James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Finally I called Rosie at her motel. I told her where I was.

"Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic film that you need to know about," I said. "Evidently Julie has branched out into some dark stuff."

"What is it, what do you mean?"

"It's pretty sadistic, Rosie. It looks like the real thing, too."

"Can we connect it to Balboni?"

"I doubt if Cholo would ever testify, but maybe we can find some of the people who made the film."

"I'll be over in a few minutes."

"Rosie, I-"

"You don't think I'm up to looking at it?"

"I don't know that it'll serve any purpose."

"If you don't want to hang around, Dave, just stick the tape in my mailbox."

Twenty minutes later she came through the door in a pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a short-sleeve denim shirt with purple and white flowers sewn on it. I closed the blinds again and started the film, except this time I used the fast-forward device to isolate the violent scenes and to get through it as quickly as possible.

When the screen went blank I pulled the blinds and filled the room with sunlight. Rosie sat very still and erect, her hands in her lap. Her nostrils were pinched when she breathed. Then she stood and looked out the window a moment.

"The beating of those girls… I've never seen anything like that," she said.

I heard her take a breath and let it out, then she turned back toward me.

"They weren't acting, were they?" she said.

"I don't think so. It's too convincing for a low-rent bunch like this."

"Dave, we've got to get these guys."

"We will, one way or another."

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and blew her nose. She blinked, and her eyes were shiny.

"Excuse me, I have hay fever today," she said.

"It's that kind of weather."

Then she had to turn and look out the window again. When she faced me again, her eyes had become impassive.

"What's the profit margin on a film like this?" she said.

"I've heard they make an ordinary porno movie for about five grand and get a six-figure return. I don't know about one like this."

"I'd like to lock up Cholo Manelli as a material witness."

"Even if we could do it, Rosie, it'd be a waste of time. Cholo's got the thinking powers of a cantaloupe but he doesn't roll over or cop pleas."

"You seem to say that almost with admiration."

"There're worse guys around."

"I have difficulty sharing your sympathies sometimes, Dave."

"Look, the film was made around New Orleans somewhere. Those were the docks in Algiers in the background. I'd like to make a copy and send it to N.O.P.D. Vice. They might recognize some of the players. This kind of stuff is their bailiwick, anyway."

"All right, let's get a print for the Bureau, too. Maybe Balboni's going across state lines with it." Then she picked up her purse and I saw a dark concern come into her face again.

"I'll buy you a drink," I said.

"Of what?"

"Whatever you like."

"I'm all right, Dave. We don't need to go to any bars."

"That's up to you. How about a Dr Pepper across the street or a spearmint snowball in the park?"

"That sounds nice."

We drove in my truck to the park. The sky was filling with afternoon rain clouds that had the bright sheen of steam. She tried to pretend that she was listening to my conversation, but her eyes seemed locked on a distant spot just above the horizon, as though perhaps she were staring through an inverted telescope at an old atrocity that was always aborning at the wrong moment in her mind.

I HAD TRIED SEVERAL TIMES THAT DAY TO PURSUE HOGMAN'S peculiar implication about the type of work done by DeWitt Prejean, the chained black man I had seen shot down in the Atchafalaya marsh in 1957. But neither the Opelousas chief of police nor the St. Landry Parish sheriff knew anything that was helpful about DeWitt Prejean, and when I finally reached the old jailer at his house he hung up the phone on me as soon as he recognized my voice.

Late that afternoon the sleeplessness of the previous night finally caught up with me, and I lay down in the hammock that I had stretched between two shade trees on the edge of the coulee in the backyard. I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sound of the water coursing over the rocks and to forget the images from Lou's apartment that seemed to live behind my eyelids like red paint slung from a brush. I could smell the ferns in the coulee, the networks of roots that trailed in the current, the cool odor of wet stone, the periwinkles that ruffled in the grass.

I had never thought of my coulee as a place where members of the Confederate Signal Corps would gather for a drink on a hot day. But out of the rain clouds and the smell of sulfur and the lightning that had already begun to flicker in the south, I watched the general descend, along with two junior officers, in the wicker basket of an observation balloon, one that looked sewn together from silk cuttings of a half-dozen colors. Five enlisted men moored the basket and balloon to the earth with ropes and helped the general down and handed him a crutch. By the mooring place were a table and chair and telegraph key with a long wire that was attached to the balloon's basket. The balloon tugged upward against its ropes and bobbled and shook in the wind that blew across my neighbor's sugarcane field.

One of the general's aides helped him to a canvas lawn chair by my hammock and then went away.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" he said.

"It surely is," I said.

"Ladies from all over Louisiana donated their silk dresses for the balloon. The wicker basket was made by an Italian pickle merchant in New Orleans. The view's extraordinary. In the next life I'm coming back as a bird. Would you like to take a ride up?"

"Not right now, thanks."

"A bad day for it?"

"Another time, general."

"You grieve for your friend?"

"Yes."

"You plan revenge, don't you? "

"The Lafayette cops are putting it down as a suicide."

"I want you to listen to me very carefully, lieutenant. No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative."

"The times you lived in were different, general. This afternoon I watched a film that showed young women being beaten and tortured, perhaps even killed, by sadists and degenerates. This stuff is sold in stores and shown in public theaters. The sonsofbitches who make it are seldom arrested unless they get nailed in a mail sting."

"I'm not quite sure I follow all your allusions, but let me tell you of an experience we had three days ago. My standard-bearer was a boy of sixteen. He got caught in their crossfire in a fallow cornfield. There was no place for him to hide. He tried to surrender by waving his shirt over his head. They killed him anyway, whether intentionally or by accident, I don't know.

"By evening we retook the ground and recovered his body. It was torn by miniés as though wild dogs had chewed it. He was so thin you could count his bones with your fingers. In his haversack was his day's ration-a handful of black beans, some roasted acorns, and a dried sweet potato. That's the only food I could provide this boy who followed me unto the death. What do you think I felt toward those who killed him?"

"Maybe you were justified in your feelings."

"Yes, that's what I told myself throughout the night or when I remembered the bloodless glow that his skin gave off when we wrapped him for burial. Then an opportunity presented itself from aloft in our balloon I looked down upon a copse of hackberry trees. Hard by a surgeon's tent a dozen federals were squatting along a latrine with their breeches down to their ankles. Two hundred yards up the bayou, unseen by any of them, was one of our boats with a twelve-pounder on its bow. I simply had to tap the order on the telegrapher's key and our gunners would have loaded with grape and raked those poor devils through their own excrement. But that's not our way, is it?"