Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 20

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.

He had just lectured a tormented man on his violence, although he, Jimmie Dolan, had just profited from it, and if truth be known he was glad he was on the street and perhaps secretly glad his false accusers had gotten their just deserts.

Better to marry than to burn, St. Paul had said. Better to be a bourbon priest or a diocesan sycophant than a self-canonized fool, Father Jimmie thought.

"What do you think, Snuggs?" he said.

Snuggs answered by nudging his head into Father Jimmie's chin.

Father Jimmie went into the bedroom, flung his clothes in the corner, and got under the shower. The water coughed in the pipes, then seemed to whisper the word hypocrite in his ear.

The South has changed dramatically since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Anyone who says otherwise has either not been there or wishes to keep old wounds green and tender as part of a personal agenda. And nowhere has the change been more visible than in the once recalcitrant states of the Deep South.

But that evening, when I took Clotile Arceneaux to supper on East Main, I tried to convince myself otherwise. I told myself the furtive glances at our table, the awkwardness of friends who felt they should stop by and say hello, were expressions of narrowness and latent racism to be expected in our culture.

The truth was no one took exception to Clotile's race. But they did take exception to my being out with another woman in less than a year of Bootsie's death.

It had turned cold again when we left the restaurant. Stars were spread across the sky, the horizon flaring with stubble fires, smoke boiling out of the electric lights at the sugar mills.

"You a little uncomfortable in there about something?" Clotile asked.

"Not me," I replied.

She opened the door to my pickup by herself and got in and closed it behind her, although I had tried to help her in. "You're really out of the past, aren't you?" she said.

"Probably," I said.

She smiled and didn't say anything. We drove toward the drawbridge and the theater complex on the other side of Bayou Teche. She had checked in to a motel out by the four-lane that afternoon.

We crossed the bayou and turned in to the theater parking lot. It was filled with teenagers, long lines of them extending out from the ticket windows.

"Friday night is a bad night for the movies here," I said.

"We don't need to go," she said, looking straight ahead.

I turned around in the parking lot, recrossed the bayou, and drove up East Main, without destination. The street seemed strangely empty, the stars shut out by the canopy of oaks overhead, my rented shotgun house dark and blown with un raked leaves. I hesitated, then pulled into my driveway and cut the engine. The ground fog in the trees and bamboo glistened in the lights from City Park across the bayou.

"Where's Father Dolan?" she asked.

"Staying with friends in Lafayette."

"You have a lot of regrets in your life, Robicheaux?" she said.

"All drunks do," I replied.

"How do you deal with them?"

"I don't labor over them anymore."

She still looked straight ahead. "I don't want to be a regret in somebody's life," she said.

"Want to meet my cat?" I said.

And that's what we did. I introduced her to Snuggs; then we ate ice cream in the kitchen and I drove her to her motel.

Afterward I went to the cemetery in St. Martinville and sat on the steel bench by Bootsie's tomb and watched the moon rise over the old French church on the bayou.

That night I dreamed I was in New Orleans in an earlier era, riding on a streetcar out to Elysian Fields. The streets were dark, the palm fronds on the neutral ground yellow with blight. No one else was on the car except the motorman. When he turned and looked back at me his eyes were empty sockets, the skin on his face dried and shrunken into little more than gauze on his skull.

Oftentimes police cases are not solved. They simply unravel, by chance and accident. With good luck there will even be an appreciable degree of justice involved, although it often originates from an expected source.

Early the next morning, Saturday, my lawn was white with frost and the bamboo on the side of the house was stiff and hard and rattled like broomsticks in the wind. I put on my sweat suit, ran three miles through City Park, then showered and drove down to Clete's cottage in the motor court.

He sat on the side of his bed in the coldness of the room, sleepy, shivering slightly, wearing only a strap undershirt and pajama bottoms. The wastebasket in his kitchen was stuffed with fast-food containers and beer cans.

"You want to do what?" he said.

"Eat breakfast at McDonald's, then maybe knock down some ducks at Pecan Island," I said.

"I'm busy today," he replied.

"I see."

It was quiet in the room. His eyes lingered on mine. "What's bothering you, big mon?" he said.

I told him about the dream, the motorman with the skeletal face, the darkness outside the streetcar, the yellowed palm fronds that clattered like bone. "You ever have a dream like that?" I said.

"I used to dream I was on a Jolly Green that was going down. But that was in the hospital in Saigon. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a dream."

"I can't shake it," I said.

He got up from the bed and began dressing. "Turn on the heat, will you? It feels like it's thirty below in here," he said.

We ate at the McDonald's on East Main. Outside, the sky was blue, the leaves of the live oak in the adjacent lot flickering in the sunlight. "Can't tempt you into a duck-hunting trip?" I said.

He wiped his mouth with a crumpled napkin and dropped it onto his plate. "That perv I told you about, Bobby Joe Fontenot, the one in the trailer court? I couldn't stop thinking about what he said to me."

"Said what?"

"That if he re offended he was going to use my name every time he stuck it to a little kid. So I called the perv's P.O. Guess what? The P.O. is on vacation. So I told the guy handling his case file about the little boy in the trailer next door. He did everything except yawn in my ear."

"Call Social Services," I said.

"I already did. I think that kid is shark meat."

He gathered up the trash from both our meals and stuffed them angrily into a bin.

"Take it easy, Cletus," I said.

"Screw the ducks. Time to spit in the punch bowl," he said.

The mother of the little boy in the trailer court was named Katie Goltz. She sat with us in her tiny living room, still not connecting the reasons we were there, even though Clete mentioned he had been chasing down a bail skip who was the fall partner of Bobby Joe Fon-tenot, a convicted sex predator living next door.

She wore no lipstick, old jeans, Indian moccasins, and a colorless pullover. Her hair was cut short, and had probably been brown before it was peroxided and waved on one side to resemble a 1940s leading lady's.

"Where's your son?" Clete said.

"At the strip mall," she replied.

Clete nodded. "He went with some friends?" he asked.

"Bobby Joe took him. To buy him a comic book for helping clean his trailer," she said.

Clete leaned forward in his chair. "Ma'am, we have a Meagan's Law in Louisiana. You must have been notified about Bobby Joe Fontenot's record," he said.

"People change," she said.

"You listen to me. That guy is a degenerate. You keep your son away from him," Clete said.

She focused her eyes on a neutral space, her hands folded in her lap. Her arms were muscular, as though she had grown up doing physical work, her complexion clear. Behind her, framed on the wall, was a black-and-white photograph of her and a man who looked like a power lifter. His hair was shaved on the sides, curly in back, his face impish, like a cartoon drawing of a monkey's.

I stood up and looked closer at the picture. It was inscribed "To Katie Gee, the girl who made my own screen role a real pleasure, Your pal, Phil."

"That's Gunner Ardoin," I said.

""Gunner' is his nickname. Phil is his real name. You know him?" she said.

"He was involved with the beating of a priest in New Orleans. You made a film with him?" I said.

She frowned, unable to process all that she just heard. "I made just one film. My screen name is Katie Gee. The producer said "Gee' looks better than "Goltz' on the credits. Phil was my co star What was that about a priest?" she said.

"You were in one of Fat Sammy Figorelli's porn films?" Clete said.

"They're art films. They're shown in art theaters. Listen, nobody has hurt my little boy. I wouldn't let that happen. I have to go to the washateria now," she said.

There seemed nothing left to say. Her mindset, formed out of either desperation, ignorance, or just plain stupidity and selfishness, was armor-plated, and in all probability no amount of attrition in her life or her son's would ever change it.

Bobby Joe Fontenot pulled up outside, wearing a foam-rubber collar, his face marbled with bruises. When the little boy got out of his car, Bobby Joe cocked his index finger at him, as though he were pointing a gun, and said, "Come over and watch some TV tonight. I got some Popsicles."

Clete and I got up to go, our mission by and large a failure. Her son rushed past us into his bedroom, a new comic book rolled tightly in his hand. Clete twisted the handle on the front door, then stopped and turned around. "It's not coincidence you let that geek be alone with your kid. There's a financial motive here, isn't there?" he said.

"Coincidence?" she said.

"You've got more than a neighborly relationship with that asshole next door. He knows you were working the trade around Folk Polk," Clete said, tapping the air with one finger. "Fontenot's in porn films, too, isn't he?"

"I'm not saying any more. I have to go to the washateria and fix lunch and do all kinds of things I don't get no help with. Why don't y'all just leave now? I didn't do anything to cause this, and you can't say I did," she said.

She stared at us indignantly, her arms folded across her breasts, as though the irrefutability of her logic should have been obvious to anyone.

Clete and I crossed the Teche on the drawbridge behind the trailer court and headed toward New Iberia on the back road, past the row of oak-shaded antebellum homes that belonged on a movie set. Then he mashed on the gas, one hand on top of the steering wheel, the sugarcane fields racing past us, a crazy light in his eyes.

"What are you thinking about, Clete?"

"Nothing. I'll drop you off," he said.

"Clete?"

"Everything is copacetic. Just hang loose. I'll check in with you later," he said. He whistled an aimless tune under his breath.