James Burke - The Neon Rain

He worked his hand off the bed onto my chest. Then his fingers began to trace lines against my skin, but he was so weak that the frail pattern he made was like a cobweb spread across my breastbone. I nodded as though I understood, and placed his hand back on the bed. The energy and effort in his eyes were now used up, and he looked at the ceiling with the expression of those who are suddenly forced to deal in a very different and dark dimension.

"I've bent your ear too long. You sack out now. I'll be back a little later," I said.

But he was already disconnected from our conversation. I left the room quietly, with the sense of both guilt and relief that we feel when we're allowed to walk away from the bedside of someone who reminds us of our mortality.

The two uniformed cops on the door nodded to me. At the end of the corridor I saw Captain Guidry walking toward me with a potted geranium wrapped in green and silver foil. The implants in his scalp had grown, and his head looked as though a badly made wig had been grafted to it.

"I'm going to leave this at the nurse's station. How's he doing?" he asked.

"He's a tough little brother."

"You look like hell. Go home and get some sleep."

"I slept all right on the couch last night. I just need a shower and a change of clothes."

Captain Guidry's eyes stared into mine. "What did he tell you in there?"

"Nothing."

"Don't jerk me around, Dave."

"He didn't say anything."

"I've worked with you a long time. You don't hide things well."

"Ask the nurse. He can't talk. I'm not sure he even knows how he got here."

"Listen, I think you're about to get out of all this trouble you've been in. Don't blow it now with an obstruction charge."

"Do I get my badge back?"

His lips pinched together, and he looked down the corridor.

"You shouldn't have hit Baxter," he said.

"So nothing is changed."

"We do it one step at a time. Have some patience, will you? Trust people a little bit."

"I'm out on ten thousand dollars' bond. I'm going to have to go to trial unless I can negotiate a misdemeanor plea."

"You're a reader. You know about Saint John of the Cross and the long night of the soul. So this is your long night. Why make it longer?"

At the houseboat I took my Remington twelve-gauge pump out of its sheepskin-lined case. The blueing shone with the thin layer of oil that I kept on it. My father had given me the twelve-gauge when I went away to college in Lafayette, and I had knocked down mallards and geese with it from Cypremont Point to Whiskey Bay almost every year since. I rubbed my fingers along the polished, inlaid stock, then wrapped the barrel with a rag and locked it in the machinist's vise that I kept anchored to one end of the drainboard. I made a pencil mark three inches in front of the pump, then sawed through the barrel with a hacksaw. The end of the barrel clanged to the floor. I picked it up and started to drop it in the garbage but, instead, ran a piece of Christmas ribbon through it and hung it on the wall over what was left of my historical jazz collection.

I sat at the kitchen table and rubbed the sawed edges of the gun's muzzle smooth with emery paper and removed the sportsman's plug from the magazine so that it would now hold five shells instead of three. I went to the closet and took out my duffel bag of decoys, my army field jacket, and the old army-surplus bandolier I used when the hunting weather was too warm for a coat. I emptied everything out on the table and stood all my shells up in an erect row like toy soldiers. Then I selected out the street cop's buffet-deer slugs and double-ought buckshot-slipped them one at a time into the magazine with my thumb until the spring came tight, slid the breech shut, and clicked on the safety.

In my mind were images that I didn't want to recognize. I looked out the window and saw a man turning a raw steak on a barbecue fire, saw two kids trying to burn each other out in a pitch-and-catch game, their faces sweaty and narrow, saw a waxed red car parked next to a sand dune under the murderous white sun.

Annie ate lunch every day in a delicatessen by Canal and Exchange, not far from where she worked at the social welfare agency. I sat in a wooden chair across the street and read the Times-Picayune and waited for her. Just after noon I saw her coming down the sidewalk in the lunchtime crowd, wearing sunglasses, her wide straw hat, and a pale yellow dress. She could live in New Orleans the rest of her life, I thought, but she would always be from Kansas. She had the tan of a farm girl, the kind that never seemed to change tone, and even though her legs were beautiful and her hips a genuine pleasure to look at, she walked in high heels as though she were on board a rocking ship.

I watched her sit by herself at a table, her back to me, remove her sunglasses, and give her order to the waiter while she moved both her hands in the air. He looked perplexed, and I could almost hear her ordering something that wasn't on the menu, which was her habit, or telling him about some "weirdness" that she had seen on the street.

Then I heard the metal-rimmed wheels of a huge handcart on the pavement and an elderly black man's voice crying out, "I got melons, I got 'loupes, I got plums, I got sweet red strawberries." His cart was loaded with tiers of fruit and also with boxes of pralines, roses wrapped in green tissue paper, and small bottles of grape juice shoved down in an ice bucket.

"How you doing, Cappie?" I said.

"Good afternoon, Lieutenant," he said, and grinned. His head was bald and brown, and he wore a gray apron. He had grown up in Laplace, next door to Louis Armstrong's family, but he had sold produce in the Quarter for years and was so old that neither he nor anyone else knew his age.

"Is your wife still in the hospital?" I asked.

"No suh, she fit and fine and out do'-popping again."

"I beg your pardon."

"She do'-popping. She pop in dis do', she pop out dat do'.You want your grape drink today?"

"No, I tell you what instead. You see that pretty lady in the yellow dress eating across the street?"

"Yes suh, I think so."

"Give her some of these roses and a box of pralines. Here, you keep the change, Cappie."

"What you want me to tell her?"

"Just tell her it's from a good-looking Cajun fellow," I said, and winked at him.

I looked once more in Annie's direction. Then I turned and walked back to where I had left my rented car parked on Decatur Street.

The beach outside of Biloxi was white and hot-looking in the afternoon sun. The palm trees along the boulevard beat in the wind, and the green surface of the Gulf was streaked with light and filled with dark patches of blue, like floating ink. A squall was blowing up in the south, and waves were already breaking against the ends of the jetties, the foam leaping high into the air before you heard the sound of the wave, and in the groundswell I could see the flicker of bait fish and the dark, triangular outlines of stingrays, almost like oil slicks, that had been pushed in toward shore by the approaching storm.

I found the Gulf Shores restaurant, but the man who ran the valet parking service wasn't there. I walked a short way down the beach, bought a paper plate of fried catfish and hush puppies from a food stand, and sat on a wooden bench under a palm tree and ate it. Then I read a paperback copy of A Passage to India , watched some South American teenagers play soccer in the sand, and finally walked out on the jetty and skipped oyster shells across the water's surface. The wind was stiffer now, with a sandy bite in it, and as the sun seemed to descend into an enormous flame across the western sky, I could see thin white streaks of lightning in the row of black clouds that hovered low on the watery horizon in the south. When the sun's afterglow began to shrink from the sky, and the neon lights of the amusement rides and beer joints along the beach began to come on, I walked back to my car and drove to the restaurant.