Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  Darrel stood stiff as a post as he watched his father walk down the trail.

  I walked ahead of them down the trail, numb and sick at heart at Jo Anne’s behavior.

  Most of the bus community, which was far more numerous than the original group, had stayed in the shadows, leaderless and without direction, their expressions disjointed, as though their messiah had deserted them and they did not know who they were or why they were there. I could smell weed and see a kid shooting up with an eyedropper. A half-dozen girls dressed in white had clasped hands and were dancing barefoot in a circle, stoned out of their heads.

  Jimmy Doyle’s body still lay curled on its side, like a broken worm. Mrs. Lowry had disappeared. Marvin Fogel was flinging logs on the bonfire, crushing the remains of the burned hitchhiker, as though the intensity of his work would extricate him from the chaos taking place around him.

  Stoney was nowhere in sight. Neither were Spud and Cotton and Maisie. The tape that had bound their wrists lay on the ground.

  “Looks like your friends bagged ass,” Darrel said.

  I looked over my shoulder. Henri was walking slowly behind us, his right arm locked around Jo Anne. She refused to look at me.

  “How’s it feel to get sold out?” Darrel said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “She’s a prick-teaser, man,” he said. “That’s why I dumped her.”

  “You dumped her?”

  “After I fucked her brains out.”

  “Don’t use that language, Darrel,” Mr. Vickers said.

  “Your son smeared his feces all over Jo Anne’s house,” I said.

  “He did what?”

  “That’s the way a succubus operates,” I said. “It probably has something to do with toilet training.”

  “Darrel?” Mr. Vickers said.

  “He’s lying, Daddy.”

  “Darrel has done things like this before, hasn’t he?” I said.

  Mr. Vickers knotted my shirt in his fist. “I’ll break your teeth.”

  “You’re a smart man, Mr. Vickers. How did you get mixed up with drug traffickers?”

  He tightened his grip on my shirt. “I don’t have anything to do with drugs.”

  “You want your son putting dope in his arm?”

  He hit me in the mouth. I felt the blow all the way to my knees; the inside of my mouth tasted like pennies. I spat in the dirt. “You can tear me up, Mr. Vickers, but your son will always remain a coward. That’s because of you, sir, not a succubus. Early on, you made him hate himself. That’s why he suffocated the little girl in the refrigerator.”

  “Shut him up, Daddy,” Darrel said.

  “I was good to him,” Mr. Vickers said. “I loved him. His mother tried to baby him. I made him a man.”

  “Is that the way he sees it?” I asked.

  Mr. Vickers looked at his son. “Tell him, Darrel.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “I loved you. I took care of you. I was proud of you.”

  “That’s a tough sale, Dads. You made me cut my own switch.”

  “I did not.”

  “I was four or five the first time. I had on short pants. You whipped my legs until they were red all over. You knew how to do it, Dads.”

  “That’s a goddamn lie,” Mr. Vickers said. His face twitched violently, his right shoulder shaking.

  “That M1 on your shoulder acting up, Dads?” Darrel said.

  “I don’t know what it’s doing,” Mr. Vickers said. “Here, I don’t want the rifle.”

  “Does it feel like it’s alive?” Darrel said.

  “Take it.”

  “When I told you it was alive, you made fun of me.”

  Mr. Vickers swallowed, then pushed the rifle off his shoulder as though it were attached to his skin. When it hit the ground, he stepped away from it.

  “Do you know why I shot Mr. Lowry, Daddy?” Darrel said.

  “You said you were taking over. Maybe I don’t agree with you shooting Jude, but he could be a difficult man. That was your choice, and I respect it.”

  “I lied. I was practicing. I’ll show you.”

  Darrel lifted the Luger and fired a round into the center of his father’s forehead. The muscles in Mr. Vickers’s face collapsed or, better said, dissolved into tapioca, as though someone had whispered a dirty secret in his ear. The crowd in the shadows went silent and turned in unison, their features shiny and ghoulish as plastic masks, the eyes and mouths scooped by a spoon. The only sound was the wind. Darrel stared at the body. A dust devil spun through rocks, then lifted into the air and fell apart. “Bet you didn’t think I could pop my old man, did you?” Darrel said to me.

  “I feel sorry for you,” I said.

  “Why?” he said.

  “You only get one father. I think he was telling you the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “He loved you.”

  The change in his eyes was one I didn’t expect. I think, for the first time in his life, Darrel understood the irrevocable nature of loss.

  * * *

  I WON’T BE FANCIFUL with you about death. It’s a motherfucker no matter how you cut it, and needless to say, a violent death is worse. You don’t have to go to war to find it, either. I saw a blowout on an offshore drilling rig that was the equal of any napalm bombing. The rig began to quiver, then the bolts started popping loose around the wellhead, and the casing jettisoned out of the hole and was clanging in the rigging like a junkyard falling down stairs, followed by a torrent of oil and gas and sludge that suddenly ignited and blew flame through the derrick and wilted the steel spars like licorice. Fourteen men died on the deck; the man racking pipe high up on the monkey board never knew what hit him.

  I was on an offshore seismograph rig in ’57 when Hurricane Audrey hit the Louisiana coast at 145 miles an hour, except we rode it out, even though we were loaded with canned dynamite and nitro caps. I don’t think I was ever more frightened, before or since. Many people in Cameron Parish were drowned, and for minimum wage, I helped extract the dead from the swamp with grappling hooks and pull them out of trees. I remember how the dead all smelled like Clorox when you dragged them over the gunwale and into the boat.

  I do not mean to assault anyone’s sensibilities, but once you face death or reach out and touch it with your hand, or look into the half-lidded eyes of a woman or child or man whose life has been violently taken, you bond with them and silently try to console them for the theft of their lives. You promise to carry them in your heart and never tell anyone about it. I think that’s what humanity is about.

  Why do I talk about these things? I do not want the reader to mourn the fate of any character in this tale. Saber was brave and did not want me to mourn his death. That alone was gift enough for me. Since that night in the box canyon, I have never feared death, nor do I brood upon it. I’ll take it a step further. Since that night, I have never feared anything in this world or the next.

  * * *

  WE WERE ALMOST to the bus. Henri was now holding Darrel’s Luger. I kept trying to make Jo Anne look at me, with no success. My mind was tired, my body weak, my spiritual resources used up. Why would she not look at me? Had she actually betrayed me? Think, I told myself. What was I not seeing?

  The .38 Police Special.

  Her bag was still hanging on her waist.

  “I want you to take a look inside the bus,” Henri said. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

  I stepped up into the vestibule of the bus. Henri and Jo Anne followed me. Henri pulled off his backpack and dropped it heavily on the floor. Young people were eating take-out pizza and smoking dope. Lindsey Lou and Orchid were huddled behind a table stacked with tape-wrapped packages that probably contained cocaine or Mexican skag. Lindsey Lou and Orchid couldn’t bring themselves to look at me.

  “How you doin’, girls?” I said. Both of them hung their heads. “This isn’t your fault,” I told them. “You got taken in by a bunch of shitheads.”

  “D
on’t test the envelope, Broussard,” Henri said.

  “What did you want to show me?” I said.

  He pulled down a blanket that was draped on a clothesline. Behind it, Jo Anne’s paintings were propped either against or all over a stuffed couch. The first one I saw clearly was of the children trapped inside the flames at the Ludlow Massacre.

  “What do you think about that, Jo Anne?” Henri said.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “You took them out of Jo Anne’s house?” I said.

  “No, Darrel did. But I got them back.”

  “Are you going to believe this guy?” I said to Jo.

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were flat, her fingernails curled into her palms.

  “You don’t seem fazed too much by all this, Broussard,” Henri said.

  “What’s to say? You win, I lose,” I replied. Through a window, I could see Darrel among his newly acquired followers. He was still wearing his straw cowboy hat. “Here’s the rub, Henri. You’re stuck with who you are. And you’re stuck with Darrel. Have fun with that.”

  “You don’t have any questions about any of this or how it happened?” he said.

  “It’s the other way around, pal. I’ve always believed in the unseen world. It’s you who’s just waking up to it. The problem is you’re on the wrong side, and in this case that makes you the dumbest academic I’ve ever met.”

  He was a vain man. I saw him fight with the insult, saw it seep into his face, his smile turn to a twitch, his gaze shift to Jo Anne, then back to me.

  “Let’s walk outside, Broussard,” he said. “I’ve got something special planned for you.”

  “My friends Spud and Cotton and Maisie get loose on you?” I said.

  “What about them?”

  “My friend Cotton is a former Army Ranger and a mean motor scooter. He wiped out a bunch of SS under Vatican Square. Spud went up the road in Kentucky. His patron saint is Devil Anse Hatfield.”

  “I’m shaking.”

  Darrel stepped up on the vestibule. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Looking at Jo Anne’s canvases,” Henri said.

  “Get out here. Bring that asshole with you. We need to wrap this up.”

  In the blink while Darrel had distracted Henri, Jo Anne pressed her foot on mine, looked directly into my eyes, then glanced at the electric-blue backpack Henri had dropped on the floor. She had gotten the .38 into his pack in case someone searched her drawstring bag. She had outthought Henri and Darrel from the jump, and she had also outthought me. But at that moment, the confirmation she had not betrayed me was worth far more to me than life itself.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  WE LEFT THE bus. In the short time we were inside, the sky had turned black, smudging out the stars as though cannon smoke had drifted across them. Flashes of electricity were rolling through the clouds directly above the canyon, lighting the cliffs and the trees that grew between the rocks. The air was cold and sweet with the smell of rain. Marvin was still flinging logs on the bonfire, his face sweaty, the back of his coat split, his commitment to his task unflagging. He grinned at me and shrugged as if he had no choice in the matter.

  “I’ve heard if you keep your eyes shut, your sensory system shuts down and the smoke does the rest,” Henri said. “That’s as good as I can offer.”

  Somebody pulled my arms behind me and taped my wrists. Lightning struck the canyon’s rim, peeling back the darkness with a huge ball of yellow fire.

  “Did you see that?” Darrel said.

  “See what?” Henri said.

  “A guy up on the cliff. Wearing black, with a hood.”

  “It could have been a dead tree.”

  “It was Bible-thumping-Bob,” Darrel said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Let’s get this over with, Darrel. I want to get my old life back. Start over with Jo Anne,” Henri said.

  “Got news for you,” Darrel said. “We need to tie up some loose ends. Starting with Miz Lowry. Time for you to get wet.”

  “That’s on you,” Henri said. “You took out her husband when you didn’t have to. Clean up your own mess.”

  “I don’t like your tone,” Darrel said.

  I felt raindrops strike my skin like drops of lead. I looked up at the sky and closed my eyes and let the rain slide down my face. I longed to have the M1 in my hands again. “Can I ask you guys something?”

  “What, wisenheimer?” Darrel said.

  “The kid you burned to death? You did it just because he got into your stash?”

  “Yeah, an object lesson,” Darrel replied.

  “How old was he?”

  “How should I know?” he said. “That’s not your business, anyway.” He kicked me behind the knee and sent me tumbling to the ground.

  I had to help Jo Anne get to Henri’s backpack, but I didn’t know how.

  “I don’t want to watch this, Henri,” she said.

  “Then don’t watch it,” Darrel said.

  She sniffed and rubbed her nose with her hand. “I’m coming down with a cold.”

  “Will you get her out of here?” Darrel said to Henri.

  The sky lit up again. I thought I saw Spud and Cotton at the edge of the clearing. Darrel followed my line of sight. I was on my knees now. I started to stand. He took the Luger from Henri and chopped the butt down on my head. I felt like something had torn loose inside my skull. But I was on one knee now and still rising to my feet.

  “Help me get him on the fire, Marvin!” Darrel said. “He’s been the problem from the start! Grab his ankles!”

  “I think we should talk this over,” Marvin said. “I’m just the bus driver. I didn’t do any of the killing here. No, sir, that’s not my bag.”

  “You poured gasoline on that kid.”

  “I thought it was just to scare him.”

  “You want to take Broussard’s place?”

  “I think I’m going back to work at the Orange Julius in Portland. I was up for assistant manager.”

  Darrel knocked me to the ground again and went behind the bus and returned with a can of gasoline. He jerked the plug from the spout and showered gasoline on my head and face and clothes, then tossed the empty can in the fire. He watched the metal blacken and fold in on itself. Then he pointed the Luger at Henri. “Pick him up, Professor.”

  Henri lifted his hands, palms out, his eyes lowered, like a peacemaker. “This isn’t the way to go, Darrel. Aaron is a smart guy. There’re ways to work it out.”

  “I always knew you were a yellowbelly,” Darrel said. He turned toward Jo Anne. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Bring me a can of Bud,” he said.

  I tried again to get to my feet, but Darrel placed his foot between my shoulder blades and shoved me down once more. I saw Jo Anne bend down over the backpack, then step off the vestibule. She pointed the .38 at Darrel with both hands, her arms straight out.

  The kids on the bus followed her out. Those already outside had formed a huge semicircle around the clearing, their faces a study in shadow and firelight. They made me think of the children in Jo Anne’s paintings.

  “Put your pistol on the ground, Darrel,” she said.

  “I think I’ll keep it,” he replied.

  “I’ll have to shoot you.”

  “How about giving me some head before you do?”

  I saw her trying to pull back the hammer. She had told me she knew nothing about guns. I believed her. Where were Spud and Cotton?

  “Jo Anne, put your gun down,” Henri said. “Darrel will kill you.”

  “Shut up, Henri,” Darrel said. “This is between me and her.” He worked a butane lighter out of his watch pocket. “I’m going to set Broussard on fire. What do you say to that, Jo Anne?”

  She pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped on either an empty chamber or a dead round. She squeezed the trigger again. And again.

  “I took the cartridges out,” Darrel said. “You and
Broussard are the perfect couple, Jo Anne. Complete losers. Gee, I wish I could have gone to college.”

  He walked toward me with the Luger swinging from his hand. I was on my knees. “Open your mouth,” he said.

  There was a collective moan in the crowd, as though a collective sin were being imposed upon them. Their behavior surprised even Darrel. They seemed to shrink individually in size, trying to hide inside themselves or inside one another. “Don’t hurt ice cream guy!” Stoney called.

  Then I saw him and Orchid and Lindsey Lou pick up stones and sticks. The others began to do the same. If they had possessed scythes and pitchforks and rakes, the scene would have been complete.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Darrel said to them.

  Out of the darkness, I saw Cotton Williams running toward Darrel, his shoulders humped, his silver hair streaming, his Buck knife open in his right hand. I never saw a man hit another man so hard with his body. Darrel looked like he had been broken in half, his robes torn open, his love handles and soft stomach exposed, the inside of his mouth as red as paint. Cotton pinned him to the ground with his knees, then inserted the point of his knife in Darrel’s right nostril.

  “Cotton—” I said.

  Darrel’s eyes were bulging. A broken tooth was glued to his chin.

  “Cotton—” I said again.

  “He felt up Maisie,” Cotton said. “All over her. Same thing a guard did to her in one of those internment camps.”

  “Don’t do it, Cotton,” I said. “This isn’t you.”

  “I killed my own son. What do you call that?”

  I knew my words were to no avail. He was going to do it, and I couldn’t blame him. Maybe I even wanted him to do it. Maybe we would all die that night. Maybe all of us had already entered eternity.

  Maisie and Spud came out of the darkness. She placed her hand on Cotton’s shoulder and knelt beside him, then leaned close to his ear. “You good man,” she said. “You kind and brave, like Spud and Aaron. That why I love you. You give me knife now, Cotton.” She took it gingerly from his hand.