James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"Speak for yourself."

"Your pretense as cynic is unconvincing."

"Let me ask you a question, general. The women who donated their dresses and petticoats for your balloon… what if they were raped, sodomized, and methodically beaten and you got your hands on the men who did it to them?"

"They'd be arrested by my provost, tried in a provisional court, and hanged."

"You wouldn't find that the case today."

His long, narrow face was perplexed.

"Why not?" he said.

"I don't know. Maybe we have so much collective guilt as a society that we fear to punish our individual members."

He put his hat on the back of his head, crossed his good leg across his cork knee, and wet the end of a cheroot. Several of his enlisted men were kneeling by my coulee, filling their canteens. Their faces were dusty, their lips blackened with gunpowder from biting through cartridge papers. The patchwork silk balloon shuddered in the wind and shimmered with the silvery light of the coming rainstorm.

"I won't presume to be your conscience," the general said. "But as your friend who wishes to see you do no harm to yourself, I advise you to give serious thought about keeping your dead friend's weapon."

"I have."

"I think you're making a serious mistake, suh. You disappoint me, too."

He waved his hand impatiently at his aides, and they helped him to his feet.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," I said.

But the general was not one given to debate. He stumped along on his crutch and cork leg toward the balloon's basket, his cigar clenched at an upward angle in his teeth, his eyes flicking about at the wind-torn clouds and the lightning that trembled whitely like heated wires out on the Gulf.

The incoming storm blew clouds of dust out of my neighbor's canefield just as the general's balloon lifted him and his aides aloft, their telegraph wire flopping from the wicker basket like an umbilical cord.

When I woke from my dream, the gray skies were filled with a dozen silken hot-air balloons, painted in the outrageous colors of circus wagons, their dim shadows streaking across barn roofs, dirt roads, clapboard houses, general stores, clumps of cows, winding bayous, until the balloons themselves were only distant specks above the summer-green horizon outside Lafayette.

On Monday morning I went to Lou Girard's funeral in Lafayette. It was a boiling green-gold day. At the cemetery a layer of heat seemed to rise off the spongy grass and grow in intensity as the white sun climbed toward the top of the sky. During the graveside service someone was running a power mower behind the brick wall that separated the crypts from a subdivision. The mower coughed and backfired and echoed off the bricks like someone firing rounds from a small-caliber revolver. The eyes of the cops who stood at attention in full uniform kept watering from the heat and the smell of weed killer. When the police chief and a captain removed the flag from Lou's casket and folded it into a military square, there was no family member there to receive it. The casket remained closed during the ceremony. Before the casket was lowered into the ground, the department chaplin removed a framed picture of Lou in uniform from the top and set it on a folding table under the funeral canopy. Accidentally he tipped it with the back of his hand so that it fell face down on the linen.

I DROVE BACK HOME FOR LUNCH BEFORE HEADING FOR the office. It was cool under the ceiling fan in the kitchen, and the breeze swayed the baskets of impatiens that hung on hooks from the eave of the back porch. Bootsie set a glass of iced tea with mint leaves and a plate of ham-and-onion sandwiches and deviled eggs in front of me.

"Where's Alafair?" I said.

"Elrod took her and Tripod out to Spanish Lake," she said from the sink.

"To the movie location?"

"Yes, I think so."

When I didn't speak, she turned around and looked at me.

"Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

"Julie Balboni's out there, Boots."

"He lives here now, Dave. He's lots of places. I don't think we should start choosing where we go and don't go because of a man like that."

"I don't want Alafair around him."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd object."

"Boots, there's something I didn't tell you about. Saturday a hood named Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic video that evidently Balboni and his people made. It's as dark as dark gets. There's one scene where it looks like a woman is actually beaten to death."

Her eyes blinked, then she said, "I'll go out to Spanish Lake and bring her home. Why don't you finish eating?"

"Don't worry about it. There's no harm done. I'll go get her before I go to the office."

"Can't somebody do something about him?"

"When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily."

"Where did you get that piece of Puritan theology?"

"It's not funny. The morons on the Chamber of Commerce who brought this guy here would screw up the recipe for ice water."

I heard her laugh and walk around behind me. Then I felt her hands on my shoulders and her mouth kiss the top of my head.

"Dave, you're just too much," she said, and hugged me across the chest.

I LISTENED TO THE NEWS ON THE RADIO AS I DROVE OUT TO Spanish Lake. A tropical storm off Cuba was gaining hurricane status and was expected to turn northwest toward the Gulf Coast. I glanced to the south, but the sky was brassy and hot and virtually free of clouds. Then as I passed the little watermelon and fruit stand at the end of West Main and headed out into the parish, my radio filled with static and my engine began to misfire.

The truck jerked and sputtered all the way to the entrance of the movie location at the lake. I pulled off the dirt road onto the grass by the security building where Murphy Doucet worked and opened the hood. He stepped out the door in his gray uniform and bifocals.

"What's wrong, Dave?" he asked. His glasses had half-moons of light in them. His blue eyes jittered back and forth when he looked at me.

"It looks like a loose wire on the voltage regulator." I felt at my pants pocket. "Do you have a knife I could use?"

"Yeah, I ought to have something."

I followed him inside his office. His work table was covered with the balsa-wood parts of an amphibian airplane. In the middle of the blueprints was a utility knife with a detachable blade inset in the aluminum handle. But his hand passed over it and opened a drawer and removed a black-handled switchblade knife. He pushed the release button and the blade leaped open in his hand.

"This should do it," he said. "A Mexican pulled this on me in Lake Charles."

"I didn't know you were a cop in Lake Charles."

"I wasn't. I was out on the highway with the State Police. That's what I retired from last year."

"Thanks for the loan of the knife."

I trimmed the insulation away from the end of the loose wire and reattached it to the voltage regulator, then returned the knife to Murphy Doucet and drove into the grove of oak trees by the lake. When I looked in the rearview mirror Doucet was watching me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

The cast and crew were just finishing lunch by the water's edge at picnic tables that were spread with checkered cloths and buckets of fried chicken, potato salad, dirty rice, cole slaw, and sweating plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Alafair sat on a wood bench in the shade, next to Elrod, the lake shimmering behind her. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century street urchin.

"What happened to your clothes?" I said.

"I'm in the movie, Dave!" she said. "In this scene with Hogman and Elrod. We're walking down the road with a plantation burning behind us and the Yankees are about to take over the town."