DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  "There wasn't no lights on in the pool when she came out of the dressing room. She started swimming back and fort' across the shallow end, then he come up to her and axed her if she could swim on her back. She said she always got water up her nose, and he says just turn over and rest on my hands and I'll show you how to do it."

  I waited for him to go on but he didn't.

  "What happened?" I said.

  "He tole her how pretty she was, how she had to be careful about young boys only got one thing on their mind. She tole him she was cold and she better go back inside and get dressed. He said it was okay, they'd come back another time, that she was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen."

  He stopped again, ticking his pencil on the clipboard, looking at nothing.

  "That was it?" I said.

  "It was enough for her daddy. He was gonna go over to Flannigan's house and break his jaw but his wife hid the car keys. So the next morning he walked into Flannigan's office and made sure the door was open so everybody could hear it and tole him his daughter wouldn't be coming back to work no more."

  "Thanks, Wally."

  "What do I know?" he said.

  A lot, I thought.

  I went back to my office and started in on the paperwork that had built up during the days I was off. The phone on my desk rang.

  "Tell me what I'm hearing isn't true," the voice of Clotile Arce-neaux said.

  "I'm not too keen on rumors."

  "Did you and your buddy Purcel brace Sammy Fig out in Metairie Friday night?"

  "Maybe."

  "Some federal agents are seriously pissed off about this, as well as somebody else, meaning myself. What gives you the right to go into another jurisdiction and intimidate other people's witnesses?"

  "I don't read it that way."

  "Well, read this. Sammy Fig thinks either I or federal agents gave you information that sent you over to Metairie. He says he'll no longer be cooperating with us and we can shove Witness Protection up our ass."

  "That's the way it flushes sometimes."

  "I love your metaphors. I even like you. But right now I'd like to push you off a tall building."

  "Where's Sammy now?"

  "I left that part out, did I? We have no idea. Gone. My guess is he's gonna try to take it to them before they get to him first."

  "Take it to whom?"

  "To whom} I love talking to cops who need to show me how educated they are. How would we know, since eighteen months of casework just got dumped in the toilet? You're something else, Robi-cheaux. I hope you come out of this all right, but remind me to be on vacation the next time I catch a case you're involved with. Did you and Purcel really take a bunch of hookers to Galatoire's?"

  "I think we've got a bad connection. Let me call you back later."

  "Not necessary. I've had all the horse shit I can take in one day," she said.

  Top that.

  At noon I signed out of the office and drove up the bayou to Hogman Patin's house. He was building a chicken coop under a pecan tree in his side yard and pretended not to see me when I turned into the drive. He slipped his hammer through a hole in a leather pouch on his belt, looking intently at his creation, then walked around the back of his house, out of sight.

  I left my truck on top of the oyster-shell drive, the engine ticking with heat, and followed him. He was sitting on his steps, his big hands cupped on his knees, the knife scars on his arms like the backs of worms that had burrowed under the skin. The sun's reflection wobbled brightly on the bayou's surface, but he stared at it without blinking. "Ain't goin' to let the past alone, are you?" he said.

  "You have to confront it to get rid of it, Hogman," I replied.

  "I done tole you almost all I know. Why don't you let it be?"

  "What happened to Jackson Posey, the guard who had to keep taking Junior up to Miss Andrea's house?"

  "Cancer eat him up. Heard he died at Charity Hospital in Lafayette. Died hard, too."

  I picked up a handful of moldy pecans from a shady, damp area and began chunking them into the bayou. "You've never told anybody why you made a bottle tree in your backyard, have you?" I said.

  "Ain't nobody else's bid ness

  "You're a religious man, Hogman. Each one of those bottles represents a different prayer. Every time the wind makes the glass sing in the branches, a prayer goes up from each of those bottles, doesn't it?"

  He lowered his eyes and pared one of his fingernails with a toothpick. "What a man do in his home is what he do in his home," he said.

  "You helping cover up a murder, Hogman."

  "Ain't right you talk to me like that, Dave. No, suh."

  "Maybe not. But why do you want to protect the Lejeune family?"

  "I ain't seen what happened after I left the camp. Cain't tell you about what I ain't seen. Don't want to tell you about what I ain't seen, either."

  "Somebody saw. Somebody knows."

  He breathed hard through his nose, his nostrils flaring in his frustration with me and his own conscience. The wind was cool and wrinkled the bayou's surface, and Hogman's bottle tree rang like spoons clinking on crystal. "There's a man down at Pecan Island stacked time in the same camps as me and Junior. He was a check writer and used to carry the water can when we road-ganged. Him and his gran'daughter sell crabs and vegetables off a truck out on the state road. His name is Woodrow Reed."

  "How does he feel about talking to a white man?"

  "He don't care what color you are. He climbed up on a power pole to get a cat down and got 'lectrocuted. His eyes cooked in his head.

  You'll t'ink he's looking at you but don't no light go t'rew his eyes.

  His eyes scare people. Maybe that's why ain't nobody ever been around axing Woodrow questions about what he seen."

  I drove back to New Iberia and on south of Abbeville, where sugarcane acreage gave way to saw grass and clumps of gum trees and the miles of wetlands that bled into the Gulf of Mexico, forming the watery, ill-defined coastline of southwest Louisiana. I crossed a bridge onto one of the few remaining barrier islands left in Louisiana, a reef composed of hard-packed shell ground up by the tides, the crest topped with alluvial soil that is among the richest in the western hemisphere. The adjacent islands had been dredged and scooped out of the surf and hauled away on barges decades ago for highway-construction material, but portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreational area for its CEOs, contains wooded acreage where the canopy of live oaks rises perhaps two hundred feet into the sky and the sunlight breaking through the moss and branches and air vines is the same color as light filtering through green water in the Florida Keys.

  In the midst of duck-hunting camps with wide, screened-in porches and adjacent boat houses was the tiny vegetable farm and blue-point crab business of Woodrow Reed. Stacks upon stacks of collapsible wire crab traps, webbed with dried river trash, stood by the side of his small, paint less house. A middle-aged black woman was chopping up nutria parts on a butcher block a short distance away, the rubber gloves on her hands spotted with brown matter.

  Woodrow Reed's eyes were large, round and flat, unblinking, like painted facsimiles that had been cut out of paper and pasted on the face of a mannikin. They stared at me intently, the pupils dilated and black, although it was obvious Woodrow Reed was sightless.

  "I'm Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said. I opened my badge holder and held it aloft so the middle-aged woman in the side yard could see it.

  "I knowed you was coming," he said, rising from where he sat on the front steps.

  "Hogman called you?" I said.

  "Yeah, but he didn't have to. I knowed somebody was coming one day. Want to come in, suh?" He opened the rusted screen door to his front porch and waited for me to enter.

  He could not have been over five feet. His skin was the color of a razor strop that has yellowed with wear, his body compressed and hard looking, his cheeks and chin scrolled with gray whiskers. But I could
not get over his eyes. I had seen eyes like his only once before, in the body of a man who had been exhumed from a grave in northern Montana where he had lain for decades under frozen ground.

  "How'd you come by your farm, Mr. Reed?" I asked.

  "You already know the answer to that."

  "Can you tell me how Junior Crudup died?" I asked.

  Woodrow Reed was sitting on what looked like a motion-picture theater seat mounted on a wood block, his palms propped on his thighs. His denim pants were neatly pressed, the cuffs and pockets buttoned on his long-sleeve work shirt.

  "The doctor give me another year. I already put my farm in my daughter's name. Ain't a whole lot can touch me no more. I got cancer, just like Jackson Posey, although I never smoked like he did or had no problems with my skin," he said.

  "Tell me about Junior, sir."

  "Junior was gonna be Junior. He didn't wear no other man's hat. That was Junior," he said. For the first time he smiled.

  In the waning days of summer, when the amber light at evening turned the countryside into a yellowing antique photograph, Junior

  Crudup took his twelve-string Stella guitar out on the steps of the cabin in the work camp and began composing a song whose lyrics he penciled on a paper bag flattened down on the board plank beside him.

  "What you calling your song?" Woodrow asked, sitting down next to him in the dusk.

  " "The Angel of Work Camp Number Nine,"" Junior replied.

  Woodrow rubbed the whiskers that grew like black wire on his chin. "T'ink that's a good idea, Junior?" he asked.

  "Gonna record it up in Memphis one day. You gonna see," Junior replied.

  "I seen her car out here last night. Parked right there on the road. She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel and playing the radio in the dark."

  "You better not be fooling with me, Woodrow."

  "It was her. Cap'n Posey walked up to her window and axed if any ting was wrong. She said she was just taking a drive. Then she drove on down the road toward the li'l sto' by the bridge. A li'l while later I seen her drive on back to the big house. She was drinking a bottle of beer, tilting her chin up each time she took a sip."

  "Why didn't you come get me?"

  "You spent too much time up Nort', Junior. You're having t'oughts ain't no nigger in Lou'sana ought to be having."

  "Maybe it was that way at first. But not now. You know what she got that make her special?"

  "Her tits ain't bad."

  "Don't be talking that way, Woodrow. She's special 'cause she got respect for other people."

  Junior adjusted the belly of his guitar on his thigh and slipped his three steel finger picks on his right hand, then corded the neck of the guitar and began singing:

  At Camp Number Nine its "Roll, nigger, roll, No heaven for you, boy, the state own your soul." They took my home and family,

  Give me chains, fat side and beans, Bossman making me a Christian, God Almighty, hear that Betty scream.

  "You risking your ass for somebody don't know you alive," Wood-row said.

  "Rich ladies like that got all kinds of things they got to do, places they got to travel to, Woodrow. She cain't be coming down here all the time."

  "Don't let Boss Posey hear that song."

  "When she invites me back up to the house?" Junior said.

  "Yeah?"

  "That's the first song I'm gonna play."

  There was drought in the fall and the fields hardened and cracked under a merciless sun and an empty sky that by noon was like white glass. The leaves of the cane baked in the wind and frayed into thread on the ends and rattled dryly on the stalks, and by evening the sky was cinnamon colored with dust and the convicts filling mule-drawn water tanks with buckets they flung into the bayou on ropes had to tie wet handkerchiefs across their nostrils and mouths. To conserve water the convicts bathed in the bayou, then sat listlessly on the porches of their cabins until lock-up. Every third or fourth evening, while the cicadas sang in a grove of cedar trees near the camp, Junior worked on the song he was composing in tribute to Andrea Lejeune, waiting for the invitation to play on her lawn again, telling himself she was contacting the governor and that any day a parole order for his release would be delivered at the camp's front gate.

  At bell count on a September morning Jackson Posey saw the folded brown paper sack covered with penciled lyrics sticking from Junior's back pocket.

  "What you got there, Junior?" he asked.

  The early sun was already a dull red inside the dust blowing out of the fields. At the bottom of the slope that led down to the bayou, the water was low and swarming with gnats, algae-webbed snags protruding from the surface, all of it smelling of dead fish that lay bloated and fly-specked on the banks.

  "Just li'l notes I keep for myself, boss," Junior replied.

  "Let's see it," Jackson Posey said, fitting a pair of glasses on his nose. He took the bag from Junior's fingers and studied the words on it, his lips moving slightly as he read. The sores on his arms seemed deeper, more black than purple now. His eyes fixed on Junior's. "You got Camp Number Nine in here?" he said.

  "Yes, suh."

  "Camp Number Nine is us."

  "It is and it ain't, boss."

  The guard read both sides of the paper bag, then shook a Camel loose from his cigarette pack and slipped it into his mouth. He laughed to himself and handed the song lyrics back to Junior. "I ain't a big judge of poetry, but I'd say keep this one."

  "Thank you, suh."

  "To wipe yourself with. You never cease to entertain me, Junior," Posey added.

  Jit morning bell count two days later Andrea Lejeune got out of her Ford convertible at the camp's front gate, wearing a polka-dot sun dress and dark glasses and a blue bandanna tied tightly on her head, the wind whipping her dress around her legs.

  "We're taking Junior to a recording studio in Crowley, Mr. Posey. Make sure he brings his guitar and his harmonica and a sack lunch. Y'all will follow me in your truck," she said.

  Jackson Posey involuntarily looked toward the big house. "Mr. Lejeune at home, ma'am?" he asked.

  "No, he's not, and I resent your asking," she replied.

  Junior wrapped his Stella in a blanket, tied string around the belly and the neck, and slipped his E-major Marine Band harmonica in his shirt pocket. Before they left the camp, Posey put chains on Junior's ankles and handcuffs on his wrists, and set the guitar in the bed of the truck. As they drove away Junior looked out the back window at his friend Woodrow flinging a bucket into the bayou on a rope under the gaze of a mounted gun bull

  Then Junior and Jackson Posey were on the highway, driving through a long tunnel of oak trees behind Andrea Lejeune's purple convertible, the broken sunlight flicking by overhead, the wind cool in their faces.

  "You gonna make the big time, huh?" Posey said.

  "Don't know about that, suh."

  "Think it's coincidence she's taking you to Crowley?"

  "I ain't following you, boss."

  "That's where she meets a man I wouldn't take time to spit on. Castille Lejeune should have invested some of his money in a chastity belt. Know the difference between rich people and us?" Posey said.

  "No, suh," Junior answered.

  "They don't get caught."

  When they pulled into the Crowley town square Andrea Lejeune parked her car next to one of the old elevated sidewalks and went inside the dime store, one with a popcorn machine in front, to use the pay telephone. Then they drove out into the countryside again, through rice fields that were separated by hedgerows, to a white-painted, flat-top building constructed entirely of cinder blocks that was located inside a grove of cedar and pine trees like a machine-gun bunker.

  This was the same primitive studio where a few years later Warren Storm and Lazy Lester would record and Phil Phillips would cut the master for "Sea of Love," which would sell over one million copies. The equipment was prewar junk, the resonator for Junior's acoustic Stella a chunk of storm sewer pipe with a microphone
on the other end. But each person working in the studio knew who Junior Crudup was, and his identity as both a black man and a convict seemed to melt away as the session progressed.

  He recorded eight pieces, the last of which was "The Angel of Work Camp Number Nine." As he sang the lyrics he looked through a greasy side window and saw her by the front fender of her convertible, talking to a tall white man who had just gotten out of an Olds-mobile with grillwork that resembled chromium teeth. The white man was thin, dark haired, his crisp shirt tucked tightly inside his seersucker slacks. He rested one foot on the bumper of his car and re moved a blade of grass from the tip of his two-tone shoe, then took his car keys from his pocket and inserted his finger through the ring and spun them in the air.

  He drove away toward town in his Oldsmobile and Andrea Le-Jeune followed him. Junior's voice broke in the middle of his song and he had to start again.

  Later, Junior and Jackson Posey rode back through the town square of Crowley, past the colonnaded storefronts and tree-shaded elevated sidewalks inset with iron tethering rings, past the dime store with a popcorn machine in front from which Andrea had made a phone call.

  Junior was hunched forward on the seat, his wrists cuffed, the chain between his ankles vibrating with the motion of the truck, his expression concealed from Jackson Posey.

  "I'll show you something," Posey said, and cut down a side street and out onto a state road, past a shady motor court that featured a swimming pool in back and a supper club in front. Posey slowed the truck so he and Junior could have a clear view of the stucco cottages inside the trellised entrance.

  "Don't need to be seeing none of this, boss," Junior said.

  "There's his Oldsmobile. There's her little Ford. What do you reckon he's doing to her right now?"

  Junior stared at the tops of his cuffed hands and did not speak again until they were back at the camp.

  But his day was not over. Just after supper Jackson Posey came for him again. "She wants to see you," he said.

  "Wore out, boss."