Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “I think you’re out of your mind, is what I think,” he replied.

  “All your news stories featured my name as the shooter. The stories also mentioned I’d shot several suspects in the past. I think you also worked in the fact I’d been canned by NOPD. Is that standard procedure with you guys?”

  “Excuse me,” Val said to his friends. He picked up his telephone and called for security.

  “This is about Ida Durbin, Val,” I said. “Get used to hearing that name. She was a decent country girl who fell into the hands of white slavers. Ida Durbin was her name. Your family had money in Galveston whorehouses. She tried to get out of the life, then something happened to her. Ida Durbin, Val. You recognize the name. I can see it in your eyes. Ida Durbin and I are going to take you and your father down, partner. You’re going to see Ida Durbin’s name on your bedroom ceiling.”

  He rose from his chair and faced me. He wore a pink tie and a pale blue shirt with white cuffs. His hair was styled so that it was long on top and trim on the sides, which accentuated both his height and the leanness of his face. “Under that veneer of the blue-collar knight errant, you’re a vulgarian and a bully, Robicheaux. You’re tolerated around New Iberia because you’ve overcome some serious difficulties in your life, but in truth most people consider you an object of pity.”

  Two uniformed security men had entered Val’s office and were now standing behind me. “On the job, fellows,” I said.

  “No, not on the job. You have no jurisdiction here,” Val said. “You either walk out of here like a gentleman or you’ll be escorted to the front door. Why not make a reasonable choice and stop degrading yourself?”

  “Before I shot Bad Texas Bob, some guy in the Florida Keys called me and tried to warn me off an investigation into Ida Durbin’s disappearance. I couldn’t figure out who that guy was. But the voice was of a kind that sticks in your memory, like a dirty moment in your life you can never scrub out of your head. I think the guy was a Galveston pimp named Lou Kale. The name Lou Kale clang any bells for you, Val?”

  He tried to hold his eyes impassively on mine, but I saw an indentation in his cheek, a twitch, as though an invisible fish hook had pricked his skin and pulled at it. Got you, you bastard, I thought.

  “Take this man out of here,” he said, lifting his chin.

  But this time Val wasn’t speaking to his security personnel. Three uniformed street cops had just walked through the door. They were Cajuns like myself, basically decent men who pumped iron at Red Lorille’s Gym and had families and worked extra jobs to make ends meet. Their hands rested awkwardly at their sides, their eyes avoiding mine. Val Chalons waited for my removal from his office, as though it were a foregone conclusion. In the silence I was sure I heard my watch ticking. “Hey, Robicheaux, come have coffee wit’ us,” one of cops said.

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.

  He and his two colleagues were relaxed and confident as we left the building. A potentially embarrassing moment had come and gone, they had not had to arrest one of their own, and their world had become a comfortable place again. They told me they were glad my “I.A. beef” had not jammed me up.

  “’Cause that was a righteous shoot, huh? That old dude tried to cap you and you smoked his sausage. You done what you had to do, wasn’t no choice about it?” one of them said. His eyes searched mine as he waited for my answer.

  THAT EVENING the sky was full of birds, the oaks deep in shade, and out on the bayou white ducks were wimpling the water among the reeds. I could smell meat fires in City Park and hear kids playing softball. I thought I was through with Valentine Chalons for the day. But I should have known you don’t publicly challenge a man whose ego is as tender as an infected gland and simply walk away from it. When the phone rang, I picked it up without glancing at the caller ID. Val began speaking as soon as he heard my voice. “You scum-sucking cretin, if it wasn’t for your age, I’d break your jaw.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Honoria told me about your tryst and the handcuffs and a few other sickening details about your behavior. You don’t seem to have any boundaries, do you?”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “You screwed my sister, you sorry sack of shit. She’s an impaired person.”

  “You listen—”

  “You’re white trash, Robicheaux, the village fraud constantly presenting himself as suffering victim. You latch on to causes that give your life a legitimacy it doesn’t rightfully possess. Now you’re trying to drag my family through the mud. People like you should be bars of soap.”

  My hand was clenched tightly on the telephone receiver, my temples throbbing with a level of anger I was not ready for. I tried to disconnect from his words and speak in a dispassionate tone, but at the moment my only impulse was to hang up the phone and find Valentine Chalons.

  “Ida Durbin and Lou Kale,” I said.

  “Good try, asshole,” he said. The line went dead.

  THE REST OF THE EVENING I tried to free myself from my anger. I had already missed the 7:00 p.m. AA meeting at the Episcopalian cottage across from old New Iberia High, and now, left to my own resources, I could not sort through my own thoughts or get Valentine Chalons’s words out of my head.

  Was there a degree of truth in them? Was that why I was so bothered? The unarguable fact was I had blood on my hands and during most of my adult life I had placed myself in situations that allowed me to do enormous physical injury to others, even taking their lives, without being held legally accountable for my deeds.

  It’s no accident that both cops and recidivists have mutual understandings about the netherworld they share. The heart-pounding rush, the lack of complexity or societal restraint, the easy access to women who love a gladiator, it all waits for the participant like a glittering avenue in Las Vegas or a free-fire zone inside a green country that has been deemed expendable.

  A therapist once told me that the id for some people is a quiet furnace that simply needs a jigger of whiskey as an accelerant. He also told me I was one of those people.

  I went to Clete’s cottage, but he was not home. Jimmie was back in town, staying in my spare bedroom, now determined to rebuild the house we had been raised in. He had gone to Lake Charles to contract a builder who specialized in salvaged hardwoods from torn-down barns and farmhouses and what in South Louisiana is called recovered cypress—huge trees that were sunk in swamps or rivers over one hundred years ago, restored into beautiful, soft wood that seems to shine with an interior glow.

  I think Jimmie believed he could correct the past and refashion it with nails and ancient wood, somehow cleansing it of bad memories and leaving only the events that should have defined our childhood. I would have given anything that evening if he had been home so I could talk with him. But he was not there, and Val Chalons’s words still burned in my ears.

  I drove to the graveyard in St. Martinville and under the rising moon said a rosary by Bootsie’s tomb. Lightning crawled through the clouds overhead, and across the Teche I could hear music coming from a nightclub and see the neon beer signs in second-floor windows where a party was taking place. I sat for a long time beside Bootsie’s tomb, then drove back to New Iberia and went to bed after midnight.

  BY FRIDAY I was wired to the eyes, trying to find professional reasons which would allow me to confront Valentine for his insults. I told myself I was allowing pride to do the work of my enemies, but my best self-analysis was of no help to me. I didn’t care if someone called me white trash or not, but that insult, when it is used in the South, is collective in nature, and Val Chalons had aimed his words at my origins, my mother and father, their illiteracy and poverty and hardship, and I wanted to back him into a corner and break him apart—bone, teeth, and joint.

  At noon, I drove out to Molly Boyle’s office on the bayou. She was behind her desk, the air-conditioning unit in the window blowing on the s
ide of her face.

  “Go to lunch with me,” I said.

  “Dave—”

  “We’ll take someone with us.”

  “You’re suggesting we’re doing something illicit,” she said.

  “It’s what we did before. Don’t shine me on.”

  She pressed her fingers against her temples. “You roll in here like a hurricane, then accuse me of being disingenuous. It’s a bit hard to take.”

  “So drink a Dr Pepper with me.”

  “No!”

  I was standing in the middle of the room, drowning in my own ineptitude and heavy-handedness.

  She put on a pair of reading glasses, then took them off again. “Is this about the man you had to shoot?”

  I felt my right hand open and close at my side, a drop of sweat form and run from my armpit. “He wasn’t the first,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve killed others.”

  “Have you talked to somebody about this?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I can’t have lunch with you,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  She looked straight ahead, out the window, her skin flushed, her eyes filming. Then she propped her forehead on the ends of her fingers so I could not see her face. “I can’t be of any help to you. I wish I could. I’m sorry,” she said. When she looked at me again, there were tiny red threads in the whites of her eyes.

  THAT EVENING, after work, I went shopping at the Winn-Dixie. I filled the basket with items I didn’t need, and told myself that perhaps I should invite friends over, maybe barbecue in the backyard or cook a huge gumbo for the people Jimmie and I had grown up with. I dropped frozen packs of veined shrimp and crawfish in the basket, along with gourmet cheese and a smoked ham, a chocolate cake, a gallon of ice cream, crackers and cans of smoked oysters, ginger ale, diet drinks, big jars of fruit juice, a case of Corona, a fat green bottle of Burgundy, and a quart of Jim Beam and one of Black Jack Daniel’s.

  I could hear a whirring sound in my ears, like wind blowing in a conch shell, as I stacked my purchases on the conveyor belt at the checkout stand. Then the black teenage girl working behind the register, whom I had deliberately chosen, went on break, and the assistant manager, a man my age, took her place. “Fixing to have a party at your house, Dave?” he said.

  “Yeah, I thought I might,” I said.

  “Good weather for a cookout, huh?” he said, scanning the beer and whiskey and wine on the belt, his face empty of expression.

  “It’s supposed to rain, but who knows?” I said.

  “Could be. Everyt’ing all right with you, Dave?” he said.

  “Just great,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s real good,” he said. For the first time, he looked directly at me, his feigned cheerfulness carefully held in place.

  I rolled the basket through the parking lot to my truck and began loading my groceries in back, the sky overhead gray and crackling with dry thunder. Then Molly Boyle passed me in a rusted compact, looked back at me, and made a U-turn, almost running over a man on a bicycle. She stopped abreast of me, her windows down, the front windshield spotted with raindrops. “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” I replied.

  Her eyes lighted on the packages in the bed of my pickup. “Not here. I’ll follow you to your house,” she said.

  “I’m kind of tied up right now,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” she said.

  I tried to lose her in the traffic and reach my house with enough time to unload the pickup and put everything away before I had to invite her inside. But Molly Boyle was a determined adversary. She stayed right behind my pickup, all the way down Main, past the antebellum and Victorian homes that lined the street, past the city library and the grotto dedicated to Jesus’s mother, right into my porte cochere.

  The rain was ticking on the trees and my tin roof as I hefted up two bags of groceries and started in the house, leaving the case of Corona and bottles of Black Jack and Beam and Burgundy in the truck.

  She did not wait on an invitation. She picked up an armload of booze and followed me into the kitchen and set it down with a clunk on the drainboard, pushing a strand of hair out of her eye. “You wouldn’t want to leave this in the rain, would you?” she said.

  “I buy it for guests sometimes,” I said.

  She raised a finger at me before the words were hardly out of my mouth. “Lie to others or lie to God, and you’re only human. Do it to yourself and you never wash out the stain,” she said.

  “How about taking it out of overdrive?” I said.

  “I acted in a cowardly fashion this afternoon,” she said.

  “I don’t under—”

  “You were obviously in need of a friend, or you wouldn’t have come to my office. I’ve been a hypocrite, Dave.”

  “No need for a confession here. Everything is copacetic,” I said, my gaze drifting back to the booze on the drainboard.

  “I led you on, then I sent you away. Please don’t drink. You’re a good man. Everyone seems to know that except you.”

  The light had gone out of the sky, and I could hear hailstones on the roof and see them bouncing in the backyard. Out on the bayou a willow tree turned white when lightning struck in the park. When I looked back at Molly, her face was close to mine, as though it had floated there, out of dream. I put my mouth to hers, then felt her arms around my neck, her stomach against me. I could feel the smoothness and warmth in her skin and smell a fragrance in her hair, like night-blooming flowers. I squeezed her against me, hard, perhaps harder than I should have, but she had the firm, muscular body of a countrywoman and I realized that Molly Boyle was probably not daunted by anyone or anything.

  She walked ahead of me into the bedroom and let down the blinds, a look of determination on her face, as though she had set aside the counsel of others for reasons she would probably never share with anyone. Then she did something I had never seen a woman do in my life—she made the sign of the cross on my person, as though I were incapable of doing it myself, touching my forehead, my breastbone, and each of my shoulders. Then she undressed with her back to me, lay down on the bed, and waited.

  The hail clattered on the roof and in the trees, and the attic fan drew the breeze across the sheets and rattled the metal blinds. I heard the phone ring and lightning crash in City Park and someone blowing a car horn in the rain, but I could not think about anything except Molly Boyle’s hair spread out like points of fire on the pillow, and the rise and fall of her breasts, and the grace and invitation of her thighs, and the heated whisper of my name, over and over, in my own ear.

  Chapter 13

  CLETE HAD NOT BEEN DOING WELL since the shooting death of Bob Cobb. He blamed himself and his own reckless attitudes for bringing Bad Texas Bob back to the fishing camp, putting both of us in harm’s way and ultimately causing me to take on the burden of Bob Cobb’s exit from the world.

  But Clete was not at fault. Cobb was evil and long ago should have been rejected by the system for the pathological creature he was. I told Clete these things, but they seemed to do him no good. He tried to get out of his melancholy mood by smacking the heavy bag at Red Lorille’s Gym in Lafayette, clanking iron, and staying in the steam room until he looked like a boiled crab.

  Sometimes I believed an incident in the present acted as a catalyst that took him back to Vietnam. But I never could be sure. Clete seldom spoke of Vietnam, even with me, dismissing his experience there as an aberration not worth resurrecting. I knew better, though. Even when we were patrolmen together, he’d fall into the thousand-yard stare, then snap out of it and tell me he couldn’t sleep because his wife was hooking up with an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder, Colorado, and was probably going to dump him for love beads and Rocky Mountain weed.

  Clete felt he had let me down. I tried to dissuade him by telling him his own attitude was arrogant, that he wasn’t the controller and centerpiece of other people�
�s lives. His reply was, “Leave the church-basement psychobabble at home, Streak.” Clete had many faults, but a lack of devotion to his friends was not among them.

  So on Saturday morning I took my troubles to my best friend at his cottage at the motor court and told him about everything that had happened in the last week—particularly my encounter at the television studio with Val Chalons and my experience with Molly Boyle the previous evening. The rain had stopped in the predawn hours, and the morning was bright and cool, the trees dripping behind the cottage. Clete sat outside in a metal chair, dressed in a strap undershirt and oversized scarlet boxing trunks, shining a bagful of shoes. I thought he would react histrionically to the story I told him, but he kept his attention fixed on the shoes he was softly brushing, his face never changing expression.

  When I finished, he set down the shoes and looked at them. “You got it on with a nun?”

  “I wouldn’t put it in those terms,” I replied.

  His eyes lifted into mine. “But you were in the sack with a Catholic nun?”

  “She never took vows.”

  “People don’t make those kinds of distinctions, big mon.”

  “I was going to get loaded. She knew it. So she got in my way.”

  His eyes were unblinking, the scar through one eyebrow and across the top of his nose like a flattened pink worm. “You want advice?”

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  “Get a lot of gone between you and this situation.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “I’m stunned,” he said. And for first time that morning he grinned.

  He went into the cottage and showered and changed clothes. Out on the Teche a barge heaped with glistening piles of mud dredged from the middle of the bayou was being towed downstream, then a speedboat passed, towing water-skiers who sent waves up into the trees along the bank. Clete came back outside combing his hair, dressed in sharkskin slacks, oxblood loafers with tassels, and a starched sports shirt printed with flowers, the sleeves folded up in one neat turn on each of his huge biceps.