Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I put my whole weight into each blow, breaking his nose, splitting his mouth against his teeth, gashing open the skin above one eye. He managed to roll off the stool and right himself, even to get his guard up and catch me once, hard, in the chest, but I drove my fist into his rib cage, right under the heart, and saw his willpower leave him, his resistance drain from his face, like water bursting from the bottom of a balloon. I hooked him in the kidney, then in the stomach, doubling him over, forcing him to cling to the stool for support.

  But I couldn’t let go of it. I seized the back of his head and drove his face down on the knurled edge of the bar, smashing it into the wood, over and over, while behind me women screamed and a tall black man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows tried to get his arms around me and put himself between me and Jimmy Dean Styles.

  I pulled my .45 and barrel-stroked the man with orange and purple hair across the face, knocking him to the floor, then racked a round into the chamber and aimed the sight between his eyes, my hands streaked with Jimmy Sty’s blood, shaking on the grips.

  “I’ll get out of town. I promise. Don’t do it, man. Please,” the man on the floor said, turning his face to one side.

  A dark stain spread through his slacks.

  I was arrested before I could get out of the parking lot. Ten minutes later I was escorted in cuffs inside the St. Martin Parish Jail, my shirt split down the back, and pushed inside the drunk tank. My skin felt dead to the touch, my muscles without texture or tone, as though I had just come off a two-day whiskey drunk. The voices of the inmates around me seemed muffled, filtered through wet cotton, even though some of them appeared to know me and were speaking directly in my face. In my mind’s eye I saw a homeless man bent under a cross made of a rolled yellow tent stuffed with all his earthly belongings, and I knew that for all of us who had been there the war would never be over and the real enemy was not Jimmy Sty but a violent creature who rose with me in the morning and lived quietly inside my skin, waiting for the proper moment to vent his rage upon the world.

  CHAPTER 17

  When the Iberia sheriff arrived at the jail, I thought he would have me released. Instead, he had me moved out of the drunk tank to an empty holding cell, one with a drain hole and a urine-streaked, rusty grate in the center of a cement floor, graffiti and female breasts and male genitalia smoked on the ceiling with Bic lighters. I sat on a wooden bench, the sheriff in a chair on the other side of the bars, his eyes deep-set with his anger and disappointment. I felt light-headed and my hands were swollen and as thick as grapefruit when I tried to close them. “Were you trying to kill him?” the sheriff asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Everyone in the bar says there was no provocation. They say Styles was just sitting on a stool and you went apeshit and starting tearing him apart.”

  “He owns the bar. He owns most of the people in it. I’m a cop. What are they supposed to say?”

  “You’re being charged with felony assault.”

  “Thanks for passing on the news,” I said.

  “You just going to sit there and act like a wiseass?”

  “Styles is a human toilet. Someone should have ripped out his spokes a long time ago,” I said.

  He rose from his chair and put on his Stetson hat and stared down at me, the light from a high window breaking around his head.

  “You want me to call your wife, or can you handle that yourself?” he asked.

  “You know, there is something you could do for me. I’d really appreciate a pack of gum from the machine out in the hall. That would really be nice,” I replied.

  I sat for twenty minutes, listening to all the sounds that are common to any jailhouse environment: steel doors clanging, toilets flushing, trusties dragging wash buckets down the corridor, Mariel felons yelling at one another in Spanish, a blaring television set tuned to a stock car race, a three-hundred-pound biker, wrapped in chains and stink, his hair like a lion’s mane, deciding to make his captors earn their money when they tried to shove him inside a cell. I took off my ruined shirt and rolled it into a ball for a pillow and lay down on the wooden bench and placed my arm over my eyes. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor again and, vain fool that all drunks are, thought it was the sheriff, my friend, returning to set things straight.

  But the sheriff did not return, nor did anyone take me out of the holding cell or indicate when I might be arraigned.

  The unpleasantness of jailhouse life has less to do with confusion and the cacophony of noise that fills the inside of your head twenty-four hours a day than it does with your disconnection from the outside world and the fact that for you time stops when the cell door slams behind you.

  You make no decisions for yourself. You are strip-searched by a bored turnkey who fits on polyethylene gloves before he pries your buttocks apart, then fingerprinted, photographed, given a cleansing cream and a dirty rag to remove the ink from your hands, spoken to in a toneless voice by people who never address you as an individual or look into your face, as though eye contact would grant you a level of personal identity that you do not deserve.

  Then you sit. Or lie on the floor. Or try to find anyplace in a crowded cell away from the open toilet that eventually you will use in full view of everyone in the cell and anyone passing in the corridor. But most of the time you simply wait. No sexual encounters in the shower, no racial beefs with blacks or the Mariels from Castro’s prisons whose space is rented for them by the G, no meetings with Damon Runyon street characters or O. Henry safecrackers. Most of the miscreants are hapless and stupid. Out-of-control hardcases are sedated, forced to shower, powdered with disinfectant, and transferred to hospitals. The screws are usually duffers worried about their prostates.

  You wait in a vacuum, maybe in a large, colorless room, one more face among the faceless and uneducated and inept and self-pitying, convinced you are not like the others, that it is only bad luck that has put you here. After a while you wonder what it is you are waiting for, then realize you’re thinking about your next meal, a chance to use the toilet or to stand a few moments at a window that looks out upon a tree. One morning you ask somebody which day of the week it is.

  The life that used to be yours comes to you only in glimpses, perhaps through a letter, a visitor who sees you out of obligation, or financial notices of foreclosure and repossession. The noise, the ennui, the lack of uncomfortable comparisons inside the jail now become a means of forgetting the sense of loss that eats daily at your heart.

  If there was ever a viable benchmark to indicate a person’s life is unraveling around him, I know of none better than the day a person discovers himself inside the gray-bar hotel chain.

  I called Bootsie, but no one was at home. When Alafair’s recorded message ended and the machine beeped, I started to speak, then realized the inadequacy as well as harmful potential of the message I would have to leave. I replaced the receiver in the cradle and called Clete’s apartment, but there was no answer. A half hour went by and I asked the turnkey for another visit to the phone. “Maybe you won’t need it. You got a visitor,” he said. Then he shouted at the other cells, “Female on the gate!”

  “Female?” I said.

  Barbara Shanahan walked down the corridor in a pink suit and white blouse and heels, her perfume as strange and incongruous inside the jail as a flower inside a machine shop. She stood at the cell door, a tinge of pity in her eyes that made me look away.

  “Clete told the locals he saw the fight. He got them to go back to Styles’s club and search the area where Styles was sitting. They found a switchblade knife under a table,” she said.

  “Switchblade knife, you say?” I said.

  “Right.” Her gaze wandered over my face. “Clete says he saw Styles pull it on you. But the arrest report makes no mention of a knife. I wonder why that is.”

  “I’m a little unsure of what happened, actually.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near this, but I made a couple of calls. A bonds
man will be over here shortly. So will your lawyer.”

  “My lawyer? I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “You do now. He’s a prick, but he’s the best at what he does.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “You’re a good cop and don’t deserve this bullshit. Most people think you’re nuts. The sheriff has washed his hands of you. You’re totally self-destructive. I wish you’d killed Jimmy Dean Styles. Take your choice.”

  “Who’s the lawyer?”

  She winked at me. “Put a piece of ice on that eye, handsome,” she said.

  She walked back down the corridor, her scent lingering in the air, smiling slightly at the remarks made to her through the bars of the adjoining cells.

  Ten minutes later Perry LaSalle came down the corridor with the turnkey.

  “You know a song by Lazy Lester titled ‘Don’t Ever Write Your Name on the Jailhouse Wall’? Man, I love that song. By the way, Jimmy Dean Styles swallowed his bridge and had to have his stomach pumped. How’s it hangin’, Dave?” he said.

  Cops call it a “drop” or sometimes a “throw-down.” It can be a tear-gas pen, a toy pistol, or perhaps the real article, the serial numbers burned off with acid or on an emery wheel. Or it can be a switchblade knife.

  When a shooting goes bad and the suspect is on the ground with his dead hand open and a set of car keys falls from his palm rather than the pocket-size automatic you thought you saw, either you can tell the truth at an Internal Affairs inquiry and be hung out to dry on a meat hook, perhaps even do serious time in a mainline joint with the same people you put there, or you can untape the drop from your ankle, wipe it with a handkerchief, throw it on the corpse, and ask God to look in the other direction.

  “Barbara must like you a lot,” Perry said as we drove through a long tunnel of oaks toward New Iberia, the top of his Gazelle down, the air warm, the four-o’clocks blooming in the shade.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “She called me to get you out of the can. Normally she treats me like chewing gum on the bottom of a theater seat.” He turned his head, his cheeks ruddy, his brownish-black hair blowing on his brow. “Purcel saw the fight but didn’t try to stop it?”

  “Better ask Clete about that.”

  “He wouldn’t commit perjury for you, would he?”

  “Clete?” I replied.

  The next morning was Wednesday. I reported to work and walked down the corridor to my office as though nothing unusual had occurred the previous day. Wally the dispatcher gave me a thumbs-up and two uniformed deputies patted me on the shoulder as I passed. I didn’t do as well with the sheriff. “You’re confined to desk duties until we clear up this mess in St. Martinville,” he said, leaning in the door.

  I nodded.

  “Nothing to say?” he asked.

  “Friends back their friends’ play,” I said.

  “My department isn’t going to be the O.K. Corral, either,” he replied, and went back down the corridor, the heat rising in his face.

  At noon I drove to Perry LaSalle’s law office across from the Shadows, unaware I was about to have one of those experiences that teach you that your knowledge of human behavior will always be inadequate, that weakness and the capacity for self-abasement seem to reside in us all.

  Perry asked me to write out what had happened in Jimmy Dean Styles’s nightclub. While I wrote on a legal pad, he gazed down on the street, on the caladiums along his front walk, the live oaks under which Louisiana’s boys in butternut retreated up the Teche in 1863, the columned homes on whose upstairs verandas people still served tea and highballs in the afternoon, regardless of the season or the historical events that might shake the rest of the world.

  After I had finished a very short description of my attack on Jimmy Dean Styles, ending the account in the passive voice (“a switchblade knife was found under a nearby table by local officers”), I waited for Perry to detach himself from whatever he was watching down below.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Oh, yes, sorry, Dave,” he said, frowning as he read the legal pad.

  “I didn’t do a very good job?” I said.

  “No, no, it’s fine. There’s someone here to see me.”

  Before he had finished his sentence, Legion Guidry stood in the doorway. His khakis were freshly ironed, stiff with starch, his eyes hard to see under the brim of his straw hat. But I could smell the maleness of his odor, a hint of sweat, onions and hamburger, diesel fuel perhaps splashed on his boots, grains of cigarette tobacco that he picked off his tongue.

  “What he doin’ here?” he asked.

  “A little legal work. That’s what I do for a living,” Perry said, trying to ignore the insult.

  “This son of a bitch spit in my food,” Legion said.

  “Have a seat downstairs, Legion. I’ll be right with you,” Perry said.

  “What y’all doin’, you? What’s on that tablet there?”

  “It has nothing to do with you. I give you my word on that,” Perry said.

  “Gimme that,” Legion said.

  “Mr. Dave and I have private business to conduct here. Legion, don’t do that. This is my office. You need to respect that,” Perry said.

  “You got the man in your office called me a queer. He ain’t no ‘mister’ to me,” Legion said, his hand crimped on the legal pad, the paper creasing from the pressure of his thumb. “What this say?”

  “Dave, do you mind waiting downstairs?” Perry said, his face reddening with embarrassment.

  “I have to go back to the office. I’ll see you later,” I said.

  I walked out of the air-conditioning into the midday sounds of the city, the heat suddenly more oppressive, the gasoline fumes from the street more offensive. I heard Perry open the door behind me and come down the walk, trying to smile, to reclaim what dignity he could from the situation.

  “He’s old and uneducated. He’s frightened by what he doesn’t understand. It’s our fault. We denied these people opportunity and access at every turn. Now we have to pay for it,” he said.

  Wrong, Perry. Not we, I thought.

  That evening I sat by myself for a long time in the backyard. The sky was purple, full of birds, the sun a molten red inside a bank of rain clouds. I felt Bootsie’s hands on my shoulders. “Perry LaSalle called. He says the assault charge probably won’t hold up. Something about Clete seeing a knife,” she said.

  “Clete’s testimony is a little bit of an ethical problem,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “He wasn’t there. He went in later and threw a switchblade under a table.”

  I felt her hands leave my shoulders.

  “Dave, this seems to go from bad to worse,” she said.

  “Clete’s a loyal friend. The sheriff isn’t.”

  “He’s an elected official. What’s he supposed to do? Let you kick the shit out of anyone you don’t like?” she said.

  I got up from the picnic table and walked down the driveway to my truck. I heard her on the grass behind me, but I started the engine and backed onto the road, then shifted into first gear and drove away, her face slipping past the window like a pale balloon, her words lost in the wind.

  The 7 p.m. Wednesday night AA meeting was held in the living room of a small gray house owned by the Episcopalian church, arbored by live oaks, across from the massive stone outline of old Iberia High. The neighborhood, with its firehouse, its ubiquitous trees, its streets glistening from a sun shower, its lawns and small porches on which a boy on a bicycle sailed the afternoon newspaper, the flashing signals dinging at an empty rail crossing, was an excursion into the America that perhaps all of us are nostalgic for, a country secure between its oceans and content with its working-class ambitions, somehow in my mind forever identified with an era when a minor league baseball game or an evening radio show was considered a special pleasure. It was a Big Book meeting, one in which the participants read from the book that is the centerpiece of the fellowship known as Alc
oholics Anonymous. But my purpose in being there was to do what AA members call a Fifth Step, or, more specifically, to admit the exact nature of my wrongs.

  Most of the people there were from middle-class backgrounds and did not use profanity at meetings or discuss their sexual lives. By and large, they were the same people you would see at a PTA gathering. When it was my turn to speak, I realized that the world in which I lived and worked and looked upon as fairly normal was not one you shared with people whose worst legal sins might reach the level of a traffic ticket.

  I told them all of it. How I had stolen and eaten my wife’s diet pills for the amphetamine in them, then had kicked it up into high gear with white speed I had taken from an evidence locker. How I had bludgeoned Jimmy Dean Styles’s face with my fists, breaking his nose and lips, knocking his bridge down his throat, grabbing his head and smashing it repeatedly on the bar, my hands slick with his blood and the sweat out of his hair, while an insatiable white worm ate a hole in the soft tissue of my brain and I ground my teeth together with a need that no amount of sex or violence or dope would relieve me of, that nothing other than whiskey and whiskey and whiskey would ever satisfy.

  The room was silent when I finished. A well-dressed woman got up from her chair and went into the bathroom, and we could hear the water running in the lavatory while she kept clearing her throat behind the door.

  The discussion leader that evening was a genial, silver-haired, retired train conductor from Mississippi.

  “Well, you got it off your chest, Dave. At least you’re not aiming to kill anybody now,” he said, starting to smile. Then he looked at my face and dropped his eyes.