Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

  “Waldo, two guys just went through the back of your property,” Roger said.

  “What guys? What are you talking about?”

  “Two hunters. I wouldn’t let them into the canyon, so they crossed the creek and climbed through your fences.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “You want guys with shotguns walking by your back door without permission?”

  “So when you see them, tell them to ask. In the meantime I don’t appreciate your waking me up because of your personal problem with hunting. Get some help, Roger, because you’re an ongoing pain in the ass.”

  The line went dead, and Roger looked out at the blueness of the morning, the black, leafless shapes of the cottonwoods along the creek bank, heard the deep, booming echo of another shotgun blast up the canyon, and felt the cold pierce his naked feet like nails.

  Two hours later the hunters walked out of the canyon in full sunlight, crunching through the sheath of ice and frozen snow along the creek’s edge, their canvas packs fat with dead grouse. The driver, who still wore a skinning knife and galoshes that flopped on his feet, flipped a cigarette across the stream onto Roger’s property, but neither he nor the other man, who had an untrimmed beard and a bitten look in his face, ever glanced in Roger’s direction. Their tracks were jagged in the crusted snow. He heard one of the hunters laugh just before the driver started the jeep engine and ground the transmission into gear as sharply as Coke-bottle glass breaking.

  That afternoon he drove into town and bought a forty-foot length of chain, a huge iron bolt and nut, and a Yale lock with two keys. A mile below his property, far down on the county road where he had no legal right to block access to the national forest, he looped one end of the chain around a ponderosa trunk, bolted the links together against the bark, strung the rest of the chain across the road, and locked it to a steel eyelet on an old U.S. Forest Service signpost. Now the only other way to reach the national forest was down Waldo’s private road, and Waldo had a locked, electronic gate across his cattle guard.

  The only neighbors who would be affected by the chain across the county road were a hippie carpenter and his girlfriend who lived just below Roger’s place. Roger stopped by their log house, drank a cup of coffee with them, and gave them one of the keys to the padlock. While he explained the reason for the chain, the carpenter and his girlfriend smiled and nodded and rolled joints out of a bowl of reefer on top of a redwood table, and he realized that they were not really listening because they considered his behavior as conventional and expected as their own.

  That night, under a full moon that lighted the valley floor like a white flame, he walked down the road in the silence, the soles of his boots squeaking on the snow, and looked at the chain strung between the ponderosa trunk and the signpost. He lifted it up in his palm and bounced it against its tension. The links were heavy and cold and shiny with ice. They felt solid and good in his hand, the way the handle of a weapon probably did to some men. He let the chain slip off his fingers and rock clinking back and forth in the shadows. Far down the valley he could see the glow of headlights from the interstate highway against the clouds.

  The season was almost over, he thought. Maybe they would not be back again this year. Maybe the birds had been enough for their pride.

  But he knew it wasn’t finished yet. They had found each other, right here, at the end of this valley, and they knew it and so did he.

  Late the next afternoon he looked out his window and saw Gretchen, Waldo’s grader, stepping carefully on the icy stones in the creek, her arms stretched out for balance, crossing onto his property. The wind was blowing, and her face was red with cold and there were ice crystals in her blond hair. When he opened the door for her, her breath puffed up in a cloud of steam.

  “The power went out, and I can’t get the generator started,” she said.

  Her eyes were blue and wide and the wind had made tears in them. He closed the door behind her. Her lug boots and the bottom of her blue jeans were caked with snow.

  “Where’s Waldo?” he said.

  “He went up to the Cabin for a drink.”

  “What are you doing at his house, Gretchen?”

  “He just gave his midterms. He likes me to grade them close by so I can ask him questions if I have to.”

  Roger had known her since she had entered the English program five years ago. Her father had been a gypo logger who had been killed felling trees over in Idaho, and she lived with her mother in a clapboard house out by the pulp mill, where on a windless day the sweet-sour stench of processed pulp hung in the air like ripe sewage. She worked hard and did well in conventional classes in which the professor rewarded a student’s ability to memorize, but she never took creative writing courses, and one way or another she avoided studying with professors whose ideas were eccentric or unpredictable, except for Roger, and he believed she enrolled in his courses only because he never gave anyone a grade lower than C.

  “Where’s Waldo’s wife?” he said.

  “She’s out of town.”

  “Are the kids by themselves?”

  “They went with her.”

  “I see. Well,” he said, veiling his eyes, “let me turn off the stove and we’ll get that generator started.”

  “We don’t have to. He’ll be back pretty soon. I can just wait here, can’t I?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, he won’t be long.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Come on upstairs and have some soup with me.”

  Her rear was tight against her blue jeans when she walked up the steps ahead of him. She took off her sheep-lined coat and hung it on a hook by the wood-burning stove that Roger had made out of an oil drum. Her breasts rose up high against her sweater, and Roger had to look away from her.

  “Waldo told his American lit class that Ronald Reagan will probably one day be considered a near-great president,” she said.

  Roger was silent.

  “Some of them put it in their exam papers,” she said.

  “Ignore it.”

  “What do you think, I mean about Reagan being near great?”

  “I’m retired, Gretchen. I try not to think anymore about what Waldo has to say. Let me get you some soup.”

  “No, I can do it. I’ll fix it for both of us. I’ll make coffee, too, if that’s all right.”

  He watched her at the stove, the way her sweater tightened against her back, the thickness of her hair against her neck, her large farm-girl hands.

  “What’s a P-38?” she asked.

  “A World War Two airplane.”

  “No. Waldo’s little boy said his daddy wore a P-38 on a chain around his neck.”

  “It’s a GI can opener.”

  “Was he in the war or something?” she said.

  “No, and neither was Ronald Reagan. Listen, Gretchen, this is important to understand. These kinds of men vicariously revise their lives through the suffering of others. Look, I don’t want to tell you what to think or whom you should listen to…” He stopped and looked down at the backs of his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You don’t like him because he hunts animals, do you? At least that’s what he thinks.”

  “What do you say we eat?”

  Her eyes roamed over his face. He felt himself swallow. She widened her eyes and the blue in them intensified, and for just a moment his vanity almost allowed him to believe he was still attractive to a beautiful young woman and his heart raced in his chest in a way that it should not have.

  Then he saw her cheeks color and her hand falter on the coffeepot. “What is it?” he asked.

  Her gaze reached out the window, out over the short pines and the frozen creek toward Waldo’s house. “He said he pulled a muscle carrying firewood. He said it throbbed all night and he couldn’t sleep. He was standing behind me in the study while I was grading papers, and he had a tube of Ben-Gay in his hand.”

  Roger looked away from her face and the shine in her
eyes.

  “He took off his shirt and sat down next to me. He said, ‘You won’t mind putting just a little bit across my shoulders, will you?’”

  “Gretchen, you don’t have to confess anything to me—”

  “While I put it on him, he kept saying I was a good girl. He said it over and over.”

  “I want you to forget this. You’re a fine person. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Just don’t go out to Waldo’s house again. Do your work at the office. If Waldo makes another overture toward you, report it to the dean. I’ll back you up.”

  “Am I a weak person? Is that why it was me instead of somebody else?”

  “No, you’re brave to work and go to school. You’re brave to put up with the deviousness of older people,” he said, and slipped his arms around her, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing that his judgment and control were coming undone now.

  He could feel the wetness of her face against his throat. The thickness in his loins made him close his eyes and hold his breath so he would not see the gold down on the taper of her neck or smell the perfume in her hair.

  The chain did not stop them the next morning. They simply drove around it, cracking over the ice, flattening the tree saplings along the creek bank. Then just before they reached Roger’s property, they veered across the creek, scouring deep black tracks along the banks, and bounced over the rocks until they reached Waldo’s horse lot and access to the national forest. Roger watched through the window as they unloaded a child’s sled out of the Toyota’s back. The snowfields danced with light, and the plumes from the hunters’ mouths were thick and white in the windless air. Then Waldo came out of his back door in a nylon vest, with a battered cowboy hat on his head, and the three men talked like old friends, laughing at something funny, looking in the direction of Roger’s house. The hunters had brought scoped rifles this time, and they wore them on shoulder straps and kept shifting the guns’ weight on their backs as they talked. They shook hands with Waldo and pulled their sled on a rope up into a heavy green stand of pines in the national forest.

  That afternoon the valley was sealed from rim to rim with snow clouds, then a heavy white mist moved across the valley floor until the trees on the hills disappeared inside it. The rick fences and stone walls became as white as the fields, and the creek was recognizable only by a thin electric-blue riffle running through the ice. Thunder boomed through the valley, and when he heard an explosion echo off the cliff walls in the public woods, he tried to tell himself that it was only more thunder.

  For some reason, that afternoon, for the first time in his life, he wondered what it would be like to kill someone. He remembered a graduate student he had taught back in the 1960s, a studious but strange kid with myopic, close-set eyes who had probably fried an element or two in his brain with LSD and once told Roger he had spent a morning in the shadows behind his second-floor apartment window, looking through the telescopic sights of an empty rifle at the passersby on the street. When Roger tried and failed to get the boy to see the campus psychologist, he wondered if the acid had inculcated such a sick urge in the boy’s head or if it had simply liberated it.

  Just before sunset, the sky started to clear and a mauve-colored glow filled the trees on the valley’s eastern rim. Roger let Boomer outside, then a few minutes later went outside himself with a propane torch to unfreeze a water line. He saw the hunters come out of the woods on the other side of the creek, dragging their sled across the glazed slickness of the snow. The doe lashed to the sled was so enormous and heavy that both men had to pull on the rope to get the sled up the incline to their jeep. They had already gutted her, and the slit from between her back legs to her throat looked like a long strip of red silk ribbon.

  He moved the white-blue flame of the propane torch up and down the water pipe and tried not to look at them as they tied down the doe on the jeep’s fender. But when enough time had passed for them to have closed their doors and started their engine and he had heard only silence, he looked up and saw them sharing a drink from a chrome flask, watching him.

  He shut off the valve on the propane torch and went back inside, stamping the crust of mud and snow off his boots, the propane bottle hot in his clenched hand. Their jeep ground across Waldo’s property and along the frozen edges of the creek, and finally he could not hear it anymore. Then he heard a solitary rifle shot, a sharp, loud crack that meant it was not an echo, that the muzzle had been pointed in the direction of his property.

  He opened the front door. It was so quiet outside he could hear a lump of snow fall through the branches of a fir tree. Boomer lay on the creek bank, a pooling dark red hole in the side of his neck, his mouth opened stiffly against the ice. The wind blew patterns in the fur along the edge of his stomach.

  Roger had bought the knife for eight dollars through a mail-order service that advertised in the family magazine in the Sunday newspaper. It was made in Taiwan and copied after the pattern of the Marine Corps K-Bar. It had a ball compass inserted in the end of the tooled grip, saw teeth and a blood groove on the blade, and a honed edge that could cut weightlessly through paper.

  He knew that they would stop at the Cabin up on the highway. It was the hunters’ place, it was Waldo’s place, where they drank busthead boilermakers at the bar, rolled the dice out of a leather cup for the drinks, and slammed the butt of their pool cues down on the floor after each shot. He didn’t know why he was so sure they would be there (maybe it was the memory of a convict-student at Deer Lodge who had told Roger, “You see, Doc, right after a score you always go to a bar or a hot-pillow joint. A guy’s got to share the feel of it, you know what I mean?”), and so when he came out on the highway and saw their jeep in the parking lot of the bar, the only unexpected moment of recognition was the fact that among all the pickups and cars in the lot, they had parked one vehicle away from Waldo’s Power Ram.

  He stepped up on the wood porch and opened the door partway. A fire burned in a hearth beyond the pool table and a flat layer of cigarette smoke hung in the purple and orange neon haze over the long, railed bar. The two hunters were eating steaks at a table, their elbows pointed outward as they sliced meat away from the bone.

  Roger’s hand rested lightly on top of the big knife inside his coat pocket, the blade cold and hard under his fingers. He looked at the two hunters, and in his mind, for just a moment, he saw a series of images like blisters popping across the surface of the brain: his own shape moving quickly across the barroom floor, the backhanded slash of the blade across a cheekbone, across the back of a fat neck, the genuine horror and fear in their eyes. But he felt both foolish and stupid now, and he closed the door and stepped back off the porch into the parking lot. The doe’s head hung downward off the jeep’s fender onto the front bumper, her eyes like brown glass in the starlight. He lifted on the tension of the nylon rope that bound her to the fender, sawed through it with the survival knife, and hefted her weight up on his shoulders. Her body had already stiffened in the cold, and her hair felt like bristles against his neck.

  After he dropped her in the bed of his pickup truck, he walked back to the jeep, cut off the air stems of all four tires, then unscrewed the gas cap and systematically scooped up five handfuls of dirt and poured them into the tank.

  As he pulled out onto the highway and skidded slightly on a strip of black ice, he heard an outraged voice behind him and saw in his rearview mirror the silhouettes of men filing quickly out the front door of the bar.

  The vault of sky over the valley was bursting with constellations and the moon had risen high above the ponderosas and lighted the snowfields and the skeletal shapes of the cottonwoods along the creek as brightly as a phosphorous flare. He stopped his truck at the chain stretched across the road, unlocked it and let it drop clinking to the road, then drove across it and kept going through his own property until he reached the wooden gate that gave onto the national forest. From the toolbox in the bed of his truck he took a GI entrenching tool, screwed the adjustable blade int
o the position of a hoe, lifted the belly of the doe across his shoulders, and with her four legs gathered together across his chest, worked his way up the trail into the darkness of the forest, under the towering gray and pink cliffs that were filmed with ice in the moonlight.

  He hadn’t gone far when he heard the surge of a truck engine up his private road. He looked back down the trail and saw Waldo’s Power Ram, with three men in the cab, stop in his yard, and behind them the headlights of cars and other pickups. He set the doe down in a tangle of huckleberry bushes and began chopping through the snow and frozen dirt with the shovel. There was no time to build a fire to thaw the ground, and with his bare hands he ripped away slabs of ice and frozen root systems that were meshed as hard as cable in the earth, felt his skin tear, a fingernail fold back on itself; then on his knees he chopped even harder into the dirt until he was down past the freeze line and the blade of the shovel bit into the moist subsoil.

  He hollowed out the hole deeper, flinging humus and dirt out to the sides, then pushed the doe into it and pressed the stiffness of her flat against the contours of the earth. As he scraped the snow and leaves back over her stomach and flanks, he saw blood on the wooden shaft of the entrenching tool, and in the heart-stopping urgency of the moment he did not know if it was the doe’s or his own.

  The wind blew down the canyon, and the ice crystals in the larch and ponderosa pine and fir trees glittered as though in a fantasy and rang as loudly as crystal. His face was white and shining with sweat in the moon’s glow.

  In Roger’s front yard, Waldo and the hunters moved in a circle, massing their energies, their voices melding together with the sound of their truck and car engines, their shadows on the snow like simian figures moving about on a prehistoric savannah.

  “We’re here,” one of the hunters yelled to the others. “We’re here.”