Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

”It was just a dream,“ I said.

”Not just a dream, Dave.“

I heard Helen rise from her chair, felt her hand touch my shoulder.

”We should go,“ she said.

”I was wrong. But so were you,“ he said.

”No, the fault was mine, Sheriff, not yours,“ I said.

”I squared it with the prosecutor's office. Don't let anybody tell you different.“

He lifted his hand off the sheet. It felt small and lifeless inside mine.

But I didn't go back to the office the next day. Instead, Batist and I took my boat all the way down Bayou Teche, through the vast green splendor of the wetlands, where blue herons and cranes glided above the flooded gum trees and the rusted wrecks of oil barges, into

West Cote Blanche Bay and the Gulf beyond, while a squall churned like glazed smoke across the early sun.

My father, Aldous, was an old-time oil field roughneck who worked the night tower on the monkey board high above the drill platform and the sliding black waves of the Gulf of Mexico. The company was operating without a blowout preventer on the wellhead, and when the bit punched into a natural gas dome unexpectedly, the casing geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, a spark danced off a steel surface, and the sky blossomed with a flame that people could see from Morgan City to Cypremort Point.

My father clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the darkness, but the derrick folded in upon itself, like coat hanger wire melting in a furnace, taking my father and nineteen other men with it.

I knew the spot by heart; I could even feel his presence, see him in my mind's eye, deep below the waves, his tin hat cocked at an angle, grinning, his denim work clothes undulating in the tidal current, one thumb hooked in the air, telling me never to be afraid. Twice a year, on All Saints' Day and the anniversary of his death, I came here and cut the engines, let the boat drift back across the wreckage of the rig and quarter boat which was now shaggy with green moss, and listened to the water's slap against the hull, the cry of seagulls, as though somehow his voice was still trapped here, waiting to be heard, like a soft whisper blowing in the foam off the waves.

He loved children and flowers and women and charcoal-filtered bourbon and fighting in bars, and he carried the pain of my mother's infidelity like a stone bruise and never let anyone see it in his eyes. But once on a duck hunting trip, after he got drunk and tried to acknowledge his failure toward me and my mother, he said, ”Dave, don't never let yourself be alone,“ and I saw another dimension in my father, one of isolation and loneliness, that neither of us would have sufficient years to address again.

The water was reddish brown, the swells dented with rain rings. I walked to the stern with a clutch of yellow roses and threw them into the sun and watched a capping wave break them apart and scatter their petals through the swell.

Never alone, Al, I said under my breath, then went back into the cabin with Batist and hit it hard for home.

That night I had an old visitor, the vestiges of malaria that lived like mosquito eggs in my blood. I woke at midnight to the rumble of distant thunder, felt the chill on my skin and heard the rain tin king on the blades of the window fan, and thought a storm was about to burst over the wetlands to the south. An hour later my teeth were knocking together and I could hear mosquitoes droning around my ears and face, although none were there. I wanted to hide under piles of blankets even though my sheet and pillow were already damp with sweat, my mouth as dry as an ashtray.

I knew it would pass; it always did. I just had to wait and, with luck, I would wake depleted in the morning, as cool and empty as if I had been eviscerated and washed out with a hose.

&nbs

p; Sometimes during those nocturnal hours I saw an electrified tiger who paced back and forth like a kaleidoscopic orange light behind a row of trees, hung with snakes whose emerald bodies were as supple and thick as an elephant's trunk.

But I knew these images were born as much out of my past alcoholic life as they were from a systemic return to the Philippines, just another dry drunk, really, part of the guignol that a faceless puppeteer in the mind put on periodically.

But tonight was different.

At first I seemed to see him only inside my head. He walked out of the swamp, his upper torso naked, with seaweed clinging to his ankles like serpents, his skin as bloodless as marble, his hair the same brightness and metamorphic shape as fire.

The storm burst over the swamp and I could see the pecan and oak trees flickering whitely in the yard, the tin roof on the bait shop leaping out of the darkness, wrenching against the joists in the wind. The barometer and the temperature seemed to drop in seconds, as though all the air were being sucked out of our bedroom, drawn backward through the curtains, into the trees, until I knew, when I opened my eyes, I would be inside a place as cold as water that had never been penetrated by sunlight, as inaccessible as the drop-off beyond the continental shelf.

What's the haps, Streak? he said.

You know how it is, you get deep in Indian country and you always think somebody's got iron sights on your back, I replied.

How about that Emile Pogue? Isn 't he a pistol?

Why'd you play their game, Sonny? Why didn't you work with me?

Your heart gets in the way of your head, Dave. You 've got a way of wheeling the Trojan horse through the gates.

What's that mean?