Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  He knocked back a jigger of whiskey, took a sip of beer from a salted can, and picked up a burning cigarette from an inverted jar top. He drew in the smoke, the cigarette paper crackling in the silence.

  “You busted up two of my men. But I’m letting that slide for now, ’cause maybe they were rude or maybe you didn’t know who they were. But somebody beat my daughter to death and I’m gonna rip his ass. I hear you got a bad record with women,” Joe said.

  “Robicheaux send you?” Legion asked.

  “Robicheaux?”

  “You one of them dagos been staying in town, ain’t you? Working for Dave Robicheaux.”

  “Are you nuts?” Joe said.

  Then Joe heard a sound in a side room, behind a blanket that was hung with sliding hooks on a doorway. Joe pulled back the blanket and looked down at a black girl, probably not over eighteen, sitting on the side of a bed in shorts and a T-shirt razored off below her breasts, snorting a line off a broken mirror through a rolled five-dollar bill.

  Joe took her by the arm and walked her barefoot and stoned to the front door.

  “Go home. Or back to the nightclub. Or wherever you come from. But stay away from this man. Where’s your father, anyway?” he said, and closed the door behind her. Then he turned around, his back feeling momentarily exposed, vulnerable.

  Legion’s face wore no expression, the skin white as a fish’s belly, creased with vertical lines. He inhaled off his cigarette, the ash glowing red, crackling against the dryness of the paper.

  “You just made a mistake,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, how’s that?” Joe asked.

  “I paid forty dollars for her dope. So now you owe the debt.”

  “You’re an ignorant and stupid man, but I’m gonna try to explain something to you as simply as I can. My daughter was Linda Zeroski. A degenerate piece of shit tied her to a chair not far from here and smashed every bone in her face with his fists.”

  Joe removed a .38 revolver with a two-inch barrel from the back of his belt. He flipped out the cylinder and dumped all six shells from the chambers into his palm.

  “I’m gonna put two rounds back in the chambers and spin them around, then we’re gonna—” he began.

  That’s when Legion Guidry slid a cut-down, double-barreled twelve-guage shotgun from a scabbard nailed under the table and raised it so the barrels were suddenly pointed into Joe Zeroski’s face.

  “Who’s stupid now?” Legion said. “You got nothing smart to say, you? Just gonna stand there wit’ your li’l gun wit’out no bullets in it? Time you got down on your knees, dago.”

  “I look Italian? Zeroski is Polish, you moron. Poles ain’t Italians,” Joe said.

  Legion rose from the table and walked to the screen door, where Baby Huey stood frozen, his eyes wide at the scene taking place in front of him.

  “Come inside,” Legion said.

  Baby Huey opened the screen and stepped out of the darkness into the white radiance of the lantern on the table. The muscles in his back jumped when the screen swung back into the jamb behind him.

  “On your knees, nigger,” Legion said.

  “My uncle owns the nightclub. He knows where we’re at,” Baby Huey said.

  “That’s good. He come here, I’ll shoot me two niggers ’stead of one,” Legion said.

  Baby Huey bent slowly to the floor, his knees popping, sweat breaking on his brow now, his gaze sliding down the length of Legion’s body.

  Legion screwed the barrels of the shotgun into Baby Huey’s neck and looked at Joe.

  “T’row your li’l gun down and get on your knees, or I’m gonna blow the nigger’s head off. Look into my eyes and tell me you don’t t’ink I’ll do it, no,” he said.

  Joe Zeroski let the .38 shells spill from his hand onto the floor, then tossed the revolver to one side and got to his knees.

  Legion Guidry stood above him, his stomach and loins flat, his khaki shirt tucked tightly inside his western belt. He reached behind him and removed his straw hat from the back of a chair and fitted it on his head so that his face was now in shadow. He drank from his whiskey bottle and spread his feet slightly and cleared his throat.

  “What you t’ink about to happen? Bet you didn’t t’ink a day like this would ever come in your life, no,” he said.

  Then he unzipped his fly.

  “How far you willing to go to keep a nigger alive?” he asked, pressing the shotgun harder into Baby Huey’s neck, his eyes riveted on Joe’s.

  Joe felt himself swallow, his hands balling at his sides. Legion’s finger was wrapped tightly inside the trigger guard on the shotgun. The back of his hand was spotted with sun freckles, his cuff buttoned at the wrist, his veins like pieces of green cord. Joe could smell the nicotine ingrained in his skin, the boilermakers that still hung on his breath, the raw odor of his manhood that seemed ironed into his clothes.

  Joe Zeroski felt his heart thundering, then a rage well up in him that was like a fire blooming in his chest. His face grew tight and his scalp seemed to shrink and shift against his skull, his eyes bulge in their sockets, with either adrenaline or fear, he would never know which. “Go ahead and shoot, you worthless cocksucker. Me first. ’Cause I get the chance, I’m gonna tear your throat out,” he said.

  He heard Legion Guidry snort.

  “You t’ink pretty high of yourself, you. I wouldn’t dirty my dick on a dago or a Pollack,” Legion said, drawing his zipper back into place. “Give me your car keys.”

  “What?” Joe asked, staring up in disbelief at the mercurial nature of his tormentor.

  “I’m taking your car to find my whore. I don’t find my whore, I’m gonna come after you for my forty dollars. Next time you want to pretend like you a New Orleans gangster, remember what you look like right now, on your knees, next to a nigger, just about an inch from sucking a man’s dick. Tell yourself later you wouldn’t do it, no. Believe me, I wanted you to, you would, you,” he said.

  Legion collected Joe’s automobile keys and his .38 revolver and shells. Minutes later, Baby Huey and Joe watched him drive away in Joe’s automobile, the radio playing, Legion’s hat and tall frame silhouetted against the front window. Baby Huey could hear Joe breathing in the darkness.

  “You saved my life, Mr. Joe. I cain’t believe you told him to shoot. That’s the bravest thing I ever seen anybody do,” he said.

  Joe waved his hand to indicate he did not want to hear about it. Baby Huey started to speak again.

  “Hey, forget it,” Joe said.

  “What we gonna do now?” Baby Huey asked, looking up the dirt track through the woods.

  “It wasn’t him beat my daughter to death,” Joe said.

  “How you know?”

  “He don’t have no feeling about people. It wasn’t him. The ones to be afraid of are the ones got feelings about you. That’s a sad truth, kid, but that’s the way it is,” Joe said.

  CHAPTER 22

  But Baby Huey Lagneaux’s encounter with Legion was not over. Toward closing time that night, after he had returned to his uncle’s club, he glanced through a back window and saw Joe Zeroski’s automobile parked at the café next door. He called a telephone number Joe had given him, but there was no answer. He went out the back door of the club and crossed the parking lot and looked through a side window of the café. Legion was eating at a table by himself. At the next table was a group of shrimpers who had just come off the salt, hard-bitten men in rubber boots who hadn’t shaved for weeks and who filled the air with cigarette smoke and drank mugs of beer while they ate platters of fried crabs with their fingers.

  In his mind’s eye Baby Huey saw himself confronting Legion, here, in public, demanding the keys to Joe Zeroski’s car, somehow regaining a degree of the self-respect he’d lost when a shotgun was screwed into his neck and his bowels turned to water. He entered the café’s side door and stared at Legion’s back, at the untrimmed locks of hair on his neck, the power in his shoulders, the way the bones in his jaws stretched his s
kin while he chewed. But Baby Huey could not make his feet move any closer to Legion’s table.

  Then Tee Bobby Hulin came through the front door and sat at the counter, within earshot of the shrimpers, some of whom must have recognized him as the man about to go on trial for the rape and murder of Amanda Boudreau. At first they only looked at him and whispered among themselves; then they seemed to ignore him and concentrate on their food and beer and the burning cigarettes they left teetering on the edges of ashtrays. But willingly or not, their eyes began to drift back to Tee Bobby, as though he were a troublesome insect that someone should swat.

  Finally one of the shrimpers turned in his chair and aimed his words at Tee Bobby’s back: “You ain’t got no bidness in here, buddy. Get what you need and carry it outside.”

  Tee Bobby stared at his menu, as though he were nearsighted and had lost his glasses, his hands clenched on the corners, his spine and shoulders rounded like a question mark.

  The same shrimper, silver and black whiskers festooned on his jaws, made a soft whistling sound through his teeth. “Hey, outside, bud. Don’t make me walk you there, no,” he said.

  Legion had set his knife and fork on the rim of his plate. He half-mooned one of his nails with a toothpick, his back hard as iron against his khaki shirt, his eyes studying Tee Bobby’s profile. Then he rose from his chair and walked to the counter, the board floor creaking with his weight, the inside of his hands as yellow and rough as barrel wood under the overhead light.

  “Get up,” Legion said.

  “What for?” Tee Bobby asked. His gaze lifted into Legion’s, then his face twitched, as though he recognized a figure from a dream he had never defined in daylight.

  “Don’t you let them men talk down to you,” Legion replied, and pulled Tee Bobby off the counter stool. “You stand up, you. Don’t you never take shit from white trash.”

  The shrimpers looked blankly at both Tee Bobby and Legion, confused, unable to connect the indignation of the towering white man with a diminutive black musician who only a moment ago had been an object of contempt.

  “Y’all looking at somet’ing? Y’all want to go outside wit’ me? How ’bout you, yeah, big mouth there, the one telling him to carry his food outside?” Legion said.

  “We ain’t got no problem with you,” one of the other shrimpers said.

  “You better t’ank God you don’t,” Legion said.

  He paid his bill in the silence of the café, put two half-dollars by his plate, and walked outside, into the darkness, into the flicker of heat lightning and the tink of raindrops on the tin roof of the café. He heard Tee Bobby come out the door behind him.

  “You’re him, ain’t you?” Tee Bobby said.

  “Depends on who you t’ink I am,” Legion said.

  “The overseer. From Poinciana Island. The one called Legion. The one who—”

  “Who what, boy?”

  “The overseer who slept wit’ my grandmother. I’m Tee Bobby. Ladice Hulin is my gran’mama.”

  “You look like her. But you ain’t as pretty.”

  “What you done inside the café, it’s ’cause of what happened at the plantation, ain’t it? It’s ’cause maybe you’re my—”

  “Your what, boy?”

  “My mama was half-white. Everybody on the plantation know that.”

  Legion laughed to himself and shook a cigarette out of his pack and fed it into the corner of his mouth.

  “Your daddy didn’t know how to use a rubber. That’s how you got here, boy. That’s how come other people try to wipe their shit on your face,” he said.

  Tee Bobby brushed a raindrop out of his eye and continued to stare at Legion, his sequined purple shirt puffing with air in the wind.

  “I said you slept with my grandmother. That ain’t true. You raped her. You pushed old man Julian around and you raped my gran’mama,” he said.

  “The white man gonna screw down whenever he got the chance. Nigger woman always gonna get what she can out of it. Which one gonna lie about it later?”

  “My gran’mama don’t never lie. You better not call her a nigger, either,” Tee Bobby said.

  Legion struck the flint on his lighter and cupped the flame in the wind, inhaling on his cigarette.

  “I’m leaving now. Them shrimpers gonna be coming out of there. You better get your ass home, you,” he said.

  Legion got behind the wheel of Joe Zeroski’s automobile and started the engine, his cigarette hanging from his mouth. But before he could back out and turn around, Tee Bobby picked up a piece of broken cement the size of a softball and smashed the driver’s-side window with it.

  Legion braked the car and got out, a huge hole in the window, his forehead bleeding, his cigarette still in his mouth.

  “You got sand,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” Tee Bobby said.

  “Ax yourself where you got it. The parents who didn’t want you? Be proud of the blood you got, boy,” Legion replied.

  He got back in Joe Zeroski’s automobile, tossed his cigarette through the hole in the window, and drove away.

  Late that night Baby Huey Lagneaux stole Joe Zeroski’s automobile out of Legion’s yard and was driving it back to New Iberia when he was stopped for speeding. Baby Huey sat in jail for suspicion of car theft until Monday morning. Before he went back on the street, I had a deputy bring him by my office. “You were taking the car back to Joe?” I asked.

  “Yes, suh.”

  “I don’t get it. His men used a stun gun on you.”

  “Mr. Joe t’rew down his .38 and got on his knees to save my life. He don’t even know me.”

  The chair he sat in groaned with the strain, his skin so black it had a purple sheen to it. He gazed out the window at the freight train clicking by on the rail crossing.

  “See you around, Huey,” I said.

  “I can go?”

  “Why’d you ever become a pimp?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I ain’t one now. Can I go?”

  “You bet,” I said. I leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head, and wondered at the complexities and contradictions that must have existed in the earth’s original clay when God first scooped it up in His palm.

  Twenty minutes later my desk phone rang. “This kid Marvin Grits or whatever was handing out Bible pamphlets at the motor court this morning. But that ain’t why he’s here. He’s got the hots for Zerelda. I want him picked up. Besides, he’s drunk,” the voice said.

  “Joe?”

  “You thought it was the pope?”

  “Marvin Oates is drunk?”

  “He looks like he got hit by a train. He smells like puke. Maybe he just come from First Baptist,” Joe said.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Baby Huey Lagneaux just left my office. He told me about your run-in with Legion Guidry.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I always said you were a stand-up guy.”

  “Go soak your head,” he said, and hung up.

  I told Wally, our dispatcher, to have Marvin Oates picked up at the motor court.

  Later, I walked downtown to eat lunch. When I came back to the department, Wally stopped me in the corridor. He was holding three pink message slips that he was about to put in my mailbox.

  “This woman keeps calling and axing for you. How about getting her off my neck?” he said.

  He put the message slips in my hand. The telephone number was in St. Mary Parish, the caller’s name one I didn’t immediately recognize.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Hillary Clinton, in coonass disguise. How do I know, Dave? By the way, Marvin Oates wasn’t at the motor court when the cruiser got there,” he answered.

  The woman’s name was Marie Guilbeau. I returned her call from my office phone. When she picked up, I suddenly remembered the face of the cleaning woman who had claimed a man in a rubber mask, wearing leather gloves, had invaded her house and molested her.

  “The priest
tole me I got to tell you somet’ing,” she said.

  “What’s that, Ms. Guilbeau?” I asked.

  There was no response.

  “I’m a little busy right now, but if you like, I can drive out to your house again,” I said.

  “I clean at the motel out on the fo’-lane,” she said. “They was a nice-looking fellow staying there. I kind of flirted wit’ him. Maybe I give him the wrong idea,” she said.

  “Was he a white or black man?” I asked.

  “He was white. I t’ink he t’ought I was a prostitute from the truck stop. I tole him to get away from me. I was ashamed to tell you about that when you come out to my house.”

  “You think the man in the rubber mask was the guy from the motel?”

  “I don’t know, suh. I don’t want to talk about this no more,” she replied. The line went dead.

  What do you say to sexual assault victims? Answer: You’re going to catch the guys who hurt them and bury them in a maximum-security prison from which they will never be paroled, and with good luck they’ll cell with predators who are twice their size and ten times more vicious.

  Except it’s usually a lie on every level. More often than not the victims get torn apart on the stand by defense attorneys and ultimately exit the process disbelieved, discredited, and accused of being either delusional or opportunistic.

  I once heard an elderly recidivist say, “Jailing ain’t the same no more. Folks just ain’t rearing criminals like they used to.” Any old-time lawman, if he’s honest, will probably tell you he’s sickened by the class of contemporary criminals he’s forced to deal with. As bad as the criminals of the Great Depression were, many of them possessed the virtues Americans admire. Most of them came from midwestern farm families and were not sexual predators or serial killers. Usually their crimes were against banks and the government, and at least in their own minds they were not out to harm individuals. Even their most vehement antagonists, usually Texas Rangers and FBI agents, granted that they were brave and died game and asked for no quarter and pleaded no excuse for their misdeeds.