Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “This is Dave Robicheaux,” I said when he picked up the receiver.

  “I’d like to buy one of your birdhouses.”

  “You called at the right time. I got a sale on. One for twenty-five dol’ars or two for forty-nine ninety-five.”

  “I think I’ll stick with one.”

  “Installation is free.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just drop it off at Molly’s office and I’ll send you a check.”

  “No, suh, I give door-to-door complete service. That’s what you got to do to make a bidness a success today. Me and Tee Bleu got to go to the Wal-Mart. You gonna be home?”

  Twenty minutes later he was at the house, balancing on a stepladder while he wired the birdhouse to an oak limb. His son, Tee Bleu, was throwing pecans into the bayou. I wrote a check for Andre on the back steps.

  “Miss Molly at home?” he said.

  “No, she’s at the grocery store. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I just heard some people talking at the agency. Stuff they didn’t have no right to say.”

  His eyes fixed on me, then he began to look innocuously around the yard, his whole head turning from spot to spot, as though it were attached to a metal rod.

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “A couple of ladies was saying they ain’t bringing their children to the agency no mo’ ’cause of what happened.”

  “You talking about the child molestation charge filed against me?”

  “Mr. Val behind that, suh. It ain’t right. No, suh. Ain’t right.”

  “You know much about Mr. Val?”

  “Know as much as I need to.”

  “You’re a mysterious man, Andre.” I tore the check out of my checkbook and handed it to him.

  His half-moon eyebrows could have been snipped out of black felt and pasted on his forehead. He studied his little boy playing down by the bayou, and shook his shirt on his chest to cool his skin. Through the trees we could see a dredge barge passing on the bayou, its hull low in the water, its decks loaded with piles of mud.

  “When I was a li’l boy about that size, I seen a gator come out of the bayou after a baby. Baby was in diapers, toddling along on the edge of the water. His mama was hanging wash up by the trees, probably t’inking about the worthless man who put that baby in her belly. Gator got the baby by his li’l leg and started dragging him toward the water. Wasn’t nothing nobody could do about it. That gator was long as your truck and two feet ’cross the head. The mother and the old folks was running ’round screaming, hitting at it wit’ buckets and crab nets and cane poles, but that gator just kept on moving down to the water, wit’ the baby hanging out its mouth, just like they was hitting on it with pieces of string.

  “Then Mr. Raphael run down from the big house wit’ a butcher knife and cut the gator’s t’roat. He drove the baby to Charity Hospital in Lafayette and saved his life. People couldn’t talk about nothing else for a year except how Mr. Raphael save that po’ child’s life.”

  Andre stopped his story and looked down the slope at his son. The late sun was a burnt orange through the trees, and blue jays were clattering in the canopy.

  “I’m not sure I get the point, Andre,” I said.

  “People loved Mr. Raphael. But they ain’t knowed him. Not like I knowed him. Not like I know Mr. Val. My li’l boy growing up in different times from the ones I growed up in. I’m real happy for that. That’s the only point I was making, Mr. Dave. I got birdseed out in my car. You want me to fill up your birdhouse?”

  “I have some in the shed. Thanks, anyway,” I said.

  On his way out, he helped Molly carry in her groceries from her car, his face jolly and full of cheer as he set the bags down heavily, one after another, on the kitchen table.

  After he was gone, I went inside and helped her put away the groceries. “Andre told me some ladies at your agency won’t bring their children there anymore,” I said.

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “Man’s just reporting what he heard.”

  “I know who I married. That’s all I care about.”

  “You’re a pretty good gal to hang out with,” I said.

  I poured a glass of iced tea for both of us and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. She leaned over me and hugged me under the neck and kissed me behind the ear.

  “What was that for?” I said.

  “I felt like it,” she replied.

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed of two brown pelicans sailing low and flat over an inland bay in late autumn, the pouches under their beaks plump with fish. In the dream they continued north in their flight, across miles of sawgrass stiff with frost and bays that looked like hammered copper. They passed over a cluster of shrimp boats tied up at the docks in a coastal town, then followed a winding bayou into the heart of the Teche country. The pelicans turned in a wide circle over a swamp thick with gum trees and cypress snags, and sailed right across the home where Jimmie and I grew up. Through the eyes of the birds I saw the purple rust on the tin roof of the house and the cypress boards that had turned the color of scorched iron from the dust and smoke of stubble fires in the cane fields. I saw my mother and father in the backyard, hoeing out their Victory garden during World War II. I saw Jimmie and me in tattered overalls, building a wood fire under the big iron pot in which we cooked hog cracklings after first frost.

  Then all the people in the yard looked up at the sky, like flowers turning into the sun, and waved at the pelicans.

  I woke up from the dream and went into the kitchen to make coffee. What did the dream mean? Bootsie had said that one day the brown pelicans would come back to the Teche. But I didn’t need dreams to tell me there were no pelicans on Bayou Teche, and that my parents were as dead as the world in which I grew up.

  “Up early?” I heard Molly say.

  “It’s a beautiful morning,” I said.

  She went outside and came back with both Tripod and Snuggs and filled their pet bowls. “There’s a robin standing on top of the new birdhouse,” she said.

  “Andre Bergeron told me a story yesterday about Mr. Raphael saving a baby from a gator. Except his story seemed to be about something else.”

  “A baby?”

  “Yeah, a black baby. A gator came after it. Bergeron said when he was a little boy he saw Mr. Raphael save the baby from the gator.”

  “The baby was Andre. At least that’s what I always heard. The old man saved his life. Andre has ugly scars all over one calf.”

  “Funny guy,” I said.

  “Andre is sweet,” she replied. She looked at the clock on the counter. “It’s only five-thirty. You sure you don’t want to take a nap before you go to work?” She pursed her lips and waited, her chest rising and falling in the soft blueness of the morning.

  “You talked me into it,” I said.

  IATTENDED THE FRIDAY noon meeting of an AA bunch known as the Insanity Group. The meeting was held in a dilapidated house in a poor section of town, and was supposedly a nonsmoking one. But people lit up in both the front and back doorways and flooded the house’s interior with amounts of smoke that few bars contain. The people in the Insanity Group had paid hard dues—in jails, detox units, car wrecks, and the kind of beer-glass brawls that quickly turn homicidal. Few of the men shaved more than once every five or six days. Many of the women, most of whom were tattooed, considered themselves fortunate to have a job in a carwash. Anybody there whose life didn’t trail clouds of chaos possessed the spiritual eminence of St. Francis of Assisi.

  But their honesty and courage in dealing with the lot life had dealt them had always been an example to me. Unfortunately for me, the subject of the meeting was the Fourth Step of Alcoholics Anonymous, namely, making a thorough and fearless inventory of one’s own conscience. It was not a subject I cared to broach, at least not since my encounter with Jericho Johnny Wineburger at Henderson Swamp.

  I made no contribution during the meeting, although the previous week I had admitted my slip
to everyone there.

  “You want to say something, Dave?” the group leader said just before closing.

  “My name is Dave. I’m an alcoholic,” I said.

  “Hello, Dave!” everyone shouted.

  “I’m glad to be here and sober. Thanks,” I said.

  After the “Our Father,” I bagged out the door and headed for the department before any overly helpful people decided to chat with me about the Fourth Step.

  I buried myself in the baskets of paperwork that had been delegated to me since I had been put on the desk. But I could not get Jericho Johnny out of my head. Clete had cranked his engine. Now neither he nor I could shut it off. In the meantime, Val Chalons had no clue that he was potential sharkmeat.

  I hated the thought of what I had to do and fought with myself about it the entire weekend.

  BY NOON MONDAY I was worn out with it and picked up the phone and called Val Chalons’s residential number. The voice that answered was unfamiliar. I could hear hammering in the background, an electric saw whining through wood.

  “Where’s Mr. Chalons?” I asked.

  “Out on the bayou, popping skeets. Well, they ain’t exactly skeets.”

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  “The carpenter.”

  “Would you ask Mr. Chalons to come to the phone? This is Detective Dave Robicheaux.”

  “He said I ain’t suppose to bot’er him. Ain’t you the guy who beat him up?”

  I drove in my pickup down the bayou to the Chalons home. Only Saturday, the old man’s ashes had been interred at a secular funeral. The transformation in progress at the property was stunning. A lawn crew of at least a dozen men was weeding out the flower beds, cracking apart and air-vacuuming layers of compacted leaves, ripping vines from the sides of the house, and stacking and burning piles of dead tree limbs.

  Roofers, carpenters, brickmasons, and painters were at work inside and outside the house. The oak trees were dark green and looked stiff and clean against the sky. Both the yard and the house were now columned with sunlight. The terrace next to the side porch was already abloom with freshly planted flowers.

  I walked through the trees, down the grassy slope toward the bayou. The scene taking place below could have been snipped from a magazine depiction of upper-class life in Cuba or Nicaragua prior to an era of Marxist revolution. A group of people I didn’t know were gathered in the shade of a candy-striped awning, eating strawberry cake and drinking champagne, while two shooters with double-barrel shotguns took turns firing at live pigeons that a black man released one by one from a wire cage.

  A nice-looking man in seersucker slacks, his tie pulled loose because of the heat, his sports coat hooked on his thumb over his shoulder, passed me on the slope. “How are you?” he said.

  “Fine. How do you do, sir?”

  “It’s mighty hot.” But the negative content of his reply was countered by a boyish smile. His hair was closely clipped, the part razor-edged, his face youthful and sincere.

  “I’ve seen you on television. You’re Mr. Alridge,” I said.

  “Yes, sir. I am. Colin Alridge,” he said, and extended his hand.

  A shotgun popped dully inside the breeze. I saw a pigeon in flight crumple and plummet into the water.

  The televangelical lobbyist named Colin Alridge cut his head. “That’s an ugly business down there. I thought it was time for me to go,” he said.

  “It’s nice meeting you, Mr. Alridge,” I said.

  “Yes, sir, same here,” he replied.

  I watched him walk to his car, a bit awed at our age-old propensity for vesting power over our lives in individuals who themselves are probably dumbfounded by the gift that we arbitrarily bestow upon them. But I had a feeling Colin Alridge would rue the day he had chosen to front points for the Chalons family and their casino interests.

  Val Chalons disengaged himself from the group under the awning and walked out in the sunlight, shading his eyes from the glare with his hand. “You don’t seem to have parameters of any kind,” he said.

  “Looks like you’re doing quite a restoration on your old man’s place,” I said.

  “I don’t care to hear my father referred to in that fashion,” he said.

  “No disrespect meant. I didn’t admire the ethos your father represented, but I liked him personally. Please accept my sympathies.”

  “You’re unbelievable,” he said.

  Val’s face was heavily made up to hide the beating I had given him. But cosmetics couldn’t disguise the blood clot in his eye and the stitches in his mouth. Actually I felt sorry for him and wondered again at the level of violence that still lived inside me.

  “I’ve got a problem of conscience, Val.”

  “Thanks for sharing that, but I couldn’t care less. I’d appreciate your leaving now.”

  I heard one of the shooters say, “Pull.” Another pigeon broke into flight, its wings throbbing, only to be blown apart above the bayou.

  “That’s an unlawful activity,” I said.

  “Not on my land it isn’t.”

  The sun was boiling overhead. The shotgun popped again, like a dull headache that wouldn’t go away.

  “A friend of mine inadvertently sent the wrong signal to a guy by the name of Jericho Johnny Wineburger. He’s a button man who works out of New Orleans. He’s now in our area. I think he might try to do you harm.”

  I tried to hold his stare but I couldn’t. I looked across the bayou at the dust blowing out of a cane field.

  “Button man?” Val said.

  “A contract killer, a guy who pushes the ‘off’ button on people. Jericho Johnny is a mean motor scooter, Val. He and another dude took out Bugsy Siegel’s cousin with a shotgun.”

  “Bugsy Siegel? This gets better all the time. And you’ve come here as a police officer to tell me that a friend of yours has aimed this person at me?”

  “Yeah, I guess that sums it up.”

  “Have some strawberry cake, Dave. Maybe a glass of non-alcoholic champagne, too. Back at your AA meetings, are you?” he said.

  I walked back up the slope to my truck and used my cell phone to make an animal cruelty report on Val Chalons to the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department. I waited for their cruiser to show up before I left, to ensure as best I could that Chalons and his friends would kill no more pigeons that day. But more disturbing than his cruelty was his apparent indifference to the fact that a man like Johnny Wineburger might be in town to break his wheels. That one definitely would not slide down the pipe.

  I GOT BACK to the office by 1:30 p.m., drinking a Coca-Cola packed with ice and lime slices, my heart rate up, my shirt peppered with sweat. Even in the air-conditioning, I couldn’t stop perspiring. I washed my face in the lavatory and went up front for my mail. “Been running up and down the stairs?” Wally said from the dispatcher’s cage.

  “How’d you know?” I replied.

  But it wasn’t funny. I could feel the blood veins tightening in the side of my head again and unconsciously I kept pushing at my scalp with my fingers, like a man who fears his brains are seeping out of his skull. Therapists call it psycho-neurotic anxiety. The manifestation is obvious but the cause is not, because the cause keeps itself armor-plated somewhere in the bottom of the id. I know of only one other experience that compares with the syndrome. Your combat tour is almost over. You’re “short,” counting days until you catch the big freedom bird home. Except your private calendar doesn’t change the fact you’re on a night trail in a Third World shithole, wrapped in your own stink, your skin crawling with insects, your toes mushy with trench foot, and out there in the jungle you’re convinced Bedcheck Charlie is writing your name on an AK-47 round or a trip-wired 105 dud.

  At 1:47 p.m. my Vice cop friend at Lafayette P.D. called. His name was Joe Dupree. Joe had worked Homicide for years before he had gone over to Vice, claiming he had burnt out on blood-splattered DOAs. But some said Joe simply wanted to be closer to a cheap source of narcotics. Sometimes
I saw him at AA meetings. Other times I saw him wasted in a baitshop or by himself in his boat, out at Whiskey Bay, doing his own kind of time inside his own head.

  “I busted a couple of lowlifes in North Lafayette last night. They say the word on the street is a husband-wife team out of Florida are setting up a new escort service,” he said.

  “Lou and Connie Coyne?”

  “That’s who it sounds like.”

  “Why now?” I asked.

  “Oil is supposed to hit fifty dollars a barrel this year. You know a better local aphrodisiac?” he replied.

  So much for the altruism of Ida Durbin, I thought.

  Another half hour went by. I went into Helen’s office. “I’ve got to get off the desk,” I said.

  She pulled on an earlobe. “Really?” she said.

  “Chalons is about to make a move. Against me or Molly or Clete. I saw this televangelical character Alridge out at his place. Jericho Johnny Wineburger is around, too. I can’t figure any of it out.”

  I thought she would be angry or at least irritated and dismissing. I knew I looked and sounded like a man waving his arms on the street, prophesying doom to anyone who would listen. Instead, she stood up and, just for something to do, arranged a floating flower in a glass bowl on her desk. “The D.A. is going ahead with felony assault charges against you, Dave. Also, there’s that molestation issue. Maybe we ought to count our blessings.”

  “Roust Wineburger. I think he’s got a contract on somebody. But I don’t know who.”

  “Give me an address,” she said, picking up a pen.

  “I saw him fishing at Henderson Swamp.”

  She clicked the button on her pen several times, staring wanly into space, afraid to speak lest she hurt me in ways she couldn’t repair.

  I went back to my office and tried to think. But long ago I had learned that my best thinking usually got me drunk. Through the window I saw a truck sideswipe a car at the train crossing, smashing it into a telephone pole, and was glad for the diversion. I dumped my incoming baskets of accident and domestic dispute reports and payroll requests and time sheets into a large paper sack, stapled it at the top, and dropped it in a corner like a load of bagged-up Kitty Litter.