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The lake was black now, and out in the darkness, above the noise of the revelers, I could hear somebody trying to crank an outboard engine.
I finished my drink and set the empty glass on the buffet table.
"That's it for me, Sam," I said. "You coming or not?"
"This lady gonna carry me home," he said. His eyes were red from drinking. They looked out at nothing from under the brim of his straw cowboy hat.
"Hogman—" I said.
"This lady live down the road from my house. Some trashy niggers been givin' her trouble. She don't want to go home by herself. That's the way it is. I be up to yo' office tomorrow mornin'."
I tried to look into his face, but he occupied himself with twisting the tuning pegs on his guitar. I turned and walked back through the shadows to my pickup truck. When I looked back at the party through my windshield, the blond girl in shorts and a halter was putting a spoonful of cake into Mikey Goldman's mouth while everyone applauded.
It rained hard as I approached the drawbridge over the bayou south of town. I could see the bridge tender in his lighted window, the wet sheen and streaks of rust on the steel girders, the green and red running lights of a passing boat in the mist. I was only a few minutes from home. I simply had to cross the bridge and follow the dirt road down to my dock.
But that was not what I did or what happened.
A bolt of lightning exploded in a white ball by the side of the road and blew the heart of a tree trunk, black and smoking, out into my headlights. I swallowed to clear my ears, and for just a second, in the back of my throat, I thought I could taste black cherries, bruised mint leaves, and orange rind. Then I felt a spasm go through me just as if someone had scratched a kitchen match inside my skull.
The truck veered off the shoulder, across a collapsed barbed-wire cattle gate, onto the levee that dissected the marsh. I remember the wild buttercups sweeping toward me out of the headlights, the rocks and mud whipping under the fenders, then the fog rolling out of the dead cypress trees and willow islands, encircling the truck, smothering the windows. I could hear thunder crashing deep in the marsh, echoing out of the bays, like distant artillery.
I knew that I was going off the levee, but I couldn't unlock my hands from the steering wheel or move my right foot onto the brake pedal. I felt myself trembling, my insides constricting, my back teeth grinding, as though all my nerve endings had been severed and painted with iodine. Then I heard lightning pop the levee and blow a spray of muddy water across my windshield.
Get out, I thought. Knock the door handle with your elbow and jump.
But I couldn't move.
The mist was as pink and thick as cotton candy and seemed to snap with electric currents, like a kaleidoscopic flickering of snakes' tongues. I felt the front wheels of the truck dip over the side of the levee, gain momentum with the weight in the rear end, then suddenly I was rumbling down an incline through weeds and broken cane, willow saplings and cattails, until the front wheels were embedded up to the axle in water and sand.
I don't know how long I sat there. I felt a wave of color pass through me, like nausea or the violent shudder that cheap bourbon gives you when you're on the edge of delirium tremens; then it was gone and I could see the reflection of stars on the water, the tips of the dead cypress silhouetted against the moon, and a campfire, where there should have been no fire, burning in a misty grove of trees on high ground thirty yards out from the levee.
And I knew that was where I was supposed to go.
As I waded through the lily pads toward the trees, I could see the shadows of men moving about in the firelight and hear their cracker accents and the muted sound of spoons scraping on tin plates.
I walked up out of the shallows into the edge of the clearing, dripping water, hyacinth vines stringing from my legs. The men around the fire paid me little notice, as though, perhaps, I had been expected. They were cooking tripe in an iron pot, and they had hung their haversacks and wooden canteens in the trees and stacked their rifle-muskets in pyramids of fives. Their gray and butternut-brown uniforms were sunbleached and stiff with dried salt, and their unshaved faces had the lean and hungry look of a rifle company that had been in the field a long time.
Then from the far side of the fire a bearded man with fierce eyes stared out at me from under a gray hat with gold cord around the crown. His left arm was pinned up in a black sling, and his right trouser leg flopped loosely around a shaved wooden peg.
He moved toward me on a single crutch. I could smell tobacco smoke and sweat in his clothes. Then he smiled stiffly, the skin of his face seeming almost to crack with the effort. His teeth were as yellow as corn.
"I'm General John Bell Hood. Originally from Kentucky. How you do, suh?" he said, and extended his hand.
Chapter 11
"Do you object to shaking hands?" he said.
“No. Not at all. Excuse me."
The heel of his hand was half-mooned with calluses, his voice as thick as wet sand. A holstered cap-and-ball revolver hung on his thigh.
"You look puzzled," he said.
"Is this how it comes? Death, I mean."
"Ask them."
Some of his men were marked with open, bloodless wounds I could put my fist in. Beyond the stacked rifles, at the edge of the firelight, was an ambulance wagon. Someone had raked a tangle of crusted bandages off the tailgate onto the ground.
