Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  That’s what I told myself about the future of Marvin Oates. But my real thoughts were on Legion Guidry and the women he had molested and raped and the methodical beating he had given me. In my mind’s eye I once again saw his face lean down into my vision, his hand gripping my hair, his lips fastening on mine, his tongue probing my mouth. Then I swear I could taste the tobacco in his saliva and the tiny strings of decayed meat impacted in his teeth.

  I felt my stomach constrict. I rolled down the window and cleared my throat and spit into the darkness. When I rolled up the window and wiped my mouth, I realized the ex-soldier who called himself Sal Angelo was awake, watching me.

  “That guy who hurt you is down here, ain’t he?” he said.

  “Which guy?” I asked.

  “We both know which guy, Loot.”

  “Can’t ever tell,” I said.

  “Remember what I told you about making yourself the executioner? It’s like your soul travels out of your body, then it can’t find its way back. That’s when you forget who you are.”

  “I may have to drop you off, Sal, and pick you up on my way out,” I said.

  “Hate to hear you say that, Loot.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Our story is already written. You can’t change it,” he said.

  I hit a deep rut and a curtain of gray water splashed across the windshield. I looked across the seat and saw him raise his head off his chest and open his eyes, as though awakening from a deep sleep.

  “What did you just say?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say nothing. I was knocked out. Where are we, anyway?” he replied.

  CHAPTER 31

  While Zerelda drove the Cadillac, Marvin sat hunched forward in the passenger seat, wired to the eyes, sweating, licking his lips, breathing through his nose like a frightened child, she thought, with a nine-millimeter Beretta resting on his thigh. “You didn’t use your turn indicator back there. You use your turn indicator, Zerelda,” he said.

  She watched the country slip by them, the cows bunched in the coulees, a tree of lightning pulsing in the clouds. She felt Clete’s weight shift in the trunk. It was the first time he had moved since Marvin had forced him to sit in the trunk, then had picked up a thick piece of steel pipe.

  “I need to use the rest room,” she said.

  “There’s time for that later,” Marvin said.

  She heard a clunking sound in the trunk. She clicked on the radio.

  “I’m worried about this storm,” she said.

  He turned the radio off. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  He took a ragged breath of air and looked hard at the side of her face, his eyes narrowing. Then, for no apparent reason, he reached across the seat and fastened his fingers on the back of her neck, sinking them deep into the tendons.

  “You make me mad,” he said.

  He lifted his fingers from her neck and touched her hair. Then he put both his hands and the Beretta between his legs and sat very still, his chest rising and falling.

  “Marvin, no one meant to hurt you.”

  “Don’t talk down to me. Not ever again. ’Cause that’s what you been doing since the beginning. I don’t like that.”

  “Then maybe you should get a life and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  Too late, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. She heard him make a grinding sound in his throat, then he struck her across the mouth with the back of his hand.

  He grabbed the wheel and hit her again.

  “Now, you steer the car and don’t make me do what I’m thinking,” he said, his voice starting to break.

  Her hand was trembling when she touched the cut on her mouth.

  “My uncle is Joe Zeroski. Can that fit in your head? What do you think he’s going to do when he gets his hands on you, you nasty little pissant?” she said.

  She thought he was about to hit her again. But he was hunched forward once more, looking at the road in the headlights, listening.

  “Pull over,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Don’t ask,” he said.

  She took her foot off the accelerator and felt the weight of the Cadillac slow, a tire touch on the shoulder of the road. She heard Clete kick solidly against the hatch. Marvin waited until a pickup truck passed, then flung open the door and walked to the rear of the vehicle.

  “Shut up in there!” he said.

  Through the backseat she heard Clete’s voice: “Tell you what, pinhead. Pop the hatch and I’ll take you in without scrubbing out the toilet with your face, the way Frankie Dogs did.”

  “Suck on this,” Marvin said, and stepped back from the vehicle and fired a round into the hatch, the muzzle flash sparking into the darkness.

  His hat was peaked in the crown, and rain slid off the brim when he got back in the front seat and pulled the door shut behind him. It was quiet in the back of the Cadillac.

  “You motherfucker,” she said.

  Marvin’s eyes closed, then opened, as though he were experiencing a sexual moment. “Drive the car, Zerelda,” he said.

  He rested the Beretta on the edge of his scrotum, the butterfly safety off, the red firing dot exposed. Minutes later Zerelda glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a vehicle click on its lights and pull out behind them, keeping a respectful distance in the rain. Was that the pickup truck that had just passed them? she asked herself.

  Legion Guidry watched the Cadillac float into the curves ahead of him, the rain blowing in a vapor off the rear wheels. He put a fresh cigarette in his mouth and removed the lighter from the dashboard and pressed the red coils against the tobacco. He could hear the crisp sound of the paper burning as he inhaled. The smell of something burning on hot metal gave him a vague sense of satisfaction, one he could not quite define, but it traveled pleasantly down into his loins. He smiled to himself when the rear end of the Cadillac swung heavily on its springs as it went into the curves, and he wondered what that smart-ass Purcel was feeling now, his head bashed with a pipe, trussed like a three-hundred-pound hog in the trunk of his own car. He hadn’t figured out the connection between the kid in the cowboy hat and Purcel and the woman yet. He had seen the kid clearly in his binoculars for perhaps thirty seconds, just enough to recognize him as the salesman who drug a suitcase on a roller skate through black neighborhoods in St. Mary Parish. He had never gotten his binoculars adequately on the woman, but he knew she had to be that slut Barbara Shanahan, who walked around town with a pissed-off look on her face, like her shit didn’t stink, whom he’d watched through her window while she mounted Purcel and stroked his sex like a whore before she put it inside her.

  His blackjack and S&W .38 were in his glove compartment. He popped it open and removed the .38 and laid it on the passenger seat, where it vibrated with the motion of the truck. After Robicheaux had thrown it in his unflushed toilet bowl, he’d had to wash it with a garden hose outside, then take it apart and soak it in gasoline overnight, before reassembling and oiling the parts. But the gasoline had softened the blueing, which came off on his cleaning rag and streaked and dulled the uniform blue-steel shine that had defined the pistol he had always been proud to own.

  But Robicheaux gonna have his day, too, he told himself. Maybe Perry LaSalle, too, who Legion had convinced himself was writing a book exposing Legion as a blackmailer and molester of Negro field women and the murderer of a New York journalist. Because he had convinced himself that the educated, the well-traveled, the technologically sophisticated, all belonged to the same club, one that had excluded him for a lifetime, treating him little differently from the Negroes, serving him his food in their backyards, on tin plates and in jelly jars that were kept in a special cabinet for people of color and white trash.

  But no one could say he hadn’t gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a planta
tion white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.

  He mashed out his cigarette in the ashtray and took a six-pack of hot beer off the floor and ripped the tab off a can and drank it half empty, the foam curling down his wrist and forearm. Up ahead, the lavender Cadillac roared through a red light.

  I bet that cowboy hitting on you now, bitch, he thought. But that’s just the previews. You cain’t even guess what it gonna be like tonight. You gonna see, you.

  He finished his beer and tossed the can out the window. He looked in the wide-angle mirror and watched the can bounce crazily in the middle of the road.

  Zerelda drove where Marvin pointed, in this instance down a winding road bordered with ditches that were brimming with rainwater, to a dirt driveway that led past a church whose roof was embedded with a fallen persimmon tree. They passed a house that was stacked inside with baled hay, and Marvin told her to park behind the house, in a stand of slash pines and water oaks, and to cut the ignition and the headlights. The hood of the Cadillac smoked in the rain, the engine ticking in the silence. There was no sound at all from the trunk.

  “I got a place fixed up for us in the house. Food and soda, bedrolls, mosquito repellent, a Coleman lantern, paper towels, a mess of board games. I dint forget anything, I don’t think,” Marvin said, his lips pursed.

  “Board games? We’re gonna play board games here?” she said.

  “Yeah, or anything you want to do. Till I can get rid of him.” He nodded toward the trunk. “I’m gonna hide the Cadillac in a barn back in them trees. I’ll borrow a car for us till I can buy us one in Texas. We’ll cross into Mexico on the other side of Laredo.”

  “You think I’m staying with you? That’s the plan? After you shot Clete and beat the shit out of me?” she said.

  “What did you expect? You wouldn’t do anything I tole you. I think it was the way you was brought up, Zerelda. I’d like to have kids with you, but you’re gonna have to change your attitude about a lot of things.”

  “Are you insane? I wouldn’t let you touch the parings from my toenails.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. It’s being around them Sicilian criminals all your life. They give you that potty mouth,” he said.

  He pulled the keys out of the ignition and stepped out into the drizzle, the Beretta hanging from his right hand. He walked around the front of the car and opened the door for her. She could smell the odor of ozone and humus and evaporated salt in the air and the drenched earth out in the sugarcane fields, a fecund heaviness she had always associated with life and birth, then the wind changed and an execrable stench struck her face like a fist.

  “God, what is that?” she said.

  “It’s them pigs. They shouldn’t be penned up like that. The germs gets in the groundwater, too. This state don’t have no environmental direction. Fact is, I’m gonna turn them poor critters out right now,” he said.

  He walked to the hog pen and kicked down the rails on one side, then threw dirt clods at the hogs to spook them into the woods. But they milled in circles, grunting, and stayed inside the confines of the pen. He watched them, perplexed, and sprayed an atomizer of breath freshener into his mouth.

  “That’s some dumb animals,” he said, then saw Zerelda walking toward the road.

  She felt his hand clench her under the arm and turn her back toward the house.

  “You’re a handful, woman. I’m gonna need to keep an eye on you,” he said.

  She looked at his chiseled profile, the smoothness of his complexion, his country-boy good looks and the vacuous serenity in his eyes, and she wondered, almost desperately, who lived inside his skin, whom she should address herself to.

  But she realized his attention was diverted now, that he was staring at a pickup truck that had stopped on the road and was backing up to the small wooden bridge over the rain ditch. He chewed on his lip, hesitating only a moment, then pushed the Beretta inside her blouse, flat against her back, and began walking with her toward the truck.

  “The man who taught me sales always said ‘A good salesman is a good listener. The customer will always tell you what he wants if you’ll just listen,’” Marvin whispered in her ear. “Just smile at this fellow while he talks. We’ll tell him what he needs to hear and he’ll go on about his bidness. There ain’t nothing to it.”

  She watched a man in a straw hat and khaki shirt and trousers get out of the truck, a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up and down the road, as though lost, then approached them, his boots hollow sounding on the wooden bridge that spanned the rain ditch. He nodded his head deferentially.

  “I got lost on the turn-off to Pecan Island, me,” he said.

  “Just go a half mile back. This road here don’t go nowhere except down to the bay,” Marvin said.

  The man in the straw hat puffed on his cigarette and looked down the road, bemused.

  “You could have fooled me. I t’ought this went to Abbeville,” he said.

  “No, sir, it don’t go nowhere,” Marvin said.

  “Y’all been fucking?” the man said.

  “What?” Marvin said.

  “I ain’t caught y’all fucking, huh?” he said.

  Both Marvin and Zerelda looked at the man, stupefied.

  “You t’ink you bad, you?” the man said to Marvin.

  He reached out, his cigarette still in his mouth, and grabbed Marvin by his shirt and ripped him away from Zerelda, the Beretta tangling under her blouse, falling to the ground. Almost simultaneously the man removed a blackjack from his side pocket and whipped it down between Marvin’s eyes, then across the side and back of his skull as though he were driving nails in wood.

  Marvin was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  Zerelda’s mouth hung open.

  “You with Vermilion Parish? The sheriff’s department?” she said.

  “Ain’t none of your bidness who I am, bitch. Where’s Barbara Shanahan at?”

  “Shanahan?” she said.

  His fist seemed to explode in the center of her face.

  The rain had stopped altogether when I came around the curve and saw the wood-frame church, the boughs of the persimmon tree, still in leaf, protruding from its crushed roof. I parked on the side of the road and cut the headlights. There were no vehicles in the yard or out in the trees, at least none that I could see, but the wooden bridge over the rain ditch was stenciled with fresh tire tracks. I rolled down the window and listened.

  “What’s that noise?” Sal, the ex-soldier, asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  It was an irregular, cacophonous sound, like a tractor-mower idling and misfiring, perhaps without a muffler.

  I slipped my .45 out of its holster and opened the door of my truck.

  “What you gonna do, Loot?” Sal asked.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.

  “That don’t sound too good. I think I’d better come along,” he said.

  “Wrong,” I said.

  He got out of the truck and grinned. “You gonna arrest me?” he said.

  “I might,” I said.

  But he wasn’t impressed with my attempt at sternness, and we crossed the bridge and saw two sets of vehicle tracks, one overlapping the other, both leading past the frame house filled with baled hay. Sal stooped down and picked up a Beretta nine-millimeter lying by a puddle of water. He tapped the mud out of the barrel and used his shirttail to wipe the mud off the grips and hammer and trigger guard, then pulled the slide far back enough to see the bright brass glint of a round already seated in the chamber.

  I extended my hand for him to give me the gun, but he only grinned again and shook his head.

  The moon looked like a piece of burnt pewter inside the clouds now, and in the pale light it gave off I could see hogs rooting at the edge of a flood
ed woods. I walked on ahead of Sal, past the church and the house where the preacher must have once lived, the sound of a gasoline- or diesel-powered engine growing louder. On the far side of a three-sided tin shed, someone turned on a lantern of some kind, one that exuded a dull white luminescence.

  Out in the trees I could see Clete’s Cadillac convertible and Legion’s red pickup truck. The hatch to the Cadillac was open, gaping, the trunk empty. I bent down, the .45 gripped in two hands, and got closer to the shed and looked through the back window at the collection of tar cookers and road graders and bulldozers that had been stored there by a parish maintenance crew. A battery-powered Coleman lantern burned on the ground, the humidity in the air almost iridescent in the glow of the neon tubing.

  Legion Guidry was filling a bucket from a water tap. Marvin Oates lay unconscious on the ground, his hair matted with straw and mud. Close by, Zerelda sat against a wood post. Her wrists were bound behind the post with electrician’s tape. But it was Clete Purcel who was obviously in the most serious jeopardy. He was slumped over by the lantern, his head hanging down, his eyes half shut with trauma and blood loss, the back of his shirt a dark red.

  A tree-shredding machine idled on the outer edge of the shed, the ejection funnel aimed out into the darkness, the entry chute that fed into the blades pointed back at Clete.

  Legion turned off the tap and threw the bucket of water into Marvin’s face.

  “Get up, boy. You fixing to hep me make some pig food, you,” he said.

  Marvin blew water out of his nostrils and mouth and pushed himself up on his hands. Legion shoved him in the shoulder with his boot.

  “Don’t make me tell you twice, no,” he said.

  “I dint hear you,” Marvin said.

  “Pick up the other side of that shithog. He going in the grinder. You be good, maybe you won’t end up there, too,” Legion said.

  Marvin glanced at Zerelda.

  “What about her?” he asked.

  “She lay down wit’ the wrong dog. She got his fleas,” Legion said.