James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“What did your P.O. tell you about putting your hands on little kids, asshole?” Clete said.

“I ain’t put—”

Clete locked one hand on the back of Bobby Joe’s neck and drove his head down on the toilet bowl, smashing his mouth against the rim, plunging his head into the water, scouring the bottom of the bowl with his face. It should have been enough but he was beyond controlling it now or even trying. He slammed the toilet seat down on Bobby Joe’s neck and head, then grabbed the top of the shower stall and mounted the toilet, crushing the seat down on Bobby Joe’s head, tap dancing on it like an elephant on hallucinogens while Bobby Joe’s legs thrashed on the linoleum.

Outside he heard children playing and through the top of the window he saw a little girl chasing after a Frisbee that sailed above her head, and like a man descending from an electrical storm high up on a mountain he stepped back down on the floor and pulled Bobby Joe from the toilet bowl, dripping with water and blood.

He tossed a towel in Bobby Joe’s face and leaned back against the wall, out of breath, his fists still knotting. “I’m going to make regular checks on the kid next door,” he said. “If I find out you’ve been near him, you’ll wish you were a bar of soap back in “Gola. The same goes if you dime me. Maybe you think you got a bad deal here today, but pervs don’t get slack. You hearing me on this?”

“You fat fuck,” Bobby Joe said, pressing the towel to the blood that ran off his chin, looking at it in disbelief, his words muffled, his mouth still trembling. “You like family values? That kid’s mother used to be an army whore over by Folk Polk. I’m gonna find out your name. If I ever offend with a kid again, I’m gonna say it each time I poke him. How’s that, asshole ?”

When Clete got back to the motor court, he stayed under the shower until the hot water tank went empty, burned his clothes in a barbecue pit, drank a quart of whiskey-laced eggnog, and still could not feel clean.

Father Jimmie Dolan had done six months federal time for demonstrating at the School of the Americas and probably considered himself jail wise But in reality, like all people who are intrinsically decent, he was incapable of the cynicism that passes for prison-acquired wisdom.

On Thursday morning he was in Franklin, in black suit and Roman collar, collecting signatures on his petition to ban the sale of mixed drinks from drive-by windows. During three hours of approaching people in front of strip malls and grocery stores, he had amassed a total of six signatures, one from a retarded man, and two from people who signed their names with an X .

He bought a take-out lunch from a McDonald’s and ate it in his car under the trees in a small park, then fell asleep. The day was unseasonably warm, the live oaks flickering with wind, but he dreamed of snowmelt in the Cumberland Mountains, the bright air of early spring, tea-colored streams that leached out of limestone cliffs, dogwood blooming purple and white on a hillside. When he awoke, children were running by the front of his car, kicking a soccer ball in the leaves, the spangled sunlight racing across their bodies, but somehow there was a continuity between the beauty of the Appalachian spring in Jimmie’s dream and the joy of the children at play.

He got out of his car and began walking toward the public rest room. He had no reason to pay attention to a nervous, agitated plain-clothes detective by the name of Dale Louviere, who was parked in a Ford by the swing sets, the same detective who had investigated the killing of Dr.

Parks by Will Guillot and called it an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

Nor did Father Jimmie pay attention to a man known as Cash Money Mouton standing by the lavatory inside the rest room.

Cash Money’s last name was French but he was actually a pecker-wood product of north Louisiana. He used to sell fire and accident and term life insurance from door to door in black and poor-white neighborhoods, and was infamous for both his sweaty enthusiasm and his carnival sales rhetoric. He would pull clutches of papers and brochures from a vinyl briefcase, his face bursting with sincerity, tapping his seated listener, usually the man of the house, on the kneecap, saying, “You run your lawnmower over your foot and chop your toes off, I’ll give you twelve-him nerd dollars, cash money, boy. You stick your hand in your skill saw, I’ll pay you five-him nerd dollars, that’s cash money, for every finger you cut off. Splash muriatic acid in your eyes and go blind, I’m talking five-thousand bananas, cash money, boy.”

Then Cash Money Mouton’s uncle became police chief and Cash Money began a new career.

Father Jimmie stood at the urinal and relieved himself. He could feel the man at the lavatory staring at the side of his face. He started to look at him, then thought better of it and kept his eyes straight ahead. But when he tried to get to the lavatory the man known as Cash Money stood in his way.

“Excuse me,” Father Jimmie said.

But Cash Money did not move. He wore sideburns, a Tabasco tie, an American flag in his coat lapel. He smelled of deodorant, hair tonic, and fear. There was almost an iridescent shine on his skin.

“Is there some difficulty here that I don’t quite grasp?” Father Jimmie asked.

“Repeat that?” Cash Money said.

“Could I be of some assistance to you?”

“That’s it,” Cash Money said.

He stepped into the rest room doorway and waved at the man in the Ford automobile. Father Jimmie rinsed his hands, shook them off, and tried to walk around him.

“You’re not going anywhere, buddy boy,” Cash Money said.

“Push me again and we’re both going to regret the next couple of minutes,” Father Jimmie said.

But Cash Money was looking over his shoulder now and not at Father Jimmie. “He just threatened me,” he said to the man approaching the rest room.

“What else did he do?” the plainclothes detective named Dale Lou-vi ere said. Even in the open air a gray fog of nicotine and ash seemed to enclose his body. Clusters of veins, like tiny pieces of green string, pulsed in his temples.

“He said he wanted to help me. He was fooling with his fly when he said it,” Cash Money said.

“You’re a liar,” Father Jimmie said.

“We saw you watching those kids, Father,” Louviere said.

“How would you like to have your teeth knocked down your throat?” Father Jimmie said.

“Hook him up,” Louviere said.

“I ain’t putting my hands on him,” Cash Money said. His eyes jumped sideways when Father Jimmie looked him directly in the face.

At the police station Father Jimmie was charged with sexual solicitation and threatening a police officer and locked in an empty holding cell that was in full view of anyone, male or female, in the booking area. He made a pillow out of his coat, pulled off his collar, and lay down on a wood bench. He stared up at the graffiti and scratched drawings of genitalia that covered almost all the painted surfaces in the cell, and remembered the admonition of the blues singer Lazy Lester: “Don’t ever write yo’ name on the jailhouse wall.”

He could see Louviere punching in numbers on a phone, calling up first the local newspaper, then a television station in Lafayette and one in Baton Rouge, the Associated Press in New Orleans, and finally the diocese.

Louviere walked to the cell door. “Want your phone call now?” he asked.

“I’d like to ask you a question first,” Father Jimmie replied.

Louviere unlocked the door and pulled it open. “If you’re wondering whether I’m a Catholic, yeah, I am. And it’s perverts like you who give the church a bad name,” he said.