In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 22

The heel of his hand was half-mooned with calluses, his voice as thick as wet sand. A holstered cap-and-ball revolver hung on his thigh.

"You look puzzled," he said.

"Is this how it comes? Death, I mean."

"Ask them."

Some of his men were marked with open, bloodless wounds I could put my fist in. Beyond the stacked rifles, at the edge of the firelight, was an ambulance wagon. Someone had raked a tangle of crusted bandages off the tailgate onto the ground.

"Am I dead?" I said.

"You don't look it to me."

"You said you're John Bell Hood."

"That's correct."

His face was narrow, his cheeks hollow, his skin grained with soot.

"I've read a great deal about you."

"I hope it met your approval."

"You were at Gettysburg and Atlanta. You commanded the Texas Brigade. They could never make you quit."

"My political enemies among President Davis's cabinet sometimes made note of that fact."

"What's the date?" I asked.

"It's April 21,1865."

"I don't understand. "

"Understand what?"

"Lee has already surrendered. The war's over. What are you doing here?"

"It's never over. I would think you'd know that. You were a lieutenant in the United States Army, weren 't you?"

"Yes, but I gave my war back to the people who started it. I did that a long time ago."

"No, you didn't. It goes on and on."

He eased himself down on an oak stump, his narrow eyes lighting with pain. He straightened his artificial leg in front of him. The hand that hung out of his sling had wasted to the size of a monkey's paw. A corporal threw a log into the campfire, and sparks rose into the tree branches overhead.

"It's us against them, my friend," he said. "There're insidious men abroad in the land." He swept his crutch at the marsh. "My G.o.d, man, use your eyes."

"The federals ? "

"Are your eyes and ears stopped with dirt? "

"I think this conversation is not real. I think all of this will be gone with daylight."

"You're not a fool, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux. Don't pretend to be one."

"I've seen your grave in New Orleans. No, it's in Metairie. You died of the yellowjack."

"That's not correct. I died when they struck the colors, suh." He lifted his crutch and pointed it at me as he would a weapon. The firelight shone on his yellow teeth. "They'll try your soul, son. But don't give up your cause. Occupy the high ground and make them take it foot by b.l.o.o.d.y foot."

"I don't know what we're talking about."

"For G.o.d's sakes, what's wrong with you? Venal and evil men are destroying the world you were born in. Can't you understand that? Why do I see fear in your face?"

"/ 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 gla.s.s, 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 thesupervising 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 s.h.i.+rt pocket, adjusted his gla.s.ses, 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 aboutthe 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.