In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (19 page)

A TROPICAL STORM THAT HAD BEEN EXPECTED TO HIT THE Alabama coast changed direction and made landfall at Grand Isle, Louisiana. At false dawn the sky had been bone white, then a red glow spread across the eastern horizon as though a distant fire were burning out of control. The barometer dropped; the air became suddenly cooler; the bream began popping the bayou's darkening surface; and in less than an hour a line of roiling, lightning-forked clouds moved out of the south and covered the wetlands from horizon to horizon like an enormous black lid. The rain thundered like hammers on the wood dock and the bait shop's tin roof, filled our unrented boats with water, clattered on the islands of lily pads in the bayou, and dissolved the marsh into a gray and shapeless mist.

      Then I saw a sleek white cabin cruiser approaching the dock, its windows beaten with rain, riding in on its own wake as the pilot cut back the throttle. Batist and I were under the awning, carrying the barbecue pit into the lee of the shop. Batist had two inches of a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth; he squinted through the rain at the boat as it bumped against the strips of rubber tire nailed to the dock pilings.

      "Who that is?" he said.

      "I hate to think."

      "He wavin' at you, Dave. Hey, it's that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot'er night. That man must surely love water."

      We set the barbecue pit under the eave of the building and got back inside. The rain was whipping off the roof like frothy ropes. Through the screen window I could see Elrod and Kelly Drummond moving around inside the boat's cabin.

      "Oh, oh, he trying to get out on the dock, Dave. I ain't goin' out there to pull him out of the bayou this time, me. Somebody ought to give that man swimmin' lessons or a big rock, one, give people some relief."

      Our awning extended on wires all the way to the lip of the dock, and Elrod was trying to climb over the cruiser's gunwale into the protected area under the canvas. He was bare-chested, his white golf slacks soaked and pasted against his skin, his rubber-soled boat shoes sopping with water. His hand slipped off the piling, and he fell backward onto the deck, raked a fishing rod down with him and snapped it in half so that it looked like a broken coat hanger.

      I put on my rain hat and went outside.

      Elrod shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up at me in the rain. A purple and green rose was tattooed on his upper left chest.

      "I guess I haven't got my sea legs yet," he said.

      "Get back inside," I said, and jumped down into the boat.

      "We're going after speckled trout. They always hit in the rain. At least they do on the Texas coast."

      The rain was cold and stung like BBs. From two feet away I could smell the heavy surge of beer on his breath.

      "I'm going inside," I said, and pulled open the cabin door.

      "Sure. That's what I was trying to do. Invite you down for a sandwich or a Dr Pepper or a tonic or something," he said, and closed the cabin door behind us.

      Kelly Drummond wore leather sandals, a pair of jeans, and the Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name ironed on the back that Alafair had given to Elrod after he had fallen into the bayou. She picked up a towel and began rubbing Elrod's hair with it. Her green eyes were clear, her face fresh, as though she had recently awakened from a deep sleep.

      "You want to go fishing with us?" she said.

      "I wouldn't advise going out on the salt today. You'll probably get knocked around pretty hard out there."

      She looked at Elrod.

      "The wind'll die pretty soon," he said.

      "I wouldn't count on that," I said.

      "The guy who rented us the boat said it can take pretty heavy seas. This weather's not that big a deal, is it?" he said.

      On the floor was an open cooler filled with cracked ice, long-necked bottles of Dixie, soda pop, and tonic water.

      "I can outfit you with some fly rods and popping bugs," I said. "Why not wait until the rain quits and then try for some bass and goggle-eye perch?"

      "When's the last time you caught fresh-water fish right after a rain?" He smiled crookedly at me.

      "Suit yourself. But I think what you're doing is a bad idea," I said. I looked at Kelly.

      "El, we don't have to go today," she said. "Why don't we just drive down to New Orleans and mess around in the French Quarter?"

      "I planned this all week."

      "Come on, El. Give it up. It looks like Noah's flood out there."

      "Sorry, we've got to do it. You can understand that, cain't you, Mr. Robicheaux?"

      "Not really. Anyway, watch the bend in the channel about three miles south. The water's been low and there're some snags on the left."

      "Three miles south? Yeah, I'll watch it," he said, his eyes refocusing on nothing. His suntanned, taut chest was beaded with water. His feet were wide spread to keep his balance, even though the boat was not moving. "You sure you don't want a tonic?"

      "Thanks, anyway. Good luck to you all," I said.

      Before I went out the cabin door, Kelly made her eyes jump at me, but I closed the door behind me and stepped up on the gunwale and onto the dock.

      I began pushing huge balloons of water out of the awning with a broom handle and didn't hear her come up behind me.

      "He'll listen to you. Tell him not to go out there," she said. There was a pinched indentation high up on her right cheek.

      "I think you should tell him that yourself."

      "You don't understand. He had a big fight with Mikey yesterday about the script and walked off the set. Then this morning he put the boat on Mikey's credit card. Maybe if we take the boat back now, the man'll tear up the credit slip. You think he might do that?"

      "I don't know."

      "El's going to get fired, Mr. Robicheaux."

      "Tell Elrod you're staying here. That's about all I can suggest."

      "He'll go anyway."

      "I wish I could help you."

      "That's it?
Au revoir,
fuck you, boat people?"

      "In the last two days Elrod told both me and my wife he'd like to go to an AA meeting with me. Now it's ten in the morning and he's already ripped. What do you think the real problem is—the boat, your director, the rain, me, or maybe something else?"

      She turned around as though to leave, then turned back and faced me again. There was a bright, painful light in her green eyes, the kind that comes right before tears.

      "What do I do?" she said.

      "Go inside the shop. I'll try again," I said.

      I climbed back down into the boat and went into the cabin. He had his elbows propped on the instrument panel, while he ate a po'-boy sandwich and stared at the rain dancing in a yellow spray on the bayou.

      His face had become wan and indolent, either from fatigue or alcoholic stupor, passive to all insult or intimidation. The more I talked, the more he yawned.

      "She's a good lady, El," I said. "A lot of men would cut off their fingers with tin snips to have one like her."

      "You got that right."

      "Then why don't you quit this bullshit, at least for one day, and let her have a little serenity?"

      Then his eyes focused on the cooler, on an amber, sweating bottle of Dixie nestled in the ice.

      "All right," he said casually. "Let me borrow your fly rods, Mr. Robicheaux. I'll take good care of them."

      "You're not going out on the salt?"

      "No, I get seasick anyway."

      "You want to leave the beer box with me?"

      "It came with the boat. That fellow might get mad if I left it somewhere. Thanks for your thoughtfulness, though."

      "Yeah, you bet."

      After they were gone, I resolved that Elrod Sykes was on his own with his problems.

      "Hey, Dave, that man really a big movie actor?" Batist said.

      "He's big stuff out in Hollywood, Batist. Or at least he used to be."

      "He rich?"

      "Yeah, I guess he is."

      "That's his reg'lar woman, too, huh?"

      "Yep."

      "How come he's so unhappy?"

      "I don't know, Batist. Probably because he's a drunk."

      "Then why don't he stop gettin' drunk?"

      "I don't know, partner."

      "You mad 'cause I ax a question?"

      "Not in the least, Batist," I said, and headed for the back of the shop and began stacking crates of canned soda pop in the storeroom.

      "You got some funny moods, you," I heard him say behind me.

      A half hour later the phone rang.

      "Hello," I said.

      "We got a problem down here," a voice said.

      There was static on the line and rain was throbbing on the shop's tin roof.

      "Elrod?"

      "Yeah. We hit some logs or a sandbar or something."

      "Where are you?"

      "At a pay phone in a little store. I waded ashore."

      "Where's the boat?"

      "I told you, it's messed up."

      "Wait until the water rises, then you'll probably float free."

      "There's a bunch of junk in the propellor."

      "What are you asking me, Elrod?"

      "Can you come down here?"

      Batist was eating some chicken and dirty rice at the counter. He looked at my face and laughed to himself.

      "How far down the bayou is the boat?" I said.

      "About three miles. That bend you were talking about."

      "The bend I was talking about, huh?"

      "Yeah, you were right. There're some dead trees or logs in the water there. We ran right into them."

      "We?"

      "Yeah."

      "I'll come after you, but I'm also going to give you a bill for my time."

      "Sure thing, absolutely, Dave. This is really good of you. If lean—"

      I put the receiver back on the hook.

      "Tell Bootsie I'll be back in about an hour," I said.

      Batist had finished his lunch and was peeling the cellophane off a fresh cigar. The humor had gone out of his face.

      "Dave, I ain't one to tell you what to do, no," he said. "But there's people that's always gonna be axin' for somet'ing. When you deal with them kind, it don't matter how much you give, it ain't never gonna be enough."

      He lit his cigar and fixed his eyes on me as he puffed on the smoke.

      I put on my raincoat and hat, hitched a boat and trailer to my truck, and headed down the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees toward the general store where Elrod had made his call. The trailer was bouncing hard in the flooded chuck-holes, and through the rearview mirror I could see the outboard engine on the boat's stern wobbling against the engine mounts. I shifted down to second gear, pulled to a wide spot on the road, and let a car behind me pass. The driver, a man wearing a shapeless fedora, looked in the opposite direction of me, out toward the bayou, as he passed.

      Elrod was not at the general store, and I drove a quarter mile farther south to the bend where he had managed to put the cabin cruiser right through the limbs of a submerged tree and simultaneously scrape the bow up on a sandbar. The bayou was running high and yellow now, and gray nests of dead morning-glory vines had stuck to the bow and fanned back and forth in the current.

      I backed my trailer into the shallows, then unwinched my boat into the water, started the engine, and opened it up in a shuddering whine against the steady clatter of the rain on the bayou's surface.

      I came astern of the cabin cruiser and looped the painter on a cleat atop the gunwale so that my boat swung back in the lee of the cruiser. The current was swirling with mud and

      I couldn't see the propeller, but obviously it was fouled. From under the keel floated a streamer of torn hyacinth vines and lily pads, baited trotline, a divot ripped out of a conical fish net, and even the Clorox marker bottle that went with it.

      Elrod came out of the cabin with a newspaper over his head.

      "How does it look?" he said.

      "I'll cut some of this trash loose, then we'll try to back her into deeper water. How'd you hit a fish net? Didn't you see the Clorox bottle?"

      "Is that how they mark those things?"

      I opened my Puma knife, reached as deep below the surface as I could, and began pulling and sawing away the flotsam from the propeller.

      "I 'spect the truth is I don't have any business out here," he said.

      I flung a handful of twisted hyacinths and tangled fishline toward the bank and looked up into his face. The alcoholic shine had gone out of his eyes. Now they simply looked empty, on the edge of regret.

      "You want me to get down in the water and do that?" he asked. Then he glanced away at something on the far bank.

      "No, that's all right," I said. I stepped up on the bow of my boat and over the rail of the cabin cruiser. "Let's see what happens. If I can't shake her loose, I'll tie my outboard onto the bow and try to pull her sideways into the current."

      We went inside the dryness of the cabin and closed the door. Kelly was sleeping on some cushions, her face nestled into one arm. When she woke, she looked around sleepily, her cheek wrinkled with the imprint of her arm; then she realized that little had changed in her and Elrod's dreary morning and she said, "Oh," almost like a child to whom awakenings are not good moments.

      I started the engine, put it in reverse, and gave it the gas. The hull vibrated against the sandbar, and through the back windows I could see mud and dead vegetation boiling to the bayou's surface behind the stern. But we didn't move off the sandbar. I tried to go forward and rock it loose, then I finally cut the engine.

      "It's set pretty hard, but it might come off if you push against the bow, Elrod," I said. "You want to do that?"