DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Helen cupped her hand around my upper arm and kneaded the muscles in it. "Come on, Loot, give a girl a lift," she said.

  "What? What did you say?" I said.

  She looked at me strangely, her eyes filled with a mixture of pity and sadness.

  Not far away, just outside the little town of Jeanerette, Clete Purcel drove down a back road past three antebellum homes that were so stunning in appearance, the tree-shaded lots they sat on so perfect in arboreal and floral arrangement, they looked like Hollywood movie fabrications rather than homes that people of enormous wealth actually lived in. He turned at the green, embanked property corner of the last house in the row, crossed a steel bridge over the Teche, and passed, within fifty yards of the last antebellum home, a rural slum composed of rusted trailers, desiccated sheds, and junker cars that could have been replicated from a photograph taken in Bangladesh.

  He removed a pair of binoculars from his glove box and went inside a cafe from which his line of sight allowed him to see the trailer slum that spilled haphazardly to the edge of the bayou. It had not been a good day for Clete. Early that morning he had picked up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine in Opelousas and was about to transport him back to New Orleans, when the skip began jerking against the D-ring anchored on the floor of the Caddy, his face twisted with visceral pain, threatening to soil himself and the convertible if he wasn't allowed to use the bathroom. Clete cuffed him to a pipe next to the toilet in a filling station and waited outside. In less than two minutes the skip managed to put seventy-five cents in a sexual-enhancement dispenser, smear his wrist with a desensitizing lubricant, slip the cuff, and escape out a window.

  Score one for the meltdowns, Clete thought.

  A half hour later a woman did a hit-and-run on his convertible in a church parking lot; the investigating traffic officer gave him a citation for an expired inspection sticker; and while Clete argued the situation a flock of robins lit in a tree above his car, the top of which was down, and defecated all over the seats and upholstery.

  He drank coffee and focused his binoculars on a trailer that was broken in the center and had vinyl garbage bags taped across the windows It was the home of the skip's one-time fall partner, an Angola parolee who had been down twice for sexual battery against children. There was no movement inside the trailer, but next door a woman in faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and peroxided hair that was waved on only one side walked down to the school-bus stop and waited for her child. Then she escorted the child, a boy of about eight, back home and closed the door behind her.

  A moment later she reemerged with a tall, equestrian-looking man who had a hard, flat stomach and a purple birthmark that seeped from his hairline to the corner of his eye. They kissed on the mouth and the man put on a yellow hard hat and got into a waiting car driven by another man wearing an identical hard hat. The two men parked in front of the cafe and came in and sat down in the booth next to Clete's.

  "Kid come home a little soon?" the driver of the car, a truncated, moon-faced man, said.

  The man with the birthmark didn't reply but instead snapped his fingers repeatedly for the waitress's attention. After she took the order and went away, he said, "This guy Robicheaux is a walking hemorrhoid. You should see the old man's property. It looks like a bombing zone."

  "Tell me about it," the other man replied. His blond hair was combed straight back from a receding hairline, and he kept leaning forward, reverentially, each time the other man spoke. But the man with the birthmark was silent now, not interested in whatever the blond man had intended to say. The blond man, who wore a pair of electrician's wire snips in a leather case on his belt, tried again. "His house was so dried out a popcorn fart could have set it on fire but he blames me for it. He tried to screw me with the Better Business Bureau and get my license pulled."

  But the man with the birthmark, whom Clete had now connected with the name Will Guillot, only sipped his coffee and looked out the window at the bayou and the antebellum home on the far side of the steel bridge.

  "You think he sent that doctor to your house?" the moon-faced man said.

  "Probably."

  "You're a mean machine, Will."

  "Nope."

  "The guy came at you with a sawed-off shotgun?"

  "He thought he could go into a man's house and kick ass. He lost. End of story," Will Guillot said.

  "Pow!" his friend said.

  Both men became silent, eating slices of apple pie, drinking their coffee, picking their teeth. Clete went to the rest room, then waited for his check. The men in the other booth were talking about football now. Go home, he thought. You don't need any more bad luck today.

  He looked out the window and saw the child of Will Guillot's girlfriend playing on a swing set, a cheap one that was probably bought at Wal-Mart. The skip's fall partner, the sex predator, pulled up next door, talked to the boy briefly, tousling his hair, then went inside his trailer.

  Clete paid his check and started toward the door. He paused, thinking to himself, then reset his porkpie hat and walked back to Will Guillot's table. He grinned without speaking, his Hawaiian shirt partially unbuttoned on his chest, his eyes flicking sideways as though he did not know how to introduce himself.

  "Help you?" Guillot said.

  "You guys were in the Crotch?" Clete said.

  "The what}" the blond man said.

  "I heard you say something about a 'mean machine," so I thought you were talking about Mother Green's Mean Machine. See, jar-heads call "

  "Yeah, I know all about that. What can I do for you?" Guillot said.

  Clete cleaned an ear with one finger, looking sideways again as he did it, his face filling with thought. "I think I know who you are," he said.

  "You do?" Guillot said.

  "You popped a doctor from Loreauville in your driveway. Guy was some kind of weirded-out Vietnam vet, right? That's some kind of irony, huh? Guy probably had a thousand AK rounds shot at him, then loses his Kool-Aid and gets smoked in the suburbs."

  Guillot looked across the table at his friend and tapped his fingernail on the cover of his wristwatch. The two men started to get up.

  "Whoa," Clete said.

  "Whoa, what}" Guillot said.

  "The lady up there in the trailer, the one you're banging? She's got a little boy. The guy next door happens to be a sex predator. So while you're getting your twanger taken care of, the freak who was just patting her kid on the head is figuring out ways to sodomize him. My suggestion is you take your mind off your dick long enough to move the lady and her son out of that shithole before the kid's life is ruined. Can you relate to that?"

  "You've got some fucking nerve," Guillot said.

  The owner of the cafe had come from behind the counter and was standing behind Clete now, resolute, his feet planted, his thumb raised in the air.

  "Out," he said.

  "No problem," Clete said. He pulled two one-dollar bills from a brass money clip and dropped them on his table.

  But outside Clete could not give it up, standing by his car door, flipping his keys back and forth, his face growing darker. He watched Will Guillot and the electrical subcontractor with him get in their car. "Hold on a minute," he said.

  "Get a life, queer bait," Will Guillot said from the passenger window as his car rolled past Clete.

  Clete watched the two men cross the steel bridge over the Teche and turn down the tree-shaded back road that led past the row of antebellum homes. In his mind's eye he saw himself running them off the road, strolling back to their car, his blackjack in his side pocket, moving the situation on up to the full-tilt boogie. Why not? he thought. The day couldn't get any worse than it was already.

  He got into his Caddy, slammed the door, and turned the ignition. He heard a dry, clicking sound, then nothing. The battery was as dead as a butcher block.

  It took an hour for a filling station a half block away to send a truck that gave him a quick-start. He sat behind the wheel, revving the engine to
charge the battery, oil smoke pouring from under the frame,

  bird-shit smears on his clothes, all immediate hope of squaring the beef with Will Guillot gone.

  He looked through the windshield at the trailer slum by the bayou and the parolee who was now drinking a can of beer on his steps and talking to the little boy from next door.

  Clete retrieved a pair of leather work gloves from under the seat and put them in his pocket, then dropped the Caddy into low gear and rolled into the trailer slum, gravel and oyster shells ticking softly under his tires.

  "You Bobby Joe Fontenot?" he said.

  The man on the steps was relaxed, smoking a cigarette with his beer, barefoot in the sunshine, his arms flecked with blue tattoos done by an needle improvised from the guts of a ballpoint pen. He wore imitation black leather pants and a tie-dyed strap undershirt, his black hair scalped on the sides and braided into a matador's pigtail in back.

  "I'm gonna take a guess. Casting director from, what's that TV show called, Survivor}" he said, squinting against the sunlight.

  Clete grinned and got out of the Caddy, opening his badge holder briefly. "Looking for your friend who jumped his bond with Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater," he said. "Slipped his cuffs this morning and left me with shit on my nose."

  "Haven't seen him."

  "Mind if I look inside?"

  "Get yourself a beer. It's in the icebox."

  "Thanks," Clete said, and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  Clete stepped inside. The garbage can in the small kitchen was overflowing, the counters covered with pizza and fried-chicken cartons. A television set was playing without sound, the VCR under it lighted, a cassette pushed halfway into the loading slot. Clete shoved the cassette all the way into the unit with his thumb and waited for the video image to transfer to the screen. Then he clicked off the set and the figures on the screen shrank to a small dot. He slipped on his work gloves and called through the screen door: "Did you know you have a gas leak in your stove?"

  Bobby Joe stepped inside the trailer, sniffing at the air. Clete drove his fist into Fontenot's stomach, burying it to the wrist, so deep he actually felt bone. Then he kicked the wood door shut, flung him headlong into a wall, and pulled a shelf filled with carnival midway ceramics down on top of him. He ripped the cassette from the VCR and bounced it off Bobby Joe's face, then rooted in the refrigerator's freezer compartment and pulled out a box of Popsicles and threw them in Bobby Joe's face, too.

  "You get the kids in here with cartoons and ice cream?" he said.

  Bobby Joe tried to raise himself up against the wall, spittle running from the corner of his mouth. "I'm in treatment. Ask my P.O.," he said hoarsely.

  Clete opened and closed his huge hands, breathing hard, his cheeks pooled with color. He lifted Bobby Joe by his shirt and belt and threw him into the narrow bathroom at the back of the trailer. Bobby Joe grabbed the side of the lavatory and tried to raise himself up again, his face bewildered.

  "What did your P.O. tell you about putting your hands on little kids, asshole?" Clete said.

  "I ain't put "

  Clete locked one hand on the back of Bobby Joe's neck and drove his head down on the toilet bowl, smashing his mouth against the rim, plunging his head into the water, scouring the bottom of the bowl with his face. It should have been enough but he was beyond controlling it now or even trying. He slammed the toilet seat down on Bobby Joe's neck and head, then grabbed the top of the shower stall and mounted the toilet, crushing the seat down on Bobby Joe's head, tap dancing on it like an elephant on hallucinogens while Bobby Joe's legs thrashed on the linoleum.

  Outside he heard children playing and through the top of the window he saw a little girl chasing after a Frisbee that sailed above her head, and like a man descending from an electrical storm high up on a mountain he stepped back down on the floor and pulled Bobby Joe from the toilet bowl, dripping with water and blood.

  He tossed a towel in Bobby Joe's face and leaned back against the wall, out of breath, his fists still knotting. "I'm going to make regular checks on the kid next door," he said. "If I find out you've been near him, you'll wish you were a bar of soap back in "Gola. The same goes if you dime me. Maybe you think you got a bad deal here today, but pervs don't get slack. g

  "You fat fuck," Bobby Joe said, pressing the towel to the blood that ran off his chin, looking at it in disbelief, his words muffled, his mouth still trembling. "You like family values? That kid's mother used to be an army whore over by Folk Polk. I'm gonna find out your name. If I ever offend with a kid again, I'm gonna say it each time I poke him. How's that, asshole}"

  When Clete got back to the motor court, he stayed under the shower until the hot water tank went empty, burned his clothes in a barbecue pit, drank a quart of whiskey-laced eggnog, and still could not feel clean.

  Chapter 19.

  rather Jimmie Dolan had done six months federal time for demonstrating at the School of the Americas and probably considered himself jail wise But in reality, like all people who are intrinsically decent, he was incapable of the cynicism that passes for prison-acquired wisdom.

  On Thursday morning he was in Franklin, in black suit and Roman collar, collecting signatures on his petition to ban the sale of mixed drinks from drive-by windows. During three hours of approaching people in front of strip malls and grocery stores, he had amassed a total of six signatures, one from a retarded man, and two from people who signed their names with an X. He bought a take-out lunch from a McDonald's and ate it in his car under the trees in a small park, then fell asleep. The day was unseasonably warm, the live oaks flickering with wind, but he dreamed of snowmelt in the Cumberland Mountains, the bright air of early spring, tea-colored streams that leached out of limestone cliffs, dogwood blooming purple and white on a hillside. When he awoke, children were running by the front of his car, kicking a soccer ball in the leaves, the spangled sunlight racing across their bodies, but somehow there was a continuity between the beauty of the Appalachian spring in Jimmie's dream and the joy of the children at play.

  He got out of his car and began walking toward the public rest room. He had no reason to pay attention to a nervous, agitated plain-clothes detective by the name of Dale Louviere, who was parked in a Ford by the swing sets, the same detective who had investigated the killing of Dr. Parks by Will Guillot and called it an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

  Nor did Father Jimmie pay attention to a man known as Cash Money Mouton standing by the lavatory inside the rest room.

  Cash Money's last name was French but he was actually a pecker-wood product of north Louisiana. He used to sell fire and accident and term life insurance from door to door in black and poor-white neighborhoods, and was infamous for both his sweaty enthusiasm and his carnival sales rhetoric. He would pull clutches of papers and brochures from a vinyl briefcase, his face bursting with sincerity, tapping his seated listener, usually the man of the house, on the kneecap, saying, "You run your lawnmower over your foot and chop your toes off, I'll give you twelve-him nerd dollars, cash money, boy. You stick your hand in your skill saw, I'll pay you five-him nerd dollars, that's cash money, for every finger you cut off. Splash muriatic acid in your eyes and go blind, I'm talking five-thousand bananas, cash money, boy."

  Then Cash Money Mouton's uncle became police chief and Cash Money began a new career.

  Father Jimmie stood at the urinal and relieved himself. He could feel the man at the lavatory staring at the side of his face. He started to look at him, then thought better of it and kept his eyes straight ahead. But when he tried to get to the lavatory the man known as Cash Money stood in his way.

  "Excuse me," Father Jimmie said.

  But Cash Money did not move. He wore sideburns, a Tabasco tie, an American flag in his coat lapel. He smelled of deodorant, hair tonic, and fear. There was almost an iridescent shine on his skin.

  "Is there some difficulty here that I don't quite grasp?" Father Jimmie asked.

  "Repeat that?" Ca
sh Money said.

  "Could I be of some assistance to you?"

  "That's it," Cash Money said.

  He stepped into the rest room doorway and waved at the man in the Ford automobile. Father Jimmie rinsed his hands, shook them off, and tried to walk around him.

  "You're not going anywhere, buddy boy," Cash Money said.

  "Push me again and we're both going to regret the next couple of minutes," Father Jimmie said.

  But Cash Money was looking over his shoulder now and not at Father Jimmie. "He just threatened me," he said to the man approaching the rest room.

  "What else did he do?" the plainclothes detective named Dale Lou-vi ere said. Even in the open air a gray fog of nicotine and ash seemed to enclose his body. Clusters of veins, like tiny pieces of green string, pulsed in his temples.

  "He said he wanted to help me. He was fooling with his fly when he said it," Cash Money said.

  "You're a liar," Father Jimmie said.

  "We saw you watching those kids, Father," Louviere said.

  "How would you like to have your teeth knocked down your throat?" Father Jimmie said.

  "Hook him up," Louviere said.

  "I ain't putting my hands on him," Cash Money said. His eyes jumped sideways when Father Jimmie looked him directly in the face.

  At the police station Father Jimmie was charged with sexual solicitation and threatening a police officer and locked in an empty holding cell that was in full view of anyone, male or female, in the booking area. He made a pillow out of his coat, pulled off his collar, and lay down on a wood bench. He stared up at the graffiti and scratched drawings of genitalia that covered almost all the painted surfaces in the cell, and remembered the admonition of the blues singer Lazy Lester: "Don't ever write yo' name on the jailhouse wall."

  He could see Louviere punching in numbers on a phone, calling up first the local newspaper, then a television station in Lafayette and one in Baton Rouge, the Associated Press in New Orleans, and finally the diocese.