Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  She looked at both of us. “Y’all sure favor for brothers who aren’t twins. Maybe your mama just liked the way y’all looked and decided she’d use just one face,” she said. She smiled at her own joke, then looked away and studied the tops of her hands when Jimmie’s eyes tried to hold hers.

  “Where you live, Ida?” he asked.

  “Over yonder,” she said, nodding vaguely up the main drag.

  “You work here in Galveston?” he said.

  “For a little while, I am. I got to go now,” she replied.

  “We’ll drive you,” he said.

  “I’ll take a cab. I do it all the time. It’s only fifty cents,” she said.

  Jimmie started to protest. But she got up and brushed crumbs of fried shrimp off her dress. “You boys don’t get in no more trouble,” she said.

  “Boys?” Jimmie said, after she was gone.

  GALVESTON ISLAND was a strange place back in those days. The town was blue-collar, the beaches segregated, the Jax brewery its most prominent industry, the old Victorian homes salt-bitten and peeling. It was a vacation spot for the poor and the marginal and a cultural enclave where the hard-shell Baptist traditions of Texas had little application. Every beer joint on the beach featured slot and racehorse machines. For more serious gamblers, usually oil people from Houston, there were supper clubs that offered blackjack, craps, and roulette. One Sicilian family ran it all. Several of their minions moved out to Vegas in ’47 with Benjamin Siegel. One of them, in fact, built the Sands.

  But nonetheless there was an air of both trust and innocence about the island. The roller coaster in the amusement park had been officially condemned by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the notice of condemnation nailed on a post hard by the ticket booth. But every night during the summer, vacationers packed the open cars that plummeted down warped tracks and around wooden turns whose spars and rusted bolts vibrated like a junkyard.

  Churchgoing families filled the bingo parlors and ate boiled crabs that sometimes had black oil inside the shells. At daybreak, huge garbage scows sailed southward for the horizon, gulls creaking overhead, to dump tons of untreated waste that somehow, in the mind’s eye, were refined into inert molecules of harmless matter.

  But inland from the carnival rides, the fishing jetties, and the beachfront beer joints and seafood restaurants, there was another Galveston, and another industry, that made no pretense to innocence.

  During the next two days we didn’t see Ida Durbin on the main drag or on the amusement pier or on any of the jetties, and we had no idea where she lived, either. Then, on Saturday morning, while we were in a barbershop a block from the beach, we saw her walk past the window, wearing a floppy straw hat and a print dress, with a lavender Mexican frill around the hem, a drawstring bag slung from her shoulder.

  Jimmie was out the door like a shot.

  She told him she had to buy a money order for her grandmother in Northeast Texas, that she had to pick up her mail at the post office, that she had to buy sunburn lotion for her back, that she was tied up all day and evening.

  “Tomorrow is Sunday. Everything is closed. What are you doing then?” he said, grinning.

  She looked quizzically at nothing, her mouth squeezed into a button. “I reckon I could fix some sandwiches and meet y’all at the amusement pier,” she said.

  “We’ll pick you up,” he said.

  “No, you won’t,” she replied.

  The next day we discovered a picnic with Ida Durbin meant Vienna sausage sandwiches, sliced carrots, a jar of sun tea, and three Milky Way bars.

  “Some folks don’t like Viennas,” she said, and she pronounced the word “Vy-ennas.” “But with lettuce and mayonnaise, I think they’re real good.”

  “Yeah, these are a treat. Aren’t they, Dave?” Jimmie said.

  “You bet,” I said, trying to wash down a piece of simulated sausage that was like a chunk of rubber.

  We were on the amusement pier, sitting on a wood bench in the shade of a huge outdoor movie screen. In the background I could hear pinball machines and popping sounds from a shooting gallery. Ida wore a pink skirt and a white blouse with lace on the collar; her arms and the top of her chest were powdered with strawberry freckles.

  “Dave and I go back on the quarter boat in the morning,” Jimmie said.

  She chewed on the end of a carrot stick, her eyes staring blankly at the beach and the surf sliding up on the sand.

  “We’ll be back on land in ten days,” Jimmie said.

  “That’s good. Maybe I’ll see y’all again,” she said.

  But if there was any conviction in her voice, I did not hear it. Down below, a huge wave crashed against the pilings, shuddering the planks under our feet.

  Chapter 2

  AFTER THE NEXT HITCH we went back to the motel where our cousin, the manager, who was confined to a wheelchair, let us stay free in return for running a few errands. For the next five days Jimmie had nothing on his mind except seeing Ida. We cruised the main drag in our convertible, night-fished on the jetties, went to a street dance in a Mexican neighborhood, and played shuffleboard in a couple of beer joints on the beach, but nobody we talked to had ever heard of Ida Durbin.

  “It’s my fault. I should have given her the motel number,” he said.

  “She’s older than us, Jimmie.”

  “So what?” he said.

  “That’s the way girls are when they’re older. They don’t want to hurt our feelings, but they got their own lives to live, like they want to be around older men, know what I mean? It’s a put-down for them to be seen with young guys,” I said.

  Wrong choice.

  “I don’t believe that at all. She wouldn’t have made sandwiches for us. You calling her a hypocrite or something?” he said.

  We went back on the quarter boat and worked a job south of Beaumont, stringing rubber cable and seismic jugs through a swamp, stepping over cottonmouths and swatting at mosquitoes that hung as thick as black gauze inside the shade. When we came off the hitch we were sick with sunburn and insect bites and spoiled food the cooks had served after the refrigeration system had failed. But as soon as we got to our motel, Jimmie showered and changed into fresh clothes and started looking for Ida again.

  “I found her,” he said our second day back. “She’s at a music store. She was piddling around with a mandolin, plink, plink, plink, then she started singing, with just me and the owner there. She sounds like Kitty Wells. She promised she’d wait. Come on, Dave.”

  “Why’d you come back to the motel?”

  “To get my wallet. I’m gonna buy us all a meal.”

  Jimmie had said she was waiting in a music store. It was actually a pawnshop, a dirt-smudged orange building sandwiched between a pool hall and a bar on the edge of the black district. She was sitting on a bench, under the canvas awning, twisting a peg on a Gibson mandolin that rested in her lap. Most of the finish below the sound hole had been worn away by years of plectrum strokes across the wood.

  The street was hot, full of noise and dust and smoke from junker cars. “Oh, hi, fellers,” she said, looking up from under her straw hat. “I thought you weren’t coming back. I was just fixing to leave.”

  “Did you buy the mandolin?” Jimmie asked.

  “It’s already mine. I pay the interest on it so Mr. Pearl doesn’t have to sell it. He lets me come in and play it whenever I want.”

  She returned the mandolin to the pawnshop owner, then came outside again. “Well, I’d better get going,” she said.

  “I’m taking us to lunch,” Jimmie said.

  “That’s nice, Jimmie, but I got to get ready for work,” she said.

  “Where you work?” he asked.

  She smiled, her eyes green and empty in the sunlight, her attention drifting to a car backfiring in the street.

  “This time we’ll drive you,” I said.

  “My bus stops right on the corner. See, there it comes now, right on time,” she said, and started walking towar
d the intersection. A throwaway shopper’s magazine was tucked under her arm. She looked back over her shoulder. “I’ve got your phone number now. I’ll call you. I promise.”

  Jimmie stared after her. “You should have heard her sing,” he said.

  When the bus pulled away from the curb, Ida was sitting up front, in the whites-only section, totally absorbed with her magazine.

  Just as we got into our convertible, the owner of the pawnshop came out on the sidewalk. He was a tall, white-haired man with a sloping girth and big hands and cigars stuffed in his shirt pocket. “Hey, you two,” he said.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “That girl has enough trouble in her life. Don’t you be adding to it,” the owner said.

  Jimmie’s hands were on top of the steering wheel, his head bent forward. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

  “Sass me again and I’ll explain it to you,” the owner said.

  “Screw that. What do you mean she’s got trouble?” Jimmie said.

  But the pawnshop owner only turned and went back inside his building.

  THE NEXT NIGHT Jimmie came in drunk and fell down in the tin shower stall. He pushed me away when I tried to help him up, his muscular body beaded with water, a rivulet of blood running from his hairline.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  “Is this about Ida Durbin?”

  “That’s not what they call her,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Shut up about Ida,” he said.

  The next morning he was gone before I woke up, but our car was still in the carport. I crossed Seawall Boulevard to the beach and saw him sitting on the sand, shirtless and barefoot, surrounded by the collapsed air sacs of jellyfish.

  “They call her Connie where she works. They don’t have last names there,” he said.

  The previous afternoon Ida had called him at the motel and told him that he was a nice fellow, that she knew he would do well in college, and maybe years from now they’d see one another again when he was a rich and successful man. But in the meantime this was good-bye and he mustn’t get her confused in his mind with the girl who was right for him.

  After she rang off, Jimmie went straight to the pawnshop and told the owner he wanted to buy Ida’s mandolin.

  “It’s not for sale,” the owner said.

  “I’m going to give it to Ida as a present. Now, how much is it?” Jimmie said.

  “What do you think you’re gonna get out of this, son?” he said.

  “Get out of what?”

  The owner clicked his fingers on the glass display case. “It’s thirty-five dollars on the loan, two dollars for the closing charge.”

  Jimmie counted out the money from his billfold. The owner placed the mandolin in a double paper sack and set it on the display case.

  “Can you tell me where she works or lives?” Jimmie asked.

  The owner looked at him as though a lunatic had walked into his shop.

  “Thought you were a put-on, boy, but I guess you’re for real. She lives and works in the same place. On Post Office Street. You figured it out by now?”

  THE PAINT ON the two-story houses was blistered, the dirt yards weedless and hard-packed, the bedsheets on the clotheslines flapping in a hot wind. Jimmie parked the convertible and looked uncertainly at the houses, the neck of the mandolin clutched in one hand. A city police car passed by, with two uniformed officers in the front seat. They were talking to one another and neither paid attention to his presence on the street. “I’m looking for Ida Durbin,” Jimmie said to a black girl who was hanging wash in a side yard.

  The girl was frail and wore a dusty yellow blouse with loops of sweat in the armpits. Her forearms were wrapped with a mottled pink and white discoloration, as though her natural color had been leached out of the skin. She shook her head.

  “She has freckles and sandy red hair. Her name is Ida,” Jimmie said.

  “This is a colored house. White mens don’t come in the daytime,” she said. The wind flapped a sheet that was gray from washing across her face, but she seemed not to notice.

  Jimmie stepped closer to her. “Listen, if this girl works in a place for white people, where would I—” he began.

  Then Jimmie felt rather than saw a presence at the window behind him. The black girl picked up her basket of wash and walked quickly away. “You don’t look like the gas man,” the man in the window said.

  He was white, with small ears, sunken cheeks, and hair that was as black and shiny as patent leather, oiled and combed into a slight curl on the neck.

  “I’m looking for Ida Durbin,” Jimmie said.

  The man leaned on the sill and thought about it. He wore a creamy cowboy shirt with stitched pockets and chains of roses sewn on the shoulders. “Four doors down. Ask for Connie. Tell you what, I’ll walk you there,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” Jimmie said.

  “I’m here to serve,” the man said.

  On the way down the street, the man extended his hand. It was small and hard, the knuckles pronounced. “I’m Lou Kale. Connie’s your heartthrob?” he said.

  “The girl I’m looking for is named Ida.”

  “On this street, nobody uses their own name. That is, except me,” Lou Kale said, and winked. “I was gonna call her Ida Red, after the girl in the song. Except she didn’t think that was respectful, so she made up her own name. What’s your name?”

  Jimmie hesitated, touching his bottom lip with his tongue.

  “See what I mean?” Lou Kale said. “Soon as people set foot on Post Office Street, their names fly away.”

  Lou Kale escorted Jimmie through the front door of a two-story Victorian house with hollow wood pillars on the gallery and a veranda on the second floor. The shades were drawn in the living room to keep out the dust, and the air inside the heated walls was stifling. The couches and straight-back chairs were empty; the only color in the room came from the plastic casing of a Wurlitzer jukebox plugged into the far wall. Lou Kale told a heavyset white woman in the kitchen that Connie had a caller.

  The woman labored up a stairs that groaned with her weight and shouted down a hallway.

  “Look at me, kid,” Lou Kale said. He seemed to lose his train of thought. He touched at his nostril with one knuckle, then huffed air out his nose, perhaps reorganizing his words. He was shorter than Jimmie, firmly built, flat-stomached, with thick veins in his arms, his dark jeans belted high on his hips. His face seemed full of play now. “You’re not here to get your ashes hauled, are you?”

  “Who cares why I’m here. It’s a free country, ain’t it?” Jimmie replied. Then wondered why he had just used bad grammar.

  Lou Kale made a sucking sound with his teeth, his eyelids fluttering as he watched a fly buzzing on the wall. Then he jiggled his fingers in the air, as though surrendering to a situation beyond his control. “You give your present to Connie, then you beat feet. This place is off limits for you and so is Connie. That means you find your own girlfriend and you don’t try to get a punch on somebody else’s tab. We connecting here?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Lou Kale said. “Connie, get down here!”

  When Ida Durbin came down the stairs she was wearing a pair of tight, blue-jean shorts and a blouse that looked made of cheesecloth that outlined the black bra she wore underneath. She had been asleep, and her face was flushed from the stored-up heat in the upper levels of the building and marked with lines from the pillow she had been sleeping upon. Even in the gloom Jimmie could see the injury in her eyes when she realized who her visitor was.

  “Let’s have a quick exchange of pleasantries, then your friend is gonna be on his way,” Lou Kale said to her.

  Jimmie stepped toward her, his arm brushing Lou Kale’s shoulder. “I paid off your loan on the mandolin,” he said.

  “Jimmie, you shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “I just thought I’d dro
p the mandolin by, that’s all,” he said. He handed it to her, his movements stiff, his voice tangled in his throat. Lou Kale clicked a fingernail on the glass cover of his wristwatch.

  “Thank you. You better go now,” she said.

  Then Jimmie couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Who is this guy?” he asked, pointing sideways at Lou Kale. “What are you doing here?”

  “Connie, two Panamanian tankers docked this morning. Go finish your nap,” Lou Kale said. “Everything is solid. Believe me, I like this guy. He’s a cute boy, that’s what he is.”

  She went up the stairs, glancing back once at Jimmie. Lou Kale moved into Jimmie’s line of sight. “You’ve done your good deed. That’s reward enough, right?” he said. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmie said. But he didn’t move from his position.

  “We don’t want insincerity here,” Lou Kale said, resting his hand on Jimmie’s shoulder, his breath touching Jimmie’s skin.

  Then Lou Kale walked him to the door, as though Jimmie had no volition of his own, and before Jimmie knew it, he was back outside, the door shutting loudly behind him.

  The sun was white and hot in the sky, and the humidity felt like damp wool on his skin. For a moment he could hear no sound, as though he were trapped inside a glass bell. Upstairs, someone turned on a radio, and from the window he heard the adenoidal voice of Kitty Wells singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.”

  AFTER JIMMIE told me of his visit to Post Office Street, I took him to breakfast and thought our misadventure with Ida Durbin was over. But I was wrong. She called him that afternoon and asked to meet him on the amusement pier.

  “Leave her alone,” I told him.

  “She paddled through sharks to get us off a sandbar,” he said.

  “She’s a prostitute. You can’t change that. Act like you have a brain,” I said.

  Once again, I had spoken without thinking. Our father, known as Big Aldous Robicheaux in the oil patch, had been a good-hearted, illiterate Cajun and notorious barroom brawler whose infidelities had included a prostitute in Abbeville. The prostitute died of Hansen’s disease in a federal facility at Carville, Louisiana. She was also Jimmie’s mother.