Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

Bobby Joe stepped inside the trailer, sniffing at the air. Clete drove his fist into Fontenot's stomach, burying it to the wrist, so deep he actually felt bone. Then he kicked the wood door shut, flung him headlong into a wall, and pulled a shelf filled with carnival midway ceramics down on top of him. He ripped the cassette from the VCR and bounced it off Bobby Joe's face, then rooted in the refrigerator's freezer compartment and pulled out a box of Popsicles and threw them in Bobby Joe's face, too.

"You get the kids in here with cartoons and ice cream?" he said.

Bobby Joe tried to raise himself up against the wall, spittle running from the corner of his mouth. "I'm in treatment. Ask my P.O.," he said hoarsely.

Clete opened and closed his huge hands, breathing hard, his cheeks pooled with color. He lifted Bobby Joe by his shirt and belt and threw him into the narrow bathroom at the back of the trailer. Bobby Joe grabbed the side of the lavatory and tried to raise himself up again, his face bewildered.

"What did your P.O. tell you about putting your hands on little kids, asshole?" Clete said.

"I ain't put "

Clete locked one hand on the back of Bobby Joe's neck and drove his head down on the toilet bowl, smashing his mouth against the rim, plunging his head into the water, scouring the bottom of the bowl with his face. It should have been enough but he was beyond controlling it now or even trying. He slammed the toilet seat down on Bobby Joe's neck and head, then grabbed the top of the shower stall and mounted the toilet, crushing the seat down on Bobby Joe's head, tap dancing on it like an elephant on hallucinogens while Bobby Joe's legs thrashed on the linoleum.

Outside he heard children playing and through the top of the window he saw a little girl chasing after a Frisbee that sailed above her head, and like a man descending from an electrical storm high up on a mountain he stepped back down on the floor and pulled Bobby Joe from the toilet bowl, dripping with water and blood.

He tossed a towel in Bobby Joe's face and leaned back against the wall, out of breath, his fists still knotting. "I'm going to make regular checks on the kid next door," he said. "If I find out you've been near him, you'll wish you were a bar of soap back in "Gola. The same goes if you dime me. Maybe you think you got a bad deal here today, but pervs don't get slack. g

"You fat fuck," Bobby Joe said, pressing the towel to the blood that ran off his chin, looking at it in disbelief, his words muffled, his mouth still trembling. "You like family values? That kid's mother used to be an army whore over by Folk Polk. I'm gonna find out your name. If I ever offend with a kid again, I'm gonna say it each time I poke him. How's that, asshole}"

When Clete got back to the motor court, he stayed under the shower until the hot water tank went empty, burned his clothes in a barbecue pit, drank a quart of whiskey-laced eggnog, and still could not feel clean.

Chapter 19.

rather Jimmie Dolan had done six months federal time for demonstrating at the School of the Americas and probably considered himself jail wise But in reality, like all people who are intrinsically decent, he was incapable of the cynicism that passes for prison-acquired wisdom.

On Thursday morning he was in Franklin, in black suit and Roman collar, collecting signatures on his petition to ban the sale of mixed drinks from drive-by windows. During three hours of approaching people in front of strip malls and grocery stores, he had amassed a total of six signatures, one from a retarded man, and two from people who signed their names with an X. He bought a take-out lunch from a McDonald's and ate it in his car under the trees in a small park, then fell asleep. The day was unseasonably warm, the live oaks flickering with wind, but he dreamed of snowmelt in the Cumberland Mountains, the bright air of early spring, tea-colored streams that leached out of limestone cliffs, dogwood blooming purple and white on a hillside. When he awoke, children were running by the front of his car, kicking a soccer ball in the leaves, the spangled sunlight racing across their bodies, but somehow there was a continuity between the beauty of the Appalachian spring in Jimmie's dream and the joy of the children at play.

He got out of his car and began walking toward the public rest room. He had no reason to pay attention to a nervous, agitated plain-clothes detective by the name of Dale Louviere, who was parked in a Ford by the swing sets, the same detective who had investigated the killing of Dr. Parks by Will Guillot and called it an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

Nor did Father Jimmie pay attention to a man known as Cash Money Mouton standing by the lavatory inside the rest room.

Cash Money's last name was French but he was actually a pecker-wood product of north Louisiana. He used to sell fire and accident and term life insurance from door to door in black and poor-white neighborhoods, and was infamous for both his sweaty enthusiasm and his carnival sales rhetoric. He would pull clutches of papers and brochures from a vinyl briefcase, his face bursting with sincerity, tapping his seated listener, usually the man of the house, on the kneecap, saying, "You run your lawnmower over your foot and chop your toes off, I'll give you twelve-him nerd dollars, cash money, boy. You stick your hand in your skill saw, I'll pay you five-him nerd dollars, that's cash money, for every finger you cut off. Splash muriatic acid in your eyes and go blind, I'm talking five-thousand bananas, cash money, boy."

Then Cash Money Mouton's uncle became police chief and Cash Money began a new career.

Father Jimmie stood at the urinal and relieved himself. He could feel the man at the lavatory staring at the side of his face. He started to look at him, then thought better of it and kept his eyes straight ahead. But when he tried to get to the lavatory the man known as Cash Money stood in his way.

"Excuse me," Father Jimmie said.

But Cash Money did not move. He wore sideburns, a Tabasco tie, an American flag in his coat lapel. He smelled of deodorant, hair tonic, and fear. There was almost an iridescent shine on his skin.

"Is there some difficulty here that I don't quite grasp?" Father Jimmie asked.

"Repeat that?" Ca

sh Money said.

"Could I be of some assistance to you?"

"That's it," Cash Money said.

He stepped into the rest room doorway and waved at the man in the Ford automobile. Father Jimmie rinsed his hands, shook them off, and tried to walk around him.

"You're not going anywhere, buddy boy," Cash Money said.

"Push me again and we're both going to regret the next couple of minutes," Father Jimmie said.

But Cash Money was looking over his shoulder now and not at Father Jimmie. "He just threatened me," he said to the man approaching the rest room.