James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

I touched the warm tip of the barrel against his eyebrow.

"Last chance, Feet."

His eyes closed; he broke wind uncontrollably in his pants; water and small chips of ceramic dripped out of his hair.

"He's got a camp south of Bayou Vista," he said. "It's almost to Atchafalaya Bay. The deed ain't in his name, nobody knows about it, it's like where he does all his weird stuff. It's right where the dirt road ends at the salt marsh. I seen it once when we were out on my boat."

"Is my daughter there?" I said quietly.

"I just told you, it's where he goes to be weird. You figure it out."

"We'll be back later, Feet. You can make a lot of noise, if you like, but your gumballs are gone and the security guard is watching war movies. If I get my daughter back, I'll have somebody from the department come out and pick you up. You can file charges against me then or do whatever you want. If you've lied to me, that's another matter."

Then I saw a secret concern working in his eyes, a worry, a fear that had nothing to do with me or the pain and humiliation that I had inflicted upon him. It was the fear that you inevitably see in the eyes of men like Julie and his kind when they realize that through an ironic accident they are now dealing with forces that are as cruel and unchecked by morality as the energies they'd awakened with every morning of their lives.

"Cholo-" he said.

"What about him?" I said.

"He's out there somewhere."

"I doubt it."

"You don't know him. He carries a barber's razor. He's got fixations. He don't forget things. He tied parts of a guy all over a ceiling fan once."

His chest moved up and down with his breathing against the rim of the toilet bowl. His brow was kneaded with lines, his nose a wet red smear against his face, his eyes twitching with a phlegmy light.

I shut off the valve that was spewing water upward into the shattered tank, then found a quilt and a pile of towels in a linen closet and placed the towels under Julie's forearms and the quilt between his knees and the bottom of the stool.

"That's about all I can do for you, Feet. Maybe it's the bottom of the ninth for both of us," I said.

The front wheels of the truck shimmied on the cement as I wound up the transmission on Highway 90 southeast of town. It had stopped raining, the oaks and palm trees by the road's edge were coated with mist, and the moon was rising in the east like a pale white and mottled-blue wafer trailing streamers of cloud torn loose from the Gulf's horizon.

"I think I'm beyond all my parameters now, Dave," Rosie said.

"What would you do differently? I'd like for you to tell me that, Rosie."

"I believe we should have Balboni picked up-suspicion for involvement in a kidnapping."

"And my daughter would be dead as soon as Doucet heard about it. Don't tell me that's not true, either."

"I'm not sure you're in control anymore, Dave. That remark about the bottom of the ninth-"

"What about it?"

"You're thinking about killing Doucet, aren't you?"

"I can put you down at the four-corners up there. Is that what you want?"

"Do you think you're the only person who cares about your daughter? Do you think I want to do anything that would put her in worse jeopardy than she's already in?"

"The army taught me what a free-fire zone is, Rosie. It's a place where the winners make up the rules after the battle's over. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there."

"You're wrong about all this, Dave. What we don't do is let the other side make us be like them."

Ahead I could see the lighted, tree-shadowed white stucco walls of a twenty-four-hour filling station that had been there since the 1930s. I eased my foot off the gas pedal and looked across the seat at Rosie.

"Go on," she said. "I won't say anything else."

We drove through Jeanerette and Franklin into the bottom of the Atchafalaya Basin, where Louisiana's wetlands bled into the Gulf of Mexico, not far from where this story actually began with a racial lynching, in the year 1957. Rosie had fallen asleep against the door. At Bayou Vista I found the dirt road that led south to the sawgrass and Atchafalaya Bay. The fields looked like lakes of pewter under the moon, the sugarcane pressed flat like straw into the water. Wood farmhouses and barns were cracked sideways on their foundations, as though a gigantic thumb had squeezed down on their roofs, and along one stretch of road the telephone poles had been snapped off even with the ground for a half mile and flung like sticks into distant trees.

Then the road entered a corridor of oaks, and through the trunks I saw four white horses galloping in circles in a mist-streaked pasture, spooking against the barbed-wire fences, mud flying from their hooves, their nostrils dilated, their eyes bright with fear against a backdrop of dry lightning, their muscles rippling under their skin like silvery water sliding over stone. Then I was sure I saw a figure by the side of the road, the palmetto shadows waving behind him, his steel-gray tunic buttoned at his throat, a floppy campaign hat pulled over his eyes.

I hit my bright lights, and for just a moment I saw his elongated milk-white face as though a flashbulb had exploded in front of it. "What are you doing here?" I said.

"Don't use those whom you love to justify a dishonorable cause."

"That's rhetoric."

"You gave the same counsel to the Sykes boy."

"It was you who told me to do it under a black flag. Remember? We blow up their shit big time, general."

"Then you will do it on your own, suh, and without me."

The truck's front springs bounced in a chuckhole and splashed a sheet of dirty water across the window; then I was beyond the pasture and the horses that wheeled and raced in the moonlight, traveling deep into the tip of the wetlands, with flooded woods on each side of me, blue herons lifting on extended wings out of the canals, the moist air whipped with the smell of salt and natural gas from the oil platforms out in the swamp.

The road bent out of the trees, and I saw the long expanses of sawgrass and mudflats that spread out into the bay, and the network of channels that had been cut by the oil companies and that were slowly poisoning the marshes with salt water. Rosie was awake now, rubbing her eyes with one knuckle, her face stiff with fatigue.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep," she said.

"It's been a long day."

"Where's the camp?"

"There's some shacks down by the flats, but they look deserted."

I pulled the truck to the side of the road and cut the lights. The tide was out, and the bay looked flat and gray and seabirds were pecking shellfish out of the wet sand in the moonlight. Then a wind gusted out of the south and bent a stand of willow trees that stood on a small knoll between the marsh and the bay.

"Dave, there's a light back in those trees," Rosie said.

Then I saw it, too, at the end of a two-lane sandy track that wound through the willows and over the knoll.

"All right, let's do it," I said, and pushed down on the door handle.

"Dave, before we go in there, I want you to hear something. If we find the wrong thing, if Alafair's not all right, it's not because of anything you did. It's important for you to accept that now. If I had been in your place, I'd have done everything the same way you have."

I squeezed her hand.

"A cop couldn't have a better partner than Rosie Gomez," I said.

We got out of the truck and left the doors open to avoid making any unnecessary sound, and walked up the sandy track toward the trees. I could hear gulls cawing and wheeling overhead and the solitary scream of a nutria deep in the marsh. Humps of garbage stood by the sides of the track, and then I realized that it was medical waste-bandages, hypodermic vials, congealed bags of gelatin, sheets that were stiff with dried fluids.