Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Retrieve it in spurts, so the lure swims like a wounded minnow,” I said.

  “You were easier to talk with when you were a drunk. Are you hearing anything I say? Listen, I went out and talked to Mr. Boudreau.”

  “Amanda Boudreau’s father?”

  “That’s right. He’s a nice gentleman. He don’t need to be told what it feels like to have your daughter killed by a degenerate. He says you belong to the same club.”

  “What?”

  “He said some fuckheads killed your mother and your wife. I didn’t know that.”

  “So now you do.”

  “Then you understand.”

  “It doesn’t change anything, Joe.”

  “Yeah, it does. I don’t know what’s going on. I get a lead on some old guy by the name of Legion Guidry, a guy maybe you’re looking at for Linda’s murder. Now two of my best guys are in Iberia General. You looking at this guy or not? What’s going on?”

  “You got to dial it down, Joe.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “I apologize for what’s happened to you in New Iberia. I think you deserve better.”

  Just then a largemouth bass struck Joe’s lure, roiling the surface, taking the treble hook down with it, its firm body straining against the monofilament, then rising, bursting through the water’s surface, like green and gold glassware breaking inside a shaft of sunlight, the lure rattling at the corner of its mouth, sprinkling the air with crystal.

  Joe jerked his rod and tried to retrieve the slack in the line, but his fingers were like wood. The reel clanked once against the aluminum gunnel and the rod tipped downward toward the water, the cork handle flipping upward and out of Joe’s fingers.

  He watched the rod sink into the darkness, then stared uncomprehendingly at his lure floating uselessly in the middle of the pool.

  “What happened? I had it under control. Right here between my hands. How’d it get away? I can’t figure nothing out,” he said.

  His eyes searched mine, waiting for me to reply.

  CHAPTER 19

  Clete Purcel grew up in the Irish Channel in the days when white gangs fought with chains over the use of a street corner. His father was a drunken, superstitious, and sentimental man who delivered milk in the Garden District, made his children kneel on grains of rice for sassing a nun, and whipped Clete with a razor strop when he lost a fight. A gang of kids from the Iberville Project jumped Clete by St. Louis Cemetery and bashed his eye open with a steel pipe. Clete packed the wound with a cobweb, closed it with adhesive tape, and drove around all night in a stolen car until he caught the pipe wielder alone. After New Orleans the Marine Corps was a breeze. Even Vietnam wasn’t much of a challenge. Women were another matter.

  His second wife, Lois, was driven by either her own neurosis or living with Clete to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. In the meantime Clete flowered as a vice cop. Unfortunately, he seemed to fit into the milieu too well. His girlfriends were addicts, strippers, compulsive gamblers, deep-fried cultists, or beautiful Italian girls with complexions and long hair like the bride of Dracula. The latter group usually turned out to be the sweethearts or relatives of criminals. When we were Homicide partners at NOPD, I often had to roll down all the windows in our car to blow out the odors Clete carried in his clothes from the previous night.

  But one way or another he always got hurt. What neither his inept, uneducated father, sadistic brig chasers, nor even Victor Charles could do to him, Clete managed to do to himself.

  He burned his kite at NOPD with pills and booze and by killing a government witness. He hired out as a mercenary in Central America and worked for the Mob in Reno and maybe engineered the crash of a gangster’s seaplane in the Cabinet Mountains of western Montana. His P.I. license and his job as a hunter of bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine were the only elements of stability in his life. The effect of his arrival in any environment was like a junkyard falling down a stairs. Chaos was his logo, honor and loyalty and a vulnerable heart his undoing.

  Now Clete was swinging into high gear again, this time with Battering Ram Shanahan.

  Just after Joe Zeroski had driven away from my dock, Clete pulled into the driveway. He was wearing a summer tux, his sandy hair wet and parted neatly on the side, his cheeks glowing, a corsage in a plastic box by his thigh.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  He got out of the car and turned in a circle. A piece of toilet paper was stuck to a shaving cut on his chin. “The coat’s not too tight? I feel like I’m wrapped in a sausage skin.”

  “You look fine.”

  “We’re going to a dance at a country club. Barbara has to pay her dues with some political people. The last time I went dancing Big Tit Judy Lavelle and I did the dirty bop in Pat O’Brien’s and got thrown out.”

  “Smile a lot. Leave early. Take it easy on the hooch,” I said.

  He blotted his forehead with his wrist and looked down the dirt road under the row of oaks that paralleled the bayou.

  “On another subject, I just passed Joe Zeroski. What was he doing here?” he said.

  “Legion Guidry scrambled a couple of his guys. One by the name of Sonny Bilotti. You know him?”

  “He was a hitter for the Calucci brothers. He shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. Guidry cleaned his clock?”

  “He put him in the hospital.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Really?” I said.

  He caught the look on my face. “Oh, like you’re a pushover? The difference is you have parameters, Dave. A guy like Bilotti parks one in the brain pan and then checks to see if he got the right guy. That’s the edge these guys have on us. I’ve got to work out a new strategy on Guidry.”

  I pulled the piece of toilet paper off the shaving cut on his chin and let it blow away in the breeze.

  “Enjoy the dance,” I said.

  The dance at the country club in Lafayette was one of those insular events where the possession of power and money are celebrated in ways that never require the participants to acknowledge the secret chambers of the heart or perhaps, more accurately, the edges of the conscience. The buffet tables and ice sculptures and silver bowls brimming with champagne and sherbet punch, the 1950s orchestra music, the flagstone patio overhung by electrically lit oak trees, the white-jacketed, sycophantic waiters, were a testament to an idea, a fusion of the antebellum South with twenty-first-century prosperity, a systemic exclusion of everything in the larger culture that seemed coarse and intellectually invasive and contrary to the ethos of free enterprise.

  The celebrants were politicians and judges and attorneys and shopping-mall developers and realtors and executives from petrochemical industries. They greeted one another with a level of warmth and gaiety that seemed born of lifelong friendships, although few of them had any personal contact outside of their business dealings. They gave the sense that they all shared the same love of country and the same patriotic commitment to its governance. There was almost an innocence in the narcissistic pleasure purchased by their success and in their shared presumption that a great, green, rolling continent had been presented to them by a divine hand for their own use.

  Clete ate his steak and lobster and drank wine spritzers and said virtually nothing during the evening. In fact, two petroleum executives who had been fighter pilots in Vietnam kept hitting him on the shoulders and roaring at his jokes. But Barbara Shanahan became increasingly restless, her face ruddy with either alcohol or frustration, blowing her breath upward to clear her hair out of her eyes, crunching ice between her molars. Then a congressman who had changed his party affiliation the day after the balance of power shifted in the House of Representatives, receiving the chairmanship of a committee in the bargain, mounted the bandstand and told jokes about environmentalists.

  He brought the house down.

  “I can’t take these assholes,” Barbara said, and snapped her fingers at the waiter. “C
lean these spritzers out of here and bring us a couple of depth charges.”

  “Depth charges, madam?” the waiter said.

  “A shot and draft. Put it on Fuckhead’s tab,” she said, gesturing with her thumb at the congressman.

  But the waiter, who had an Irish accent, was a piece of work. “Which fuckhead is that, madam?” he asked.

  “Not bad. Have one yourself while you’re at it,” Barbara said.

  “Maybe we ought to hit the road,” Clete said.

  “Not a chance,” she said.

  When the waiter returned, Barbara lowered a jigger of bourbon into a schooner of beer, then drank the schooner empty. She blew the hair out of her face, her eyes slightly out of focus.

  “Wow,” she said. “You gonna drink yours?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, putting his hand on the schooner before she could pick it up.

  She waved at the waiter. “Hey, Irish, bring us a couple more,” she called out.

  Then they went out on the crowded dance floor. The band had gone into “One O’clock Jump,” and Barbara danced in her stockinged feet, her arms flying in the air, her body caroming off the dancers around her.

  “Oops, excuse me,” she said to a woman she knocked into a table.

  “My, but you’re an energetic thing, aren’t you?” the woman said, her glasses askew.

  “Sorry. Don’t I know you? Oh, you’re the new federal judge. Hi, Your Honor,” Barbara said, stopping, shutting her eyes, then opening them again. “Boy, am I shit-faced.”

  She walked unsteadily back to the table, then pulled off her corsage and threw it on her plate and leaned over and hooked her shoes in her fingers and almost fell when she tried to put them on. Clete put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Guess who is seriously fucked up,” she said.

  “You’re beautiful,” Clete said.

  “I know. But I think I’m going to throw up,” she replied.

  They drove back to New Iberia on the old highway that led past Spanish Lake. It started to rain and mist blew out of the trees, and a long Southern Pacific freight clicked by on the elevated grade, its whistle blowing down the line. Barbara pressed her fingers against her head as though she were awaking from a dream. Her skin looked green in the glow of the dashboard.

  When he mentioned food, she made a sound like someone slipping into a whirlpool.

  “I think you were great back there,” he said.

  “Good try,” she said.

  When they reached her apartment on Bayou Teche, he walked her upstairs and was about to say good night.

  “No, come in. I’ll try to stop acting like a basket case. Watch television while I take a shower. Then I’ll fix you something to eat,” she said, then sprained her ankle going through the bedroom door. She threw a shoe at the wall and closed the door behind her.

  Clete could hear her pulling at zippers and snaps on her clothes. He folded the coat of his summer tux and pulled off his tie and sat on the couch and watched a boxing match on a sports channel. He tried not to think about Barbara Shanahan in the shower. When she came back out of the bedroom, she had put on faded jeans, a blue terry-cloth pullover, and Indian moccasins. Her hair was damp, her skin rosy from the heat of the shower. But her eyes were scorched with an early hangover, her voice husky, her speech clipped, as though she could not coordinate her thoughts with her words.

  She started breaking eggs in a skillet.

  “Is there something on your mind I could help you with?” he said behind her.

  “I thought I might run for district attorney. You know, make a difference, put away more of the bad guys, stick it to the polluters, all that jazz. What a joke.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said.

  She dropped an egg on the floor and looked at it wanly. “I’m sorry, Clete. I just don’t feel very well,” she said.

  He used a dishrag to clean the floor, then squeezed it out in the sink and dropped the broken eggshells in a waste can. “I’d better get going,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I probably should.”

  “You don’t need to,” she said, her face averted, looking at the streetlights on the drawbridge.

  Then, against all his instincts, all the warnings that told him not to take advantage, not to be a surrogate, he closed his arms around her, his biceps swelling into the girth of pressurized firehoses. He could smell the freshness of her clothes, the powder she had sprinkled on her shoulders, a touch of perfume behind her ears. He ran his big hand across the firmness of her back, the taper of her muscles along her hips.

  “You’re stand-up,” he said.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “You feel great, Barbara. Wow, do you feel great,” he said, rubbing his cheek against her hair, petting her back, closing his eyes as he breathed in the fragrance and heat on her neck.

  “So do you. But, Clete . . .” she said uncomfortably.

  “What is it?” he asked, looking with alarm at her face.

  “You’re standing on my foot.”

  From her bedroom window he could look out across the veranda and see the tops of the banana trees below, the old gray convent across the bayou, and the moss in the oaks that grew above the convent’s roof. He saw a milk truck drive by, one like his father had driven, and he tried to think of an explanation for the presence of a milk truck on a quiet, lamp-shadowed street at this time of night. For some reason he saw images out of his childhood: a razor strop, a thick-bodied child walking to school, bent down in the wind, a peanut butter sandwich and an apple in a paper bag for lunch. Clete blew out his breath and shook the image out of his head and tried to remember the number of drinks he’d had that evening, almost as a form of reassurance.

  He felt awkward undressing in front of Barbara, conscious of his weight, the gold hair on his back and shoulders. She lay down on the far side of the bed and waited for him, her hair like points of fire on the pillow.

  “Is something wrong, Clete?” she asked.

  “No, not at all,” he lied.

  He lay down beside her and kissed her mouth, then touched her breasts and stomach and felt his sex harden against her thigh. But all his movements seemed heavy-handed, clumsy, his knees constantly hitting her, making her flinch.

  “I jog and lift weights. I’ve cut down my beer intake to eleven or twelve cans a day. But I keep tubbing up,” he said.

  “I think you’re a sweet man,” she said.

  He knew it should have been a compliment. In fact, he was convinced she was sincere. But he knew there were other words that women used in certain moments, words that were intimate, naked in their expression of vulnerability and love and surrender, words they used rarely in an entire lifetime and that marked a contract with a man that no wedding ceremony ever provided. But these were not the words he heard.

  “I think you’re a fine woman who’s had a bad night. I think maybe the wrong guy shouldn’t take advantage of the situation,” he said.

  She brushed at his hair with her hand, in almost a maternal way, then mounted him and cupped his sex in her palm and placed it inside her. There was a spray of strawberry freckles on her shoulders and arms and the tops of her breasts. He put her nipples in his mouth and ran his hands down her hips and over her rump, and then turned her sideways in the bed and reentered her, this time on top, and he saw her mouth open and her eyes close and felt her fingers dig tightly into his back.

  When she came, her face grew small and pale, then he felt a long, sustained shudder commence inside her womb and a tightening in her thighs and a cry burst from her throat that was strangely more like need and unsatiated desire than it was satisfaction. But he could not sort out his thoughts from the nature of his own desire and the incredible loveliness of her face, the smallness of her mouth that in the dark looked like a purple flower, the caress and grace of her thighs, and the heat of her womb, the orgasm that broke inside him and rushed out of his body in a way he had never experienced before, like a bu
rst of white light that had nothing to do with the self or the fear and hunger and sometimes rage that characterized his life.

  He sat up on the side of the bed and kissed her hands and her forehead and traced her features with his fingers. Her arms lay by her sides now, the sheet pulled to her navel, her head turned toward him in a melancholy fashion.

  “You doin’ all right?” he said.

  “You were fine, Clete.”

  But the answer did not fit the question he had asked, and he searched her eyes and found no explanation for the strange sense of disquiet he felt.

  “Dave and I were always the odd pieces at NOPD. He got fired and I had to run for a plane to Guatemala. Both of us learned too late not to fight with the bastards,” he said. She covered his hand with hers. But her eyes were focused beyond him, over his shoulder, and she was not listening to his words now.

  “Clete, a shadow just went across the screen,” she said.

  He pulled on his pants and walked shirtless and barefoot out on the veranda. He smelled cigarette smoke, then heard footsteps leave the stairs down below and head across a grassy area toward a side street that led to the drawbridge. But the person was not running, as though he had no fear of apprehension or sense of shame at being discovered in a voyeuristic act.

  The lamps above the side street were haloed with humidity. He heard an automobile or truck engine fire up, then fade between the buildings as the driver turned into the Friday-night traffic crossing the drawbridge. A burning cigarette glowed in the grass next to the sidewalk. Clete picked it up gingerly with the balls of his fingers and looked at it. It was unfiltered, still wet on the unlit end with the smoker’s saliva. He tossed it in a sewer grate, then wiped his fingers on his pants.

  On his way upstairs Clete saw a Bible on the top step, barely visible in the shadows, a rose stem inserted under the cover.

  “Did you see him?” Barbara said when he came back through the door of her apartment.

  “No,” he replied.

  He put on his shirt and tucked it in his trousers, then stuffed his socks into his coat pocket and slipped on his shoes without tying them.