In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Chapter 10

It was a strange week, for me as well as the town. Kelly's death brought journalists from all over the country to New Iberia. They filled all the motels, rented every available automobile in Lafayette, and dwarfed in both numbers and technical sophistication our small area news services.

Many of them were simply trying to do their jobs. But another kind came among us, too, those who have a voyeuristic glint in their eyes, whose real motivations and potential for callousness are unknown even to themselves.

I got an unlisted phone number for the house.

I began to be bothered by an odor, both in my sleep and during the late afternoon when the sun baked down on the collapsed barn at the back of our property. I noticed it the second day after Kelly's death, the day that Elrod escorted her body back to Kentucky for the burial. It smelled like dead rats. I scattered a bag of lime among the weeds and rotted boards and the smell went away. Then the next afternoon it was back, stronger than before, as invasive as a stranger's soiled palm held to your face.

I put our bedroom fan in the side window so it would draw air from the front of the house, but I would dream of turkey buzzards circling over a corrugated rice field, of sandflecked winds blowing across the formless and decomposing shape of a large animal, of a woman's hair and fingernails wedging against the sides of a metal box.

On the seventh morning I woke early, walked past the duck pond in the soft blue light, soaked the pile of boards and strips of rusted tin with gasoline, and set it afire. The flames snapped upward in an enormous red-black handkerchief, and a cottonmouth moccasin, with a body as thick as my wrist, slithered out of the boards into the weeds, the hindquarters of an undigested rat protruding from its mouth.

The shooter left nothing behind, no ejected brass, no recoverable prints from the tree trunk where he had fired. The pocket knife Rosie had found on the levee turned out to be free of prints. Almost all of our work had proved worthless. We had no suspects; our theories about motivation were as potentially myriad as the time we were willing to invest in thinking about them. But one heart-sinking and unalterable conclusion remained in front of my eyes all day long, in my conversations with Rosie, the sheriff, and even the deputies who went out of their way to say good morning through my office door-Kelly Drummond was dead, and she was dead because she had been mistaken for me.

I didn't even see Mikey Goldman walk into my office. I looked up and he was standing there, flexing the balls of his feet, his protruding, pale eyes roving about the room, a piece of cartilage working in his jaw like an angry dime.

"Can I sit down?" he said.

"Go ahead."

"How you doing?"

"I'm fine, thanks. How are you?"

"I'm all right." His eyes went all over me, as though I were an object he was seeing for the first time.

"Can I help you with something?" I said.

"Who's the fucking guy who did this?"

"When we know that, he'll be in custody."

"In custody? How about blowing his head off instead?"

"What's up, Mr. Goldman?"

"How you handling it?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"How you handling it? I'm talking about you. I've been there, my friend. First Marine Division, Chosin Reservoir. Don't try to bullshit me."

I put down my fountain pen on the desk blotter, folded my hands, and stared at him.

"I'm afraid we're operating on two different wavelengths here," I said.

"Yeah? The guy next to you takes a round, and then maybe you start wondering if you aren't secretly glad it was him instead of you. Am I wrong?"

"What do you want?"

He rubbed the curly locks of salt-and-pepper hair on his neck and rolled his eyes around the room. The skin around his mouth was taut, his chin and jaw hooked in a peculiar martial way like a drill instructor's.

"Elrod's going to go crazy on me. I know it, I've seen him there before. He's a good kid, but he traded off some of his frontal lobes for magic mushrooms a long time ago. He likes you, he'll listen to you. Are you following me?"

"No."

"You keep him at your place, you stay out at his place, I don't care how you do it. I'm going to finish this picture."

"You're an incredible man, Mr. Goldman."

"What?" He began curling his fingers backward, as though he wanted to pull words from my chest. "You heard I got no feelings, I don't care about my actors, movie people are callous dipshits?"

"I never heard your name before you came to New Iberia. It seems to me, though, you have only one thing on your mind-getting what you want. Anyway, I'm not interested in taking care of Elrod Sykes."

"If I get my hands on the fuckhead who shot Kelly, you're going to have to wipe him off the wallpaper."

"Eventually we're going to get this guy, Mr. Goldman. But in the meantime, the vigilante histrionics don't float too well in a sheriff's department. Frankly, they're not too convincing, either."

"What?"

"Ask yourself a question: How many professional killers, and the guy who did this is a professional killer, could a rural parish like this have? Next question: Who comprises the one well-known group of professional criminals currently with us in New Iberia? Answer: Julie Balboni and his entourage of hired cretins. Next question: Who's in a movie partnership with these characters?"

He leaned back in his chair, bouncing his wrists lightly on the chair's arms, glancing about the room, his eyes mercurial, one moment almost amused, then suddenly focused on some festering inner concern.

"Mr. Goldman?" I said.

"Yeah? You got something else to say?"

"No, sir, not a thing."

"Good. That's good. You're not a bad guy. You've just got your head up your hole with your own problems. It's just human."

"I see. I'm going down the hall for a cup of coffee now," I said. "I suspect you'll be gone when I get back."

He rose to his feet and flexed a kink out of his back. He unwrapped a short length of peppermint candy and stuck it in his jaw.

"You want one?" he said.

"No, thanks."

"Don't pretend to be a Rotary man. I checked out your background before I asked you to babysit Elrod. You're as crazy as any of us. You're always just one step away from blowing up somebody's shit."

He cocked his finger, pointed it at me, and made a hollow popping sound with his mouth.

That night I dreamed that I was trying to save a woman from drowning way out on the Gulf of Mexico. We were sliding down a deep trough, the froth whipping across her blond curls and bloodless face, her eyes sealed against the cobalt sky. Our heads protruded from the water as though they had been severed and placed on a plate. Then her body turned to stone, heavier than a marble statue, and there was no way I could keep her afloat. She sank from my arms, plummeting downward into a vortex of spinning green light, down into a canyon hundreds of feet below, a gush of air bubbles rising from a pale wound in her throat.

ROSIE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR, CLUNKED HER PURSE LOUDLY on her desk, and began rummaging through the file cabinet. She had to stand on her toes to see down into the top drawer.

"You want to have lunch today?" she asked.

"What?"

"Lunch… do you want to have lunch? Come in, Earth."

"Thanks, I'll probably go home." Then as an afterthought I said, "You're welcome to join us."

"That's all right. Another time." She sat down behind her desk and began shifting papers around in a couple of file folders. But her eyes kept glancing up into my face.

"Have you got something on your mind?" I asked.

"Yeah, you."

"You must be having an uneventful day."

"I worked late last night. The dispatcher and I had a cup of coffee together. He asked me how I was getting along here, and I told him real good, no complaints. Then he asked me if I'd experienced any more smart-aleck behavior from some of the resident clowns in the department. I told him they'd been perfect gentlemen. I bet you can't guess what he said next."

"You got me."

She imitated a Cajun accent. " 'Them guys give you any mo' trouble, you just tell Dave, Miz Rosie. He done tole 'em what's gonna happen the next time they bother you.' "

"He was probably exaggerating a little bit."

"You didn't need to do that for me, Dave."

"I apologize."

"Don't be a wise-ass, either."

"Boy, you're a pistol."

"How should I take that?"

"I don't know. How about easing up?"

"Don't count on it."

She rested one small hand on top of the other. She had the same solid posture behind her desk that I remembered in the nuns at the elementary school I attended.

"You look tired," she said.

"I have bouts of insomnia."

"You want to talk about what happened out on the bayou?"

"No."

"Do you feel guilty about it?"

"What do you think I feel? I feel angry about it."

"Why?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"Do you feel angry because you couldn't control what happened? Do you think somehow you're to blame for her death?"

"What if I said 'yes to all the above'? What difference would it make? She's dead."

"I think beating up on yourself has about as much merit as masturbation."

"You're a friend, Rosie, but let it go."

I busied myself with my paperwork and did not look back up for almost a minute. When I did, her eyes were still fixed on me.

"I just got some interesting information from the Bureau about Julie Balboni," she said. She waited, then said, "Are you listening?"

"Yes."

"This year N.O.P.D. Vice has closed up a half-dozen of his dirty movie theaters and two of his escort services. His fishing fleet just went into bankruptcy, too." When I didn't respond, she continued. "That's where he laundered a lot of his drug money. He'd declare all kinds of legitimate profits to the IRS that never existed."

"That's how all the wiseguys do it, Rosie. In every city in the United States."

"Except the auditors at the IRS say he just made a big mistake. He came up with millions of dollars for this Civil War movie and he's going to have a hard time explaining where he got it."

"Don't count on it."

"The IRS nails their butts to the wall when nobody else can."

I sharpened a pencil over the wastebasket with my pocket knife.

"I have the feeling I'm boring you," she said.

"No, you're just reviving some of my earlier misgivings."

"What?"

"I think your agency wants Julie's ass in a sling. I think these murders have secondary status."

"That's what you think, is it?"

"That's the way it looks from here."

She rose from her chair, closed the office door, then stood by my desk. She wore a white silk blouse with a necklace of black wooden beads. Her fingers were hooked in front of her stomach like an opera singer's.

"Julie's been a longtime embarrassment to the feds," I continued. "He's connected to half the crime in New Orleans and so far he's never spent one day in the bag."

"When I was sixteen something happened to me that I thought I'd never get over." There was a flush of color in her throat. "Not just because of what two drunken crew leaders did to me in the back of a migrant farmworkers' bus, either. It was the way the cops treated it. In some ways that was even worse. Have I got your attention, sir?"

"You don't need to do this, Rosie."

"Like hell I don't. The next day I was sitting with my father in the waiting room outside the sheriff's office. I heard two deputies laughing about it. They not only thought it was funny, one of them said something about pepper-belly poontang. I'll never forget that moment. Not as long as I live."

I folded up my pocket knife and stared at the tops of my fingers. I brushed the pencil shavings off my fingers into the wastebasket.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"When I went to work for the Bureau, I swore I'd never see a woman treated the way I was. So I take severe exception to your remarks, Dave. I'd like to bust Julie Balboni, but that has nothing to do with the way I feel about the man who raped and murdered these women."

"Where'd this happen?"

"In a migrant camp outside of Bakersfield. It's not an unusual story. Ask any woman who's ever been on a crew bus."

"I think you're a solid cop, Rosie. I think you'll nail any perp you put in your sights."

"Then change your goddamn attitude."

"All right."

She was waiting for me to say something else, but I didn't.

Her shoulders sagged and she started back toward her desk. Then she turned around. Her eyes were wet.

"That's all you've got to say?" she asked.

"No, it's not."

"What, then?"

"I'm proud to be working with you. I think you're a standup lady."

She started to take a Kleenex out of her purse, then she snapped the purse shut again and took a breath.

"I'm going down the hall a minute," she said.

"All right."

"Are we both clear about the priority in this investigation, Dave?"

"Yeah, I think we are."

"Good. Because I don't want to have this kind of discussion again."

"Let me mention just one thing before you go. Several years ago my second wife was murdered by some drug dealers. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes."

"One way or another, the guys and the woman who killed her went down for it. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and the old anger comes back. Even though these people took a heavy fall, for a couple of them the whole trip, sometimes it still doesn't seem enough. You know the feeling I'm talking about, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Fair enough." Then I said, "You're sure you don't want to come home and have lunch with us today?"

"This isn't the day for it, Dave. Thanks, anyway," she said, and went out the door with her purse clutched under her arm, her face set as impassively as a soldier's.

Elrod Sykes called the office just after I had returned from lunch. His voice was deep, his accent more pronounced.

"You know where there're some ruins of an old plantation house south of your boat dock?" he asked.

"What about it?"

"Can you meet me there in a half hour?"

"What for?"

"I want to talk to you, that's what for."

"Talk to me now, Elrod, or come into the office."

"I get nervous down there. For some reason police uniforms always make me think of a breathalyzer machine. I don't know why that might be."

"You sound like your boat might have caught the early tide."

"Who cares? I want to show you something. Can you be there or not?"

"I don't think so."

"What the fuck is with you? I've got some information about Kelly's death. You want it or not?"

"Maybe you ought to give some thought as to how you talk to people."

"I left my etiquette in Kelly's family plot up in Kentucky. I'll meet you in thirty minutes. If you're not interested, fuck you, Mr. Robicheaux."

He hung up the phone. I had the feeling I was beginning to see the side of Elrod's personality that had earned him the attention of the tabloids.

Twenty minutes later I drove my pickup truck down a dirt lane through a canebrake to the ruins of a sugar planter's home that had been built on the bayou in the 1830s. In 1863 General Banks's federal troops had dragged the piano outside and smashed it apart in the coulee, then as an afterthought had torched the slave quarters and the second story of the planter's home. The roof and cypress timbers had collapsed inside the brick shell, the cisterns and outbuildings had decayed into humus, the smithy's forge was an orange smear in the damp earth, and vandals had knocked down most of the stone markers in the family cemetery and, looking for gold and silver coins, had pried up the flagstones in the fireplaces.

Why spend time with a rude drunk, particularly on the drunk's terms?

Because it's difficult to be hard-nosed or righteous toward a man who, for the rest of his life, will probably wake sweating in the middle of the night with a recurring nightmare or whose series of gray dawns will offer no promise of light except that first shuddering razor-edged rush that comes out of a whiskey glass.

I leaned against the fender of my truck and watched Elrod's lavender Cadillac come down the dirt lane and into the shade of the oak trees that grew in front of the ruined house. The security guard from the set, Murphy Doucet, was behind the wheel, and Elrod sat in the passenger's seat, his tanned arm balanced on the window ledge, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.

"How you doing today, Detective Robicheaux?" Doucet said.

"Fine. How are you?"

"Like they say, we all chop cotton for the white man one way or another, you know what I mean?" he said, and winked.

He rubbed the white scar that was embossed like a chicken's foot on his throat and opened a newspaper on the steering wheel. Elrod came around the side of the Cadillac in blue swimming shorts, a beige polo shirt, and brand-new Nike running shoes.

He drank from his Coca-Cola can, set it on the hood of the car, then put a breath mint in his mouth. His eyes wandered around the clearing, then focused wanly on the sunlight winking off the bayou beyond the willow trees.

"Would you like to continue our conversation?" I said.

"You think I was out of line or something?"

"What did you want to tell me, Elrod?"

"Take a walk with me out yonder in those trees and I'll show you something."

"The old cemetery?"

"That isn't it. Something you probably don't know about."

We walked through a thicket of stunted oaks and hack-berry trees, briars and dead morning-glory vines, to a small cemetery with a rusted and sagging piked iron fence around it. Pines with deep-green needles grew out of the graves. A solitary brick crypt had long ago collapsed in upon itself and become overgrown with wild roses and showers of four o'-clocks.

Elrod stood beside me, and I could smell the scent of bourbon and spearmint on his breath. He looked out into the dazzling sunlight but his eyes didn't squint. They had a peculiar look in them, what we used to call in Vietnam the thousand-yard stare.

"There," he said, "in the shade, right on the edge of those hackberry trees. You see those depressions?"

"No."

He squeezed my arm hard and pointed.

"Right where the ground slopes down to the bayou," he said, and walked ahead of me toward the rear of the property. He pointed down at the ground. "There's four of them. You stick a shovel in here and you'll bring up bone."

In a damp area, where rainwater drained off the incline into a narrow coulee, there was a series of indentations that were covered with mushrooms.

"What's the point of all this?" I said.

"They were cooking mush in an iron pot and an artillery shell got all four of them. The general put wood crosses on their graves, but they rotted away a long time ago. He was a hell of an officer, Mr. Robicheaux."

"I'll be going now," I said. "I'd like to help you, Elrod, but I think you've marked your own course."

"I've been with these guys. I know what they went through. They had courage, by God. They made soup out of their shoes and rifle balls out of melted nails and wagonwheel rims. There was no way in hell they were going to quit."

I turned and began walking back to my truck. Through the shade I could see the security guard urinating by the open door of the Cadillac. Elrod caught up with me. His hand clenched on my arm again.

"You want to write me off as a wet-brain, that's your business," he said. "You don't care about what these guys went through, that's your business, too. I didn't bring you out here for this, anyway."

"Then why am I here?"

He turned me toward him with his hand.

"Because I don't like somebody carrying my oil can," he said.

"What?"

"That's a Texas expression. It means I don't want somebody else toting my load. You've convinced yourself the guy who killed Kelly thought he had you in his sights. That's right, isn't it?"

"Maybe."

"What makes you so goddamn important?"

I continued to walk toward my truck. He caught up with me again.

"You listen to me," he said. "Before she was killed I had a blowout with Mikey. I told him the script stinks, the screenwriters he's hired couldn't get jobs writing tampon ads, he's nickel-and-dimeing the whole project to death, and I'm walking off the set unless he gets his head on straight. The greaseballs heard me."

"Which greaseballs?"

"Balboni's people. They're all over the set. They killed Kelly to keep me in line."

His facial skin high up on one cheek crinkled and seemed almost to vibrate.

"Take it easy, El."

"They made her an object lesson, Mr. Robicheaux."

I touched his arm with my hand.

"Maybe Julie's involved, maybe not," I said. "But if he is, it's not because of you. You've got to trust me on this one."

He turned his face away and pushed at one eye with the heel of his hand.

"When Julie and his kind create object lessons, they go right to the source of their problem," I said. "They don't select out innocuous people. It causes them too many problems."

I heard his breath in his throat.

"I made them keep the casket closed," he said. "I told the funeral director in Kentucky, if he let her parents see her like that, I'd be back, I'd-"

I put my arm over his shoulder and walked back through the cemetery with him.

"Let's go back to town and have something to eat," I said. "Like somebody said to me this morning, it's no good to kick ourselves around the block, is it? What do you think?"

"She's dead. I cain't see her, either. It's not right."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I see those soldiers but I cain't see her. Why's that? It doesn't make any sense."

"I'll be honest with you, partner. I think you're floating on the edge of delirium tremens. Put the cork in the jug before you get there, El. Believe me, you don't have to die to go to hell."

"You figure me for plumb down the road and around the bend, don't you? I don't blame you. I got my doubts about what I see myself."

"Maybe that's not a bad sign."

"When we were driving through that canebrake, I said to Murph, the security guy, 'Who's that standing behind Mr. Robicheaux?' Then I looked again and I knew who it was. Except I've never seen him in daylight before. When I looked again, he was gone. Which isn't the way he does things."

"I'm going to an A A meeting tonight. You want to come?"

"Yeah, why not? It cain't be worse than having dinner with Mikey and the greaseballs."

"You might be a little careful about your vocabulary when you're around those guys."

"Boy, I wonder what my grandpa would say if he saw me working with the likes of that bunch. I told you he was a Texas ranger, didn't I?"

"You surely did."

"You know what he once told me about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? He said-"

"I have to get back to the office. How about I pick you up at your place at seven-thirty?"

"Sure. Thanks for coming out, Mr. Robicheaux. I'm sorry about my bad manners on the phone. I'm not given to using profanity like that. I don't know what got into me." He picked up his soda can off the hood of his Cadillac and started to drink out of it. "It's just Coca-Cola. That's a fact."

"You'd better drink it then."

He smiled at me.

"It rots your teeth," he said, and emptied the can into the dirt.

That night I sat alone in the bait shop, a glass of iced coffee in my hand, and tried to figure the connection between Kelly's death and the pursuit of a serial killer who might also be involved with prostitution. Nothing in the investigation seemed to fit. Was the serial killer also a pimp? Why did his crimes seem to be completely contained within the state of Louisiana? If he had indeed mistaken Kelly for me, what had I discovered in the investigation that would drive him to attempt the murder of a police officer? And what was Baby Feet Balboni's stake in all this?

Equally troubling was the possibility that Kelly's death had nothing to do with our hunt for a serial killer. Maybe the rifleman in the fedora had had another motivation, one that was connected with a rat's nest of bones, strips of dried skin, rotted clothing, and a patch of kinky hair attached to a skull plate. Did someone out there believe that somehow that gaping mouth, impacted with sand, strung with green algae, could whisper the names of two killers who thought they had buried their dark deed in water thirty-five years ago?

We live today in what people elect to call the New South. But racial fear, and certainly white guilt over racial injustice, die hard. Hogman Patin, who probably feared very little in this world, had cautioned me because of my discovery of the lynched black man out in the Atchafalaya. He had also suggested that the dead man had been involved with a white woman. To Hogman, those events of years ago were still alive, still emblematic of an unforgiven and collective shame, to be spoken about as obliquely as possible, in all probability because some of the participants were still alive, too.

Maybe it was time to have another talk with Hogman, I thought.

When I drove out to his house on the bayou, the interior was dark and the white curtains in his open windows were puffing outward in the breeze. In the back I could hear the tinkling of the Milk of Magnesia bottles and the silver crosses that he had hung all over the branches of a live oak.

Where are you, Hogman? I thought. I wedged my business card in the corner of his screen door.

The moon was yellow through the trees. I could smell the unmistakable odor of chitterlings that had been burned in a pot. Out on the blacktop I heard a car engine. The headlights bounced off the tree trunks along the roadside, then the driver slowed and I thought he was about to turn into the grove of trees at the front of Hogman's property. I thought the car was probably Hogman's, and I started to walk toward the blacktop. Then the driver accelerated and his headlights swept past me.

I would have given no more notice to the driver and his vehicle, except that just as I started to turn back toward my truck and leave, he cut his lights and really gave it the gas.

If his purpose had been to conceal his license number, he was successful. But two other details stuck in my mind: the car looked new and it was dark blue, the same characteristics as the automobile that two witnesses had seen on the levee in Vermilion Parish where the asphyxiated girl had been stuffed nude into a metal barrel.

Or maybe the car had simply contained a couple of teenage neckers looking for a little nocturnal privacy. I was too tired to think about it anymore. I started my truck and headed home.

The night was clear, the constellations bursting against the black dome of sky overhead. There was no hint of rain, no sudden drop or variation in temperature to cause fog to roll off the water. But two hundred yards down from Hogman's house the road was suddenly white with mist, so thick my headlights couldn't penetrate it. At first I thought a fire was burning in a field and the wind had blown the smoke across the road. But the air smelled sweet and cool, like freshly turned earth, and was almost wet to the touch. The mist rolled in clouds off the bayou, covered the tree trunks, closed about my truck like a white glove, drifted in wisps through my windows. I don't know whether I deliberately stopped the truck or my engine killed. But for at least thirty seconds my headlights flickered on and off, my starter refused to crank, and my radio screamed with static that was like fingernails on a blackboard.

Then as suddenly as it had come, the mist evaporated from the road and the tree trunks and the bayou's placid surface as though someone had held an invisible flame to it, and the night air was again as empty and pristine as wind trapped under a glass bell.

In the morning I made do with mechanical answers in the sunlight and cleaned the terminals on my truck battery with baking soda, water, and an old toothbrush.

Hogman called the next afternoon from the movie set out on Spanish Lake.

"What you want out at my house?" he said.

"I need to talk with you about the lynched black man."

"I done already tole you what I know. That nigger went messin' in the wrong place."

"That's not enough."

"Is for me."

"You said my father helped your mother when you were in prison. So now I'm asking you to help me."

"I already have. You just ain't listen."

"Are you afraid of somebody, Sam? Maybe some white people?"

"I fear God. Why you talkin' to me like this?"

"What time will you be home today?"

"When I get there. You got your truck?"

"Yes."

"My car hit a tree last night. It ain't runnin' no mo'. Come out to the set this evenin' and give me a ride home. 'Bout eight or nine o'clock."

"We'll see you then, partner," I said, and hung up.

The sun was red and half below the horizon, the cicadas droning in the trees, when I drove down the lane through the pecan orchard to the movie set on Spanish Lake. But I soon discovered that I was not going to easily trap Hogman Patin alone. It was Mikey Goldman's birthday and the cast and crew were throwing him a party. A linen-covered buffet table was piled with catered food, a huge pink cake, and a bowl of champagne punch in the center. The tree trunks along the lake's edge were wrapped with paper bunting, and Goldman's director's chair must have had two dozen floating balloons tied to it.

It was a happy crowd. They sipped punch out of clear plastic glasses and ate boiled shrimp and thin slices of boudin off paper plates. Mikey Goldman's face seemed to almost shine in the ambiance of goodwill and affection that surrounded him.

In the crowd I saw Julie Balboni and his entourage, Elrod Sykes, the mayor of New Iberia, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, a couple of Teamster officials, a state legislator, and Twinky Hebert Lemoyne from Lafayette. In the middle of it all sat Hogman Patin on an up-ended crate, his twelve-string guitar resting on his crossed thighs. He was dressed like a nineteenth-century Negro street musician, except he also wore a white straw cowboy hat slanted across his eyes. The silver picks on his right hand rang across the strings as he sang,

Soon as day break in the mornin' I gone take the dirt road home. 'Cause these blue Monday blues Is goin' kill me sure as you're born.

"You ought to get yourself a plate."

It was Murphy Doucet, the security guard. He was talking to me but his eyes were looking at a blond girl in shorts and a halter by the punch bowl. He ate a slice of boudin off a toothpick, then slipped the toothpick into the corner of his mouth and sucked on it.

"It doesn't look like everybody's broken up about Kelly Drummond's death, does it?" I said.

"I guess they figure life goes on."

"You're in business with Mr. Lemoyne over there, Murph?"

"We own a security service together, if that's what you mean. For me it's a pretty good deal, but for him it's nothing. If there's a business around here making money, Twinky's probably got a piece of it. Lord God, that man knows how to make money."

Lemoyne sat by the lake in a canvas chair, a julep glass filled with bourbon, shaved ice, and mint leaves in his hand. He looked relaxed and cool in the breeze off the water, his rimless glasses pink with the sun's afterglow. His eyes fixed for a moment on my face, then he took a sip from his glass and watched some kids waterskiing out on the lake.

"Get something to eat, Dave. It's free. Hell, I'm going to take some home," Murphy Doucet said.

"Thanks, I've already eaten," I said, and walked over to where Hogman sat next to two local black women who had been hired as extras.

"You want a ride?" I said.

"I ain't ready yet. They's people want me to play."

"It was your idea for me to come out here, Sam."

"I'll be comin' directly. That's clear, ain't it? Mr. Goldman fixin' to cut his cake." Then he began singing,

I ax my bossman, Bossman, tell me what's right.

He whupped my left, said, Boy, now you know what's right.

I tole my bossman, Bossman, just give me my time.

He say, Damn yo' time, boy,

Boy, you time behind.

I waited another half hour as the twilight faded, the party grew louder, and someone turned on a bank of floodlamps that lit the whole area with the bright unnatural radiance of a phosphorus flare. The punch bowl was now empty and had been supplanted by washtubs filled with cracked ice and canned beer, a portable bar, and two white jacketed black bartenders who were making mint juleps and martinis as fast as they could.

"I've got to head for the barn, Hogman," I said.

"This lady axin' me somet'ing. Give me ten minutes," he said.

A waiter came by with a tray and handed Hogman and the black woman with him paper cups streaming with draft beer. Then he handed me a frosted julep glass packed with shaved ice, mint leaves, orange slices, and candied cherries.

"I didn't order this," I said.

"Gentleman over yonder say that's what you drink. Say bring it to you. It's a Dr Pepper, suh."

"Which gentleman?"

"I don't rightly remember, suh."

I took the cup off the tray and drank from it. The ice was so cold it made my throat ache.

The lake was black now, and out in the darkness, above the noise of the revelers, I could hear somebody trying to crank an outboard engine.

I finished my drink and set the empty glass on the buffet table.

"That's it for me, Sam," I said. "You coming or not?"

"This lady gonna carry me home," he said. His eyes were red from drinking. They looked out at nothing from under the brim of his straw cowboy hat.

"Hogman-" I said.

"This lady live down the road from my house. Some trashy niggers been givin' her trouble. She don't want to go home by herself. That's the way it is. I be up to yo' office tomorrow mornin'."

I tried to look into his face, but he occupied himself with twisting the tuning pegs on his guitar. I turned and walked back through the shadows to my pickup truck. When I looked back at the party through my windshield, the blond girl in shorts and a halter was putting a spoonful of cake into Mikey Goldman's mouth while everyone applauded.

It rained hard as I approached the drawbridge over the bayou south of town. I could see the bridge tender in his lighted window, the wet sheen and streaks of rust on the steel girders, the green and red running lights of a passing boat in the mist. I was only a few minutes from home. I simply had to cross the bridge and follow the dirt road down to my dock.

But that was not what I did or what happened.

A bolt of lightning exploded in a white ball by the side of the road and blew the heart of a tree trunk, black and smoking, out into my headlights. I swallowed to clear my ears, and for just a second, in the back of my throat, I thought I could taste black cherries, bruised mint leaves, and orange rind. Then I felt a spasm go through me just as if someone had scratched a kitchen match inside my skull.

The truck veered off the shoulder, across a collapsed barbed-wire cattle gate, onto the levee that dissected the marsh. I remember the wild buttercups sweeping toward me out of the headlights, the rocks and mud whipping under the fenders, then the fog rolling out of the dead cypress trees and willow islands, encircling the truck, smothering the windows. I could hear thunder crashing deep in the marsh, echoing out of the bays, like distant artillery.

I knew that I was going off the levee, but I couldn't unlock my hands from the steering wheel or move my right foot onto the brake pedal. I felt myself trembling, my insides constricting, my back teeth grinding, as though all my nerve endings had been severed and painted with iodine. Then I heard lightning pop the levee and blow a spray of muddy water across my windshield.

Get out, I thought. Knock the door handle with your elbow and jump.

But I couldn't move.

The mist was as pink and thick as cotton candy and seemed to snap with electric currents, like a kaleidoscopic flickering of snakes' tongues. I felt the front wheels of the truck dip over the side of the levee, gain momentum with the weight in the rear end, then suddenly I was rumbling down an incline through weeds and broken cane, willow saplings and cattails, until the front wheels were embedded up to the axle in water and sand.

I don't know how long I sat there. I felt a wave of color pass through me, like nausea or the violent shudder that cheap bourbon gives you when you're on the edge of delirium tremens; then it was gone and I could see the reflection of stars on the water, the tips of the dead cypress silhouetted against the moon, and a campfire, where there should have been no fire, burning in a misty grove of trees on high ground thirty yards out from the levee.

And I knew that was where I was supposed to go.

As I waded through the lily pads toward the trees, I could see the shadows of men moving about in the firelight and hear their cracker accents and the muted sound of spoons scraping on tin plates.

I walked up out of the shallows into the edge of the clearing, dripping water, hyacinth vines stringing from my legs. The men around the fire paid me little notice, as though, perhaps, I had been expected. They were cooking tripe in an iron pot, and they had hung their haversacks and wooden canteens in the trees and stacked their rifle-muskets in pyramids of fives. Their gray and butternut-brown uniforms were sunbleached and stiff with dried salt, and their unshaved faces had the lean and hungry look of a rifle company that had been in the field a long time.

Then from the far side of the fire a bearded man with fierce eyes stared out at me from under a gray hat with gold cord around the crown. His left arm was pinned up in a black sling, and his right trouser leg flopped loosely around a shaved wooden peg.

He moved toward me on a single crutch. I could smell tobacco smoke and sweat in his clothes. Then he smiled stiffly, the skin of his face seeming almost to crack with the effort. His teeth were as yellow as corn.

"I'm General John Bell Hood. Originally from Kentucky. How you do, suh?" he said, and extended his hand.