Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “Lighten up, Streak. I think Zerelda likes you. Notice how she squeezed her .357 when she told you to fuck off?” he said, his eyes beaming.

  We went through the side entrance of the nightclub. It was loud and hot inside, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, dense with the smells of whiskey and boiled crabs and beer sweat. Tee Bobby was at the microphone, his long-sleeved lavender shirt plastered against his skin, a red electric guitar hanging from his neck. He drank from a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer and wiped the moisture out of his eyes on his sleeve and stumbled slightly against the microphone, then began singing “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” His eyes were closed while he sang, his face suffused with a level of emotion that at first glance might have seemed manufactured until you heard the irrevocable sense of loss in his voice.

  “Guitar Slim didn’t have anything on this guy. Too bad he’s a rag nose,” Clete said.

  “How do you know he is?” I asked.

  “He was snorting lines off the toilet tank. I thought that might be a clue.”

  We found Jimmy Dean Styles in his office at the rear of the club. He sat at a cluttered desk, above which was a framed autographed photo of Sugar Ray Robinson. He was counting money, his fingers clicking on a calculator. His eyes lifted to mine.

  “See, I went out of Angola max-time. That means I ain’t got my umbilical cord thumbtacked to some P.O.’s desk. How about respecting that?” he said.

  “Where’d you get the autographed photo of Sugar Ray?” I said.

  “My grandfather was his sparring partner. You probably don’t know that ’cause when you growed up most niggers around here picked peppers or cut cane,” he replied.

  “You told me you cut Tee Bobby loose. Now I see him up on your bandstand,” I said.

  “Little Albert Babineau own half this club. He feel sorry for Tee Bobby. I don’t. Tee Bobby got a way of stuffing everything he make up his nose. So when he finish his gig tonight, he packing his shit.” His eyes shifted to Clete. “Marse Charlie, don’t be sitting on my desk.”

  “There’s a guy outside named Joe Zeroski. I hope he comes in here,” Clete said.

  “Why’s that, Marse Charlie?” Styles said.

  “He was a mechanic for the Giacanos. Nine or so hits. Your kind of guy,” Clete said.

  “I’ll be worried about that the rest of the night,” Styles replied.

  Clete stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and stared at Styles, who had gone back to counting a stack of currency, his fingers dancing on the calculator.

  I touched Clete on the arm and we walked back through the crowd and out the side door. The parking lot smelled of dust and tar, and the stars were hot and bright above the trees. Clete stared back into the club, his face perplexed.

  “That guy’s dirty. I don’t know what for, but he’s dirty.” Then he said, “You think his grandfather really sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson?”

  “Maybe. I remember he was a boxer.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was lynched in Mississippi,” I said.

  But our evening at the club owned by Jimmy Dean Styles and Little Albert Babineau wasn’t over. As Clete and I walked toward my truck, we heard the angry voices of two men behind us, the voices of others trying to restrain or pacify them. Then Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean Styles burst out the back door into the parking lot, with a balloon of people following them.

  There was a smear of blood and saliva on Tee Bobby’s mouth. He swung at Styles’s face and missed, and Styles pushed him down on the oyster shells.

  “Touch me again, I’m gonna mess you up. Now haul your freight down the road,” Styles said.

  Tee Bobby got to his feet. His slacks were torn, his knees lacerated. He ran at Styles, his arms flailing. Styles set himself and hooked Tee Bobby in the jaw and dropped him as though he had used a baseball bat.

  Tee Bobby got to his feet again and stumbled toward the crowd, swinging at anyone who tried to help him. One of his shoes was gone and his belt had come loose, exposing the elastic of his underwear.

  “You’re one sorry-ass, pitiful nigger,” Styles said, and fitted his hand over Tee Bobby’s face and shoved him backward into the crowd.

  Tee Bobby reached in his pocket and flicked open a switchblade knife, but I doubted he had any idea whom he was going to use it on or even where he was. I started toward him.

  “Mistake, Dave,” I heard Clete say.

  I came up behind Tee Bobby and grabbed him around the neck and twisted his wrist. There was little strength in his arm and the knife tinkled on the oyster shells. Then he began to fight, as a girl might, with his elbows and nails and feet. I locked my arms around him and carried him down the bank, through the trees, onto a dock, and flung him as far as I could into the bayou.

  He went under, then burst to the surface in a cloud of mud and slapped at the water with both hands until his feet gained the bottom. He slipped and splashed through the shallows, grabbing the stems of elephant ears for purchase, his hair and body strung with dead vegetation.

  Then, as the crowd from the nightclub flowed down the bank, someone switched on a flood lamp in the trees, burning away the darkness like a phosphorus flare, lighting me and Tee Bobby Hulin like figures frozen in a photograph of a waterside baptism.

  At the edge of the crowd I saw Joe Zeroski and his niece Zerelda. Joe’s face was incredulous, as though he had just walked into an open-air mental asylum. Clete lit a cigarette and rubbed the heel of his hand on his temple.

  “I don’t listen to you? Dave, you just threw a black man in the bayou while two hundred of his relatives watched. Way to go, big mon,” he said.

  I sat in the sheriff’s office early the next morning. He was generally a quiet, avuncular man, looking forward to his retirement and the free time he would have to spend with his grandchildren. He did not contend with either the world or mortality, did not grieve upon the wrongs of his fellowman, and possessed a Rotarian view of both charity and business and saw one as a natural enhancement of the other. But sometimes on a wintry day I would catch him gazing out the window, a liquid glimmer in his eyes, and I knew he was back in his youth, on a long, white road that wound between white hills that were rounded like women’s breasts, the road lined with chained-up Marine Corps six-bys and marching men whose coats and boots and steel pots were sheathed with snow. He had just finished a phone conversation with the chief of police in St. Martinville. He opened the blinds on the window and stared at the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery for a long time, his shoulders erect to compensate for the way his stomach protruded over his belt. His face was slightly flushed, his small mouth pinched. He removed his suit coat and placed it on the back of his chair, then brushed at the fabric as an afterthought but did not sit down. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

  “You went out of your jurisdiction and made a bunch of people mad in St. Martinville. I can live with that. But you’ve deliberately involved Clete Purcel in department business. That’s something I won’t put up with, my friend,” he said.

  “Clete gave me a lead I didn’t have.”

  “I got a call earlier from Joe Zeroski. You know what he said? ‘This is how you guys solve cases? Fire up the cannibals?’ I couldn’t think of an adequate reply. Why are you still following Tee Bobby Hulin around?”

  “I’m not convinced of his guilt.”

  “Who died and made you God, Dave? Tell Purcel he’s not welcome in Iberia Parish.”

  I focused my gaze on a neutral space, my face empty.

  “You AA guys have an expression, don’t you, something about not carrying another person’s load? How’s it go? You’ll break your own back without making the other person’s burden lighter?” the sheriff said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Why go to meetings if you don’t listen to what people say at them?” he said.

  “Clete thinks Jimmy Dean Styles might be a predator,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Go back to your office, Dave. One of us has a thinking disorder.”

  Later in the morning I passed the district attorney’s office and saw Barbara Shanahan inside, talking to the young salesman who had dragged a suitcase filled with Bibles and encyclopedias and what he termed “family-type magazines” into my bait shop. What was the name? Oates? That was it, Marvin Oates. He was sitting in a wood chair, bending forward attentively, his eyes crinkling at something Barbara was saying. I saw him again at noon when I was stopped by the traffic light at the four corners up on the Loreauville Road; this time he was pulling his suitcase on a roller skate up a street in a rural black slum by Bayou Teche. He tapped on the screen door of a clapboard shack that was propped up on cinder blocks. A meaty black woman in a purple dress opened the door for him, and he stepped inside and left his suitcase on the gallery. A moment later he opened the door again and took the suitcase inside with him. I parked in the convenience store at the four corners and bought a soft drink from the machine and drank it in the shade and waited for Marvin Oates to come out of the shack.

  Thirty minutes later he walked back out in the sunlight and fitted his bleached cowboy straw hat on his head and began pulling his suitcase down the street. I drove up behind him and rolled down the window. He wore a tie and a navy-blue sports coat in spite of the heat and breathed with the slow inhalation of someone in a steam room. But his face managed to fill with a grin before he even knew whose vehicle had drawn abreast of him.

  “Why, howdy do, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

  “I see you and Barbara Shanahan are pretty good friends,” I said.

  His grin remained on his face, as though incised in clay, his eyes full of speculative light. He removed his hat and fanned himself. His ash-blond hair was soggy with sweat and there were gray strands in his sideburns, and I realized he was older than he looked.

  “I don’t quite follow,” he said. For just a second his gaze lit on the shack he had just left.

  “I saw you in Barbara’s office this morning,” I replied.

  He nodded agreeably, as though a humorous mystery had just been solved. He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and twisted his head and looked down toward the end of the street, although nothing of particular interest was there.

  “It’s flat burning up, ain’t it?” he said.

  “In traveling through some of the other southern parishes, have you run across a man by the name of Legion? No first name, no last name, just Legion,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. “An old man? He worked in Angola at one time? Black folks walk around him. He lives behind the old sugar mill down by Baldwin. Know why I remember his name?” he said. His face lit as he spoke the last sentence.

  “No, why’s that?” I said.

  “’Cause when Jesus was fixing to heal this possessed man, he asked the demon his name first. The demon said his name was Legion. Jesus cast the demon into a herd of hogs and the hogs run into the sea and drowned.”

  “Thanks for your help, Marvin. Did you sell a Bible to the woman in that last house you were in?”

  “Not really.”

  “I imagine it’d be a hard sell. She hooks in a joint on Hopkins.”

  He looked guardedly up and down the road, his expression cautionary now, one white man to another. “The Mormons believe black people is descended from the lost tribe of Ham. You think that’s true?”

  “Got me. You want a ride?”

  “If you work in the fields of the Lord, you’re suppose to walk it, not just talk it.”

  His face was full of self-irony and boyish good cheer. Even the streaks of sweat on his shirt, like the stripes a flagellum would make on the chest of its victim, excited sympathy for his plight and the humble role he had chosen for himself. If his smile could be translated into words, it was perhaps the old adage that goodness is its own reward.

  I gave him the thumbs-up sign and made a mental note to run his name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., at the first opportunity.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next night Batist’s sister banged down the dirt road in a dilapidated pickup that sounded like a dying animal when she parked it by the bait shop and turned off the ignition. She sat down heavily at the counter and fished in her purse for a Kleenex and blew her nose, then stared at me as though it were I rather than she who was expected to explain her mission to my bait shop.

  “Ain’t nobody ever known the true story of what happened on Julian LaSalle’s plantation,” she said.

  I nodded and remained silent.

  “I had bad dreams about Legion since I was a girl. I been afraid that long,” she said.

  “Lots of us have bad memories from childhood. We shouldn’t think less of ourselves for it, Clemmie,” I said.

  “I always tole myself God would punish Legion. Send him to hell where he belong.”

  “Maybe that’ll happen.”

  “It ain’t enough,” she said.

  Then she told me of the events following the death by fire of Julian LaSalle’s wife.

  Ladice went back to work in the fields but was not molested by Legion. In fact, he didn’t bother any of the black girls or women and seemed preoccupied with other things. Vendors and servicepeople drove out to see him, rather than Julian LaSalle, with their deliveries or work orders for electrical or plumbing repairs on the plantation. Legion sometimes tethered his horse in the shade and went away with the vendors and servicepeople and did not return for hours, as though his duties in the fields had been reduced to a much lower level of priority and status. Mr. Julian stayed in a guest cottage by the freshwater bay and was rarely seen except when he might emerge at evening in a robe and stand in the gloom of the trees next to the water’s edge, unshaved, staring at the wooden bridge that led to the mainland and the community of small houses where most of his employees lived.

  Sometimes his employees, perhaps washing their cars in the yard or barbecuing over a pit fashioned from a washing machine, would wave to him in the waning light, but Mr. Julian would not acknowledge the gesture, which would cause his employees to round up their children and go inside rather than let the happiness of their world contrast so visibly with the sorrow of his.

  But to most of the black people on the plantation the die was cast three weeks after Mrs. LaSalle’s death by an event that to outsiders would seem of little importance.

  A bull alligator, one that was at least twelve feet long, had come out of the bay in the early dawn and caught a terrapin in its jaws. Down the bank, a black woman had left her diapered child momentarily unattended in the backyard. When the child began crying, the alligator lumbered out of the mist into the yard, rheumy-eyed, pieces of sinew and broken terrapin shell hanging from its teeth, its green-black hide slick with mud and strung incongruously with blooming water hyacinths.

  The mother bolted hysterically into the yard and scooped her child into her arms and ran all the way down the road to the plantation store, screaming Mr. Julian’s name.

  Mr. Julian knew every alligator nesting hole on or near the island, the sandbars where they fed on raccoons, the corners and cuts in the channels where they hung in the current waiting for nutria and muskrat to swim across their vision.

  Mr. Julian hunted rogue alligators in his canoe. He’d paddle quietly along the bank, then stand suddenly, his balance perfect, lift his deer rifle to his shoulder, and drill a solitary .30–06 round between the alligator’s eyes.

  Mr. Julian had his faults, but neglecting the safety of a child was not one of them.

  The woman who had run to the plantation store was told by the clerk to return home, that someone would take care of the gator that had strayed into her yard.

  “Mr. Julian gonna bring his gun down to my house?” she said.

  “Legion is handling things right now,” the clerk said.

  “Mr. Julian always say tell him when a gator come up in the yard. He say go right on up to the house and ban
g on the do’,” the woman said.

  The clerk removed a pencil from behind his ear and wet the point in his mouth and wrote something on a pad. Then he took a peppermint cane out of a glass case and gave it to the woman’s child.

  “I’m putting a note for Legion in his mailbox. You seen me do hit. Now you take your baby on home and don’t be bothering folks about this no more,” he said.

  But three days passed and no one hunted the rogue alligator.

  The same black woman returned to the store. “You promised Legion gonna get rid of that gator. Where Mr. Julian at?” she said.

  “Send your husband down here,” the clerk said.

  “Suh?” the woman said.

  “Send your man here. I want to know if y’all plan to keep working on Poinciana Island,” the clerk said.

  Two days later Legion and another white man showed up behind the black woman’s house and flung a cable and a barbed steel hook through the fork of a cypress tree on the water’s edge. They spiked one end of the cable into the cypress trunk and baited the hook with a plucked chicken carcass and a dead blackbird and threw the hook out into the lily pads.

  That night, under a full moon, the gator slipped through the reeds and the hyacinths and the layer of algae that floated in the shallows and struck the bait. Its tail threw water onto the bank for fifteen feet.

  In the morning the gator lay in the shallows, exhausted, hooked solidly through the top of the snout, through sinew and bone, so that its struggle was useless, no matter how often it wrenched against the cable or thrashed the water with its tail.

  Legion left the gator on the hook until dusk, when he and two other white men backed a truck up to the cypress tree and looped the free end of the cable through the truck’s bumper. Then they pulled the cable through the fork of the tree, grinding off the bark, hoisting the gator halfway out of the water, its pale yellow stomach spinning in the last red glow of sunlight in the west.

  Legion slipped on a pair of rubber boots and waded into the shallows and swung an ax into the gator’s head. But the angle was bad and the gator was only stunned. Legion swung again, whacking the blade into its neck, then he hit it again and again, like a man who knows the strength and courage and ferocity of his adversary is greater than his own and that his own efforts would be worthless on an equal playing field. Finally the gator’s stubby legs quivered stiffly and its tail knotted over and became motionless in the hyacinths below.