Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “So what’s the haps?” I said.

  “I came down on you pretty hard when you and Purcel scared Fat Sammy out of town,” she replied.

  “Your feelings were understandable.”

  There was a fried-egg-and-ham sandwich on French bread in her Styrofoam container but she hadn’t touched it. “I talked to Purcel. He told me about your wife’s death,” she said.

  I raised my chin to straighten my collar and looked at the tug moving the barge down the bayou.

  “So what I’m saying is—”

  “Got it. You don’t need to explain.”

  “How about shutting up a minute? My husband was killed in Iraq in ’91. He was in a tank. The army said he died instantly but I don’t believe them,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For a long time I thought I saw him at a football game or in a bar or in a crowd at a department store. That ever happen to you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lucky. What I’m saying, Robicheaux, is I think you’re a good cop and you don’t need another cop yelling at you.” She picked up her sandwich and took a bite out of it. I heard the tug blowing its whistle at the next drawbridge.

  “It’s Friday. You want to hang around town, maybe catch dinner and go to a movie?” I said.

  “What’s playing?” she asked.

  “Really hadn’t checked it out.”

  “Father Dolan’s being arraigned at eleven,” she said.

  “I thought you’d cut loose of Father Jimmie’s problems.”

  “A girl’s got to do something for kicks,” she said, and watched me over the top of her cup while she drank her coffee.

  Dale Louviere liked being a city police officer, especially since he had been promoted to plainclothes and given his own office, a travel account, and membership in two civic clubs. The pay was nothing to brag about, but good things happened if a man did his job and accorded people respect and made sure he was available to serve in whatever capacity he was needed.

  Anything wrong with that? he asked himself.

  He lived a bachelor’s life in a freshly painted bungalow out in the country, enclosed by sugarcane fields, cedar trees, flower beds and vegetable gardens tended by a trusty from the parish stockade. The radical priest’s accusation that he was on a pad still rankled him. Dale Louviere never accepted a bribe from anyone; he didn’t have to. He took care of his own side of the street and the other things took care of themselves. A mortgage or car loan was approved upon application; his drinks were put on a tab at local bars but he was not expected to ever pay the tab; a land developer gave him forty-yard-line tickets to LSU’s home games whenever he wanted them; and at Christmas-time cellophane-wrapped baskets of candy, fruit, and wine were delivered to his door.

  The people who owned the sugar mills, drilled the oil wells, and governed the parish’s affairs paid most of the taxes, didn’t they? They gave other people jobs. The parish would be a giant rural slum without them. So a civil servant had to pay attention to the needs of rich people who could locate elsewhere anytime they chose.

  Anything wrong with that?

  Early the same morning Father Jimmie Dolan was to be arraigned, Dale Louviere rose at first light, put on his warm-up suit, and drank coffee and smoked a cigarette at the kitchen table, waiting for the chill to go out of the room. Through the front window he saw a Honda pass on the state road, then return, going in the opposite direction.

  He washed his cup and saucer in the sink, put his spare set of house and car keys around his neck on a braided lanyard, and began his early-morning aerobic walk down the state road. Two hundred yards from his bungalow he crossed a wood bridge over a coulee and entered a long, cleared slash between two unharvested cane fields. The rain had quit temporarily, but fog hung like smoke in the cane and the thatch under his feet was sodden and mud coated, squishing each time he took a step, soaking the bottoms of his sweat pants.

  One of his shoes went down ankle-deep in water. Bad day for aerobics, he thought.

  He heard a car stop on the road. When he looked behind him he saw the Honda again, and a priest with a map spread across his steering wheel, rolling down his window now, his face expressing his obvious need for directions. But secretly Dale Louviere neither liked nor trusted the clergy, and off the clock he gave them no time. He pretended to tie his shoe until he heard the sound of the Honda’s engine thinning in the distance.

  It started to sprinkle again and Dale Louviere headed home, walking fast along the edge of the road, through ground fog that welled out of the ditches, his arms pumping the way he had learned in an aerobics class. He wondered if he would ever successfully quit smoking. He had tried many times, but within three days he would be so irritable and agitated his colleagues would toss cigarettes on his desk blotter by way of suggestion. Now the best he could do was pump the smoke out of his lungs and the nicotine out of his blood with a hard, early-morning walk that left his head spinning and his nervous system screaming for another cigarette.

  Fortunately he had stuffed a pack in his jacket pocket. Just as he fished one out he saw the Honda coming in his direction again. The driver pulled alongside Dale Louviere and rolled down the window with the electric motor. He wore a golfer’s cap pulled down on one eye, and had a tight face and small ears, like a fighter who had spent too many years in the ring. A road map was crumpled on the dashboard. His black suit and rabat were dry, his shoulders narrow, his hands round and pink on the steering wheel.

  “Could you be directing me back to Highway 90, sir?” the priest said.

  “Go to the four corners and turn left,” Louviere said.

  The priest screwed his head about, his eyebrows raised into half-moons. “That simple? I must have made a complete circle. I think the bishop served too much of the grog last night.”

  But instead of driving away he started fiddling with his map, running his finger along a line that marked Highway 90, peering down the road, then through the back window again. Dale Louviere thought he heard a knocking sound in the trunk.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  The priest clucked his tongue. “I’m afraid I ran over a dog. I’m taking him to a veterinary if I can find one,” he said. “Turn at the crossroads, you say?”

  “Correct. You can’t get lost. Got it now?” Louviere said impatiently. He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke lovingly into his lungs.

  “I don’t see that on this map,” the priest said.

  “Look, it’s not that hard. You see the state road here—” He held his cigarette to one side and leaned in the window.

  That was as far as he got. The priest grabbed the lanyard around Louviere’s neck and rolled up the window on his throat, trapping his head at the top of the glass like a man caught in an inverted guillotine.

  He pressed down on the accelerator and drove his car down the road and into Louviere’s driveway, while Louviere held onto the door handle and tried to extend his body like a crane’s to keep from being decapitated.

  “Be a good fellow and toggle along as best you can. We’ll have you safe and snug in your digs before you know it,” the priest said. “Oops, a little bump there. Hang on.”

  Dale Louviere felt his head being torn loose from his torso as he tripped over his feet, fighting to find purchase. The Honda moved past the side of his house, his gardens and flower beds and across the thin, wintergreen stretch of grass that comprised his backyard, into a paintless cypress barn left over from an earlier time.

  The priest lowered the window glass and Dale Louviere fell backward into a smell of rotted straw, hard-packed, damp earth, and horse manure that powdered into dust. The priest cut the engine on the car and got out, a .45 automatic hanging from his right hand. “I have nothing against coppers. Except those who are no better than me and pretend otherwise. On which side of the line would a fellow like you fall, sir?” he said.

  Again Dale Louviere heard a kicking sound in the Honda’s trunk but could not think of anything exc
ept the violent pounding in his own chest.

  At 10:55 A.M., while Father Jimmie Dolan sat in a St. Mary Parish courtroom, cuffed to a wrist chain with a collection of drunks, pipeheads, prostitutes, and wife batterers, the prosecutor’s office received a call from Dale Louviere. He indicated he was resigning his job and, for personal reasons, moving to an undisclosed city out of state. He also said there was no substance to the charges against Father James Dolan and that his colleague, Cash Money Mouton, who had made the arrest in the public rest room, would confirm the same, provided he could be found.

  Clotile Arceneaux, Father Jimmie, and I walked out the front door of the courthouse together. The rain had stopped and the town looked washed and clean, the trees green against the grayness of the day, the ebb and flow of the traffic on a wet street somehow an indicator of the world’s normalcy.

  “What happened in there?” Father Jimmie said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Max Coll is behind this, isn’t he?” he said.

  “Who cares? Those guys deserve anything that happens to them,” I said.

  “I thought New Orleans was tough. Y’all have death squads over here?” Clotile said.

  I started to make a flippant reply, but saw the troubled expression on Father Jimmie’s face. “I have to get my car from the pound,” he said.

  “We’ll see you at the house. Let it slide, Jimmie,” I said.

  “One of those men may be dead,” he replied.

  He walked down the street, his black suit rumpled and stained from sleeping overnight on a cement jailhouse floor.

  “Your friend isn’t easily consoled, is he?” Clotile said.

  “Ever hear about the Jewish legend of the thirteen just men who suffer for the rest of us?”

  “No. What’s the point?”

  “Some people have to do life in the Garden of Gethsemane,” I said.

  She picked up my left hand and looked at it, her fingers cool on my skin. “This is where those greaseballs put the pliers to you?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She patted the top of my hand and released it. “Take care of your own ass for a change,” she said.

  Chapter 20

  Father Jimmie had not been back at my house ten minutes when the phone rang in the kitchen. He picked it up but did not speak, his breath audible in the silence.

  “Ah, you’re a clairvoyant as well as a spiritual man,” the voice on the other end said.

  “Leave me alone. Please,” Father Jimmie said.

  “I got you, didn’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean, sir. It took a bastard like me with blood on his hands to get you out of the slams. Now it’s you who owe me.”

  “What did you do with those men?”

  “They’re both alive and probably enjoying a cool drink in a warm climate by now. I think one of them mentioned Ecuador. Have to say, though, I was tempted to release them from their earthly bonds.”

  Father Jimmie sat down in a chair and tried to think. “Perhaps you mean well, but you cannot use violence to solve either your problems or mine,” he said.

  “What do you know of violence, sir? What do you fucking know of it?”

  “You’re full of hatred, Max. Get it out of your life. You injure yourself with it more than others.”

  “If I came into your confessional, would you give me absolution?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are a couple more house calls I’d like to make.”

  “You don’t negotiate the terms of forgiveness…. Max? Did you year me?”

  But Max Coll had hung up. Father Jimmie leaned his head down on his hand, the stink of the jail still on his clothes, Snuggs the cat pacing back and forth on the table, his tail dragging across Father Jimmie’s face. He felt more tired than he had ever been in his life, vain and used up, now sullied by the accusation of molester, even though it was a lie.

  He knew the rumor would always follow him, regardless of where he went or what he did. A wave of revulsion and anger washed through him and made him clench his fists. Is this what all the years in the seminary, the struggles with celibacy and bigots and dictatorial and obtuse superiors had been about? To end up with his name and life’s work soiled by an accusation that made his skin crawl?

  Why didn’t he quit running a game on himself? He posed as the altruist, but other people constantly had to get him out of trouble. If he had wanted to be a true missionary and take real risks, why hadn’t he joined the Maryknolls? He disdained the role of the traditional priest, but in his self-imposed piety he had become little more than a noisy gadfly dedicated to causes Carrie Nation might have supported.

  He had just lectured a tormented man on his violence, although he, Jimmie Dolan, had just profited from it, and if truth be known he was glad he was on the street and perhaps secretly glad his false accusers had gotten their just deserts.

  Better to marry than to burn, St. Paul had said. Better to be a bourbon priest or a diocesan sycophant than a self-canonized fool, Father Jimmie thought.

  “What do you think, Snuggs?” he said.

  Snuggs answered by nudging his head into Father Jimmie’s chin.

  Father Jimmie went into the bedroom, flung his clothes in the corner, and got under the shower. The water coughed in the pipes, then seemed to whisper the word hypocrite in his ear.

  The South has changed dramatically since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Anyone who says otherwise has either not been there or wishes to keep old wounds green and tender as part of a personal agenda. And nowhere has the change been more visible than in the once recalcitrant states of the Deep South.

  But that evening, when I took Clotile Arceneaux to supper on East Main, I tried to convince myself otherwise. I told myself the furtive glances at our table, the awkwardness of friends who felt they should stop by and say hello, were expressions of narrowness and latent racism to be expected in our culture.

  The truth was no one took exception to Clotile’s race. But they did take exception to my being out with another woman in less than a year of Bootsie’s death.

  It had turned cold again when we left the restaurant. Stars were spread across the sky, the horizon flaring with stubble fires, smoke boiling out of the electric lights at the sugar mills.

  “You a little uncomfortable in there about something?” Clotile asked.

  “Not me,” I replied.

  She opened the door to my pickup by herself and got in and closed it behind her, although I had tried to help her in. “You’re really out of the past, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  She smiled and didn’t say anything. We drove toward the drawbridge and the theater complex on the other side of Bayou Teche. She had checked in to a motel out by the four-lane that afternoon.

  We crossed the bayou and turned in to the theater parking lot. It was filled with teenagers, long lines of them extending out from the ticket windows.

  “Friday night is a bad night for the movies here,” I said.

  “We don’t need to go,” she said, looking straight ahead.

  I turned around in the parking lot, recrossed the bayou, and drove up East Main, without destination. The street seemed strangely empty, the stars shut out by the canopy of oaks overhead, my rented shotgun house dark and blown with unraked leaves. I hesitated, then pulled into my driveway and cut the engine. The ground fog in the trees and bamboo glistened in the lights from City Park across the bayou.

  “Where’s Father Dolan?” she asked.

  “Staying with friends in Lafayette.”

  “You have a lot of regrets in your life, Robicheaux?” she said.

  “All drunks do,” I replied.

  “How do you deal with them?”

  “I don’t labor over them anymore.”

  She still looked straight ahead. “I don’t want to be a regret in somebody’s life,” she said.

  “Want to
meet my cat?” I said.

  And that’s what we did. I introduced her to Snuggs; then we ate ice cream in the kitchen and I drove her to her motel.

  Afterward I went to the cemetery in St. Martinville and sat on the steel bench by Bootsie’s tomb and watched the moon rise over the old French church on the bayou.

  That night I dreamed I was in New Orleans in an earlier era, riding on a streetcar out to Elysian Fields. The streets were dark, the palm fronds on the neutral ground yellow with blight. No one else was on the car except the motorman. When he turned and looked back at me his eyes were empty sockets, the skin on his face dried and shrunken into little more than gauze on his skull.

  Oftentimes police cases are not solved. They simply unravel, by chance and accident. With good luck there will even be an appreciable degree of justice involved, although it often originates from an expected source.

  Early the next morning, Saturday, my lawn was white with frost and the bamboo on the side of the house was stiff and hard and rattled like broomsticks in the wind. I put on my sweat suit, ran three miles through City Park, then showered and drove down to Clete’s cottage in the motor court.

  He sat on the side of his bed in the coldness of the room, sleepy, shivering slightly, wearing only a strap undershirt and pajama bottoms. The wastebasket in his kitchen was stuffed with fast-food containers and beer cans.

  “You want to do what?” he said.

  “Eat breakfast at McDonald’s, then maybe knock down some ducks at Pecan Island,” I said.

  “I’m busy today,” he replied.

  “I see.”

  It was quiet in the room. His eyes lingered on mine. “What’s bothering you, big mon?” he said.

  I told him about the dream, the motorman with the skeletal face, the darkness outside the streetcar, the yellowed palm fronds that clattered like bone. “You ever have a dream like that?” I said.