In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

Hogman would probably still be in there, except he got religion and a Baptist preacher in Baton Rouge worked a pardon for him through the state legislature. His backyard was dirt, deep in shadow from the live-oak trees, and sloped away to the bayou, where a rotted-out pirogue webbed with green algae lay half-submerged in the shallows. He sat in a straight-backed wood chair under a tree that was strung with blue Milk of Magnesia bottles and crucifixes fashioned out of sticks and aluminum foil. When the breeze lifted out of the south, the whole tree sang with silver and blue light.

Hogman tightened the key on a new string he had just strung on his guitar. His skin was so black it had a purple sheen to it; and his hair was grizzled, the curls ironed flat against his head. His shoulders were an ax handle wide, the muscles in his upper arms the size of grapefruit. There wasn't a tablespoon of fat on his body. I wondered what it must have been like to face down Hogman Patin back in the days when he carried a barber's razor on a leather cord around his neck.

"What did you want to tell me, Sam?" I asked.

"One or two t'ings that been botherin' me. Get a chair off the po'ch. You want some tea?"

"No, that's fine, thank you."

I lifted a wicker chair off the back porch and walked back to the oak tree with it. He had slipped three metal picks onto his fingers and was running a blues progression up the neck of the guitar. He mashed the strings into the frets so that the sound continued to reverberate through the dark wood after he had struck the notes with his steel picks. Then he tightened the key again and rested the big curved belly of the twelve-string on his thigh.

"I don't like to have no truck with white folks' bidness," he said. "But it bother me, what somebody done to that girl. It been botherin' me a whole lot."

He picked up from the dirt a jelly glass filled with iced tea and drank out of it.

"She was messin' in somet'ing bad, wouldn't listen to me or pay me no mind about it, neither. When they that age, they know what they wanta do."

"Messing in what?"

"I talked to her maybe two hours befo' she left the juke. I been knowing that girl a long time. She love zydeco and blues music. She tell me, 'Hogman, in the next life me and you is gonna get married.' That's what she say. I tole her, 'Darlin', don't let them mens use you for no chicken.'

"She say, 'I ain't no chicken, Hogman. I going to New Orleans. I gonna have my own coop. Them others gonna be the chickens. I gonna have me a townhouse on Lake Pontchartrain.'"

"Wait a minute, Sam. She told you she was going to have other girls working for her?"

"That's what I just tole you, ain't I?"

"Yes, you did."

"I say, 'Don't be talkin' like that. You get away from them pimps, Cherry. Them white trash ain't gonna give you no townhouse. They'll use you up, t'row you away, then find some other girl just like you, I mean in five minutes, that quick.'

"She say, 'No, they ain't, 'cause I got the mojo on the Man, Hogman. He know it, too.'

"You know, when she say that, she smile up at me and her face look heart shape, like she just a little girl doin' some innocent t'ing 'stead of about to get herself killed."

"What man did she mean?"

"Probably some pimp tole her she special, she pretty, she just like a daughter to him. I seen the same t'ing in Angola. It ain't no different. A bunch take a young boy down on the flo', then when they get finish with him, he ready, he glad to put on a dress, makeup, be the punk for some wolf gonna take care of him, tell him he ain't just somebody's poke chops in the shower stall."

"Why'd you wait to tell me this?"

" 'Cause ain't nothin' like this ever happen 'round here befo'. I don't like it, me. No, suh."

"I see."

He splayed his long fingers on the belly of the guitar. The nails were pink against his black skin. His eyes looked off reflectively at the bayou, where fireflies were lighting in the gloom above the flooded cattails.

Finally he said, "I need to tell you somet'ing else."

"Go ahead, Sam."

"You mixed up with that skeleton they found over in the Atchafalaya, ain't you?"

"How'd you know about that?"

"When somebody find a dead black man, black people know about it. That man didn't have on no belt, didn't have no strings in his boots, did he?"

"That wasn't in the newspaper, podna."