Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Which guy?” I said.

  “A guy who hurts people when he don’t have to. You want to find him, follow the cooze. In the meantime, don’t say I ain’t warned you.”

  Then he labored down the sidewalk toward his Cadillac, his football-shaped head twisted back at the sunset.

  “Come back here,” I said.

  He shot me the finger over his shoulder.

  I thought I was finished with Sammy Fig for awhile. Wrong. The phone rang at 2:14 in the A.M. “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, the receiver cold against my ear. Outside, the moon was bright and glowing with a rain ring behind the sculpted limbs of a pecan tree. “Time to desist, Sammy. That means join Weight Watchers or go to the fat farm, but stay out of my life,” I said.

  “Frankie Dellacroce’s family is in Fort Lauderdale. A couple of them are on their way here.”

  “So long,” I said, and started to lower the receiver from my ear.

  “They got you made for the pop on Frankie.”

  “Me?”

  “You broke his sticks in front of a bunch of colored people earlier in the night. Later the same night he catches a .44 mag in the head. You’re a cop. Who would you put it on?” he said.

  I could hear my breath against the receiver. “This is crazy,” I said.

  “I got to get some sleep. You’re lucky you ain’t got insomnia,” he said, and hung up.

  In the morning I confronted Father Jimmie at the breakfast table. “Sammy Figorelli says a couple of Frank Dellacroce’s relatives might be coming around,” I said.

  “What for?” he said.

  “They think I killed him.”

  “Not too good, huh?”

  “Where can I find Max Coll, Jimmie?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you,” he replied.

  “I’d like to believe that. But I’m starting to have my doubts.”

  “Want to repeat that?” he said, chewing his food slowly.

  “He’s going to call again. When he does, I’d like for you to set up a meet with him.”

  I saw his brow furrow. “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “You sentimental about this guy?”

  “He’s a tormented man,” he said.

  “Tell yourself that the next time he empties somebody’s brainpan.” I picked up my cup of coffee and took it with me to work.

  Except I did not go to work. I turned around in the parking lot and drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville, where Bootsie was buried in a crypt right up the bayou from the Evangeline Oak. I sat on the ventilated metal bench in front of the crypt and said the first two decades of my rosary, then lost my concentration and stared woodenly at the bayou and the leaves swirling in the current and the ducks wimpling the water around lily pads that had already turned brown from early frost. My skin felt chafed, as dry as paper, my palms stiff and hard to close. I replaced my rosary in my coat pocket and put my face in my hands. The sun went behind a cloud and the wind was like ice water on my scalp.

  Why did you go and die on us, Boots? I heard myself say, then felt ashamed at the selfish nature of my thoughts.

  An hour later I walked into the department, washed my face in the men’s room, then undertook all the functions of the working day that give the illusion of both normalcy and productivity. Clete Purcel dropped by, irreverent as always, telling outrageous jokes, throwing paper airplanes at my wastebasket. He even used my telephone to place an offtrack bet. By noon the day seemed brighter, the trees outside a darker green against blue skies.

  But I could not concentrate on either the growing loveliness of the day or the endless paperwork that I was sure no one ever looked at after it was completed.

  We had no one in custody for the shooting of the drive-by daiquiri store operator, even though we had a suspect with motivation in the form of Dr. Parks, and a connection, through the murder weapon, to an employee of Castille LeJeune. In the meantime a Celtic killing machine like Max Coll was running loose in our area; I had been made by the family of Frank Dellacroce for the murder of their relative; and Theo and Merchie Flannigan continued to hover on the edge of my vision, chimeric, protean, like the memory of a college prom that, along with youth, belongs in the past.

  It was the kind of criminal investigation in which thinking served no purpose. The motivation in most crimes was not complex. Usually people steal and cheat because they’re either greedy or lazy or both. People kill for reasons of money, sex, and power. Even revenge killings indicate a sense of powerlessness in the perpetrator.

  At least that was the conventional wisdom of duffer cops who think psychological profiling works best in films or TV shows that have little to do with reality.

  But where did Junior Crudup fit into this? Or did he? Maybe Helen was right, I just wanted to nail the Daddy Warbucks of St. Mary Parish, Castille LeJeune, to a tree.

  I spread the photos of Junior Crudup given me by our reference librarian on my desk blotter. Did you dream at night of the black Betty slicing across your back? I wanted to ask him. Didn’t you learn you can’t beat the Man at his own game? What happened to you, partner?

  I picked up the last photo in the series and looked again at the image of Junior staring up at a mounted gunbull, across the bayou from Castille LeJeune’s home, his hoe at an odd angle on his shoulder, his face puzzled by a world whose rules ensured he would never have a place in it. But the focus of my attention was not Junior. In the wintry background, guiding a single-tree plow through the cane stubble, was a muscular, coal black convict, with the clear detail of welted scars on his forearms, the kind a convict might earn in a half dozen knife beefs.

  I held a magnifying glass to the grainy black-and-white image. I was almost sure the face was that of a youthful Hogman Patin, the longtime recidivist who had been on the Red Hat Gang with Junior but had said he did not know Junior’s fate.

  I picked up the telephone and called my house.

  “Hello?” Father Jimmie said.

  “Want to check out some Louisiana history you don’t find in school books?”

  “Why not?” he said.

  Chapter 12

  Wherever Hogman lived, he created a bottle tree, for reasons he never explained. During winter, when the limbs were bare, he would insert the points of the branches into the mouths of colored glass bottles until the whole tree shimmered with light and tinkled with sound.

  Father Jimmie and I parked in the front yard of his house on the bayou and walked around to the back, where Hogman was hoeing weeds out of a garden next to his bottle tree. He stopped his work and smiled, then saw my expression.

  “Why’d you jump me over the hurdles?” I said.

  “You mean about Junior?” he said.

  “You got it,” I replied.

  “Junior punched his own ticket. You might t’ink he was a hero, but back in them days, if a nigger got mixed up wit’ a white woman, all of us had to suffer for it.”

  “How about spelling that out for me?” I said.

  The year was 1951. Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell played on every jukebox in the South, and across the ocean GIs packed snow on the barrels of .30 caliber machine guns to keep them from melting while they mowed down wave after wave of Chinese troops pouring into North Korea.

  But in central Louisiana, a group of black convicts who knew little or nothing of the larger world suddenly found themselves transferred from Angola Penitentiary to a work camp for nonviolent offenders deep down in bayou country. The camp had been created out of the remnants of what had been called the quarters on Fox Run Plantation. None of the convicts knew what to expect. The first morning they found out.

  They were given clean denims, soap, toothpaste, good work shoes, and were told to burn their striped pants and jumpers in a trash barrel behind the camp. The beatings with the black Betty, the sweatboxes and anthill-treatment, the fecal-smelling lockdown units, the killings by guards on the Red Hat Gang, became only a memory at Fox Run. Sometimes a tr
uculent inmate was forced to wear leg irons or stand all night on an upended bucket, and the food they ate—the greens, fatback, beans, corn bread, and molasses—was the same fare served at Angola; but the guards were not allowed to abuse them, and at night the inmates slept in cabins with mosquito screens on the windows, boiled coffee in the fireplace, played cards and listened to radios, and on holidays had preserves and cookies to eat.

  The humane treatment they received was due solely to one person: Miss Andrea, as they called her, the wife of Castille LeJeune.

  The other inmates had been in the camp six months when Junior transferred in from the Red Hat Gang. The first time he saw her he was in the bottom of an irrigation canal with Hogman Patin, raking mounds of yellowed weeds out of the water and flinging them up on the embankment. She was riding English saddle on a black gelding, her long hair tied behind her head, her white riding pants skintight across her rump and thighs. Her small hand was cupped around a braided quirt.

  “That’s her, huh?” Junior said.

  “Who?” Hogman said.

  “Miz LeJeune,” Junior said.

  “What you care who she is?”

  “She wrote me a letter.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s right. Up at the joint. Tole me how much she liked my music. She’s a fine-looking woman.”

  “You get them t’oughts out of your head, nigger,” Hogman said.

  “You boys eye-balling down there?” the guard said from horseback.

  Among Junior’s few possessions was a guitar, a twelve-string Stella he had bought in a New Orleans pawnshop. He tuned the double-strung E, A, and D strings an octave apart so that the chords reverberating out of the sound hole gave the impression of two guitars being played simultaneously. Each evening, after supper, he played on the front steps of his cabin, his steel finger picks glinting in the setting of the sun, his voice rising into a sky filled with clouds that looked like colored smoke.

  Then, one spring night, while he played on the steps, he saw her car stop on the road. It was a purple 1948 Ford convertible, with an immaculate white, buttoned-down top. She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel, her skin softly lit by the green illumination of the dashboard. She listened to him play until she had finished her cigarette, then she dropped it outside the window, restarted her engine, and drove away.

  In July, on a languid Saturday morning, a guard by the name of Jackson Posey told Junior to put on a fresh change of state blues, to brush his shoes, comb his hair, bring his guitar, and get in the guard’s pickup truck. As the two of them drove toward the big house, Junior could feel the guard’s irritation like a palpable presence inside the cab.

  “What’s going on, boss?” Junior asked.

  Jackson Posey did not reply. Although he was often called boss, he held the rank of captain, one he had earned by shepherding convicts under the gun for two decades, pulling almost the same kind of time as his charges. But the fact he was a captain was a matter of great pride to him, because it meant he was literate and had administrative duties within the penal system. His forearms were pocked with early indications of skin cancer, the top of his forehead half-mooned like a sliver of melon rind where he normally wore a hat. He put three fingers into a pouch of Red Man and inserted the string tobacco into his jaw, then drove around to the back of the big house and parked under a mulberry tree.

  Junior could see Andrea Castille seated on the patio, a pitcher of lemonade on a glass table beside her. A recording machine, the kind that made use of wire spools, rested on the brickwork by her foot, an extension cord running back through the French doors into the house. Inside the living room a little girl, a miniature of her mother, played on the rug with wood blocks.

  “I always treated you fair, ain’t I?” the guard said.

  “Yes, suh,” Junior said.

  “Then it don’t hurt to tell Miss Andrea that, does it?”

  “No, suh.”

  “You stay where I can see you,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t have it no other way, boss.”

  Jackson Posey narrowed one watery blue eye, as though squinting down a rifle barrel. “You sassing me?” he said.

  Junior shut the truck door behind him and approached Andrea Castille with his guitar cradled under his right arm. She wore a pink sundress and dark glasses and a gold cross on a chain around her throat. “Can you play ‘Goodnight Irene’?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I learned it from the man who wrote it,” he replied.

  “I’d like to record you while you do it. That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m glad to.”

  “Would you like to sit down?”

  “Standing is just fine, ma’am.”

  He slipped the cloth strap of the guitar around his neck and sang for her, feeling foolish at the contrived nature of the situation, wondering if the guard’s eyes were burrowing into his back or if Andrea Castille’s husband was watching him from an upstairs window.

  “You have a wonderful voice,” she said. “Sit down. Please, it’s all right.”

  “Ma’am, I’m a convict.” Involuntarily his eyes swept across the back windows of the house.

  She seemed to resign herself to his recalcitrance. “Would you sing another song?” she said.

  He sang one of his own compositions. The breeze had dropped and his shirt was damp against his skin. He could not see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but he believed they were invading his person. His fingers were moist and clumsy on the frets, his voice uncertain. A muscle spasm sliced across his back from the odd angle in which he was holding the Stella.

  He stopped and blotted his face on his sleeve, his heart beating. Why was he behaving like this?

  But he already knew the answer. He wanted her approval—just like an organ grinder’s monkey.

  “I hurt my back in the field yesterday. Just ain’t myself,” he said.

  “Maybe you can come another time, when you’re feeling better,” she said.

  He shook his head negatively, his eyes lowered, his frustration and anger at himself rising. But she didn’t give him time to speak. “I have something for you. I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

  He waited patiently in the dappled sunlight, the heat rising from the bricks around him. What was she up to? He had known white women like her in the North, he told himself. They liked to stick their hand in the tiger cage. Sometimes they even brought the tiger into their bed. Well, if that was what she wanted, maybe she might just find out who sticks what in who, he said to himself.

  She emerged from the French doors with a narrow, blue-felt, brass-hinged box in one hand. She removed her dark glasses and handed him the box. For the first time he saw her eyes. They were the color of violets, like none he had ever seen, and there was a kindness and honesty in them that caused a thickening sensation in his throat.

  “I’ve heard you play these on your records. I didn’t know if you had one now or not,” she said.

  He pried the lid back stiffly and looked down at a chrome-plated harmonica cushioned inside the white satin interior of the box.

  “It’s an E-major Marine Band,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I know. This is a fine instrument, Miss Andrea.”

  “Well, thank you for coming to my house,” she said. Then she shook his hand, something no southern white woman had ever done.

  On the way back to the camp, the guard, Jackson Posey, kept turning and staring at the side of Junior’s face. Junior looked straight ahead, the harmonica case gripped in his palm. Just before they drove past the wire into the cluster of cabins that made up the improvised work camp, Posey braked the truck and shifted the floor stick into neutral. A cloud of dust floated by his open window.

  “You got no control over what that woman does, so I ain’t holding it against you,” he said.

  “Suh?” Junior replied.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Her husband’s coming home from the arm service next week,” the guard
said.

  “Yes, suh,” Junior said, still uncertain about the direction of the conversation.

  “I ain’t gonna lose my job ’cause I let his wife shake hands with a nigger convict. You hearing me, Junior?”

  Junior could feel the softness of the felt box in his fingers. “You don’t like what she done, lock me down, bossman,” Junior replied.

  “You just earned yourself a night on the bucket. Sass me again, and Miss Andrea or no Miss Andrea, you’re gonna be the sorest nigger in the state of Lou’sana.”

  Two weeks later, while Junior and Hogman were pulling stumps on the far side of the bayou, he saw Andrea LeJeune and her husband cantering their horses through a field of buttercups. They clopped across a wood bridge that spanned a coulee, disappearing into a grove of live oaks. A few minutes later she emerged by herself, her face pinched with anger, and slashed her quirt across her horse’s flank. She galloped past Junior toward the drawbridge, her thighs crimped tightly into the horse’s sides, dirt clods flying off her horse’s hooves. She was so close Junior could have reached out and touched her leg.

  But if she saw him, she showed no recognition in her face.

  That night another convict in Junior’s cabin was looking at the pages of a newspaper that had blown from the road into the camp’s wire fence. A photograph on the front page showed Castille LeJeune in a dress Marine Corps uniform with a medal hanging on a ribbon from his neck. “That’s the man own Fox Run, ain’t it?” the convict said. His name was Woodrow Reed. He wore a goatee that looked like a cluster of black wire on his chin, and the other inmates believed he could tell fortunes with a greasy pack of cards he carried in his shirt pocket.

  “That’s the man,” Junior replied.

  “What it say about him?” Woodrow asked.

  “He saved a bunch of lives, then he shot down a Nort’ Korean name of Bed Check Charley.”

  “Bed Check who?”

  “That’s a guy used to fly over the Americans in a Piper Cub and drop hand grenades on them. The F-80s couldn’t nail him ’cause they was too fast. But Mr. LeJeune went after him in a World War II plane that was a lot slower and blew his ass out of the sky.”