Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  On some weekends I drove out to the dock and bait shop to see him. We’d fish the swamp for bass and sac-a-lait, then head home at sunset, the cypress trees riffling like green lace in the wind, the water back in the coves bloodred in the sun’s afterglow. But across the road and up the incline from the dock were the burned remains of the house my father had built out of notched and pegged timbers during the Depression, the home where I had lived with my wife and daughter, and I had a hard time looking at it without feeling an indescribable sense of loss and anger.

  The inspector from the fire department called it “electrical failure.” I wished I could accept the loss in terms as clinical as those. But the truth was I had trusted the electrical rewiring on my home to a fellow A.A. member, one who had stopped attending meetings. He filled the walls with cheap switches that he did not screw-wrap and inserted fourteen-gauge wire into twelve-gauge receptacles. The fire started inside the bedroom wall and burned the house to the ground in less than an hour.

  I went into the house and looked up Merchie Flannigan’s name in the directory. I had known his parents in both New Orleans and New Iberia, but I’d never had reason to take official notice of Merchie until I was a patrolman near the Iberville Welfare Project off Basin Street, back in the days when cops still rang their batons off street curbs to signal one another and white kids would take your head off with water-filled garbage cans dropped from a five-story rooftop.

  Long before Hispanic and black caricatures acted out self-created roles as gangsters on MTV, white street gangs in New Orleans fought with chains, steel pipes, and zip guns over urban territory that a self-respecting Bedouin wouldn’t live in. During the 1950s, the territorial war was between the Cats and the Frats. Frats lived uptown, in the Garden District and along St. Charles Avenue. Cats lived in the Irish Channel, or downtown or in the projects or out by the Industrial Canal. Cats were usually Irish or Italian or a mixture of both, parochial school bust-outs who rolled drunks and homosexuals and group-stomped their adversaries, giving no quarter and asking for none in return.

  In a back-alley, chain-swinging rumble, their ferocity and raw physical courage could probably be compared only to that of their historical cousins in Southie, the Five Points, and Hell’s Kitchen. Along Bourbon Street, after twelve on Saturday nights, the Dixieland bands would pack up their instruments and be replaced by rock ’n’ roll groups that played until sunrise. The kids spilling out the front doors of Sharkey Bonnano’s Dream Room, drinking papercup beer and smoking cigarettes on the sidewalks, their motorcycle caps and leather jackets rippling with neon, made most tourists wet their pants.

  But Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan could not be easily categorized as a blue-collar street kid who had made good in the larger world. In fact, I always had suspicions that Jumpin’ Merchie joined a gang for reasons very different from his friends in the Iberville. Unlike most of them, he was not only streetwise but good in school and naturally intelligent. Merchie’s problem really wasn’t Merchie. It was his parents.

  In New Iberia Merchie’s father was thought of as a decent but weak and ineffectual man whose rundown religious store was almost an extension of its owner’s personality. Many nights a sympathetic police officer would take Mr. Flannigan out the back door of the Frederic Hotel bar and drive him to his house by the railroad tracks. Merchie’s mother tried to compensate for the father’s failure by constantly treating Merchie as a vulnerable child, protecting him, making him wear short pants at school until he was in the fifth grade, denying him entry into a world that to her was as unloving as her marriage. But I always felt her protectiveness was of a selfish kind, and in reality she was not only sentimental rather than loving, she could also be terribly cruel.

  After the family moved to New Orleans and took up life in the Iberville, Merchie became known as a mama’s boy who was anybody’s punching bag or hard-up pump. But at age fifteen, he threw a black kid from the Gird Town Deuces off a fire escape onto the cab of a passing produce truck, then outraced a half dozen cops across a series of rooftops, finally leaping out into space, plummeting two stories through the ceiling of a massage parlor.

  His newly acquired nickname cost him a broken leg and a one-bit in the Louisiana reformatory, but Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan came back to Canal Street and the Iberville Project with magic painted on him.

  When I called him at home he was gregarious and ingratiating, and said he wanted to see me. In fact, he said it with such sincerity that I believed him.

  His home, of which he was very proud, was a gray architectural monstrosity designed to look like a medieval castle, inside acres of pecan and live oak trees, all of it in an unzoned area that mixed pipeyards and welding shops with thoroughbred horse barns and red-clay tennis courts.

  He greeted me in the front yard, athletic, trim, wearing pleated tan slacks, half-top, slip-on boots, and a polo shirt, his long hair so blond it was almost white, a V-shaped receded area at the part the only sign of age I could see in him. The yard was covered in shadow now, the chrysanthemums denting in the wind, the sky veined with electricity. In the midst of it all Merchie seemed to glow not so much with health and prosperity as confidence that God was truly in His heaven and there was justice in the world for a kid from the Iberville.

  He meshed his fingers, as though making a tent, then pointed the tips at me.

  “You were out at the Crudup farm in St. James Parish today,” he said.

  “Who told you?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to clean up the place,” he replied.

  “Think it might take a hydrogen bomb?”

  “So give me the gen on it,” he said.

  “The Crudup woman says she was cheated out of the title.”

  “Look, Dave, I bought the property three years ago at a bankruptcy sale. I’ll check into it. How about some trust here?”

  It was hard to stay mad at Merchie. I knew people in the oil business who were openly ecstatic at the prospect of Mideastern wars or subzero winters in the northern United States, but Merchie had never been one of them.

  “Been out of town?” I said.

  “Yeah, Afghanistan. You believe it?”

  “Shooting at the Taliban?”

  He smiled with his eyes but didn’t reply.

  “The woman in St. James Parish? Her grandfather was Junior Crudup,” I said.

  “An R&B guy?”

  “Yeah, one of the early ones. He did time with Leadbelly. He played with Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner,” I said. But I could see him losing interest in the subject. “I’d better go. Your place looks nice. Give me some feedback later on the Crudup situation, will you?” I said.

  “My favorite police officer,” I heard a woman say.

  The voice of Theodosha Flannigan was like a melancholy recording out of the past, the kind that carries fond memories but also some that are better forgotten. She was a member of the LeJeune family in Franklin, down the Teche, people whose wealth and lawn parties were legendary in southwest Louisiana, and she still used their name rather than Merchie’s. She was tall, darkly beautiful, with hollow cheeks and long legs like a model’s, her southern accent exaggerated, her jeans and tied-up black hair and convertible automobiles an affectation that belied the conservative and oligarchical roots she came from.

  But in spite of her corn bread accent and the pleasure she seemed to take in portraying herself as an irreverent and neurotic southern woman, she had another side, one she never engaged in conversation about. She had written two successful screenplays and a trilogy of crime novels containing elements that were undeniably lyrical. Although her novels had never won an Edgar award, her talent was arguably enormous.

  “How you doin’, Theo?” I said.

  “Stay for coffee or a cold drink?” she said.

  “You know me, always on the run,” I said.

  She curled her fingers around the limb of a mimosa tree and propped one moccasin-clad foot against the trunk. Her breasts rose and fell against her blouse.

&
nbsp; “How about diet Dr Pepper on the rocks, with cherries in it?” she said.

  Don’t hang around. Get away now, I heard a voice inside me say.

  “I’m just about to fix some sherbet with strawberries. We’d love to have you join us, Dave,” Merchie said.

  “Sounds swell,” I said, and dropped my eyes, wondering at the price I was willing to pay in order not to be alone.

  On the way into the backyard Theodosha touched my arm. “I’m sorry about your loss. I hope you’re doing all right these days,” she said.

  But I had no memory of her sending a sympathy card when Bootsie died.

  I went to an early Mass the next morning, then bought a copy of the Times-Picayune and drank coffee at the picnic table in the backyard and read the newspaper. I read three paragraphs into an article about an errant bomb falling into a community of mudbrick huts in Afghanistan, then closed the paper and watched a group of children throwing a red Frisbee back and forth under the oak trees in the park. A speedboat full of teenagers roared down the bayou, swirling a trough back and forth between both banks, splintering the air with a deafening sound. I heard my portable phone tinkle softly by my thigh.

  The operator asked if I would accept a collect call from Clete Purcel.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Streak, I’m in the zoo,” Clete shouted.

  In the background I could hear voices echoing down stone corridors or inside cavernous rooms.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m in Central Lock-Up. They busted me for assaulting Gunner Ardoin. I feel like I’ve been arrested for spraying Lysol on a toilet bowl.”

  “Why haven’t you bonded out?” I asked.

  “Nig and Willie aren’t answering my calls.”

  I tried to make sense out of what he was saying. For years Clete had chased down bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. He should have been out of jail with a signature.

  I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Gunner is a grunt for Fat Sammy Fig, and Fat Sammy is connected up with every major league piece of shit in Louisiana. I think Nig and Willie don’t want trouble with the wrong people. Arraignment isn’t until Tuesday morning. Been down to Central Lock-Up lately?”

  I took the four-lane through Morgan City into New Orleans. But I didn’t go directly to the jail. Instead, I drove up St. Charles Avenue, then over toward Tchoupitoulas and parked in front of Gunner Ardoin’s cottage. His Honda was in the driveway. I walked down to a corner store and bought a quart of chocolate milk and a prepackaged ham sandwich and sat down on Gunner’s front steps and began eating the sandwich while children roller-skated past me under the trees.

  I heard someone open the door behind me.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doin’?” Gunner’s voice said.

  “Oh, hi. I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said.

  “What?” he said. He was bare chested and barefoot, and wore only a pair of pajama bottoms string-tied under his navel. The breeze blew from the back of the cottage through the open door. “What?” he repeated.

  “Toking up kind of early today?”

  “So call the DEA.”

  “Father Jimmie Dolan was your basketball coach. Why did you say you didn’t know him?”

  “’Cause I can’t remember every guy I knew in high school with a whistle hanging out of his mouth.”

  “Father Jimmie says it wasn’t you who attacked him, Gunner. But I think somebody told you to bust him up, and you pieced off the job to somebody else. Probably because you still have qualms.”

  “Is this because I filed on your friend?”

  “No, it’s because you’re a shitbag and you’re going to drop those charges or I’ll be back here tonight and jam a chainsaw up your ass.”

  “Look, man—” he began.

  “No, you look,” I said, rising to my feet, shoving him backward through the door into the living room. “Fat Sammy is behind the job on Father Jimmie?”

  “No,” he said.

  I shoved him again. He tripped over a footstool and fell backward on the floor. I pulled back my sports coat and removed my .45 from its clip-on holster and squatted next to him. I pulled back the slide and chambered a round, then pointed the muzzle at his face.

  “Look at my eyes and tell me I won’t do it,” I said.

  I saw the breath seize in his throat and the blood go out of his cheeks. He stretched his head back, turning his face sideways, away from the .45.

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “Please.”

  I waited a long time, then touched his forehead with the gun’s muzzle and winked at him.

  “I won’t. I’d think about my request on those charges, though,” I said.

  Just as I eased the hammer back down, his bladder gave way and he shut his eyes in shame and embarrassment. When I looked up I saw a little girl, no older than six or seven, staring at us, horrified, from the kitchen doorway.

  “That’s my daughter. I get her one day a week. I’ve known some cruel guys with a badge, but you take the cake,” Gunner said.

  The charges against Clete were dropped by three that afternoon. I drove him from Central Lock-Up to his apartment on St. Ann, where he fell asleep on the couch in front of a televised football game. Fat Sammy Figorelli’s home was only three blocks away, over on Ursulines. The temptation was too much.

  Fat Sammy had grown up in the French Quarter, and although he owned homes in Florida and on Lake Pontchartrain, he spent most of his time inside the half city block where the Figorelli family had lived since the 1890s. It seemed Sammy had been elephantine all his life. As a child the balloon tires of his bicycle burst under his weight. His rump wouldn’t fit in the desk at the school run by the Ursuline nuns. In high school he got stuck inside his tuba while performing with the marching band at an LSU football game. The paramedics had to scissor off his jacket, smear him with Vaseline, and pry him loose in front of ninety thousand people. In his senior year he mustered up the courage to invite a girl to the Prytania Theater. A gang of Irish kids in the balcony rained down a barrage of water-filled condoms on their heads.

  As an adult he filled his body with laxatives, tried every diet program imaginable, trained at fat farms, sweated to the oldies with Richard Simmons, attended a fire-walker’s school run by a celebrity con man in California, almost died from liposuction, and finally had a gastric bypass. The consequence of the latter was a weight loss of 170 pounds in a year’s time.

  All of the wrong kind.

  He lost the blubber, but under the blubber was a support system of sinew that hung on his frame like curtains of partially hardened cement. If this was not enough of a problem, Fat Sammy had another one that was equally egregious and beyond the scope of medicine. His head was shaped like a football, his few strands of gold hair brushed like oily wire into his scalp.

  I twisted an iron bell on the grilled door that gave onto a domed archway leading into Fat Sammy’s courtyard.

  “Who is it?” a voice said from a speaker inside the gate.

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux. I’ve got a problem,” I said.

  “Not with me, you don’t.”

  “It’s about Gunner Ardoin. Open the door.”

  “Never heard of him. Come back another time. I’m taking a nap.”

  “There’re some movie people in New Iberia. They want to work with some local guys who know their way around,” I said.

  The speaker box went dead and the gate buzzed open.

  The courtyard was surfaced with soft brick, the flower beds blooming with yellow and purple roses, irises and hibiscus and Hong Kong orchids. Banana and umbrella trees and windmill palms grew along the walls, and the balconies dripped with bougainvillea and passion vine. Fat Sammy lay in a hammock like a beached whale, a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his skin glazed with suntan lotion. A portable stereo and a mirror and a hairbrush sat on a glass-topped table next to him. The stereo was playing “Clair de Lune.”

  “Who are these m
ovie people?” he asked.

  “Germans. They’re making a documentary. I think you’re the man to show them around,” I said.

  I pulled up a deep-backed wicker chair and sat down without being asked. He sat up in the hammock and turned down the volume on the stereo, his scalp glistening in the sunshine. He wiped his head with a towel, his eyes neutral, his mouth down-turned at the corners. “Documentary on what?” he asked.

  “Let me clear the decks about something else first. Somebody beat up a priest named Father Jimmie Dolan. It’s a lousy thing to happen, Sammy, something no respectable man would be involved in. I thought you’d want to know about it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “In the old days elderly people in New Orleans didn’t get jack-rolled and their houses didn’t get creeped and nobody murdered a child or abused Catholic clergy. If N.O.P.D. couldn’t take care of it, we let you guys do it for us.”

  His eyes were hooded, like a frog’s. “You were kicked off the force, Robicheaux. You don’t speak for nobody, at least not around here.” He paused, as though reconsidering the tenor of his rhetoric. “Look, this used to be a good city. It ain’t no more.”

  When I didn’t speak he took a breath and started over. “This is the way it is. I make movies. I build houses. I’m developing shopping centers in Mississippi and Texas. You want to know who’s running New Orleans? Flip over a rock. Welfare pukes hustling bazooka and blacks and South American spics and bikers muleing brown skag out of Florida. Nothing against the blacks or the spics. They’re making it just like we did. But I wouldn’t be in a room with none of them people unless I was encased in a full-body condom.”

  “Who did the job on Father Dolan?”

  His eyes were pale blue, almost without color, his expression like that of a man who had never learned to smile. “Somebody saying it’s on me? This guy Ardoin you mentioned?”

  I looked at a strip of pink cloud above the courtyard. “You’re the man in New Orleans,” I said.

  “Yeah, every whore in the city tells me the same thing. I wonder why. I ever jerk you around, Robicheaux?” he said.