In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 29

Behind us, an elderly fat mulatto woman in a print dress came out on her porch and began gesturing at us. Doobie Patout glanced at her, then opened the pa.s.senger door to the wrecker and paused before getting in.

"Y'all can rake spinach out of that ditch all you want," he said. "I ran a metal detector over it last night. There's no gun in it. So don't go back to New Iberia and be tellin' people you got a bad shake over here."

"Y'all gonna do somet'ing 'bout my garden, you?" the woman shouted off the porch.

The wrecker drove off with the Buick wobbling on the winch cable behind it. At the corner the wrecker turned and a hubcap popped off the Buick and bounced on its own course down the empty dirt road.

"My, what a nasty little man," Rosie said.

I looked back at the footprints in the vegetable patch. They exited in the Johnson gra.s.s and disappeared completely. We walked into the shade of the oaks and looked back at the road, the bits of broken gla.s.s that glinted in the dirt, the brilliant glare of sunlight on the white sh.e.l.l parking lot. I felt a weariness that I couldn't find words for.

"Let's talk to some of the neighbors, then pack it in," I said.

We didn't have to go far. The elderly woman whom we had been ignoring labored down her porch steps with a cane and came toward us like a determined crab. Her legs were bowed and popping with varicose veins, her body ringed with fat, her skin gold and hairless, her turquoise eyes alive with indignation.

"Where that other one gone?" she said.

"Which one?" I said.

"That policeman you was talkin' to."

"He went back to his office."

"Who gonna pay for my li'l garden?" she asked. "What I gone do wit' them smush tomato? What I gone do wit' them smush eggplant, me?"

"Did you see something last night, auntie?" I said.

"You ax me what I seen? Go look my li'l garden. You got eyes, you?"

"No, I mean did you see the shooting last night?"

"I was in the bat'room, me."

"You didn't see anything?" Rosie said.

The woman jabbed at a ruined eggplant with her cane.

"I seen that. That look like a duck egg to you? They don't talk English where y'all come from?"

"Did you see a woman in a white car outside your house?" I said.

"I seen her. They put her in an ambulance. She was dead."

"I see," I said.

"What you gone do 'bout my garden?"

"I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said.

"He can put his big feet all over my plants and I cain't do nothin' 'bout it?"

"Who?" I said.

"The man that run past my bat'room. I just tole you. You hard of hearin' just like you hard of seein'? I got up to go to the bat'room."

My head was swimming.

"Listen, auntie, this is very important," I said. "You're telling me you saw a man run past your window?"

"That's right. I seen him smush my li'l plants, break down my tomato pole, keep on runnin' right out yonder t'rough them tree, right on 'cross the tracks till he was gone. I seen the light on that li'l gun in his hand, too."

Rosie and I looked at each other.

"Can you describe this fellow, auntie?" I said.

"Yeah, he's a white man who don't care where he put his big muddy feet."

"Did the gun look like this one?" Rosie said, opened her purse, and lifted out her .357 magnum.

"No, it mo' li'l than that."

"Why didn't you tell this to the police last night?" I asked.

"I tole them. I be talkin' and they be carryin' on with each other like I ain't here, like I some old woman just in they way. It ain't changed, no."

"What hasn't?" I said.

"When the last time white people 'round here ax us what we t'ink about anyt'ing? Ain't n.o.body ax me if I want that juke 'cross from my li'l house, no. Ain't n.o.body worried 'bout my li'l garden. Black folk still black folk, livin' out here without no pave, with dust blowin' off the road t'rough my screens. Don't be pretendin' like it ain't so."

"You've helped us a great deal, auntie," I said.

She leaned over on her cane, wrapped a tangle of destroyed tomato vines around her hand, and flung them out into the gra.s.s. Then she began walking back toward her porch, the folds of skin in her neck and shoulders creasing like soft tallow.

"Would you mind if we came to see you again?" I asked "Waste mo' of my day, play like you care what happen down here on the dirt road? Why you ax me? You comin' when you want, anyway, ain't you?"

Her b.u.t.tocks swelled like an elephant's against her dress when she worked her way up the steps. On the way out of town we stopped at a nursery and I paid cash to have a dozen tomato plants delivered to her address.

"Not smart giving anything to a potential witness, Slick," Rosie said when we were back on the highway.

"You're used to operating in the normal world, Rosie. Did you hear what Doobie Patout said? Lafayette Homicide has given that girl's death the priority of a hangnail. Welcome to the New South."

WHEN I GOT BACK HOME I TURNED ON THE WINDOW FAN IN THE bedroom, undressed, and lay down on top of the sheets with my arm across my eyes. The curtains, which were printed with small pink flowers, lifted and fell in the warm breeze, and I could hear Tripod running back and forth on his chain in the dead leaves under the pecan trees.

In my sleep I thought I could feel the .45 jumping in my palm, the slide slamming down on a fresh cartridge, the recoil climbing up my forearm like the reverberation from ajackhammer. Then, as though in slow motion, I saw a woman's face bursting apart; a small black hole appeared right below the mouth, then the fragile bone structure caved in upon itself, like a rubber mask collapsing, and the back of her head suddenly erupted in a b.l.o.o.d.y mist.

I wanted to wake from my dream, force myself even inside my sleep to realize that it was indeed only a dream, but instead the images changed and I heard the ragged popping of small-arms and saw the border of a hardwood forest in autumn, the leaves painted with fire, and a contingent of Confederate infantry retreating into it.

No, I didn't simply see them; I was in their midst, under fire with them, my throat burning with the same thirst, my hands trembling as I tried to reload my weapon, my skin twitching as though someone were about to peel it away in strips. I heard a toppling round throp close to my ear and whine away deep in the woods, saw the long scarlet streaks in the leaves where the wounded had been dragged behind tree trunks, and was secretly glad that someone else, not me, had crumpled to his knees, had cried out for his mother, had tried futilely to press his blue nest of entrails back inside his stomach.

The enemy advanced across an open field out of their own cannon smoke, their bayonets fixed, their artillery arching over their heads and exploding behind us in columns of dirt and flame. The light was as soft and golden as the season, but the air inside the woods was stifling, filled with dust and particles o'f leaves, the smell of cordite and bandages black with gangrene, the raw odor of blood.

Then I knew, even in sleep, what the dream meant. I could see the faces of the enemy now, hear the rattle of their equipment, their officers yelling, "Form up, boys, form up!" They were young, frightened, unknowledgeable of politics or economics, trembling as much as I was, their mouths too dry now even to pray, their sweaty palms locked on the stocks of their rifles. But I didn't care about their innocence, theirbeardless faces, the crimson flowers that burst from their young b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I just wanted to live. I wanted every round we fired to find a target, to buckle bone, to shatter lungs and explode the heart; I wanted their ranks to dissolve into a cacophony of sorrow.

My head jerked erect on the pillow. The room was hot and close and motes of dust spun in the columns of weak light that shone through the curtains. My breath rasped in my throat, and my chest and stomach were slick with perspiration.

The general sat in a straight-backed chair by the foot of my bed, with his campaign hat resting on one knee. His beard was trimmed and he wore a brushed gray coat with a high gold collar. He was gazing out the window at the s.h.i.+fting patterns of light made by the pecan and oak trees.

"You!" I said.

"I hope you don't mind my being here."

"No, I-you simply surprised me."

"You shouldn't have remorse about the kinds of feelings you just experienced, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux. A desire to live doesn't mean you lack humanity."

"I opened up on the Buick too soon. I let off the whole magazine without seeing what I was shooting at."

"You thought your life was at risk, suh. What were you supposed to do?"

"They say I killed an unarmed woman, general."

"Yes, I think that would probably trouble me, too." He turned his hat in a circle on his knee. "I have the impression that you were very fond of your father, the trapper."

"Excuse me?"

"Didn't he once tell you that if everyone agrees on something, it's probably wrong?"

"Those were his words."

"Then why not give them some thought?"

"General, somebody has done a serious mind f.u.c.k on me. I can't trust what I see or hear anymore."

"I'm sorry. Someone has done what?"

"It's the same kind of feeling I had once in Golden Gloves. A guy hooked me after the bell, hard, right behind the ear. For two or three days I felt like something was torn loose from the bone, like my brain was floating in ajar."

"Be brave."

"I see that woman, the back of her head . . . Her hair was glued to the carpet with her own blood."

"Think about what you just said."

"What?"

"You're a good police officer, an intelligent man. What does your eye tell you?"

"I need some help, general."

"You belong to the quick, you wake in the morning to the smell of flowers, a woman responds to the touch of your fingers, and you ask help of the dead, suh?"

He lifted himself to his feet with his crutch.

"I didn't mean to offend you," I said.

"In your dream you saw us retreating into a woods and you saw the long blue line advancing out of the smoke in the field, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Were you afraid?"

"Yes."

"Because you thought time had run out for you, didn't you?"

"Yes, I knew it had."

"We should have died there but we held them. Our thirst was terrible. We drank rainwater from the hoof prints of livestock. Then that night we tied sticks in the mouths of our wounded so they wouldn't cry out while we slipped out of the woods and joined the rest of our boys."

The wind began blowing hard in the trees outside the window. Last fall's leaves swirled off the ground and blew against the house.

"I sense resentment in you," he said.

"I already paid my dues. I don't want-"

"You don't want what?" He pared a piece of dirt from under his fingernail.

"To be the only man under a flag."

"Ah, we never quit paying dues, my friend. I must be going now. The wind's out of the south. There'll be thunder by this afternoon. I always have a hard time distinguis.h.i.+ng it from Yankee cannon."

He made a clucking sound with his tongue, fitted his campaign hat on his head, took up his crutch, and walked through the blades of the window fan into a spinning vortex of gold and scarlet leaves.

WHEN I FINALLY WOKE FROM MY SLEEP IN MIDAFTERNOON, like rising from the warm stickiness of an opium dream, I saw Alafair watching me through the partly opened bedroom door. Her lips were parted silently, her round, tan face wan with incomprehension. The sheets were moist and tangled around my legs. I tried to smile.

"You okay, Dave?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You were having a dream. You were making all kinds of sounds."

"It's probably not too good to sleep in the daytime, little guy."

"You got malaria again?"

"No, it doesn't bother me much anymore."

She walked into the room and placed one hand on the bedstead. She looked at the floor.