James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“After the juke closed up, five white men drunk on moonshine caught the singer out on the road and beat him till he couldn’t get off the ground. But that wasn’t enough for them, no. They was in an old Ford, one wit’ them narrow tires, and they run the tire right acrost his t’roat and busted his windpipe. Man never sung again and died in the asylum. Junior seen it all, right there on the side of the road, and couldn’t do nothing about it. I don’t t’ink there was a person in the whole round world he trusted after that.”

“Why’d he go to the joint, Batist?”

“Got caught sleeping wit’ a white man’s wife. That was 1934 or ‘35. But you want to know what happened in there, we got to talk to Hogman.”

“Batist, I’d really like to keep this simple.”

“They put Junior Crudup on the Red Hat Gang. Every nigger in Lou’sana feared that name, Dave. The ones come off it wasn’t never the same.”

Hogman Patin was a big, powerful man, an ex-con musician who had done time at the old camps in Angola with Robert Pete Williams, Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Git-and-Go Welch. His arms were coal black and laced with pink scars from a half dozen knife beefs inside the prison system.

Now he ran a cafe in St. Martinville, appeared once a year at the International Music Festival in Lafayette, and sold scenic postcards with his signature on them for a dollar a piece. Batist and I sat with him in his side yard, a mile up the bayou, while he threw scrap wood on a fire and told us about Junior Crudup and the Red Hat Gang.

“See, Junior run the first year he was on the farm. Gunbull put a half cup of birdshot in his back, but he whipped a mule into the water and held onto its tail till it swum him all the way acrost the Miss’sippi,” Hogman said, flinging a board into the fire, the sparks fanning across the bayou’s surface. “A young white doctor on the other side picked the shot out of his back and tole Junior he had a choice he’d give Junior ten dollars and forget he was there or the doctor would carry him on back to the penitentiary.

“Junior said, “They’ll whup me with the black Betty if I go back.”

“The doctor say, “No, they ain’t. I’m gonna make sure they ain’t.”

“The doctor carried him on back to the farm and tole the warden he was gonna come see Junior every mont’, and if Junior was whupped, the doctor was gonna have the warden’s job.

“When Junior come out of the infirmary, they sent him to the Red Hat Gang. There was two captains running the Red Hat Gang then, the Latiolais brothers. First day they tole Junior they knowed they couldn’t whup him, but by God they was gonna kill him.

“See, there was several tings special about the Red Hat Gang. Everybody wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats that was painted red. But didn’t nobody walk. From cain’t-see to cain’t-see, it was double-time, hit-it-and-git-it, roll, nigger, roll.

“The Latiolais brothers was both drunkards. One of them might drink corn liquor under a tree and take a nap, then wake up and point his finger at a man and say, “Take off, boy.” The next ting you’d hear was that shotgun popping.

“If a man fell out under the sun, he’d get put on an anthill. If a man was dogging it on the wheelbarrow, the captain would say, “I need me a big wet rock.” There was a mess of rocks piled up down in the shallows, see. A convict would have to find a big one, a twenty-five pounder maybe, wet it down, and run it back up the slope to the captain befo’ it was dry. Course, the faster the convict run, the quicker the rock got dried.

“So one day the captain tole Junior he was dogging it and he better get his ass down on the river and bring the captain the biggest wet rock he could find. Now, them rocks was a good half mile away and the captain knowed Junior was gonna be one wore-out nigger by the end of the day.

“Except Junior toted the rock on up the slope, then when the captain wasn’t looking, he ducked behind some gum trees and pissed all over it. Then he holds up the rock to the captain and says, ‘This wet enough for you, boss?’

“The captain touches the rock and looks at his hand and smells it. He cain’t believe what Junior just done. Everybody on the Red Hat Gang started laughing. They was trying to hide it, looking at the ground and each other, but they just couldn’t hold it inside. It was so funny they thought for a minute even the captain would laugh. They was sure wrong about that.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Hogman wore a strap undershirt that hung like rags on his body. His eyes took on a melancholy cast.

“The captain took Junior to the sweatbox on Camp A. It was an iron box no bigger than a coffin, standing straight up on a concrete pad. They kept that boy in there seven days, in the middle of summer, no way to go to the bat’ room except a bucket between his legs,” he said.

“What became of Junior?” I asked.

“Don’t know. He was in and out of “Gola a couple of times. Maybe they buried him in the levee. I reckon there’s hundreds in that levee. I don’t study on it no mo’,” he said.

His eyes seemed to focus on nothing, his forehead glistening in the firelight.

Early the next morning I picked up my mail in my pigeon hole at the department and sorted through it at my desk. In it was an invitation, written in a beautiful hand on silver-embossed stationery.

Dear Dave,

Can you come to Fox Run Saturday afternoon? It’s lawn tennis and drinks and probably a few self-satisfied people talking about their money. In fact, it’s probably going to be a drag. But that’s life on the bayou, right? Merchie and I do want to see you. Call me. Please.

It’s been a long time.

A long time since what? I thought.

But I knew the answer, and the memory was one I tried to push out of my mind. I dropped the invitation into a drawer and glanced out the window at a car with two men in it, pulling to the curb in front of the courthouse. The driver wore a black suit and a Roman collar. His passenger twisted his head about, his face bloodless, like someone on his way to the scaffold.

Two minutes later the pair of them were at my door.

“Phil came to the church and made his reconciliation,” Father Jimmie said, closing the door behind him. “If you don’t mind, he’d like to talk over some things with you. Maybe in private.”

Gunner Ardoin, whom Father Jimmie referred to as Phil, looked at me briefly, then out the window at a trusty mowing the grass.

“You want to tell me something, Gunner?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” he replied.

Father Jimmie nodded and left the room. I told Gunner to take a seat in front of my desk. He breathed through his mouth, as though he were inside a walk-in freezer.

“I’m doing this for Father Dolan,” he said.

“You’re doing it to save your ass,” I said.

His eyes didn’t look at me but his face hardened.

“You went to confession?” I said.

“They call it reconciliation now. But, yeah, I went,” he said.

“So who put the contract on Father Jimmie?”

“I got a phone call. From a guy named Ray. He don’t have another name. He just said I was supposed to take care of Father Dolan. When I got a delivery to make, Ray is the guy who calls me. I told Ray I didn’t do stuff like that. He says I do it or I find a new source of income. So.I called up a guy. He rolls queers in the Quarter and at some sleaze joints on Airline. For a hundred bucks he does other kinds of work, too.”

“Do you have any idea what you did to a decent and fine man?”

“You want the guy’s name?”

“No, I want Ray’s last name and I want the guy Ray works for.”

“Man, you don’t understand. Father Dolan’s got enemies all over New Orleans. He’s trying to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and trash incinerators and these guys who been dumping sludge out in the river parishes. He told the Times-Picayune these right-to-life people were committing a sin by putting these women’s pictures and names on the Internet.”