Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  I went back down the trail to Jo Anne and squatted beside her.

  “What did you see?” she asked.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Lowry seem to be in charge.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “They’re dressed like people from the seventeenth century.”

  “Who else is down there?”

  “Cotton and Maisie and Spud. Their hands are tied.”

  “They were our only hope,” she said.

  “I’ve got to tell you something else. Someone was burned to death in that bonfire. I think these bastards killed Stoney.”

  “No, no, don’t say that.”

  “I know what I saw. It could be someone else. But they burned somebody alive.”

  “The Lowrys are doing this?” she said. “This is madness, Aaron. No, this is hell. We found it on earth. It’s not a myth.”

  “We need to get to the top of the canyon,” I said. “There’s no other way out. Are you up to it?” I tried to smile.

  “Whatever it takes. Who else was down there?”

  “Orchid and Lindsey Lou, Jimmy Doyle and Marvin Fogel.”

  “Moon Child was their friend.”

  “Orchid and Lindsey Lou are scared. Doyle and Fogel are butt crust.”

  “The Lowrys are actually behind all this? The people who had us to dinner? The man you compared to your father?”

  “I told you what I saw.”

  “There’s something wrong in that picture,” she said. “The Lowrys? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “We’d better get going. There’s only one trail that goes to the top. It’s awful steep. There’s not much cover on it, either.”

  “They can see us?”

  “If we let them,” I replied.

  * * *

  I GOT HER TO her feet, and we began walking up the trail, then branched off to another trail that led to a cave. The opening was probably less than thirty yards below the canyon’s rim. The pain in Jo Anne’s ankle was obvious. I tried carrying her but tripped and almost dropped her.

  “Set me down,” she said.

  “No, I think we can make it.”

  “We’ll be out in the open. Those creatures flying in the air will see us. Get help and come back. I’ll stay in the cave.”

  I eased her down on a smooth claylike spot fifteen feet from the cave’s entrance, then put the binoculars on the bonfire. The number of people gathered before it had doubled. They were cheering and clapping. I moved the glasses back to Mr. and Mrs. Lowry. Again, I could not believe what I was watching. Rueben and Darrel Vickers were standing next to the Lowrys. Both father and son were wearing black robes with red trim, although Darrel wore his coned-up cowboy straw hat as well. A German Luger hung from Darrel’s right hand. He must have told a joke, because the crowd was laughing. However, the faces of the Lowrys were shiny with fear, as though a gravitational shift in the earth had just occurred and they were the only ones who would be affected by it.

  Then Darrel Vickers pointed the Luger’s barrel at the side of Mr. Lowry’s head and fired two shots, pop-pop, that fast, like a fool having fun at a funeral. Mr. Lowry dropped straight down, stone dead before he hit the ground.

  I lowered the binoculars, stupefied. Jo Anne looked up at me. “Those sounded like gunshots,” she said.

  “Darrel Vickers just murdered Jude Lowry.”

  “What?”

  “He killed him with a German Luger. His father is with him.”

  “What about Mrs. Lowry?”

  I put the binoculars to my eyes. “She’s just standing there. I think she’s crying.”

  “What about your friends, Spud and—”

  “The crowd’s pushing them toward the fire.”

  “We can’t leave them, Aaron.”

  I could hear the wind blowing in the pines on the lip of the canyon; I could smell the odor of stone and cave air and hard-packed damp clay and bat guano and the salty smell of birds’ nests. I thought of a womb and the symbolism of Elijah finding the voice of God inside a cave. I do not mean that a miracle had been prepared for me. But I do believe that terror can rip away the curtain that binds us to all the mundane distractions of the world and also the lies of kings and dictators and militarists and those who would turn the Grand Canyon into a gravel pit if they had the opportunity.

  I looked at my watch, although I cannot explain why. It had started ticking again. The second hand indicated the time was five seconds past midnight, as though my life were being reset or I had stepped into an alternate reality, one where my blackouts had taken me many times.

  I heard a voice that Jo Anne did not hear. More important, I saw a man she did not see. He was standing inside the cave, unshaved, wearing fatigues that were sweat-stained and dirty, his skin powdered with dust, his dog tags and a P-38 can opener hanging on a chain outside his shirt. He was grinning.

  Saber? I said.

  The one and only.

  Are you dead?

  Kind of. Things aren’t too orderly on this side of the Big Divide. I keep thinking I might wake up at battalion aid.

  The flamethrowers didn’t—

  No, you were carrying me. A 105 came in short. Lights out. Your gal looks like Esther Williams. Does she have a sister?

  How can we get out of this, Saber?

  Leave your probs to the Bledsoe. I got something for you.

  He went deeper into the cave. I looked over my shoulder at Jo Anne. She was motionless, frozen in time, her gaze fixed on nothing. Saber returned, cradling an object with both palms. Catch!

  It was an M1. I caught it with both hands. He draped a cloth bandolier stuffed with .30-06 clips across the bolt.

  We’re outnumbered, Saber.

  Not with that.

  It just moved. In my hand.

  Time to stomp ass and take names, Aaron. Your friends are depending on you.

  Are you coming back, Saber?

  Wish I knew. Remember when we drag-raced on the edge of the surf down at Galveston? The salt ate the floor out of my ’39 Ford. Why’d I get dead, Aaron?

  I wish neither one of us went to Korea.

  You gotta do something for kicks. Keep a cool stool. You heard it first from the Bledsoe himself.

  Suddenly, he was gone and I was wide awake, the stars as white and cold as dry ice above the canyon, the pines swelling in the wind. The hands on my watch had stopped again. Jo Anne was looking up at me.

  I knelt beside her and placed her fingers on the M1’s stock. “Feel that?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “My best friend burned his initials there in the spring of 1953.”

  Down below, people were shouting, their voices filled with hate and bloodlust and a form of desire that cannot be sated, cannot be explained, and I am convinced is passed down by a single creature who, millions of years ago, cracked apart his shell and was startled to discover the feast that awaited him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  IF YOU SUBSCRIBE to a Judeo-Christian view of our tenure on earth, war does not leave you with many positive memories. There is a short-lived exception, though. For days before you’re moved into the line, you carry a nauseating ball of fear in your stomach and a stench in your armpits like spoiled clams. Then you hear a sound on your flank similar to Chinese firecrackers popping; in seconds it grows in volume and velocity until it becomes a sustained roar of automatic weapons and mortar and bazooka rounds and hand grenades and incoming artillery and explosions like locomotive engines blowing apart and dirt showering down on your steel pot, followed by the screams of those whose arms or legs are gone and whose torsos twitch on the ground as though electrocuted.

  Then it stops in the same way it started. You slide down in your hole and touch yourself all over and, in disbelief, discover the Angel of Death has passed you by. The joy you experience is like none you have ever known. You’ve not only proved your courage, you’re painted with magic, chosen by fate to survive the war and accomplish great deeds, to walk the earth as the friend of God and
man.

  Perhaps that same evening, in the twilight, you sit on the edge of your foxhole and eat your C rations, pork and beans or chopped eggs and ham, and listen to the dull knocking of .50-caliber and watch the tracers glide like segments of neon into purple hills filled with enemies you no longer fear. The sense of peace and control you experience is ethereal.

  Of course, you eventually learn all of this is an illusion, but like many self-manufactured opiates, it’s a grand one just the same.

  And that was how I felt after Saber gave me his M1. It was a beautiful weapon, with its heft and balance and peep sight and deadly accuracy and its eight-round clips you could load as fast as you could thumb one into the magazine and roll the heel of your hand off the bolt.

  I looked down at the bonfire. Maisie and Spud and Cotton had been pushed on their knees.

  “What are you going to do?” Jo Anne said.

  “This,” I replied.

  I propped myself against a boulder and aimed at Darrel Vickers’s back and fired a solitary round. The report echoed through the entirety of the canyon. I saw him grab the top of his left shoulder with his right hand and look at the blood on it. The crowd receded from the bonfire like water running backward. Some ran for the bus; others crouched among the shadows in the rocks. Both Darrel and his father looked up the incline in my direction, although I doubted they could see me. Mrs. Lowry was bent into a ball over her husband’s body, her face buried in his chest.

  “That you, Broussard?” Darrel yelled. “You can’t shoot for shit!” He waited in the silence. “No comment? Is Jo Anne there? Jimmy Doyle says she chugs serious pud.”

  I aimed through the peep sight again, this time lower, right under the breastbone. I wet my lip and began to squeeze the trigger.

  Darrel cupped his hands around his mouth, seemingly indifferent to the round he might have to eat. “Think you got us by the shorts? Watch your army buddy at work!”

  Doyle came out of the shadows and stood behind Spud and Maisie and Cotton with a cigarette lighter raised above his head.

  “Your friends are soaked in gasoline!” Darrel said. “Come down or we light them up!”

  I saw a shadow zoom across the rocks around us. I looked up and saw one of the winged creatures making a wide turn, coming back for another flyover.

  I wanted to burn the whole clip on Darrel. I thirsted to shed his blood in every way I could. I knew then I had denied my true identity my whole life, that indeed the Holland legacy of violence and mayhem had always lived inside me. I wanted to blow Darrel Vickers apart one piece at a time, then reload as I walked down the slope and do the same to his father. I wanted to kill them for the boy whose blackened body was little more than embers about to collapse into ash, and I wanted to kill them for Moon Child and all the other people they had tortured and murdered, and I knew, like my ancestors, I would never have a minute’s remorse.

  Jo Anne got to her feet and put her hand on my shoulder. “What should we do?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Stay behind me,” I said.

  I began firing at Jimmy Doyle. I saw his face and head break apart like a flowerpot. I saw one round drill through his throat and another cut the fingers that gripped his lighter. Then I swung the iron sights on Darrel and got off one wide round before he went behind some rocks and began firing wildly with the Luger. I also fired at his father, then the bolt locked open, and the spent shell and the empty clip ejected with the brief metallic clink that every soldier who has fired the M1 rifle never forgets.

  * * *

  DARREL WAS RUNNING up the slope, headed for cover in the larger rocks. I pushed another clip into the magazine and released the bolt and fired three rounds, each ricocheting and whining into the darkness with a sound like a bobby pin twanging.

  “I’ve got to get a better shot at Darrel.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Not far.”

  “Stay.”

  “We have to put Darrel out of business.”

  “Please stay.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  I walked down a path to the edge of the clearing, my head roaring with sound, hating to leave Jo Anne, wondering if I was making a terrible mistake.

  “Hey, ice cream guy. It’s me,” I heard a voice say. Stoney stepped into the light. He wore a mackinaw and a battered football helmet and navy blue sweatpants and pink tennis shoes. “Is that Jimmy Doyle? Geez, what a mess. His face looks like a pepperoni pizza that got run over by a garbage truck.”

  “I thought that was you in the bonfire,” I said.

  “Oh, no, he was a hitchhiker. They were really mean to him, ice cream guy. Just because he got into their stash.”

  I was trying to look at everyone in the clearing, including Maisie and Spud and Cotton, and listen to Stoney at the same time. Also I was drunk on adrenaline from having just killed a man. “What stash?” I said.

  “Bags and bags of it. Behind the panels on the sides of the bus. The kid was sucking it up his nose like an anteater.”

  “Do you know where Darrel Vickers’s father went?”

  “The guy with the face like a bowl full of walnuts?”

  If Stoney ever got off chemicals, I was determined to get him into a creative writing class. “Yeah, that guy.”

  “Stay away from him. That guy is definitely a criminal.”

  “He’s a criminal?”

  “Fucking A, I know his type. I wouldn’t trust him.”

  I took out my long-blade Swiss Army knife. “Cut my friends loose, will you? I need to get Jo Anne.”

  “What for?” he said.

  “To get out of here?”

  “She’s not going anywhere, ice cream guy. This is the Shitsville where bad people go. Nobody told you?”

  * * *

  I RAN UP A trail, the M1 gripped with both hands at forty-five degrees, my lungs aching in the thin air, and tried to think my way through all the events of the last two hours. Nothing made sense. I was surrounded by sandstone boulders, some with petroglyphs carved on them. A Comanche moon, huge and yellow, the kind you associate with summer rather than fall, had risen above the canyon. I had just killed one man and had tried to kill another and felt no regret. I had watched the execution of Mr. Lowry, a man I believed to be a genteel farmer and egalitarian patriot, and now, if I had the chance, I was going to cap both Darrel and Rueben Vickers and any others of their ilk I could lay my peep sight on.

  But inside this giant grotesque web hung with bat-faced winged creatures, probably from the Abyss, I had returned to the worst day of my life, the one I denied on a daily basis, the day my best friend died at Pork Chop Hill or, worse, was captured and sent across the Yalu to be used as a lab rat.

  I have always been a believer. I don’t care what the naysayers and cynics say. In fact, I say fuck them. The big blue marble, the constellations, the Milky Way, the wine-dark waves of the ancient Greeks are filled with magic and with us forever.

  I knew now that Saber would always be with me. Just like the days we drifted in his hot rod down South Main in Houston, down by Rice University, under the live oaks and Spanish moss and in the drive-in hangouts, the throaty roar of his twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling on the asphalt, convertibles full of pretty girls waving as they flew past us, Jackie Brenston and Gatemouth Brown blaring from the radio.

  So I would not fear whatever happened that night in a box canyon that somehow had become a twisted mirror of the America I loved and fought for. As Stephen Crane wrote at the close of The Red Badge of Courage, the great death was only the great death, not to be sought, not to be feared, but treated as an inconsequential player in the human comedy.

  I was breathing heavily when I reached the plateau that led to the place I had left Jo Anne. I had five rounds in the clip and many more in the bandolier. My heart was beating triumphantly, the way it had when Saber and I survived our first day of combat. I knew that Saber and I would prevail again, that the ev
il forces of the world were essentially craven and not worth grieving on. Up the trail I thought I saw Rueben Vickers. I could have shot him, but I felt pity rather than hatred toward him, an angry man who knew his seed should have been cast upon the ground.

  Then I rounded a corner and looked into the faces of Rueben Vickers, Henri Devos, and Jo Anne. Henri was standing next to Jo Anne, his arm around her waist, his face gleeful. Darrel stepped from behind a rock and pressed the muzzle of his Luger behind my ear. “Let the rifle fall to the ground, asshole,” he said.

  “Jo?” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You want your brains on her shirt?” Darrel said.

  I let the M1 drop. He peeled the bandolier off my waist. “Jo?” I repeated.

  “How does it feel, former instructor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana?” Henri said. He wore an electric-blue backpack and lugged boots and hiking knickers with white socks pulled up on his shins.

  “Jo, say something.”

  “What’s to say?” she replied. “You never listen. That’s always been our problem, you just never get it.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “PICK UP THE Garand,” Mr. Vickers said. “I’ll carry the Luger.”

  “It’s called an M1,” Darrel said.

  “I was in the army,” his father said. “I know what it’s called.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  Darrel told me to stand back, then handed the Luger to his father. He leaned over to pick up Saber’s rifle. Then he hesitated, staring down at it.

  “What are you waiting on?” Mr. Vickers said.

  “It moved.”

  “It did what?”

  Darrel put one hand on the stock, then jumped back. “It came alive. Just like a snake.”

  His father shook his head. He slapped his son on the ear with the flat of his hand, then gave him the Luger and picked up the M1 and balanced it on his shoulder. “I don’t know how I got involved with you pissants. I really don’t.”