The Neon Rain Part 15

I wanted to put my arms around her waist and take her out of the smoke, hold her against me and feel her curly hair under my hands.

"You just can't leave a woman alone in the night, Dave."

I looked away from her face.

"I woke up and you were gone and I thought maybe those defective people had come back. I drove up and down the beach looking for you until dawn," she said.

"I didn't know that."

"How could you, if you were with some sideshow people?"

"Annie, I'd like another chance with you. I can't make you many promises, except I won't deliberately hurt you again. That's probably not very adequate, but it's all I have."

She turned her face away from me, and I saw her brush her eye with the back of her wrist.

"Another night. There's someone coming over now," she said.

"All right."

"Are those people out there worth all this?"

"They'll find me if I don't find them. You can bet on it."

"My great-grandparents were part of the Underground Railway. Quantrill's Raiders tore down their sod houses and burned their cornfields. Long after Quantrill and b.l.o.o.d.y Bill Anderson and Jesse James were dead, they were raising children and Russian wheat in a free state.

"But somebody canceled Quantrill and Company's action first, namely, federal cavalry."

I smiled at her, but her face suddenly looked wan in the electric light that was hung in the chinaberry tree. I didn't care about propriety or restraint or the fact that her friend would arrive any minute now; I set the Cold Duck and the pralines on the gla.s.s tabletop and put my arms around her and kissed her curly hair. But she didn't respond. Her shoulders were stiff, her eyes turned down, her arms angular and dead.

"Call me tomorrow," she whispered.

"Sure."

"I want you to."

"I will. I promise."

"Things just aren't right with me tonight. I'll be all right tomorrow."

"I'll leave the pralines. I'll call early. Maybe we'll have breakfast at the Cafe du Monde."

"That sounds nice," she said. But her eyes were veiled, and I couldn't read them. Under all her fascination with weirdness, she had the sensitive heart of a small-town Midwestern girl.

On my way down the front walk I pa.s.sed a young man who looked like a graduate student at Tulane. He wore cream-colored slacks, a pale blue s.h.i.+rt, and a striped tie, and his smile was good-natured and his face very handsome. I asked him if he was having dinner with Annie Ballard.

"Why, yes," he said, and smiled again.

"Here, take this," I said, and handed him the bottle of Cold Duck. "It's on the fuzz tonight."

It was an old thing to do, and a moment later I felt foolish and rude. Then I remembered an axiom taught me in Vietnam by a line officer who used to cut through Gordian knots with a sentence: f.u.c.k it. Who wants to be a good loser?

That night as I sat in the morgue of the Times-Picayune and turned the yellowed pages of old newspapers or flipped the strips of microfilm up on the viewing screen, I reflected upon the ambiguous importance of the past in our lives. In order to free ourselves from it, I thought, we treat it as a decaying memory. At the same time, it's the only measure of ident.i.ty we have. There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are.

For some, even our darkest past moments are preferable somehow to those few interludes of peace and suns.h.i.+ne in the world. Why? G.o.d only knows. I thought about the followers of Pancho Villa who found his a.s.sa.s.sination and the end of his violent era so unacceptable that they dug up his corpse, sawed the head from the trunk, sank it in a huge gla.s.s jar of white rum, and brought it in a Model T Ford to the Van Horn Mountains outside of El Paso, where they entombed it under a pile of orange rocks. At night for years thereafter, they would remove the rocks and drink mescal and smoke marijuana in the hot wind and talk to his bloated, leering face floating against the gla.s.s.

But I was looking at another kind of dark history now. The retired two-star general had not been hard to find. His full name was Jerome Gaylan Abs.h.i.+re, and he lived right here in New Orleans, in the Garden District off St. Charles Avenue. He was a West Point graduate, and he'd had a distinguished combat record in World War II and Korea. A 1966 color photograph showed him eating out of a GI mess kit with his men in an LZ cut out of the elephant gra.s.s in the central highlands of Vietnam. He wore an automatic pistol in a shoulder holster over his bare, leathery chest; his face was deeply tanned, his eyebrows and hair very white, his eyes the intense blue of a butane flame. A creative journalist had called him "The Happy Warrior" in the cutline.

But I ran across another Jerome Gaylan Abs.h.i.+re in the newspaper files, this one a junior, a U.S. Army lieutenant, obviously his son. His name first appeared in a 1967 story when he was listed as missing in action; then I found a second clipping dated November 1, 1969, that described how two American prisoners held by the Vietcong in an area called Pinkville had been tied to posts with their heads inserted in wooden cages filled with rats. The article said one of these soldiers may have been Lieutenant Jerome Abs.h.i.+re of New Orleans.

The word "Pinkville" leaped off the page like a sin not confessed and deliberately forgotten. It was the name that GIs called the area around My Lai.

Then, as though the newspaper librarian had made the same a.s.sociations as I, he or she had attached a crossreferenced Xerox copy of an article about some testimony at the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley, when he was tried for ordering the My Lai ma.s.sacre. One of the grunts who had taken the stand said in a parenthetical aside that some captured Vietcong had told him that two American prisoners had helped them string mines through a rice field, the same rice field in which his company had been blown apart.

I was tired. My system was beginning to crave alcohol again, and the place names, the dates, a photograph of villagers executed on a trail, filled me with a sadness and despair that made me close the file, flick off the viewing screen, walk to the window, and stare out into the darkness for a full minute, hoping that no one in the room saw my eyes.

I never saw an American atrocity, at least not a deliberate one, so I did not have those kinds of memories from the war. Instead, if there was one experience that encapsulated my year in Vietnam, it was a strange incident involving two men in my platoon and a drowning water buffalo.

They were almost all Southerners, from textile and cannery and cotton-gin towns where young people seldom expected more than Sat.u.r.day nights at the drive-in movie with others like themselves who would wear their high school football jackets years after their graduation. We had walked twenty miles out of Indian country into a secured area by a tree-lined, milky brown river, and the men had dropped their packs and rifles and undressed, and were splas.h.i.+ng around in the shallows like boys. The late-afternoon sun was warm through the trees and dappled the ground with shadow. I hadn't slept in a day and a half, and I lay down in the cool, short gra.s.s under a banyan tree, put my arm across my eyes, and in seconds I was asleep.

I awoke a half hour later to giggling and laughter and the drowsy smell of marijuana. Somebody had scored some Cambodian red, and the whole platoon was getting loaded. I got up stiffly from under the tree, walked down the bank, and realized they were all being entertained by a scene taking place in the middle of the river. A water buffalo had wandered out into the hard current, had become stuck in the silt on the bottom, and was now floundering and barely able to keep its nostrils above the surface. Its eyes were wide with terror, its horns webbed with debris from the river. The owner of the buffalo, who wore a French legionnaire's flop hat on his pointed head and who was so thin and bony that he looked like he was made of coat hangers, ran up and down the bank, waving his arms and shouting at us in Vietnamese and sc.r.a.ps of French.

Two cousins from Conroe, Texas, had waded in after the buffalo with a lariat they had fas.h.i.+oned from a rope they had taken out of the back of a Marine Corps six-by. Their brown backs were wet and ridged with muscle and vertebrae, and they were grinning and laughing and flinging out their lariat with all the stoned confidence of nineteen-year-old cowboys.

"There's dropoffs out there," I said.

"Watch this, Lieutenant," one of them called back. "We'll slide this honker out slicker than a hog's p.e.c.k.e.r."

Then suddenly out of the brown current I saw the gnarled, black roots of a floating tree break through the surface and reach into the air like an enormous claw.

It hit them broadside with such force that their faces went white. Their mouths gasped open, then spit water. They tried to push away from the roiling, yellow foam around the tree and the roots that spiked their eyes and twisted their faces into contortions. The tree spun around in the current, s.h.i.+ning with mud, caught new momentum, and pressed them under. We waited for them to surface on the other side, to pop up in a calm place, rattling water and light from their hair, but we never saw them again.

We probed the river with poles and dragged it with a grappling hook for three hours. Instead of our own people, we dredged up belts of French machine-gun ammunition, a box of unexploded j.a.panese potato mashers that leaked rust and green slime on the bank, American soda-pop cans, and a cargo net filled with Vietcong dead that must have been dropped by one of our helicopters. When the hook pulled the net tautly from the water's surface, we saw arms and heads draped through the webbing like those of prisoners long since tired of their eternal sentence.

I wrote letters to the families of the two boys in Conroe, Texas. I said they had given their lives in trying to help others. Their lives had not been taken; they were given. I did not say I regretted there were no medals for innocence and the trusting courage it took to keep being a Texas country boy in a land that seemed created for jaded and transient colonials.

An hour later I was in a wonderful old bar on Magazine Street, which separated the Garden District from a huge black residential area of paintless, wooden nineteenth-century houses whose sagging galleries and dirt yards reminded me of the Negro quarters on the plantations in Iberia Parish. The bar, like many buildings along Magazine, had a wooden colonnade in front, big windows, and screen doors, and inside was a long mahogany counter with a bra.s.s rail, overhead fans, walls filled with Hadacol and Dixie 45 and Dr. Nut signs, Earl K. Long political posters, and a blackboard with the names of major-league teams and ball scores chalked all over it. The owner used to be a submarine pitcher for the Lafayette Bulls in the defunct cla.s.s-C Evangeline League, and he had never been quite able to extricate himself from yesterday. He sold loose-string Virginia Extra tobacco and cigarettes out of cartons on the shelf, covered the pool tables with oilcloth on Thursday nights and served free chicken gumbo as bar owners often did back in the bayou country, never called the cops to settle a beef, kept hard-boiled eggs in big pickle jars on the bar, and made hot boudin that would break your heart. It was always cool and softly lighted inside, and the jukebox was full of zydeco and Cajun records, and workingmen shot pool in back under a red Jax sign and a tin-shaded swinging light.

Archie, the owner, picked up my empty boudin plate and wiped under it with a rag. He was a dark Cajun with a big round face and a small mouth. His arms were covered with black hair. I motioned with my shot gla.s.s for a refill.

"You know why they call them boilermakers, Dave?" he asked. "Because they put pieces of foundry plate in your head, like broken metal teeth."

"Sounds like bad stuff."

"Then one day it chews its way through your brain."

"Can I have another shot of Beam?"

"I don't like to argue against my own profits, but I hate to see you sit on the porch and listen to your liver rot."

"Would it make you feel better if I told you I'm not enjoying it?"

"Ease up tonight. You can have a s.h.i.+thouse of misery any day you want."

I looked away from his face. He was a friend and an honest man, and because I had no defense, I knew I was capable of insulting people, even an old friend, to save my situation.

"I got another problem, too. Your slip's showing," he said.

"What?"

"Wearing a pistol as big as a cornbread pan on your hip gives anxiety to some people."

"Here," I said, unsnapping the holster from my belt. "Stick it under the bar till I leave."

"What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you, Dave? Are you trying to take a big fall? Why invite more trouble in your life?"

"It came free of charge."

"I'm talking about tonight. They took your badge. That means you can't walk around like Wyatt Earp."

"Do you know anything about a retired general named Jerome Abs.h.i.+re over on Prytania?"

"A little bit. His kid used to come in here."

"Is he a right-wing crazy?"

"No, I don't think so. I always heard he was kind of a cla.s.sy guy. His kid was a h.e.l.l of a fine boy, though. He used to come in here with his baseball team when he went to Tulane. He was a big, blond boy with a pitching arm like a whip. He was always arm-wrestling and tussling and having fun. It was a shame he disappeared over there in Vietnam."

"Does anybody know what happened to him?"

"Just a lot of stories. He was captured, he was missing, the Vietcong executed him or something. My boy was over there, but he came back home all right. I tell you the truth, Dave, if I'd lost him, I'd be afraid what I'd do."

"I've got to cruise. We'll see you around, Archie."

"I hope so. Don't crowd the plate when you don't have to, podna."

I drove into the Garden District. The neighborhood was filled with homes that had been built during the 1850s. They were pillared and scrolled, marked with widow's walks and latticework, wide porches and second-story verandas, with brick courtyards and gazebos on the lawns. The streets were lined with oaks, and the yards themselves seemed to explode with every type of Southern flower and tree: blooming myrtle, azalea, bamboo, umbrella and banana trees, elephant ears, hibiscus, tangles of red and yellow roses. I could smell barbecue fires and hear people diving in swimming pools. It was a neighborhood of historical security and endless summer parties that flowed from one thick, clipped lawn onto the next.

Jerome Gaylan Abs.h.i.+re's home was no exception. The brick walk was lighted by burning candles placed inside paper bags in the flower beds, and through the tall windows beyond the front porch I could see the guests crowded in a large living room lighted by chandeliers. The loud conversation reached all the way to the street. A band was playing on the lawn somewhere in back.

Why not? I thought. I had on a coat and tie. Archie was right. Why crowd the plate when it was just as easy to throw the bat at the pitcher's head?

I parked the car up the street and walked back to the party. The sidewalk was buckled and peaked by the enormous roots that grew under the concrete. I b.u.t.toned my coat so my .45 wasn't apparent, combed my hair, flattened my tie with the palm of my hand, and walked up the brick entrance with my eyes fixed steadily on the face of the man checking invitations at the door.

He probably worked for a security service and was not accustomed to handling anybody more serious than college party-crashers.

"I don't have an invitation. I'm the New Orleans heat," I said.

"May I see your identification?"

"Here's a quarter. Call the First District and tell them Lieutenant Dave Rob.i.+.c.heaux is here."

"I think you're drunk, sir."

I brushed past him, went to the bar, and picked up a gla.s.s of champagne off a tray. The rooms were furnished with French antiques, gold and silver grandfather clocks, deep purple divans with scrolled walnut frames, oil portraits of a Southern military family that went back to the War of 1812. The blond hardwood floors were waxed to a s.h.i.+ne that looked like clear plastic. Every tabletop, bra.s.s candelabra, ashtray, gla.s.s light chimney, and polished strip of seamed woodwork gleamed as though it had been rubbed incessantly with soft rags.

The people in the room were an older crowd, undoubtedly wealthy, confident in themselves and their friends and the world of manners and success in which they lived. The women had bluing in their hair and wore glittering evening dresses, and their throats and wrists dripped with jewelry. In their white tuxedo coats, the men gave you the impression that age was no more a physical problem in their lives than the remote struggles of the poor. It was obvious that I didn't belong there, but they were too polite to look directly at me.

But the security man at the door was talking with two others who looked like rent-a-cops, and all three of them were staring at me. I put down my empty champagne gla.s.s, picked up another, and walked out the French doors onto the back patio, where a half-dozen black cooks in white jackets were making mint juleps and barbecuing a pig impaled on a roasting spit. The wind rustled through the oaks, the banana trees, the bamboo border of the lawn, and ruffled the unlit water in the swimming pool that was as dark as burgundy wine. One of the elderly black cooks fanned the barbecue smoke away from his face with his hand.

"Where's the general gone to?" I asked.

"He having his julep in the library with the other gentlemens," he said.

"I don't want to go back through that big crowd. Is there another way I can get to the library?"

"Yes suh. Go back through the kitchen. The girl tell you where it's at." I walked across the clipped lawn, went through a huge Colonial-style kitchen with brick in the walls, where three black maids were making hors d'oeuvres, and came out in a hallway. I could see the library door partly opened and two men with highball gla.s.ses in their hands talking to somebody who sat in a chair with his legs crossed. I recognized one of the standing men immediately. I pushed the door, sipped out of my champagne gla.s.s, and smiled at the three of them.

The general had gained weight since the newspaper photograph was taken, but his skin was still deeply tanned and glowing with health, the white hair was cut GI, and his acetylene-blue eyes looked at you with the unflinching clarity of a man who was never inhibited by complexity or moral doubt.

"How are you doing, General?" I said. "It's amazing who might drop in on a c.o.c.ktail party these days. I'm speaking about myself, of course. But what are you doing with a character like Whiplash Wineburger? Most people call the Orkin Company if they see this guy anywhere near their neighborhoods I'll take care of it," Wineburger said, and moved his hand to the table phone.

"It's all right," the general said.

"I don't know about that," I said. "I think some of your cadre are starting to unravel. I've got a couple of Polaroids of Bobby Joe Starkweather lying out behind his fish camp. You can have them for postcards."

"You'll be treated as a guest in my home, even though you came here uninvited. You can go back to the bar, or you can leave."

"I'm comfortable here."

"You've had too much to drink, or perhaps you're simply obsessive," he said. "But there's no point in your being here."

"You should have stuck with regular army, General. These guys working for you wouldn't even measure up to Mafia standards. Wineburger here is a jewel. One time a naive cop down at the First District asked him to defend some indigent Haitians, and he said, 'I'm full up on food stamps.' It's the amateurs that kill the IPs."

"What do you know about IPs?"

"I was in Vietnam, too, except my outfit went out of its way to protect innocent people. I don't think you can say the same."

"How dare you!" he said.

"Cut the gentlemanly rancor. You've got Sam Fitzpatrick's blood painted all over you, and I'm going to nail you for it."

"Ignore him. He's a lush," Wineburger said.

"I'll give you something else to work on, too," I said. "I visited the father of that nineteen-year-old girl that Segura's people murdered. I wonder if you'd like to confront him and explain why she had to lose her life over some elephant game you and your cretins are playing."

"Get out."

"You lost a son in Vietnam. I think if he were alive he'd consider you a disgrace."