Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Marvin rose to his feet, his face dazed, his eyes looking back at Zerelda.

  “You’ll let me go?” he said, the register of his voice falling. Then the skin on his face seemed to shrink when he heard the fear and cowardice in his own words.

  I started to stand up straight, to move around the edge of the shed, where I could have a clear shot at Legion. But I felt an open handcuff come down on my right wrist, the steel tongue ratcheting into the lock. Sal locked the other end of the cuffs on a water pipe that elbowed out of the shed into the ground.

  My handcuff key was in my right pocket and I couldn’t reach it with my left hand. I tried to grab his arm as he walked away from me, but he only turned and grinned, lifting a finger to his lips.

  Sal rounded the corner of the shed and aimed the Beretta with both hands at Legion’s chest.

  Legion released Clete’s arm, his eyes focusing on Sal, as though recognizing an old enemy.

  “Where you come from, you?” Legion said.

  “Looks like you been causing folks a lot of grief,” Sal said.

  “I ain’t got no quarrel wit’ you.”

  “Time for you to check out, Jack. I don’t mean boogie on down the road, either,” Sal said.

  Legion stepped backward, tripping over the water bucket, his .38 revolver pushed down in his belt, a loud hiss rising from his throat. Then he bolted for the woods.

  Sal began shooting, the recoil of the Beretta jerking against his wrists, sparks flying from the barrel. I had worked my right pants pocket inside out with my left hand now, and I inserted my handcuff key into the lock on my wrist and ran around the corner of the shed with my .45.

  I could see Legion running through the woods toward the bay, hogs scattering around him, while Sal fired all ten rounds from the Beretta. A bolt of lightning struck the bay or the woods, I couldn’t tell which, and I saw Legion’s silhouette in the illumination, like a piece of scorched tin. Then the woods were dark again, and I saw Clete looking up at me in the glow of the Coleman lantern, his face white, a smile at the corner of his mouth.

  “Better hook up the pinhead, big mon,” he said.

  I cuffed Marvin Oates and put him on the ground, then knelt down and used my pocketknife to cut the tape on Zerelda’s wrists. A pair of headlights bounced across the wooden bridge over the rain ditch, levering up and down as the car came too fast across the ground. Then Joe Zeroski’s Chrysler braked by the shed and Joe and Baby Huey got out on each side. Joe wore a pair of tight slacks and a formfitting strap undershirt, his flat chest rising and falling, his vascular arms pumped. He studied his niece’s battered face and stroked her hair.

  Then he looked down at Marvin Oates. A small chrome-plated automatic pistol protruded from his pocket.

  “This is the man who beat my daughter to death?” he said.

  “We going to have a problem here, Joe?” I said.

  “I asked you if this is the piece of shit who killed my Linda.”

  “Yes, sir, I think he probably is,” I said.

  Joe stared at Marvin a long time, the nails of his right hand cutting into his palm. His nostrils whitened around the rims and his hand floated toward his pants pocket.

  “Joe—” I began.

  He removed a handkerchief from his back pocket and reached down to Marvin’s face with it.

  “He’s got a runny nose. It ain’t nice to look at. You ought to wipe it for him,” Joe said. When he finished, he threw the handkerchief on the ground.

  Twenty minutes later Helen Soileau and I watched the paramedics load Clete and Zerelda into an ambulance and take them to an emergency receiving room in Abbeville. The sky was still churning with black clouds, the air loud with crickets and the sound of tree frogs. I looked for the ex-soldier named Sal Angelo but found him nowhere. The last I had seen him, he had walked into the trees, but I could not remember seeing him come out. The coroner and several Vermilion Parish deputies were deep in the woods, almost to the bay, their flashlights bouncing off the trees and scrub brush. “He locked you up with your own cuffs?” Helen said.

  “Yeah, I’d left them on the truck seat,” I said.

  “Why’d he want to cap Guidry?”

  “He knew I was going to do it,” I replied.

  “I didn’t hear you say that.”

  She watched the coroner and three Vermilion Parish sheriff’s deputies come out of the woods with a zipped body bag. The bag looked heavy, sagging in the center, and the deputies had trouble holding on to the corners.

  “Did you talk to the coroner?” Helen asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Your friend must have been the worst shot in the U.S. Army,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were no wounds in Guidry’s body. It looks like he was hit by lightning. His boots were blown off his feet,” she said.

  “Lightning?” I said.

  “Anyway, he didn’t go out alone. He was floating around with a bunch of dead pigs. Buy me coffee, Pops?” she said.

  EPILOGUE

  It’s winter now, and Clete Purcel and I hunt ducks out on Whiskey Bay like two duffers who have no need to share their war stories anymore and are more interested in the sunrise than the number of birds they knock out of the sky. Barbara Shanahan left town with Perry LaSalle, bound for the Pacific Rim, where cheap labor is called outsourcing and Perry plans to start up a half-dozen new canneries. Whenever Barbara’s name is mentioned in conversation, Clete’s eyes crinkle fondly, and no one ever guesses the nature of the thorn that was left in his heart. In November, the same month Jimmy Dean Styles was sentenced to death and Tee Bobby Hulin to life, the Easter Bunny returned to New Iberia and creeped the mayor’s house. Then he robbed a pet store in Lafayette and took two huge blue-and-yellow-and-red-flecked parrots with him. The next night he robbed the home of a notorious ex-Klansman and candidate for the U.S. Senate on Lake Pontchartrain while the ex-Klansman was promoting his most recent anti-Semitic book in Russia.

  A week later the ex-Klansman’s bank statements and record of receipts from his donors were mailed to the IRS and the FBI. The Easter Bunny left the stolen parrots in the house and the following day reported his own crime. The cops who investigated the break-in said the house was layered end-to-end with bird shit.

  Marvin Oates was convicted of kidnapping, felony assault, and second-degree homicide in the death of Frankie Dogs. But he skated on the murder of Linda Zeroski and perhaps the murder of Ruby Gravano, the prostitute in St. Mary Parish. Helen Soileau and I and two ADAs from the prosecutor’s office gave up trying to manipulate him into a confession. Whenever pressed about his crimes, he sang the lyrics from “I’m Using My Bible for a Road Map” and stared back at us with eyes that seemed incapable of guile or even momentary retention of violent thoughts.

  Our psychiatrist said Marvin was sane. A fundamentalist preacher and a half-dozen church people testified as to his character. As I watched him on the stand, I was bothered by the nagging speculation that has troubled me since I became a police officer, namely, that no matter how heinous the crime or evil the deed, human beings feel at the time they commit the act that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.

  I never again saw the ex-soldier who called himself Sal Angelo. I didn’t want to think any more about his coming to New Iberia, virtually out of nowhere, dressed in rags and madness, or his claim that it was he who had carried me on his back out of the elephant grass and loaded me onto a helicopter bound for battalion aid. What did it matter who he was? I told myself. Legion Guidry was dead and I was glad. Let my friend keep his tattered mystique and let Vietnam remain a decaying memory.

  But eventually I put in an information request with the Veterans Administration.

  A soldier named Sal Angelo, from Staten Island, New York, had indeed been a medic in my outfit and had served in the same area as I in late 1964 and early 1965. But one month after I was hit, he had been killed ten miles from the Laotian border.

&nb
sp; In the fall Alafair went away to Reed College and returned to us at Christmastime. It’s been a wet and foggy winter this year, good for the ducks and me and Clete and for dinners and parties at the house with Bootsie and Alafair and Alafair’s reassembled high school friends.

  But sometimes amid the gaiety in our living room and the tinkle of glass ornaments on the Christmas tree, I look out at the swamp in the failing light, the denuded cypresses and wisps of moss stark against the sky, and I think about a black field woman of years ago and old man Julian and the moments of weakness and need they shared, and I think about a bullet-rent and sun-faded battle flag encased in glass like the dried blood of a saint, and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

  But those concerns are fleeting ones now, and when they occur during my workday, I concentrate on hunting down the Easter Bunny, the trickster in our midst, the buffoon and miscreant who lives in us all and allows us to laugh at evil and ourselves.

  I don’t think it’s a bad way to go.

  By The Same Author

  White Doves at Morning

  Jolie Blon’s Bounce

  Bitterroot

  Purple Cane Road

  Heartwood

  Lay Down My Sword and Shield

  Sunset Limited

  Half of Paradise

  Cimarron Rose

  Cadillac Jukebox

  Heaven’s Prisoners

  Burning Angel

  The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  The Convict

  Dixie City Jam

  In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

  A Stained White Radiance

  The Neon Rain

  A Morning for Flamingos

  Black Cherry Blues

  Two for Texas

  To the Bright and Shining Sun

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by James Lee Burke

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6097-8

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-6097-X

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-4420-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonandShuster.com

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Leslie Blanchard at the Iberia Parish Library and Vaun Stevens and Don Spritzer at the Missoula Public Library for their friendship and generous help over the years.

  To my wife, Pearl, and my children,

  Jim, Jr., Andree, Pamala, and Alafair

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue of an inverted ceramic bowl. In the evenings I sat on the back steps of a rented shotgun house on Bayou Teche and watched the boats passing in the twilight and listened to the Sunset Limited blowing down the line. Just as the light went out of the sky the moon would rise like an orange planet above the oaks that covered my rented backyard, then I would go inside and fix supper for myself and eat alone at the kitchen table.

  But in my heart the autumnal odor of gas on the wind, the gold and dark green of the trees, and the flame-lit edges of the leaves were less a sign of Indian summer than a prelude to winter rains and the short, gray days of December and January, when smoke would plume from stubble fires in the cane fields and the sun would be only a yellow vapor in the west.

  Years ago, in both New Orleans and New Iberia, the tannic hint of winter and the amber cast of the shrinking days gave me the raison d’etre I needed to drink in any saloon that would allow me inside its doors. I was not one of those valiant, alcoholic souls who tries to drink with a self-imposed discipline and a modicum of dignity, either. I went at it full-bore, knocking back Beam or Black Jack straight-up in sawdust bars where I didn’t have to make comparisons, with a long-necked Jax or Regal on the side that would take away the aftertaste and fill my mouth with golden needles. Each time I tilted the shotglass to my lips I saw in my mind’s eye a simian figure feeding a fire inside a primeval cave and I felt no regret that I shared his enterprise.

  Now I went to meetings and didn’t drink anymore, but I had a way of putting myself inside bars, usually ones that took me back to the Louisiana in which I had grown up. One of my favorites of years past was Goldie Bierbaum’s place on Magazine in New Orleans. A green colonnade extended over the sidewalk, and the rusted screen doors still had painted on them the vague images and lettering of Depression-era coffee and bread advertisements. The lighting was bad, the wood floor scrubbed colorless with bleach, the railed bar interspersed with jars of pickles and hard-boiled eggs above and cuspidors down below. And Goldie himself was a jewel out of the past, a seventy-year-old flat-chested ex-prizefighter who had fought Cleveland Williams and Eddie Machen.

  It was night and raining hard on the colonnade and tin roof of the building. I sat at the far end of the bar, away from the door, with a demitasse of coffee and a saucer and tiny spoon in front of me. Through the front window I could see Clete Purcel parked in his lavender Cadillac convertible, a fedora shadowing his face in the glow of the streetlight. A man came in and removed his raincoat and sat down on the other end of the bar. He was young, built like a weight-lifter whose physique was earned rather than created with steroids. He wore his brown hair shaved on the sides, with curls hanging down the back of his neck. His eyebrows were half-moons, his face impish, cartoonlike, as though it were drawn with a charcoal pencil.

  Goldie poured him a shot and a draft chaser, then set the whiskey bottle back on the counter against the wall and pretended to read the newspaper. The man finished his drink and walked the length of the bar to the men’s room in back. His eyes looked straight ahead and showed no interest in me as he passed.

  “That’s the guy,” Goldie said, leaning close to me.

  “You’re sure? No mistake?” I said.

  “He comes in three nights a week for a shot and a beer, sometimes a catfish po’boy. I heard him talking about it on the payphone back there. Maybe he’s not the guy who hurt your friend, but how many guys in New Orleans are gonna be talking about breaking the spokes on a Catholic priest?”

  I heard the men’s room door open again and footsteps walk past me to the opposite end of the bar. Goldie’s eyes became veiled, impossible to read. The top of his head looked like an alabaster bowling ball with blue lines in it.

  “I’m sorry about your wife. It was last year?” he said.

  I nodded.

 
“It was lupus?” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I replied.

  “You doin’ all right?”

  “Sure,” I said, avoiding his eyes.

  “Don’t get in no trouble, like we used to do in the old days.”

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  “Hey, my po’boy ready?” the man at the end of the bar asked.

  The man made a call on the payphone, then ate his sandwich and bounced pool balls off the rails on the pool table. The mirror behind the bar was oxidized an oily green and yellow, like the color of lubricant floating in water, and between the liquor bottles lined along the mirror I could see the man looking at the back of my head.

  I turned on the bar stool and grinned at him. He waited for me to speak. But I didn’t.

  “I know you?” he said.

  “Maybe. I used to live in New Orleans. I don’t anymore,” I said.

  He spun the cue ball down the rail into the pocket, his eyes lowered. “So you want to shoot some nine ball?” he said.

  “I’d be poor competition.”

  He didn’t raise his eyes or look at me again. He finished his beer and sandwich at the bar, then put on his coat and stood at the screen door, looking at the mist blowing under the colonnade and at the cars passing in the neon-streaked wetness in front of Goldie’s bar. Clete Purcel fired up his Cadillac and rattled down the street, turning at the end of the block.

  The man with the impish face and curls that hung on the back of his neck stepped outside and breathed the air like a man out for a walk, then got into a Honda and drove up Magazine toward the Garden District. A moment later Clete Purcel pulled around the block and picked me up.

  “Can you catch him?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to. That’s Gunner Ardoin. He lives in a dump off Tchoupitoulas,” he said.

  “Gunner? He’s a button man?”

  “No, he’s been in two or three of Fat Sammy Figorelli’s porn films. He mules crystal in the projects, too.”