Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  “I won’t do it.”

  “That’s your final word?”

  “Want me to write it in the dust on your dashboard?”

  “Get out of my car.”

  * * *

  MR. LOWRY TOLD me to take three days off with full pay and dropped me off in his big Buick at Jo Anne’s house. He stuck a twenty-dollar bill in my shirt pocket.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “Get yourself some fresh clothes and take your girlfriend to dinner and a movie.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Mr. Lowry.”

  “You’re a good boy, Aaron. So is Spud and so is Cotton. Fellows like you are the salt of the earth. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

  Then he drove away. I walked up into the shade of Jo Anne’s porch. I had called earlier but had mentioned nothing about my encounter with Rueben Vickers. Yesterday I had taken Jo Anne to breakfast, then had returned to the Lowry farm. I probably hadn’t spent more than an aggregate of three hours with her. I had not even held her hand. Yet I felt I had known her for years. Know the song “Born to Be with You” by the Chordettes? I couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to hold her against me. I wanted to smell her hair and kiss her neck. I wondered if I was going crazy.

  She must have seen me out the window. She jerked open the door. “What happened to you?”

  “I straightened out Rueben Vickers and his son. Mr. Lowry said I should take you to dinner and a movie.”

  “You look like you climbed out of a concrete mixer.”

  Before I could answer, she pulled me inside, glancing back at the two-lane state road as she shut the door.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “My boss called this morning and said he had to let me go.”

  “Why?”

  “My art classes cause too much conflict with my schedule. It’s a lie.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “What do you think? He said I was a ‘good girl’ and he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

  I sat down at the counter. The furniture in her living room was made of leather and sanded driftwood, the rug woven with a black-and-red-and-blue Indian design. Everything about her house was immaculate. I wondered how any grown man with a teaspoon of charity or self-respect could do such harm to such a good young woman.

  “Does your boss know Rueben Vickers?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d like to talk with him.”

  “My boss? Stay away from him.”

  “You lost your job because of me. What’s his telephone number?”

  “Right now I’m eligible for unemployment. Don’t piss him off. He’ll challenge my application. You want a beer or a soda?” She opened the icebox door and bent over and began rattling bottles and cans around. She was wearing a long-sleeve black western shirt with roses on it and a braided cloth belt and baggy blue jeans that exposed her baby fat. “Did you hear me? What do you want to drink?”

  “A soda,” I said, the words tight in my throat.

  She uncapped a Coca-Cola for me and a Tuborg for herself. She tilted the bottle to her mouth, the sunlight through the window sparkling inside the amber glass, the foam sliding down her throat. There was something wrong in the image, though, like a painting that contains one incongruous detail. She blew out her breath. “Shit,” she said.

  “Shit, what?”

  “Everything. It’s harder looking for a job than working. How’s your face feel?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t drink?”

  “I used to.”

  “But you don’t now?”

  “Alcoholism runs in my family.”

  She came around the counter and sat down next to me. “You need to get honest with me, Aaron.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re not a picker or a ranch hand. You’re on the run from the law or maybe a wife and baby or something that’s a whole lot bigger than you. That’s what I think.”

  “I’m not on the run from anybody,” I said.

  She drank from the bottle again. I could smell the beer on her breath. I wanted to put my mouth on hers.

  “Are you married?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Guys with master’s degrees get it on with waitresses. They don’t marry them.”

  I looked at her fingers curved around the beaded moisture on the Tuborg label. “You didn’t buy that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Young women just getting by don’t keep imported beer at home unless a man buys it for them. That’s the professor’s Tuborg, isn’t it?”

  “What if it is?”

  “I think he’s a predator.”

  She took another sip from the bottle. “Here we go again.”

  “You told him you were fired?”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes going away from mine.

  “Did he want to talk to your employer?”

  “Like I said, it wouldn’t do any good. It would just cause harm.”

  “Did he ask if he could?”

  “No.”

  She went to the sink and poured the beer down the drain, then dropped the bottle in a trash bag under the sink. “You sure know how to rain on the parade. Even when there’s no parade to rain on.”

  “When you let me in, you looked out at the road like you were worried.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You think Rueben Vickers might be sending someone out here?”

  “It’s a very good possibility.”

  “I feel bad about what’s happened to you, Jo Anne.”

  “Come here.”

  “What for?”

  She ripped an ice tray from the freezer compartment and dropped it into the sink. “Get the ice cubes out. I’ll get a towel and a rolling pin from the pantry. Give me any more trouble and I’ll use the rolling pin on your head.”

  * * *

  SHE CRUSHED THE ice cubes inside the towel, then tightened and retied the corners of the towel and walked me into her bedroom and pushed me down on the pillow and sat beside me and touched her improvised ice bag to the welts on my face and head. Then she stroked my forehead and cheek and eyebrows. Her fingers were as light and cool as refrigerated air, and she did something no girl or woman had ever done to me before. She leaned over and kissed each of my eyelids and my mouth, then continued to stroke my hair with her nails until I felt myself drifting away, free of all pain and age, free of the evil that undid Eden and set brother against brother and left us forever wounded and benighted and at war with ourselves and the earth.

  I wanted to reach up and hold her, but she didn’t allow me to. She got beside me and held my head against her breast and hummed a song as though comforting a child. I saw myself descending into a garden filled with palm and orchid and fruit trees and animals and flamingos and swans and herons and parrots and peacocks whose fanned tails were embroidered with purple and green eyes that seemed as numerous as the stars but made no judgment of us.

  I could feel her thighs spread on either side of mine, feel her hand place me inside her, and feel her breath against my ear, her tongue in my mouth, her hands trembling on my face when we both came.

  I dropped away into a place I never wanted to leave, and did not wake until the sun faded and died like thunder in the hills and hailstones clattered on the hardpan as far as the eye could see.

  Chapter Seven

  I WROTE JO ANNE a note and left early in the morning, ashamed that I had caused her to lose her job and dragged her into a dangerous world occupied by men like Rueben Vickers. And rather than arrive at her house as benefactor and friend, I had become the pitiful victim upon whom she had to take mercy when she owed me nothing and I had nothing to give her in turn.

  I walked and hitched a ride to the bank in Trinidad where I had saved up almost six hundred dollars. I withdrew it all and closed the account, then took a city bus to a used-car lot and paid two hundred dollars for a sa
lt-eaten 1952 Chevrolet. It had no radio or heater; the paneling inside the doors was cardboard. The owner of the car lot, Put-Some-South-in-Yo’-Mouth Fat Johnny Dean, also owned the diner and the pawnshop across the street. After the paperwork, he walked me to the car and opened the driver’s door. “We have a scavenger special every day,” he said. “Tell your friends.”

  I rubbed the spray of rust on the hood. “I think I saw this car in Galveston. After the last hurricane.”

  He crimped his mouth, his face reddening, like he had stopped breathing. Then his mouth burst open, his eyes watering while he slapped his thighs. “You don’t like the way it drives, come back and I’ll give you a shovel to bury it.”

  I looked across the street at the pawn store. “What have you got in the way of sidearms?”

  He wiped at his eyes. “You’re serious?”

  “I can go thirty-five dollars for a quality piece.”

  His eyes held mine. The humor had gone out of his face. “You want a gun for personal protection?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Follow me. Watch the traffic. People tend to run the light.”

  Five minutes later, he placed four pistols on the glass top of his display counter. I picked up a .38 snub-nose Police Special and released the cylinder and rotated it and looked through the barrel, then snipped the cylinder back into the frame. The bluing was worn, the wood grips grainy and dark with oil, but there was no pitting inside the barrel, and the cylinder locked solidly in place when I cocked the hammer.

  “How much?” I said.

  “I need to get fifty on it.”

  “Thirty-five is all I can afford.”

  He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and shook his head. “Cain’t do it.”

  “Forty for the gun and a box of shells.”

  He smacked his gum, his eyes on mine. “You look like you walked into a window fan.”

  “So?”

  “You scare me. You fixing to do some payback?”

  “I got a rodent problem.”

  He started to drag the revolver off the counter.

  “There are people out there who’d like to put me in a box,” I said.

  “Son, I don’t know who you are, but you sure know how to put a blister on a man’s conscience.”

  * * *

  I DROVE TO JO Anne’s house, but she wasn’t home. I put one hundred dollars and a note in an envelope and slid it under the door. The note read: I hope this will tide you over. I bought clothes and a toothbrush and toothpaste and a razor and checked in to a motel at the top of Ratón Pass. I peeled back the covers on the bed and lay facedown without undressing and fell instantly asleep, one arm touching the floor, one hand clutching the .38 Special under a pillow, each chamber loaded with a hollow-point.

  I never liked sleep. It took me to too many bad places. Late at night, my parents fought when my father came home from the icehouse, feeling his way along the wall to their bedroom door, which my mother kept closed when he was drinking. Their words were muffled, like shards of anger rising and falling inside a pool of dark water. After I grew older and lost my best friend, Saber Bledsoe, at Pork Chop Hill and my father in a car accident, I knew that sleep would always be my enemy, forcing me to look at images that may have been dreams or, chillingly, replications of real events that took place during one of my blackouts.

  I mentioned earlier that they were not chemically induced. Sometimes during a blackout, I got my hands on alcohol and went genuinely insane, shouting at people in the street, once getting into it with Green Berets in a Lake Charles roadhouse, once fighting with cops. In the aftermath, I would be terrified at the fate I could have suffered. My darkest hours came when I was in a deep sleep and a motion picture projector clicked on and lit up a screen inside my head I couldn’t flee.

  The worst images on that screen showed Saber on a godforsaken hillside in July ’53 writhing inside a burst from a Chinese flamethrower, his mouth wide, as though he were calling out to me, his arms extended, begging me to take him home.

  * * *

  I SHOWERED AND SHAVED and called Jo Anne in the morning. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  “Can you have breakfast with me?”

  “I have to look for a job. I won’t be able to get compo.”

  “Compo?” I repeated.

  “Unemployment compensation. My boss says I quit. It’ll take two months for me to get a hearing.”

  “Did you get the envelope I put under the door?”

  “Yes, that’s nice, Aaron. But I can’t take it.”

  “You have to.”

  “No, I do not.”

  When I entered puberty and the problems that go with it, my father gave me a brief admonition on the subject and never spoke about it again: “Women are God’s greatest creation. So are young girls. No matter what they do, never show them disrespect. When you find one who won’t give up her principles at gunpoint, never let go of her.”

  “When can I see you?” I said. “I have to be back at the farm by tomorrow evening.”

  “Aaron, I hope I haven’t misled you.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, my heart sinking.

  “I have ties to Henri.”

  “What if I drop by his office and tell him he’s untied?”

  “That’s not your choice to make.”

  “I think he’s a bum. Not like the bums I’ve met on freight cars, just a bum.”

  “I can’t believe the way you talk about people.”

  But I could tell she was on the edge of laughing, and I felt like flowers had just bloomed all over my motel room. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, what?”

  “You’ve got to have dinner with me tonight. I bought a car. A scavenger special.”

  “A what?”

  “I’ll cruise by at six.”

  * * *

  I CHANGED THE OIL in the Chevrolet and filled the tank and wiped the inside clean and drove to the Mexican restaurant from which Jo Anne had been fired. The lunch crowd was just drifting in, the owner guiding them to tables and handing out menus. He wore a dark blue suit with stripes in it and a soft lavender dress shirt and a plum-colored tie and a red carnation in his lapel. His teeth were small, like kernels of white corn, his black hair shiny and swept up in a pile, his eyes feverishly attentive to his waitresses, his fingers snapping when need be. I walked up behind him. “Could I speak with you, sir?”

  His eyes locked on mine. “What do you want?”

  “Jo Anne McDuffy didn’t quit her job. Why do you want to mess her up with the state employment system?”

  “I’ll call the police,” he said.

  Over his shoulder, I recognized a familiar face. Darrel Vickers was eating at the bar, one cheek puffed with food, chasing it with a Lone Star, a big bubble of foam swelling against the inside of the bottle. He was wearing striped pants tucked inside hand-tooled multicolored Mexican stovepipe boots. He shot me the bone.

  I looked back at the owner. “Why didn’t you call the cops when Darrel Vickers and his friends attacked us?” I said.

  He went to the counter and picked up the phone and dialed zero, his eyes never leaving me. Then he turned his back and began talking into the receiver.

  I went out the door. The day was cool and bright, the wind blowing the way it does on the Southern Colorado Plateau at the end of summer, a passenger train dipping into Ratón Pass, its wheels locked for the long, screeching ride down the tracks into New Mexico. Behind me I heard someone coming across the gravel, but I didn’t turn around. “Wait up, asshole,” a voice said.

  I kept walking.

  “Hey, dipshit, want to save yourself some trouble?” the same voice said.

  I opened my car door and started to get in.

  Darrel Vickers kicked the door shut. “I’m doing you a favor, queer-bait.”

  I brushed the paint where his boot had scratched it. “I thought we were friends.”

  “You went someplace inside my father that c
an cost you pain you can’t imagine.”

  I dusted off my fingers. “My remark about an incubus? Yeah, I’ve given that some thought. I was mistaken. See, an incubus is a male demon that gets inside a woman. A succubus is a female demon that gets inside a man. Your father has a succubus. Tell him I’m sorry for the mix-up.”

  “Listen, shit-for-brains, my father boxed Golden Gloves and turned a kid into a vegetable. He killed a guy on the racetrack doing a hundred and ten miles an hour. He finished the last lap without slowing down. What’s that tell you?”

  “You attacked us because we had a union sticker on our bumper?”

  “Because I fucking felt like it, toe jam.”

  “Does your father knock you around?”

  He pointed his finger in my face. “I can hurt you, man. Not me, but people I know, people who do it with pliers.”

  “I believe you.”

  “You got something going with Jo Anne McDuffy?” He had shaved since I’d seen him at Mr. Lowry’s farm, and had clipped his sideburns. “I asked you a question. You think you can come to town and take any girl you want?”

  “Your old man get her fired or did you?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Somebody did.”

  He removed his hat and gazed down the Pass, then replaced it. “Maybe I could get her a job.”

  “She might appreciate that.”

  “Yeah?”

  I shrugged.

  “What’s with you, man?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t get it. The way you stood there while my father cut you up with the quirt. What the fuck is with that?”

  “I have to go, Darrel. Regarding that business about the succubus?”

  “I don’t like to talk about that kind of stuff.” He shifted his weight, the gravel compressing under his feet.

  “Your father and the owner of this restaurant don’t need a succubus,” I said. “They work for the Prince of Darkness. That’s not a shuck, Ace. For real.”

  His lips parted. He was still standing there when I drove away.