Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 17

Mr. Lejeune and Miss Andrea had a big fight that night," Woodrow said.

"How do you know?"

"My cousin was the maid. She tole me later, that was after I was out of the joints, she tole me Mr. Lejeune went crazy that night. He picked up Miss Andrea's clothes off the flo' and smelled them."

"lie did what?"

"He smelled her clothes and knowed she was messing around on him. He was yelling all over the house, saying his wife went to bed wit' a nigger. My cousin was so scared she run out the do' and hid in the trees down by the bayou. She said Mr. Castille come crashing out of the house and drove his car down to the work camp."

"Looking for Junior?"

"No, suh. He was after Boss Posey. A man like Castille Lejeune don't go after a nigger convict. It was Boss Posey he took it out on."

"I don't understand. Jackson Posey knew Junior was innocent, that Andrea Lejeune was having an affair with a man in Crowley."

"What was Boss Posey gonna say? "Your wife been sleeping wit' another white man and I knowed about it and I ain't said nothing'? Boss Posey was caught, just like Junior. Boss Posey was gonna save his job and his ass only way he knew how."

Woodrow Reed stopped his account, his hands fixed rigidly on his thighs, staring at me with his flat, sightless eyes. The pupils were overly large, like black dimes, as though they contained thoughts and remembered images that were bursting inside his head.

"Save his ass how, Woodrow?" I said.

"I got great shame about this, Mr. Robicheaux. The story of Judas ain't only in the Bible. Thirty pieces of silver can come to you in lots of ways."

He looked at me a long time while fireflies sparked in the darkness outside and moths thudded softly against the screens, then he told me the rest of it.

Two weeks passed at the camp, and still there was no rain, only heat and dust blowing from the fields and dry lightning at night and the rumble of distant thunder over the Gulf. Cigarettes thrown from automobiles and pickup trucks started roadside grass fires that spread into the cane, and after sunset Woodrow and Junior sat on the front steps of their cabin and watched the dull red glow inside the clouds of brown smoke on the horizon.

Junior no longer played his guitar or sat in on bouree games or sassed the guards. Until lock-up he loitered in the corners of the yard, or sat on his up-ended Coca-Cola box, which everyone now called "Junior's box," or sat on the steps with Woodrow, staring at the empty dirt road that led down to a small general store by the drawbridge.

"You tearing yourself up over so meting that was never real," Woodrow said. "Miss Andrea is a nice white woman. But that's all she is. She ain't sent down by God to take care of Junior Crudup."

"Shut up, Woodrow," Junior replied.

"Sure, I can do that. Then you can talk to yourself 'cause everybody else around here t'inks you done lost your mind."

Woodrow took a worn pack of playing cards out of his shirt pocket, shuffled them, then cupped and squared them in his palm. "Here, I'm gonna give you one of my readings. Won't cost you a cent," he said.

"Don't be giving me none of your truck," Junior said.

But Woodrow went ahead and turned the cards over one at a time, placing them in a circle in the space between him and Junior. "See,

there's you, the one-eyed Jack. Slick, wit' a li'l thin mustache, got the mojo going on the rest of the world. Up top there is the queen of hearts. Guess who that is. Over here is the king of diamonds. Guess who that is. Notice the king and the queen ain't interested in whether the one-eyed Jack is playing pocket pool wit' himself or not. What that mean, Junior, is that rich white people don't care about what goes on down here in this camp."

"Ain't got time for this, Woodrow."

Woodrow peeled three more cards off the deck and snapped them down in a vertical line traversing the circle. "See, there's the joker, right over the head of the one-eyed Jack. That means our man, the one-eyed Jack, is a full-time fool. Sure you don't want to rename your song "The Dumbest Nigger in Camp Number Nine'?"

But Junior only stared at the fires and brown clouds of smoke on the horizon and the buzzards that were slowly descending in a vortex toward a woods on the far side of the bayou.

Woodrow put three cards down on the step in a horizontal line, completing a cross inside the circle. Junior expected another ridiculing remark but instead there was only silence. He glanced sideways at Woodrow. "Why you got that look on your face?" he said.

Woodrow started to scoop the cards up. But Junior held his wrist. "Answer me, Woodrow," he said.

"It's just a card trick. Been playing it on people for years. Don't none of it mean any ting he replied.

Junior peeled loose a card that was cupped inside Woodrow's palm. "How come you trying to hide the Jack of spades?" he asked.

Woodrow rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand and stared sadly at the bayou. "It's Boss Posey, Woodrow. Lawd Gawd, it's Boss Posey. Why you gone and done this to yourself?" he said.

Then he rushed away to be by himself, leaving his deck of cards scattered on the steps.

The next day Junior received a contract in the mail from the recording studio. He sat on the edge of his bunk and read the letter that accompanied it, then walked to the fireplace and held a match to the letter, the contract, and the envelope they came in and watched the pages blacken and curl into ash on the hearth. The next morning at bell count Junior stood unshaved and dirty in the front row of men who were about to go into the fields to trench fire lines around un-burned cane and shovel dirt over stubble that was still smoldering. Jackson Posey looked at the puffiness around his eyes and sniffed at his breath. "Where'd you get the julep?" he said.

"Don't remember, boss," he replied.

"Woodrow, run back to the shed and bring me a case of them empty pop bottles," Posey said.

Woodrow started toward the rear of the camp.

"I said run, boy."

"Yow, boss," Woodrow said.

He ran to the shed and lifted a wood case of Royal Crown Cola bottles by the handles and closed the door behind him with his foot, the bottles clinking between his hands. Then, as though a choice lay before him that would forever define who he was and the place he would inhabit in the world, he hesitated. On the perimeters of his vision he could see the Lejeune home high up on the slope, built to resemble a steamboat, surrounded by live oaks and palm trees; he could see a bulldozer and scooped out hole between the camp and the house where a damaged gas storage tank had just been removed; he could see the soot and brown smoke blowing out of the fields, the buzzards circling in the sky, the barbed wire that surrounded the camp, the tin roofs of the cabins already expanding against the joists with the heat of the day, the hard-packed clay smoothness of the yard, the gun bulls and trusty guards already mounted on their horses, most of them armed with double-barrel, cut-down shotguns whose steel was the color of a worn five-cent piece, and in the midst of it all, Woodrow's best friend, Junior Crudup, drunk on julep made from yeast, raisins, and cracked corn boiled in a syrup can, about to be destroyed by his own pride.

Drop the bottle case on the ground, he told himself. Let them ship you back to "Gola. Do cain't-see to cain't-see on the Red Hat Gang,

take the sweatbox treatment on Camp A, but don't hep them to hurt Junior. Please, Lawd, make me be strong when I am weak, he prayed.

"Goddamn it, boy, move your ass!" Jackson Posey shouted.

"I'm coming, boss!" Woodrow said, running, the empty pop bottles rattling inside their wooden slots.

Junior sat down on the ground, pulled off his shoes and socks, and mounted the pop bottles, extending his arms out sideways for balance. The other men marched out the front gate, their-eyes straight ahead, and began climbing into the trucks that waited for them. When the trucks drove away in the dust, Woodrow looked through the slats in the tailgate and saw his friend quivering like Jell-O atop the rows of R.C. Cola bottles, his pain sealed inside his closed eyelids.

Junior was still there when the trucks returned in the evening. Except he didn't look like Junior anymore. There were skinned places on his face and knots on his head; one eye was swollen shut and his denims were dark with his own urine.

At sunset Junior was allowed to come off the box and sit in one corner of the yard. As the other men passed on their way to the mess shack, they saw the bottoms of Junior's feet and had to look away. But Junior's trial by ordeal was not over. Jackson Posey stood over him, thinking private thoughts, touching at the corner of his mouth with one finger. Posey looked up the slope toward the gouged hole in the landscape where a gas storage tank had been pried out of the ground.

"Get your shoes on, Junior. Woodrow, bring a spade from the shed and get my lunch bucket and a chair from my office," Posey said.

The three of them walked together up the slope in the twilight, Junior limping like he had glass in his shoes, while purple martins darted through the haze of smoke in the air. A fat, thumb-buster .45 revolver creaked in a holster on Boss Posey's hip. Woodrow set down the chair for Boss Posey to sit in and speared the spade into a huge mound of wet clay by the hole, then set down Posey's lunch bucket on the ground by the chair. For just a moment he thought he smelled rain inside the wind.

"You don't need me no more, huh, boss?" he said.

"Hunker down on the dirt pile and keep me company," Posey replied, opening his lunch bucket and removing a pint of whiskey.

He wants you to attack him, Junior. Then he's gonna kill you. He brung me to be a witness and cover his ass, Woodrow said to himself. Look at me, Junior. Can you hear the words I'm t'inking?

"Dozer man run out of gas today, Junior. So you got to fill up that hole for me. Better get on it," Posey said.

"Stood all day on the bottles, boss. Ain't got nothing left," Junior said.

"You done this to yourself, boy." Posey unscrewed the cap on his whiskey bottle and took a sip, rolling it in the corners of his mouth before he swallowed. Then he seemed to think a long time before he spoke again. "You believe you're better than me, don't you?"

"No, suh," Junior replied.

"Smarter, been more places, slept with better-looking white women than I have. Been wrote up in northern magazines. A man like me don't get his name in the paper lessen it's in the obituary."

Junior pulled the spade out of the clay mound and began shoveling into the hole, keeping his bruised feet stationary, swiveling his back to throw each spadeful. Boss Posey drank from the bottle again, then removed a piece of wax paper-wrapped chocolate cake and a slapjack from his lunch bucket. The slapjack was perhaps eight inches long, thin, mounted on a spring, lead-weighted and swollen at the tip, like the head on a snake. He rested it on his thigh and ate part of the cake, then put both the slapjack and the remnant of the cake back in the lunch bucket.

The sun dipped over the rim of the earth and the fields went dark and night birds began calling to one another in the woods across the bayou. At first Woodrow tried to close his eyes and sleep on his feet. Then, without asking permission, he sat down on the back side of the pile Junior was spading into the hole. But Boss Posey didn't seem to mind. He was drinking steadily from the bottle now, bent slightly forward in the chair, the cancer on his arms like small poisoned roses buried in his skin.

Off in the distance Woodrow heard the dry rumble of thunder and saw a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. Junior's movements with the shovel became slower and slower, then it slipped out of his hands and clattered down into the darkness.

"I had it, boss. You gonna shoot me, go 'head on and do it," he said. He stood erect, his face slick with sweat, his body glowing with stink, one eye swollen into a knot with a slit in it.

"I'm about to lose my job 'cause of you. My pension goes out the window with it. That's what you done, you black sonofabitch. Now, you fill that goddamn hole."

"Know what the problem is, boss?" Junior asked. "It ain't Miss Andrea. It ain't Mr. Lejeune, either. It's 'cause you ain't no different from us. You eat the same food, stack the same time, kiss the same pink ass the niggers do. Maybe it's time you wise up."

The first blow with the slapjack caught Junior across the temple, splitting the skin to the bone. Then Jackson Posey whipped him to the ground, just as though he were chopping on a piece of wood.

But Woodrow believed it was the first blow that killed Junior and that the others were visited upon the body of a dead man, because Junior made no sound as the slapjack whistled down on his head and neck and back, thudding to the ground on his knees, his eyes already rolled upward in his head.

And while his friend died Woodrow stood by impotently, his fists balled in front of him, a cry coming from his throat that sounded like a child's and not his own.

Jackson Posey's chest was heaving when he looked down at his work. He flung the slapjack aside. "Damn!" he said. He paced up and down, staring back at the camp, then at the lights burning in the Lejeune house. Woodrow was so frightened his teeth knocked together in the back of his mouth.

Posey steadied his foot against Junior's shoulder and tried to shove his body over the edge of the hole. But Junior's body fell sideways and Boss Posey couldn't move it with his foot. In fact, Woodrow could not believe how weak Posey was.

"Get a holt of his feet," Posey said.

"Suh?"

"Pick up his feet or join him. Which way you want it?"

Woodrow gathered up Junior's ankles while Boss Posey lifted his arms, and the two of them flung Woodrow's friend over the rim of the hole. The thump it made when it hit the bottom was a sound Woodrow would hear in his sleep the rest of his life.

"Go over there and set on the ground," Posey said.

Posey mounted the bulldozer and started the engine. With the lights off he lowered the blade and pushed the huge pile of clay into the hole, backing off it, packing it down, scraping it flat, until the hole was only a dimple in the landscape. When he cut the engine Woodrow could hear the first drops of rain pinging on the steel roof over the driver's seat.

"Junior transferred out of here tonight. Ain't none of this happened. That's right, ain't it, Woodrow?"

"If you say so, boss."

"There's a half inch of whiskey left in that bottle. You want it?"

"No, suh."

"Have a Camel," Posey said, and shook two loose from his pack. "Go ahead and take it. It's a new day tomorrow. Don't never forget that. Sun gonna be breakin' and a new day shakin'. That's what my daddy always used to say."

How'd you come by this little farm here?" I asked Woodrow.

"Mr. Lejeune sold it to me. Give me a good price wit' out no interest," he replied.

"To shut you up?"

"He sent a black man to me wit' the offer. Never saw Mr. Lejeune." Woodrow stared at me with his flat, sightless eyes that could have been large painted buttons sewn on his face. Lightning jumped in the clouds over the Gulf.

I slipped my business card between his fingers. "Let me know if I can do anything for you," I said.

His hand folded around the card. "Whatever happened to Mr. Lejeune's li'l girl, the one named T'co?" he asked.

"Theodosha? She's around."

"My cousin, the maid for Mr. and Miz Lejeune? She always worried about that li'l girl. She said tings wasn't right in that house."

I asked him what he meant but he refused to explain.

"How long were you inside?" I said as I was leaving.

"Five years."

"What'd you go down for?"

"Fifty-tree-dol'ar bad check," he replied.