Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I dried my hands and face with a paper towel and went back to the interview room. Tee Bobby was drinking coffee from a paper cup, the soles of his shoes tapping nervously on the floor.

  “You going to make it?” I asked.

  “Make it? What you mean ‘make it’?”

  I pulled up a chair across from him. “Remember back there in the cruiser, you told me you didn’t ‘shoot’ anyone?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  “You used the word ‘shoot,’” I said.

  “Yeah, I said I ain’t shot nobody. Is that hard to understand?”

  “You didn’t say you didn’t ‘kill’ anybody.”

  “This is bullshit, man. I want to go back home,” he said.

  “Why do you avoid using the word ‘kill,’ Tee Bobby?” I asked.

  “I ain’t playing no word games wit’ you.” His eyes fluttered toward the ceiling, where he examined an air duct as though it were of great complexity.

  “You want another candy bar?” I said.

  “I want to go. I ain’t sure this is a good idea no more.”

  There was a tap on the door. I opened it and Mack Bertrand handed me a cassette recorder. He was wearing a raincoat and a hat, and his ascetic face looked hard-edged and dark under the brim of his hat. He walked away without speaking.

  “Who’s that?” Tee Bobby asked.

  “There’s been a development here, Tee Bobby. I think it’s only fair you know everything that’s going on. Walk around the corner with me,” I said, getting up from the chair.

  “What’s he doin’, Miss Helen?” Tee Bobby asked.

  “Time you knew your enemy, Tee Bobby,” she replied.

  “My enemy?” he said.

  I opened the door and slipped my hand under his arm. The muscles in his arm were flaccid, without tone, like soft rubber.

  “Where we goin’?” he asked.

  We walked to the glass window that gave onto the interior of Kevin Dartez’s office. Tee Bobby’s eyes bulged in his head when he saw Jimmy Dean Styles sitting in front of Dartez’s desk, rolling his shoulders, rotating a crick out of his neck, the profile and down-hooked nose like a sheep’s.

  “Why’s he here?” Tee Bobby said.

  “Jimmy Dean just made a statement. You know how he operates, Tee Bobby. Jimmy Dean’s not about to take somebody else’s bounce,” I said.

  “Statement ’bout what?”

  “The shit’s in the fire, partner. You want to go down for this guy?”

  “You saying he—” Tee Bobby stopped and squeezed his mouth with his hand as though he were about to be sick.

  “Let’s go back to the interview room,” I said, draping my arm over his shoulders. “Listen to this tape I have, then tell us what you want to do. You can be in the driver’s seat on this.”

  Tee Bobby was breathing hard now, the pulse jumping in his neck.

  “What he tole you, man?” he said, looking backward over his shoulder at Dartez’s office. “What that son of a bitch tole you?”

  I closed the door to the interview room behind us and pulled out a chair for Tee Bobby. I placed my hand on his shoulder. His shirt was damp, his collarbone as hard as a broomstick.

  “Calm down, kid. Eat another candy bar,” Helen said. “It’s not as bad as you think. You’ve got choices. Everybody knows Jimmy Sty is a liar and a pimp. Just don’t take his weight.”

  I pressed the Play button on the recorder. The voice of Jimmy Dean Styles seemed to leap from the speaker: “Tee Bobby’s a hype and a ragnose. He got a thing for white cooze, too.”

  “You committed no form of assault or what could be interpreted as such?” the voice of Kevin Dartez said.

  “Man, I tole you, he’s a sick, violent motherfucker. He done it, just like some crazy person been wanting to hurt somebody a long time. Hey, you ax me if I’m bothered about that cunt? Anything happen to her, she deserve,” Styles’s voice said.

  I snapped off the recorder. The sound of Tee Bobby’s breathing filled the silence. Sweat had popped on his forehead. His tongue looked like a gray biscuit in his mouth.

  “Is what he says correct?” I asked.

  “I cain’t believe it. Jimmy Dean put it on me? Man, that lying— How I got in this? If they just hadn’t been there. If they had been anyplace else. If we’d gone to drink beer at the drive-in instead of by the coulee. I cain’t believe this is happening, man.” He squeezed his hands in his lap and rocked in the chair.

  “You heard what Miss Helen said, Tee Bobby. Don’t take Jimmy Dean’s weight. Time to lay down your burden, partner,” I said.

  “You got that right. I’m gonna cook his hash, man. You want to know how it went down? Push on your recorder. Get that videotape machine going. Jimmy Dean call it cooling out a white broad. That’s the kind of dude he is, all ’cause they was making too much noise.”

  “Yeah, too much noise. That can be a real problem,” Helen said, a look of unrelieved sadness in her eyes.

  There are stories no one wants to hear. This was one of them.

  CHAPTER 27

  Tee Bobby had loaded Rosebud in the car and roared across the bridge that separated Poinciana Island from the rest of Iberia Parish, his anger burning in his chest, the words of Perry LaSalle like a dirty presence in his ears. “Let’s see if I understand this correctly, Tee Bobby. You want money to go to California? To make a record?” Perry had said. He had been stripped to the waist, combing his hair in a mirror by his wet bar, his gaze wandering through the sliding doors to the bass pond, where a woman in shorts and a halter was fly-casting on the water’s surface.

  “Yes, suh. I got a shot with a recording company in West Hollywood. But I got to have money to go out there, stay at a hotel for a week, maybe, buy meals, front a few dol’ars wit’ this agent setting up the gig,” Tee Bobby said.

  “You sure this agent isn’t throwing you a slider?” Perry said, his eyes watching the woman in the mirror.

  “No, suh. It’s just the way they do things out there.” “It sounds interesting, Tee Bobby, but if you’re looking for a loan, my income is a little down right now. Maybe another time.”

  “Suh?”

  “I’m short of cash, podna,” Perry said, and grinned at him in the mirror.

  “I ain’t never made no claim on the estate,” Tee Bobby said.

  “You haven’t what?”

  “Never claimed no kind of inheritance. Neither my mother or my gran’mama, either. We ain’t never axed money from your family.”

  “You think you’re owed something by my family, do you?”

  “Everybody know old man Julian was sleeping wit’ my gran’mama.”

  “Ah, I get your drift now. We both share the same grandfather? Is that correct?” Perry said.

  Tee Bobby shrugged and looked at the woman by the pond. She was lovely to watch, her skin unblemished by the sun or physical work, her body firm and graceful as she whipped the popping-bug over her head.

  “You shouldn’t refer to my grandfather as ‘old man Julian,’ Tee Bobby. That said, the child your grandmother had out of wedlock was not his. Mr. Julian had been dead over a year when Miss Ladice’s baby was born. There was an overseer here named Legion Guidry. He did things he shouldn’t have. But that was the nature of the times.”

  “The man people call ‘Legion’ is my grandfather?”

  “Better talk to Miss Ladice,” Perry said, slipping his comb into his back pocket and drawing the sleeve of a silk shirt up his arm.

  Then Perry, with a grin on his face, still tucking his shirt in his slacks, opened the sliding doors and walked down to the bass pond to join his companion.

  In the neon-lit darkness of the Boom Boom Room, Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean smoked some high-octane Afghan skunk and snorted up a half-dozen lines of Colombian pink from Jimmy’s private stock, so pure and unstepped on it roared up Tee Bobby’s nostril with the white brilliance of a train engine inside a tunnel. “Tell me that ain’t righteous, my man. It put
the snap in yo’ whip, don’t it? Forget that cracker on Poinciana Island. I’ll introduce you to a lady down the road make you fall in love,” Jimmy Dean said.

  “I got Rosebud out front. Can you give me the money to go to California, Jimmy Dean?”

  “If we talking about recording contracts, I got to have my lawyer draw up some papers, make sure you protected. Let’s take a ride, drink some beer, make a house call on a couple of bidness associates later. It gonna be all right, man. The Sty got yo’ ass covered, bro. Hey, go a li’l easy on my stuff. You slam a gram and you fry yo’ Spam. You heard it first from Jimmy Style. Come on in back wit’ me a minute.”

  Tee Bobby followed Jimmy Dean into the back room of the bar, where Jimmy Dean knelt down in front of a cabinet with a burlap bag spread by his foot.

  “What you doing wit’ that shotgun and them watch caps?” Tee Bobby asked.

  “Sometimes you got to put a li’l scare into people. A couple of my artists think they gonna dump me for some Los Angeles niggers got more gold chains than brains. It ain’t gonna happen.”

  “I ain’t up for no guns,” Tee Bobby said.

  Jimmy Dean rested on one haunch, the barrel of a cut-down, pistolgrip pump shotgun propped at an angle on his shoulder, a box of twelve-gauge double-ought buckshot by his foot.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna get hurt, Tee Bobby. It’s all show. But you want me to back your play, you got to back mine. Tell me what you want to do. Tell me now,” he said, his eyes burrowing into Tee Bobby’s face.

  A few minutes later they drove across the bridge over the Teche and stopped at a convenience store that sold gas. They bought a twelve-pack of beer and a bucket of microwave fried chicken and a soda for Rosebud, who sat belted in the backseat, staring at the pecan orchards, the dust blowing out of the cane acreage, the carrion birds circling in a hot, brassy sky that gave no promise of rain, a truck filled with oil-field workers at the gas pumps.

  “You gonna take Rosebud to California?” Jimmy Dean asked, glancing at the oil-field workers. He had tied a black silk scarf on his head, and the tails of the scarf hung from the knot down the back of his neck.

  “Yeah,” Tee Bobby replied.

  “You doin’ the right thing, man. I mean, getting out of here.”

  But while he spoke Jimmy Dean continued to stare at the oil-field workers, who were now lounging by the gas pumps, throwing a child’s football to each other. They were all grease-stained, sweaty, tobacco-chewing white men, with crewcuts and hillbilly sideburns and faces that were red with sunburn. Their truck bore a Mississippi license plate. Jimmy Dean’s eyes were close-set, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw. He sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist, then bit down on a matchstick. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Something wrong?” Tee Bobby asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What?” Tee Bobby asked.

  “There ain’t no open season on crackers.”

  They drove on up the state highway toward St. Martinville, chugging beers, throwing chicken bones out the window. The new cane in the fields was dry and pale green, the air crackling with electricity. The wind began gusting, buffeting the car, kicking dust out of the fields.

  “I got to take a leak. Pull down by that coulee,” Jimmy Dean said.

  Tee Bobby turned off the highway onto a dirt road that led past a black man’s house. He stopped by a clump of bushes downstream from a wooden bridge and a grove of gum trees, and Jimmy Dean got out and urinated into the coulee. The coulee was almost dry, the mud at the bottom spiderwebbed with cracks, and the odor of a dead armadillo rose into Jimmy Dean’s face, causing him to wrinkle his nose and grimace while he shook off his penis. A four-wheeler roared across the field behind them, a teenage boy at the handlebars, a girl with long black hair clinging to his waist.

  Jimmy Dean got back in the front seat and began rolling a joint. The four-wheeler turned in circles, the driver gunning the engine, scouring a cloud of dust in the air that drifted back through the car’s windows. Jimmy Dean opened his mouth and flexed his jaws to pop the noise out of his ears.

  “There’s a white boy need a slap upside the head. Here, blow the horn,” he said, and reached across the seat to press down on the horn button.

  “That’s Amanda Boudreau. Let it go, Jimmy,” Tee Bobby said.

  “That high school girl you been scoping out?”

  “Not no more. She say I’m too old.”

  “Too old? What she mean is too black. You let her talk shit like that and get away wit’ it?”

  Tee Bobby didn’t answer. The noise of the four-wheeler was like a chainsaw cutting through a chunk of angle iron. Amanda’s arms were wrapped tightly around the boy’s stomach, the side of her face pressed into his back.

  Jimmy Dean slapped his hand on the horn and held it down for almost ten seconds. When the driver of the four-wheeler turned around, Jimmy Dean shot him the finger over the top of the car.

  The driver shot him the finger back, then rumbled across the wooden bridge into another cane field.

  “You see what that motherfucker just did?” Jimmy Dean said.

  Tee Bobby looked straight ahead, uncertain as to what he should say, grit blowing in his eyes, the humidity like steam on his skin.

  “Let me ax you, Tee Bobby, how much shit you willing to take in one day?” Jimmy Dean said. “Perry LaSalle do everything except put his dick in your mouth and a li’l white pissant give us the bone in front of the girl who tole you she ain’t getting it on wit’ no raggedy-ass plantation nigger from Poinciana Island. ’Cause that’s what it is, man.”

  “I ain’t saying you wrong,” Tee Bobby said.

  “Then do something about it,” Jimmy Dean said, handing Tee Bobby the joint.

  Tee Bobby put the joint loosely in his mouth and shotgunned it, huffing air and smoke along the paper until it burned almost to his lips, holding each hit deep down in his lungs. But he made no reply to Jimmy Dean’s challenge.

  “How ’bout it, Tee Bobby? You don’t stand up in Los Angeles, they’ll use you to wipe their ass. If I’m putting out my bread, you got to show me ain’t nobody shoving you around,” Jimmy Dean said.

  Tee Bobby gave the joint back to Jimmy Dean, his hand trembling slightly. He started the engine and heard the transmission clank loudly and reverberate through the floorboards when he dropped the gearshift into drive, almost like he had begun a mechanical process that would take on a life of its own. For just a moment, as the car inched forward toward the wooden bridge, he saw Rosebud in the rearview mirror, her face drowsy in the heat, a strand of hair stuck damply to her forehead.

  “Go back to sleep, Rosebud. I’m going to talk to a smart-ass white boy a minute, then we be back on the highway,” Tee Bobby said.

  He was surprised by the resolution in his own words. When he looked across the seat at Jimmy Dean, he saw an approval in Jimmy Dean’s face he had never seen there before. Maybe Jimmy Dean was right. A day came when you stopped taking people’s shit.

  Amanda and her boyfriend had pulled the four-wheeler to a stop in a dusty space between the cane field and a grove of gum trees next to a humped cluster of blackberry bushes. Amanda and the boy were watching a hot-air balloon drifting high in the sky to the west, the engine of the four-wheeler idling loudly, and they did not hear Tee Bobby’s car approach them. Jimmy Dean reached inside the gunnysack at his feet and removed the two watch caps he had placed inside it with the cut down twelve-gauge and a box of shells.

  “Put it on, my man. Let’s see if Chuckie want to stick his finger up in the air again,” Jimmy Dean said.

  “Just shake ’em up, right? That’s all we doing, huh, Jimmy Dean?” Tee Bobby said.

  “It’s their call, man. Watch me and go wit’ the flow,” Jimmy Dean replied. He pulled a pair of leather gloves on his hands, then got out of the car, his watch cap stretched tightly over his face, the pistol-grip shotgun held at an upward angle.

  “Hey, motherfucker, you just shot the bone
at the wrong nigger!” he yelled, and jacked a round into the chamber.

  Tee Bobby hurriedly pulled his watch cap over his face, his heart exploding in his chest. What was Jimmy Dean doing?

  But the answer was simple: Jimmy Dean had just forced Amanda and her boyfriend to get on the ground, inside the hot shade of the sweet gums, a child’s jump rope hanging from his left hand. He threw the jump rope in the boy’s face.

  “Tie her wrists to that tree,” Jimmy Dean said.

  “I don’t want to,” the boy said.

  “What makes you think you got a choice?” Jimmy Dean said, and kicked the boy in the ribs.

  “Okay,” the boy said, raising his hands, his face jerking with the blow.

  Jimmy Dean looked back at the road, then at the hot-air balloon drifting across the sun, his palms opening and closing on the shotgun. When the boy had finished looping the rope around Amanda’s wrists, knotting it behind the tree trunk, Jimmy Dean leaned down and tested the tension.

  “Now you gonna take a walk wit’ me, make up your mind if you want to live or be a smart-ass some more,” Jimmy Dean said. “You heard me, cracker, move! And take off your belt while you at it.”

  The boy walked ahead of Jimmy Dean, his skin almost jumping off his back each time Jimmy Dean touched him with the shotgun’s barrel.

  Tee Bobby stared down at Amanda through the weave of his watch cap. She wore elastic-waisted jeans and red tennis shoes with dusty socks and a purple blouse that was printed with little rabbits. Her cheeks were hollowed with shadow, her lips dry, caked on the edges, but there was no fear in her eyes, only anger and contempt. The skin on her wrists was crimped, her veins like green string under the tightness of the jump rope. He knelt down and tried to rotate the rope to a narrower place on her wrists, but instead he only managed to bunch and pinch the skin even worse.

  “You filthy scum, get your hands off me!” she said, and reared her forehead into his cheek.