In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "/ think maybe I'm drunk again. I used to have psychotic episodes when I went on benders. I thought dead men from my platoon were telephoning me in the rain."

  "You're not psychotic, lieutenant. No more than Sykes is."

  "Elrod is a wet-brain, general."

  "The boy has heart. He's not afraid to be an object of ridicule for his beliefs. You mustn't be either. I'm depending on you."

  "I have no understanding of your words."

  "Our bones are in this place. Do you think we 'II surrender it to criminals, to those who would use our teeth and marrow for landfill?"

  "I'm going now, general."

  "Ah, you'll simply turn your back on madness, will you? The quixotic vision is not for you, is it?"

  "Something's pulling me back. I can feel it."

  "They put poison in your system, son. But you'll get through it. You've survived worse. The mine you stepped on, that sort of thing."

  "Poison?"

  He shrugged and put a cigar in his mouth. A corporal lit it with a burning stick from the fire. In the shadows a sergeant was putting together a patrol that was about to move out. Their faces were white and wrinkled like prunes with exhaustion and the tropical heat.

  "Come again," he said.

  "I don't think so."

  "Then goodnight to you, suh."

  "Goodnight to you, general. Goodnight to your men, too."

  He nodded and puffed on his cigar. There were small round hollows in his cheeks.

  "General?"

  "Yes, suh?"

  "It's going to be bad, isn't it?"

  "What?"

  "What you were talking about, something that's waiting for me down the road."

  "I don't know. For one reason or another I seem to have more insight into the past than the future." He laughed to himself. Then his face sobered and he wiped a strand of tobacco off his lip. "Try to keep this in mind. It's just like when they load with horseshoes and chain. You think the barrage will last forever, then suddenly there's a silence that's almost louder than their cannon. Please don't be alarmed by the severity of my comparison. Goodnight, lieutenant."

  "Goodnight, general."

  I waded through the shallows, into deeper water, back toward the levee. The mist hung on the water in wisps that were as dense as thick-bodied snakes. I saw ball lightning roll through the flooded trees and snap apart against a willow island; it was as bright and yellow as molten metal dipped from a forge. Then rain began twisting out of the sky, glistening like spun glass, and the firelight behind me became a red smudge inside a fog bank that billowed out of the marsh, slid across the water, and once again closed around my truck.

  The air was so heavy with ozone I could almost taste it on my tongue; I could hear a downed power line sparking and popping in a pool of water and smell a scorched electrical odor in the air like the metallic, burnt odor the St. Charles streetcar makes in the rain. I could hear a nutria crying in the marsh for its mate, a high-pitched shriek like the scream of a hysterical woman. I remember all these things. I remember the mud inside my shoes, the hyacinth vines binding around my knees, the gray-green film of algae that clung to my khaki trousers like cobweb.

  When a sheriff's deputy and two paramedics lifted me out of the truck cab in the morning, the sun was as white as an arc welder's flame, the morning as muggy and ordinary as the previous day, and my clothes as dry as if I had recently taken them from my closet. The only physical change the supervising paramedic noted in me was an incised lump the size of a darning sock over my right eye. That and one other cautious, almost humorous observation.

  "Dave, you didn't fall off the wagon on your head last night, did you?" he asked. Then, "Sorry. I was just kidding. Forget I said that."

  Our family physician, Dr. Landry, sat on the side of my bed at Iberia General and looked into the corner of my eye with a small flashlight. It was late afternoon now, Bootsie and Alafair had gone home, and the rain was falling in the trees outside the window.

  "Does the light hurt your eyes?" he asked.

  "A little. Why?"

  "Because your pupils are dilated when they shouldn't be. Tell me again what you felt just before you went off the road."

  "I could taste cherries and mint leaves and oranges. Then I felt like I'd bitten into an electric wire with my teeth."

  He put the small flashlight in his shirt pocket, adjusted his glasses, and looked at my face thoughtfully. He was an overweight, balding, deeply tanned golf player, with rings of blond hair on his forearms.

  "How do you feel now?" he said.

  "Like something's torn in my head. The way wet cardboard feels when you tear it with your hands."

  "Did you eat anything?"

  "I threw it up."

  "You want the good news? The tests don't show any booze in your system."

  "How could there be? I didn't drink any alcohol."

  "People have their speculations sometimes, warranted or not."

  "I can't help that."

  "The bad news is I don't know what did this to you. But according to the medics you said some strange things, Dave."

  I looked away from his face.

  "You said there were soldiers out there in the marsh. You kept insisting they were hurt."

  The wind began gusting, and rain and green leaves blew against the window.

  "The medics thought maybe somebody had been with you. They looked all over the levee," he said. "They even sent a boat out into those willow islands."

  "I'm sorry I created so much trouble for them."

  "Dave, they say you were talking about Confederate soldiers."

  "It was an unusual night."

  He took a breath, then made a sucking sound with his lips.

  "Well, you weren't drunk and you're not crazy, so I've got a theory," he said. "When I was an intern at Charity Hospital in New Orleans back in the sixties, I treated kids who acted like somebody had roasted their brains with a blowtorch. I'm talking about LSD, Dave. You think one of those Hollywood characters might have freshened up your Dr Pepper out there at Spanish Lake?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  "It didn't show up in the tests, but that's not unusual. To really do a tox screen for LSD, you need a gas chromatograph. Not many hospitals have one. We sure don't, anyway. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?"

  "When my wife was killed, I got drunk again and became delusional for a while."

  "Why don't we keep that to ourselves?"

  "Is something being said about me, doc?"

  He closed his black bag and stood up to go.

  "When did you start worrying about what people say?" he said. "Look, I want you to stay in here a couple of days."

  "Why?"

  "Because you didn't feel any gradual effects, it hit you all at once. That indicates to me a troubling possibility. Maybe somebody really loaded you up. I'm a little worried about the possibility of residual consequences, Dave, something like delayed stress syndrome."

  "I need to get back to work."

  "No, you don't."

  "I'll talk with the sheriff. Actually I'm surprised he hasn't been up yet."

  Dr. Landry rubbed the thick hair on his forearm and looked at the water pitcher and glass on my nightstand.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "I saw him a short while ago. He said he talked with you for a half hour this morning."

  I stared out the window at the gray sky and the rain falling in the trees. Thunder boomed and echoed out of the south, shaking the glass in the window, and for some reason in my mind's eye I saw rain-soaked enlisted men slipping in the mud around a cannon emplacement, swabbing out the smoking barrel, ramming home coils of chain and handfuls of twisted horseshoes.

  I couldn't sleep that night, and in the morning I checked myself out of the hospital and went home. The doctor had asked me how I felt. My answer had not been quite accurate. I felt empty, washed-out inside, my skin rubbery and dead to the touch, my eyes jittering with refracted l
ight mat seemed to have no source. I felt as if I had been drinking sour mash for three days and had suddenly become disconnected from all the internal fires that I had nourished and fanned and depended upon with the religious love of an acolyte. There was no pain, no broken razor blades were twisting inside the conscience; there was just numbness, as though wind and fleecy clouds and rain showers marching across the canefields were a part of a curious summer phenomenon that I observed in a soundless place behind a glass wall.

  I drank salt water to make myself throw up, ate handfuls of vitamins, made milkshakes filled with strawberries and bananas, did dozens of pushups and stomach crunches in the back yard, and ran wind sprints in the twilight until my chest was heaving for breath and my gym shorts were pasted to my skin with sweat.

  I showered with hot water until there was none left in the tank, then I kept my head under the cold water for another five minutes. Then I put on a fresh pair of khakis and a denim shirt and walked outside into the gathering dusk under the pecan trees. The marsh across the road was purple with haze, sparkling with fireflies. A black kid in a pirogue was cane fishing along the edge of the lily pads in the bayou. His dark skin seemed to glow with the sun's vanishing red light. His body and pole were absolutely still, his gaze riveted on his cork bobber. The evening was so quiet and languid, the boy so transfixed in his concentration, that I could have been looking at a painting.

  Then I realized, with a twist of the heart, that something was wrong—there was no sound. A car passed on the dirt road, the boy scraped his paddle along the side of the pirogue to move to a different spot. But there was no sound except the dry resonance of my own breathing.

  I went into the house, where Bootsie was reading under a lamp in the living room. I was about to speak, with the trepidation a person might have if he were violating the silence of a church, just to see if I could hear the sound of my own voice, when I heard the screen door slam behind me like a slap across the ear. Then suddenly I heard the television, the cicadas in the trees, my neighbor's sprinkler whirling against his myrtle bushes, Batist cranking an outboard down at the dock.

  "What is it, Dave?" Bootsie said.

  "Nothing."

  "Dave?"

  "It's nothing. I guess I got some water in my ears." I opened and closed my jaws.

  "Your dinner is on the table. Do you want it?"

  "Yeah, sure," I said.

  Her eyes studied mine.

  "Let me heat it up for you," she said.

  "That'd be fine."

  When she walked past me she glanced into my face again.

  "What's the deal, Boots? Do I look like I just emerged from a hole in the dimension?" I said, following her into the kitchen.

  "You look tired, that's all."

  She kept her back to me while she wrapped my dinner in plastic to put it in the microwave.

  "What's wrong?" I said.

  "Nothing, really. The sheriff called. He wants you to take a week off."

  "Why didn't he tell me that?"

  "I don't know, Dave."

  "I think you're keeping something from me."

  She put my plate in the microwave and turned around. She wore a gold cross on a chain, and the cross hung at an angle outside her pink blouse. Her fingers came up and touched my cheek and the swelling over my right eye.

  "You didn't shave today," she said.

  "What did the sheriff say, Boots?"

  "It's what some other people are saying. In the mayor's office. In the department."

  "What?"

  "That maybe you're having a breakdown."

  "Do you believe I am?"

  "No."

  "Then who cares?"

  "The sheriff does."

  "That's his problem."

  "A couple of deputies went out to the movie location and questioned some of the people who were at Mr. Goldman's birthday party."

  "What for?"

  "They asked people about your behavior, things like that."

  "Was one of those deputies Rufus Arceneaux?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Boots, this is a guy who would sell his mother to a puppy farm to advance one grade in rank."

  "That's not the point. Some of those actors said you were walking around all evening with a drink in your hand. People believe what they want to hear."

  "I had blood and urine tests the next morning. There was no alcohol in my system. It's a matter of record at the hospital."

  "You beat up one of Julie Balboni's hoods in a public place, Dave. You keep sending local businessmen signals that you just might drive a lot of big money out of town. You tell the paramedics that there're wounded Confederate soldiers in the marsh. What do you think people are going to say about you?"

  I sat down at the kitchen table and looked out the back screen at the deepening shadows on the lawn. My eyes burned, as though there were sand under my eyelids.

  "I can't control what people say," I said.

  She stood behind me and rested her palms on my shoulders.

  "Let's agree on one thing," she said. "We just can't allow ourselves to do anything that will help them hurt us. Okay, Dave?"

  I put my right hand on top of hers.

  "I won't," I said.

  "Don't try to explain what you think you heard or saw in the marsh. Don't talk about the accident. Don't defend yourself. You remember what you used to say? 'Just grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.' "

  "All right, Boots."

  "You promise?"

  "I promise."

  She folded her arms across my chest and rested her chin on the top of my head. Then she said, "What kind of person would try to do this to us, Dave?"

  "Somebody who made a major mistake," I said.

  But it was a grandiose remark. The truth was that I had taken the drink at the party incautiously and that I had walked right into the script someone else had written for me.

  Later that night, in bed, I stared at the ceiling and tried to recreate the scene under the oak trees at Spanish Lake. I wanted to believe that I could reach down into my unconscious and retrieve a photographic plate on which my eye had engraved an image of someone passing his hand over the glass of Dr Pepper, black cherries, orange slices, and bruised mint that a waiter was about to serve me.

  But the only images in my mind were those of a levee extending out into gray water and an electrically charged fog bank rolling out of the cypress trees.

  Bootsie turned on her side and put her arm across my chest. Then she moved her hand down my stomach and touched me.

  I stared up into the darkness. The trees were motionless outside the window. I heard a 'gator flop in the marsh.

  Then her hand went away from me and I felt her weight turn on the mattress toward the opposite wall.

  An hour later I dressed in the darkness of the living room, slipped my pickup truck into neutral, rolled it silently down the dirt lane to the dock, and hooked my boat and trailer to the bumper hitch.

  I PUT MY BOAT INTO THE WATER AT THE SAME PLACE I HAD driven my truck off the levee. I used the paddle to push out into deeper water, past the cattails and lily pads that grew along the bank's edge, then I lowered the engine and jerked it alive with the starter rope.

  The wake off the stern looked like a long V-shaped trench roiling with yellow mud, bobbing with dead logs. Then the moon broke through the clouds, gilding the moss in the cypress with a silver light, and I could see cottonmouths coiled on the lower limbs of willow trees, the gnarled brown-green head of a 'gator in a floating island of leaves and sticks, the stiffened, partly eaten body of a coon on a sandbar, and a half-dozen wood ducks that skittered across the water in front of the high ground and the grove of trees where I had met the general.

  I cut the throttle and let the boat ride on its wake until the bow slid up on the sand. Then I walked into the trees with a six-battery flashlight and a GI entrenching tool.

  The ground was soft, oozing with moisture, matted with layers of dead lea
ves and debris left by receding water. Tangles of abandoned trotlines were strung about the tree trunks; Clorox marker bottles from fish traps lay half-buried in the sand.

  In the center of the clearing I found the remains of a campfire.

  A dozen blackened beer cans lay among the charred wood. Crushed into the grass at the edge of the fire was a used rubber.

  I kicked the wood, ashes, and cans across the ground, propped my flashlight in the weeds, folded the E-tool into the shape of a hoe, screwed down and locked the socket at the base of the blade, and started chopping into the earth.

  Eighteen inches down I hit what archaeologists call a "fireline," a layer of pure black charcoal sediment from a very old fire. I sifted it off the blade's tip a shovelful at a time. In it was a scorched brass button and the bottom of a hand-blown bottle, one that had tiny air bubbles inside the glass's green thickness.

  But what did that prove? I asked myself.

  Answer: That perhaps nineteenth-century trappers, cypress loggers, or even army surveyors had built a campfire there.

  Then I thought about the scene the other night: the stacked rifle muskets, the haversacks suspended in the trees, the exhaustion in the men who were about to move out on patrol, the dry, bloodless wounds that looked like they had been eaten clean by maggots, the ambulance wagon and the crusted field dressings that had been raked out onto the ground.

  The ambulance wagon.

  I picked up my flashlight and moved to the far side of the clearing. The water was black under the canopy of flooded trees out in the marsh. I knelt and started digging out a two-by-four-foot trench. The clearing sloped here, and the ground was softer and wetter, wrinkled with small eroded gullies. I scraped the dirt into piles at each end of the hole; a foot down, water began to run from under the shovel blade.

  I stopped to reset the blade and begin digging back toward the top of the incline. Then I saw the streaks of rust and bits of metal, like small red teeth, in the wet piles of dirt at each end of the hole. I shined the flashlight into the hole, and protruding from one wall, like a twisted snake, was a rusted metal band that might have been the rim of a wagon wheel.