James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

He was drinking steadily from the bottle now, bent slightly forward in the chair, the cancer on his arms like small poisoned roses buried in his skin.

Off in the distance Woodrow heard the dry rumble of thunder and saw a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. Junior’s movements with the shovel became slower and slower, then it slipped out of his hands and clattered down into the darkness.

“I had it, boss. You gonna shoot me, go ‘head on and do it,” he said.

He stood erect, his face slick with sweat, his body glowing with stink, one eye swollen into a knot with a slit in it.

“I’m about to lose my job ‘cause of you. My pension goes out the window with it. That’s what you done, you black sonofabitch. Now, you fill that goddamn hole.”

“Know what the problem is, boss?” Junior asked. “It ain’t Miss Andrea. It ain’t Mr. LeJeune, either. It’s ‘cause you ain’t no different from us. You eat the same food, stack the same time, kiss the same pink ass the niggers do. Maybe it’s time you wise up.”

The first blow with the slapjack caught Junior across the temple, splitting the skin to the bone. Then Jackson Posey whipped him to the ground, just as though he were chopping on a piece of wood.

But Woodrow believed it was the first blow that killed Junior and that the others were visited upon the body of a dead man, because Junior made no sound as the slapjack whistled down on his head and neck and back, thudding to the ground on his knees, his eyes already rolled upward in his head.

And while his friend died Woodrow stood by impotently, his fists balled in front of him, a cry coming from his throat that sounded like a child’s and not his own.

Jackson Posey’s chest was heaving when he looked down at his work. He flung the slapjack aside. “Damn!” he said. He paced up and down, staring back at the camp, then at the lights burning in the LeJeune house. Woodrow was so frightened his teeth knocked together in the back of his mouth.

Posey steadied his foot against Junior’s shoulder and tried to shove his body over the edge of the hole. But Junior’s body fell sideways and Boss Posey couldn’t move it with his foot. In fact, Woodrow could not believe how weak Posey was.

“Get a holt of his feet,” Posey said.

“Suh?”

“Pick up his feet or join him. Which way you want it?”

Woodrow gathered up Junior’s ankles while Boss Posey lifted his arms, and the two of them flung Woodrow’s friend over the rim of the hole.

The thump it made when it hit the bottom was a sound Woodrow would hear in his sleep the rest of his life.

“Go over there and set on the ground,” Posey said.

Posey mounted the bulldozer and started the engine. With the lights off he lowered the blade and pushed the huge pile of clay into the hole, backing off it, packing it down, scraping it flat, until the hole was only a dimple in the landscape. When he cut the engine Woodrow could hear the first drops of rain pinging on the steel roof over the driver’s seat.

“Junior transferred out of here tonight. Ain’t none of this happened.

That’s right, ain’t it, Woodrow?”

“If you say so, boss.”

“There’s a half inch of whiskey left in that bottle. You want it?”

“No, suh.”

“Have a Camel,” Posey said, and shook two loose from his pack. “Go ahead and take it. It’s a new day tomorrow. Don’t never forget that.

Sun gonna be breakin’ and a new day shakin’. That’s what my daddy always used to say.”

How’d you come by this little farm here?” I asked Woodrow.

“Mr. LeJeune sold it to me. Give me a good price wit’ out no interest,” he replied.

“To shut you up?”

“He sent a black man to me wit’ the offer. Never saw Mr. LeJeune.”

Woodrow stared at me with his flat, sightless eyes that could have been large painted buttons sewn on his face. Lightning jumped in the clouds over the Gulf.

I slipped my business card between his fingers. “Let me know if I can do anything for you,” I said.

His hand folded around the card. “Whatever happened to Mr. LeJeune’s li’l girl, the one named T’eo?” he asked.

“Theodosha? She’s around.”

“My cousin, the maid for Mr. and Miz LeJeune? She always worried about that li’l girl. She said t’ings wasn’t right in that house.”

I asked him what he meant but he refused to explain.

“How long were you inside?” I said as I was leaving.

“Five years.”

“What’d you go down for?”

“Fifty-tree-dol’ar bad check,” he replied.

As I drove back toward New Iberia a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf and marched across the southern tip of Vermilion Parish, thrashing the sugarcane in the fields, the rain twisting in my headlights. I could not shake the tale told me by Woodrow Reed, nor the sense of needless death and cruelty and loss that it instilled in the listener. I turned on my radio and tried to find a station that was playing music, but my radio went dead, although it had been working fine earlier.

I tried to get Helen again on my cell phone, but I couldn’t raise the wireless service and gave it up and tossed the cell phone on the seat.

I passed flooded rice fields wrinkled with wind and lighted farmhouses that looked like snug islands inside the storm. Then I passed a billboard on a curve and my lights flashed across a woman standing by the side of the road.

She wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned tan raincoat that whipped back in the wind. Her hair was honey colored, tapered on her neck, her skin almost luminous in the glare of headlights. Hey, G.I., give a girl a ride? I thought I heard a voice say.

I braked the truck to the side of the road, my heart beating, and looked through the back window. The woman stood on the shoulder of the road, silhouetted against a light that shone on the face of the billboard. Don’t buy into this, I told myself. It’s not her. Your wife is dead and all the delusions and misery you inject into your life will not change that inalterable fact.

Then I put the truck in reverse and began backing toward the figure on the side of the road.

She glanced back over her shoulder once and began running. I accelerated faster, swerving on and off the pavement, until I was abreast of her. Through the rain-streaked glass her face stared at me, beaded with water, eyeshadow running down her cheeks, her mouth glossy with lipstick. I closed and opened my eyes, like a man coming out of darkness into light, her face forming and reforming in the rain.

I shoved open the passenger door and held up my badge holder. “Get in,” I said.

She hesitated a moment, then sat down in the passenger seat and slammed the door behind her. She gave me a hard look in the glow of the dash panel. Her cheeks were pitted and heavily made up, her clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and booze. “Thanks for the ride. My old man threw me out,” she said.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“First bar we pass,” she said. “For a minute you scared me. I had trouble with a couple of black guys last night. You stopped just ‘cause you saw me in the rain?”

“I thought you were somebody else,” I said.

She gave me a look. “There’s a bar past the curve. Right by the motel,” she said.

I put on my turn indicator and began to slow the truck. I knew the bar. It was a ramshackle, sullen place owned by a man who ran dog fights.

“I left my purse at the house. The sonofabitch I live with has probably drunk it up by now,” she said.

I stopped in the parking lot and waited. She took a cigarette from her shirt pocket and lit it with a plastic butane lighter. She continued rubbing the striker wheel under her thumb. “Look, I can’t drink in there for free. You want some action or not?” she said.