Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

  The wind makes a sound like water when it sharks through the grass.

  Albert had seen the bikers for the first time only last week. Three of them had ridden up the dirt road that splits his ranch in half, ignoring the PRIVATE ROAD sign nailed to the railed fence that encloses his lower pasture. They turned around when they hit the dead end two hundred yards north of Albert’s barn, then cruised back through Albert’s property toward the paved highway.

  They were big men, the sleeves of their denim jackets scissored off at the armpits, their skin wrapped with tattoos. They sat their motorcycles as though they absorbed the throttled-down power of the engine through their thighs and forearms. The man in the lead had red hair and a wild beard and sweat rings under his arms. He seemed to nod when Albert lifted his hand in greeting.

  Albert caught the tag number of the red-haired man’s motorcycle and wrote it down on a scrap of paper that he put away in his wallet.

  A half hour later he saw them again, this time in front of the grocery store in Lolo, the little service town two miles down the creek from his ranch. They had loaded up with canned goods and picnic supplies and sweating six-packs of beer and were stuffing them into the saddlebags on their motorcycles. He passed within three feet of them, close enough to smell the odor of leather, unwashed hair, engine grease, and woodsmoke in their clothes. One of them gargled with his beer before he swallowed it, then grinned broadly at Albert. He wore black glasses, as a welder might. Three blue teardrops were tattooed at the corner of his left eye.

  “What’s happening, old-timer?” he said.

  “Not much outside of general societal decay, I’d say,” Albert replied.

  The biker gave him a look.

  Five days later, Albert drove his truck to the Express Lube and took a walk down toward the intersection while he waited for his truck to be serviced. It was sunset and the sky was a chemical green, backdropped by the purple shapes of the Bitterroot Mountains. The day was cooling rapidly and Albert could smell the cold odor of the creek that wound under the highway. It was a fine evening, one augmented by families enjoying themselves at the Dairy Queen, blue-collar people eating in the Mexican restaurant, an eighteen-wheeler shifting down for the long pull over Lolo Pass. But the voices he heard on the periphery of his vision were like a dirty smudge on a perfect moment in time. The three bikers who had trespassed on his private road had blundered onto a young woman who had just gotten out of her car next to the town’s only saloon.

  Her car was a rust-eaten piece of junk, a piece of cardboard taped across the passenger window, the tires bald, a child’s stuffed animal inside the back window. The woman had white-gold hair that was cut short like a boy’s, tapered on the sides and shaved on the neck. Her hips looked narrow and hard inside her pressed jeans, her breasts firm against her tight-fitting T-shirt. She was trapped between her car and the three bikers, who behaved as though they had just run into an old friend and only wanted to offer her a beer. But it was obvious they were not moving, at least not without a token to take with them. A pinch on the butt or the inside of her thigh would probably do.

  She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at an upward angle, not responding, waiting for their energies to run down.

  “How about a steak when you get off?” the man with the red beard asked.

  “Sorry, I got to go home and wash out my old man’s underwear,” she said.

  “Your old man, huh? Wonder why he didn’t buy you a ring,” the man with the beard replied. When he got no response, he tried again. “You a gymnast? ’Cause that’s what you look like. Except for that beautiful pair of ta-tas, you’re built like a man. That’s meant as a compliment.”

  Don’t mix in it. It’s not your grief, Albert told himself.

  “Hey, fellows,” he said.

  The bikers turned and looked at him, like men upon whom a flashbulb had just popped.

  “I think she’s late for work,” Albert said.

  “She sent you a kite on that?” the red-bearded man said, smiling.

  Albert looked into space. “Y’all on your way to Sturgis?”

  The third biker, who so far had not spoken, stuck an unfiltered cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a Zippo that flared on his face. His skin looked like dirty tallow in the evening light, his dark hair hanging in long strands on his cheeks. “She your daughter? Or your wife? Or your squeeze on the side?” he said. He studied Albert. “No, I can see that’s probably not the case. Well, that means you should butt out. Maybe go buy yourself a tamale up at the café. A big, fat one, lot of juice running down it.”

  The bikers grinned into space simultaneously, as though the image conjured up shared meaning that only they understood.

  Walk away, the voice inside Albert said.

  “What’s wrong with you fellows?” he asked.

  “What?” the bearded man said.

  “You have to bully a young woman to know who you are? What the hell is the matter with you?” Albert said.

  The three bikers looked at one another, then laughed. “I remember where I saw you. On that ranch, up the creek a couple of miles. You walk up and down the road a lot, telling other people what to do?” the bearded man said.

  The young woman dropped her cigarette to the ground and used the distraction to walk between the bikers, onto the wood porch of the saloon.

  “Hey, come on back, sweet thing. You got a sore place, I’ll kiss it and make it well,” the biker with black glasses said.

  She shot him the finger over her shoulder.

  “Showtime is over,” the bearded man said.

  “No harm intended,” Albert said.

  “You got a church hereabouts?” the man with the black glasses said.

  “There’s a couple up the road,” Albert said.

  The three bikers looked at one another again, amused, shaking their heads.

  “You’re sure slow on the uptake,” the bearded man said. “If you go to one of those churches next Sunday, drop a little extra in the plate. Thank the Man Upstairs he’s taking care of you. It’s the right thing to do.” He winked at Albert.

  But the evening was not over. Fifteen minutes later, after Albert picked up his truck at the Express Lube, he passed by the saloon and saw the three men by the young woman’s car. They had pulled the taped cardboard from the passenger-side window and opened the door. The biker with the beard stood with his feet spread, his thighs flexed, his enormous phallus cupped in his palm, urinating all over the dashboard and the seat.

  Albert drove down the state highway toward the turnoff and the dirt road that led to his ranch. The hills were dark green against the sunset, the sharp outline of Lolo Peak capped with snow, the creek that paralleled the road sliding through shadows the trees made on the water’s surface. He braked his truck, backed it around, and floored the accelerator, the gearshift vibrating in his palm. The note he left under the young woman’s windshield wiper was simple: The Idaho tag number of the red-haired man who vandalized your car is— He copied onto the note the number he had placed in his wallet the day the bikers had driven through his property. Then he added: I’m sorry you had this trouble. You did nothing to deserve it.

  He walked back toward his truck, wondering if the anonymity of his note was not a form of moral failure in itself. He returned to the woman’s car and signed his name and added his phone number at the bottom.

  On the way home the wind buffeted his truck, powdering the road with pine needles, fanning geysers of sparks out of a slash pile in a field. In the distance he saw a solitary bolt of lightning strike the ridgeline and quiver whitely against the sky. The air smelled of ozone and rain, but it brought him no relief from the sense of apprehension that seized his chest. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, like copper pennies, like blood, a taste that reminded him of his misspent youth.

  It takes him most of the afternoon to hand-dig a hole in the pasture in order to bury the sorrel mare. The vinyl draw-string bag someone had wrapped over her head and cinched
tight around her neck lies crumpled and streaked with ropes of dried saliva and mucus in the bunchgrass. The undersheriff, Joe Bim Higgins, watches Albert fling the dirt off the shovel blade onto the horse’s flank and stomach and tail.

  “I checked them out. You picked quite a threesome to get into it with,” Joe Bim says.

  “Wasn’t of my choosing,” Albert replies.

  “Others might argue that.”

  Albert wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his forearm. The wind is up, channeling through the grass, bending the fir trees that dot the slopes of the hills that border both sides of his ranch. The sun is bright on the hills and the shadow of a hawk races across the pasture and breaks apart at the fence line. “Say again?”

  “In the last year you filed a complaint because some kids fired bottle rockets on your property. You pissed off the developers trying to build a subdivision down on the creek. You called the president a draft-dodging moron in print. Some might say you have adversarial tendencies.”

  Albert thought about it. “Yes, I guess I do, Joe Bim. Particularly when a lawman stands beside my dead horse and tells me the problem is me, not the sonsofbitches who ran her heart out.”

  But Joe Bim is not a bad man. He removes a shovel from his departmental SUV and helps Albert bury the animal, wheezing down in his chest, his stomach hanging against his shirt like a water-filled balloon. “All three of those boys been in the pen,” he says. “The one who hosed down the girl’s car is a special piece of work. His child was taken away from him and his wife for its own protection.”

  Then Joe Bim tells Albert what the biker or his wife or both of them did to a four-month-old infant. Albert’s eyes film. His clears his throat and spits into the grass. “Why aren’t they in jail?” he says.

  “Why do we have crack and meth in middle schools? The goddamn courts, that’s why. But it ain’t gonna change because you get into it with a bunch of psychopaths.”

  Albert packs down the dirt on top of his horse and lays a row of large, flat stones on top of the dirt. He cannot rid himself of the images Joe Bim’s story has created in his mind. Joe Bim looks at him for a long time.

  “How’s the wife?” he asks.

  “Parkinson’s is Parkinson’s. Some days are better than others,” Albert says.

  “You’re a gentle man. Don’t mess in stuff like this,” Joe Bim says. “I’ll get them out of town. They’re con-wise. They know the hurt we can put on them.”

  You have no idea what you’re talking about, Albert says to himself.

  “What’s that?” Joe Bim asks.

  “Nothing. Thanks for coming out. Listen to that wind blow,” Albert says.

  Before his retirement he had taught at the state university in Missoula although he did not have a Ph.D. and had managed to publish several novels that had enjoyed a fair degree of commercial success. Early on he had learned the secret of survival among academics, and that was to avoid showing any sign of disrespect for what they did. But in actuality the latter had never been a problem for him. He not only respected his colleagues but thought their qualifications and background superior to his own. His humility and southern manners and publications earned him a tenured position and in an odd way gave him a form of invisibility. In the aftermath of the most bitter faculty meetings, no one could remember if Albert had attended the meeting or not.

  In truth, Albert’s former colleagues, as well as his current friends, including Joe Bim Higgins, have no idea who he really is.

  He never speaks of the road gang he served time on as a teenager, or the jails and oil-town flophouses he slept in from Mobile to Corpus Christi. In fact, he considers most of his youthful experience of little consequence.

  Except for one event that forever shaped his thinking about the darkness that can live in the human breast.

  It was the summer of 1955, and he had been sentenced to seven days in a parish prison after a bloody, nose-breaking brawl outside a bar on the Texas-Louisiana line. The male lockdown unit was an enormous iron tank, perforated with square holes, on the third floor of the building. Most of the inmates were check writers, drunks, wife beaters, and petty thieves. A handful of more serious criminals were awaiting transfer to the state prison farm at Angola. The inmates were let out of the tank at 7:00 a.m. each day and allowed the use of the bull run and the shower until 5:00 p.m., when they went back into lockdown until the next morning. By 6:00 p.m. the tank was sweltering, the smoke from cigarettes trapped against the iron ceiling, the toilets often clogged and reeking.

  The treatment of the inmates was not deliberately cruel. The trusties ladled out black coffee, grits, sausage, and white bread for breakfast and spaghetti at noon. It was the kind of can where you did your time, stayed out of the shower when the wrong people were in there, never accepted favors from another inmate, and never, under any circumstances, sassed a hack. The seven days should have been a breeze. They weren’t.

  On Albert’s fourth day, a trailer truck with two huge generators boomed down on the bed, pulled to a stop with a hiss of air brakes, and parked behind the prison.

  “What’s that?” Albert asked.

  “This is Lou’sana, boy. The executioner does it curb-side, no extra charge,” an inmate wiping his armpits with a ragged towel replied. His name was Deek. His skin was as white as a frog’s belly and he was doing consecutive one-year sentences for auto theft and jailbreak.

  But Albert was staring down from the barred window at a beanpole of a man on the sidewalk and was not concentrating on Deek’s words. The man on the sidewalk was dressed western, complete with brim-coned hat, the bones of his shoulders almost piercing his snap-button shirt. He was supervising the unloading of a heavy rectangular object wrapped with canvas. “Say that again?” Albert said.

  “They’re fixing to fry that poor sonofabitch across the hall,” Deek replied.

  The clouds above the vast swampland to the west were the color of scorched iron, pulsing with electricity. Albert could smell an odor like dead fish on the wind.

  “Some night for it, huh?” Deek said.

  Without explanation, the jailer put the inmates into lockdown an hour early. The heat and collective stink inside the tank were almost unbearable. Albert thought he heard a man weeping across the hall. At 8:00 p.m. the generators on the truck trailer began to hum, building in velocity and force until the sounds of the street, the juke joint on the corner, and even the electric storm bursting above the swamp were absorbed inside a grinding roar that made Albert press his palms against his ears.

  He would have sworn he saw lightning leap from the bars on the window, then the generators died and he could smell rain blowing through the window and hear a jukebox playing in a bar across the street from the jail.

  The next morning, the jailer ran a weapons search on the tank and also sprayed it for lice. The inmates from the tank were moved into the hall and the room in which the condemned man had died. The door to the perforated two-bunk iron box in which he had spent his last night on earth was open, the electric chair already loaded on the trailer truck down below. When Albert touched the concrete surface of the windowsill he thought he could feel the residue from the rubber-coated power cables that had been stretched through the bars. He also smelled an odor that was like food that had fallen from a skillet into a fire.

  Then he saw the man in the coned hat and western clothes emerge from a café across the street with a masculine-looking woman and two uniformed sheriff’s deputies. They were laughing—perhaps at a joke or an incident that had just happened in the café. The man in the coned hat turned his face up into the light and seemed to look directly at Albert. His face was thin, the skin netted with lines, his eyes as bright and small as a serpent’s.

  “You waving at free people?” a guard said. He was a lean, sun-browned man who had been a mounted gunbull at Angola before he had become a sheriff’s deputy and a guard at the parish prison. Even though the morning was still cool, his shirt was peppered with sweat, as though
his body heat created its own environment.

  “No, sir.”

  “So get away from the window.”

  “Yes, sir.” Then he asked the question that rose from his chest into his mouth before he could undo the impulse. “Was that fellow crying last night?”

  The guard lifted his chin, his mouth downturned at the corners. “It ain’t none of your business what he was doing.”

  Albert nodded and didn’t reply

  “Food cart’s inside now. Go eat your breakfast,” the guard said.

  “Don’t know if I can handle any more grits, boss. Why don’t you eat them for me?” Albert said.

  The guard tightened the tuck of his shirt with his thumb, his expression thoughtful, his shoulders as square as a drill instructor’s. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils. “Let’s take a walk down to the second floor, get you a little better accommodated,” he said. “Fine morning, don’t you think?”

  Albert never told anyone of what the guard did to him. But sometimes he smells the guard’s stink in his sleep, a combination of chewing tobacco and hair oil and testosterone and dried sweat that had been ironed with starch into the clothes. In the dream he also sees the upturned face of the executioner, his skin lit in the sunshine, his friends grinning at a joke they had brought with them from the café. Albert has always wanted to believe this emblematic moment in his life was regional in origin, born out of ignorance and fear and redneck cruelty, perhaps one even precipitated by his own recklessness, but he knows otherwise.

  Albert has learned that certain injuries go deep into the soul, like a stone bruise, and that time does not eradicate them. He knows that the simian creature that lived in the guard and the executioner took root many years ago in his own breast. He knows that, under the right circumstances, Albert Hollister is capable of deeds no one would associate with the professor who taught creative writing at the university and whose presence at faculty meetings was so innocuous it was not even remembered.