James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“You can’t what?” she said.

She stared him down, then turned on her heel and marched inside her house, curling one finger for Junior to follow her.

“Sit down,” she said.

“Miss Andrea, Boss Posey ain’t an ordinary man,” Junior said.

“I’m going to call every week and have someone check on you. You have nothing to be afraid of.”

“It don’t work like that.”

She sat down in an antique chair with an egg-shaped crimson pad inset in the back and folded her hands in her lap. “The producer said you wrote a song called “The Angel of Camp Number Nine.” Is that about me?”

He hesitated, then said, “Yes, ma’am, I reckon it is.”

“That’s one of the most touching compliments I’ve ever received. I’d appreciate it very much if you’d play it.”

He slipped the guitar over his neck and began to sing:

Even before he looked through the front window and saw the automobile of Castille LeJeune approaching the house, he knew there was something terribly wrong. Andrea LeJeune’s face seemed repelled, as though someone had touched it with a soiled hand.

“You don’t need to sing anymore,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“What you’ve done is very nice, but I don’t think this song needs to be recorded.”

“I don’t rightly understand,” he said.

“This particular composition would probably be better deleted from your recording session. I think that’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

He felt his mouth pucker as though a nerve ending had been cut in his face. From outside he heard a car door slant, then footsteps on the gallery. He lowered his eyes. “Why ain’t it supposed to be recorded?” he asked.

“I don’t think I should have to explain that to you,” she replied.

His throat felt as though he had swallowed a handful of needles. “I’m ready for Boss Posey to take me back now,” he said. He pulled the Marine Band harmonica from his shirt pocket and set it on a flower-patterned couch by the French doors.

“I’m not in the habit of having people return gifts to me,” she said.

“I’d really appreciate it, ma’am, I mean appreciate more than anything else in the world, if you could just yell at Boss Posey for me, tell him I’se on my way,” Junior said.

Just then Castille LeJeune opened the front door and walked into the living room, a Panama hat hanging from his fingertips, his mouth twisted in an incredulous smile.

“Please explain it to me, or I’ll have to conclude I’ve either lost my mind or walked into the wrong house,” he said.

I heard the cell phone ring on the front seat of my truck. I went outside and picked it up.

“Where are you?” Helen Soileau’s voice said.

“Pecan Island.”

“What are you doing at Pecan Island?”

“Interviewing a man who did time with Junior Crudup.”

She exhaled her breath into the phone. “We’ve got a submerged car in West Cote Blanche Bay. The driver’s still in there. A witness says he heard firecrackers going off before the car went into the water. Then the car drove off a pier.”

“How about sending someone else?”

“Dave, your separate itinerary ends right now. Get your butt over there.”

“Soon as I can,” I said.

“Not good enough.”

I turned off the ringer on the cell and went back inside to finish my interview with Woodrow Reed.

Mr. LeJeune and Miss Andrea had a big fight that night,” Woodrow said.

“How do you know?”

“My cousin was the maid. She tole me later, that was after I was out of the joints, she tole me Mr. LeJeune went crazy that night. He picked up Miss Andrea’s clothes off the flo’ and smelled them.”

“He did what ?”

“He smelled her clothes and knowed she was messing around on him. He was yelling all over the house, saying his wife went to bed wit’ a nigger. My cousin was so scared she run out the do’ and hid in the trees down by the bayou. She said Mr. Castille come crashing out of the house and drove his car down to the work camp.”

“Looking for Junior?”

“No, suh. He was after Boss Posey. A man like Castille LeJeune don’t go after a nigger convict. It was Boss Posey he took it out on.”

“I don’t understand. Jackson Posey knew Junior was innocent, that Andrea LeJeune was having an affair with a man in Crowley.”

“What was Boss Posey gonna say? “Your wife been sleeping wit’ another white man and I knowed about it and I ain’t said nothing’? Boss Posey was caught, just like Junior. Boss Posey was gonna save his job and his ass only way he knew how.”

Woodrow Reed stopped his account, his hands fixed rigidly on his thighs, staring at me with his flat, sightless eyes. The pupils were overly large, like black dimes, as though they contained thoughts and remembered images that were bursting inside his head.

“Save his ass how, Woodrow?” I said.

“I got great shame about this, Mr. Robicheaux. The story of Judas ain’t only in the Bible. Thirty pieces of silver can come to you in lots of ways.”

He looked at me a long time while fireflies sparked in the darkness outside and moths thudded softly against the screens, then he told me the rest of it.

Two weeks passed at the camp, and still there was no rain, only heat and dust blowing from the fields and dry lightning at night and the rumble of distant thunder over the Gulf. Cigarettes thrown from automobiles and pickup trucks started roadside grass fires that spread into the cane, and after sunset Woodrow and Junior sat on the front steps of their cabin and watched the dull red glow inside the clouds of brown smoke on the horizon.

Junior no longer played his guitar or sat in on bouree games or sassed the guards. Until lock-up he loitered in the corners of the yard, or sat on his up-ended Coca-Cola box, which everyone now called “Junior’s box,” or sat on the steps with Woodrow, staring at the empty dirt road that led down to a small general store by the drawbridge.

“You tearing yourself up over so meting that was never real,” Woodrow said. “Miss Andrea is a nice white woman. But that’s all she is. She ain’t sent down by God to take care of Junior Crudup.”

“Shut up, Woodrow,” Junior replied.

“Sure, I can do that. Then you can talk to yourself ‘cause everybody else around here t’inks you done lost your mind.”

Woodrow took a worn pack of playing cards out of his shirt pocket, shuffled them, then cupped and squared them in his palm. “Here, I’m gonna give you one of my readings. Won’t cost you a cent,” he said.

“Don’t be giving me none of your truck,” Junior said.

But Woodrow went ahead and turned the cards over one at a time, placing them in a circle in the space between him and Junior. “See, there’s you, the one-eyed Jack. Slick, wit’ a li’l thin mustache, got the mojo going on the rest of the world. Up top there is the queen of hearts. Guess who that is. Over here is the king of diamonds. Guess who that is. Notice the king and the queen ain’t interested in whether the one-eyed Jack is playing pocket pool wit’ himself or not. What that mean, Junior, is that rich white people don’t care about what goes on down here in this camp.”