Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“It's all right. Help those gentlemen there, will you? I'll be back down in a minute,” I said.

“It ain't good you not tell me.”

“It's the name of a man I was in the army with. It's some kind of coincidence. Don't worry about it.”

But in his eyes I could see the self-imposed conviction that somehow his own ineptitude or lack of education had caused me injury.

“I ain't mad about that coon, Dave,” he said. “Coon gonna be a coon.

Tell Alafair it ain't nobody's fault.”

I sat at the redwood table with a cup of coffee under the mimosa tree in the backyard, which was still cool and blue with shadow. The breeze ruffled the periwinkles and willows along the edge of the coulee, and two greenhead mallards, who stayed with us year-round, were skittering across the surface of the pond at the back of our property.

The stainless steel dog tag contained the name of Roy J. Bumgartner, his serial number, blood type, religion, and branch of service, the simple and pragmatic encapsulation of a human life that can be vertically inserted as neatly as a safety razor between the teeth and locked in place with one sharp blow to the chin.

I remembered him well, a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston, Texas, who had brought the slick in low out of the molten sun, the canopy and elephant grass flattening under the down draft while AK-47 rounds whanged off the ship's air-frame like tack hammers.

Ten minutes later, the floor piled with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochromed Ms to indicate the morphine that laced their hearts, we lifted off from the LZ and flew back through the same curtain of automatic weapons fire, the helicopter blades thropping, the windows pocking with holes like skin blisters snapping.

My body was as dry and dehydrated as a lizard's skin, all the moisture used up by the blood-expander the medic had given me during the night, the way spilled water evaporates off a hot stove. The same medic, a sweaty Italian kid from Staten Island, naked to the waist, held me in his arms now, and kept saying, as much to convince himself as me, You 're gonna make it, Loot.. . Say good-bye to Shitsville .. . You 're going home alive in sixty-five .. . Bum's chauffeuring this baby right into Battalion Aid .. . They got refrigeration, Loot .. . Plasma .. .

Don't put your hands down there … I mean it.. . Hey, somebody hold his goddamn hands.

With the ship yawing and grooves shearing out of the rotary and black smoke from an electrical fire spiraling back through the interior, the rice paddies and earthen dikes and burned-out hooches streaking by below us, I stared at the back of the pilot's head as though my thoughts, which were like a scream inside my skull, could penetrate his: You can do it, pappy, you can do it, pappy, you can do it, pappy.

Then he turned and looked behind him, and I saw his thin blond face inside his helmet, the dry lump of chewing tobacco in his cheek, the red field dressing across one eye, the bloodshot and desperate energies in the other, and I knew, even before I saw the waves sliding onto the beach from the South China Sea, that we were going to make it, that no one this brave could perish.

But that conclusion was born out of political innocence and a soldier's naive belief that he would never be abandoned by his own government.

Bootsie brought me another cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts with milk and blackberries in it. She wore a pair of faded jeans and a beige sleeveless shirt, and her face looked cool and fresh in the soft light.

“What's that?” she said.

“A dog tag that's thirty years old.”

She touched the tag with the balls of her fingers, then turned it over.

“It belonged to a guy who disappeared into Laos,” I said. “He never came back home. I think he's one of those who got written off by Nixon and Kissinger.”

“I don't understand,” she said.

“Batist found it on the windowsill in the bait shop this morning.

It's thespian bullshit of some kind. Last night somebody put a rusted leg iron on the seat of my truck.”

“Did you tell the sheriff?”

“I'll talk to him Monday.”

I chewed a mouthful of Grape-Nuts and kept my face empty.

“Alafair's still asleep. You want to go back inside for a little while?”

“You bet.”

A few minutes later we lay on top of the sheets in our bedroom. The curtains were gauzy and white with small roses printed on them, and they puffed in the breeze that blew through the azaleas and pecan trees in the side yard. Bootsie kissed like no woman I ever knew. Her face would come close to mine, her mouth parting, then she would angle her head slightly and touch her lips dryly against mine, remove them, her eyes never leaving mine; then she'd brush my lips with hers one more time, her fingernails making a slow circle in the back of my hair, her right hand moving down my stomach while her tongue slid across my teeth.

She made love without inhibition or self-consciousness, and never with stint or a harbored resentment. She sat on top of me, took me in her hand, and placed me deep inside her, her thighs widening, a wet murmur breaking from her throat. Then she propped herself on both arms so that her breasts hung close to my face, her breath coming faster now, her skin bright with a thin sheen of sweat. I felt her heat spreading into my loins, as though it were she who was controlling the moment for both of us. She leaned closer, gathering herself around me, her feet under my thighs, her face flushed and growing smaller and turning inward now, her hair damp against her skin like swirls of honey. In my mind's eye I saw a great hard-bodied tarpon, thick and stiff with life, glide through tunnels of pink coral and waving sea fans, then burst through a wave in strings of foam and light.