James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

Fortunately he had stuffed a pack in his jacket pocket. Just as he fished one out he saw the Honda coming in his direction again. The driver pulled alongside Dale Louviere and rolled down the window with the electric motor. He wore a golfer’s cap pulled down on one eye, and had a tight face and small ears, like a fighter who had spent too many years in the ring. A road map was crumpled on the dashboard. His black suit and rabat were dry, his shoulders narrow, his hands round and pink on the steering wheel.

“Could you be directing me back to Highway 90, sir?” the priest said.

“Go to the four corners and turn left,” Louviere said.

The priest screwed his head about, his eyebrows raised into half-moons.

“That simple? I must have made a complete circle. I think the bishop served too much of the grog last night.”

But instead of driving away he started fiddling with his map, running his finger along a line that marked Highway 90, peering down the road, then through the back window again. Dale Louviere thought he heard a knocking sound in the trunk.

“What’s that?” he asked.

The priest clucked his tongue. “I’m afraid I ran over a dog. I’m taking him to a veterinary if I can find one,” he said. “Turn at the crossroads, you say?”

“Correct. You can’t get lost. Got it now?” Louviere said impatiently. He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke lovingly into his lungs.

“I don’t see that on this map,” the priest said.

“Look, it’s not that hard. You see the state road here—” He held his cigarette to one side and leaned in the window.

That was as far as he got. The priest grabbed the lanyard around Louviere’s neck and rolled up the window on his throat, trapping his head at the top of the glass like a man caught in an inverted guillotine.

He pressed down on the accelerator and drove his car down the road and into Louviere’s driveway, while Louviere held onto the door handle and tried to extend his body like a crane’s to keep from being decapitated.

“Be a good fellow and toggle along as best you can. We’ll have you safe and snug in your digs before you know it,” the priest said. “Oops, a little bump there. Hang on.”

Dale Louviere felt his head being torn loose from his torso as he tripped over his feet, fighting to find purchase. The Honda moved past the side of his house, his gardens and flower beds and across the thin, wintergreen stretch of grass that comprised his backyard, into a paint less cypress barn left over from an earlier time.

The priest lowered the window glass and Dale Louviere fell backward into a smell of rotted straw, hard-packed, damp earth, and horse manure that powdered into dust. The priest cut the engine on the car and got out, a .45 automatic hanging from his right hand. “I have nothing against coppers. Except those who are no better than me and pretend otherwise. On which side of the line would a fellow like you fall, sir?” he said.

Again Dale Louviere heard a kicking sound in the Honda’s trunk but could not think of anything except the violent pounding in his own chest.

At 10:55 A.M. while Father Jimmie Dolan sat in a St. Mary Parish courtroom, cuffed to a wrist chain with a collection of drunks, pipe heads prostitutes, and wife batterers, the prosecutor’s office received a call from Dale Louviere. He indicated he was resigning his job and, for personal reasons, moving to an undisclosed city out of state. He also said there was no substance to the charges against Father James Dolan and that his colleague, Cash Money Mouton, who had made the arrest in the public rest room, would confirm the same, provided he could be found.

Clotile Arceneaux, Father Jimmie, and I walked out the front door of the courthouse together. The rain had stopped and the town looked washed and clean, the trees green against the grayness of the day, the ebb and flow of the traffic on a wet street somehow an indicator of the world’s normalcy.

“What happened in there?” Father Jimmie said.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.

“Max Coll is behind this, isn’t he?” he said.

“Who cares? Those guys deserve anything that happens to them,” I said.

“I thought New Orleans was tough. Y’all have death squads over here?” Clotile said.

I started to make a flippant reply, but saw the troubled expression on Father Jimmie’s face. “I have to get my car from the pound,” he said.

“We’ll see you at the house. Let it slide, Jimmie,” I said.

“One of those men may be dead,” he replied.

He walked down the street, his black suit rumpled and stained from sleeping overnight on a cement jailhouse floor.

“Your friend isn’t easily consoled, is he?” Clotile said.

“Ever hear about the Jewish legend of the thirteen just men who suffer for the rest of us?”

“No. What’s the point?”

“Some people have to do life in the Garden of Gethsemane,” I said.

She picked up my left hand and looked at it, her fingers cool on my skin. “This is where those grease balls put the pliers to you?” she said.

“Yes.”

She patted the top of my hand and released it. “Take care of your own ass for a change,” she said.

Father Jimmie had not been back at my house ten minutes when the phone rang in the kitchen. He picked it up but did not speak, his breath audible in the silence.

“Ah, you’re a clairvoyant as well as a spiritual man,” the voice on the other end said.

“Leave me alone. Please,” Father Jimmie said.

“I got you, didn’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know what I mean, sir. It took a bastard like me with blood on his hands to get you out of the slams. Now it’s you who owe me.”

“What did you do with those men?”

“They’re both alive and probably enjoying a cool drink in a warm climate by now. I think one of them mentioned Ecuador. Have to say, though, I was tempted to release them from their earthly bonds.”

Father Jimmie sat down in a chair and tried to think. “Perhaps you mean well, but you cannot use violence to solve either your problems or mine,” he said.

“What do you know of violence, sir? What do you fucking know of it?”

“You’re full of hatred, Max. Get it out of your life. You injure yourself with it more than others.”

“If I came into your confessional, would you give me absolution?”

“Yes.”

“There are a couple more house calls I’d like to make.”

“You don’t negotiate the terms of forgiveness... Max? Did you hear me?”

But Max Coll had hung up. Father Jimmie leaned his head down on his hand, the stink of the jail still on his clothes, Snuggs the cat pacing back and forth on the table his tail dragging across Father Jimmie’s face. He felt more tired than he had ever been in his life, vain and used up, now sullied by the accusation of molester, even though it was a lie.

He knew the rumor would always follow him, regardless of where he went or what he did. A wave of revulsion and anger washed through him and made him clench his fists. Is this what all the years in the seminary, the struggles with celibacy and bigots and dictatorial and obtuse superiors had been about? To end up with his name and life’s work soiled by an accusation that made his skin crawl?

Why didn’t he quit running a game on himself? He posed as the altruist, but other people constantly had to get him out of trouble. If he had wanted to be a true missionary and take real risks, why hadn’t he joined the Maryknolls? He disdained the role of the traditional priest, but in his self-imposed piety he had become little more than a noisy gadfly dedicated to causes Carrie Nation might have supported.