DR01 - The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  Like many others, I learned a great lesson in Vietnam: Never trust authority. But because I had come to feel that authority should always be treated as suspect and self-serving, I had also learned that it was predictable and vulnerable. So that afternoon I sat under my beach umbrella on my houseboat deck, dressed only in swimming trunks and an open tropical shirt, with a shot of Jim Beam and a beer chaser on the table in front of me, and called Sam Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.

  "I ran down Abshire," I said. "I don't know why you held out on me at the hospital. He's not exactly well concealed."

  There was a moment's silence on the line.

  "Have you got wax in your ears or something?" he said. "How do I get through to you? You stay off federal turf."

  "I'm going to kick a board up his ass."

  "You're not going to do a goddamn thing, except get a warrant filed on you for obstruction."

  "You want in on it or not?" I asked.

  "I have a strong feeling you're drunk."

  "So what? I'm going to cool him out. You want to be there for the party, or do you want us local boys to write the story for you in the Picayune? It's going to be socko stuff, partner."

  "What the hell is the matter with you? You don't seem to have any bottom. One of my best men is burned to death in your car. Your own people dump you like a sack of dog turds. You're evidently working on becoming a full-time drunk again, and now you're talking about taking out a retired two-star general. You think it's possible you're losing your mind?"

  "You're a good man, but don't take up poker."

  "What?"

  "It's a terrible vice. It'll lead you to ruin."

  "You bastard, you're not going to get away with this," he said.

  I hung up the phone, knocked back the jigger of Jim Beam, and sipped from the glass of beer. The sun looked like a yellow balloon trapped under the lake's surface. The wind was warm, and sweat ran down my bare chest in the hot shade of the umbrella. My eyes burned with the humidity of the afternoon. I dialed Clete down at the First District.

  "Where are you?" he asked.

  "At home."

  "There's a bunch of people asking about you. You sure spit in the soup, Dave."

  "I'm not hard to find. Who's curious about me?"

  "Who else? Feds. Did you really call up the CIA? Man, that's unbelievable."

  "I have a lot of time on my hands. A guy has to do something for kicks."

  "I don't know as I'd want to fire up these babies. A nasty bunch. They're not our crowd."

  "You think I ought to get lost for a while?"

  "Who knows? I just wouldn't pull on their tallywackers anymore."

  "Actually, I called you for a point of information, Clete. In all the shootings you've investigated, how many times have you known the shooter to recover his brass?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Sure you do."

  "I don't guess I ever gave it much thought."

  "I've never seen it once," I said. "Except when a cop was the shooter."

  "What's the point?"

  "It's funny how that can be trained into a guy, isn't it?"

  "Yeah. Imagine that."

  "If I was the shooter, I'd rather leave the shell casing than my signature."

  "Maybe some things aren't worth speculating about, Dave."

  "Like I said, I'm idle now. It fills the time. I spent two hours this morning over at the St. Charles sheriff's department answering questions about Bobby Joe Starkweather. Did they contact you all yet?"

  "We heard about it." His voice was becoming irritated.

  "A truly big mess out there. Another hour or so and I don't think there would have been anything left of Bobby Joe except his belt buckle and his boot nails."

  "He's better off as sausage links. A guy finds his proper level after a while. I got to split, partner."

  "Do me a favor. How about punching on the computer and seeing if you can turn up a retired two-star general named Abshire?"

  "Stay idle, Dave. Adjust. We'll get out of this bullshit eventually. You'll see. Adios."

  The phone went dead in my hand, and I looked at the smoky green surface of the water in the summer haze and poured another jigger of Jim Beam. What did they have on him? I wondered. Whores? Juice from narcotics? It seemed sometimes that the best of us became most like the people whom we loathed. And whenever a good cop took a big fall, he could never look back and find that exact moment when he made a hard left turn down a oneway street. I remembered sitting in a courtroom when an ex-major-league baseball pitcher from New Orleans was sentenced to ten years in Angola for extortion and trafficking in cocaine. Seventeen years earlier he had won twenty-five games, had thrown fastballs that could destroy barn doors, and now he weighed three hundred pounds and walked as though a bowling ball were slung between his thighs. When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, he stared up at the judge, the rings of fat on his neck trembling, and replied, "Your Honor, I have no idea how I got from there to here."

  I believed him, too. But as I sat in the warm breeze with the drowsy heat of the whiskey working in my head, my concern was not for Clete or an ex-baseball pitcher. I knew that my own fuse was lit, and it was only a matter of time before my banked fires would roar out of control in my life. I had never felt more alone, and I uttered a prayer that seemed a contradiction of everything I had learned back at the Catholic school: Dear God, my higher power, even though I've abandoned You, don't abandon me.

  * * *

  EIGHT

  Late that afternoon I fixed a poor-boy sandwich of oysters, shrimp, lettuce, and a sauce piquante, then drove through the cooling, tree-shaded streets toward the Times-Picayune, where a night editor sometimes let me use their morgue.

  But first I wanted to make amends to Annie for deserting her at the houseboat the other night. Afternoon Jim Beam always endowed me with that kind of magical power.

  I bought a bottle of Cold Duck and a box of pralines wrapped in orange cellophane and yellow ribbon, kept my freshly pressed seersucker coat on, and strolled up her sidewalk in the dusky light. The air smelled of lilac and spaded flower beds and clipped lawns and water sprinklers clicking across hedges and the trunks of trees.

  When she didn't answer the bell, I walked around back and found her barbecuing steaks on a portable grill on a brick patio under a chinaberry tree. She wore white shorts and Mexican straw shoes and a yellow shirt tied under her breasts. Her eyes were watering in the smoke, and she stepped away from the fire and picked up a gin gimlet from a glass tabletop that was set with plates and silverware. The gimlet glass was wrapped in a paper napkin with a rubber band around it. Her eyes lighted briefly when she saw me, then she looked away.

  "Oh, hello, Dave," she said.

  "I should have called. I caught you at a bad time."

  "A little bit."

  "I brought these pralines and some Cold Duck," I said.

  "That was nice of you."

  "I'm sorry I left you the other night. It's something you won't understand very well, I'm afraid."

  The light came back in her blue eyes. I could see the red birthmark on the top of her breast.

  "The best way to end a conversation is to tell somebody she can't understand something," she said.

  "I meant there was no excuse for it."

  "There was a reason. Maybe you just don't want to look at it."

  "I went after liquor. I was drunk all night. I ended up in a bar on Old 90 with a bunch of sideshow performers. I called up the CIA and cussed out the duty officer."

  "I guess that prevented you from finding a telephone for two days."

  "I tried to find Bobby Joe Starkweather. Somebody canceled him out in a hog lot."

  "I'm not interested, Dave. Did you come by to screw me?"

  "You think I'm giving you a shuck?"

  "No, I think you're singleminded and you're bent on revenge. I made the overture the other night and complicated things for you. Now you're feeling the
gentleman's obligation. Sorry, I'm not in the absolution business. I don't have any regrets. If you do, that's your problem."

  She began to poke the meat on the grill with a fork. The fire flared up and her eyes winced in the smoke. She poked at the meat all the harder.

  "I'm truly sorry," I said. "But you're right about my being singleminded. There's only one girl I'm interested in."

  I wanted to put my arms around her waist and take her out of the smoke, hold her against me and feel her curly hair under my hands.

  "You just can't leave a woman alone in the night, Dave."

  I looked away from her face.

  "I woke up and you were gone and I thought maybe those defective people had come back. I drove up and down the beach looking for you until dawn," she said.

  "I didn't know that."

  "How could you, if you were with some sideshow people?"

  "Annie, I'd like another chance with you. I can't make you many promises, except I won't deliberately hurt you again. That's probably not very adequate, but it's all I have."

  She turned her face away from me, and I saw her brush her eye with the back of her wrist.

  "Another night. There's someone coming over now," she said.

  "All right."

  "Are those people out there worth all this?"

  "They'll find me if I don't find them. You can bet on it."

  "My great-grandparents were part of the Underground Railway. Quantrill's Raiders tore down their sod houses and burned their cornfields. Long after Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson and Jesse James were dead, they were raising children and Russian wheat in a free state.

  "But somebody canceled Quantrill and Company's action first, namely, federal cavalry."

  I smiled at her, but her face suddenly looked wan in the electric light that was hung in the chinaberry tree. I didn't care about propriety or restraint or the fact that her friend would arrive any minute now; I set the Cold Duck and the pralines on the glass tabletop and put my arms around her and kissed her curly hair. But she didn't respond. Her shoulders were stiff, her eyes turned down, her arms angular and dead.

  "Call me tomorrow," she whispered.

  "Sure."

  "I want you to."

  "I will. I promise."

  "Things just aren't right with me tonight. I'll be all right tomorrow."

  "I'll leave the pralines. I'll call early. Maybe we'll have breakfast at the Café du Monde."

  "That sounds nice," she said. But her eyes were veiled, and I couldn't read them. Under all her fascination with weirdness, she had the sensitive heart of a small-town Midwestern girl.

  On my way down the front walk I passed a young man who looked like a graduate student at Tulane. He wore cream-colored slacks, a pale blue shirt, and a striped tie, and his smile was good-natured and his face very handsome. I asked him if he was having dinner with Annie Ballard.

  "Why, yes," he said, and smiled again.

  "Here, take this," I said, and handed him the bottle of Cold Duck. "It's on the fuzz tonight."

  It was an old thing to do, and a moment later I felt foolish and rude. Then I remembered an axiom taught me in Vietnam by a line officer who used to cut through Gordian knots with a sentence: Fuck it. Who wants to be a good loser?

  That night as I sat in the morgue of the Times-Picayune and turned the yellowed pages of old newspapers or flipped the strips of microfilm up on the viewing screen, I reflected upon the ambiguous importance of the past in our lives. In order to free ourselves from it, I thought, we treat it as a decaying memory. At the same time, it's the only measure of identity we have. There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are.

  For some, even our darkest past moments are preferable somehow to those few interludes of peace and sunshine in the world. Why? God only knows. I thought about the followers of Pancho Villa who found his assassination and the end of his violent era so unacceptable that they dug up his corpse, sawed the head from the trunk, sank it in a huge glass jar of white rum, and brought it in a Model T Ford to the Van Horn Mountains outside of El Paso, where they entombed it under a pile of orange rocks. At night for years thereafter, they would remove the rocks and drink mescal and smoke marijuana in the hot wind and talk to his bloated, leering face floating against the glass.

  But I was looking at another kind of dark history now. The retired two-star general had not been hard to find. His full name was Jerome Gaylan Abshire, and he lived right here in New Orleans, in the Garden District off St. Charles Avenue. He was a West Point graduate, and he'd had a distinguished combat record in World War II and Korea. A 1966 color photograph showed him eating out of a GI mess kit with his men in an LZ cut out of the elephant grass in the central highlands of Vietnam. He wore an automatic pistol in a shoulder holster over his bare, leathery chest; his face was deeply tanned, his eyebrows and hair very white, his eyes the intense blue of a butane flame. A creative journalist had called him "The Happy Warrior" in the cutline.

  But I ran across another Jerome Gaylan Abshire in the newspaper files, this one a junior, a U.S. Army lieutenant, obviously his son. His name first appeared in a 1967 story when he was listed as missing in action; then I found a second clipping dated November 1, 1969, that described how two American prisoners held by the Vietcong in an area called Pinkville had been tied to posts with their heads inserted in wooden cages filled with rats. The article said one of these soldiers may have been Lieutenant Jerome Abshire of New Orleans.

  The word "Pinkville" leaped off the page like a sin not confessed and deliberately forgotten. It was the name that GIs called the area around My Lai.

  Then, as though the newspaper librarian had made the same associations as I, he or she had attached a crossreferenced Xerox copy of an article about some testimony at the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley, when he was tried for ordering the My Lai massacre. One of the grunts who had taken the stand said in a parenthetical aside that some captured Vietcong had told him that two American prisoners had helped them string mines through a rice field, the same rice field in which his company had been blown apart.

  I was tired. My system was beginning to crave alcohol again, and the place names, the dates, a photograph of villagers executed on a trail, filled me with a sadness and despair that made me close the file, flick off the viewing screen, walk to the window, and stare out into the darkness for a full minute, hoping that no one in the room saw my eyes.

  I never saw an American atrocity, at least not a deliberate one, so I did not have those kinds of memories from the war. Instead, if there was one experience that encapsulated my year in Vietnam, it was a strange incident involving two men in my platoon and a drowning water buffalo.

  They were almost all Southerners, from textile and cannery and cotton-gin towns where young people seldom expected more than Saturday nights at the drive-in movie with others like themselves who would wear their high school football jackets years after their graduation. We had walked twenty miles out of Indian country into a secured area by a tree-lined, milky brown river, and the men had dropped their packs and rifles and undressed, and were splashing around in the shallows like boys. The late-afternoon sun was warm through the trees and dappled the ground with shadow. I hadn't slept in a day and a half, and I lay down in the cool, short grass under a banyan tree, put my arm across my eyes, and in seconds I was asleep.

  I awoke a half hour later to giggling and laughter and the drowsy smell of marijuana. Somebody had scored some Cambodian red, and the whole platoon was getting loaded. I got up stiffly from under the tree, walked down the bank, and realized they were all being entertained by a scene taking place in the middle of the river. A water buffalo had wandered out into the hard current, had become stuck in the silt on the bottom, and was now floundering and barely able to keep its nostrils above the surface. Its eyes were wide with terror, its horns webbed with debris f
rom the river. The owner of the buffalo, who wore a French legionnaire's flop hat on his pointed head and who was so thin and bony that he looked like he was made of coat hangers, ran up and down the bank, waving his arms and shouting at us in Vietnamese and scraps of French.

  Two cousins from Conroe, Texas, had waded in after the buffalo with a lariat they had fashioned from a rope they had taken out of the back of a Marine Corps six-by. Their brown backs were wet and ridged with muscle and vertebrae, and they were grinning and laughing and flinging out their lariat with all the stoned confidence of nineteen-year-old cowboys.

  "There's dropoffs out there," I said.

  "Watch this, Lieutenant," one of them called back. "We'll slide this honker out slicker than a hog's pecker."

  Then suddenly out of the brown current I saw the gnarled, black roots of a floating tree break through the surface and reach into the air like an enormous claw.

  It hit them broadside with such force that their faces went white. Their mouths gasped open, then spit water. They tried to push away from the roiling, yellow foam around the tree and the roots that spiked their eyes and twisted their faces into contortions. The tree spun around in the current, shining with mud, caught new momentum, and pressed them under. We waited for them to surface on the other side, to pop up in a calm place, rattling water and light from their hair, but we never saw them again.

  We probed the river with poles and dragged it with a grappling hook for three hours. Instead of our own people, we dredged up belts of French machine-gun ammunition, a box of unexploded Japanese potato mashers that leaked rust and green slime on the bank, American soda-pop cans, and a cargo net filled with Vietcong dead that must have been dropped by one of our helicopters. When the hook pulled the net tautly from the water's surface, we saw arms and heads draped through the webbing like those of prisoners long since tired of their eternal sentence.

  I wrote letters to the families of the two boys in Conroe, Texas. I said they had given their lives in trying to help others. Their lives had not been taken; they were given. I did not say I regretted there were no medals for innocence and the trusting courage it took to keep being a Texas country boy in a land that seemed created for jaded and transient colonials.