James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

But it wasn’t November yet. Or was it? I had to look at the calendar window on my watch to assure myself the month was still October.

Bootsie’s crypt was located by the bayou, and standing next to it I could look downstream and see on the opposite bank the ancient French church and the Evangeline Oak where she and I had first kissed as teenagers and the stars overhead had swirled like diamonds inside a barrel of black water.

I removed the three roses I had placed in a vase two nights previous and washed and refilled the vase under a tap by the gravel path that led through the cemetery. Then I put three fresh roses in the vase and set it in front of the marble marker that was cemented into the front of Bootsie’s crypt. The roses were yellow, the petals edged with pink, the stems wrapped in green tissue paper by a young clerk at the Winn-Dixie store in New Iberia. When he handed me the roses I was struck by the bloom of youth on his face, the clarity of purpose in his eyes. “I bet these are for a special lady,” he had said.

I sat on a metal bench with a ventilated backrest for a long time and drank a bottle of carbonated water I had brought from home. Then the wind came up and scattered the leaves from a swamp maple on the bayou’s surface, and inside the sound of the wind I thought I heard a loon calling.

I finished the bottle of carbonated water, screwed the top back on, and pitched the bottle at a trash barrel. But the bottle bounced on the rim of the barrel and fell on the gravel path. Rather than get up from the bench and retrieve it, I looked at it dumbly, all my energies dissipated for reasons that made no sense, the light as cold and brittle as if the sun were layered with ice.

I heard footsteps behind me.

“I wasn’t going to disturb you but I have to get back home,” Theodosha Flannigan said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Your neighbor told me you’d be here if you weren’t at home,” she said.

“I was parked in my car, waiting for you to come out. Merchie doesn’t know where I am. He ducks bullets in Afghanistan, then gets strung out if he breaks a shoelace. It’s because of his mother. I think she was lobotomized. That’s not a joke.”

I couldn’t follow what she was saying. I started to get up, but she put her hand on my shoulder and sat down beside me.

“It’s about Saturday night. Those two children were in danger of falling in the pond and I just stood there and watched it happening. I feel like shit,” she said.

“‘Bravery’ and ‘fear’ are relative terms. What counts is you went after them,” I said.

“I have some bad memories about that pond,” she said. She bit on a hangnail and stared into space. “I never go inside that fence. You must think I’m an awful person.”

But the truth was I didn’t want to talk about Theo’s personal problems.

I stood and picked up the plastic bottle that had bounced off the trash can and dropped it inside. When I sat back down I felt the blood rush from my head.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I still have bouts with malaria sometimes,” I said.

She wore a scarf tied under her chin, the points of her hair pressed flat against her cheeks. “Something else is bothering me, too, Dave. I think I make you uncomfortable,” she said.

“No, that’s not true. Not at all,” I said, focusing my eyes on the bayou.

“That night we had the little fling? We’d both been drinking our heads off. Neither one of us was married at the time. I admit I thought you might come back around, but you didn’t. So I wrote it off. It’s no big deal.”

“You’re right, it’s no big deal. I didn’t say it was a big deal,” I replied.

“Then why are you so “

“It’s not a problem. That’s really important to understand here,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’ve intruded upon you.”

“No, you haven’t. Everything is fine. Give Merchie my best.”

“Will you come out to dinner?”

I pinched my temples and looked down the bayou at the Evangeline Oak looming over the water and at the spire of the old French church, a sliver of moon rising behind the steeple.

“Maybe we can talk about it later,” I said.

“Sure. I’m sorry for being here like this. Since my psychiatrist died.. No, that’s the wrong word. Since he shot himself I feel this terrible sense of guilt. I’ve got two days’ sobriety now. That’s pitiful, isn’t it? I mean, taking pride in staying off the hooch for two days, like I invented the wheel?”

“I’ll see you, Theo.”

She exhaled her breath and I felt it touch my skin. She raised her eyebrows, staring inquisitively into my face, as though I needed to supply the endings to all her unfinished thoughts. Then she seemed to give it up and kissed the tips of two fingers, pressed them against my cheek, and walked out of the cemetery, a solitary firefly lighting in a tree above her head.

In the morning I called a homicide detective at the Lafayette City Police Department by the name of Joe Dupree. He had been in the 173 Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, but never spoke of the war and ate aspirin constantly for the pain he’d carried in his knees for thirty-five years. He was also one of the most thorough investigators I had ever known.

“What do you have on this psychiatrist who shot himself in Girard Park?” I said.

“Dr. Bernstine? It’s going down as a suicide. Why do you ask?”

“A woman named Theodosha Flannigan has brought it up a couple of times.”

“Merchie Flannigan’s wife?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Her name was in Bernstine’s appointment book,” he replied.

“You don’t buy the suicide?”

“He took two .25 caliber rounds in the right side of the head. The muzzle burns were an inch apart, just above the ear. If the second round was discharged as a spastic reaction, why were the entry wounds almost identical?”

“Any witnesses?” I asked.

“None who could give a visual. But a kid said he heard two pops. At first he said they were a few seconds apart. Then he said they were together. Finally he said he couldn’t be sure what he heard. Anyway, Bernstine had powder residue on his right hand. I’d like to say he was left-handed so my suspicions would have more basis. But he was ambidextrous.”

“What’s bothering you, besides the kid originally saying there was a time lag between the shots?”

“Bernstine died on a Saturday. The Flannigan woman was scheduled to see him the following Tuesday. But there was no case record on her in his files.”

“Maybe he had just started seeing her.”

“No, I called Ms. Flannigan. She said she’d been going to Bernstine for six months. Anyway, Bernstine’s wife calls me every day and tells me no way in hell he shot himself. Maybe not. But he’d lost his butt in the stock market and rumor has it he was messing around on his wife. So it’s going down as a suicide.”

“Thanks for your time, Joe.”

“You haven’t told me what Ms. Flannigan said to you.”

“For some reason she feels guilty about Bernstine’s death,” I said.

“Think she was in the sack with him?”

“If she had been, she would have told you about it. She’s a little neurotic,” I said.

“I’m shocked you’d know anybody like that, Dave.”

The following Monday Father Jimmie Dolan had just returned to the rectory after saying a 7:00 A.M. Mass when the phone rang in his office.

“Hello?” he said.

There was no reply. He heard a streetcar bell clanging in the background.

“Hello?” he repeated.

“Oh hello, Father. Sorry. I couldn’t get the bloody door closed on the booth,” a voice said.

“It’s you again, is it?”

“Father, you’ve put me seriously in the shitter.”