Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “Then for no reason she puts her arms around my neck and pushes her stomach up against me and plants one on my mouth, and suddenly I’m sort of in an awkward manly state again and I’m thinking maybe there’s no need to toss our situation over the gunnels all at once.

  “Just when I’m about to suggest we move our operation indoors I hear somebody behind us and I turn around and there’s that hillbilly Bible salesman again, dressed in a white sports coat with a red carnation and his hat in his hand. He goes, ‘I dint know if you found the Bible and the rose I left for you.’

  “Zerelda goes, ‘Oh, that was so sweet.’

  “So of course I step in my own shit and say, ‘Yeah, thanks for coming around. We’d invite you to have supper with us, but you’ve probably already eaten, so why don’t you come back another time?’

  “Zerelda goes, ‘Clete, I don’t believe your rudeness.’

  “I say, ‘Sorry. Stay and eat. Maybe if I roast some potatoes there’ll be enough for three.’

  “She says, ‘Well, just eat by yourself, Clete Purcel.’ And the two of them walk on down the street to the ice cream parlor. I’ve gotten blown out of the water twice by a meltdown who pulls a suitcase full of magazines and Bibles around town on a roller skate. My self-esteem is on a level with spit on the sidewalk.”

  “It sounds like you’re off the hook with Zerelda. Count your blessings,” I said.

  He rubbed his face against his hand. I could hear his whiskers against his skin.

  “After Zerelda and Gomer are gone, Frankie Dogs comes up to me and says, ‘I seen that guy before.’

  “I ask him where, like at that point I really care.

  “Frankie Dogs says, ‘He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the niggers up Tchoupitoulas. The vacuum cleaners cost four hundred dollars, but they were Korean junk. He’d talk the niggers into signing a loan they’d never get out of.’

  “I say, ‘Thanks for telling me that, Frankie.’

  “Frankie goes, ‘He was around three or four times looking for Zerelda. Joe don’t want him here. You ain’t got to worry about him kicking you out of the sack.’”

  Clete blew air out his nose and picked up his coffee cup and stared out the window, as though he couldn’t believe the implication that the success of his love life was dependent upon the Mafia’s intercession.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I moved out of the motor court. Why is stuff like this always happening to me?” he said.

  Search me, I thought.

  The next day I tried to concentrate on the investigation into the murder of Linda Zeroski. But the pimps and crack dealers and street whores who had been Linda’s friends all stonewalled me and I got absolutely nowhere. I had another problem, too. I could not get the man named Legion off my mind. In the midst of a conversation or a meal, I would see his mouth leaning down to mine and smell the tobacco odor of his breath, the dried testosterone on his clothes, and I would have to break from whatever I was doing and walk away from the curious stares I received from others. The first story I had heard about Legion had been told to me by Batist’s sister. I remembered her describing Legion’s arrival on Poinciana Island and the ex-convict who had taken one look at the new overseer and leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles into New Iberia, never to return, even for his pay.

  I made a phone call to a retired Angola gunbull by the name of Buttermilk Strunk, then signed out of the office and drove to a small pepper farm and tin-roofed white frame house not far from the entrance of the prison. Buttermilk was not a rotund, happy, doughlike creature, as his name might suggest. Instead, he was one of those for whom psychiatrists and theologians do not have an adequate category.

  It is difficult to describe in a convincing way the kind of place Angola was in the Louisiana of my youth, primarily because no society wishes to believe itself capable of the kinds of abuse that occur when we allow our worst members, usually psychopaths themselves, to have sway over the powerless.

  For the inmates on the Red Hat gang, which was assigned to the levee along the river, it was double time and hit-it-and-git-it from sunrise to sunset, or what the guards called “cain’t-see to cain’t-see.” The guards on the Red Hat gang arbitrarily shot and killed and buried troublesome convicts without ever missing a beat in the work schedule. The bones of those inmates still rest, unmarked, under the buttercups and the long green roll of the Mississippi levee.

  The sweatboxes were iron cauldrons of human pain set in concrete on Camp A, where Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Welch did their time. Convicts who passed out on work details were stretched on anthills. Trusty guards, mounted on horseback and armed with chopped-down double-barreled shotguns, had to serve the time of any inmate they let escape. There was a high attrition rate among convicts who tried to run.

  I sat at the kitchen table with Buttermilk Strunk, the curtains puffing in the breeze. His face was like a pie plate, his skin almost hairless, his eyes baby-blue, so pure in color they seemed incapable of moral doubt. His breath wheezed inside his massive chest, and he smelled of soap and talcum powder and the whiskey he drank from a jelly glass. His shirt was scissored off below his nipples, and the place where his liver was located looked as if a football had been sewn beneath the skin there. After he had retired from the prison, he had worked for five years for the state police. Whenever a convict ran, the state always called upon Buttermilk Strunk to bring him back. Buttermilk killed eight men and never returned a living convict to the prison system.

  “Remember a guard named Legion, Cap? Maybe last name of Guidry?” I asked.

  His eyes left mine uncertainly, then came back. “He worked at Camp I. That’s when it was half female,” he replied.

  “Know much about him?”

  “They run him off. Some of the colored girls said he was molesting them.”

  “That’s all you recall about him?”

  “Why you want to know?”

  “I’ve had trouble with him.”

  He started to take a drink from his jelly glass, then set it down. He got up from the table and poured his glass in the sink and rinsed it under the faucet.

  “Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

  “You read much of Scripture?”

  “A bit.”

  “Then you seen his name before. Don’t you drag that man into my life and don’t you tell nobody I was talking about him, either. You best be on your way, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said, his mouth puckered, his eyes steadfastly avoiding mine.

  The next day Barbara Shanahan showed me a side to her character that made me reconsider all my impressions about her.

  CHAPTER 13

  She had gone to bed early, then had been awakened near midnight by a dream of a hard-bodied bird thudding against her window glass. She sat up in bed and looked out the back window but saw only the tops of banana trees and the green slope of her yard that dead-ended against the rear wall of a nineteenth-century brick warehouse. Then she heard the sound again. She put on a robe and looked out the front window on Bayou Teche and the dark cluster of oaks and the gray stone presence of the ancient convent across the water. She realized the sound came from below her feet, down in the garage, where she parked her car.

  She pulled out the drawer to her desk and removed a .25-caliber automatic. In the kitchen she opened the door to the enclosed stairwell that led downstairs and switched on the light. The garage door was shut, locked electronically from the inside, and her tan Honda four-door gleamed softly under the overhead light, its surfaces waxed and immaculately clean. Her ten-speed bicycle, her snow skis and alpine rock-climbing equipment she took to Colorado and Montana on vacation were all placed neatly on hooks and wall shelves, her nylon backpacks and winter jackets glowing with all the colors of the rainbow.

  But as she descended the stairs she could feel a presence that didn’t belong there, a violation of the fresh white paint on the garage walls, the cement floor that did not
have a drop of oil on it, the cleanliness and order that always seemed to define the environment Barbara chose to live in. She smelled an odor, like unwashed hair, bayou water, clothing that had started to rot. A window on the side wall had been pried open, the wall marked with black scuffs from someone’s shoes or boots.

  She moved around the front of her car and under the window saw a shape curled inside the tarp she used to cover her vegetable garden when there was frost.

  She pulled back the slide on the .25 and released it, snicking the small round off the top of the magazine into the chamber.

  “If you like, I can just shoot through the canvas. Tell us what your decision is,” she said.

  Tee Bobby Hulin uncovered his face and pushed himself up on his palms, his back against the wall. His eyes looked scalded; his hair was like dirty string. He wore a pullover, a moth-holed black sweater that emanated an eye-watering stench.

  “What in the world do you think you’re doing?” Barbara asked.

  “I ain’t got no place to go. You got to hep me, Miss Barbara,” he said.

  “Are you retarded? I’m the prosecutor in your case. I’m going to ask that you be sentenced to death.”

  He covered his head with his arms and pressed his face down on the tops of his knees. His left forearm was perforated with needle tracks that had become infected and looked like a tangle of knotted red wire under his skin.

  “What are you shooting?” she asked.

  “Speedballs, smack straight up, sometimes smack and whiskey, sometimes I ain’t sure. There’s a bunch of us cook with the same spoon, shoot with the same works sometimes.”

  “I’m going to have you picked up. I suggest when you’re allowed to use the phone, you contact your attorney. Then you have him call me.”

  “I used to cut your grass. I run errands for your granddaddy. Perry LaSalle don’t care about black people, Miss Barbara. He care about hisself. They gonna kill my gran’mama. They’ll kill my sister, too.”

  “Who’s going to kill them?”

  He balled both his fists and squeezed them into his temples. “The day I say that, that’s the day my gran’mama and sister die. Ain’t no place to go wit’ it, Miss Barbara,” Tee Bobby said.

  Barbara released the magazine from the butt of her .25, ejected the round from the chamber, and dropped the magazine and the pistol into the pocket of her robe.

  “How many times did you fix today?” she asked.

  “T’ree. No, four.”

  “Get up,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “You’re going to take a shower. You stink.”

  She lifted him by one arm from the floor, then pushed him ahead of her up the stairs.

  “You gonna dime me?” he asked.

  “Right now I recommend you shut your mouth.” She shoved him inside the bathroom door. “I have some of my brother’s clothes here. I’m going to throw them and a paper bag inside. When you finish showering, put your dirty things in the paper bag. Then wipe down the shower and the floor and put the soiled towel in the basket. If you ever break into my house again, I’m going to blow your head off.”

  She shut the bathroom door and punched in a number on the telephone.

  “This is Barbara Shanahan. Here’s your chance to prove what a great guy you are,” she said into the receiver.

  “It’s one in the morning,” I said.

  “You want to pick up Tee Bobby at my apartment or would you like him to sweat out a four-balloon load in a jail cell?” she asked.

  When I got to Barbara’s, Tee Bobby was sitting in the living room, dressed in oversize khakis and a gold and purple LSU T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He kept sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.

  “They sent you ?” he said.

  “Go down to my truck and wait there,” I said.

  “Detox ain’t open. What you up to?” he said.

  “I’m about to throw you down the stairs,” Barbara said.

  After Tee Bobby was gone, she told me everything that had happened.

  “Why didn’t you have the city cops pick him up?” I asked.

  “This case has too many question marks in it,” she replied.

  “You have doubts about his guilt?”

  “I didn’t say that. Others were involved. That dead girl deserves better than what she’s getting.”

  Her terry-cloth robe was cinched above her hips. Even in her slippers she was slightly taller than I. In the soft light her freckles looked like they had been feather-dusted on her skin. Her hair was dark red, and she lifted a lock of it off her brow and for just a moment reminded me of a high school girl caught unawares in a camera’s lens.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked.

  “No reason.”

  “You taking Tee Bobby to his grandmother’s?”

  “I thought I’d cuff him to a train track,” I said.

  A grin started to break at the corner of her mouth. Tee Bobby was sitting in the passenger seat of my truck when I got downstairs. He had vomited on the gravel and the foulness and density of his breath filled the cab of the truck. His hands were pressed between his legs, his back shivering.

  “Are your grandmother and sister in harm’s way, Tee Bobby?” I asked before starting the engine.

  “I ain’t saying no more. I was sick up there. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight.”

  “Even if you beat the charges, where do you think all this will end?”

  “Gonna be back playing my gig.”

  “You want me to drop you somewhere you can fix?”

  We were on the drawbridge over the Teche. I could hear the tires on the steel grid in the silence.

  “I ain’t got no money,” he answered.

  “What if I gave you some?”

  “You’d do that? I’d really appreciate that. I’ll pay you back, too. There’s a joint off Loreauville Road. I just need to flatten out the kinks, then maybe join some kind of program.”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of real hope for you, Tee Bobby.”

  “Oh, man, what you doin’ to me?”

  “I can’t get Amanda Boudreau out of my mind. I see her in my sleep. Does she bother you at all?” I said.

  “Amanda hurt me, man, but it wasn’t me shot her.” His voice was squeezed in his throat, his eyes wet.

  “Hurt you how?”

  “Made like we couldn’t have no kind of relationship. She say it was ’cause I was so much older. But I knowed it was ’cause I’m black.”

  “You want to come down to the department and make a statement?”

  He tried to open the truck door, even though I was up on the Loreauville Road now, speeding past a rural slum by the four corners. I reached across the seat and pulled the door shut, then hit him on the side of the face with my elbow.

  “You want to kill yourself, do it on your own time,” I said.

  He cupped one hand over his ear and cheek, then he began to shake, as though his bones were disconnected.

  “I’m gonna be sick. I got to fix, man,” he said.

  I drove him out in the country to the home of a black minister who ran a shelter for alcoholics and homeless men. When I left, heading up the dirt track toward the highway, the sky was still black, bursting with all the constellations, the pastures sweet with the smell of grass and horses and night-blooming flowers.

  It was one of those moments when you truly thank all the spiritual powers of the universe you were spared the fate that could have been yours.

  My partner, Helen Soileau, was eating outside at the McDonald’s on East Main later the same day when she saw Marvin Oates towing his suitcase filled with his wares up East Main, his powder-blue, long-sleeved shirt damp at the armpits. He paused in the shade of a live oak in front of the old Trappey’s bottling plant and wiped his face, then continued on to the McDonald’s, took his sack lunch and a thermos out of his suitcase, and began eating at a stone table, outside, under the trees. An unshaved
man with jowls like a St. Bernard was eating at another table a few feet away. He picked up his hamburger and fries and sat down next to Marvin without being invited, sweeping crumbs off the table, flattening a napkin on the stone, knocking over Marvin’s thermos. Marvin righted his thermos but remained hunched over his sandwich, his eyes riveted on a neutral spot ten inches in front of his nose.

  “You bring your own lunch to a restaurant?” the unshaved man asked.

  “I don’t know you,” Marvin said.

  “Yeah, you do. They call me Frankie Dogs. Some people say it’s because I look like a dog. But that ain’t true. I used to race greyhounds at Biscayne Dog Track. So the people I worked for started calling me Frankie Dogs. You like greyhound racing?”

  “I don’t gamble.”

  “Yeah, you do. You’re trying to put moves on Zerelda Calucci. That’s a big gamble, my friend. One you ain’t gonna win. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  “I dint hear Miss Zerelda say that.”

  “Take the shit out of your mouth. You got a speech defect? Here, I’ll give you the short version. Joe Zeroski don’t want no peckerwood magazine salesman coming around his niece. You do it again, I’ll be paying you a visit.”

  Marvin nodded solemnly, as though agreeing.

  “Good man,” Frankie said, and got up from the table and patted Marvin on the back. “I’ll tell Joe we don’t got no problem. You have a good day.”

  Frankie started to walk away.

  “You forgotta your Bigga Mac,” Marvin said into the dead space in front of him.

  Frankie stopped, straightening his shoulders above the enormous breadth of his stomach. He walked back to the table and propped one arm on it and leaned down toward Marvin’s face.

  “What’d you say?” he asked.

  “You lefta a bigga mess. It don’ta looka good.”