Read DR08 - Burning Angel for Free Online Page B

across the bays and willow islands and dance in a yellow mist on the water around us. I pulled up the sash weight I used for an anchor, cranked the engine, and headed back for the levee. Clete opened another bottle of Dixie, then reached deep down in the crushed ice, found a can of Dr.
    Pepper, and tossed it to me. “Sorry, Streak,” he said, and smiled with his eyes.
    But the apology would be mine to make.
    That night I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a T-shirt, and drove out toward Spanish Lake and the little community of Cade. I can't explain why I decided to jog there rather than along the bayou, by my house, south of town. Maybe it was because the only common denominator in the case, so far, was a geographical one. For no reason I understood, Sonny Boy had mentioned a barra-coon, built near the lake by Jean Lafitte, then Sweet Pea Chaisson,
    who could never be accused of familial sentiment, other than a violent one, had decided to exhume his adoptive mother's remains from the Bertrand plantation and transport them in a garbage truck back to Breaux Bridge. Both men operated in a neon and concrete world where people bought and sold each other daily and lived by the rules that govern piranha fish. What was their interest or involvement in a rural community of poor black people? I parked my truck and jogged along a dirt road between sugarcane acreage, over the railroad tracks, past a dilapidated clapboard store and a row of shacks. Behind me, a compact white automobile turned off the highway, slowed so as not to blow dust in my face, and drove toward the lighted houses on the lake. I could see the silhouettes of two people talking to each other. The breeze was warm and smelled of horses and night-blooming flowers, freshly turned soil, and smoke blowing off a stump fire hard by a pecan orchard. The tree trunks seemed alive with shadows and protean shapes in the firelight, as though, if you let imagination have its way, the residents from an earlier time had not yet accepted the inevitability of their departure. I've often subscribed to the notion that perhaps history is not sequential; that all people, from all of history, live out their lives simultaneously, in different dimensions perhaps, occupying the same pieces of geography, unseen by one another, as if we are all part of one spiritual conception. Attakapas Indians, Spanish colonists, slaves who dredged mud from the lake to make bricks for the homes of their masters, Louisiana's boys in butternut brown who refused to surrender after Appomattox, federal soldiers who blackened the sky with smoke from horizon to horizon—maybe they were all still out there, living just a breath away, like indistinct figures hiding inside an iridescent glare on the edge of our vision. But the lights I saw in a distant grove of gum trees were not part of a metaphysical speculation. I could see them bouncing off tree trunks and hear the roar and grind of a large machine at the end of the dirt lane that ran past Bertie Fontenot's house.
    I slowed to a walk, breathing deep in my chest, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes at the cattle guard and wisteria-grown arched gate that marked the entrance to the Bertrand property. The dirt lane was faintly haloed with humidity in the moonlight, the rain ditches boiling with insects. I began jogging toward the lights in the trees, the steady thud of my shoes like an intrusion on a nocturnal plantation landscape that had eluded the influences of the twentieth century.
    Then I had the peculiar realization that I felt naked. I had neither badge nor gun, and hence no identity other than that of jogger. It was a strange feeling to have, as well as to be forced into acknowledging simultaneously the ease with which my everyday official capacity allowed me to enter and exit any number of worlds where other people lived with an abiding trepidation.
    The grinding sounds of the machine ceased and the headlights dimmed and then went off. I strained my eyes