"I want to get your reaction to what some people might call a developing situation," he said.
"Developing situation?"
"I went two years to USL, Dave. I"m not the most articulate person in the world. I just try to deal with realities as they are."
"I get the feeling we"re about to sell the ranch."
"It"s not a perfect world."
"Where"s the heat coming from?" I said.
"There"re a lot of people who want Balboni out of town."
"Which people?"
"Business people."
"They used to get along with him just fine."
"People loved Mussolini until it came time to hang him upside down in a filling station."
"Come on, cut to it, sheriff. Who are the other players?"
"The feds. They want Balboni bad. Doucet"s lawyer says his client can put Julie so far down under the penal system they"ll have to dig him up to bury him."
"What"s Doucet get?"
"He cops to resisting arrest and procuring, one-year max on an honor farm. Then maybe the federal witness protection program, psychological counseling, ongoing supervision, all that jazz."
"Tell them to go f.u.c.k themselves."
"Why is it I thought you might say that?"
"Call the press in. Tell them what kind of bulls.h.i.t"s going on here. Give them the morgue photos of Cherry LeBlanc."
"Be serious. They"re not going to run pictures like that. Look, we can"t indict with what we have. This way we get the guy into custody and permanent supervision."
"He"s going to kill again. It"s a matter of time."
"So what do you suggest?"
"Don"t give an inch. Make them sweat ball bearings."
"With what? I"m surprised his lawyer even wants to accept the procuring charge."
"They think I"ve got a photo of Doucet with Balboni and Cherry LeBlanc in Biloxi."
"Think?"
"Doucet"s face is out of focus. The man in the picture looks like bread dough."
"Great."
"I still say we should exhume the body and match the utility knife to the slash wounds."
"All an expert witness can do is testify that the wounds are consistent with those that might have been made with a utility knife. At least that"s what the prosecutor"s office says. Doucet will walk and so will Balboni. I say we take the bird in hand."
"It"s a mistake."
"You don"t have to answer to people, Dave. I do. They want Julie out of this parish and they don"t care how we do it."
"Maybe you should give some thought about having to answer to the family of Doucet"s next victim, sheriff."
He picked up a chain of paper clips and trailed them around his blotter.
"I don"t guess there"s much point in continuing this conversation, is there?" he said.
"I"m right about this guy. Don"t let him fly."
"Wake up, Dave. He flew this morning." He dropped the paper clips into a clean ashtray and walked past me with his coffee cup. "You"d better take off a little early this afternoon. This hurricane looks to be a real frog stringer."
IT HIT LATE THAT EVENING, PUSHING WAVES AHEAD OF IT THAT curled over houseboats and stilt cabins at West Cote Blanche Bay and flattened them like a huge fist. In the south the sky was the color of burnt pewter, then rain-streaked, flumed with thunderheads. You could see tornadoes dropping like suspended snakes from the clouds, filling with water and splintered trees from the marshes, and suddenly breaking apart like whips snapping themselves into nothingness.
I heard canvas popping loose on the dock, billowing against the ropes Batist and I had tried to secure it with, then bursting free and flapping end over end among the cattails. The windows swam with water, lightning exploded out of the gray-green haze of swamp, and in the distance, in the roar of wind and thunder that seemed to clamp down on us like an enormous black gla.s.s bell, I thought I could hear the terrified moaning of my neighbor"s cattle as they fought to find cover in a woods where mature trees were whipped out of the soft ground like seedlings.
By midnight the power was gone, the water off, and half the top of an oak tree had crashed on the roof and slid down the side of the house, covering the windows with tangles of branches and leaves.
I heard Alafair cry out in her sleep. I lit a candle, placed it in a saucer on top of her bookcase, which was filled with her collection of Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and got in bed beside her. She wore her Houston Astros baseball cap and had pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her brown eyes moved back and forth as though she weresearching out the sounds of the storm that seeped through the heavy cypress planks in the roof. The candlelight flickered on all the memorabilia she had brought back from our vacations or that we had saved as private signposts of the transitions she had made since I had pulled her from the submerged upside-down wreck of a plane off Southwest Pa.s.s: conch sh.e.l.ls and dried starfish from Key West, her red tennis shoes embossed with the words Left and Right on the toes, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill from Disney-world, her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale on the front and the words Baby Orca that she had fitted over the torso of a huge stuffed frog.
"Dave, the field behind the house is full of lightning," she said. "I can hear animals in the thunder."
"It"s Mr. Broussard"s cattle. They"ll be all right, though. They"ll bunch up in the coulee."
"Are you scared?"
"Not really. But it"s all right to be scared a little bit if you want to."
"If you"re scared, you can"t be standup."
"Sure you can. Standup people don"t mind admitting they"re scared sometimes."
Then I saw something move under the sheet by her feet.
"Alf?"
"What?" Her eyes flicked about the ceiling as though she were watching a bird fly from wall to wall.
I worked the sheet away from the foot of the bed until I was staring at Tripod"s silver-tipped rump and black-ringed tail.
"I wonder how this fellow got in your bed, little guy," I said.
"He probably got out of his cage on the back porch."
"Yeah, that"s probably it. He"s pretty good at opening latched doors, isn"t he?"
"I don"t think he should go back out there, do you, Dave? He gets scared in the thunder."
"We"ll give him a dispensation tonight."
"A dis-What?"
"Never mind. Let"s go to sleep, little guy."
"Goodnight, big guy. Goodnight, Tripod. Goodnight, Frogger. Goodnight, Baby Squanto. Goodnight, Curious George. Goodnight, Baby Orca. Goodnight, sea sh.e.l.ls. Goodnight-"
"Cork it, Alf, and go to sleep."
"All right. Goodnight, big guy."
"Goodnight, little guy."
In my sleep I heard the storm pa.s.s overhead like freight trains grinding down a grade, then suddenly we were in the storm"s eye, the air as still as if it had been trapped inside a jar; leaves drifted to the ground from the trees, and I could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead.
The bedroom windows shine with an amber light that might have been aged inside oak. I slip on my khakis and loafers and walk out into the cool air that smells of salt and wet woods, and I see the general"s troops forming into long columns that wind their way into other columns that seem to stretch over an infinitely receding landscape of hardwood forests fired with red leaves, peach orchards, tobacco acreage, rivers covered with steam, purple mountain ridges and valleys filled with dust from ambulance and ammunition wagons and wheeled artillery pieces, a cornfield churned into stubble by horses" hooves and men"s boots, a meandering limestone wall and a sunken road where wild hogs graze on the bodies of the dead.
The general sits on a cypress stump by my coulee, surrounded by enlisted men and his aides. A blackened coffeepot boils amidst a heap of burning sticks by his foot. The officers as well as enlisted men are eating honeycombs peeled from inside a dead oak tree. The general"s tunic is b.u.t.toned over his bad arm. A civilian in checkered trousers, high-top shoes, braces, and a straw hat is setting up a big box camera on a tripod in front of the group.
The general tips his hat up on his forehead and waves me toward him.
"A pip of a storm, wasn"t it?" he says.
"Why are you leaving?"
"Oh, we"re not gone just yet. Say, I want to have your photograph taken with us. That gentleman you see yonder is the correspondent for the Savannah Republican. He writes an outstanding story, certainly as good as this Melville fellow, if you ask me."
"I don"t understand what"s happening. Why did your wounds open, what were you trying to warn me of? "
"It"s my foolishness, son. Like you, I grieve over what I can"t change. Was it Bacon that talked about keeping each cut green ? "
"Change what?"
"Our fate. Yours, mine. Care for your own. Don"t try to emulate me. Look at what I invested my life in. Oh, we were always honorable-Robert Lee, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, A. P. Hill-but we served venal men and a vile enterprise. How many lives would have been spared had we not lent ourselves to the defense of a repellent cause like slavery?"
"People don"t get to choose their time in history, general."
"Well said. You"re absolutely right." He swings the flat of his right hand and hits me hard on the arm, then rises on his crutch and straightens his tunic. "Now, gentlemen, if y"all will take the honeycombs out of your faces, let"s be about this photographing business. I"m amazed at what the sciences are producing these days."
We stand in a group of eight. The enlisted men have Texas accents, powder-blackened teeth, and beards that grow like snakes on their faces. I can smell horse sweat and wood smoke in their clothes. Just as the photographer removes his straw hat and ducks his head under a black cloth at the back of the camera, I look down the long serpentine corridor ofamber light again and see thousands of troops advancing on distant fields, their blue and red and white flags bent into the fusillade, their artillery crews laboring furiously at the mouths of smoking cannon, and I know the place names without their ever being spoken-Culp"s Hill, Corinth, the Devil"s Den, Kennesaw Mountain, the b.l.o.o.d.y Lane-and a collective sound that"s like no other in the world rises in the wind and blows across the drenched land.
The photographer finishes and stoops under his camera box and lifts the tripod up on his shoulder. The general looks into the freshening breeze, his eyes avoiding me.
"You won"t tell me what"s at hand, sir?" I say.
"What does it matter as long as you stay true to your principles?"
"Even the saints might take issue with that statement, general."
"I"ll see you directly, lieutenant. Be of good heart."
"Don"t let them get behind you," I say.
"Ah, the admonition of a veteran." Then his aides help him onto his horse and he waves his hat forward and says, "Hideeho, lads," but there is no joy in his voice.
The general and his mounted escort move down the incline toward my neighbor"s field, the tails of their horses switching, the light arcing over them as bright and heated and refractive as a gla.s.s of whiskey held up to the sun.
When I woke in the morning the rain was falling evenly on the trees in the yard and a group of mallards were swimming in the pond at the foot of my property. The young sugarcane in my neighbor"s field was pounded flat into the washed-out rows as though it had been trampled by livestock. Above the treeline in the north I saw a small tornado drop like a spring from the sky, fill with mud and water from a field, then burst apart as though it had never been there.
I WORKED UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O"CLOCK THAT EVENING.Power was still off in parts of the parish; traffic signals were down; a rural liquor store had been burglarized during the night; two convenience stores had been held up; a drunk set fire to his own truck in the middle of a street; a parolee two days out of Angola beat his wife almost to death; and a child drowned in a storm drain.
Rosie had spent the day with her supervisor in New Orleans and had come back angry and despondent. I didn"t even bother to ask her why. She had the paperwork on our case spread all over her desk, as though somehow rereading it and rearranging it from folder to folder would produce a different result, namely, that we could weld the cell door shut on Murphy Doucet and not have to admit that we were powerless over the bureaucratic needs of others.
Just as I closed the drawers in my desk and was about to leave, the phone rang.
"Dave, I think I screwed up. I think you"d better come home," Elrod said.
"What"s wrong?"
"Bootsie went to town and asked me to watch Alafair. Then Alafair said she was going down to the bait shop to get us some fried pies."
"Get it out, Elrod. What is it?" I saw Rosie looking at me, her face motionless.
"I forgot Batist had already closed up. I should have gone with her."
I tried to hold back the anger that was rising in my throat.
"Listen, Elrod-"
"I went down there and she was gone. The door"s wide open and the key"s still in the lock-"
"How long"s it been?"
"A half hour."
"A half hour?"
"You don"t understand. I checked down at Poteet"s first. Then I saw Tripod running loose on his chain in the road."
"What was she wearing?"