Last Car to Elysian Fields dr-13

by James Lee Burke

  "He died in Angola," I said.

  "No, he disappeared in Angola. Went in and never came out. No record at all of what happened to him," Father Jimmie said. "I'd like for you to meet his family."

  "Got to get back to New Iberia."

  "It's Saturday," he said.

  "Nope," I said.

  "Junior's granddaughter owns a twelve-string guitar she thinks might have belonged to Leadbelly. Maybe you could take a look at it. Unless you just really don't have the time?" he said.

  I followed Father Jimmie in my pickup truck into St. James Parish, which lies on a ninety-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that environmentalists have named Toxic Alley. We drove down a state road south of the Mississippi levee through miles of sugarcane and on through a community of narrow, elongated shacks that had been built in the late nineteenth century. At the crossroads, or what in south Louisiana is called a four-corners, was a ramshackle nightclub, an abandoned company store with a high, tin-roofed gallery, a drive-by daiquiri stand, and a solitary oil storage tank that was streaked with corrosion at the seams, next to which someone had planted a tomato garden.

  Most of the people who lived at the four-corners were black. The rain ditches and the weeds along the roadside were layered with bottles of beer and pop cans and trash from fast-food restaurants. The people who sat on the galleries of the shacks were either old or infirm or children. I watched a car filled with teenagers run a stop sign and fling a quart beer bottle on the side of the road, ten feet from where an elderly woman was picking up litter from her lawn and placing it in a vinyl bag.

  Then we were out in the countryside again and the sky was as blue as a robin's egg, the sugarcane bending in the wind as far as the eye could see, egrets perched like white sculptures on the backs of cattle in a roadside pasture. But inside the loveliness of the day was another element, discordant and invasive, the metallic reek of natural gas, perhaps from a wellhead or a leaking connection at a pump station. Then the wind shifted and it was gone and the sky was speckled with birds rising from a pecan orchard and from the south I could smell the brassy odor of a storm that was building over the Gulf.

  I looked at my watch. No more than one hour with Father Jimmie friends, I told myself. I wanted to get back to New Iberia and forget about the previous night and the trouble with Gunner Ardoin.

  Maybe it was time to let Father Jimmie take care of his own problems, I thought. Some people loved adversity, got high on it daily, and secretly despised those who would take it from them. That trait didn't necessarily go away because of a Roman collar.

  The state road made a bend and suddenly the endless rows of sugarcane ended. The fields were uncultivated now, empty of livestock, dotted with what looked like settling ponds. The Crudup family lived down a dirt lane in a white frame house with a wraparound veranda hung with baskets of flowers. Three hundred yards behind the house was a woods bordered with trees that were gray with dead leaves and the scales of air vines, as though the treeline had been matted with premature winterkill.

  Father Jimmie had set the hook when he had mentioned Lead-belly's name, but I knew as we drove down the road toward the neat white house back dropped by a poisoned woods that this trip was not about the recidivist convict who wrote "Goodnight Irene" and "The Midnight Special" and who today is almost forgotten.

  In fact, I wondered if I, like Father Jimmie, could not wait to fill my day with adversity in the way I had once filled it with Jim Beam and a glass of Jax with strings of foam running down the sides.

  When I cut my engine in front of the house, I took a Dr. Pepper from the cooler on the seat and raked the ice off the can and drank it empty before stepping out onto the yard.

  CHAPTER 2

  Junior Crudup's granddaughter had a face like a goldfish, light skin that was dusted with freckles, and glasses that turned her eyes into watery brown orbs. She sat in a stuffed chair, fanning herself with a magazine, her rings of fat bulging against her dress, waiting for me to finish examining the Stella guitar that had lain propped in a corner of her attic for thirty years. The strings were gone, the tuning keys stiff with rust, the sound hole coated with cobweb. I turned the guitar on its belly and looked at three words that were scratched into the back of the neck: Huddle Love Sarie.

  "Leadbelly's real name was Huddie Ledbetter. His wife was named Sarie," I said.

  Junior Crudup's granddaughter looked through a side window at two children playing on a rope swing that was suspended from a pecan tree. Her name was Doris. She kept straightening her shoulders, as though a great weight were pressing on her lungs. "How much it wort'?" she asked.

  "I couldn't say," I replied.

  "Four or five songs were in the bottom of the guitar case, each with Junior's signature," Father Jimmie said.

  "Yeah, what they wort'?" Doris Crudup asked.

  "You'd have to ask somebody else," I said.

  She gave Father Jimmie a look, then got up from her chair and took my coffee cup into the kitchen, although I had not finished drinking the coffee in it.

  "Her husband died three years ago. Last month the social worker cut off her welfare," Father Jimmie said.

  "Why?"

  "The social worker felt like it. That's the way it works. Take a walk with me," he said.

  "I need to get back home."

  "You have time for this," he said.

  We went outside, into the sunlit, rain-washed loveliness of the fall afternoon. The pecan tree in the side yard puffed with wind and a yellow dog rolled on its back in the dirt while the children swung back and forth above it on their rope swing. But as I followed Father Jimmie down an incline toward the woods in back I could feel the topography changing under my feet, as though I were walking on a sponge.

  "What's that smell?" I said.

  "You tell me." He tore a handful of grass from the soil and held the roots up to my nose. "They truck it in from all over the South. Doris's lungs are as much good to her as rotted cork. People around here carry buckets in their cars because of their children's constant diarrhea."

  I held onto the trunk of a withered persimmon tree and looked at the soles of my shoes. They were slick with a black-green substance, as though I had walked across a factory floor. We crossed a board plank spanning a rain ditch. The water was covered with an iridescent sheen that seemed to be rising in chains of bubbles from the bottom of the ditch. Perhaps twenty settling ponds, layered over with loose dirt, were strung along the edge of the woods, each of them crusted with a dried viscous material that looked like an orange scab.

  "Is this Doris's property?" I said.

  "It belonged to her grandfather. But twenty years ago Doris's cousin made his "X' on a bill of sale that had Junior's name typed on it. The cousin and the waste management company that bought the land both claim he's the Junior Crudup of record and Doris is out of luck."

  "I'm not following you."

  "No one knows what happened to the real Junior Crudup. He went into Angola and never came out. There's no documentation on his death or of his release. Figure that one out."

  "I don't want to."

  Father Jimmie studied my face. "These people here don't have many friends," he said.

  I slipped the flats of my hands in my back pockets and scuffed at the ground with one shoe, like a third-base coach who had run out of signals.

  "Think I'll pass," I said.

  "Suit yourself."

  Father Jimmie picked up a small stone and side-armed it into the woods. I heard it clatter among the tree trunks. Birds should have risen from the canopy into the sky, but there was no movement inside the tree limbs.

  "Who owns this waste management company?" I asked.

  "A guy named Merchie Flannigan."

  "Jumpin' Merchie Flannigan? From New Iberia?" I said.

  "One and the same. How'd he get that name, anyway?" Father Jimmie said.

  "Think of rooftops," I said.

  As I drove back to New Iberia, through Morgan City, and down
East Main to my rented house on Bayou Teche, I tried not to think anymore of Father Jimmie and the black people in St. James Parish whose community had become a petro-chemical dumping ground. As sad as their story was, in the state of Louisiana it wasn't exceptional. In fact, on television, the current governor had threatened to investigate the tax status of some young Tulane lawyers who had filed suit against several waste management companies on the basis of environmental racism. The old plantation oligarchy was gone. But its successors did business in the same fashion with baseball bats.

  I fixed an early supper and ate it on an ancient green picnic table in the backyard. Across the bayou kids were playing tag football in City Park and smoke from meat fires hung in the trees. In the deepening shadows I thought I could hear voices inside my head: my adopted daughter, Alafair, away at Reed College; my deceased wife Bootsie; and a black man named Batist, to whom I had sold my bait and boat rental business south of town. I didn't do well on Saturday afternoons. In fact, I wasn't doing well on any afternoon.

  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 AA. 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 MTVj 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 paper cup 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 pipe yards 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.

  "AnR&Bguy?"

  "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.

  "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 Boot-she 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 mud brick 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.