Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I went to the pier with Jimmie and listened to Ida Durbin’s story about her background, a story that neither Jimmie nor I had the experience to deal with or even evaluate in terms of veracity. She told us she had been raised by her grandmother in a sawmill town just south of the Arkansas line, and that she had borrowed twenty-seven hundred dollars from the mortgage holder of their house to pay for the grandmother’s cancer treatment in Houston. When Ida couldn’t pay back the loan, she was offered a choice of either eviction or going to work in a hot pillow joint.

  “Stuff like that doesn’t happen, Ida. At least, not anymore,” Jimmie said. His eyes clicked sideways at her. “Does it?”

  She turned one cheek into the light. It was layered with makeup, but we could see the swelling along the jawline, like a chain of tiny dried grapes. “I talked to Lou Kale about getting out. He said if I worked what they call special trade, that’s girls who do everything, I can be even in a month,” she said.

  “He put those bruises on your face?” Jimmie said.

  “A cop did. He was drunk. It’s nothing,” she said.

  We were on the end of the pier, and we could see gulls dipping sand shrimp out of the waves. The sun was hot on the boards, the wind blowing, and blood had dried on the railing where someone had chopped up fish bait.

  “A cop?” Jimmie said.

  “They get free ones sometimes,” she said.

  I didn’t want to listen to it anymore. I went back to the motel by myself. Later, I heard Jimmie outside with Ida, then the two of them driving away in our convertible.

  JIMMIE DIDN’T GO back on the job with me the next day and instead hung out with Ida in Galveston. He bought her clothes and paid four dollars apiece for four recordings of her songs in a recording booth on the amusement pier. This was in an era when we were paid one dollar and ten cents an hour for work that, outside of building board roads in swamps, was considered the lowest and dirtiest in the oil field. He also withdrew his one hundred and twelve dollars in savings from the bank, money put away for his college tuition, and gave it to Ida. When I came back off the hitch, I wanted to punch him out.

  “What’d she do with it?” I said. He was doing push-ups on the floor in his underwear, his feet propped up on the windowsill. His hair was black and shiny, his wide shoulders as smooth as tallow.

  “Gave it to this guy Lou Kale to pay off her debt,” he replied. He dropped his feet from the sill and sat up. From outside I could hear the surf crashing on the beach. “Quit looking at me like that.”

  “Nobody is that stupid,” I said.

  “We sent one of her recordings to Sun Records in Memphis. That’s where Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley got started. Jerry Lee Lewis, too,” he said.

  “Yeah, I heard the Grand Ole Opry has a lot of openings for singing prostitutes.”

  “Why don’t you show a little respect for other people once in a while?” he said.

  Was I my brother’s keeper? I decided I was not. I also decided I did not want to be held hostage by what I considered the self-imposed victimhood of others. I let Jimmie take the convertible and I went back to Louisiana until it was time to rejoin the doodlebug crew on the quarter boat. I hoped by the end of the next hitch, Jimmie would be free of his entanglement with Ida Durbin.

  It was a hot, windblown day when Jimmie picked me up at the dock. A storm was building, and in the south the sky was the blue-black of gunmetal, the inland waters yellow with churned sand, the waves capping as far as the eye could see. Jimmie had the top down on the convertible, and he grinned from behind his shades when he saw me walking toward him with my duffel bag over my shoulder. A bucket of iced-down Pearl and Jax sat on the backseat, the long-neck bottles sweating in the sunlight.

  “You look like a happy man,” I said.

  “Ida’s getting out of the life. I’m moving her out of that house tonight. We’re going to Mexico,” he said. He reached in back and slid a beer out of the ice. He cracked off the cap with a bottle opener that hung from a cord around his neck and handed the bottle to me. “You don’t have anything to say?”

  “It’s a little more than I can think my way through right now. How do you get somebody out of the life?” I said.

  “I went to the cops. This is a free country. People can’t make other people work in whorehouses,” he said.

  I didn’t speak until after he started the engine and began backing out of the parking area, the sun hot on the leather seats, the palm trees clattering in the wind. “The cops who get free ones are on the side of the good guys now?” I said.

  “There was one little bump in the road,” he said. “Remember the hundred and twelve bucks Ida and I gave this guy Lou Kale? He says the guys he works for consider that the interest, so Ida still owes the principal. I don’t quite know what to do about that.”

  He lifted a beer out of a wire holder on the dashboard and drank it while he steered with one hand, his sunglasses patterned with the reflected images of trees, sky, and asphalt, all of it rushing at him, like a film strip out of control, as he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  THAT EVENING Jimmie went off with Ida in the car, supposedly to confront Lou Kale about the one hundred twelve dollars Kale had obviously stolen. I walked down on the amusement pier and ate a burrito for supper. The thunderheads in the south rippled with electricity and I could see the lights of freighters on the horizon and I wondered if Jimmie was actually serious about going to Mexico with Ida Durbin. In three weeks the fall term would be starting at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, in Lafayette, where we were both enrolled. We were three weeks away from normalcy and football games on crisp Saturday afternoons, the booming sounds of marching bands, the innocence of the freshman sock hop in the school gym, the smell of leaves burning and barbecues in the city park across the street from the campus. In my mind’s eye I saw my self-deluded half brother sinking in quicksand, while Ida Durbin sat astride his shoulders.

  My own mother had long ago disappeared into a world of low-rent bars and lower-rent men. Big Aldous, our father, had died in an oil well blowout when I was eighteen. Jimmie’d had little or no parental authority in his life, and I had obviously proved a poor substitute for one. I threw my burrito in a trash can, went to a beer joint down the beach, and drank until 2:00 a.m. while hailstones the size of mothballs pelted the surf.

  IWOKE BEFORE DAWN, trembling all over, the distorted voices and faces of the people from the bar more real than the room around me. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten back to the motel. Water was leaking through the ceiling, and a garbage can was tumbling end over end past the empty carport. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking, my throat so dry I couldn’t swallow. The window curtains were open, and a network of lightning bloomed over the Gulf, all the way to the top of the sky. Inside the momentary white brilliance that lit the clouds and waves I thought I saw a green-black lake where the naked bodies of the damned were submerged to their chests, their mouths crying out to any who would hear.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just booked my first passage on the SS Delirium Tremens.

  I buried my head under a pillow and fell into a sweaty dream. Thunder shook the walls and sheets of rain whipped against the windows. I thought I heard the door open and wind and a sudden infusion of dampness blow into the room. Maybe Jimmie had returned, safe and sound, and all my fears about him had been unjustified, I told myself in my sleep. But when I looked up, the room was quiet, his bed made, the carport empty. I felt myself descending into a vortex of nausea and fear, accompanied by a dilation of blood vessels in the brain that was like a strand of piano wire being slowly tightened around my head with a stick.

  When I woke a second time, I could hear no sound except the rain hitting on the roof. The thunder had stopped, the power in the motel was out, and the room was absolutely black. Then a tree of lightning crackled over the Gulf and I saw a man seated in a chair, no more than two feet from me. He wore sideburns and a striped western shirt, with pearl-colored sn
ap buttons. His cheeks were sunken, pooled with shadow, his mouth small, filled with tiny teeth. A nickel-plated automatic with white grips rested on his thigh.

  He leaned forward, his eyes examining me, his breath moving across my face. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Dave,” I said. “Dave Robicheaux.”

  “If you ain’t Jimmie, you’re his twin. Which is it?” he said.

  “Tell me who you are,” I said.

  He touched the pistol barrel to the center of my forehead. “I ask the questions, hoss. Lay back down,” he said.

  I saw a swelling above his left eye, a cut in his lip, a clot of blood in one nostril. He pulled back the receiver on the pistol and snicked a round into the chamber. “Put your hands on top of the covers,” he said.

  With one hand he felt my knuckles and the tops of my fingers, his eyes fastened on my face. Then he stood up, dropped the magazine from the butt of the automatic, and ejected the round in the chamber. He reached over, picked up the cartridge from the rug, and snugged it in his watch pocket. “You got a lot of luck, kid. When you get a break, real slack, like you’re getting now, don’t waste it. You heard it from the butter and egg man,” he said.

  Then he was gone. When I looked out the window I saw no sign of him, no automobile, not even footprints in the muddy area around the room’s entrance. I lay in bed, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach, my skin crawling with a sense of violation and the stale odor of copulation from the bedcovers.

  Unbelievably, I closed my eyes and fell asleep again, almost like entering an alcoholic blackout. When I woke it was midmorning, the sun shining, and I could hear children playing outside. Jimmie was packing an open suitcase on top of his bed. “Thought you were going to sleep all day,” he said.

  “A guy was looking for you. I think it was that pimp from Post Office Street,” I said.

  “Lou Kale? I don’t think so,” Jimmie replied.

  “He had a gun,” I said. “What do you mean you don’t think so?”

  “He didn’t want to pay back the hundred and twelve bucks he stole. He pulled a shiv on me. So I cleaned his clock. I took the money off him, too,” he said. He dropped his folded underwear in the suitcase and flattened it down, his eyes concentrated on his work. I couldn’t believe what he had just said.

  “Where’s Ida?” I asked.

  “Waiting for me at the bus depot. Get dressed, you got to drive me down there. We’ll be eating Mexican food in ole Monterrey tonight. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he said. He touched at the tops of his swollen hands, then grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Quit worrying. Guys like Kale are all bluff.”

  BUT IDA WAS NOT at the bus depot, nor, when the cops checked, was she at the brothel on Post Office Street. In fact, she had disappeared as though she had been vacuumed off the face of the earth. We didn’t know the name of the town she came from, nor could we even be sure her real name was Ida Durbin. The cops treated our visits to the police station as a nuisance and said Lou Kale had no criminal record, that he denied having a confrontation with Jimmie and denied ever knowing a woman by the name of Ida Durbin. The prostitutes in the house where she had worked said a cleaning girl named Connie had been around there for a while, but that she had gone back home to either Arkansas or Northeast Texas.

  The years passed and I tried not to think about Ida Durbin and her fate. As I began my long odyssey through low-bottom bars and drunk tanks and skin joints of every stripe—in the Deep South, the Philippines, and Vietnam—I would sometimes hear a voice on the jukebox that reminded me of Kitty Wells. I wanted to believe the voice was Ida’s, that somehow the four-dollar discs she and Jimmie had sent to Sun Records had worked a special magic in her life and opened a career for her in Nashville and that she was out there now, under another name, singing in roadhouses where a sunburst guitar and a sequined western costume were proof enough of one’s celebrity.

  But I knew better, and when my booze-induced fantasy faded, I saw Ida in the backseat of a car, a man on either side of her, speeding down a dirt road at night, toward a destination where no human being ever wishes to go.

  Chapter 3

  I WOULD ALMOST FORGET about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that’s what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree—it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.

  Troy Bordelon was a bully when I knew him at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. SLI, as it was called, had been the first integrated college in the South. As far as I knew, there were no incidents when the first black students enrolled, and by and large the students, both white and black, treated one another respectfully. Except for Troy Bordelon. His name was French, but he came from a sawmill town north of Alexandria, an area where the deeds of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia were burned into Reconstruction history with a hot iron.

  Troy kept the tradition alive and well.

  A black kid from Abbeville by the name of Simon Labiche was the only person of color in my ROTC unit. Troy did everything in his power to make Simon’s life miserable. During drill he stepped on Simon’s heels, throwing him off-step, constantly murmuring racial and sexual insults in his ear. When Simon made the drill team and was scheduled to perform at the halftime ceremonies during the homecoming game, Troy brought him a goodwill offering of a cold drink from the refreshment stand. It was loaded with a high-powered laxative that can cause the red scours in cattle.

  Simon, dressed in chrome-plated helmet, white scarf, and white leggings, fouled himself in front of twenty thousand people, dropped his M-1 in the mud, and fled the field in shame.

  But Troy did not confine his abuse to minorities. He bullied anyone who exposed a chink in his armor, and most often these were people who reminded Troy of himself. Nor did the passage of time bring him the wisdom that would allow him to understand the origins of his sadistic inclinations. He returned to his hometown, where he was related to the sheriff and the president of the parish police jury, and went to work for a finance company, one that was owned by the same family who owned the cotton gin and the lumberyards in town.

  His power over poor whites and people of color was enormous. He was loud, imperious, and unflagging in his ridicule of the vulnerable and the weak. For Troy, an act of mercy was an act of identification with his victim.

  Oddly, when traveling through New Iberia, he would always call me up for coffee or to share a meal. I suspected I belonged in Troy’s mind to a self-manufactured memory about his college days in Lafayette, a time he evidently looked back upon with nostalgia. Or maybe because I was a police officer, he enjoyed being in the company of someone who represented power and authority.

  “We had some real fun back then, didn’t we?” he’d say, and slap me hard on the arm. “Dances and all that. Playing jokes on each other in the dorm. Hey, you remember when—”

  I’d try to smile and avoid looking at my watch.

  Then one fine day in early June, after I had hung it up with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, I got a call from Troy’s estranged wife, a schoolteacher named Zerelda. Years ago, at age thirty-five, she had looked sixty. I couldn’t even imagine what she probably looked like today. “He wants to see you. Can you drive up this afternoon?” she said.

  “He doesn’t have a telephone?” I said.

  “He’s at Baptist Hospital. As far as I’m concerned, you can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of dying. So what’s a Christian girl to do?” she said.

  Evidently Troy’s denouement began with the new waitress in the Blue Fish Café—an overweight, big-boned country girl whose mouth was painted bright red, her hair shampooed and blow-dried for her first day on the job. She was eager to please and thought of her new situation as an opportunity to be a cashier or a hostess, a big jump up from her old job at the Wal-Mart. When Troy came in for his breakfast he lit up a cigarette in the non-smoking section, sent his coffee back because it was not
hot enough, and told the waitress there were dishwater spots on his silverware. When his food was served, he complained his steak was pink in the middle, his eggs runny, and he had been given whole wheat rather than rye toast.

  When the girl spilled his water, he asked if she was an outpatient at the epileptic rehabilitation center. By the end of his meal she was a nervous wreck. While she was bent over his table, clearing his dishes, he told others a loud joke about a big-breasted woman and a farm equipment salesman who sold milking machines. The girl’s face burned like a red lightbulb.

  Then one of those moments occurred that no one in a small town ever expects. The owner of the restaurant was a hard-packed, rotund Lebanese man who attended the Assembly of God Church and whose taciturn manner seldom drew attention to him. Without saying a word, he picked up a Silex of scalding hot coffee and poured it over the crown of Troy Bordelon’s head.

  After Troy stopped screaming, he attacked the owner with his fists and the fight cascaded through the dining area into the kitchen. It should have ended there, with two over-the-hill men walking away in shame and embarrassment at their behavior. Instead, when they had stopped fighting and a peacemaker asked both men to apologize, Troy gathered the blood and spittle in his mouth and spat it in the owner’s face. The owner responded by plunging a razor-edged butcher knife four times through Troy’s chest.

  It was dusk when I arrived at the hospital in the little town where Troy had spent most of his life. It was a beautiful evening, the summer light high in the sky, the moon rising over red cotton land and a long bank of green trees on the western horizon. The air smelled of chemical fertilizer, distant rain, night-blooming flowers, and the fecund odor of the ponds on a catfish farm. I didn’t want to go into the hospital. I was never good at deathbed visits, nor at funerals, and now, with age, I resented more and more the selfish claims the dead and dying lay on the quick.