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

"Somebody who made a major mistake," I said.

But it was a grandiose remark. The truth was that I had taken the drink at the party incautiously and that I had walked right into the script someone else had written for me.

Later that night, in bed, I stared at the ceiling and tried to recreate the scene under the oak trees at Spanish Lake. I wanted to believe that I could reach down into my unconscious and retrieve a photographic plate on which my eye had engraved an image of someone passing his hand over the glass of Dr Pepper, black cherries, orange slices, and bruised mint that a waiter was about to serve me.

But the only images in my mind were those of a levee extending out into gray water and an electrically charged fog bank rolling out of the cypress trees.

Bootsie turned on her side and put her arm across my chest. Then she moved her hand down my stomach and touched me.

I stared up into the darkness. The trees were motionless outside the window. I heard a 'gator flop in the marsh.

Then her hand went away from me and I felt her weight turn on the mattress toward the opposite wall.

An hour later I dressed in the darkness of the living room, slipped my pickup truck into neutral, rolled it silently down the dirt lane to the dock, and hooked my boat and trailer to the bumper hitch.

I PUT MY BOAT INTO THE WATER AT THE SAME PLACE I HAD driven my truck off the levee. I used the paddle to push out into deeper water, past the cattails and lily pads that grew along the bank's edge, then I lowered the engine and jerked it alive with the starter rope.

The wake off the stern looked like a long V-shaped trench roiling with yellow mud, bobbing with dead logs. Then the moon broke through the clouds, gilding the moss in the cypress with a silver light, and I could see cottonmouths coiled on the lower limbs of willow trees, the gnarled brown-green head of a 'gator in a floating island of leaves and sticks, the stiffened, partly eaten body of a coon on a sandbar, and a half-dozen wood ducks that skittered across the water in front of the high ground and the grove of trees where I had met the general.

I cut the throttle and let the boat ride on its wake until the bow slid up on the sand. Then I walked into the trees with a six-battery flashlight and a GI entrenching tool.

The ground was soft, oozing with moisture, matted with layers of dead lea

ves and debris left by receding water. Tangles of abandoned trotlines were strung about the tree trunks; Clorox marker bottles from fish traps lay half-buried in the sand.

In the center of the clearing I found the remains of a campfire.

A dozen blackened beer cans lay among the charred wood. Crushed into the grass at the edge of the fire was a used rubber.

I kicked the wood, ashes, and cans across the ground, propped my flashlight in the weeds, folded the E-tool into the shape of a hoe, screwed down and locked the socket at the base of the blade, and started chopping into the earth.

Eighteen inches down I hit what archaeologists call a "fireline," a layer of pure black charcoal sediment from a very old fire. I sifted it off the blade's tip a shovelful at a time. In it was a scorched brass button and the bottom of a hand-blown bottle, one that had tiny air bubbles inside the glass's green thickness.

But what did that prove? I asked myself.

Answer: That perhaps nineteenth-century trappers, cypress loggers, or even army surveyors had built a campfire there.

Then I thought about the scene the other night: the stacked rifle muskets, the haversacks suspended in the trees, the exhaustion in the men who were about to move out on patrol, the dry, bloodless wounds that looked like they had been eaten clean by maggots, the ambulance wagon and the crusted field dressings that had been raked out onto the ground.

The ambulance wagon.

I picked up my flashlight and moved to the far side of the clearing. The water was black under the canopy of flooded trees out in the marsh. I knelt and started digging out a two-by-four-foot trench. The clearing sloped here, and the ground was softer and wetter, wrinkled with small eroded gullies. I scraped the dirt into piles at each end of the hole; a foot down, water began to run from under the shovel blade.

I stopped to reset the blade and begin digging back toward the top of the incline. Then I saw the streaks of rust and bits of metal, like small red teeth, in the wet piles of dirt at each end of the hole. I shined the flashlight into the hole, and protruding from one wall, like a twisted snake, was a rusted metal band that might have been the rim of a wagon wheel.

Five minutes later I hit something hard, and I set the E-tool on the edge of the hole and used my fingers to pry up the hub of a wagon wheel with broken spokes the length of my hand radiating from it. I placed it on the slope, and in the next half hour I created next to it a pile of square nails, rotted wood as light as balsa, metal hinges, links of chain, a rusted wisp of a drinking cup, and a saw. The wood handle and the teeth had been almost totally eaten away by ground-water, but there was no mistaking the stubby, square, almost brutal shape; it was a surgeon's saw.

I carried everything that I had found back to the boat. My clothes were streaked with mud; I stunk of sweat and mosquito repellent. My palms rang with popped water blisters. I wanted to wake up Bootsie, call Elrod or perhaps even the sheriff, to tell anybody who would listen about what I had found.

But then I had to confront the foolishness of my thinking. How sane was any man, at least in the view of others, who would dig for Civil War artifacts in a swamp in the middle of the night in order to prove his sanity?

In fact, that kind of behavior was probably not unlike a self-professed extraterrestrial traveler showing you his validated seat reservations on a UFO as evidence of his rationality.

When I got back home I covered my boat with a tarp, took a shower, ate a ham-and-onion sandwich in the kitchen while night birds called to each other under the full moon, and decided that the general and I would not share our secrets with those whose lives and vision were defined by daylight and a rational point of view.

Chapter 12

I slept late the next morning, and when I awoke, I found a note from Bootsie on the icebox saying that she had taken Alafair shopping in town. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk, Grape-Nuts, and strawberries on a tray and carried it out to the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The morning was not hot yet, and blue jays flew in and out of the dappled shade and my neighbor's sprinkler drifted in an iridescent haze across my grass.