In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 47

But I knew better. I would sound like a traveling junkyard before I ever made the gallery, and if Alafair was still alive, in all probability he would be holding a pistol at her head.

"We have to wait until it's light or until he comes out," I whispered to Rosie.

We knelt down in the trees, in the damp air, in the layered mat of black and yellow willow leaves, in the mosquitoes that rose in clouds from around our knees and perched on our faces and the backs of our hands and necks. I saw him get up once, walk to a shelf, then return to the table and read a magazine while he ate soda crackers out of a box. My thighs burned and a band of pain that I couldn't relieve began to spread slowly across my back. Rosie sat with her rump resting on her heels, wiping the mosquitoes off her forearms, her pink skirt hiked up on her thighs, her .357 propped in the fork of a tree. Her neck was s.h.i.+ny with sweat.

Then at shortly after four I could hear mullet jumping in the water, a 'gator flop his tail back in the marsh, a solitary mockingbird singing on the far side of the clearing. The air changed; a cool breeze lifted off the bay and blew the smell of fish and gra.s.s shrimp across the flats. Then a pale glow, like cobalt, like the watery green cast of summer light right before a rain, spread under the rim of banked clouds on the eastern horizon, and in minutes I could see the black shapes of jetties extending far out into the bay, small waves white-capping with the incoming tide, the rigging of a distant shrimp boat dropping below a swell.

Then Murphy Doucet wrote the rest of the script for us. He turned down the Coleman lantern, stretched his back, picked up something from the table, went out the front door, and walked behind our line of vision on the far side of the cabin toward the outhouse.

We moved out of the trees into the clearing, stepping over and under the network of can-rigged fishline, then divided in two directions at the corner of the gallery. I could smell a fecund salty odor like dead rats and stagnant water from under the cabin.

The rear windows were boarded with slats from packing boxes and I couldn't see inside or hear any movement. Atthe back of the cabin I paused, held the shotgun flat against my chest, and looked around the comer. Murphy Doucet was almost to the door of the outhouse, a pair of untied hunting boots flopping on his feet, a silvery object glinting in his right hand. Beyond the outhouse, by the marsh's edge, a blue-tick dog was tied to a post surrounded by a ring of feces.

I stepped out from the lee of the cabin, threw the stock of the shotgun to my shoulder, sighted between Doucet's neck and shoulder blades, and felt the words already rising in my throat, like bubbles out of a boiling pot, Surprise time, motherf.u.c.ker! Throw it away! Do it now! when he heard Rosie trip across a fishline that was tied to a cow bell on the gallery.

He looked once over his shoulder in her direction, then leaped behind the outhouse and ran toward the marsh on a long green strip of dry ground covered with b.u.t.tercups. But five yards before he would have splashed into the willows and dead cypress and perhaps out of our field of fire, his untied boots sank into a pile of rotting medical waste that was matted with the scales of morning-glory vines. A wooden crutch that looked hand-hewn, with a single shaft that fitted into the armrest, sprang from under his boot and hung between his legs like a stick in bicycle spokes.

He turned around helplessly toward Rosie, falling backward off balance now, his blue eyes jittering frantically, his right arm extended toward her, as though it were not too late for her to recognize that his hand held a can of dog food rather than a weapon, just as she let off the first round of her .357 and caught him right in the sternum.

But it didn't stop there. She continued to fire with both hands gripped on the pistol, each soft-nosed slug knocking him backward with the force of a jackhammer, his s.h.i.+rt exploding with scarlet flowers on his bony chest, until the last round in the cylinder hit him in the rib cage and virtually eviscerated him on the water's edge. Then he simply satdown on top of his crumpled legs as though all the bone in his body had been surgically removed.

When she lowered the weapon toward the ground, her cheeks looked like they contained tiny red coals, and her eyes were frozen wide, as though she were staring into a howling storm, one that was filled with invisible forces and grinding winds only she could hear.

But I didn't have time to worry about the line that Rosie had crossed and the grief and knowledge that dark moment would bring with it.

Behind me I heard wood slats breaking loose from the back of the cabin, then I saw metal chair legs crash through the window, and Alafair climbing over the windowsill, her rump hanging in midair, her pink tennis shoes swinging above the damp earth.

I ran to her, grabbed her around the waist, and held her tightly against me. She buried her head under my chin and clamped her legs on my side like a frog, and I could feel the hard resilience of her muscles, the heat in her hands, the spastic breathing in her throat as though she had just burst from deep water into warm currents of salt air and a sunlit day loud with the sound of seabirds.

"Did he hurt you, Squanto?" I said, my heart dropping with my own question.

"I told him he'd better not. I told him what you'd do. I told him you'd rip his nuts out. I told him-"

"Where'd you get this language, Alf?"

A shudder went through her body, as though she had just removed her hand from a hot object, then her eyes squeezed shut and she began to cry.

"It's all right, Baby Squanto. We're going back home now," I said.

I carried her on my hip back toward the truck, her arms around my neck, her face wet against my s.h.i.+rt.

I heard Rosie walking in the leaves behind me. She dumped the spent bra.s.s from the cylinder of her .357 intoher palm, looked at them woodenly, then threw them tinkling into the trees.

"Get out of it, Rosie. That guy dealt the play a long time ago."

"I couldn't stop. Why didn't I stop shooting? It was over and I kept shooting."

"Because your mind shuts down in moments like that."

"No, he paid for something that happened to me a long time ago, didn't he?"

"Let the Freudians play with that stuff. They seldom spend time on the firing line. It'll pa.s.s. Believe me, it always does."

"Not hitting a man four times after he was going down. A man armed with a can of dog food."

I looked at the spreading glow out on the bay and the gulls streaking over the tide's edge.

"He had a piece on him, Rosie. You just don't remember it right now," I said, and handed Alafair to her.

I went back into the trees, found my raincoat, and carried it over my arm to the place where Murphy Doucet sat slumped among the b.u.t.tercups, his torn side draining into the water. I took Lou Girard's .32 revolver from my raincoat pocket, wiped the worn bluing and the taped wooden grips on my handkerchief, fitted it into Doucet's hand, and closed his stiffened fingers around the trigger guard.

On his forearm was a set of teethmarks that looked like they had been put there by a child.

Next time out don't mess with Alafair Rob.i.+.c.heaux or the Confederate army, Murph, I thought.

Then I picked up the crutch that had caught between his legs. The wood was old, weathered gray, the shaft shaved and beveled by a knife, the armrest tied with strips of rotted flannel.

The sun broke through the clouds overhead, and under the marsh's green canopy I could see hammered gold leaf hanging in the columns of spinning light, and gray shapes likethose of long-dead sentinels, and like a man who has finally learned not to think reasonably in an unreasonable world, I offered the crutch at the air, at the shapes in the trees and at the sound of creatures moving through the water, saying, "Don't you want to take this with you, sir?" But if he answered, I did not hear it.

EPILOGUE.

I'd like to tell you that the department and the local prosecutor's office finally made their case against Julie Balboni, that we cleaned our own house and sent him up the road to Angola in waist and leg chains for a twenty- or thirty-year jolt. But that's not what happened. How could it? In many ways Julie was us, just as his father had been when he provided the town its gambling machines and its rows of cribs on Railroad and Hopkins avenues. After Julie had left town on his own to become a major figure in the New Orleans mob, we had welcomed him back, winking our eyes at his presence and pretending he was not what or who he was.

I believe Julie and his father possessed a knowledge about us that we did not possess about ourselves. They knew we were for sale.

Julie finally went down, but in a way that no one expected-in a beef with the IRS. No, that's not quite right, either. That ubiquitous federal agency, the bane of the mob, was only a minor footnote in Julie's denouement. The seed of Julie's undoing was Julie. And I guess Julie in his grandiosity would not have had it any other way.

He should have done easy time, a three-year waltz on a federal honor farm in Florida, with no fences or gunbulls, with two-man rooms rather than cells, tennis courts, and weekend furloughs. But while in federal custody in New Orleans he spit in a bailiff's face, tore the lavatory out of hiscell wall, and told an informant planted in his cell that he was putting a hit out on Cholo Manelli, who he believed had turned over his books to the IRS (which I heard later was true).

So they s.h.i.+pped Baby Feet up to a maximum-security unit at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a place that in the wintertime makes you believe that the earth has been poisoned with Agent Orange and the subzero winds blow from four directions simultaneously.

Most people are not aware of who comprises the population of a maximum-security lockup. They are usually not men like Baby Feet, who was intelligent and fairly sane for a sociopath. Instead, they are usually psychotic meltdowns, although they are not cla.s.sified as such, otherwise they would be sent to mental inst.i.tutions from which they would probably be released in a relatively short time. Perhaps they have the intelligence levels of battery-charged cabbages, housed in six-and-one-half-foot bodies that glow with rut. Often they're momma's boys who wear horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and comb their hair out on their frail shoulders like girls, murder whole families, and can never offer more in the way of explanation than a bemused and youthful smile.

But none was a match for Julie. He was a made guy, connected both on the inside and outside, a blockhouse behemoth whose whirling feet could make men bleed from every orifice in their bodies. He took over the dope trade, broke heads and groins in the shower, paid to have a rival shanked in the yard and a snitch drowned in a toilet bowl.

He also became a celebrity wolf among the punk population. They ironed his clothes, shampooed his hair, manicured his nails, and asked him in advance what kind of wigs and women's underthings they should wear when they came to his bunk. He encouraged jealousies among them and watched as an amused spectator while they schemed and fought among themselves for his affections and the reefer, pills, and prune-o he could provide to his favorites.

Perhaps he even found the adoration and submission that had always eluded him from the time he used to visit Mabel White's mulatto brothel in Crowley until he had Cherry LeBlanc murdered.

At least the psychologist at Fort Leavenworth who told me this story thought so. He said Julie actually seemed happy his first and final spring on the yard, hitting flyb.a.l.l.s to his boys in the outfield, ripping the bat from deep in the box with the power and grace of a DiMaggio, the fine black hair on his shoulders glazed with sweat, his black silk shorts hanging on his hips with the confident male abandon of both a successful athlete and lover, snapping his wrists as he connected with the ball, lifting it higher into the blue sky than anyone at Leavenworth had ever done before, while all around him other cons touched themselves and nodded with approval.

Maybe he was still thinking about these things on the Sunday evening he came in from the diamond, showered, and went to the empty cell of his current lover to take a nap under a small rubber-bladed fan with the sheet over his head. Maybe in his dreams he was once again a movie producer on the edge of immense success, a small-town boy whose story would be recreated by biographers and become the stuff of legends in Hollywood, a beneficent but feared mogul in sungla.s.ses and a two-thousand-dollar white tropical suit who strolled with elegance and grace through the bougainvillea and palm trees and the clink of champagne gla.s.ses at Beverly Hills lawn parties.

Or maybe, for just a moment, when a pain sharper than any he had ever thought possible entered his consciousness like a red shard of gla.s.s, he saw the face of his father contorted like a fist as the father held him at gunpoint and whipped the nozzle end of a garden hose across Julie's s.h.i.+vering back.

The Molotov c.o.c.ktail thrown by a compet.i.tor for Julie's affections burst on the stone wall above the bunk where Juliewas sleeping and covered his entire body with burning paraffin and gasoline. He erupted from the bunk, flailing at the air, the sheet dissolving in black holes against his skin. He ran blindly through the open cell door, wiping at his eyes and mouth, his disintegrating shape an enormous cone of flame now, and with one long bellowing cry he sprang over the rail of the tier and plunged like a meteor three stories to the cement floor below.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TWINKY HEBERT LEMOYNE?.

Nothing. Not externally. He's still out there, a member of a generation whose metamorphosis never quite takes place.

Sometimes I see his picture on the business page of the Lafayette newspaper. You can count on him to be at fundraiser kick-off breakfasts for whatever charity is in fas.h.i.+on with the business community. In all probability he's even sincere. Once or twice I've run into him at a crab boil or fish fry in New Iberia. He doesn't do well, however, in a personal encounter with the past. His manners are of course gentlemanly, his pink skin and egg-shaped head and crinkling seersucker suit images that you a.s.sociate with a thoughtful and genteel southern barrister, but in the steady and trained avoidance that his eyes perform when you look into his face, you see another man, one whose sense of self-worth was so base that he would partic.i.p.ate in a lynching because he had been made a cuckold by one of his own black employees.

No, that's not quite fair to him.

Perhaps, just like Julie Balboni, Twinky Hebert is us. He loathed his past so much that he could never acknowledge it, never expiate his sin, and never forgive himself, either. So, like Proteus rising from the sea and forever reshaping his form, Twinky Hebert Lemoyne made a contract of deceit with himself and consequently doomed himself to relive his past every day of his life.

At the crab boil in the park on Bayou Teche he inadvertently sat down at a wooden table under the pavilion notthree feet away from me, Bootsie, and Alafair. He had just started to crack the claws on a crab when he realized who sat across from him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, his mouth hanging open.

"I live in New Iberia. I was invited to attend."

"Are you trying to hara.s.s me?"

"I closed the file on the summer of 1957, Mr. Lemoyne. Why don't you?"

There was a painful light, like a burning match, deep in his eyes. He tried to break open a crab claw with a pair of nutcrackers, then his hand slipped and sprayed juice on his s.h.i.+rt front.

"Tell a minister about it, tell a cop, get on a plane and tell somebody you never saw before," I said. "Just get rid of it once and for all and lose the Rotary Club doodah."

But he was already walking rapidly toward the men's room, scrubbing at his palms with a paper towel, his change rattling in his pants' pockets, twisting his neck from side to side as though his tie and stiff collar were a rope against his skin.

WE TOOK OUR VACATION THAT YEAR IN CALIFORNIA AND stayed with Elrod in his ranch home built on stilts high up on a cliff in Topanga Canyon, overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean that was covered each morning with a thick bluish-white mist, inside which you could hear the waves cras.h.i.+ng like avalanches into the beach.

For two weeks Alafair acted in a picture out at Tri-Star with Mikey Goldman and Elrod, and in the evenings we ate cherrystone clams at Gladstone's on the beach and took rides in Mikey Goldman's pontoon plane out to Catalina Island. As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific's watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trcilises dripping with pa.s.sion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun's afterglow.

Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

I thought in the morning mists that rolled up the canyon I might once again see the n.o.ble and chivalric John Bell Hood. Just a glimpse, perhaps, a doff of his hat, the kindness of his smile, the beleaguered affection that always seemed to linger in his face. Then as the days pa.s.sed and I began to let go of all the violent events of that summer, I had to accept the fact that the general, as Bootsie had said, was indeed only a hopeful figment of my fantasies, a metaphorical and mythic figure probably created as much by the pen of Thomas Malory or Walter Scott as the LSD someone had put in my drink out at Spanish Lake.

Then two nights before we returned home, Alafair was sitting on the coral wall that rimmed Elrod's terrace, flipping the pages in one of the library books Bootsie had checked out on the War Between the States.

"What you doing in here, Dave?" she said.

"In what? What are you talking about, little guy?"

She continued to stare down at a page opened in her lap.

"You're in the picture. With that old man Poteet and I saw in the corn patch. The one with B.O.," she said, and turned the book around so I could look at it.

In the photograph, posed in the stiff att.i.tudes of nineteenth-century photography, were the general and seven of his aides and enlisted men.

"Standing in the back. The one without a gun. That's you, Dave," she said. Then she stared up at me with a confused question mark in the middle of her face. "Ain't it?"

"Don't say 'ain't,' little guy."

"What are you doing in the picture?"

"That's not me, Alf. Those are Texas soldiers who fought alongside John Bell Hood. I bet they were a pretty good bunch," I said, and rubbed the top of her head.

"How do you know they're from Texas? It doesn't say that here."

"It's just a guess."

She looked at the photograph again and back at me, and her face became more confused.

"Let's get Elrod and Bootsie and go down to the beach for some ice cream," I said.

I slipped the book from her hand and closed it, picked her up on my hip, and walked through the canopy of purple trumpet vine toward the patio behind the house, where Bootsie and Elrod were clearing off the dishes from supper. Down the canyon, smoke from meat fires drifted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I squinted my eyes in the sun's setting, I could almost pretend that Spanish soldiers in silver chest armor and bladed helmets or a long-dead race of hunters were encamped on those hillsides. Or maybe even old compatriots in b.u.t.ternut brown wending their way in and out of history-gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours. H

end.