James Burke - Crusader's Cross

I could have stayed on that stretch of water the rest of my life.

But a storm broke in the early afternoon, and we headed back for land, eating fried-oyster po'boys, our skin stiff with salt and sunburn, a good thirty pounds of gutted fish in the ice chest.

The problems of the workweek had completely disappeared from my mind. We winched the boat up on the trailer and washed it down, then started to clean up the cabin. The rain was hitting hard on the tin roof now, and the gum trees and saw-grass in the marsh were turning gray inside the mist. Without explanation, Clete seemed to be growing agitated, faintly irritable, looking at his watch as though he were late for an appointment.

"Give me the keys and I'll gas up and buy some groceries to replace what we used," he said.

"We can buy gas on the way out," I said.

"I know that. But I want to restock my canned goods. That's why I just said I wanted to buy groceries," he replied.

Clete's duration of abstinence from booze was always short-lived. After a maximum of forty-eight hours, a physiological change would take place in him. He would perspire and constantly clear his throat, as though his mouth had turned to cotton, then light up a cigarette and take a deep hit on it, holding it inside, just as if he were toking on a joint. In a short while he would be back on the dirty boogie, tossing back Beam with the happy abandon of a hog rolling in slop.

But who was I to be the expert on somebody else's alcoholic chemistry? I tossed him the truck keys and watched through the back window as he drove down the road through the sawgrass and sheets of rain, the northern sky forked with lightning.

He should have been gone no longer than a half hour. I finished washing the dishes and making our beds, but still no Clete. I tried his cell phone and got no answer. I lay down on top of one of the bunks and by the light of a Coleman lantern read a fine novel titled The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. The wind outside made a humming sound in the sawgrass, and when I glanced through the window I could see whitecaps on the bay, like tiny bird wings, all the way out to the horizon.

Where was Clete?

I fell asleep briefly and had a troubling dream that later I couldn't remember. When I woke I heard my truck coming up the shell road, the boat trailer bouncing through the depressions. I sat on the side of the bunk and rubbed the sleep out on my face, resolving not to be angry or impatient with Cletus. The side window of the cabin had fogged in the rain, and I wiped it clean and looked out at the parking spot by the boat ramp. Clete had somebody with him and they were both drunk.

I opened the door onto the small gallery and watched them gather up two bags of groceries and a case of beer and head through the rain. The man with Clete was dressed western – in tight jeans, cowboy boots, chrome belt buckle the size of a car tag, a snap-button shirt that glittered like tin, and a short-brim Stetson tilted on the side of his head. His teeth were long, his face as lined as a tobacco leaf.

"Hey, Streak, look who I ran into – Bob Cobb. Remember Stomp-ass Bad Texas Bob?" Clete said.

They clomped inside the cabin, shaking off the rain, blowing out their breath, sorting out the beer and snacks on the kitchen table. Bad Texas Bob sat down in a chair, removed his hat, and wiped the water out of his hair onto the floor. "You guys got any chippies down here?" he said.

"Not a good question, Bob," Clete said.

"I was pulling Dave's joint," Bob said. "How's it danglin', Streak?"

"We're just about to head out," I said, giving Clete a look.

Bob's face wrinkled with hundreds of little lines when he grinned, but his eyes contained a steady, forced brightness, the kind you see in people who claim to be born again or wish to sell you something. I had not shaken hands with him, although I wasn't sure why not. In fact, I had stepped backward, toward my rucksack, which lay against the wall, the flap open.

"I didn't know you were a fisherman," I said.

"It beats spending your days at the OTB parlor," he replied. He bent over and began slipping off his boots. "Y'all got a towel? I'm soaked to my socks."

His back was to us as he worked the sock off his right foot with his fingers. I could see the whiteness of his ankle, the hair along the bone, the dark yellow, shell-like thickness of his toenails. But more than anything else I could see the liquid glimmer in the corner of his eye.

"Sorry about this, boys," he said.

But even before Bad Texas Bob spoke or turned toward us, I was reaching down into the pouch of my rucksack.

"What the hell you doing, Bob?" Clete said, lowering a can of beer he was about to drink from.

Bob had pulled a blue-black.25 auto from a Velcro ankle holster. But Clete kicked the table against him, knocking off his aim, and his first shot went wild and broke out the window behind me.

I pointed my.45 in front of me with both hands, pulling back the hammer to full cock. When I fired, the room roared with sound and a hollow-point round cored through the top of Bob's left shoulder. He should have gone down, but he didn't, perhaps because he was standing up against the wall now, shooting wildly, one palm held up in front of his face, as though it could protect him from the impact of a.45 fired at close range.

I think it was my second or third round that punched through his hand and sheared off three of his fingers and part of his palm, but I cannot be sure. My ears were ringing, my heart pounding with fear, my wrists bucking upwards with the recoil of my weapon. Then I saw Bad Texas Bob's face come apart, jaw and teeth and brain matter dissolving like wax held too close to a flame.

Bob crashed across the table and rolled dead-up in the center of the floor, while Clete stared at him, openmouthed, his beer splattered on his pants leg.

I kicked open the front door and walked outside, my weapon hanging from my hand, the rain driving into my eyes. I could smell ozone and fish spawn and the salty odor of dead animals in the marsh, but I could hear no sound, as though both earth and sky had been struck dumb. Clete was shaking me, lifting my weapon from my hand, saying words that were lost in the wind. The marsh was flat and long and green in the mist, and it made me think of elephant grass in a distant country, denting and swirling under helicopters that were painted with shark's teeth and flown by boys who only last season had played American Legion baseball.

I was on the desk a week while Internal Affairs investigated the shooting death of Robert Cobb. During that time my colleagues stopped by to shake hands and chat,, perhaps about baseball or fishing, or they'd inquire about Alafair and her life in Portland, then they'd go away.

The same was true at Victor's Cafeteria and at the Winn-Dixie store up the street, the golf course where I sometimes bought a bucket of balls and hacked them into trees, and at my church down the bayou in Jeanerette. People went out of their way to show both respect and goodwill toward me. They shook hands and patted me on the shoulder or back, as they would do to a family member of the deceased at a funeral.

But if you have ever been seriously ill or have received life-threatening injuries in a war, you know what I am about to say is true. People may be kind to you, but they also fear you because you remind them of their own mortality. The insularity they seem to create around themselves is not in your imagination. We have an atavistic sense about death, and we can smell it on others as surely as a carrion bird can.

The same applies to those who shed blood on our behalf. We collectively absolve them and, if they wear uniforms, we may even give them medals, because, after all, they took human life while defending us, didn't they? But we do not, under any circumstances, want to know the details of what they did or how they did it; nor do we want to know about the images that will come aborning forever in their dreams.