In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (35 page)

      "I'm going to be a little hard on you, El. I think you're using her death to feel sorry for yourself."

      "What?" His face was incredulous.

      "When I lost my wife I found out that self-pity and guilt could be a real rush, particularly when I didn't have Brother Jim Beam to do the job."

      "That's a lousy fucking thing to say."

      "I was talking about myself. Maybe you're different from me."

      "What the hell's the matter with you? You don't think it's natural to feel loss, to feel grief, when somebody dies? I tried to close the hole in her throat with my hands, her blood was running through my fingers. She was still alive and looking straight into my eyes. Like she was drowning and neither one of us could do anything about it." He pressed his forehead against his fist; his flexed thigh trembled against his slacks.

      "I got four of my men killed on a trail in Vietnam. Then I got drunk over it. I used them, I didn't respect them for the brave men they were. That's the way alcoholism works, El."

      "I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me be for a while."

      "Will you go to the meeting?"

      He didn't answer. There was a pained light in his eyes like someone had twisted barbed wire around his forehead.

      "You don't have to talk, just listen to what these guys have to say about their own experience," I said.

      "I'd rather pass tonight."

      "Suit yourself," I said.

      I told Bootsie where I was going and walked out to the truck. The cicadas droned from horizon to horizon under the vault of plum-colored sky. Then I heard Elrod walking through the leaves and pecan husks behind me.

      "If I sit around here, I'll end up in the beer joint," he said, and opened the passenger door to the truck. Then he raised his finger at me. "But I'm going to ask you one thing, Dave. Don't ever accuse me of using Kelly again. If you do, I'm going to knock your teeth down your goddamn throat."

      There were probably a number of things I could have said in reply; but you don't deny a momentary mental opiate to somebody who has made an appointment in the Garden of Gethsemane.

THE BLACK JUKEJOINT IN ST. MARTINVILLE WAS SET BACK IN a grove of trees off a yellow dirt road not far from Bayou Teche. It was one of those places that could be dropped by a tornado in the middle of an Iowa cornfield and you would instantly know that its origins were in the Deep South. The plank walls and taped windows vibrated with noise from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night. Strings of Christmas-tree lights rimmed the doors and windows year round; somebody was barbecuing ribs on top of a tin barrel, only a few feet from a pair of dilapidated privies that were caked under the eaves with yellow jacket and mud-dauber nests; people copulated back in the woods against tree trunks and fought in the parking lot with knives, bottles, and razors. Inside, the air was always thick with the smell of muscatel, smoke, cracklings, draft beer and busthead whiskey, expectorated snuff, pickled hogs' feet, perfume, body powder, sweat, and home-grown reefer.

      Sam Patin sat on a small stage with a canopy over it hung with red tassels and miniature whiskey bottles that clinked in the backdraft from a huge ventilator fan. His white suit gleamed with an electric purple glow from the floor lamps, and the waxed black surfaces of his twelve-string guitar winked with tiny lights. The floor in front of him was packed with dancers. When he blew into the harmonica attached to a wire brace on his neck and began rolling the steel picks on his fingers across an E-major blues run, the crowd moaned in unison. They yelled at the stage as though they were confirming a Biblical statement he had made at a revival, pressed their loins together with no consciousness of other people around them, and roared with laughter even though Hogman sang of a man who had sold his soul for an ox-blood Stetson hat he had just lost in a crap game:

     
Stagolee went runnin'

     
In the red-hot boilin' sun,

     
Say look in my chiffro drawer, woman,

     
Get me my smokeless .41.

     
Stagolee tole Miz Billy,

     
You don't believe your man is dead,

     
Come down to the barroom,

     
See the .41 hole in his head.

     
That li’l judge found Stagolee guilty

     
And that li’l
 
clerk wrote it down,

     
On a cold winter morning,

     
Stagolee was Angola bound.

     
Forty-dollar coffin,

     
Eighty-dollar hack,

     
Carried that po' man to the burying ground,

     
Ain't never comin'  back.

      Two feet away from me the bartender filled a tray with draft beers without ever looking at me. He was bald and had thick gray muttonchop sideburns that looked like they were pasted on his cheeks. Then he wiped his hands on his apron and lit a cigar.

      "You sho' you in the right place?" he said.

      "I'm a friend of Hogman's," I said.

      "So this is where you come to see him?"

      "Why not?"

      "What you havin', chief?"

      "A 7 Up."

      He opened a bottle, placed it in front of me without a glass, and walked away. The sides of the bottle were warm and filmed with dust. Twenty minutes later Hogman had not taken a break and was still playing.

      "You want another one?" the bartender said.

      "Yeah, I would. How about some ice or a cold one this time?" I said.

      "The gentleman wants a cold one," he said to no one in particular. Then he filled a tall glass with cracked ice and set it on the bar with another dusty bottle of 7 Up. "Why cain't y'all leave him alone? He done his time, ain't he?"

      "I look like the heat?" I said.

      "You
are
the heat, chief. You and that other one out yonder."

      "What other one? What are you talking about, partner?"

      "The white man that was out yonder in that blue Mercury."

      I got off the stool and looked into the parking lot through the Venetian blinds and the scrolled neon tubing of a Dixie beer sign.

"I don't see any blue Merc," I said.

      " 'Cause he gone now, chief. Like it's a black people's club, like he figured that out, you understand what I'm sayin'?"

      "What'd this guy look like?" I said.

      "White. He look white. That he'p you out?" he said, tossed a towel into the tin sink, and walked down the duck-boards toward the far end of the bar.

      Finally Hogman slipped his harmonica brace and guitar strap off his neck, looked directly at me, and went through a curtained door into a back storage room. I followed him inside. He sat on a wood chair, among stacks of beer cases, and had already started eating a dinner of pork chops, greens, and cornbread from a tin plate that rested on another chair.

      "I ain't had a chance to eat today. This movie-star life is gettin' rough on my time. You want some?" he said.

      "No, thanks." I leaned against a stack of beer cartons.

      "The lady fix me these chops don't know how to season, but they ain't too bad."

      "You want to get to it, Sam?"

      "You t'ink I just messin' with you, huh? All right, this is how it play. A long time ago up at Angola I got into trouble over a punk. Not my punk, you understand, I didn't do none of that unnatural kind of stuff, a punk that belong to a guy name Big Melon. Big Melon was growin' and sellin' dope for a couple of the hacks. Him and his punk had a whole truck patch of it behind the cornfield."

      "Hogman, I'm afraid this sounds a little remote."

      "You always
know,
you always got somet'ing smart to say. That's why you runnin' around in circles, that's why them men laughin' at you."

      "Which men?"

      "The ones who killed that nigger you dug up in the Atchafalaya. You gonna be patient now, or you want to go back to doin' it your way?"

      "I'm looking forward to hearing your story, Hogman."

      "See, these two hacks had them a good bidness. Big Melon and the punk growed the dope, cured it, bagged it all up, and the hacks sold it in Lafayette. They carried it down there themselves sometimes, or the executioner and another cop picked it up for them. They didn't let nobody get back there by that cornfield. But I was half-trusty then, livin' in Camp I, and I used to cut across the field to get to the hog lot. That's how come I found out they was growin' dope back there. So Big Melon tole the hack I knowed what they was doin', that I was gonna snitch them off, and then the punk planted a jar of julep under my bunk so I'd lose my trusty job and my good-time.

      "I tole the hack it ain't right, I earn my job. He say, 'Hogman, you fuck with the wrong people in here, you goin' in the box and you goin' stay in there till you come out a white man.' That's what the bossman say. I tole him it don't matter how long they keep me in there, it still ain't right. They wrote me up for sassin' and put me to pickin' cotton. When I get down in a thin patch and come up short, they make me stand up all night on an oil barrel, dirty and smellin' bad and without no supper.

      "I went to the bossman in the field, say I don't care what Big Melon do, what them hacks do, it ain't my bidness, I just want my job back on the hog lot. He say, 'You better keep shut, boy, you better fill that bag, you better not put no dirt clods in it when you weigh in, neither, like you tried to do yesterday.' I say, 'Boss, what's I gonna do? I ain't put no dirt clods in my bag, I ain't give nobody trouble, I don't be carin' Big Melon want to grow dope for the hacks.' He knock me down with a horse quirt and put me in the sweat-box on Camp A for three days, in August, with the sun boilin' off them iron sides, with a bucket between my knees to go to the bat'room in."

      He had stopped eating now and his face looked solitary and bemused, as though his own experience had become strange and unfamiliar in his recounting of it.

      "You were a standup guy, Hogman. I always admired your courage," I said.

      "No, I was scared of them people, 'cause when I come out of the box I knowed the gunbulls was gonna kill me. I seen them do it befo', up on the levee, where they work them Red Hat boys double-time from cain't-see to cain't-see. They shot and buried them po' boys without never missin' a beat, just the way somebody run over a dog with a truck and keep right on goin'.

      "I had me a big Stella twelve-string guitar, bought it off a Mexican on Congress Street in Houston. I used to keep it in the count-man's cage so nobody wouldn't be foolin' with it while I was workin' or sleepin'. When I come out of the box and taken a shower and eat a big plate of rice and beans, I ax the count-man first thing for my guitar. He say, 'I'm sorry, Sam, but the bossman let Big Melon take it while you was in the box.'

      "I waited till that night and went to Big Melon's 'hunk,' that's what we call the place where a wolf stay with his punk. There's that big fat nigger sittin' naked on his mattress, like a big pile of black inner tubes, while the punk is playin' my guitar on the floor, lipstick and rouge all over his face and pink panties on his li'l ass.

      "I say, 'Melon, you or your punk fuck wit' my guitar again and I gone cut that black dick off. It don't matter if I go to the electric chair for it or not. I'm gonna joog you in the shower, in the chow line, or while you pumpin' your poke chops here. They's gonna be one fat nigger they gonna have to haul in a piano crate down to the graveyard.'

      "Melon smile at me and say, 'We just borrowed it, Hogman. We was gonna give it back. Here, you want Pookie to rub your back for you?'

      "But I knowed they was comin'. Two nights later, right befo' lockup, I was goin' to the toilet and I turn around and his punk is standin' in the do'. I say, 'What you want, Pookie?' He say, 'I'm sorry I was playin' your guitar, Hogman. I wants be yo' friend, maybe come stay up at your hunk some nights.'

      "When I reached down to pull up my britches, he come outta his back pocket with a dirk and aim it right at my heart. I catched him around the neck and bent him backwards, then I kept bendin' him backwards and squeezin' acrost his windpipe, and he was floppin' real hard, shakin' all over, he shit in his pants, 'cause I could smell it, then it went
snap,
just like you bust a real dry piece of firewood acrost your knee.

      "I look up and there's one of the hacks who's selling the dope. He say, 'Hogman, we ain't gonna let this be a problem. We'll just stuff this li'l bitch out yonder in the levee with them others. Won't nobody care, won't make no difference to nobody, not even to Big Melon. It'll just be our secret.'

      "All that time they'd been smarter than me. They sent Pookie to joog me, but they didn't care if he killed me or if I killed him. It worked out for them just fine. They knew I'd never cause them no trouble. They was right, too. I didn't sass, I done what they tole me, I even he'ped hoe them dope plants a couple of times."

      "I don't understand, Sam. You're telling me that the lynched black man was killed by one of these guards?"

      "I ain't said that. I said they was a bunch of them sellin' that dope. They was takin' it out of the pen in a police car. What was the name of that nigger you dug out of the sandbar?"

      "DeWitt Prejean."

      "I'll tell you this. He was fuckin' a white man's wife. Start axin' what he done for a livin', you'll find the people been causin' you all this grief."

      "Who's the guy I'm looking for?"

      "I said all I can say."

      "Look, Sam, don't be afraid of these gunbulls or cops from years ago. They can't harm you now."

      He put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, then took a pint bottle of rum from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb. He held the bottle below his mouth. His long fingers were glistening with grease from the pork chops he had eaten.