AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His long, narrow face was perplexed.
"Why not?" he said.
"I don't know. Maybe we have so much collective guilt as a society that we fear to punish our individual members."
He put his hat on the back of his head, crossed his good leg across his cork knee, and wet the end of a cheroot. Several of his enlisted men were kneeling by my coulee, filling their canteens. Their faces were dusty, their lips blackened with gunpowder from biting through cartridge papers. The patchwork silk balloon shuddered in the wind and shimmered with the silvery light of the coming rainstorm.
"I won't presume to be your conscience," the general said. "But as your friend who wishes to see you do no harm to yourself, I advise you to give serious thought about keeping your dead friend's weapon."
"I have."
"I think you're making a serious mistake, suh. You disappoint me, too."
He waved his hand impatiently at his aides, and they helped him to his feet.
"I'm sorry you feel that way," I said.
But the general was not one given to debate. He stumped along on his crutch and cork leg toward the balloon's basket, his cigar clenched at an upward angle in his teeth, his eyes flicking about at the wind-torn clouds and the lightning that trembled whitely like heated wires out on the Gulf.
The incoming storm blew clouds of dust out of my neighbor's canefield just as the general's balloon lifted him and his aides aloft, their telegraph wire flopping from the wicker basket like an umbilical cord.
When I woke from my dream, the gray skies were filled with a dozen silken hot-air balloons, painted in the outrageous colors of circus wagons, their dim shadows streaking across barn roofs, dirt roads, clapboard houses, general stores, clumps of cows, winding bayous, until the balloons themselves were only distant specks above the summer-green horizon outside Lafayette.
On Monday morning I went to Lou Girard's funeral in Lafayette. It was a boiling green-gold day. At th
e cemetery a layer of heat seemed to rise off the spongy grass and grow in intensity as the white sun climbed toward the top of the sky. During the graveside service someone was running a power mower behind the brick wall that separated the crypts from a subdivision. The mower coughed and backfired and echoed off the bricks like someone firing rounds from a small-caliber revolver. The eyes of the cops who stood at attention in full uniform kept watering from the heat and the smell of weed killer. When the police chief and a captain removed the flag from Lou's casket and folded it into a military square, there was no family member there to receive it. The casket remained closed during the ceremony. Before the casket was lowered into the ground, the department chaplin removed a framed picture of Lou in uniform from the top and set it on a folding table under the funeral canopy. Accidentally he tipped it with the back of his hand so that it fell face down on the linen.
I DROVE BACK HOME FOR LUNCH BEFORE HEADING FOR the office. It was cool under the ceiling fan in the kitchen, and the breeze swayed the baskets of impatiens that hung on hooks from the eave of the back porch. Bootsie set a glass of iced tea with mint leaves and a plate of ham-and-onion sandwiches and deviled eggs in front of me.
"Where's Alafair?" I said.
"Elrod took her and Tripod out to Spanish Lake," she said from the sink.
"To the movie location?"
"Yes, I think so."
When I didn't speak, she turned around and looked at me.
"Did I do something wrong?" she asked.
"Julie Balboni's out there, Boots."
"He lives here now, Dave. He's lots of places. I don't think we should start choosing where we go and don't go because of a man like that."
"I don't want Alafair around him."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd object."
"Boots, there's something I didn't tell you about. Saturday a hood named Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic video that evidently Balboni and his people made. It's as dark as dark gets. There's one scene where it looks like a woman is actually beaten to death."
Her eyes blinked, then she said, "I'll go out to Spanish Lake and bring her home. Why don't you finish eating?"
"Don't worry about it. There's no harm done. I'll go get her before I go to the office."
"Can't somebody do something about him?"
"When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily."
