James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

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, boss man,” 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.”

“How come you know all this?” Woodrow asked.

“Read about it in a magazine.”

“You so meting else, Junior,” Woodrow said.

But secretly Junior did not feel he was something else. One out of three of his adult years had been spent in prison. He had made race records in Memphis, been interviewed in Downbeat magazine, and performed with Cab Calloway’s orchestra in New York City, all before he was thirty years old. But what had he done with his success? Rather than build upon it, he had gotten into trouble every place he went. Now he was the man with one eye in the country of the blind, sassing redneck prison guards, a hero to hapless, illiterate, and superstitious men because he could read a magazine.

One month later, on a Saturday afternoon, Andrea LeJeune had him brought to the big house again. This time her husband was with her on the patio, seated under an umbrella, a tropical drink in his hand.

Their daughter, who must have been around three or four years of age, was throwing a ball back and forth on the lawn with a black maid.

“This is my husband, Junior. He’d love to hear you sing “Goodnight, Irene,”” she said.

LeJeune’s legs were crossed. He wore socks with his sandals and seemed to be studying the points of his toes.

“Huddie Ledbetter done it a lot better than I can,” Junior replied. He shifted his weight and felt the belly of the guitar scrape hollowly against his belt buckle.

“Then play something of your own choosing,” Castille LeJeune said, his gaze still fixed on the end of his foot.

“Suh, I ain’t all that good,” Junior said. His eyes met LeJeune’s briefly, then slipped away.

“You uncomfortable for some reason?” LeJeune asked, “No, suh.”

“Then play. Please,” LeJeune said.

He sang “Dig My Grave with a Silver Spade,” running quickly through the verses, leaving out the treble string improvisations he usually ran high up on the guitar’s neck. When he finished he looked at nothing, the guitar strap biting into the back of his neck. He could smell the exhaled smoke from LeJeune’s cigarette drifting into his face.

“You seem to be a man of considerable accomplishment. How is it you spent so many years in jail?” LeJeune said.

“Don’t rightly know, suh. Guess some niggers just ain’t that smart,” Junior replied.

He heard the guard’s shoes crunch on the gravel drive, as though the guard were experiencing a tension he had to run through the bottoms of his feet into the ground. But LeJeune seemed to take no notice of any sardonic content in Junior’s remark.

“Maybe you should have joined the military and found a career for yourself that didn’t get you into trouble,” LeJeune said.

“I served in the United States Navy, suh. Under another name, but in the navy just the same.”

“You were a Stewart?”

“No, suh. I was a munitions loader. I loaded munitions right next to Harry Belafonte.”

“Who?”

“He’s a singer, suh.”

“Obviously my knowledge of poplar music isn’t very extensive,” LeJeune said, and smiled self-indulgently at his wife.

Why had Junior just told LeJeune of his military record or the fact he had known Harry Belafonte? It was like nipping a piece of gold through a sewer grate. At that moment he hated LeJeune more than any human being he’d ever met.

“Would you like something to eat before you go?” LeJeune said. He held up a crystal plate on which a thick ring of crushed ice was embedded with peeled shrimp.

“No, thank you, suh.”

“I insist,” LeJeune said. He used a fork to scrape a pile of shrimp and ice on a paper plate, then inserted a toothpick in a shrimp and handed the plate to Junior. “Go back yonder and sit in the shade and eat these.”