James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Late that afternoon the sheriff called me on my extension.

"Dave, could you come down to my office and help me with something?" he said.

When I walked through his door he was leaned back in his swivel chair, watching the treetops flatten in the wind outside the window, pushing against his protruding stomach with stiffened fingers as though he were discovering his weight problem for the first time.

"Oh, there you are," he said.

"What's up?"

"Sit down."

"Do we have a problem?"

He brushed at his round, cleft chin with the backs of his fingers.

"I want to get your reaction to what some people might call a developing situation," he said.

"Developing situation?"

"I went two years to USL, Dave. I'm not the most articulate person in the world. I just try to deal with realities as they are."

"I get the feeling we're about to sell the ranch."

"It's not a perfect world."

"Where's the heat coming from?" I said.

"There're a lot of people who want Balboni out of town."

"Which people?"

"Business people."

"They used to get along with him just fine."

"People loved Mussolini until it came time to hang him upside down in a filling station."

"Come on, cut to it, sheriff. Who are the other players?"

"The feds. They want Balboni bad. Doucet's lawyer says his client can put Julie so far down under the penal system they'll have to dig him up to bury him."

"What's Doucet get?"

"He cops to resisting arrest and procuring, one-year max on an honor farm. Then maybe the federal witness protection program, psychological counseling, ongoing supervision, all that jazz."

"Tell them to go fuck themselves."

"Why is it I thought you might say that?"

"Call the press in. Tell them what kind of bullshit's going on here. Give them the morgue photos of Cherry LeBlanc."

"Be serious. They're not going to run pictures like that. Look, we can't indict with what we have. This way we get the guy into custody and permanent supervision."

"He's going to kill again. It's a matter of time."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Don't give an inch. Make them sweat ball bearings."

"With what? I'm surprised his lawyer even wants to accept the procuring charge."

"They think I've got a photo of Doucet with Balboni and Cherry LeBlanc in Biloxi."

"Think?"

"Doucet's face is out of focus. The man in the picture looks like bread dough."

"Great."

"I still say we should exhume the body and match the utility knife to the slash wounds."

"All an expert witness can do is testify that the wounds are consistent with those that might have been made with a utility knife. At least that's what the prosecutor's office says. Doucet will walk and so will Balboni. I say we take the bird in hand."

"It's a mistake."

"You don't have to answer to people, Dave. I do. They want Julie out of this parish and they don't care how we do it."

"Maybe you should give some thought about having to answer to the family of Doucet's next victim, sheriff."

He picked up a chain of paper clips and trailed them around his blotter.

"I don't guess there's much point in continuing this conversation, is there?" he said.

"I'm right about this guy. Don't let him fly."

"Wake up, Dave. He flew this morning." He dropped the paper clips into a clean ashtray and walked past me with his coffee cup. "You'd better take off a little early this afternoon. This hurricane looks to be a real frog stringer."

It hit late that evening, pushing waves ahead of it that curled over houseboats and stilt cabins at West Cote Blanche Bay and flattened them like a huge fist. In the south the sky was the color of burnt pewter, then rain-streaked, flumed with thunderheads. You could see tornadoes dropping like suspended snakes from the clouds, filling with water and splintered trees from the marshes, and suddenly breaking apart like whips snapping themselves into nothingness.

I heard canvas popping loose on the dock, billowing against the ropes Batist and I had tried to secure it with, then bursting free and flapping end over end among the cattails. The windows swam with water, lightning exploded out of the gray-green haze of swamp, and in the distance, in the roar of wind and thunder that seemed to clamp down on us like an enormous black glass bell, I thought I could hear the terrified moaning of my neighbor's cattle as they fought to find cover in a woods where mature trees were whipped out of the soft ground like seedlings.

By midnight the power was gone, the water off, and half the top of an oak tree had crashed on the roof and slid down the side of the house, covering the windows with tangles of branches and leaves.

I heard Alafair cry out in her sleep. I lit a candle, placed it in a saucer on top of her bookcase, which was filled with her collection of Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and got in bed beside her. She wore her Houston Astros baseball cap and had pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her brown eyes moved back and forth as though she were searching out the sounds of the storm that seeped through the heavy cypress planks in the roof. The candlelight flickered on all the memorabilia she had brought back from our vacations or that we had saved as private signposts of the transitions she had made since I had pulled her from the submerged upside-down wreck of a plane off Southwest Pass: conch shells and dried starfish from Key West, her red tennis shoes embossed with the words Left and Right on the toes, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill from Disney-world, her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale on the front and the words Baby Orca that she had fitted over the torso of a huge stuffed frog.

"Dave, the field behind the house is full of lightning," she said. "I can hear animals in the thunder."

"It's Mr. Broussard's cattle. They'll be all right, though. They'll bunch up in the coulee."

"Are you scared?"

"Not really. But it's all right to be scared a little bit if you want to."

"If you're scared, you can't be standup."

"Sure you can. Standup people don't mind admitting they're scared sometimes."

Then I saw something move under the sheet by her feet.

"Alf?"

"What?" Her eyes flicked about the ceiling as though she were watching a bird fly from wall to wall.

I worked the sheet away from the foot of the bed until I was staring at Tripod's silver-tipped rump and black-ringed tail.

"I wonder how this fellow got in your bed, little guy," I said.

"He probably got out of his cage on the back porch."

"Yeah, that's probably it. He's pretty good at opening latched doors, isn't he?"

"I don't think he should go back out there, do you, Dave? He gets scared in the thunder."

"We'll give him a dispensation tonight."

"A dis-What?"

"Never mind. Let's go to sleep, little guy."

"Goodnight, big guy. Goodnight, Tripod. Goodnight, Frogger. Goodnight, Baby Squanto. Goodnight, Curious George. Goodnight, Baby Orca. Goodnight, sea shells. Goodnight-"

"Cork it, Alf, and go to sleep."

"All right. Goodnight, big guy."

"Goodnight, little guy."

In my sleep I heard the storm pass overhead like freight trains grinding down a grade, then suddenly we were in the storm's eye, the air as still as if it had been trapped inside a jar; leaves drifted to the ground from the trees, and I could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead.

The bedroom windows shine with an amber light that might have been aged inside oak. I slip on my khakis and loafers and walk out into the cool air that smells of salt and wet woods, and I see the general's troops forming into long columns that wind their way into other columns that seem to stretch over an infinitely receding landscape of hardwood forests fired with red leaves, peach orchards, tobacco acreage, rivers covered with steam, purple mountain ridges and valleys filled with dust from ambulance and ammunition wagons and wheeled artillery pieces, a cornfield churned into stubble by horses' hooves and men's boots, a meandering limestone wall and a sunken road where wild hogs graze on the bodies of the dead.