I drank out of my iced tea and looked down the sloping lawn at the duck pond and the bright, humid haze on my neighbor's sugarcane.

"You see, Dave, according to these books, John Bell Hood never had a command in Louisiana," she said. "He fought at Gettysburg and in Tennessee and Georgia."

"He was all through this country, Boots."

"He lived here but he didn't fight here. You see, what's interesting, Dave, is that part of your information is correct but the rest you created from associations. Look here-"

She turned the notebook around so I could see the notes she had taken. "You're right, he commanded the Texas Brigade," she said. "It was a famous cavalry outfit. But look here at this date. When you asked the general what the date was, he told you it was April 21, 1865, right?"

"Right."

"April 21 is Texas Independence Day, the day the battle of San Jacinto was fought between the Mexican army and the Texans in 1836. Don't you see, your mind mixed up two historical periods. Nothing happened out in that mist, Dave."

"Maybe not," I said. "Wait here a minute, will you?"

I walked to the front of the house, where my boat trailer was still parked, pulled back the tarp, which was dented with pools of rainwater, reached down inside the bow of the boat, and returned to the backyard.

"What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Why'd you go out front?"

"I was going to show you some junk I found out in the marsh."

"What junk?"

"Probably some stuff left by an old lumber crew. It's not important."

Her face was puzzled, then her eyes cleared and she put her hand on top of mine.

"You want to go inside?" she said.

"Where's Alf?"

"Playing over at Poteet's house."

"Sure, let's go inside."

"I'm kind of dirty."

She waited for me to say something but I didn't. I stared at my iced-tea glass.

"What is it, babe?" she said.

"Maybe it's time to start letting go of the department."

"Let go how?"

"Hang it up."

"Is that what you want?"

"Not really."

"Then why not wait awhile? Don't make decisions when you're feeling down, cher."

"I think I've already been cut loose, Boots. They look at me like I have lobotomy stitches across my forehead."

"Maybe you read it wrong, Dave. Maybe they want to help but they just don't know how."

I didn't answer. Later, after we had made love in the warm afternoon gloom of our bedroom, I rose from the softness of her body and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. A moment later I felt her nails tick lightly on my back.

"Ask the sheriff if he wants your resignation," she said.

"It won't solve the problem."

"Why won't it? Let them see how well they'll do without you."

"You don't understand. I'm convinced Kelly Drummond's killer was after me. It's got something to do with that dead black man. That's the only thing that makes sense."

"Why?"

"We've gotten virtually nowhere in trying to find this serial killer or psychopath or whatever he is. So why would he want to come after me? But the lynched black man is another matter. I'm the only one making noise about it. That's the connection. Why doesn't the sheriff see that?"

I felt her nails trace my vertebrae.

"You want to believe that all people are good, Dave," she said. "When your friends don't act the way they should, you feel all this anger and then it turns inward on you."

"I'm going to take down that guy, Boots. Even if I have to do it outside the department."

It was quiet for a long time. Then I felt her weight shift on the mattress and I thought she was getting up to get dressed. Instead, she rose to her knees, pressed her body hard against my back, and pulled my head against her breasts.