Last Car to Elysian Fields Read online

  “We provide a free school on Poinciana. Most people would find that generous. I’m not familiar with the accreditation system at Southern University.”

  “I t’ink I’m gonna be moving back to the quarters.”

  “Now, listen,” he said. He looked over his shoulder, up the curved stairs that led to the second floor. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  She wadded up the envelope and the letter and threw it over his shoulder onto his living room rug.

  The following Thursday, the one night he always spent playing gin rummy with his wife, Mr. Julian drove to Ladice’s house, where she now lived with her mother on a dead-end, isolated road lined with slash pines. It was cold and smoke from wood fires hung as thick as cotton in the trees. She watched him through the front window as he studied her vegetable garden, thumb and forefinger pinched on his chin, his eyes busy with thoughts that had nothing to do with her garden. When he entered the house, he removed his hat.

  “There’s a Catholic college for colored students in New Orleans. I had a talk with the dean’s office this morning. Would you be willing to take some preparatory courses?” he said.

  She had been ironing when he had driven up to the house, and she picked up the iron from the pie pan it sat in and sprinkled a shirt with water from a soda bottle and ran the iron hissing across the cloth. She hadn’t bathed that day, and she could smell her own odor in her clothes.

  “If I take these courses, how I know I’m gonna get in?” she asked.

  “You have my word,” he replied.

  She nodded and touched at the moisture on her forehead with her wrist. She wanted to tell him to leave, to take his promises and manipulations and mercurial moods back to his home, back to the wife whose cancer of the spirit was greater than the disease that attacked her body. But she thought about New Orleans, the streetcars clattering down the oak- and palm-lined avenues, the parades during Mardi Gras, the music that rose from the French Quarter into the sky at sunset.

  “You ain’t fooling me, Mr. Julian?” she said.

  Then she knew how weak she actually was, how much she wanted what he could give her, and consequently, when all was said and done, how easily she would always be used either by him or someone like him. She felt a sense of shame about herself, her life, and most of all her self-delusion that she had ever been in control of Julian LaSalle.

  “I passed your mother and uncle on the road. Will they be back soon?” he said, and rubbed her arm with his palm.

  “No. They gone to Lafayette,” she said, wondering at how easy it was to become complicitous in her own exploitation.

  He removed the iron from her hand and put his arms around her and rubbed his face in her hair and pressed her tightly against his body.

  “I’m dirty. I been on my feet all day,” she said.

  “You’re lovely anytime, Ladice,” he said. He led her to her bedroom, which was lit only by a bedside lamp, and pulled her T-shirt over her head and pushed her jeans down over her hips.

  “It’s Thursday. You don’t have a sitter for Miz LaSalle on Thursday night,” she said.

  “She’s taking a nap. She’ll be fine,” he replied. Then he was on top of her, his body trembling, his lips on her breasts.

  She fixed her eyes on the smoke in the slash pines outside, the fireflies that lit like sparks in the limbs, the moon that was orange with dust from the fields. She thought she heard a pickup truck clanking by on the road, but the sound of its engine was absorbed by the distant whistle of a Southern Pacific freight rumbling through the wetlands toward New Orleans. She closed her eyes and thought of New Orleans, where the mornings always smelled of mint and flowers and chicory coffee and beignets frying in someone’s kitchen.

  She felt his body constrict and tighten and his loins shudder, then his weight left her and he was lying next to her, his breath short, his hair damp against her cheek. After a moment he widened his eyes, like a man returning to the world that constituted his ordinary life. He sat on the side of the mattress, his pale back sweaty and etched by vertebrae.

  Then he did something he had never done in the aftermath of their lovemaking. He patted her on top of the hand and said, “In another time and place we might have made quite a pair, you and I. You’re an extraordinary woman. Don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.”

  The inside of the room seemed filled with mist or smoke, and the fireflies in the tops of the trees seemed brighter than they should have been. She wondered if she was coming down with a cold or if she had lost a part of her soul and no longer knew who she was. She rose from the bed, still naked, and went to the window.

  “Turn out the light,” she said.

  He clicked off the lamp on the bedside table and the room dropped into darkness. She looked out the window and realized it was too late in the year for fireflies, that the red pinpoints of light in the pines were sparks tumbling out of the sky.

  But it was not the threat of fire to her own house that made her heart stop. The narrow, grained face of Legion the overseer suddenly moved into her vision, no more than three feet on the other side of the glass. His eyes raked her nude body even as he was tipping his hat.

  CHAPTER 6

  The fire at the LaSalle home had started in the kitchen, probably by a dish towel that had been left near an open flame. The fire climbed up the wall and flattened on the ceiling, then spread through a hallway and was sucked by a draft up the staircase onto the second story. Mr. Julian had removed the phone from Mrs. LaSalle’s bedroom long ago, after a judge in Opelousas and a U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge complained she was calling them in the middle of the night, claiming that Huey Long had been murdered by agents of Franklin Roosevelt. The clerk from the plantation store was passing on the road when he saw the windows of the house fill with pink light. He was an excitable man, given to belief in demonic possession and the gift of tongues, and after the heat of the front doorknob seared his hand, he began shouting at the house and throwing dirt clods on the roof to alert those who might be sleeping upstairs.

  He picked up a garden rake and broke the glass out of a living room window. The flames mushroomed up through the second and third stories like cold oxygen igniting in a chimney.

  The store clerk and the black people from up the road tried to soak the roof with a lawn hose. They scooped dirt with their hands and threw it through the windows into the smoke and hand-carried water buckets from the bay but were finally driven back from the house by the heat radiating from the walls. They heard glass break in Mrs. LaSalle’s bedroom and saw her hands on the iron grillwork, like the yellow talons of a bird extended through a cage. They never saw more of her physical person than her hands; the rest of her body disappeared in an envelope of flame.

  An obese black woman grabbed her daughter and held her tightly against her stomach, smothering her daughter’s head with her arms so she would not hear the sounds that came from Mrs. LaSalle’s window.

  But at Ladice Hulin’s house, neither she nor Mr. Julian knew of these events. Legion waited outside for her and Mr. Julian to emerge. There was ash on his khaki clothes, a smear of soot on his cheek and one shirtsleeve. “You were watching us through the window? You were spying on me?” Mr. Julian said incredulously.

  “No, sir, I wouldn’t say that. I come here to tell you somet’ing else. It’s sad news, yeah. Miz LaSalle got burned up in a fire.”

  Legion turned his face away, but he watched Mr. Julian out of the corner of his eye to see the reaction his words would cause.

  “What? What did you say?” Mr. Julian said.

  “Your home’s gone, too. I hate to be the one to tell you, Mr. Julian.”

  Mr. Julian’s face was bloodless, popping with sweat, even though the temperature was still dropping.

  “We’ll go back wit’ you, Mr. Julian,” Ladice said.

  “I was the first one in her room. The deadbolt was locked from the outside. I took the key out and stuck it in the other side of the lock, so nobody ain’t gonna get th
e wrong idea, no,” Legion said.

  “You did what? Say that again?” Mr. Julian said as though he could not sort through Legion’s words.

  “The key was almost melted. But I moved it to the other side of the lock, me. You ain’t got to worry,” Legion replied.

  But Mr. Julian wasn’t listening now. He walked to his car and started the engine and backed one tire into Ladice’s garden, then drove down the road under an orange moon toward the smoke that rose from the ruins of his home.

  Ladice looked up into Legion’s face. He had removed his hat and was running a comb through his hair. His hair was black, like tar from a barrel, the vertical lines in his narrow face like those in a prune.

  “You going in the field tomorrow, Ladice. It ain’t gonna hep you to sass me about it, either,” he said.

  She started to speak, but he placed his thumb on her mouth.

  . . .

  W hat did Legion do to her?” I asked Batist’s sister. She was a heavy woman, with a big head and wide shoulders and knees that looked like hubcaps. She sat in an overstuffed chair in a gloomy corner of her living room, her large hands squeezing each other in the cone of light from a floor lamp.

  “Did Ladice have a child by Mr. Julian?” I asked.

  “I ain’t said that,” she answered.

  “Why won’t you tell me the rest of the story? Mr. Julian and his wife are both dead,” I said.

  Batist’s sister was silent a moment.

  “He still out there. Maybe in St. Mary Parish. Maybe down by New Orleans. Some of the old people say he killed a man in Morgan City,” she said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Legion. He out there, in the dark. He don’t like the sun. His face is pale, like it don’t have no blood. I seen him once. It was Legion,” she said.

  She looked at the tops of her folded hands and would not raise her eyes to mine.

  It was late when I got home and Bootsie was asleep. I ate a ham and onion sandwich in the kitchen, then brushed my teeth and lay down by her side and stared at the ceiling in the darkness. I could hear the cries of nutrias out in the swamp, an alligator rolling its tail in the flooded trees, the echo of distant thunder that gave no rain. The moon was up and Bootsie’s hair was the color of honey on the pillow. She was the only woman I had ever known who had a natural fragrance, like night-blooming gardenias. Her eyes opened and she smiled and turned on her side and put her arm across my chest, one knee over my leg. Her body had the curvature and undulations of a classical Greek sculpture, but her skin was always smooth and soft under my hand, virtually without a wrinkle, as though age had decided to pass her by.

  “Anything wrong?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You can’t sleep?”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  She touched me under the sheet. “It’s all right,” she said.

  I awoke at dawn and made coffee on the stove. The light was gray in the trees, the Spanish moss motionless in the silence. “Did you ever hear of an overseer at Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?” I asked Bootsie.

  “No, why?”

  “When I was twelve, my brother, Jimmie, and I had a bad encounter with some low-rent people in City Park. A man opened a knife on us. One of the women with him called him Legion.”

  “Why do you ask about him now?”

  “His name came up when I was checking out some background material on Tee Bobby. It may not be important.”

  “By the way, Perry LaSalle came by last night,” she said.

  “Perry is becoming a pain in the ass,” I said.

  “He told me you’d say that.”

  Before I went to the office I drove out to Ladice Hulin’s house on Poinciana Island and asked her about the overseer named Legion and the death of Mrs. LaSalle in the fire.

  “Mind your own bidness. No, I take that back. Get out of my life altogether,” she said, and closed the door in my face.

  The next day Perry was at my office door. Before he could speak, I said, “Why were you at my house the other night?” “One of Barbara Shanahan’s colleagues got drunk and shot off his mouth at the country club. Barbara and the D.A. think you’re not a team player. I’m calling you as a witness for the defense, Dave. I thought I ought to warn you in advance,” he replied.

  I went back to the paperwork on my desk and tried to pretend he was not there.

  “On another subject, you care to explain to me why you’re bothering Ladice Hulin about my grandfather?” he asked.

  I put the cap on my pen and looked up at him. “She told me Amanda Boudreau’s death was related to events that happened before Tee Bobby was born. What do you think she meant by that?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t know. But stay out of my family’s private life,” he replied.

  “Your book on capital punishment didn’t spare people in the Iberia prosecutor’s office. What makes the LaSalles sacrosanct? The fact y’all own some canneries?”

  He shook his head and went out the door. I thought he had gone and I got up from my desk to go down the corridor for my mail. But he came back through the door, the blood pooled in his cheeks.

  “Where do you get off indicting my family?” he said.

  “That case you used in your book, the murder of those teenagers up on the Loreauville Road? The mother of that girl those two fuckheads killed said she heard her daughter’s voice out in the front yard at the same hour her daughter died. Her daughter was saying, ‘Please help me, Momma.’ I don’t remember seeing that in either your book or the movie.”

  “You make a remark about my family again, and cop or no cop, I’m going to bust your jaw, Dave.”

  “Give your grief to Barbara Shanahan. I think you two deserve each other,” I said.

  My hands were shaking when I brushed past him.

  That night Clete Purcel called the house. I could hear an electric guitar and saxophones and laughter and people talking loudly in the background. “I can hardly hear you,” I said.

  “I thought I’d have another run at Jimmy Dean Styles. I’m at a joint he owns in St. Martinville. I thought you’d like to know who’s parked across the street.”

  “It’s late, Clete.”

  “Joe Zeroski. He’s got a P.I. with him, his niece, Zerelda Calucci. Her old man was one of the Calucci brothers.”

  “Tell me about it tomorrow.”

  “The kid you’re looking at for the murder of the girl in the cane field? He’s playing here.”

  “Say again?”

  “What’s his name? Hulin? He’s up there on the bandstand. Anyway, I’d better hit the road. The only other thing white in this place is the toilet bowl. Sorry I bothered you.”

  “Give me a half hour,” I said.

  I drove up the Teche, under the long canopy of live oaks on the St. Martinville highway, the same road that federal soldiers had marched in 1863, the same road that Evangeline and her lover had walked almost a century before the federals came.

  Jimmy Dean Styles owned only a half-interest in the nightclub Clete had called from. His business partner was a black bondsman named Little Albert Babineau who had recently made the state news wires after he threw packages of condoms off a Mardi Gras float. Each package was printed with the words “Be Sure You ‘Bond’ Right. Be Safe with Little Albert. 24-Hour Bail Bonds. Little Albert Will Not Let You Down.”

  The club was built of plywood that had been painted blue and strung with yellow and purple lights. The window glass and walls literally shook from the noise inside. I pulled in at the back, where Clete waited for me next to his Cadillac. Through the trees below the club I could see a glaze of yellow light on Bayou Teche and the wake of a large boat slapping into the elephant ears along the banks.

  “You’re not pissed off because I took another run at Styles?” Clete said.

  “Why should I be? You never listen to anything I say, anyway.”

  “How you want to play it?” he asked.

  “We need to get Joe
Zeroski out of here. What was that you said about a P.I.?”

  “It’s his niece. I’d like to develop a more intimate relationship with her, except I always get the feeling she’d like to blow my equipment off. Wait till you see the bongos on that broad.”

  “Will you stop talking like that? I’m not kidding you, Clete. It’s an illness.”

  He put two sticks of gum in his mouth and chewed them loudly, his eyes full of mirth, his head seeming to turn in all directions at once.

  “I tell you what. I’ll handle Joe, you deal with Zerelda,” he said.

  Joe Zeroski’s car was parked down the block, across the street, in front of a small grocery store. A woman was behind the wheel. Her hair was black and long, the neckline of her blouse plunging, her nails and mouth painted arterial red. I opened my badge holder and lifted it into the light so she could see it. A holstered revolver sat on the seat between the woman and Joe Zeroski.

  “We need you to move your car out of here,” I said.

  “Pull your pud on somebody else’s time,” she said. I heard Clete snicker behind me.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “You’re out of your jurisdiction. Go screw yourself,” she said.

  “You have a permit for that gun?”

  “I don’t need one. In Louisiana the automobile is an extension of the home. But in answer to your question, yes, I do have a permit. Now, how about moving yourself out of my view?”

  I looked across the seat at Joe Zeroski. His stolid face and wide-set eyes had all the malleability of a cinder block.

  “She’s doing her job,” he said.

  “Tee Bobby didn’t kill your daughter, Joe,” I said.

  “Then why were you asking about him down at that pickup corner, the one my little girl was abducted from?” he replied.

  I blew out my breath and recrossed the street with Clete.