Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

“What’s in there?” I said.

  “Shit.”

  “Jo—”

  She leaned forward so she could see the sky through the windshield. “The storm is coming right out of the Sangre de Cristos. The clouds look like they’re full of coal dust or smoke from a big fire.”

  * * *

  I CAUGHT THE TWO-LANE up to Ludlow, then turned west on the dirt road that led through the site of the massacre and the Cordova Pass and then northwest to the mountains named for the blood of Christ. The night was black and the snow white and blinding in my headlights, the wiper blades coated with ice. “What’s that up ahead?” Jo Anne asked.

  “The miners’ shacks or what’s left of them,” I said.

  “No, there’s a man. I saw him.”

  “Out in this weather?”

  “Hit your brights.”

  I clicked the floor switch. “Jesus!” I said.

  I swerved to miss the figure who stood in the middle of the road, his hooded face as gray as bone. The front of the car hit a pothole and splashed water and mud all over the windshield. But I had no doubt who the figure was. I had seen him at the United Farm Workers gathering and had spoken with him outside the Lowry bunkhouse.

  The engine had died. When I restarted it, the wipers went wild, then stopped for no reason, slush sliding in waves down the windshield. My heart was thudding, my breath short. “You know who that is?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Think.”

  “I have no idea who he is.”

  “Did you see his eyes?” I asked.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re black sockets. They’re not eyes.” I slowly accelerated. Ahead of us, lightning forked into the top of a mountain that penetrated the clouds. “I think he’s the man called Bible-thumping Bob. I also think that’s not his real name.”

  She peered into the whiteness of the snow swirling at us. “He’s gone. How could anyone survive out here by himself?”

  “Does he look like somebody you used to know?”

  “Don’t do this to me, Aaron.”

  “Tell the truth. Stop denying what we’re seeing.”

  “I know the difference between the dead and the living. My father is dead.”

  “What was your father’s first name?”

  “Robert,” she said, her mouth a tight line. “It was Robert.”

  “There’s no possibility that’s your dad?”

  “I looked for him two years. Robert McDuffy is dead.”

  “I’ve talked with him, Jo.”

  She stared straight ahead, her brow furrowed. “I think this man is here to see you, not me, Aaron. Maybe it has to do with your friend who died in Korea.”

  “Saber was MIA.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “Your friend is dead. He’s not coming back. And neither is my father.”

  A bolt of lightning struck a huge tree not over thirty yards from us, splitting the trunk in a clean V all the way to the roots, turning every leaf on every branch into a tiny flame. I would have sworn I saw Moon Child standing by the tree, her face as expressionless as bread dough, her bangs and eyes jet black.

  “What did you just see?” Jo Ann asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing out there. Shadows play tricks on you.”

  “Aaron?”

  “What?”

  “I can’t say this.”

  “Can’t say what?”

  “Do you think this is hell?”

  * * *

  I WAS GUESSING AT the destination of Stoney and Jimmy Doyle and their friends. My friend at the Sally had mentioned Cordova Pass and the Sangre de Cristos, both in alpine country filled with peaks over eleven thousand feet high. The road I chose had no signs, no campgrounds, not even a Forest Service lookout tower. The road was six inches deep with mud and in some places eroded away, particularly on corners that overlooked thick stands of fir trees two hundred feet straight down. The only gifts the road offered were the deep, swerving tire marks of a very heavy, very large vehicle such as a school bus, and a four-foot-broad ornamental wood star that may have fallen off its roof.

  “Look at the snowbank between those two Ponderosas,” I said. “That’s the star my friend at the Sally was talking about. He said Marvin had a star like that tied on top of the bus. German farmers in the Midwest call it a hexe. They think it will bring them good luck. They evidently don’t know hexe in German means ‘witch.’ ”

  “Tell me what you saw when the lightning struck the tree.”

  “Moon Child,” I replied.

  “I saw her, too. I’ve never been this afraid. I’m just too tired to show it.”

  We went over a rise and around a pile of broken rocks that had rolled down the hill. We kept going until we were above the storm, at an elevation where the road was dry and the stars visible through the clouds. The road ended at a box canyon, its walls high and sheer, a reddish-brown color more like river clay than rock, forming a natural amphitheater.

  The bus’s tires were stenciled across the entrance into the canyon. I cut my engine and headlights. Somehow the engine flared to life again, then coughed and died.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “Maybe the carburetor and a bad plug or two acting up.”

  “There’s fires burning at the base of that cliff.”

  “You want to leave?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her chest was rising and falling. She rubbed the backs of her hands as though they were chafed. “I really don’t know.”

  “We can go back to town and tell Wade Benbow what we saw.”

  “Tell him we saw what? A murdered girl and a man with no eyes?”

  “No one knows where we are, Jo.”

  “I Scotch-taped a note for Spud and Cotton and the Japanese woman inside the little window on the front door.”

  “Do you have my gun in your bag?”

  “Yeah. I bought some shells for it, too. It’s not going to do us any good here, though.” She paused. “Is it?”

  “We both saw the hooded man and Moon Child. That means that nothing we thought we knew about the world is true. It’s like starting our lives all over. How many people get to do that?”

  “I bet the dead think it’s a great opportunity,” she said. “Except they can’t tell us that because their mouths and eyes are stopped with dirt. I want to get this over with. Good God, do I want to get this over with.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I HATE VIOLENCE. I hated it then; I hate it now. I hate even more the people who flaunt it and take pleasure in speaking of it. They belong to a culture of cowards and misogynists who have chewing tobacco for brains and never make the connection between their obsession with firearms and carnality, penis envy and white supremacy. It’s not their fault; most of them were unwanted at birth. Every one of them is cruel, every one of them a spiritual failure. The louder their rhetoric, the more craven their behavior. I have entertained thoughts about them that make me ashamed, because in some ways they are more victim than perpetrators.

  The Holland family wrote their history in blood. My father, James Eustache Broussard, went to war but was not like the Hollands. I never heard him utter an unkind or profane word, not once. He wore a formal coat at the table even when he ate alone. He also went over the top five times at the Somme and would leave the room when others spoke of war.

  When I was small and asked him why he shunned the subject, he said, “Hell is more than half of paradise, Aaron. So we should take no joy in the destruction of the Eden that was given us.” That’s how I discovered the work of Edwin Arlington Robinson.

  I mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne and Goodman Brown earlier. Goodman wandered into the New England darkness and on the trail met a figure who walked with a cane carved in the likeness of a serpent, so realistic it seemed to ripple in the figure’s grip. But rather than flee the figure’s presence, Goodman convinced himself he was above temptation and need not fear the guile of a demonic sp
irit. As a result, his faith in man and God was robbed from him.

  I wondered if I was about to take the same journey, although I seemed to have no alternative. I had to save Stoney. I also had to save my own sanity and confront the man who had no eyes. I had another motivation. (And this is where my pride got to me.) Was I being offered the chance to step through the curtain? Allowed to unravel the great mysteries? Allowed to see my best friend, Saber Bledsoe, and ask his forgiveness?

  My father, who was buried alive under an artillery barrage on the Somme River, said there was no such thing as death. We enter eternity at birth, he said, and at a certain time in our journey, we go deeper into a meadow that is sprinkled with flowers and grazed by herbivores, where there are no fences and where we turn our swords into plowshares and like the earth abideth forever.

  That’s what he learned inside his premature burial place, one that stank of cordite and mustard gas.

  With these thoughts in mind, I parked the car in a dark spot by the side of the mountain, removed a pair of binoculars from the glove box, and, with Jo Anne at my side, walked into the box canyon.

  * * *

  IMMEDIATELY INSIDE ITS parameters, the temperature changed dramatically, as though we had entered another dimension, perhaps caused by a weather inversion that had sealed the canyon, creating a bubble of warm air that had molded itself against the rocks and trapped the firelight on the cliffs and subsumed the smell of woodsmoke and burnt sage and the pine needles under our feet.

  I put the binoculars to my eyes. The scene was idyllic. How could evil exist in a natural environment unmarked by the Industrial Age? Then I saw the bus parked below a row of giant boulders at the far end of the canyon. It looked like a toy, a harmless artifact borrowed from the culture of The Saturday Evening Post.

  “Do you see any people?” Jo Anne asked.

  “There’s smoke coming from behind those boulders, but I can’t see anyone.”

  I handed her the binoculars. She fitted them to her eyes and adjusted the focus. Then she wiped her eyes and looked through them again.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Turkey buzzards flying in and out of the smoke. But they’re too big.”

  “What’s too big?”

  “What I saw,” she said. “They were as big as people.”

  I took back the binoculars. “There’s a big gush of black smoke rising from between two of the boulders. Is that what you saw?”

  “No, it didn’t look like smoke at all.”

  We were on a narrow deer trail about a third of the way to the bus when we heard the dry, clattering sound of slag or small rocks above us. Jo Anne looked up, then grabbed my arm.

  “Oh, Aaron!” she said. “Oh my God, Aaron!”

  “What?” I said, off balance from her pressure on my arm.

  “On that ledge.” She fumbled in her bag for the gun, then dropped it. She looked up again. “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!”

  Now I could see them, four or five of them, going from rock to rock. They looked like stick figures, similar in structure to a praying mantis but as tall as human beings. They bounded away as fast as they had come.

  “You saw that, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “What are they?” she said. I could hear her breathing when I didn’t answer.

  “I don’t know what they are.”

  She picked up the .38 and tried to give it to me. “I never shot a gun.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “You’re suddenly a pacifist? While we die here?”

  I saw the look on her face and didn’t argue. “There’s an answer to this, but we’ll find it elsewhere. Start walking toward the entrance. Don’t look back. If anything happens to me, keep going.”

  Minutes later, I saw sparks spiraling into the air just outside the canyon, followed by a great red, black, and yellow ball of flame rising from the windows and roof of my car. The stick figures had formed a chain across the canyon’s entrance.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I COULD SEE NO way out except up. If we kept going and stayed in the shadows, eventually we would find another deer trail, one that could take us to a cliff or a place where we could get over the lip of the canyon. The problem was the stick figures we had seen in the rocks. What were they? I knew there was no rational explanation for what we had seen. Please don’t misunderstand. I have never been keen on the physical sciences, because most of them usually end in a cul-de-sac. Einstein believed that parallel lines intersect on the edges of infinity. Try to visualize that and see what it does to your head. If the physical sciences don’t always slide down the pipe, who can say the stick figures were not real?

  We worked our way along the canyon wall, the trail smooth and clean and worn from the passage of both hoofed and foot-padded animals, the stone cool to the touch. The boulders around us were enormous and shielded us from view of the people in the bus or those who had built the fires. Jo Anne was in front of me, pausing at each bend in the trail before continuing on. I could see stars through the trees that rimmed the canyon. There was a dry wash twenty yards ahead of us, slanted at forty degrees. With luck, it would put us on a ledge where we could stay until sunrise, when the nightmare world we had stumbled into would recede like a harmless shadow.

  “Jo,” I whispered.

  She turned around, then stepped into a hole, twisting her ankle, her mouth opening silently, her face draining. I grabbed her before she could fall and lowered her to the ground. “I think I tore it,” she said.

  I cupped my hand on her ankle. It was already hot. “Hang on,” I said. I worked her back against a boulder so she could sit up comfortably and keep her ankle straight out and the other leg pulled up. I took off my coat and put it behind her head.

  “Go on, get out of here,” she said.

  “That won’t happen.”

  “That’s what you told me to do if you got hurt.”

  “I learned long ago not to take my own advice.”

  “We need help, Aaron.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “God, you’re stubborn. I want to pound you with my fists.”

  I looked around us. “This isn’t a bad place to be. They can’t see us. We have the gun. It could be worse.”

  “You have to go for help.”

  “Out here, there is no help.” I sat down and put my arm around her. “Let’s rest a little while. Cotton and Spud and Maisie know we’re here.”

  “What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch. Then tapped on the glass.

  “It stopped?” she said.

  “I must have knocked it against a rock.”

  But Jo Anne was not one you put the slide on. “What time did it stop?”

  “Exactly midnight. Even the second hand is straight up.”

  Had we stepped out of time? I had no idea. The shadow of a large object raced across the boulders around us. I tried to get my binoculars on it, but it was moving too fast. Then I smelled a stench that was unmistakable, one that makes you gag, one that you associate with a rendering plant or hair burning, one that could have come from the stacks in Poland during World War II.

  Jo Anne choked as though she had swallowed a fish bone. “What are they doing out there?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m going to take the binoculars down the trail. Here’s the gun. I’ll be right back.”

  “Aaron, I don’t want these people or creatures or whatever they are to get their hands on me. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not going to come to that,” I said.

  “Lose the charade and promise you won’t let them get me, Aaron,” she said.

  “I won’t let them get you, Jo Anne.”

  * * *

  I WALKED BEHIND THE boulders along the deer trail to a spot where I could see the bus and the people who had gathered at the head of the canyon. I focused the binoculars on a tab
le rock that seemed to serve as an altar. A bonfire was burning on it, and Mr. and Mrs. Lowry were standing up the slope from it, the firelight flickering on their faces. She wore a black ankle-length dress with a white lace collar similar to the one worn by the wife of Rueben Vickers. Mr. Lowry was also dressed in black and wearing a wide-brimmed, tall-crowned hat that had a silver buckle on its band, as either a Puritan or a French musketeer might wear.

  Below them, on the other side of the bonfire, were Lindsey Lou and Orchid and Jimmy Doyle and Marvin Fogel and people I had never seen. They all seemed to be waiting on something or someone, perhaps the creatures flying over the canyon, maybe an entity that had more power than all of them together.

  I shifted the glasses and was suddenly looking at the faces of Cotton Williams and Spud Caudill and Maisie, who was probably the only woman in the world who had ever believed in Spud. I stepped backward, behind the boulder, unable to accept what I had just seen. Maisie and Spud and Cotton had become acolytes in a demonic cult?

  I closed my eyes and tried to think, then realized that something was wrong, that the body language of my friends was out of sync with that of the people around them, their expressions wan and resentful. I looked again through the glasses. Cotton had a rope around his neck; Spud’s fedora was gone; Maisie’s scarf was knotted around her mouth; all of them had their wrists tied behind them.

  Then I saw the birds that Jo Anne had seen, except they weren’t birds, nor were they witches on brooms. They had faces like bats and wings that were singed and streamed ashes. A stick figure leaped back and forth across the bonfire, then skittered up into the rocks. But none of this explained the odor that was like incinerated offal.

  I lifted the glasses again and focused them on the bonfire. I did not believe what I was looking at. It was too cruel to be real. The humped and charred remains of a human being, wrists bound in back, head slumped, was in the center of the flames. The victim was slight of build, with arms that could have been pipe cleaners. Stoney? Was there not one person who would try to protect this innocent kid? I thought I had seen the worst in human beings in Korea, and I mean our F-86s strafing miles of civilian refugees as they fled south on foot, hoping for safe harbor. I looked at the fire and wanted to weep. No, I wanted to kill the people who had done this.