Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “Would he bust up a priest?” I asked.

  Clete looked massive behind the steering wheel, his upper arms like big, cured hams inside his tropical shirt. His hair was sandy, cut short like a little boy’s. A diagonal scar ran through his left eyebrow.

  “Gunner?” he said. “It doesn’t sound like him. But a guy who performs oral sex for a hometown audience? Who knows?”

  We caught up with the Honda at Napoleon Avenue, then followed it through a dilapidated neighborhood of narrow streets and shotgun houses to Tchoupitoulas. The driver turned on a side street and parked under a live oak in front of a darkened cottage. He walked up a shell driveway and entered the back door with a key and turned on a light inside.

  Clete circled the block, then parked four houses up the street from Gunner Ardoin’s place and cut the engine. He studied my face.

  “You look a little wired,” he said.

  “Not me,” I said.

  The rain on the windshield made rippling shadows on his face and arms. “I made my peace with N.O.P.D.,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Most of the guys who did us dirt are gone. I let it be known I’m not in the O.K. Corral business anymore. It makes life a lot easier,” he said.

  Through the overhang of the trees I could see the Mississippi levee at the foot of the street and fog billowing up from the other side. Boat lights were shining inside the fog so that the fog looked like electrified steam rising off the water.

  “Are you coming?” I asked.

  He pulled an unlit cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the window. “Why not?” he said.

  We walked up Gunner Ardoin’s driveway, past a garbage can overflowing with shrimp husks. Banana trees grew against the side of the house and the leaves were slick and green and denting in the rainwater that slid off the roof. I jerked the back screen off the latch and went into Gunner Ardoin’s kitchen.

  “You beat up Catholic priests, do you?” I said.

  “What?” he said, turning from the sink with a metal coffeepot in his hand. He wore draw-string, tin-colored workout pants and a ribbed undershirt. His skin was white, clean of jailhouse art, his underarms shaved. A weight set rested on the floor behind him.

  “Lose the innocent monkey face, Gunner. You used a steel pipe on a priest name of Jimmie Dolan,” Clete said.

  Gunner set the coffeepot down on the counter. He studied both of us briefly, then lowered his eyes and folded his arms on his chest, his back resting against the sink. His nipples looked like small brown dimes through the fabric of his undershirt. “Do what you have to do,” he said.

  “Better rethink that statement,” Clete said.

  But Gunner only stared at the floor, his elbows cupped in his palms. Clete looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said, opening my badge holder. “But my visit here is personal.”

  “I didn’t beat up a priest. You think I did, then I’m probably in the shitter. I can’t change that.” He began picking at the calluses on his palm.

  “You get that at a twelve-step session up at Angola?” Clete said.

  Gunner Ardoin looked at nothing and suppressed a yawn.

  “You raised Catholic?” I said.

  He nodded, without lifting his eyes.

  “You’re not bothered by somebody hospitalizing a priest, breaking his bones, a decent man who never harmed anyone?” I said.

  “I don’t know him. You say he’s a good guy, maybe he is. There’s a lot of priests out there are good guys, right?” he said.

  Then, like all career recidivists and fulltime smart-asses, he couldn’t resist the temptation to show his contempt for the world of normal people. He turned his face away from me, but I saw one eye glimmer with mirth, a grin tug slightly at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe they kept the altar boys away from him,” he said.

  I stepped closer to him, my right hand balling. But Clete pushed me aside. He picked up the metal coffeepot from the counter and smashed it almost flat against the side of Gunner Ardoin’s head, then threw him in a chair. Gunner folded his arms across his chest, a torn grin on his mouth, blood trickling from his scalp.

  “Have at it, fellows. I made both y’all back on Napoleon. I dialed 911 soon as I came in. My lawyer loves guys like you,” he said.

  Through the front window I saw the emergency flasher on an N.O.P.D. cruiser pull to the curb under the live oak tree that grew in Gunner Ardoin’s front yard. A lone black female officer slipped her baton into the ring on her belt and walked uncertainly toward the gallery, her radio squawking incoherently in the rain.

  I slept that night on Clete’s couch in his small apartment above his P.I. office on St. Ann. The sky was clear and pink at sunrise, the streets in the Quarter puddled with water, the bougainvillea on Clete’s balcony as bright as drops of blood. I shaved and dressed while Clete was still asleep and walked past St. Louis Cathedral and through Jackson Square to the Cafe du Monde, where I met Father Jimmie Dolan at a table under the pavilion.

  Although we had been friends and had bass fished together for two decades, he remained in many ways a mysterious man, at least to me. Some said he was a closet drunk who had done time in a juvenile reformatory; others said he was gay and well known among the homosexual community in New Orleans, although women were obviously drawn to him. He had crewcut, blond good looks and the wide shoulders and tall, trim physique of the wide-end receiver he had been at a Winchester, Kentucky, high school. He didn’t talk politics but he got into trouble regularly with authority on almost all levels, including six months in a federal prison for trespassing on the School of the Americas property at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

  It had been three months since he had been waylaid in an alley behind his church rectory and methodically beaten from his neck to the soles of his feet by someone wielding a pipe with an iron bonnet screwed down on the business end.

  “Clete Purcel and I rousted a guy named Gunner Ardoin last night. I think maybe he’s the guy who attacked you,” I said.

  Father Jimmie had just bitten into a beignet and his mouth was smeared with powdered sugar. He wore a tiny sapphire in his left earlobe. His eyes were a deep green, thoughtful, his skin tan. He shook his head.

  “That’s Phil Ardoin. Wrong guy,” he said.

  “He said he didn’t know you.”

  “I coached his high school basketball team.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  “With Phil it’s a way of life.”

  An N.O.P.D. cruiser pulled to the curb out on Decatur and a black female officer got out and fixed her cap on her head. She looked like she was constructed of twigs, her sky blue shirt too large on her frame, her pursed lips layered with red lipstick. Last night Clete had said she reminded him of a black swizzle stick with a cherry stuck on the end.

  She threaded her way through the tables until she was abreast of ours. The brass name tag on her shirt said C. ARCENEAUX.

  “I thought I should give you a heads-up,” she said.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  She looked off abstractly at the traffic on the street and at the artists setting up their easels under the trees in Jackson Square. “Take a walk with me,” she said.

  I followed her down to a shady spot at the foot of the Mississippi levee. “I tried to talk to the other man, what’s his name, Purcel, but he seemed more interested in riding his exercise bike,” she said.

  “He has blood pressure problems,” I said.

  “Maybe more like a thinking problem,” she replied, looking idly down the street.

  “Can I help you with something?” I asked.

  “Gunner Ardoin is filing an assault charge against you and your friend. I think maybe he’s got a civil suit in mind. If I was you, I’d take care of it.”

  “Take care of it?” I said.

  Her eyes squinted into the distance, as though the subject at hand had alrea
dy slipped out of her frame of reference. Her hair was black and thick and cut short on her neck, her eyes a liquid brown.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Don’t like people who mule crystal into the projects.”

  “You work both the night and the morning watch?”

  “I’m just up from meter maid. Low in standing, know what I mean, but somebody got to do it. Tell the priest to spend more time with his prayers,” she said, and started to walk back to her cruiser.

  “What’s your first name?” I asked.

  “Clotile,” she said.

  Back at the table I watched her drive away into the traffic, the lacquered brim of her cap low on her forehead. Meter maid, my ass, I thought.

  “Ever hear of Junior Crudup?” Father Jimmie asked.

  “The blues man? Sure,” I said.

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He died in Angola,” I said.

  “No, he disappeared in Angola. Went in and never came out. No record at all of what happened to him,” Father Jimmie said. “I’d like for you to meet his family.”

  “Got to get back to New Iberia.”

  “It’s Saturday,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Junior’s granddaughter owns a twelve-string guitar she thinks might have belonged to Leadbelly. Maybe you could take a look at it. Unless you just really don’t have the time?” he said.

  I followed Father Jimmie in my pickup truck into St. James Parish, which lies on a ninety-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that environmentalists have named Toxic Alley. We drove down a state road south of the Mississippi levee through miles of sugarcane and on through a community of narrow, elongated shacks that had been built in the late nineteenth century. At the crossroads, or what in south Louisiana is called a four-corners, was a ramshackle nightclub, an abandoned company store with a high, tin-roofed gallery, a drive-by daiquiri stand, and a solitary oil storage tank that was streaked with corrosion at the seams, next to which someone had planted a tomato garden.

  Most of the people who lived at the four-corners were black. The rain ditches and the weeds along the roadside were layered with bottles of beer and pop cans and trash from fast-food restaurants. The people who sat on the galleries of the shacks were either old or infirm or children. I watched a car filled with teenagers run a stop sign and fling a quart beer bottle on the side of the road, ten feet from where an elderly woman was picking up litter from her lawn and placing it in a vinyl bag.

  Then we were out in the countryside again and the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, the sugarcane bending in the wind as far as the eye could see, egrets perched like white sculptures on the backs of cattle in a roadside pasture. But inside the loveliness of the day was another element, discordant and invasive, the metallic reek of natural gas, perhaps from a wellhead or a leaking connection at a pump station. Then the wind shifted and it was gone and the sky was speckled with birds rising from a pecan orchard and from the south I could smell the brassy odor of a storm that was building over the Gulf.

  I looked at my watch. No more than one hour with Father Jimmie’s friends, I told myself. I wanted to get back to New Iberia and forget about the previous night and the trouble with Gunner Ardoin. Maybe it was time to let Father Jimmie take care of his own problems, I thought. Some people loved adversity, got high on it daily, and secretly despised those who would take it from them. That trait didn’t necessarily go away because of a Roman collar.

  The state road made a bend and suddenly the endless rows of sugarcane ended. The fields were uncultivated now, empty of livestock, dotted with what looked like settling ponds. The Crudup family lived down a dirt lane in a white frame house with a wraparound veranda hung with baskets of flowers. Three hundred yards behind the house was a woods bordered with trees that were gray with dead leaves and the scales of air vines, as though the treeline had been matted with premature winterkill.

  Father Jimmie had set the hook when he had mentioned Leadbelly’s name, but I knew as we drove down the road toward the neat white house backdropped by a poisoned woods that this trip was not about the recidivist convict who wrote “Goodnight Irene” and “The Midnight Special” and who today is almost forgotten.

  In fact, I wondered if I, like Father Jimmie, could not wait to fill my day with adversity in the way I had once filled it with Jim Beam and a glass of Jax with strings of foam running down the sides.

  When I cut my engine in front of the house, I took a Dr Pepper from the cooler on the seat and raked the ice off the can and drank it empty before stepping out onto the yard.

  Chapter 2

  Junior Crudup’s granddaughter had a face like a goldfish, light skin that was dusted with freckles, and glasses that turned her eyes into watery brown orbs. She sat in a stuffed chair, fanning herself with a magazine, her rings of fat bulging against her dress, waiting for me to finish examining the Stella guitar that had lain propped in a corner of her attic for thirty years. The strings were gone, the tuning keys stiff with rust, the sound hole coated with cobweb. I turned the guitar on its belly and looked at three words that were scratched into the back of the neck: Huddie Love Sarie.

  “Leadbelly’s real name was Huddie Ledbetter. His wife was named Sarie,” I said.

  Junior Crudup’s granddaughter looked through a side window at two children playing on a rope swing that was suspended from a pecan tree. Her name was Doris. She kept straightening her shoulders, as though a great weight were pressing on her lungs. “How much it wort’?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t say,” I replied.

  “Four or five songs were in the bottom of the guitar case, each with Junior’s signature,” Father Jimmie said.

  “Yeah, what they wort’?” Doris Crudup asked.

  “You’d have to ask somebody else,” I said.

  She gave Father Jimmie a look, then got up from her chair and took my coffee cup into the kitchen, although I had not finished drinking the coffee in it.

  “Her husband died three years ago. Last month the social worker cut off her welfare,” Father Jimmie said.

  “Why?”

  “The social worker felt like it. That’s the way it works. Take a walk with me,” he said.

  “I need to get back home.”

  “You have time for this,” he said.

  We went outside, into the sunlit, rain-washed loveliness of the fall afternoon. The pecan tree in the side yard puffed with wind and a yellow dog rolled on its back in the dirt while the children swung back and forth above it on their rope swing. But as I followed Father Jimmie down an incline toward the woods in back I could feel the topography changing under my feet, as though I were walking on a sponge.

  “What’s that smell?” I said.

  “You tell me.” He tore a handful of grass from the soil and held the roots up to my nose. “They truck it in from all over the South. Doris’s lungs are as much good to her as rotted cork. People around here carry buckets in their cars because of their children’s constant diarrhea.”

  I held onto the trunk of a withered persimmon tree and looked at the soles of my shoes. They were slick with a black-green substance, as though I had walked across a factory floor. We crossed a board plank spanning a rain ditch. The water was covered with an iridescent sheen that seemed to be rising in chains of bubbles from the bottom of the ditch. Perhaps twenty settling ponds, layered over with loose dirt, were strung along the edge of the woods, each of them crusted with a dried viscous material that looked like an orange scab.

  “Is this Doris’s property?” I said.

  “It belonged to her grandfather. But twenty years ago Doris’s cousin made his ‘X’ on a bill of sale that had Junior’s name typed on it. The cousin and the waste management company that bought the land both claim he’s the Junior Crudup of record and Doris is out of luck.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “No one knows what happened to the real Junior Crudup. He went into
Angola and never came out. There’s no documentation on his death or of his release. Figure that one out.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Father Jimmie studied my face. “These people here don’t have many friends,” he said.

  I slipped the flats of my hands in my back pockets and scuffed at the ground with one shoe, like a third-base coach who had run out of signals.

  “Think I’ll pass,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Father Jimmie picked up a small stone and side-armed it into the woods. I heard it clatter among the tree trunks. Birds should have risen from the canopy into the sky, but there was no movement inside the tree limbs.

  “Who owns this waste management company?” I asked.

  “A guy named Merchie Flannigan.”

  “Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan? From New Iberia?” I said.

  “One and the same. How’d he get that name, anyway?” Father Jimmie said.

  “Think of rooftops,” I said.

  As I drove back to New Iberia, through Morgan City, and down East Main to my rented house on Bayou Teche, I tried not to think anymore of Father Jimmie and the black people in St. James Parish whose community had become a petro-chemical dumping ground. As sad as their story was, in the state of Louisiana it wasn’t exceptional. In fact, on television, the current governor had threatened to investigate the tax status of some young Tulane lawyers who had filed suit against several waste management companies on the basis of environmental racism. The old plantation oligarchy was gone. But its successors did business in the same fashion—with baseball bats.

  I fixed an early supper and ate it on an ancient green picnic table in the backyard. Across the bayou kids were playing tag football in City Park and smoke from meat fires hung in the trees. In the deepening shadows I thought I could hear voices inside my head: my adopted daughter, Alafair, away at Reed College; my deceased wife Bootsie; and a black man named Batist, to whom I had sold my bait and boatrental business south of town. I didn’t do well on Saturday afternoons. In fact, I wasn’t doing well on any afternoon.