Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Clyde Barrow was beaten unmercifully with the black Betty in Eastham State Prison and made to run two miles to work in the cotton fields and two miles back to the lockup every workday of his sentence. He swore that one day he would not only get even for the brutality he suffered and witnessed there, but he would return to Eastham a free man and break out every inmate he could. Sure enough, after he was paroled, he and Bonnie Parker shot their way into the prison, then shot their way back out with five convicts in tow, whom they packed into a stolen car and successfully escaped with.

  Doc Barker and four others got over the wall at Alcatraz Island and were almost home free, a rubber boat waiting for them in the shoals, when one man sprained his ankle on the rocks. The other four went back for him, got caught in the searchlights, and were blown apart by automatic-weapons fire. Oddly, the prison authorities named the stretch of rocky sand where they died Barker Beach.

  Lester Gillis, also known as Baby Face Nelson, declared war on the FBI and hunted federal agents as though he was the offended party, not they, carrying their photos and names and license tag numbers in his automobile, on the last day of his life actually making a U-turn and pursuing two of them down a road, forcing them into a ditch and a firefight that lasted over an hour and left Gillis with seventeen bullet holes in his body.

  He managed to drive away and receive the church’s last rites.

  Helen opened the door of my office without knocking and came inside. “Lost in thought?” she said.

  “What’s up?”

  “The bartender at the Boom Boom Room says Marvin Oates is stoking up the neighborhood. The skipper wants a net over him,” she said.

  “Send a uniform,” I said.

  “Marvin got into it with Jimmy Dean Styles.”

  A drop of rain struck the window glass.

  “Let me get my hat,” I said.

  We signed out a cruiser and drove out past the city limits, crossed a drawbridge spanning the Teche, next to a leafy pecan orchard, and entered the black slum community where Jimmy Sty operated the Boom Boom Room. When Helen got out of the cruiser, she slipped her baton into the ring on her gun belt. Styles was inside, behind the bar, his face still swollen from the beating I had given him. The room was dark except for the lit beer signs on the wall and the glow of a jukebox in the corner. Two black women sat at the end of the bar, their mouths thick with lipstick, their hair in disarray, glasses of bulk synthetic wine in front of them.

  “Hey, my man Lou’sana Chuck, I hear you lucking out. My charge against you being dropped,” Styles said.

  “News to me,” I said.

  “My lawyer got the word. Marse Purcel say he saw me pull a switchblade knife. Funny how a big fat pig like that can see a knife when he wasn’t even there.”

  “Marvin Oates been giving you a bad time?” I said.

  “Passing out religious tracts in a bar? Trying to hide the boner in his pants at the same time? You tell me, Lou’sana Chuck.”

  “Watch your language,” Helen said.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Think he met a girlfriend. He be converting her now,” Styles said. He reached into the cooler behind him and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of chocolate milk. In the light of the beer sign above his head, his gold-textured face seemed grotesque, a blood knot on the ridge of his nose, the skin puckered where it had been stitched. He drank until the bottle was half empty, then rested his hands on the bar and lowered his head and belched.

  “Can you give us a minute?” I said to Helen.

  “No problem. I just hate to give up the eau de caca coming from the bathroom,” she said, fitting on her sunglasses, stepping out the front door into the hazy midday glare, her baton at a stiff angle on her left side.

  Styles looked at me curiously.

  “I think you’re a sorry sack of shit, Jimmy. But I didn’t have the right to take you down the way I did. I also think you’re getting a lousy deal with the St. Martin D.A.’s office. But you know the rules. Cops take care of their own. Anyway, I apologize for busting you up,” I said.

  “Lookie here, Chuck, you want to feel good about yourself, go somewhere else to do it. You want to shut my bidness down, come back wit’ a court order. In the meantime, get the fuck out of my life.”

  “You helped Tee Bobby get on the spike, Jimmy. How’s it feel to ruin one of the greatest musicians ever to come out of Louisiana?” I said.

  “Had about all this I can stand,” he replied. He walked to the front door and called outside. “Gots a problem in here!”

  Helen came through the door, pulling off her sunglasses, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness.

  “What’s the trouble?” she said.

  “I hear you a dyke who’s straight up and don’t take shit from nobody. ’Preciate you being a witness if Chuck here decides to assault me again,” Styles said.

  “Say again?” Helen said.

  Styles blew out his breath and made an exasperated face. “Lady, I ain’t give you the reputation. You walked in here wit’ it. Yesterday, in the McDonald’s on Main, male cops was laughing about you. I ain’t lying. Ax Chuck here they don’t do it.”

  Styles upended his bottle of chocolate milk. He had worked the hook in deep, with a good chance of getting away with it. Except he let his eyes light on Helen’s while a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Helen pulled her baton from the loop on her belt and swung it backhanded across his face. The bottle shattered in Styles’s hand, speckling his face with chocolate milk and fragments of glass.

  She placed her business card on the bar.

  “Have a nice day. Call me if you need any more assistance,” she said.

  We drove through the neighborhood, past shacks with rusted screen galleries that were still hung with Christmas lights, and crossed a coulee that was shaded by pecan trees and whose banks were green and raked clean and sprinkled with periwinkles. Then, back among the trees, we saw a pale yellow shotgun house and Marvin’s suitcase on the porch. Music came from the windows, and, incongruously, a bright red Coca-Cola machine sat in the carport, the refrigeration unit vibrating, the exterior beaded with fat drops of moisture. We pulled into the yard and walked up on the porch. The inside door was open and a heady, autumnal odor, like wet leaves burning, drifted through the screen. I knocked, but no one answered.

  Helen stayed in front and I walked around to the rear door. Then, through the screen, I witnessed one of those scenes that makes us wish we knew less about the human family’s potential for deceit and the manipulation of those who are weaker than ourselves.

  Marvin Oates sat at a bare kitchen table, his shirt off, his eyes pinched shut, his balled fists trembling with anxiety or perhaps visions that only he saw on the backs of his eyelids. His forehead was barked and there was a bruise along his jawbone like the discoloration in an overripe banana. A pair of marijuana roach clips sat in an ashtray, smoldering at the tips.

  A young black woman, her short hair curled and peroxided at the ends, stood over him, kneading his shoulders, letting her breasts touch his head, her loins rub against his back, blowing her breath in his ear. She wore white shorts rolled up into her genitalia, a denim shirt embroidered with flowers, a rose tattooed on her throat, bracelets that jangled on her ankles, and pink tennis shoes, like a little girl might wear.

  “Leona got what you want, honey. But I got to have a li’l more money than what you give me. That ain’t hardly enough to cover Jimmy Sty’s end of things. Girl got to have some money for rent. Got to pay for the liquor you drunk, the dope you smoked, too, darlin’. Don’t make me go down the road and get another date. You a cute t’ing . . .”

  She traced her hands down his chest and touched his sex. His chin lifted and his face seemed to sharpen, to blade with color and the heated energies he could barely control. He opened his eyes, like a man waking from a dream.

  His voice was a rusty clot, a mixture of desire and guilt and need. “There’s more money in my britches,” he said.

&
nbsp; The woman reached over to remove his wallet from his back pocket. When she did, I saw Marvin’s naked back and the pockmarks on it that ran all the way down to his beltline.

  I opened the screen door and stepped into the kitchen.

  “Sorry to bother you, Leona, but Marvin has an appointment at the sheriff’s department,” I said.

  At first her face jerked with surprise. Then she grinned and straightened her shoulders and pushed back her hair.

  “Dave Robicheaux come to see me? I love you, darlin’, and would run off wit’ you in a minute, but I’m all tied up right now,” she said.

  “I realize that, Leona. But how about returning the money you were holding for Marvin so we can be on our way?” I said.

  “He want me to have it. Tole me so wit’ his hand on his heart,” she said, rubbing the top of Marvin’s head.

  Helen came through the front of the house, whirled Leona against the table, and kicked her feet apart. She pulled a sheaf of bills from Leona’s pocket. “You take anything else from him?” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” Leona said.

  “Where’d you get the rock?” Helen said, holding up a two-inch plastic vial with a tiny cork in the top.

  “Don’t know where that come from,” Leona said.

  “Is that your baby in the other room?” Helen said.

  “Yes, ma’am. He’s eighteen months now,” Leona said.

  “Then go take care of him. I catch you turning tricks again, I’m going to roust Jimmy Sty and tell him you dimed him,” Helen said.

  “Can I have the rock back?” Leona said.

  “Get out of here,” Helen said. She picked up Marvin’s shirt and draped it on his shoulders and put his hat on his head.

  “Let’s go, cowboy,” she said, and pushed him ahead of her toward the front door.

  It had started to rain. The trees were blowing on the bayou, and the air was cool and smelled like dust and fish spawning.

  Marvin began putting on his shirt, drawing it over the network of scars on his back.

  “Who did that to you, partner?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Sometimes I almost remember. Then I go inside in my head and don’t come out for a long time. It’s like I ain’t s’pposed to remember some things.”

  Helen looked at me. I picked up Marvin’s suitcase and placed it in the trunk of the cruiser, then shut the hatch and opened the back door for him.

  “Why’d you get drunk?” I asked.

  “No reason. I got beat up in the Iberville Project. I looked all over for Miss Zerelda, but she was gone. I dint know where she went,” he replied.

  “Think you can stay out of this part of town for a while?” I asked.

  “I ain’t gonna drink no more. No, sir, you got my word on that,” he said. He shook his head profoundly.

  Helen and I got in front. She started the engine, then turned and looked back through the wire-mesh screen that separated us from Marvin Oates. Lightning splintered the sky on the other side of the pecan trees that lined the coulee.

  “Marvin, have you ever noticed you never answer a question directly? Can you tell us why that is?” she said.

  “The Bible is my road map. The children of Israel used it, too. They crossed the Red Sea of destruction and God done seen them safely through. That’s all I can say,” he replied.

  “That’s very illuminating. Thanks for sharing that,” she said, and shifted the cruiser into gear.

  Fifteen minutes later we dropped him in front of his house. He hefted his suitcase out of the trunk and ran through the rain, his straw hat clamped on his head, his hand-tooled cowboy boots splashing on the edge of the puddles in his tiny yard, his shirt flapping in the wind.

  “You think those scars on his back are from hot cigarettes?” Helen asked.

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “It’s a great life, huh?” she said.

  I’m sure I knew a glib reply to her remark, which she had obviously intended to hide her feelings, but the image of a child being systematically burned, probably by a parent or stepparent, was just too awful to talk about.

  Through the window I saw a man walk against the red light at the intersection, a heavy piece of rolled canvas draped over his shoulders, like a cross, his unlaced work boots sloshing through the water.

  “Let’s take that fellow to the shelter,” I said.

  “You know him?” Helen said.

  “He was a medic in my outfit. I saw him in New Orleans. He must have hopped a freight back to New Iberia.”

  She turned in the seat and looked into my face. “Run that by me again.”

  “When I was hit, he carried me piggyback into the slick and kept me alive until we got to battalion aid,” I said.

  “I’m a little worried about you, Pops,” she said.

  CHAPTER 23

  I rose before dawn the next morning and walked down to the dock to help Batist open up. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk and heated an egg sandwich and ate breakfast by an open window above the water and listened to the moisture dripping out of the trees in the swamp and the popping of bluegill that were feeding along the edge of the hyacinths. Then the stars went out of the sky and the wind dropped and the stands of flooded cypresses turned as gray as winter smoke. A moment later the sun broke above the rim of the earth, like someone firing a furnace on the far side of the swamp, and suddenly the tree trunks were brown and without mystery, streaked with night damp, their limbs ridged with fern and lichen, the water that had been layered with fog only moments ago now alive with insects, dissected by the V-shaped wakes of cottonmouths and young alligators. I washed my dishes in the tin sink and was about to walk back up to the house when I heard a car with a blown muffler coming down the road. A moment later Clete Purcel came through the bait shop door, wearing new running shoes, elastic-waisted, neon-purple shorts that bagged to his knees, a tie-dye strap undershirt that looked like chemically stained cheesecloth on his massive torso, and his Marine Corps utility cap turned sideways on his head.

  “What d’you got for eats?” he asked.

  “Whatever you see,” I replied.

  He went behind the counter and began assembling what he considered a healthy breakfast: four jelly doughnuts, a quart of chocolate milk, a cold pork-chop sandwich he found in the icebox, and two links of microwave boudin. He glanced at his watch, then sat on a counter stool and began eating.

  “I’m jogging three miles with Barbara this morning,” he said.

  “Three miles? Maybe you should pack another sandwich.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I replied, my face blank.

  “I’ve done some more checking on our playboy lawyer LaSalle. If I were you, I’d take a closer look at this guy.”

  “Would you?”

  “Big Tit Judy Lavelle says he’s got a half-dozen regular pumps in the Quarter alone. She says his flopper not only has eyes, it’s got X-ray vision. A female walks by and it pokes its way out of his fly.”

  “So what?” I said.

  “So he’s hinky. Sex predators can have college degrees, too. He uses people, then throws them over the gunnel. He got it on with both Barbara and Zerelda, then treated them like yesterday’s ice cream. His whole family made their money on other people’s backs. You see a pattern here?”

  “You’re saying you don’t like him?”

  “Talk to Big Tit Judy. She used the term ‘inexhaustible needs.’ Gee, I wonder what she means by that.”

  “I’d better get to work. How are things going with you and Barbara?”

  He crumpled up a paper napkin and dropped it on his plate. He started to speak, then shrugged his shoulders, his face chagrined.

  “My feelings seem a little naked?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You’re sure a bum liar.”

  I walked with him to his car, then watched him drive down the dirt road, his convertible top down, a Smi
ley Lewis tape blaring from his loudspeakers, determined not to let mortality and the exigencies of his own battered soul hold sway in his life.

  I went to the office, but I couldn’t quite shake a thought Clete had planted in my head. His thinking and behavior were eccentric, his physical appetites legendary, his periodic excursions into mayhem of epic proportions, but under it all Clete was still the most intelligent and perceptive police officer I had ever known. He not only understood criminals, he understood the society that produced them. When he was a patrolman in the Garden District, he busted a choleric, obnoxious United States congressman for D.W.I. and hit-and-run and had the congressman’s car towed to the pound. When the congressman and his girlfriend tried to walk off to a bar on the corner of St. Charles and Napoleon, Clete handcuffed him to a fireplug.

  Charges against the congressman were dropped, and one week later Clete found himself reassigned to a program called Neighborhood Outreach. He spent the next year ducking bullets and bricks or garbage cans weighted with water and thrown from roofs at the Desire, Iberville, and St. Thomas projects.

  Even though Clete made constant derogatory allusions to the population of petty miscreants and meltdowns that cycles itself daily through the bail bond offices, courts, and jails of every city in America, in reality he viewed most of them as defective rather than evil and treated them with a kind of sardonic respect.

  Drug dealers, pimps, sexual predators, jackrollers, and armed robbers were another matter. So were slumlords and politicians on the pad and cops who did scut work for the Mob. But Clete’s real disdain was directed at a state of mind rather than at individuals. He looked upon public displays of charity and morality as the stuff of sideshows. He never trusted people in groups and was convinced that inside every reformer there was a glandular, lascivious, and sweaty creature aching for release.

  After Clete made plainclothes, he worked a case involving a Garden District doyenne whose philandering husband went missing on a fishing trip down in Barataria. The husband’s outboard was found floating upside down in the swamp immediately after a storm, the rods, tackle boxes, ice chest, and life preservers washed into the trees. His disappearance was written off as an accidental drowning.