Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “You’re mean through and through, Clete. I don’t know what I ever saw in you,” Zerelda said.

  But Clete wasn’t listening. No Duh was staring into the distance, into the glow of sodium lamps that rose in a dusty haze above the project.

  “You know him?” Clete asked.

  “Yeah, I definitely seen that guy before,” No Duh said.

  “You sure?” Clete said.

  “No doubt about it. I don’t forget a face. Particularly not no nutcase.”

  “Where did you see him, No Duh?” Clete asked, his exasperation growing.

  “He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the coloreds for Fat Sammy Figorelli. It was a scam to get them to sign loans at twenty percent. What, you thought he was somebody else?” No Duh said.

  He tilted his head curiously at Clete, his mustache like the extended wings of a tiny bird.

  What did Marvin Oates mean by ‘There ain’t no detours in heaven’?” Clete asked the next day as he walked with me from the office to Victor’s Cafeteria. “Who knows? I think it’s a line from a bluegrass song,” I replied.

  “Zerelda Calucci says I’m butt crust.”

  “How you doing with Barbara?” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “Marvin dimed me with her, too. You think the Peeping Tom was Legion Guidry?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said.

  Clete chewed on a hangnail and spit it off his tongue. We were walking past the crumbling, whitewashed crypts of St. Peter’s Cemetery now.

  “I put flowers on my old man’s grave when I was in New Orleans. It was a funny feeling, out there in the cemetery, just me and him,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “That’s all. He had a crummy life. It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. He took off his porkpie hat and refitted it on his head, turning his face away so I could not see the expression in his eyes.

  That afternoon Perry LaSalle asked me to stop by his office. When I got there, he was just locking the doors. The gallery and lawn and flower beds were deep in shadow, and his face had a melancholy cast in the failing light. “Oh, hello, Dave,” he said. He sat down on the top step of the gallery and waited for me to join him. Through the window behind him I could see the glass-framed Confederate battle flag of the 8th Louisiana Vols that one of his ancestors had carried in northern Virginia, and I wondered if indeed Perry was one of those souls who belonged in another time, or if he was a deluded creature of his own manufacture, playing the role of a tragic scion who had to expiate the sins of his ancestors, when in fact he was simply the beneficiary of wealth that had been made on the backs of others.

  “Fine evening,” I said, looking across the street at the Shadows plantation house and the bamboo moving in the wind and the magnificent, lichen-encrusted, moss-hung canopy of the live oaks.

  “I’ve got to cut you loose,” Perry said.

  “You’re resigning as my lawyer?”

  “Legion Guidry is my client, too. You’ve got him up on assault charges. I can’t represent both of you.”

  I nodded and put a stick of gum in my mouth and didn’t respond.

  “No hard feelings?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “What’s this guy have on you?” I asked.

  He rose from the steps and buttoned his coat, removed his sunglasses from their case, and blew dust off the lenses. He started to speak, then simply walked to his car and drove away into the sunlight that still filled the streets of the business district.

  I parked my truck in the backyard and went into the kitchen, where Bootsie was fixing supper. I sat down at the table with a glass of iced tea. “You’re disappointed in Perry?” she said.

  “He helped organize migrant farm workers in the Southwest. He was a volunteer worker at a Dorothy Day mission in the Bowery. Now he’s the apologist for a man like Legion Guidry. His behavior is hard to respect.”

  She turned from the stove and set a bowl of étouffée on the table with a hot pad and blotted her face on her sleeve. I thought she was going to argue.

  “You’re better off without him,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Perry might have taken a vacation from the realities of his life in his youth, but he’s a LaSalle first, last, and always.”

  “Pretty hard-nosed, Boots.”

  “You just learning that?”

  She stood behind me and mussed my hair and pressed her stomach against my back. Then I felt her hands slip down my chest and her breasts against my head.

  “We can put dinner in the oven,” I said.

  I felt her straighten up, her hands relax on my shoulders, then I realized she was looking through the hallway, out into the front yard.

  “You have a visitor,” she said.

  CHAPTER 21

  Tee Bobby Hulin had parked his gas-guzzler by the cement boat ramp and had walked up into the gloom of the trees. His autistic sister, Rosebud, sat in the passenger’s seat, a safety belt locked across her chest, staring at an empty pirogue floating aimlessly on the bayou. The evening was warm, the string of lightbulbs above my dock glowing with humidity, but Tee Bobby wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned at the wrists. His armpits were damp with sweat, his lips dry and caked at the edges. “I just cut a CD. It’s got ‘Jolie Blon’s Bounce’ on it. Nobody else seem to like it too much. Anyway, see what you think,” he said.

  “I appreciate it, Tee Bobby. You kind of warm in that shirt?” I said.

  “You know how it is,” he replied.

  “I can get you into a treatment program.”

  He shook his head and kicked gingerly at a tree root.

  “Your sister okay?” I asked.

  “Ain’t nothing okay.”

  “We’re getting ready to eat dinner right now. Maybe we can talk later,” I said.

  “I just dropped by, that’s all.”

  It was dark where we stood under the trees, the molded pecan husks and blackened leaves soft under our feet, the air tannic, like water that has stood for a long time in a wooden cistern. The dying light was gold on the tops of the cypresses in the swamp, and snow egrets were rising into the light, their wings feathering in the wind.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “You busted up Jimmy Dean Styles real bad. You shamed him in front of other people. Jimmy Sty always square the score.”

  “Forget about Jimmy Sty. Tell the truth about what happened to Amanda Boudreau.”

  “The lie detector say I didn’t do it. That’s all that counts. I ain’t raped or shot nobody. Got the proof.”

  “You were there.”

  He tried to stare me down, then his eyes watered and broke.

  “I wish I ain’t come here. The lie detector say I’m innocent. But ain’t nobody listening,” he said.

  “That girl is going to live in your dreams. She’ll stand by your deathbed. You’ll never have any peace until you get honest on this, Tee Bobby.”

  “Oh, God, why you do this to me?” he said, and walked hurriedly down the incline, slightly off balance.

  That night I listened to his CD down at the bait shop. The rendition of his new composition, “Jolie Blon’s Bounce,” was the best Acadian rhythm and blues I had ever heard. But I had a feeling the larger world would never come to know the tormented musical talent of Tee Bobby Hulin.

  The next morning the sheriff took me off the desk and sent me to New Orleans with Helen Soileau to pick up a prisoner. It was noon when we crossed the Mississippi and drove into the city. While she ate lunch, I went back across the river to Algiers and caught the end of a low-bottom AA meeting off an alley, next to a bar, in the back of a warehouse with painted-over windows. But this was not an ordinary AA group.

  The failed, the aberrant, the doubly addicted, and the totally brain-fried whose neurosis didn’t even have a name found their way to the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting: strippers from the Quarter, psychotic street people, twenty-dollar hoo
kers, peckerwood fundamentalists, leather-clad, born-again bikers, women who breast-fed their infants in a sea of cigarette smoke, a couple of cops who had done federal time, male prostitutes dying of AIDS, parolees with a lean, hungry look who sought only a signature on an attendance slip for their P.O.’s, methheads who drank from fire extinguishers in the joint, and Vietnam vets who wore their military tattoos and black- or olive-colored 1st Cav. and airborne T-shirts and still heard the thropping of helicopter blades in their sleep.

  When it was my turn to speak, I began to do another Fifth Step, confessing my use of speed, the injury I had done Jimmy Dean Styles, the abiding anger and violence that seemed to afflict my life. But as I looked out into the smoke at the seamed and unshaved and rouged faces of the people sitting around the long table strewn with AA pamphlets, my words seemed twice-told and melodramatic, removed from the problems of people who counted themselves fortunate if they had food to eat that evening or a place to sleep that night.

  I took a breath and started over again.

  “An evil man did me physical injury. I think I know to at least a degree what a woman must feel like after she’s been raped. For this deed and others he has committed, I believe this man does not deserve to live. These are serious and not idle thoughts that I have. In the meantime, I’m possessed of an enormous desire to drink,” I said.

  The discussion leader was a gaunt-faced biker with sunglasses as dark as welders’ goggles and long silver hair that looked freshly shampooed and blow-dried.

  “I’d get a lot of gone between me and them kind of thoughts, Dave. In California I went down for twenty-five and did twelve flat because of a dude like that. When I got out, I married his wife. She wrecked my truck, give my P.O. the clap, and run off with my Harley. Tell me that dude wasn’t laughing in his grave,” he said.

  Everybody howled.

  Except me and a street person at the far end of the table, a man with the glint of genuine madness in his eyes, his blond hair like melted and recooled tallow.

  When the meeting broke up, he caught me at the door, his fingers biting into my upper arm, the vinegary stench of his body welling out of his yellow raincoat.

  “Remember me?” he said.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “Not from New Iberia. You remember me from ’Nam?”

  “A guy has lots of memories from the war,” I said.

  “I killed a child,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “We got into a meat grinder. It was after you got hit. We burned the ville. I seen a little girl run out of a hooch. She come apart in the smoke.”

  There were lines like pieces of white thread in the dirt around the corners of his eyes. His breath was odorless, his face inches from mine. He waited, as though I held a key that could unlock doors that were welded shut in his life.

  “You want something to eat?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Take a ride with me,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied.

  There was no place for him, really. He was trapped inside memories that no human being should have to bear, and he would do the time and carry the cross for those makers of foreign and military policy who long ago had written their memoirs and appeared on televised Sunday morning book promotions and moved on in their careers.

  I took him to a motel and put two nights’ rent on my credit card and gave him thirty dollars from my wallet.

  “There’s a Wal-Mart down the street. Maybe you can get yourself a razor and some clothes and a couple of food items,” I said.

  He was sitting on the bed in his motel room, staring at the motes of dust in a column of sunlight. I studied his face and his hair and eyes. I tried to remember the face of the medic who had cradled me in his arms as the AK-47 rounds from the trees below whanged off the helicopter’s frame.

  “How’d you get to New Orleans?” I asked.

  “Rode a freight.”

  “The medic who saved my life was Italian. He was from Staten Island. You from Staten Island, troop?” I said.

  “The trouble with killing somebody is it makes you forget who you used to be. I get places mixed up,” he said. He rubbed his face on his sleeve. “You gonna pop that guy you was talking about in the meeting?”

  Huey Lagneaux, also known as Baby Huey, had been hired as a bartender and bouncer at his uncle’s club because of his massive size, the deep black tone of his skin, which gave him the ambience of a leviathan rising from oceanic depths, and the fact he only needed to lay one meaty arm over a troublemaker’s shoulders in order to walk him quietly to the door. But the uncle had also given him the job out of pity. Baby Huey had not been the same since he had been kidnapped by a collection of white men from New Orleans and prodded at gunpoint through a cemetery, down to the water’s edge on Bayou Teche, and systematically tortured with a stun gun.

  The club was on a back road out by Bayou Benoit, an area of deepwater bays, flooded cypress and willow and gum trees that under the rising moon was dented with what looked like rain rings from the night feeding of bream and largemouth bass. On Friday nights the club thundered with electronic sound, and the parking lot, layered from end to end with flattened beer cans, clattered like a tin roof under the hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks driving across it.

  Tee Bobby Hulin was behind the microphone, up on the bandstand, in black slacks and a sequined purple shirt, his fingers splayed on the keys of an accordion whose case had the bright, wet shine of a freshly sliced pomegranate. The air was gray with cigarette smoke, heavy with the smell of body powder and sweat and perfume and okra gumbo. Baby Huey wiped down the bar and began rinsing a tin sink full of dirty glasses. When he looked up again, he saw a sheep-sheared white man in a tailored suit and a tropical shirt walking toward him, oblivious to the stares around him or even to the people who stepped out of his way before they were knocked aside.

  “You know me?” the white man asked.

  “Hard to forget, Mr. Zeroski,” Baby Huey answered. He bent over the sink and washed the dish soap from his hands and wrists.

  “A white man named Legion Guidry just went to the service window. Then I lost him. I hear he’s got a camp around here,” Joe said.

  Baby Huey’s face remained impassive, his gaze focused on the bandstand, the dancers out on the floor.

  “You hear me?” Joe asked.

  “I knew your daughter. She was nice to people. If I knew who killed her, I’d tell you. That night on the bayou, you didn’t have no right to hurt me like that.”

  “You should have said that on the bayou. Maybe it would have gone down different.”

  “You wasn’t looking for the troot. You was looking to get even,” Baby Huey said.

  Joe scratched at his cheek with the balls of his fingers.

  “You keep the wrong company, you pay dues. They ain’t always fair,” he said. He took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and creased it lengthwise and placed it on the bar like a miniature tent.

  Baby Huey pushed it away and dried a glass. “I ain’t axed you for nothing. In case you ain’t noticed, you in the wrong part of town,” he said.

  “Yeah, I got that impression when I walked in. You want to earn that hunnerd bucks and another hunnerd like it, or keep blaming me ’cause you decided to be a pimp and sell crack?”

  Baby Huey filled a bowl with gumbo and put a spoon in it and set it on a napkin in front of Joe.

  “It’s on me. I made it this afternoon,” Baby Huey said. “You want a beer wit’ it?”

  “I don’t mind,” Joe said.

  “You got bidness wit’ the man people call Legion, huh?” Baby Huey said.

  “What do you mean the man they ‘call’ Legion?”

  “He ain’t got a first name. He ain’t got a last name. Just ‘Legion.’ That’s all black people ever call him.”

  “He’s hard on women?” Joe said.

  “If they the right color,” Baby Huey said, and put the on
e-hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.

  . . .

  They drove in Joe Zeroski’s car up on a levee that looked out on a wide bay fringed with flooded cypresses. A storm was kicking up out on the Gulf, and the wind was blowing hard from the south, wrinkling the bay, puffing leaves out of the adjacent woods. Joe turned off on a dirt track, dropping down into persimmon and pecan trees, palmettos, and landlocked pools that had the greasy shine of an oil slick. Baby Huey pointed to a shack in a clearing, a lantern burning whitely on a table inside. In back were a privy and a collapsed smokehouse and Legion Guidry’s truck, parked next to an oak that was nailed with the scraped hides of raccoons. One of the truck’s rear tires was flat on the rim.

  Joe cut the engine. Through the trees they could hear Tee Bobby’s band belting out Clifton Chenier’s “Hey, Tite Fille.” They stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the darkness, the mosquitoes that boiled out of the trees, the wind that smelled of humus and beached fish.

  “You stay where you are,” Joe said, and pitched a cell phone to Baby Huey. “It goes south in there, you push the redial button and say ‘Joe needs a hose crew.’ Then you tell them where we’re at and you take my car down the road and wait for whoever comes.”

  “That’s Legion in there, Mr. Joe,” Baby Huey said.

  “I think you’re a nice kid. I think you were sincere what you said about my daughter. But take the collard greens out of your mouth and tell me what you’re trying to say. That’s why you people are always gonna be cleaning toilets. You can’t say what’s on your mind.”

  Baby Huey shook his head. “Legion ain’t no ordinary white man. He ain’t no ordinary man of any kind.”

  Joe Zeroski opened the screen door of the shack and walked inside without knocking. While he and Baby Huey had talked outside, the tall, black-haired man in khaki clothes who sat at the table with a six-pack of beer and a bottle of bourbon in front of him had shown no curiosity about the headlights or the presence of others in his yard.