Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I backed out of the bedroom, the .45 still pointed at Legion, then hurried through the kitchen and out into the night.

  I started the truck and roared away toward a streetlight burning inside a vortex of rain, my hand shaking violently on the gearshift knob.

  The next morning I ate breakfast at the kitchen table with Bootsie. Outside, the sky was a washed-out blue, the trees a deep green from last night’s rain. Through the side window I saw Alafair lead her Appaloosa, whose name was Tex, out of the horse lot and begin brushing him down under a pecan tree. “You get enough sleep?” Bootsie said.

  “Sure.”

  “Where’d you go last night, Dave?” she asked, her eyes not quite meeting mine.

  “I broke into Legion Guidry’s house. I held a gun to the side of his face,” I said.

  There was a long silence. She set her spoon down on the plate under her cereal bowl and touched her coffee cup but did not pick it up.

  “Why?” she said.

  “I haven’t been working the program. I’ve been fueling my resentment against this guy and thinking of ways to drill one through his brisket. The consequence is, I want to drink or use. So I thought I’d do a Ninth Step with him, make amends, and let go of my anger.”

  “You don’t make amends with rabid animals.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Not much.”

  “Look at me,” she said.

  “I threw his piece in the toilet and left. Did Alafair hear something from Reed College yesterday? I thought I saw an envelope on the couch.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “The guy’s got another voice. One with no accent. Like words floating up from a basement. He’s got somebody else living inside him. What’s it called, dissociative behavior or personality disorder or something like that?”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Nothing happened, Boots. It’s a new day. Evil always consumes itself. People like us live in the sunshine, right?”

  “God, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. It’s like talking to a cryptologist.”

  “I’m coming home for lunch. See you then,” I said, and went out the door before she could say anything else.

  I started the truck, then looked through the windshield at Alafair grooming her horse under the pecan tree. We had not spoken since she had taken me to task the previous afternoon, either out of mutual embarrassment or the fact that, as far as she knew, I had done nothing to rectify the problems I had caused in my home. I turned off the ignition and walked across the yard, through the dappled shade and the unraked leaves that had pooled in rain puddles and dried in serpentine lines. I know she saw me, but she pretended she did not. She smoothed down a quilted pad on Tex’s back, then started to lift his saddle off the fence rail.

  “I’ve got it,” I said, and swung the saddle into place on Tex’s back and lifted the hand-carved wood stirrup from the pommel and straightened it on his right side.

  “You look nice,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “Where’d you go last night?” she asked.

  “To set some things straight.”

  She nodded.

  “Why do you ask?” I said.

  “I thought maybe you’d gone to a bar. I thought maybe I’d caused you to do that,” she replied.

  “You would never do that, Alf. It’s not in your nature.”

  She rested her arm across Tex’s withers and looked down the slope at the bait shop.

  “I think going away to school isn’t a good idea,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t afford it,” she replied.

  “Sure we can,” I lied.

  She inserted a booted foot in the left stirrup and swung up in the saddle. She looked down at me, then tousled my hair with her fingers.

  “You’re a cute guy for a dad,” she said.

  I popped Tex on the flank so that he spooked sideways. But Alafair, as always, was not to be outdone by the manipulations of others. She kicked her heels into Tex’s ribs and bolted through the yard, ducking under branches, thundering across the wooden bridge over our coulee and out into our neighbor’s sugarcane field, her Indian-black hair flying in the wind, her jeans and cactus-embroidered shirt stitched to her hard, young body.

  I told myself I would not allow Legion Guidry and the evil he represented to hold any more claim on my life. In the damp, sun-spangled enclosure among the trees, I was convinced no force on earth could cause me to break my resolution.

  Later, at the office, Wally walked down the corridor from the dispatcher’s cage and opened my door and leaned inside. “That soldier, the nutjob, the one who claimed he knew you in Vietnam?” he said.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “He’s hanging around New Iberia High. They’ve got summer-school classes in session now. One of the teachers called and says they want him out of there.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “She said he’s got all his junk piled up on the sidewalk and he tries to make conversation with the kids when they walk by.”

  “I think he’s harmless,” I said.

  “Could be,” Wally replied. His hair was a coppery-reddish color, his sideburns neatly defined. His eyes were bright with an unspoken statement.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You check your mail this morning?”

  “No.”

  “If you had, you might have seen a note I put in there late yesterday. We got a complaint he was bothering a couple of hookers over on Railroad. On the same corner where Linda Zeroski used to work.”

  “Thanks, Wally,” I said.

  “Any time. Wish I could be a detective. You guys got all the smarts and stay on top of everything while us grunts clean the toilets. You think I could sharpen up my smarts if I went to night school?” he said.

  I checked out a cruiser and drove to the high school. I saw the ex-soldier sitting in a shady spot on his rolled-up tent, his back propped against a fence, watching the traffic roar by. His face was clean-shaved, his hair washed and cut, and he wore a pair of new jeans and an oversize T-shirt emblazoned front and back with an American flag.

  I pulled the cruiser to the curb.

  “How about coffee and a doughnut, Doc?” I said.

  He squinted up at a palm tree, then watched a helicopter thropping across the sky.

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  We packed his duffel bag, his rolled-up tent, and a plastic clothes basket filled with cook gear, magazines, and canned goods into the backseat of the cruiser, then drove to the center of town and crossed the train tracks to a doughnut shop.

  “Wait here. I’ll get it to go,” I said.

  “You don’t want to go inside?” he asked, his face vaguely hurt.

  “It’s a nice day. Let’s eat it in the park,” I replied.

  I went inside the store and bought pastry and two paper cups of hot coffee, then drove across the drawbridge into City Park and stopped by one of the tin-roofed picnic shelters next to Bayou Teche.

  He sat at the plank table, his coffee and a doughnut on a napkin in front of him, gazing through the live oaks at the children swimming in the public pool.

  “You ever been in trouble?” I asked.

  “I been in jail.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “For whatever they wanted to make up.”

  “You’re looking copacetic, Doc.”

  “I went to the Catholic men’s shelter in Lafayette. They give me new clothes and a haircut. They’re nice people.”

  “What were you doing over on Railroad Avenue yesterday?”

  His face colored. He bit a large piece out of his doughnut and drank from his coffee and fixed his attention on the gardens in the backyard of the Shadows, across the bayou.

  “You don’t have a girlfriend on Railroad, do you?” I said, and smiled at him.


  “The woman didn’t have no cigarettes. So I went in the store and bought some for her.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “She took the cigarettes, then I asked her why she didn’t change her life.”

  I kept my eyes averted, my expression flat. “I see. What happened then?” I said.

  “She and the other broad laughed at me. They laughed for a long time, real loud.”

  “The report says you threw a rock at them.”

  “I kicked a rock. It hit their pimp’s car. Take me back where you found me. Or put me in that shit bucket you call a jail. You want a lesson, Loot? Everybody does time. It just depends on where you do it. I do my fucking time wherever I am.” He pointed a stiffened index finger into the side of his head. “I got stuff in here worse than anything you motherfuckers could ever do to me.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  In seconds his face had gone from pity to rage. Then, just as quickly, he seemed to disconnect from his own rhetoric and fix his attention on a butterfly that had just come to rest on a camellia leaf, its pink and gray wings gathered together, its purchase on the leaf tenuous and unsteady.

  When the breeze came up, the butterfly fell to the ground, among red ants that had nested below the camellia bush. The ex-soldier, who in my encounters with him had given me three different Italian names, got down on all fours and lifted the butterfly up on a twig and walked it down to the bayou, protecting it from the wind with his cupped hand. He stooped and set it inside a hollow cypress on a mound of moss.

  I cleaned up our trash and wedged three fingers inside his paper cup and placed it inside the cardboard box containing the rest of our doughnuts. After I dropped him off on Main, I drove out to the crime lab by the airport and asked one of our forensic chemists to lift the latents on the cup and run them through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

  “We got any kind of priority?” he said.

  “Tell them it’s part of a homicide investigation,” I replied.

  That afternoon Clete Purcel picked up Barbara Shanahan after work, and the two of them drove to a western store, located on the south end of town among strip malls and huge discount outlets whose parking lots were blown with trash. Clete sat in his convertible and listened to the radio while Barbara went inside and bought a western shirt and a silverbelt buckle as a birthday gift for her uncle. While the clerk processed her credit card, she felt a sense of uneasiness that she could not explain, a tiny twitch in her back, a puff of fouled air on her neck, although the front door of the store was closed and no one stood behind her. Then she smelled cigarette smoke, even though the store was supposedly a smoke-free environment. She turned and looked down an aisle lined with racks of cowboy boots and hand-tooled leather purses and saw a tall, sinewy man, with vertical furrows in his face, wearing a snap-button, long-sleeved maroon shirt, a Panama hat at a jaunty angle, starched khaki trousers, and a chrome belt buckle with a rearing brass horse on it.

  The man was smoking a nonfiltered cigarette with two fingers that were yellow with nicotine. His eyes moved over her face, her breasts and stomach, her hips and thighs. Inside the shadow of his hat brim, a smile wrinkled at the corner of his mouth.

  For some reason her credit card did not clear. The clerk started to excuse himself.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “The line’s down. I don’t know what’s wrong. I have to use a separate line,” he replied.

  “I can pay cash,” she said.

  “That’s all right, ma’am. I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked away.

  She looked straight ahead, examining a row of antique firearms on the wall. Then she smelled an odor behind her, like sweat and unrinsed soap detergent ironed into someone’s clothes. No, that wasn’t it. It was far worse, raw and dead smelling, like a rat buried inside a wall.

  She turned and stared into Legion Guidry’s face, only inches from her own. He took a puff off his cigarette and averted his face and blew his smoke at an upward angle.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” she said.

  “I seen you. Both you and him,” he said. He nodded toward the parking lot, where Clete sat in his car, reading a magazine.

  “You saw me? What are you talking about?” she said.

  “What you t’ink? T’rew your window. You must be hard up, you. To let some shithog like that one out yonder put his dick in you.”

  She tried to step back from his words, from the smell that seemed auraed on his body. She felt the edge of the glass counter knock into her back.

  He laughed under his breath and spit a grain of tobacco off his tongue and started to walk away. Her hand went into her purse.

  “Wait,” she said.

  He dropped his cigarette to the wood floor and twisted his shoe on it, then turned.

  “What you want, bitch?” he said.

  Her hand closed around her car and house and office keys. They were mounted on a ring, and the ring was mounted on a stainless-steel handle. She pulled the keys out of her purse and swung them, like a sock filled with scrap iron, across his face.

  “You ever look through my window again, you pathetic fuck, I’ll blow your goddamn liver out,” she said.

  A narrow welt, needle-pointed with blood, appeared just below his eye. He touched it with the balls of his fingers, then rubbed them against his thumb. He reached out and clenched her hand in his, squeezing, cupping the bones behind the knuckles into a circle of pain, blowing his breath into her face, touching her hair with it, tracing her eyes and mouth with it, causing her to push her free hand against his chest like a child.

  “I know where that shithog live. Y’all gonna be seeing a lot more of me. You gonna like it, you,” he said.

  Then he walked toward the rear of the store, past customers who stepped back from him, stunned and open-mouthed. He pushed through the back door, and the interior of the store was filled with a hot light like the sun leaping off a heliograph. Then Legion Guidry was gone.

  Clete opened the front door and walked into the air-conditioning, his face puzzled.

  “Anything wrong? What’s that smell?” he said.

  That evening, just at sunset, I ran four miles on the dirt road that wound past my house. The moss was blowing in the trees along the road, and I could smell water sprinklers twirling on my neighbors’ lawns and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou. The sugarcane and cattle acreage and distant clumps of pecan trees behind the houses had already fallen into shadow, but the summer light still filled the sky, as though somehow it had a life of its own and was not affected by the setting of the sun. Then a huge flock of birds rose out of the swamp and freckled the perfection of the sky directly overhead, and for some reason I thought of a painting by Van Gogh, a cornfield suddenly invaded by black crows. A gas-guzzler passed me, with two figures in the front seat, then stopped at a bend in the road, the muffler rattling against the frame. The driver cut the engine and got out and stood with one arm propped across the top of the door, waiting. He wore a pink shirt unbuttoned on his chest and black trousers, stitched with silver thread, that hung down below his navel. His throat and chest ran with sweat.

  I slowed and wiped my face with a bandanna, then tied it around my forehead. “Just taking a drive?” I said.

  “I’ll go into that treatment program you was talking about,” Tee Bobby said.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I cain’t take it no more.”

  I leaned down slightly, below the top of the car door. “How you doin’, Rosebud?” I asked.

  His sister smiled lazily, in a private and self-indulgent way, then her eyes closed and opened vacantly and looked at nothing.

  “Your trial is in a couple of weeks,” I said to Tee Bobby.

  “If I’m in a treatment program, I can get it postponed. See, a guy got to be able to hep with his own defense.”

  “Talk to Mr. Perry. You can’t scam the court.”

  “Ain’t no scam. I�
��m sick. Perry LaSalle ain’t worried about me. He worried about his family, his pink ass, his Confederate flags and portraits he got all over the walls.”

  “Know what’s bothered me from the jump on this deal, Tee Bobby? It’s the fact you’ve got everything else in the world on your mind except the death of that girl. Yourself, your habit, your music, your troubles with Jimmy Sty and Perry LaSalle, a kind of general discontent with the entire universe. But that poor girl’s murder never seems to enter your thought processes.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said.

  “Amanda Boudreau. That was her name. Amanda Boudreau. It’s never going to go away. Amanda Boudreau. You knew her. She was your friend. You saw her die. Don’t tell me you didn’t, Tee Bobby. Say her name and look me in the eye and tell me you’re not responsible in any way for her death. Say her name, Tee Bobby. Amanda Boudreau.”

  Rosebud twisted against her seat strap and began to keen and slap the seat and the dashboard, her face round with fear, the corners of her mouth flecked with slobber.

  “See what you done? I hate you, you white motherfucker. I hate Perry LaSalle and I hate every drop of white blood I got in my veins. I hate y’all in ways y’all cain’t even think about,” Tee Bobby said, and smashed his fists into the window glass of the back door, again and again, the glass flying into the interior, his knuckles flaying against the broken edges.

  I stared at him stupidly, only now realizing some of the complexities that drove Tee Bobby’s soul.

  “Perry should plead you out, but he’s not. He’s feeding you to the lions, isn’t he? Perry’s connected in some way to Amanda’s death,” I said.

  But Tee Bobby had gotten behind the wheel of his car again and started the engine, the backs of his hands slick with blood. He floored his car down the road while his sister screamed insanely out the window.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next morning was Friday. I awoke early, rested, my mind free of dreams and nocturnal worries, the trees outside filled with birdsong. Wednesday night I had broken into the home of Legion Guidry and had probably experienced the most bizarre behavior I had ever witnessed in a human being, namely, the revelation of what I believed to be an enormous evil presence living inside a man who looked little different than the rest of us. But nonetheless, because I had been able to tell him I would pursue no personal vendetta against him, I felt freed of Legion Guidry and the violation he had committed against my person. The white worm was gone. I didn’t feel the need to drink and use.