The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke Page B

three pistols—my departmental .38 revolver, a hideaway Beretta .25, and a U.S. Army-issue .45 automatic. As I reamed out the barrel of the .45 with a bore brush, I thought about some of the mythology that Southern boys of my generation had grown up with. And like all myth, it was a more or less accurate metaphorical reflection of what was actually going on inside us, namely our dark fascination with man’s iniquity. In moments like these I suspected that John Calvin was much more the inventor of our Southern homeland than Sir Walter Scott.
    Southern Myths to Contemplate While Cleaning One’s Guns—Substitute Other Biographical Names or Geographical Designations to Suit the Particular State in the Old Confederacy in Which You Grew Up:
    1. A town in east Texas used to have a sign on the main street that read, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on your head in this county.”
    2. Johnny Cash did time in Folsom Prison.
    3. Warren Harding was part Negro.
    4. Spanish fly and Coca-Cola will turn a girl into an instant drive-in-movie nymphomaniac.
    5. The crushed hull of a Nazi submarine, depth-charged off Grand Island in 1942, still drifts up and down the continental shelf. At a certain spot on a calm night, shrimpers out of Morgan City can hear the cries of drowning men in the fog.
    6. A Negro rapist was lynched outside of Lafayette and his body put inside a red wooden box and nailed up in a pecan tree as a warning to others. The desiccated wood, the strips of rag, the rat’s nest of bones hang there to this day.
    7. The .45 automatic was designed as a result of a Filipino insurrection. The insurrectionists would bind up their genitals with leather thongs, which would send them into a maniacal agony that would allow them to charge through the American wire while the bullets from our Springfields and .30-40 Kraigs passed through their bodies with no more effect than hot needles. The .45, however, blew holes in people the size of croquet balls.
    There is usually a vague element of truth in all mythology, and the basic objective truth about the .45 automatic is simply that it is an absolutely murderous weapon. I had bought mine in Saigon’s Bring-Cash Alley, out by the airport. I kept it loaded with steel-jacketed ammunition that could blow up a car engine, reduce a cinder-block wall to rubble, or, at rapid fire, shred an armored vest off someone’s chest.
    The darkness of my own meditation disturbed me. My years of drinking had taught me not to trust my unconscious, because it planned things for me in a cunning fashion that was usually a disaster for me, or for the people around me, or for all of us. But by this time I also knew that I was involved with players who were far more intelligent, brutal, and politically connected than the kind of psychotics and losers I usually dealt with.
    If I had any doubts about my last conclusion, they were dispelled when a gray, U. S. government motor-pool car stopped on the dock and a redheaded, freckle-faced man in a seersucker suit who could have been anywhere from fifteen to thirty years old walked down the gangplank onto my houseboat.
    He flipped open his identification and smiled.
    “Sam Fitzpatrick, U. S. Treasury,” he said. “You expecting a war or something?”
     

FOUR
    “It doesn’t look like you believe me,” he said. “Do you think I boosted the ID and a government car, too?” He wouldn’t stop grinning.
    “No, I believe you. It’s just that you look like you might have escaped from ‘The Howdy Doody Show.’”
    “I get lots of compliments like that. You New Orleans people are full of fun. I hear you’ve been taking a little heat for me.”
    “You tell me.”
    “Are you going to offer me some iced tea?”
    “You want some?”
    “Not here. You’re too hot, Lieutenant. In fact, almost on fire. We need to get you back on the sidelines somehow. I’m afraid it’s not going to be easy. The other team is unteachable in some ways.”
    “What are you talking