James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

Junior looked at the yard, the absence of chairs or scrolled-iron benches on the grass or even a glider hanging from an oak limb. “Where, suh?” he said.

“Behind the carriage house. There’s a box you can sit on. Enjoy your snack and then Mr. Posey will take you back to the camp,” LeJeune said.

“You sit right here at the table I’m going to get you some gumbo and a Coca-Cola from the house,” Miss Andrea said. “Did you hear me? Put your guitar in the chair and sit down.”

“I think Mr. Crudup knows where he should eat,” her husband said.

“Castille, if you weren’t so miserably stupid and insensitive, I think I’d shoot you,” she replied. Then she added “God!” and went inside the house.

LeJeune got up from his chair and walked to the driveway, where he talked quietly with the guard, Jackson Posey. Junior Crudup felt as though he were sliding to the bottom of a dark well from which he would never emerge.

Jackson Posey did not drive the pickup truck directly back to the work camp. Instead, he crossed the bayou on the drawbridge and parked between a sugarcane field and a persimmon grove, out of sight of either the LeJeune home or the camp. He breathed hard through his nose, his mouth a tightly crimped line.

“Get out of the truck,” he said.

“I ain’t did nothing, boss.”

“You got that sonofabitch on my ass. You call that nothing?”

“Not my fault, boss.”

They were both standing outside the truck now. The sky was hot and bright and wind was blowing dust out of the cane field and birds were clattering in the persimmon trees. Jackson Posey reached behind the driver’s seat. Junior heard something hard clank against metal.

“Drink it,” Posey said.

But Junior shook his head.

“Good ‘cause now I can send your skinny black ass right back up to “Gola.”

“Ain’t nobody in the camp supposed to get the Mussolini treatment. Miss Andrea don’t allow it.”

“Miz LeJeune don’t write the rules now. What’s it gonna be? Don’t matter to me one way or another.” Posey shook a cigarette loose from a package of Camels and inserted it in his mouth.

Junior took the bottle of castor oil from the guard’s hand and unscrewed the cap. The bottle was brown and heavy, the oil as viscous as syrup. He began to drink, then gagged and started again. The guard looked at his watch.

“All of it,” Posey said.

“Ain’t right, boss.”

“You messed up the man’s pussy. What do you expect him to do? Like my daddy used to say, life’s a bitch, then you die. Chug it down, boy.”

Posey watched while Junior finished the bottle, then fingered a reddish purple scab on his arm, one that had not been there only two days ago.

He drew in heavily on his cigarette, his eyes draining, as though he were purging himself of any intimations of his own mortality.

“It ain’t nothing personal, Junior,” he said.

“It’s real personal, boss.”

The guard stared emptily at the heat waves bouncing off the bayou and flicked his cigarette into the wind.

By the time Junior got back to the camp his bowels were collapsing inside him.

Hogman stopped his account and picked up a bottle that had fallen from his bottle tree. He wedged it in the fork of the tree and seemed to lose interest in both Father Jimmie and me and the story he had been telling.

“Go on, Hogman,” I said.

“Junior started believing he was gonna have a life besides jailing and road-ganging. Gonna get a pardon from the governor and be a big star up Nort’. Just like Leadbelly.”

“Andrea LeJeune was going to work a pardon for him?”

“That’s what he t’ought. She made Jackson Posey keep taking Junior up to the house when Mr. LeJeune was gone. Junior talked about her all the time, how pretty she was, what she smelled like, how she had all these fine manners, how she knew every ting about his music. A whole bunch of people come up from New Orleans to hear him sing and play his twelve-string in the backyard.”

“What happened to him, Hogman?”

“Don’t know. I got paroled. Last time I seed Junior he was playing “Goodnight Irene’ on the steps of his cabin, waiting to see if Miss Andrea was gonna drive by in her li’l convertible.”

“I think you’re holding out on me, partner.”

“Miss Andrea got killed in a car wreck two or tree years after I left the camp. Mr. LeJeune lived up in that big house wit’ just himself and his li’l girl. Junior disappeared. Ain’t nothing left of him but a voice on scratchy old records. Nobody cared what happened back then. Nobody care now. You axed for the troot’. I just give it to you.”

Hogman walked inside the back of his house and let the screen door slam behind him.

Ordinary people sometimes do bad things. A wrong-headed business decision, a romantic encounter in a late-night bar, a rivalry with a neighbor over the placement of a fence, any of these seemingly insignificant moments can initiate a series of events that, like a rusty nail in the sole of the foot, can systemically poison a normal, law-abiding person’s life and propel him into a world he thought existed only in the perverse imaginings of pulp novelists.

At sunrise on Saturday morning the sky was pink and blue, the trees in my yard dripping from a thunder shower during the night, and I took a cup of coffee and hot milk and a bowl of Grape-Nuts out on the gallery and read the morning paper while I ate. When I was halfway into the editorial page Dr. Parks pulled his battered, beige pickup to the curb and got out. His jaws were heavy with beard stubble, one eye clotted with blood; he wore no socks and jeans that were grass-stained at the knees.

“I need help,” he said.

“In what way?”

He sat down on a step, a few inches from me. His long, tapered hands rested between his legs and his body gave off an odor like sour milk.

His mouth began to form words, but nothing came out.

“Take it easy, Doctor. This stuff will pass with time. A guy just needs to put one foot in front of the other for a while,” I said.

“There’s no justice. Not for anything,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“My daughter’s death. The electrical fire at my house. I bought a home warranty policy from Sunbelt Construction. The policy is underwritten by a bunch of criminals in Aurora, Colorado. I tried to talk to the Louisiana insurance commissioner about it and was told he’s on his way to the federal pen.”

Like most people whose lives have been left in disarray by events so large he couldn’t even describe them to himself, his rage against the universe had now reduced itself to the level of a petty financial quarrel with a fraudulent home warranty company.

“There might be a state senator or two we can call on Monday. How about a cup of coffee?” I said. I rested my hand on his shoulder and tried to smile, then I saw the green cast in the skin under his eyes and the detached stare that made me think of soldiers I had known many years ago.

“I was on a medevac at Khe Sanh. I was in two crashes and one shoot-down. I put my best friends in body bags. It was all for nothing. This goddamn country is going down the sewer,” he said.

“I was over there, too, Doc. We can always be proud of what we did and let the devil take the rest of it. Sometimes you’ve got to throw the bad times over the gunnels and do the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just say full throttle and fuck it.”

But my words were of no value. He got to his feet like a man walking in his sleep, then turned and extended his hand. “I insulted you at my home and in your office. I didn’t mean what I said. My wife and I are better people than we seem,” he said.