James Burke: Last Car to Elysian Fields

As an adult he filled his body with laxatives, tried every diet program imaginable, trained at fat farms, sweated to the oldies with Richard Simmons, attended a fire-walker’s school run by a celebrity con man in California, almost died from liposuction, and finally had a gastric bypass. The consequence of the latter was a weight loss of 170 pounds in a year’s time.

All of the wrong kind.

He lost the blubber, but under the blubber was a support system of sinew that hung on his frame like curtains of partially hardened cement. If this was not enough of a problem, Fat Sammy had another one that was equally egregious and beyond the scope of medicine. His head was shaped like a football, his few strands of gold hair brushed like oily wire into his scalp.

I twisted an iron bell on the grilled door that gave onto a domed archway leading into Fat Sammy’s courtyard.

“Who is it?” a voice said from a speaker inside the gate.

“It’s Dave Robicheaux. I’ve got a problem,” I said.

“Not with me, you don’t.”

“It’s about Gunner Ardoin. Open the door.”

“Never heard of him. Come back another time. I’m taking a nap.”

“There’re some movie people in New Iberia. They want to work with some local guys who know their way around,” I said.

The speaker box went dead and the gate buzzed open.

The courtyard was surfaced with soft brick, the flower beds blooming with yellow and purple roses, irises and hibiscus and Hong Kong orchids. Banana and umbrella trees and windmill palms grew along the walls, and the balconies dripped with bougainvillea and passion vine.

Fat Sammy lay in a hammock like a beached whale, a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his skin glazed with suntan lotion. A portable stereo and a mirror and a hairbrush sat on a glass-topped table next to him. The stereo was playing “Clair de Lune.”

“Who are these movie people?” he asked.

“Germans. They’re making a documentary. I think you’re the man to show them around,” I said.

I pulled up a deep-backed wicker chair and sat down without being asked. He sat up in the hammock and turned down the volume on the stereo, his scalp glistening in the sunshine. He wiped his head with a towel, his eyes neutral, his mouth down-turned at the corners.

“Documentary on what?” he asked.

“Let me clear the decks about something else first. Somebody beat up a priest named Father Jimmie Dolan. It’s a lousy thing to happen, Sammy, something no respectable man would be involved in. I thought you’d want to know about it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“In the old days elderly people in New Orleans didn’t get jack-rolled and their houses didn’t get creeped and nobody murdered a child or abused Catholic clergy. If N.O.P.D. couldn’t take care of it, we let you guys do it for us.”

His eyes were hooded, like a frog’s. “You were kicked off the force, Robicheaux. You don’t speak for nobody, at least not around here.” He paused, as though reconsidering the tenor of his rhetoric. “Look, this used to be a good city. It ain’t no more.”

When I didn’t speak he took a breath and started over. “This is the way it is. I make movies. I build houses. I’m developing shopping centers in Mississippi and Texas. You want to know who’s running New Orleans? Flip over a rock. Welfare pukes hustling bazooka and blacks and South American spies and bikers muleing brown skag out of Florida.

Nothing against the blacks or the spies. They’re making it just like we did. But I wouldn’t be in a room with none of them people unless I was encased in a full-body condom.”

“Who did the job on Father Dolan?”

His eyes were pale blue, almost without color, his expression like that of a man who had never learned to smile. “Somebody saying it’s on me? This guy Ardoin you mentioned?”

I looked at a strip of pink cloud above the courtyard. “You’re the man in New Orleans,” I said.

“Yeah, every whore in the city tells me the same thing. I wonder why. I ever jerk you around, Robicheaux?” he said.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then I ain’t going to now. That means I didn’t have nothing to do with hurting a priest, and what I might know about it is my own business.”

“I’m a little disappointed, Sammy. Within certain parameters you were always straight up,” I said. I got up to go.

He brushed at his nose, his pale blue eyes burrowing into my face. “You lied your way in here? About them movie people?” he said.

“That was on the square.” I handed him a business card that had been given to me by a member of a visiting German television crew the previous week. “These guys are doing a story on the New Orleans connection to the assassination of President Kennedy. They believe it got set up here and in Miami.”

“You saying I “ His voice broke in his throat. “I voted for John Kennedy.”

“I’m saying nothing had better happen to Father Dolan again.”

Fat Sammy rose from the hammock, wheezing in his chest, like an angry behemoth that couldn’t find its legs. I had forgotten how tall he was.

He picked up a glass of iced tea from the table gargled with it, and spit it in the flower bed.

“You own your soul?” he asked.

“What?”

“If so, count yourself a lucky man. Now get the fuck out of here,” he said.

I ate dinner with Clete at a small restaurant up the street from the French Market, then shook hands with him and told him I had better head back for New Iberia. I watched him walk across Jackson Square and pass the cathedral, pigeons napping in the shadows around his feet, and disappear down Pirates Alley. I started to get into my truck, but instead, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I sat down on one of the iron benches by Andrew Jackson’s equestrian statue, and listened to a black man playing a bottleneck guitar.

It was the burnt-out end of a long day and a longer weekend. The wind was cold off the river, the light cold and mauve colored between the buildings that framed the square, the air tinged with the smell of gas from the trees and flower beds. The black man worked the glass bottleneck up and down the frets of his guitar and sang, “Oh Lord, my time ain’t long. Rubber-tired hack coming down the road, burial-ground bound.”

An N.O.P.D. cruiser pulled to the curb on Decatur. A black woman in uniform got out and fixed her cap, adjusted the baton on her belt, and walked toward me. She positioned herself between me and the sun, like an exclamation point against a fiery crack in the sky. I picked at my nails and didn’t return her stare.

“Can’t stay out of town?” she said.

“I have an addictive personality,” I replied.

She sat down on the corner of the bench. “You got a bad jacket for a cop, Robicheaux.”

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“Clotile Arceneaux. See,” she said, lifting her brass name tag with her thumb. “Your friend, Father Dolan? He’s an amateur, and they’re going to take his legs off yours, too, you keep messing in what you’re not supposed to be messing in.”

“I’m not big on telling other people what to do. I ask they show me the same courtesy,” I said.

The baton on her hip kept banging against the bench. She slid it out of the ring that held it and bounced it between her legs on the cement.

Her pursed lips looked like a tiny red rose in the gloom. I thought she would speak again, but she didn’t. The sun went down behind the buildings in the square and the wind gusted off the levee, smelling of rain and fish-kill in the swamps.

“Can I buy you coffee, officer?” I said.

“Your friend is off the hook on the assault beef. Time for you to go home, Robicheaux,” she said.

Home, I thought, and looked at her curiously, as though the word would not register in my mind.