Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

She straightened her back, then looked at me for a long moment. But whatever she had planned to say seemed to go out of her eyes. She grinned, shaking her head, and walked out into the corridor.

I followed her outside.

"What was that about?" I asked.

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing," she said. "Streak, you're just too much. God protect me from my own sins."

Then she laughed out loud and walked away.

Monday night I listened to two ancient .78 recordings made by Junior Crudup in the 1940s. As with Leadbelly, the double-strung bass strings on his guitar were tuned an octave apart, but you could hear Blind Lemon and Robert Johnson in his style as well. His voice was haunting. No, that's not the right word. It drifted above the notes like a moan.

There are some stories that are just too awful to hear, the kind that people press on you after AA. meetings or in late-hour bars, and later you cannot rid yourself of. This is one of them.

Oldtime recidivists always maintained that the worst joints in the country were in Arkansas. Places like Huntsville and Eastham in the Texas penal system came in a close second, primarily because of the furious pace at which the convicts were worked and the punishment barrels they were forced to stand on throughout the night, dirty and unfed, if a gun hack decided they were dogging it in the cotton field.

But Angola Pen could lay claims that few other penitentiaries could match. During Reconstruction Angola became the model for the rental convict system, one emulated throughout the postbellum South, not only as a replacement for slave labor but as a far more cost-efficient and profitable successor to it. Literally thousands of Louisiana convicts died of exposure, malnutrition, and beatings with the black Betty. Each of the camps made use of wood stocks that were right out of medieval Europe. The scandals at Angola received national notoriety in the 1950s when convicts began slashing the tendons in their ankles rather than stack time on what was called the Red Hat Gang.

I drove up Bayou Teche to Loreauville, where the black man to whom I had sold my boat and bait business now lived with his daughter on a small plot of land not far from town. His house was set back in the shadows, on the bayou's edge, the tin roof almost entirely covered by the overhang of pecan and oak trees. I parked my pickup truck in the trees and walked up to the gallery, where he sat in a wood rocker, a jelly glass filled with iced coffee in his massive hand.

His name was Batist, and he was both older than he would concede and yet indifferent to what the world thought of him. He had worked most of his life as a farmer, a muskrat trapper and commercial fisherman with my father, and as a packer in several canneries. He could not read or write, but he was nonetheless one of the most insightful people I had ever known.

A fat, three-footed raccoon named Tripod was eating out of a pet bowl on the steps.

"What's the haps, "Pod?" I said to the raccoon, scooping him up in my arms.

Batist's whiskers were white against his cheeks. He removed a cigar from the pocket of his denim shirt and slipped it into his jaw but didn't light it.

"You ain't come to see me this weekend," he said.

"I had to take care of some business in New Orleans," I said. "Years ago, you knew Junior Crudup, didn't you?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh yeah, ain't no doubt about that," he replied.

"What happened to him?"

"What always happened to his kind back then. Trouble wherever he went."

"Want to be a little more specific?"

"Back in them days there was fo' kinds of black folks. There was people of color, there was Negroes, and there was colored people. Under all them others was niggers."

"Crudup was in the last category?"

"Wrong about that. Junior Crudup was a man of color. Called his-self a Creole. He wore an ox-blood Stetson, two-tone shoes, and a shirt and suit that was always pressed. Used to have a cherry red electric guitar he'd carry to all the dances. If a man could be pretty, that was Junior."

"How'd he end up in Angola?"

"Didn't fit. Not in white people's world, not in black people's world. Junior had his own way. Didn't take his hat off to nobody. He'd walk five miles befo' he'd sit in the back of the bus. Back in them days, a black man like that wasn't gonna have a long run."

Tripod was struggling in my arms and kicking at me with his feet. I set him down and looked at the fireflies lighting in the trees. The air was cool and breathless, the surface of the bayou layered with steam. An electrically powered boat hung with lanterns was passing through the corridor of oaks that lined the banks. Batist's attitudes on race were not conventional ones. He never saw himself as a victim, nor did he ever act as

the apologist for black men who were forced into lives of crime, but by the same token he never told less than the truth about the world in which he'd grown up. So far I could not determine where he stood on Junior Crudup.

"It started at a dance at the beginning of the Depression," he said.

"Junior was about t'irteen or fo'teen years old, working in a band for a black man had the most beautiful voice you ever heard. They was playing in a white juke by Ville Platte, on a real hot night, the place burning up inside. The singer, the man wit' the beautiful voice, he was playing the piano and singing at the same time, sweat pouring down his face. A white woman come off the dance flo' and patted her handkerchief on his brow. That's all she done. That's all she had to do.

"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."