Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Legion and his two workmen skinned out the carcass and left the meat to rot and took the hide to a tanner in Morgan City.

  The next afternoon Ladice’s mother received a call from a white woman who ran a laundry in New Iberia. The white woman said one of her regular girls was sick and she needed Ladice’s mother to fill in. That evening. Not the next day. That evening or not at all.

  Just after dark Legion came to Ladice’s house. He didn’t knock; he simply opened the front door and walked into the front room. His khakis were starched and pressed, his jaws freshly shaved. The top of a thick silver watch, with a Lima construction fob on it, protruded from the watch pocket in his trousers. He removed a toothpick from his mouth.

  “You getting along all right?” he asked.

  She was cutting bread that she had just baked and her face was hot from the oven, her T-shirt damp with perspiration against her breasts.

  “My mother gonna be back soon, Legion.”

  “Your mother’s working at the laundry tonight. I give her name to Miz Delcambre. I thought y’all could use the money.” He cupped his hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t mess wit’ me,” she said.

  His hand left her person, but she could feel his breath on her skin, his loins an inch from one of her buttocks.

  “You gonna tell Mr. Julian on me?” he asked.

  “If you make me.”

  “I wonder what it was like for Mr. Julian’s wife to be locked in that burning room, grabbing that hot grillwork with her bare hands, trying to pull open the do’ he locked from the outside. Don’t nobody else know how that po’ woman died, no,” Legion said.

  Ladice drew the butcher knife through the loaf of bread. The knife was thick at the top, the color of an old five-cent piece, wood-handled, the cutting edge ground on an emery wheel. She felt the knife snick into the chopping board. Legion touched her cheek with the ball of his finger.

  “Mr. Julian sold me a quarter hoss for ten dollars. I liked that hoss so much, me, I went back and bought four more, same price,” he said.

  “What I care?” she said.

  “Them hoss worth a hunnerd-fifty apiece. Why you t’ink he give me such a good price?” Legion said.

  She concentrated on her work and tried to hide the expression on her face, but he could see the recognition grow in the corner of her eye. He stroked her hair and the callused edges of his fingers brushed lightly against her skin. Then he slipped his hand down her back and she felt his sex swelling against her. “You t’ink you worth more than them hoss, Ladice?” he asked.

  His words were like an obscene presence on her skin, as though Legion knew her in a way that no one else did, knew the truth about her real worth, as though all her self-deception and vanity and her attempt to manipulate Mr. Julian’s carnality for her own ends had made her deserving of anything Legion wished to do to her. He placed his hand loosely on her wrist, then removed the knife from her grasp and set it in a pan of greasy water and picked her up against his chest, locking his arms around her rib cage, squeezing until her head reared back in pain and her knees opened and clenched his hips and her hands fought to find purchase around his neck.

  “A colored man ever hold you that tight, Ladice?” he said.

  He carried her in that position through the curtained entrance to her bedroom.

  After he dropped her on top of the quilt, her eyes brimming with water, he sat on the side of the bed and formed a triangle over her with his arms and sternum and stared into her face. “I ain’t a bad man, no. I’m gonna treat you a whole lot better than that old man. You gonna see, you,” he said.

  Perhaps she tried to report Legion to Mr. Julian. No one ever knew. Mr. Julian received no visitors and was often unwashed and drunk. He forgot to feed his Labrador retriever and the animal had to beg food scraps from the back doors of Negro homes along the bay. To people on East Main, where most of his peers lived, he was an object of pity when they saw him escorted by his elderly black chauffeur into the doctor’s office for his medical appointments. On one occasion an old friend, a man who had been a recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Great War, persuaded Mr. Julian to join him at the Frederic Hotel for a meal. At the table Mr. Julian became very still and his face filled with shame. The elderly ex-soldier did not understand and wondered what he could have said to hurt his friend, then realized that Mr. Julian had soiled himself. But one fine morning Mr. Julian awoke before dawn, seemingly a new man, and worked in his flower garden and bathed in a great iron tub in the washhouse behind the cottage and watched the sun rise and the mullet fly on the bay. He packed a suitcase and whistled a song and dressed in a white linen suit and put on his Panama hat and had his driver take him to the train depot in New Iberia, where he caught the Sunset Limited for New Orleans. From the club car, a drink in his hand, he watched the familiar world he had grown up in, one of columned homes and oak-lined streets and gentle people, slip past the window.

  In New Orleans he checked into a luxury hotel on Canal and while unpacking he heard a woman weeping through the wall. When he knocked on her door, she told him her husband had left her and their ten-year-old daughter and she was sorry for her emotional behavior.

  He drank whiskey sours in the bar and danced with the cocktail waitress. That evening he dined at the Court of Two Sisters and strolled through the French Quarter and attended a religious service in a storefront church whose congregation was composed mostly of black people. In front of St. Louis Cemetery he talked about baseball with a beat cop and put a twenty-dollar bill in the begging can of a blind woman.

  A formal dance was being held at his hotel, and he stood in the entrance of the ballroom and watched the dancers and listened to the orchestra, his hat held loosely on his fingers, his face marked with a wistfulness that caused the hostess to invite him inside. Then he stopped for a cup of coffee in the bar and asked that a dozen roses and a dish of ice cream, with cinnamon sprinkled on it, be sent up to his room. When the tray was delivered on a cart, he instructed the waiter to leave it in the corridor.

  A few moments later Mr. Julian moved the cart in front of the door of the woman whose husband had abandoned her and their daughter. He tapped with the brass knocker on her door and went back inside his room and opened the French doors that gave onto the balcony and looked out at the pink glow of the sky over Lake Pontchartrain while the curtains puffed in the breeze around his head. Then Julian LaSalle mounted the rail on the balcony and like a giant white crane sailed out over the streetcars and the flow of traffic and the neon-lit palm trees along the neutral ground twelve stories below.

  CHAPTER 8

  In the morning I ran the name of Marvin Oates, the Bible salesman, through the NCIC computer. But the sheet I got back contained no surprises. Besides his arrest on a bad check charge, he had been picked up for nothing more serious than petty theft and failure to appear, panhandling in New Orleans, and causing a disturbance at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles.

  “You know a guy named Marvin Oates?” I asked Helen.

  She was gazing out my office window, her hands in her back pockets.

  “His mother was a drunk who used to drift in and out of town?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She was from Mississippi or Alabama. They used to live by the train tracks. What about him?”

  “He was trying to sell door-to-door out by my house. I didn’t like the way he looked at Alafair.”

  “Get used to it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your daughter’s beautiful. What do you expect?”

  She laughed to herself as she walked out the door.

  I waited five minutes, then went down the corridor to her office.

  “You ever hear of an overseer on Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?” I asked.

  “No. Who is he?” she replied.

  “This character Oates says ‘Legion’ is the name of a demon in the New Testament. Oates believes people of color are descended from the lost tribe
of Ham. Think Oates might be unusual in any way?”

  She brushed at her nose with a Kleenex and went back to reading an open file on her desk.

  “Take a ride with me down to Baldwin,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “I thought I might check out a guy from my boyhood.”

  We drove south on the four-lane, through sugarcane acreage that had been created out of the alluvial floodplain of Bayou Teche. The sky was sealed with clouds that had the bright sheen of silk or steam but offered no rain, and I could see cracks in the baked rows of the cane fields and dust devils spinning across the road and breaking apart on the asphalt. The air smelled like salt and the odor a streetcar gives off when it scotches across an electrical connection. Up ahead was the gray outline of an abandoned sugar mill. When we are injured emotionally or systematically humiliated or made to feel base about ourselves in our youth, we are seldom given the opportunity later to confront our persecutors on equal terms and to show them up for the cowards they are. So we often create a surrogate scenario in which the vices of our tormentors, the fears that fed their cruelty, the self-loathing that drove them to hurt the innocent, eventually consume them and make them worthy of pity and in effect drive them from our lives.

  But sometimes the dark fate that should have been theirs just does not shake properly out of the box.

  Helen pulled off the road and stopped at a small grocery store in front of a cluster of shacks. In the distance the rectangular tin outline of the sugar mill was silhouetted against the sky. On the side of the grocery was a crude porte cochere and under it sat a thin, black-haired man in a blood-smeared butcher’s apron, peeling potatoes and onions into a stainless-steel cauldron that was boiling on a grated butane burner that rested on the ground. Close by, a gunnysack crackling with live crawfish lay on top of a wood worktable.

  I opened my badge holder. “I was looking for a fellow by the name of Legion,” I said.

  “Legion Guidry?” the man said. He dropped the peeled onions and potatoes into the cauldron and dumped a bowl of artichokes and husked yellow corn on top of them.

  “I only know him by the name Legion,” I said.

  “He don’t come in here,” the man said.

  “Where’s he live?” I asked.

  The man shook his head and didn’t reply. He turned his back on me and began cutting open a box of seasoning.

  “Sir, I asked you a question,” I said.

  “He works at the casino. Go ax up there. He don’t come in here,” the man replied. He raised his finger for added emphasis.

  Helen and I drove to the casino on the Indian reservation, a garish obscenity of a building that had been constructed in what was once a rural Indian slum overgrown with persimmons and gum trees and swamp maples. Now the poor whites and blacks, the trusting and the naive, the working-class pensioners and the welfare recipients and those who signed their names with an X, crowded the gaming tables inside an air-conditioned, hermetically sealed, sunless environment, where cigarette smoke clung to the skin like damp cellophane. Collectively they managed to feed enormous sums of money into an apparatus that funneled most of it to Las Vegas and Chicago, all with the blessing of the State of Louisiana and the United States government.

  A St. Mary Parish deputy sheriff, directing traffic in the casino parking lot, told us where we could find the man named Legion. The man who had once lived in my childhood dreams was down the road, under a picnic shelter, eating a barbecue sandwich on top of a paper towel that he had spread neatly on the table to catch his crumbs. He wore a starched gray uniform, with dark blue flaps on the pockets, and a polished brass name tag on his shirt, with his title, Head of Security, under the engraved letters of his name. His hair was still black, with white streaks in it, his face creased vertically with furrows like those in dried fruit. A crude caricature of a naked woman was tattooed with blue ink on the underside of each of his forearms.

  I looked at him a long time without speaking.

  “Can I hep you wit’ somet’ing?” he said.

  “You were an overseer at Poinciana Island?” I asked.

  He folded the paper towel around his sandwich and pitched it toward the trash barrel. It struck the side of the barrel and fell apart on the ground.

  “Who want to know?” he asked.

  I opened my badge holder in my palm.

  “I used to be. A long time ago,” he said.

  “You rape a black woman by the name of Ladice Hulin?” I asked.

  He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it and exhaled the smoke across the tops of his cupped fingers. Then he removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it.

  “That bitch still spreadin’ them rumor, huh?” he said.

  “Let me run something else by you, Legion. That’s the name you go by, right? Legion? No first name, no last name?” I said.

  “I know you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you do. My brother and I walked up on you and some other white trash while y’all were copulating in an automobile. You opened a knife on me. I was twelve years old.”

  His eyes shifted on mine and stayed there. “You’re a goddamn liar,” he said.

  “I see,” I said. I looked at my feet and thought about the mindless animus in his stare, the arrogance and stupidity and insult in his words, the ignorance that he and his kind used like a weapon against their adversaries. I heard Helen shift her weight on the gravel. “What I wanted to run by you, Legion, is the fact there’s no statute of limitations on a homicide. Nor on complicity in a homicide. You getting my drift on this?”

  “No.”

  “Julian LaSalle’s wife was locked in her room the night she burned to death. That’s called negligent homicide. You removed the key from the deadbolt and inserted it on the inside of the door in order to protect Mr. Julian. Then you blackmailed him.”

  He stood up from the picnic table and put his pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.

  “You t’ink I care what some nigger done tole you?” He cleared his throat and spat a glob of phlegm two inches from my shoe. A trace of splatter, like strands of cobweb, clung to the cuff of my trouser leg.

  “How old are you, sir?” I asked.

  “Seventy-four.”

  “I’m going to stick it to you. For all the black women you molested and raped, for all the defenseless people you humiliated and degraded. That’s a promise, partner.”

  He lifted his chin and rubbed the whiskers on his throat, the cast in his green eyes as ancient and devoid of moral light as those in a prehistoric, scale-covered creature breaking from the egg.

  A week passed. Clete Purcel went back to New Orleans, then returned to New Iberia to hunt down more of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine’s bail skips. On Monday Clete and I went to Victor’s, a cafeteria located on Main Street in a refurbished nineteenth-century building with a high, stamped ceiling, where cops and businesspeople and attorneys often ate lunch. “Check out the pair by the cashier,” Clete said.

  I turned around and saw Zerelda Calucci and Perry LaSalle at a small table, their heads bent toward each other, a solitary rose in a small vase between them.

  But Clete and I were not the only ones who had taken notice of them. Barbara Shanahan was eating at another table, her muted anger growing in her face.

  When Clete and I walked outside, Zerelda and Perry were across the street in the parking lot. Perry opened the passenger door of his Gazelle for Zerelda to get inside. Barbara Shanahan stood on the sidewalk in a white suit, staring at them, her eyes smoldering.

  “What’s the deal with Zerelda Calucci and Perry?” I asked.

  “Ask him, ” she replied.

  “I’m asking you.”

  “She was always one of his on-again, off-again groupies. Perry likes to think of himself as the great benefactor of the underclass. It’s part of his mystical persona.”

  “She’s Joe Zeroski’s niece. Zeroski thinks Tee Bobby Hulin killed both the Bou
dreau girl and his daughter. Why’s Zerelda hanging with Tee Bobby’s defense attorney?”

  “Duh, I don’t know, Dave. Why don’t you research the LaSalle family-history? Are you sure you’re in the right line of work?” Barbara said.

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

  “God, you’re stupid,” she replied.

  She crossed the street and walked down to the bayou, where she lived by herself in a waterfront apartment surrounded by banana trees.

  “That broad gives me a boner just watching her walk,” Clete said.

  “Clete, will you—” I began.

  “How long ago was she LaSalle’s punch?” he said.

  “Why do you always have to ask questions that offer a presumption as a truth? Why don’t you show a little humility about other people once in a while?”

  “Right,” he said, sticking a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his face thoughtful. “You think she might dig an older guy?”

  That afternoon I was visited by the parents of Amanda Boudreau. They sat side by side in front of my desk, their faces impassive, their eyes never lingering on any particular object, as though they were sitting in a vacuum and addressing voices and concerns that were alien to all their prior experience. They wore their best clothes, probably purchased at a discount store in Lafayette, but they looked like people who might have recently drowned and not become aware of their fate. “We don’t know what’s going on,” the father said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said.

  “A woman came to our house yesterday. She told us she was a detective,” he said.

  “Her name was Calucci. Zerelda Calucci,” the mother said.