James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Yes,” I said weakly.

“I’ve never harmed a woman, sir, so I let the matter go. But I’ll be reamed up the bung hole with a spiked telephone pole if you haven’t made me reconsider the LeJeune and Guillot fellows.”

“Hold on, Coll.”

“No, you’ve done me a favor. I’ve got to cancel my flight reservations and give it all a good think. Tell Father Dolan thanks for his help. A tip of the hat to yourself as well.”

The line went dead. I replaced the receiver and wiped my face with a dish towel. I tried to sort through the conversation I had just had with Max Coll. My head was a basket of snakes, my mouth dry, my thoughts suddenly centered on a jigger of Beam poured into an iced mug of draft beer inside a Saturday-afternoon bar that was only two blocks up the street.

Father Jimmie Dolan’s car pulled into the driveway, pushing a wave of water under the house. When he entered the front door he was smiling, his tan, wide-brim hat dripping. “Any calls for me?” he asked.

I drove downtown to the restaurant that used to be Provost’s Pool Room.It was warm and cheerful and crowded inside, and I sat at the hand-carved mahogany bar and looked out the window at the wetness of the day and the traffic passing in the street. As a boy I used to come to the pool room on Saturday afternoons with my father, Big Aldous, in a era when the plank floors were strewn with football betting cards and green sawdust and the owner served free robin gumbo out of big pots that he set on an oilcloth-covered pool table. The stamped tin ceilings and mahogany bar and old brick walls still remained, but the building was an upscale restaurant now that catered to tourists who came to see a world that no longer existed.

The bartender wore his hair slicked back and black pants and a white jacket and black tie. “You just gonna have coffee, sir?” he asked.

“How about I buy you a drink?” I said.

“Sir?”

“It’s not a complicated question.” It sounded bad but I grinned when I said it.

He shrugged. “I get off in a hour,” he said.

I put several one-dollar bills on the bar. “Make sure it’s Beam or Jack,” I said.

“You got it,” he said, scooping up the bills.

Then I drove back home and went into the kitchen, where Father Jimmie was reading the newspaper. He lowered the paper, then looked curiously at my face. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” he said.

So I told him how bad it was, or at least how bad I thought it was; but I was to learn my education about my own obtrusiveness was ongoing.

After I finished he sat for a long time without speaking, his gaze turned inward, unable to conceal his disappointment at either me or his own missionary failure, or the world as it really is. I suspect I wanted absolution, like a child going to confession on a Saturday afternoon, leaving behind his imaginary sins, bounding down the street as though a stricken world has just been made whole again. But that wasn’t to be.

Father Jimmie had a look of sadness in his eyes that I cannot adequately describe. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” he said.

“Maybe I have at least a fair idea,” I replied.

“Max met with me outside Franklin. He expressed what I think was genuine remorse for the evil he’s done in his life. I gave him absolution. But you hung the bait in his face and energized him. My God, man, we’re talking about his soul.”

I felt light-headed, as though I were coming down with the flu. When I tried to speak I couldn’t clear the obstruction in my throat. Father Jimmie filled a glass with water but did not hand it to me.

“Listen, Coll changed his direction because he didn’t want to kill a woman,” I said.

“It makes no difference.”

“It does. I never thought about Theo being involved. Even though Clete kept warning me, I never thought about Theo.”

Father Jimmie realized I had already moved on from my own irresponsibility and was now concentrating on another matter, one that showed a degree of obsession beyond his grasp. He set down the glass and turned on me. I saw his right hand close. His next words were spoken through his teeth: “Don’t deceive yourself. You’re a violent and driven man, Dave, just like Max Coll.”

His eyelids were stitched to his brows, his throat bladed with anger and rebuke.

That evening the sky was as dark as I had ever seen it. Lightning rippled like quicksilver across the thunderheads in the south, and the sugarcane in the fields along the road to St. Martinville thrashed and flickered in the wind and rain, the oak canopy blowing leaves that stuck like leeches on my windshield. I went to Mass in the old French church on the square in St. Martinville, then when the church was empty put five dollars in the poor box and removed an unlit votive candle in a red glass receptacle and took it with me down to the cemetery on the bayou.

It was a foolish thing to do, I suspect, but I had long ago come to view the world as an unreasonable place, not to be contended with, better left to pragmatists and the mercantile who view the imagination and the unseen as their enemy. I parked under the streetlight, opened an umbrella, and walked between the crypts toward Bootsie’s tomb. A generic compact car passed behind me, turned at the corner, and disappeared down a side street.

The bayou was high, dented with rain rings, yellow in the lights from the drawbridge. I placed the votive candle next to the marble tablet on Bootsie’s tomb, wedged the umbrella so that it sheltered the candle from the rain and wind, then lit the wick.

The same compact car came out of the square and crossed the drawbridge, but I paid little attention to it. An event I had never seen in my life was taking place in front of me. Two huge brown pelicans drifted out from under the bridge, floating south on the tidal current, their wings folded tightly against the wind, their long yellow bills tucked down on their chests. I had never seen pelicans this far inland and had no explanation for their presence. Then I did something that made me wonder about my level of sanity.

I rose from the steel bench I was sitting on, pointing at the two birds, and said, “Take a look, Boots. These guys were almost extinct a few years ago. They’re beautiful.”

Then I sat down and folded my arms on my chest, the rain clicking on my coat.

That’s when I saw the compact in plain relief against the streetlight at the corner. It was pulled into a careless position at the curb, steam rising from the hood, the driver moving around in silhouette, as though he were having trouble with his safety belt.

Dave! a voice said, as audibly as a voice speaking to you on the edge of sleep, as denned as a stick snapping inside the eardrum.

I rose from the bench just as the streetlight glinted on the lens of a telescopic sight and the muzzle flash of a rifle splintered from the passenger window of the compact car. The bullet whanged off the steel bench and blew pieces off a statue of Jesus’s mother.

I ducked down between the crypts and pulled my .45 from my belt holster and sighted with two hands on the compact. But there were houses on the far side of the street and I couldn’t fire. I started running toward the compact, the .45 held at an upward angle, zigzagging between the crypts, my eyes locked on the driver, who was fighting to straighten the car’s wheels so he would not hit the curb.

He pulled around a parked pickup truck and floored the compact down the street. In seconds he would be beyond any safe angle of fire that I would have. I left the sidewalk and ran toward the corner of the cemetery, jumped on top of a crypt, and went over the chain link fence into the street. The compact was twenty-five to thirty yards away, headed down the bayou in the direction of the church, the license plated patinaed with mud. I stood in the center of the street, both arms extended, and aimed low on the trunk.