Purple Cane Road

officers?'

'Saturday night I was in Maggie Glick's bar over in Algiers. I ran into Jim Gable's ex-chauffeur, a guy named Micah something or another. He said he was going to come into some money by squeezing the man who was milking the cow.'

'What?'

'Those were his words. I think he was saying Remeta is shaking down Jim Gable.'

'You're saying Jim Gable killed your mother?' he said.

'Remeta forced Don Ritter to give up the names of my mother's killers before he executed him. At least that's what he says.'

'What am I supposed to do with information like this? I can't believe I'm having this conversation,' Magelli said.

'Put Micah under surveillance.'

'Shake loose three or four detectives and follow a guy around who has no last name? This sounds like something Purcel thought up, maybe to get even with the department.'

'I'm serious, Dana.'

'No, you're obsessed. You're a good guy. I love you. But you're stone nuts. That's not a joke. Stay out of town.'

The next DAY I drove to the City Library and found the collection of Civil War-era photographs that Johnny Remeta had been looking at just before he jumped out of the reading room window. I used the index, then flipped to the grainy black-and-white pictures taken at the Bloody Angle and Dunker Church.

The images in the pictures told me nothing new about Remeta. He was simply a necromancer with broken glass in his head trying to find a historical context for the rage and pain his mother had bequeathed him. But if that was true, why had the image of the book, its pages turning in the wind, disturbed me in my dream?

Because I hadn't considered he was looking at something else in the collection, not just at the photos of Union and Confederate dead at Sharpsburg and Spotsylvania?

I flipped back two pages and was suddenly looking at a photograph of a two-story, narrow, columned house, surrounded by a piked iron fence. The picture had been taken in 1864, in uptown New Orleans, after the Union occupation of the city by General Butler.

According to the historical notes opposite the photograph, the house was owned by a young woman, believed to be a southern spy, who hid her lover, an escaped Confederate prisoner of war, from General Butler's soldiers. The soldier was badly wounded, and when she discovered her own arrest was imminent, the two of them drank poison and died upstairs in a tester bed.

I went back to the department and called Dana Magelli at NOPD again.

'We haven't found Remeta because he hides in plain sight,' I said.

'I knew it was going to be that kind of day.'

'Give it a rest, Dana. When he had a cop on his tail in the Quarter, he parked his truck and went inside the police station. How many perps have that kind of cool?'

'Give me a street address and we'll swing by.'

'He's imbued with this notion he's a Confederate hero of some kind and my daughter is his girlfriend. He was reading an account in our library about two lovers who committed suicide during the Civil War in a home on Camp Street.'

'That doesn't mean he's living in New Orleans.'

'You have something better to offer?'

'Every cop in the city has a mug shot of this guy. What else can we do?'

'Pull Jim Gable's personnel records for me.'

'Forget it.'

'Why?'

'We'll handle our own people. Am I communicating here? Gable is none of your business.'

That's what you think, I thought as I lowered the receiver into the phone cradle.

I worked late that evening, then drove home along the bayou road in the dusk. I could smell chrysanthemums and a smell like gas on the wind and see fireflies lighting in the gloom of the swamp. The house had already fallen into shadow when I turned into the drive and the television set was on in the living room, the sounds of canned laughter rising and falling in the air like an insult to the listener's credulity. I tried not to think about the evening that awaited Bootsie and me as soon as I entered the house, hours of unrelieved tension, formality that hid our mutual anger, physical aversion, and periods of silence that were louder than a scream.

I saw Batist chopping up hog meat on a butcher table he had set up by the coulee. He had taken off his shirt and put on a gray apron, and I could see the veins cord in his shoulder each time he raised the cleaver in the air. Behind him, the sky was still blue and the evening star was out and the moon rising, and his head was framed against the light like a glistening cannonball.

'Sold thirty-five lunches today. We run out of poke chops,' he said.

A cardboard box by his foot contained the hog's head and loops of blue entrails.

'You doin' all right?' I asked.

'Weather's funny. The wind's hard out of the west. I seen t'ings glowing in the swamp last night. My wife use to say that was the loupgarou.'

'It's swamp gas igniting or ball lightning, podna. You know that. Forget about werewolves.'

'I run my trot line this morning. Had a big yellow mudcat on it. When I slit it open there was a snake in its stomach.'

'I'll see you later,' I said.

'When the loupgarou come, somebody gonna die. Old folks use to burn blood to run it back in the trees.'

'Thanks for putting up the meat, Batist,' I said, and went inside the house.

Bootsie sat at the kitchen table reading from two sheets of lined paper. She wore blue jeans and loafers and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut away at the shoulders; wisps of her hair had fallen loose from her barrette and hung on the back of her neck. Her fingers were pressed to her temples while she read.

'Is that from Remeta?' I said.

'No. I went to an Al-Anon meeting today. Judy Theriot, my sponsor, was there. She said I had a problem with anger.'

'She did?' I said, my voice neutral.

'She made me do a Fourth Step and write out an inventory. Now that I've read it again I'd like to wad it up and throw it away.'

I went to the icebox and took out a pitcher of iced tea and poured a glass at the sink. I raised the glass to my mouth, then lowered it and set it back on the drain-board.

'Would you care for one?' I asked.

'You want to know what's in my inventory?' Bootsie asked.

'I'm a little bit afraid of what's coming.'

'My first statement has to do with absolute rage.'

'That's understandable.'

'Hold your water, Streak, before I get charged up again. Judy made me write out a list of all the things you did that angered me. It's quite long.'

I looked out the window at Batist chopping meat on the wood table by the coulee. He had started a trash fire of leaves, and the smoke was blowing into my neighbor's cane field. I could feel my scalp tightening as I waited for Bootsie to recite her written complaint, and I wanted to be outside, in the wind, in the autumnal smell of smoldering leaves, away from the words that would force me to look again at the ongoing insanity of my behavior.

Then, rather than wait for her to speak again and quietly accept criticism, I took the easier, softer way and tried to preempt it. 'You don't have to tell me. It's the violence. Nobody should have to live around it. I drag it home with me like an animal on a chain,' I said.