Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

  “I might have hit on my clothes. I ain’t got hit on my conscience.”

  Bobby Joe puffed on a filter-tipped cigar without missing a beat. “I wish I was smart,” he said. He leaned forward and tipped ashes off the side of the deck. “Then I could figure out how come I like girls and I didn’t turn out to be a faggot. I’m here to tell you, boys, it’s a pure mystery.”

  Skeeter stared at Bobby Joe and rolled a wood match back and forth across his false teeth. You could flat hear that match clicking it was so quiet.

  At quitting time that day, the party chief said anybody who wanted could go into the levee on the crewboat as long as they were back in the galley sober at 0600 the next morning. The upper deck of the quarterboat was divided into two rows of tiny one-man cabins, with the showers and a can at one end of the gangway and a recreation room with a big window fan, where we played cards, at the other. The rain had just stopped and the air was cool and smelled like fish and wet trees, with yellow and purple clouds piled out on the Gulf, wind blowing through the willow islands and mullet jumping where the sunlight still shone above the dead cypress; everybody was in a good mood, whistling, combing their hair with Lucky Tiger and butch wax, putting on starched khakis, skintight jeans, snap-button shirts, and hand-tooled belts with chrome buckles as big as Cadillac bumpers and Indian stitching along the edges.

  Bobby Joe was sitting on the edge of his bunk, buffing the points of his black cowboy boots till the leather was full of little lights. Skeeter leaned against the hatchway with his arms folded across his chest, crinkling his nose under his glasses.

  “What you want, Skeeter?”

  “You ain’t got to carry hit.”

  “Carry what? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “What happened to your little boy.”

  “I hate guys like you. You’re always feeding off somebody’s grief. You quit pestering me.”

  “I don’t mean you no harm.”

  You could hear Bobby Joe breathing. Another guy had just cut his hair for him out on deck, and there was a white stretch of skin half-mooned under the hairline on his neck. His hands opened and closed into rocks, his knuckles swelling up the size of quarters. Then he just about knocked Skeeter down tearing out the door into Skeeter’s cabin.

  He ripped the mattress back off Skeeter’s bunk and grabbed the paper bag with all the little statues of Jesus in it, wadded it up in his hands, and pushed the screen out on the stick and flung the bag straight out into the willow and cypress trees. You could see it spinning in an eddy just before the paper turned dark with water and went under.

  “Now you leave me alone,” Bobby Joe said, his hands trembling at his sides, the veins in his forearms purple and thick as soda straws.

  “All right, Bobby Joe. I promise I won’t bother you no more,” Skeeter said.

  He wasn’t expecting that.

  I’d been to Claudette’s before and always thought the girls were pretty nice, no worse or better than us, anyway, people don’t always get to choose what they are, that’s the way I figured it. Most of them came from mill or farm towns in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi, the kind of towns where people worked in ammunition or roach-paste factories, places where hanging out at the Dairy Queen or down at the filling station was the biggest thing going on Saturday night, which wasn’t the reason they got in the life, I think, although that’s what they tried to tell you when you asked how they ended up in a hundred-year-old two-story house next to colored town with a blue light over the door and the paint eaten off the wood by the salt and a pimp in the front room who once knocked the glass eye out of a girl for sassing him.

  You want to get one of them mad? Ask her about her father, what kind of guy was he, did he ever take her to a kid’s show or a county fair, did he know what happened to her, did he care what happened to her, something like that, and tell me about it. I never thought they were bad girls, though. As long as you bought a beer, it was six bits for a little-bitty Schlitz, you could talk to them, or listen to the jukebox, and you didn’t have to take one of them upstairs, nobody’d bother you, really.

  But I saw something that changed my thinking. It was a weekday afternoon and business was slow except for a roughneck who’d just been paid off his rig and three kids with boogies, flattops with ducktails on the sides, and black jeans and boots with steel taps and chains dripping off the leather, the kind of stomp-ass stuff juvenile delinquents wore back in those days. The roughneck was juiced to the eyes, by himself, no crew to take care of him, and kept splitting open his billfold and showing off his money to the girls, like this would have them lining up to glom his twanger.

  One of the three kids said something about rolling the guy. Then a girl pulled the kid over by the jukebox, you could see them wreathed in cigarette smoke against the orange and purple light from the plastic casing, their heads bent together like two question marks, her hair like white gold, her mouth glossy and red, she was pretty enough to make you hurt. I’ll never forget what she said to him, because it wasn’t just the words, it was the smile on the kid’s face when she said it, like a twisted slit across bread dough, “Y’all take him somewhere else and do it, okay? Then come back and spend the money here.”

  It was pretty depressing.

  After most of the others took off for the levee, I went out on the jugboat with Skeeter to move his dynamite caps and primers to a new sandbar. The caps and primers were a lot more sensitive than the actual dynamite, and he kept them in a big steel lockbox on a sandbar and he had to move the box every week or so to keep up with the drill barge.

  “I wouldn’t let it bother me, Skeet,” I said. “Bobby Joe’s got a two-by-four up his cheeks sometimes.”

  “Hit ain’t him.”

  “So what’s got you down?”

  “My ministry ain’t gone nowhere. Same back in Wiggins. I might as well be out talking in a vacant lot.”

  We unloaded the box, then heaved it empty up on the deck. The water was capping in the south and you could smell salt in the wind and see birds flying everywhere.

  “Maybe if you went about it a little different,” I said. “Sinking those little dashboard statues is a mite unusual.”

  “I done something I never could make up for,” he said. “A bunch of Japs was down in a cave, maybe seventy or eighty of them. I blew the mountain in on top of them. You could hear a hum through the coral at night, like thousands of bees singing. It was all them men moaning down there.”

  He scratched a mosquito bite on his face and looked at the willow islands and the leaves that were starting to shred in the wind.

  “Sometimes people have to do bad things in a war,” I said.

  “I almost had myself convinced they wasn’t human. Then I seen them people going off the cliffs at Saipan. Women threw their babies first, then jumped after them, right on top of the rocks, they was so scared of us.”

  I pulled the anchor and we drifted out into the current. The sun’s afterglow made a dark red light in the water.

  “What’s that got to do with statues?” I said.

  “I bring Jesus to them people who jumped into the sea. The same water is wrapped all the way around the earth, ain’t hit? Hit ain’t that way with land. You could drive this boat from here to Saipan if you had a mind.”

  “I say don’t grieve on it. I say let the church roll on, Skeeter.”

  But there was no consoling him. He sat on the deck rail, his face like an empty pie plate, and I kicked the engines over and hit it hard across the bay. The sky in the south had gone white as bone, the way it does when the barometer drops and no birds or other living things want to be out there.

  Hurricane Audrey flat tore South Louisiana up. It killed maybe five hundred people in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, and left drowned people hanging in trees out in the marsh. We rode it out, though, with the wind screaming outside, houseboats spinning around upside down in the current, and coons climbing up the mooring ropes to hide from the rain on the lee
side of the deck.

  Then the third day the sun rose up out of the steam like a yellow balloon over the cypress trees and we were climbing back on the crewboat and headed for the drill barge again. The night before, I’d been out looking for a bunch of recording jugs that got washed overboard, and till we picked up the dynamite caps and primers at the lockbox out on the sandbar, I didn’t even notice Skeeter was gone and we had a new shooter on board, a man with a steel-gray military haircut and skin the color of chewing tobacco who didn’t have much to say to anybody and worked a crossword puzzle. Everybody was enjoying the ride out to the barge, smoking hand-rolls, drinking coffee, relaxing on the cushions while the bow slapped across the waves and the spray blew back over the windows, when I asked, “Where’s Skeeter at?”

  Suddenly nobody had diddly-squat on a rock to say.

  “Where’s he at?” I said.

  “He drug up last night,” one fellow finally said.

  “That don’t make sense. He would have told me,” I said.

  “He got run off, W.J.,” another guy said.

  “The hell he was,” I said. Then I said it again, “The hell he was.”

  All I could see were the backs of people’s heads staring at the windows. The engines were throbbing through the deck like an electric saw grinding on a nail.

  At first I thought the party chief decided it was either Bobby Joe or Skeeter and it was easier to hire a new shooter than a driller who had to keep a half-dozen other men who hated authority in line and make them like him for it at the same time.

  But that evening, when I talked to Ray, the party chief, he cut right to it. So did I, just as soon as I found Bobby Joe up in his cabin, playing solitaire on his bunk, biting a white place on the corner of his lip.

  “You sorry sonofabitch.”

  “I don’t let a whole lot of people talk to me like that, W.J.”

  “He won’t be able to work anywhere. That was a lousy thing to do, Bobby Joe.”

  “A man oughtn’t have to work with a queer.”

  “You told Ray Skeeter came on to you?”

  “How you know he didn’t?”

  “’Cause I know you’re a damn liar, Bobby Joe. I know you lied about Magpie cheating, too.”

  “You’re in my light.”

  “Too bad. You’re going to hear this,” I said, and sat down on his bunk, right on top of his cards. His face twitched, like a rubber band snapping under the skin. Then I told him everything I knew about Skeeter, the coral rocks humming with the voices of Jap soldiers trapped down below, women with their babies dropping off the cliffs into the sea, all the guilt he was carrying around twelve years after we set fire to the air over their cities and had parades and got back down to making money.

  “I ain’t got nothing to say to you, W.J.”

  “I bet you ain’t.”

  I was too hard on Bobby Joe, though. Two nights later he started acting weird, almost like Skeeter, paddling the pirogue out in the swamp, raking a pile of silt up on the paddle and staring at it, walking along the edge of a sandbar like he’d lost something while cicadas droned in the sky and the sun’s last light looked like electric blood painted on the trees.

  “The hurricane blew them sloughs slick as spit,” I said to Bobby Joe.

  “Where you figure Skeeter headed to?” he asked. He bit on his thumbnail and looked at it.

  “Back to Wiggins, I expect.”

  “You think?”

  “They’d know where he’s at.”

  Bobby Joe drug up the next day, told Ray to mail his check general delivery, New Iberia, Louisiana. I never saw him or Skeeter again. But I sure heard about them; they must have been looking for each other all over the oil patch, one man trying to forgive the other so he could lay his own burden down.

  Sometimes when it’s hot and the barometer starts falling and the bottom of the sky turns green in the south, the way it does right before a storm, I start to think about Bobby Joe and Skeeter, or the girls in the hot-pillow joint who’d set up a drunk to get rolled, or the guys who didn’t speak up when the party chief ran Skeeter off, and I commence to get a terrible headache, just like when you’d breathe that awful cloud of yellow smoke boiling off the water when we’d zap the juice into the hole and blow carp and catfish belly-up to the surface, never worrying about it or asking a question, like it was all a natural part of our old war with the earth and whatever was down there.

  Texas City, 1947

  Right after WW II everybody in southern Louisiana thought he was going to get rich in the oil business. My father convinced himself that all his marginal jobs in the oil fields would one day give him the capital to become an independent wildcatter, perhaps even a legendary figure like Houston’s Glenn McCarthy, and he would successfully hammer together a drilling operation out of wooden towers and rusted junk, punch through the top of a geological dome, and blow salt water, sand, chains, pipe casing, and oil into the next parish.

  So he worked on as a roughneck on drilling rigs and as a jug-hustler with a seismograph outfit, then began contracting to build board roads in the marsh for the Texaco company. By mid-1946, he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya Basin and over in East Texas. But that was also the year that I developed rheumatic fever and he drove my mother off and brought Mattie home to live with us.

  I remember the terrible fight they had the day she left. My mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on that burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink dress with the white piping on the collar and pockets, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard and shucking off their feathers in a big iron cauldron of scalding water. My father came home later than he should have, parked his pickup truck by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded-up shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi’s. He was a dark Cajun, and his shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with black hair. He wore cowboy boots, a red sweat handkerchief tied around his neck, and a rakish straw hat that had an imitation snakeskin band around the crown.

  Headless chickens were flopping all over the grass, and my mother’s forearms were covered with wet chicken feathers. “I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint,” she said, without looking up from where she sat with her knees apart on a wood chair in front of the steaming cauldron.

  “I ain’t been with nobody,” he said, “except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.”

  “You said you’d leave her alone.”

  “You children go inside,” my father said.

  “That gonna make your conscience right ’cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.”

  “I ain’t seen her.”

  “You sonofabitch, I smell her on you,” my mother said, and she swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across my father’s chest and Levi’s.

  “You ain’t gonna act like that in front of my children, you,” he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. “Y’all get inside. You ain’t got no business listening to this. This is between me and her.”

  My two older brothers, Weldon and Lyle, were used to our parents’ quarrels, and they went inside sullenly and let the back screen slam behind them. But my little sister, Drew, whom my mother nicknamed “Little Britches,” stood mute and fearful and alone under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.

  “Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We’re gonna play with the Monopoly game,” I said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.

  Then I saw my father’s large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of my mother’s face, heard the sound of her weeping, as I tried to step into Drew’s line of vision and hold her and her cat against my body, hold the three of us tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of my mother’s weeping.

&
nbsp; Three hours later, her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. I dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble rose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface, her drowned breath stuck against my face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.

  That fall I began to feel sick all the time, as though a gray cloud of mosquitoes were feeding at my heart. During recess at school I didn’t play with the other children and instead hung about on the edges of the dusty playground or, when Brother Daniel wasn’t looking, slipped around the side of the old redbrick cathedral and sat by myself on a stone bench in a bamboo-enclosed, oak-shaded garden where a statue of Mary rested in a grotto and camellia petals floated in a big goldfish pond. Sometimes Sister Roberta was there saying her rosary.

  She was built like a fire hydrant. Were it not for the additional size that the swirl of her black habit and the wings of her veil gave her, she would not have been much larger than the students in her fifth-grade class. She didn’t yell at us or hit our knuckles with rulers like the other nuns did, and in fact she always called us “little people” rather than children. But sometimes her round face would flare with anger below her white, starched wimple at issues which to us, in our small parochial world, seemed of little importance. She told our class once that criminals and corrupt local politicians were responsible for the slot and racehorse machines that were in every drugstore, bar, and hotel lobby in New Iberia, and another time she flung an apple core at a carload of teenagers who were baiting the Negro janitor out by the school incinerator.

  She heard my feet on the dead oak leaves when I walked through the opening in the bamboo into the garden. She was seated on the stone bench, her back absolutely erect, the scarlet beads of her rosary stretched across the back of her pale hand like drops of blood. She stopped her prayer and turned her head toward me. Fine white hair grew on her upper lip.