DR01 - The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  "What?"

  The words wouldn't come. My eyes swept around the brightly lit room and went outside the window to the green tops of the oak trees moving in the breeze.

  "Could you get me a big glass of Coca-Cola? With a lot of ice in it, maybe with cherry juice and slices of lime in it?"

  "Of course."

  "Thanks very much, Sister."

  "Do you want anything else?"

  "No. Just the Coca-Cola. I'm sure that's all I need."

  That afternoon Captain Guidry sat on the foot of my bed, snuffed down in his nose, and wiped his glasses on my bedsheet.

  "One time after every newspaper in the country condemned George Wallace as a racist, he told a reporter, 'Well, that's one man's opinion,'" Captain Guidry said. "I was never his admirer, but I always liked that statement."

  "How bad is it going to be?"

  "They stiffed you. Indefinite suspension without pay."

  "That's what they give cops who get caught dealing dope."

  "For what it's worth, I argued against it. They dumped on you, Dave, but you've got to see their side of it, too. In a week's time your name has gotten into a lot of paperwork. We're also talking about two people shot to death in one of the richest neighborhoods in New Orleans, and a Treasury agent killed in your automobile that falls three stories into the middle of a city street. That's a tough act to follow." ,

  "Do you believe my report?"

  "You've always been a good cop. There's none better."

  "Do you believe me?"

  "How the hell do I know what happened out there? To tell you the truth, I'm not sure you do, either, Dave. The paramedics said you were half crazy when they brought you in here. I saw what was left of your car. I don't know how you survived it. The doctor said you had enough dope and booze in your blood to embalm the Russian army."

  "You want me to resign?"

  "Don't let them call the plays for you. You let parasites like Baxter see that you're wounded and they'll try to file a manslaughter charge against you."

  "That special agent, Fitzpatrick's supervisor, knows who this guy Abshire is. I saw it in his eyes."

  "You shake a federal tree, and all you get in your face is birdshit. Secondly, you're suspended. You're out of it. That's absolute."

  "What am I supposed to do, Captain?"

  "It's your turn in the barrel. I just hope it passes quick. Tell them all to go fuck themselves and take up needlepoint if you have to."

  I watched the sunset through the window that evening. The sky was crimson above the trees and the rooftops, then it turned lavender and finally a deep purple as the sun burned itself out in a crack of brilliant fire on the horizon. I sat alone in the dark awhile, then used the remote television control to switch on the twenty-four-hour cable news. I watched pictures of Salvadoran guerrillas threading their way through a jungle trail at the base of a dead volcano. Their faces were very young, with wispy beards like Orientals, and their bodies were hung with bandoliers and cloth belts of shotgun shells. Each of them had laced his straw hat with long blades of pampas grass.

  A moment later the screen showed an unrelated scene of government troops in GI issue moving through a forest of banana trees and enormous clumps of green elephant ears. A Cobra gunship streaked across the glassy sky, hovered at an angle over a deep, rocky ravine, then unloaded a succession of rockets that blew water, powdered coral, and bits of trees and scrub brush out of the bottom of the ravine. The footage closed with a shot of the government troops retreating out of the banana trees with their wounded on stretchers. The heat in those trees must have been terrible, because the wounded were covered with sweat and the medics were washing their faces with water from canteens. It all looked very familiar.

  Having been raised in Louisiana, I had always thought that politics was the province of moral invalids. But as a gambler I had certain instincts about which side I would wager my money on in certain military situations. On one side of the equation were people who had been conscripted into the army and were either forced or paid to fight, and who sometimes sold their weapons to the enemy if given the chance. On the other side was a group that lived off the jungle, scavenged guns and ammunition wherever they could buy or steal them, had absolutely nothing of economic value to lose, and who, because they had no illusions about their fate if they were captured, would go down to the last man in a firefight. I doubted there was a bookie in New Orleans who would take a bet on that one.

  But my war was over, and maybe my career as well. I turned off the set and looked out the window at the reflection of the lights against the sky. The room was quiet, the sheets were cool and clean, and my stomach didn't feel sick anymore; but the tuning fork was still vibrating inside me. I brushed my teeth, I showered, I rinsed my mouth with Listerine again; then I got back in bed and pulled my knees up in front of me and started to shake all over.

  Fifteen minutes later I checked myself out of the hospital and took a cab to my houseboat. It was a dark, hot night and the heat had built up all day in the cabin. My collection of historical jazz records—irreplaceable seventy-eights of Blind Lemon, Bunk Johnson, Kid Ory, Bix Beiderbecke—lay scattered and broken and tattooed with footprints on the floor. I opened the windows wide, turned on my floor fan, picked up the few records that were still hard and stiff in their jackets, cleaned them with a soft cloth, and set them in the wail rack. Then I swept the rest into a paper bag and lay down to sleep on the couch with my clothes on.

  Small waves chucked against the hull, and the boat rocked rhythmically under me. But it was no good; I couldn't sleep. I was sweating and trembling and when I took my shirt off I shivered as though I'd been struck with a blast of arctic air. Each time I closed my eyes I felt the earth's surface drop away under me, felt myself spinning end over end inside my automobile toward the distant bottom of a rock-strewn canyon, saw words form like a bubble on the dead lips of Sam Fitzpatrick sitting next to me.

  Later, Annie Ballard tapped softly on the cabin door. I unlocked it and went back to the couch in the dark. A sailing yacht out on the lake had a floodlamp lighted on its deck, and it made gold lights in Annie's hair. I saw her feel for the switch on the wall.

  "Don't turn it on," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "People just out of the hospital don't look good."

  "I don't care."

  "I do."

  "You knew I was coming up there. Didn't you want to leave me a message?"

  "I thought I did. Maybe I didn't. There were cops in there all day."

  She walked closer to the couch. She wore a pair of white jeans with a blue denim shirt tucked inside.

  "What's wrong?" she said.

  "I guess it's malaria. I picked it up in the Philippines."

  "I'm going to turn on the light."

  "No."

  "You don't have to hide anything, Dave."

  "I'm suspended without pay. I don't feel well right now. To tell you the truth, I feel like killing somebody."

  "I don't understand."

  "When they suspend you indefinitely without pay, it means you're probably not coming back. It's the kind of stuff they drop on cops that are about to be indicted."

  She sat down on the edge of the couch and put her hand on my bare shoulder. Her face was a dark silhouette against the glass behind her. She touched my forehead with her fingers.

  "I can't believe they would do that to you."

  "It's my past history. You don't know about it. I was a full-blown drunk for years. They figure I'm back into it."

  "They can't hold the past against you."

  "Why the hell not? It makes it easier. Most cops couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They think categorically about virtually every situation. That's why we don't put a lot of people away. Look, four pieces of human slime that wouldn't even make good bars of soap are out there right now drinking a beer, celebrating burning a kid into charcoal, while some of our own people are wondering if they should hang a DUI on me, or a DUI an
d a manslaughter charge."

  "You're not talking like yourself."

  "Annie, in the real world we fry paupers in the electric chair and send priests to prison for splashing chicken blood on draft files. It's the nature of ritual. We deal with the problem symbolically, but somebody has to take the fall. In this case, a guy that looked like he escaped from a Popsicle wrapper launched a one-man crusade against an entire government policy in Central America. If you were an administrative pencil-pusher, don't you think it would be easier to deal with a drunk-driving fatality than a story about a lot of right-wing crazies who are killing peasant villagers in Nicaragua?"

  "Why do you think you're the only person who sees the truth?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "But it's the way you feel, Dave. That's too big a burden for a person." Her face was soft and composed and she looked out the window across the water for a moment, then stood up and began undressing in the dark.

  "Annie, I'm not a charity case. I'm just not doing too good today."

  "If you want me to go away, tell me. But look me directly in the face and tell me honestly, with no weirdness or bullshit this time."

  "I like you a great deal."

  She sat back down on the couch and leaned her face close to mine.

  "Loving somebody is being there when nobody else is. When it's not even a choice. You should understand that, Dave," she said. She bent and kissed me lightly on the mouth.

  She was beautiful to look at, and her skin was smooth and warm and I could smell the sun and a perfume like the scent of four-o'clocks in her hair. She kissed me again and blew her breath on the side of my face and slipped her arms around my neck and pressed her breasts tight against me. I sat up on the side of the couch and took off my trousers; then she pressed me back into the cushions, raised herself up on her knees, and with her hand guided me inside her. Her eyes closed, she moaned and her mouth opened wide, and she leaned down over me on her arms with her breasts close to my face. She had ignored all my anger—no, my self-pity—and I felt humbled and dizzy and physically weak when I looked up into the electric blueness of her eyes.

  There was a strawberry birthmark on her right breast, and it seemed to grow darker and fill with blood as her breathing became more rapid. I felt her warmth drawing me into her, felt her wet palms slip under me, felt her thighs flex and tighten around me, then her hands held my face and my heart twisted in my chest and I felt an aching hardness crest inside of me and burst apart like a heavy stone ripping loose in a rushing streambed.

  "Oh, you fine man," she said, and brushed the drops of sweat out of my eyes with her fingers, her body still shaking.

  She fell asleep next to me, and I covered her with a sheet from the bedroom. The moon was out now, and the light through the glass made her curly blond hair look like it was touched with silver. Just the edge of her strawberry birthmark showed above the sheet.

  I knew I was very fortunate to have a girl like this. But the great nemesis of the gambler is that he's never satisfied with just winning the daily double; he'll reinvest his winnings in every race remaining that afternoon, and if he's still ahead when the window closes on the last race, he'll be at the dog track that night and stay with it until he loses everything.

  I didn't have a parimutuel window handy, so I left Annie asleep and started walking down the lakefront toward Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park. The wind had picked up and the waves were cresting against the hard-packed sand of the beach and the palm fronds were rattling dryly against the darkening sky. By the time I reached the amusement park the air was cool and filled with flying grains of sand and smelled of the gale blowing out of the south. Most of the rides were closed, with tarpaulins stretched over them to protect them from the coming rain, and the red neon signs over the empty funhouse looked like electrified blood in the sky.

  But I found what I had been looking for all day.

  "A double Jack Daniel's with a Pearl draft on the side," I told the bartender.

  "You look like you already lost a fight to a chainsaw, buddy," he said.

  "You ought to see the chainsaw," I said.

  But it was a dark, cheerless place, not given to either humor or protocol, and the bartender poured silently into my shot glass.

  * * *

  SEVEN

  At five o'clock the next morning the eastern sky was gray and pink beyond the tree line on the far side of the Mississippi. I was in an all-night bar set back from old Highway 90 under the long, black, looming expanse of the Huey Long Bridge. Mist hung in clouds on the river's surface and around the brush-choked pilings of the bridge; the air itself seemed to drip with moisture, and the shale rock in the parking lot glistened with a dull shine as the pinkness of the sun spread along the earth's rim.

  A bus loaded with carnival and circus people from Sarasota, Florida, had broken down on the highway, and the bar and the café counter were crowded with a strange collection of roustabouts, acrobats, and sideshow performers. I sat at a table with the Crocodile Boy, the Pencil Man, and a dwarf named Little Mack. The Pencil Man had arms and legs that were so thin and sort that they looked as though all the bone had been surgically removed from them, like rubbery snakes attached to his torso, which in itself could not have been much greater in circumference than a telephone pole. His kinky red hair was waxed and brushed into a conk so that it resembled a pencil eraser. The skin of the Crocodile Boy was covered with hard black bumps like barnacles, and his teeth looked as if they had been filed to points. In rotating order he sipped from his muscatel wine, chased it with beer, smoked a cigar, and ate out of a bowl of pickled hogs' feet. Little Mack sat next to me, his tiny feet not able to touch the floor, his elongated jug face filled with concern at my situation.

  I looked at the long-distance number I had written on a damp napkin. My head was filled with a steady buzzing sound, like a neon short circuit.

  "You shouldn't call those CIA people again, Lieutenant," Little Mack said in his high-pitched mechanical voice. "They're the ones tied in with those UFOs. We saw one once in the desert outside of Needles, California. It was glowing green and orange and it streaked over the top of the bus at maybe a thousand miles an hour. The next day the paper said a bunch of cows on a ranch were all mangled up. Maybe those UFO guys were trying to take some food on board."

  "That could be," I said, and I motioned to the bartender to bring us two more shots of Jack Daniel's.

  "The government will mess you up," the Pencil Man said. "Each time you have contact with a government agency, it creates a piece of paper on you. There's people that's got whole rooms of paper on their lives. I don't have any, not even a birth certificate. My mother squatted down just long enough to squirt me out in the back of a boxcar. I been moving ever since. I never had a social security card, a driver's license, a draft card. I never filed an in-come tax return. You let them get papers on you and they'll jerk you around."

  "You guys are my kind of situational philosophers," I said.

  "What's that?" the Crocodile Boy asked. He had stopped eating a hog's knuckle, and his narrow green eyes were curious and perplexed.

  "You deal with the action on your own terms, whether it's a UFO or a bunch of government buttholes. Right?" I said.

  "Have you seen a UFO?" Little Mack asked.

  "I've heard reports on them," I said.

  I poured my jigger of whiskey into my beer glass, drank it down, then looked at the telephone number on the napkin again. I raked my change off the table into my palm and started toward the pay phone on the wall.

  "Lieutenant, don't use dirty words to anyone this time," Little Mack said. "I read a story once they even put poison inside a guy's condom."

  I called the number in McLean, Virginia, and asked for a duty officer. My ear felt thick and wooden against the phone receiver. I tried to focus my eyes through the front window on the clouds of steam rising off the river in the soft light. The neon buzz in my head wouldn't stop. Finally the voice of an annoyed man came on the line
.

  "Who's this?" I asked.

  "The same guy you were talking to a half hour ago."

  "Then put somebody else on."

  "I'm all you get, pal."

  "Tell me your name so I can look you up sometime."

  "Let me give you the facts of life, Lieutenant. We traced your call, we know what bar you're in, we ran your sheet, we know everything about you. If you weren't such a pathetic asshole, I'd have your own people pick you up."

  "All right, try this with your morning coffee, motherfucker. I'm the loose cannon on your deck and I'm going to leave blood and shit all over the gunwales."

  "If you didn't have the alcoholic titty in your mouth, I might even take you seriously. Call here one more time and you're going to be sitting in your own drunk tank."

  The line went dead. When I lowered the receiver from my ear, the side of my face felt numb, as though I had been slapped with a thick hand.

  "What's the matter? Your face don't look good," Little Mack said.

  "We need some more drinks," I said.

  "They threaten to assassinate you or something? The cocksuckers. You ever read The Black Star? There was a story about how the CIA used these Nazi scientists to make clones from Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, then they killed the clones when they couldn't use them to spy anymore. I think they got the idea from this show about these seed-pod people taking over the earth. They put a seed pod under your bed, and when you go to sleep the pod sucks out all your ectoplasm and turns you into a dry shell that just blows away in the wind… Where you going?"

  "I don't know."

  "Better sit down, get something to eat," the Pencil Man said. "You can ride with us when the bus is fixed."

  "Thanks, I need to walk. This last round is on me."

  But when I opened my wallet I had no money.

  "You all right, Lieutenant?" Little Mack asked.

  "Sure."

  "I mean, you're listing pretty bad," he said.

  "I'm okay."

  "You got to be careful out there in the fog and all," he said. "There's crazy people on the highway, drunks and such. You going to be safe?"