DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  "See, Junior run the first year he was on the farm. Gunbull put a half cup of birdshot in his back, but he whipped a mule into the water and held onto its tail till it swum him all the way acrost the Miss'sippi," Hogman said, flinging a board into the fire, the sparks fanning across the bayou's surface. "A young white doctor on the other side picked the shot out of his back and tole Junior he had a choice he'd give Junior ten dollars and forget he was there or the doctor would carry him on back to the penitentiary.

  "Junior said, "They'll whup me with the black Betty if I go back."

  "The doctor say, "No, they ain't. I'm gonna make sure they ain't."

  "The doctor carried him on back to the farm and tole the warden he was gonna come see Junior every mont', and if Junior was whupped, the doctor was gonna have the warden's job.

  "When Junior come out of the infirmary, they sent him to the Red Hat Gang. There was two captains running the Red Hat Gang then, the Latiolais brothers. First day they tole Junior they knowed they couldn't whup him, but by God they was gonna kill him.

  "See, there was several tings special about the Red Hat Gang. Everybody wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats that was painted red. But didn't nobody walk. From cain't-see to cain't-see, it was double-time, hit-it-and-git-it, roll, nigger, roll.

  "The Latiolais brothers was both drunkards. One of them might drink corn liquor under a tree and take a nap, then wake up and point his finger at a man and say, "Take off, boy." The next ting you'd hear was that shotgun popping.

  "If a man fell out under the sun, he'd get put on an anthill. If a man was dogging it on the wheelbarrow, the captain would say, "I need me a big wet rock." There was a mess of rocks piled up down in the shallows, see. A convict would have to find a big one, a twenty-five pounder maybe, wet it down, and run it back up the slope to the captain befo' it was dry. Course, the faster the convict run, the quicker the rock got dried.

  "So one day the captain tole Junior he was dogging it and he better get his ass down on the river and bring the captain the biggest wet rock he could find. Now, them rocks was a good half mile away and the captain knowed Junior was gonna be one wore-out nigger by the end of the day.

  "Except Junior toted the rock on up the slope, then when the captain wasn't looking, he ducked behind some gum trees and pissed all over it. Then he holds up the rock to the captain and says, "This wet enough for you, boss?"

  "The captain touches the rock and looks at his hand and smells it. He cain't believe what Junior just done. Everybody on the Red Hat Gang started laughing. They was trying to hide it, looking at the ground and each other, but they just couldn't hold it inside. It was so funny they thought for a minute even the captain would laugh. They was sure wrong about that."

  "What happened?" I asked.

  Hogman wore a strap undershirt that hung like rags on his body. His eyes took on a melancholy cast.

  "The captain took Junior to the sweatbox on Camp A. It was an iron box no bigger than a coffin, standing straight up on a concrete pad. They kept that boy in there seven days, in the middle of summer, no way to go to the bat' room except a bucket between his legs," he said.

  "What became of Junior?" I asked.

  "Don't know. He was in and out of "Gola a couple of times. Maybe they buried him in the levee. I reckon there's hundreds in that levee. I don't study on it no mo'," he said.

  His eyes seemed to focus on nothing, his forehead glistening in the firelight.

  Early the next morning I picked up my mail in my pigeon hole at the department and sorted through it at my desk. In it was an invitation, written in a beautiful hand on silver-embossed stationery.

  Dear Dave,

  Can you come to Fox Run Saturday afternoon? It's lawn tennis and drinks and probably a few self-satisfied people talking about their money. In fact, it's probably going to be a drag. But that's life on the bayou, right? Merchie and I do want to see you. Call me. Please. It's been a long time.

  Until then, Theodosha

  A long time since what? I thought.

  But I knew the answer, and the memory was one I tried to push out of my mind. I dropped the invitation into a drawer and glanced out the window at a car with two men in it, pulling to the curb in front of the courthouse. The driver wore a black suit and a Roman collar. His passenger twisted his head about, his face bloodless, like someone on his way to the scaffold.

  Two minutes later the pair of them were at my door.

  "Phil came to the church and made his reconciliation," Father Jimmie said, closing the door behind him. "If you don't mind, he'd like to talk over some things with you. Maybe in private."

  Gunner Ardoin, whom Father Jimmie referred to as Phil, looked at me briefly, then out the window at a trusty mowing the grass.

  "You want to tell me something, Gunner?" I asked.

  "Yeah, sure," he replied.

  Father Jimmie nodded and left the room. I told Gunner to take a seat in front of my desk. He breathed through his mouth, as though he were inside a walk-in freezer.

  "I'm doing this for Father Dolan," he said.

  "You're doing it to save your ass," I said.

  His eyes didn't look at me but his face hardened.

  "You went to confession?" I said.

  "They call it reconciliation now. But, yeah, I went," he said.

  "So who put the contract on Father Jimmie?"

  "I got a phone call. From a guy named Ray. He don't have another name. He just said I was supposed to take care of Father Dolan. When I got a delivery to make, Ray is the guy who calls me. I told Ray I didn't do stuff like that. He says I do it or I find a new source of income. So .I called up a guy. He rolls queers in the Quarter and at some sleaze joints on Airline. For a hundred bucks he does other kinds of work, too."

  "Do you have any idea what you did to a decent and fine man?"

  "You want the guy's name?"

  "No, I want Ray's last name and I want the guy Ray works for."

  "Man, you don't understand. Father Dolan's got enemies all over New Orleans. He's trying to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and trash incinerators and these guys who been dumping sludge out in the river parishes. He told the Times-Picayune these right-to-life people were committing a sin by putting these women's pictures and names on the Internet."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "These anti-abortion nutcases. They take pictures of women going into abortion clinics, then put the pictures and the women's names and addresses on the Internet. Father Dolan spoke up about it, a Catholic priest. How many enemies does one guy need?"

  "Our time is about up, Gunner," I said.

  "The queer-bait from the Quarter was supposed to scare Father Dolan, not go ape shit with a pipe. Hey, are you listening? It's on the street I snitched off Sammy Fig. You must have given up my name to Fat Sammy."

  "Sammy says he never heard of you. You shouldn't have anything to worry about."

  "I knew it." His face turned gray. He wiped his mouth and looked at the trusty gardener clipping a hedge outside the window. "Why you staring at me like that?" he said.

  "I think you're using the seal of the confessional to keep Father Dolan from testifying against you."

  "Maybe that was true at first. But I'm still sorry for what I done. He's a good guy. He didn't deserve what happened to him."

  I glanced at my watch. "We're done here. So long, Gunner," I said.

  He rose from his chair and walked to the door, then stopped, his shoulders slightly stooped, his impish features waiting in anticipation, as though an act of mercy might still be extended to him.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "Call Sammy Fig. Tell him I didn't rat him out."

  "What's Ray's last name?" I asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Adios,"I said.

  I went back to reading my morning mail. When I looked up again, he was gone. A moment later Father Jimmie stuck his head in the door, his disappointment obvious.

  "You couldn't help Phil out?" he as
ked.

  The next day I called the warden's office at Angola Penitentiary and asked an administrative assistant to do a records search under the name of Clarence "Junior" Crudup.

  "When was he here?" the assistant asked.

  "In the forties or fifties."

  "Our records don't go back that far. You'll have to go through Baton Rouge for that."

  "This guy went in but didn't come out."

  "Say again?"

  "He was never released. No one knows what happened to him."

  "Try Point Lookout."

  "The cemetery?"

  "Nobody gets lost in here. They either go out through the front gate or they get planted in the gum trees."

  "How about under the levee?"

  He hung up on me.

  At noon I walked past the whitewashed and crumbling brick crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery to Main Street and ate lunch at Victor's Cafeteria, then returned to the office just as the sun went behind a bank of thunderheads and the wind came up hard in the south and began blowing the trees along the train tracks. There were two telephone messages from Theodosha Flannigan in my mailbox. I dropped them both in the dispatcher's wastebasket.

  At 4:00 P.M." in the middle of a downpour, I saw her black Lexus pull to the curb in front of the courthouse. She popped open an umbrella and raced for the front of the building, water splashing on her calves and the bottom of her pink skirt.

  I went out into the corridor to meet her, feigning a confidence that masked my desire to avoid seeing her again.

  "Did you get my invitation?" she said, her face and hair bright with rain.

  "Yes, thanks for sending it," I replied.

  "I called earlier. A couple of times."

  Two deputies at the water cooler were looking at us, their eyes traveling the length of her figure.

  "Come on in the office, Theo. It's been a little busy today," I said.

  I closed the door behind us. "If you can't come Saturday, I understand. I need to talk to you about something else, though," she said.

  "Oh?"

  "I've got a problem. It comes in bottles. Not just booze. Six months ago I started using again. My psychiatrist gave me the keys to the candy store," she said.

  Her voice was wired, the whites of her eyes threaded with tiny veins. She let out a breath in a ragged sigh. Her breath smelled like whiskey and mint leaves, and not from the previous night. "Can I sit down?" she asked.

  "Yes, I'm sorry. Please," I said, and looked over my shoulder at Helen Soileau passing in the corridor.

  "Dave, I have little men with drills and saws working in my head all day. Sometimes in the middle of the night, too," Theodosha said.

  "There's a meeting tonight at Solomon House, across from old New Iberia High," I said.

  "I've been in treatment twice. I was in analysis for seven years. I get a year of sobriety, then things start happening in my head again. My most recent psychiatrist shot himself last week. In Lafayette, in Girard Park, while his kids were playing on the swings. I keep thinking I had something to do with it."

  "Where's Merchie in all this?"

  "He makes excuses for me. He doesn't complain. I couldn't ask for more. You know, he's not entirely normal himself." She took a handkerchief from her purse and blotted the moisture from her eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing here. Merchie's bothered because you think he's dumping oil waste around poor people's homes. He looks up to you. Can't you come out to Fox Run Saturday?"

  "I'm kind of jammed up these days."

  "How long were you drunk?"

  "Fifteen years, more or less."

  "You didn't want to drink when your wife died?"

  "No," I said, my eyes leaving hers.

  "I don't know how anybody stays sober. I feel dirty all over."

  "Why?"

  "Who cares? Some people are born messed up," she said. "I'm sorry for coming in here like this. I'm going to find a dark, hermetically sealed, air-conditioned lounge and dissolve myself inside a vodka collins."

  "Some people just ride out the hangover. Today can be the first inning in a new ballgame."

  "Good try," she said, rising from her chair.

  I thought she was about to leave. Instead, she fixed her gaze on me, waiting. Her hair had the black-purplish sheen of silk, the tips damp and curled around her throat.

  "Is there something else?" I asked.

  "What about Saturday?" Her face softened as she waited for an answer.

  Chapte

  4.

  That evening, at twilight, a Buick carrying three teenage girls roared around a curve on Loreauville Road, passed a truck, caromed off a roadside mailbox, then righted itself and slowed behind a school bus as someone in the backseat flung a box of fast-food trash and plastic cups and straws out the window. The truck driver, a religious man who kept a holy medal suspended from a tiny chain on his rearview mirror, would say later he thought the girls had settled down and would probably follow the church bus at a reasonable speed into Loreauville, five miles up Bayou Teche.

  Instead, the driver crossed the double-yellow stripe again, into oncoming traffic, then tried to cut in front of the church bus when she realized safe harbor would never again be hers.

  Helen Soileau, four uniformed deputies, two ambulances, and a firetruck were already at the accident scene when I arrived. The girls were still inside the Buick. The telephone pole they had hit was cut in half at the base and the downed wires were hanging in an oak tree. The Buick had slid on its roof farther down the embankment, splintering a white fence before coming to rest by the side of a fish pond, where the gas tank had exploded and burned with heat so intense the water in the pond boiled.

  "You run the tag yet?" I said.

  "It's registered to a physician in Loreauville. The baby-sitter says he and his wife are playing golf. I left a message at the country club," Helen said.

  She wore her shield on a black cord around her neck. The wind shifted, blowing across the barns and pastures of the horse farm where the Buick had burned. But the odor the wind carried was not of horses and alfalfa. Helen held a wadded-up piece of Kleenex to her nose, snuffing, as though she had a cold. Two firemen used the jaws-of-life to pry apart the window on the driver's side of the Buick, then began pulling the remains of the driver out on the grass.

  "The bus driver says the Buick was swinging all over the road?" I asked.

  "Yep, they were having a grand time of it. Life on the bayou in 2002," Helen said.

  The water oaks along the Teche had already lost their leaves and their branches looked skeletal against the flattened, red glow of the sun on the western horizon. A spruce green Lincoln with two people in the front seat approached us from the direction of Loreauville, slowing in the dusk, pulling onto the shoulder. The driver got out, looking over the top of his automobile at the scene taking place by the fish pond, his face stenciled with a sadness that no cop, at least no decent one, ever wishes to deal with.

  I reached through the open window of Helen's cruiser and picked up a pair of polyethylene gloves and a vinyl garbage bag.

  "Where you going?" she said.

  "Litter patrol," I replied.

  I walked back along the road for two hundred yards or so, past a line of cedar trees that bordered another horse farm, then crossed the road to the opposite embankment where a spray of freshly thrown trash bloomed in the grass. I picked up chicken bones, half-eaten dinner rolls, soiled paper napkins, a splattered container of mashed potatoes and gravy, three blue plastic cups, three lids and straws, and broken pieces of a plastic wrap that had been used to seal the lids on the cups.

  There were still grains of ice in the cups, along with the unmistakable smell of sugar, lemon juice, and rum. I found a paper sack and placed the cups and lids in it, then deposited the sack in the garbage bag.

  When I got back to the accident scene, Helen was talking to the father and mother of the girl who had driven the Buick. The father's face was dilated with rage as he pointed his finger at the dri
vers of both the truck and the church bus, both of whom had said his daughter was speeding and crossing the double-yellow stripe.

  "Maybe you boxed her off, too. Why would she go off the left-hand embankment unless you wouldn't let her back in line? Answer me that, goddammit," he said.

  An ambulance containing the bodies of the. three girls was working its way around the other emergency vehicles, its flashers beating silently against the dusk.

  I dropped the evidence bag in Helen's cruiser and drove home, passing a rural black slum at the four corners, where several cars and pickup trucks were lined up at the service window of a drive-by daiquiri store.

  Early the next morning, when the streets were still empty and the light was gray and streaked with mist in the backyards along the bayou, Fat Sammy Figorelli parked his Cadillac in front of my house, puffed on a cigarette while studying the live oaks and antebellum homes that lined East Main, then walked up on my gallery and began knocking so hard the walls shook.

  "You mad at my door?" I said.

  "I need to straighten you out about a certain issue," he said.

  I stepped outside, barefoot, still unshaved, dressed only in a T-shirt and khakis. He wore a rust-colored shirt and brown knit necktie and knife-creased slacks. He stood a half-head taller than I, his porcine face shiny with cologne.

  "A little early, isn't it?" I said.

  "I get up at four every morning. I think sleep sucks," he said.

  "I see. Then you wake up other people. Makes sense."

  "What?" he said.

  "Why are you here, Sammy?"

  "I got this punk Gunner Ardoin calling me up, telling me he didn't rat me out, that he's got a little girl, that he can't afford to lose work 'cause he's in the hospital."

  "Why tell me about it?" I asked.

  "Thanks to you and that animal Purcel, my name is getting drug into all this."

  "Into what?"

  "Stories about a priest getting bashed. I don't want to hear my name coming up no more in regard to Father Jimmie Dolan. This guy is a world-class pain in the ass and I got nothing to do with him. What kind of priest punches out the owner of a health salon, anyway?"

  "I hadn't heard that one."

  "He probably left it out of his homily."