Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

“Sure. You want to ask Nick?” he said.

  “I don’t hang around with Nick anymore,” I replied.

  “You boys have a fight?”

  “No,” I replied. Then I felt my mouth flex, waiting for the words to come out that would explain how I let Vernon rub his spit on me and call me Frump, how I gave him half my money just so he would climb off my chest, how I could still feel his scrotum and buttocks pressing against my body.

  But I crimped my lips and looked at the cars passing on the street, gas ration stickers glued to their front windows. The light on the trees and lawns and cars seemed to shimmer and break apart.

  “You all right, son? You having trouble with the other kids on the block or something?” my father said.

  “There’s a new kid on the next street from Chicago. He thinks he’s better than everybody else. Why doesn’t he go back where he came from?” I said.

  “Hey, hey,” my father said, patting me on the back. “Don’t talk about a chum like that. He can’t help where he’s from. No more of that now, okay?”

  “Are we going fishing?”

  “We’ll see. Your mother has a bunch of things for me to do. Let’s take one thing at a time here,” my father said.

  My parents had a fight that night and my father and I did not go to Galveston in the morning. In fact, I didn’t know where my father went. He was gone for two days, then he came home, unpacked his suitcase, read the newspaper on the front porch, and walked down to the icehouse.

  I started to have trouble at school that fall. I had thought of myself as a favorite of the nuns, but on my first six-week report card for the term, the gold stars I had previously received for “attitude” and “conduct” were replaced by green and red ones. To combat wartime scarcity of paper, Sister Agnes examined the Big Chief notebooks of everyone in class. Those who wasted any paper at all were classified as “Germans.” Those who wasted egregiously were classified as “Japs.” I was designated a Jap.

  Later that same day I pushed the boy from Chicago down on the ground and called him a Yankee and a yellowbelly.

  In January, the weather turned cold, streaked with rain and smoke from trash fires. The kids in the neighborhood constructed forts from discarded Christmas trees in the pasture at the end of the block, stacking them in front of pits they had dug to make mud balls that they launched with elaborate slingshots they had fashioned from bicycle inner tubes.

  But I took no part in the fun. I read the Hardy Boys series I checked out from the bookmobile and listened to Terry and the Pirates, Captain Midnight, and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy in the afternoons. Then my mother brought home a box of Wheaties that contained a picture of a Flying Fortress, and a coupon, which, when filled out and returned to the cereal company, would entitle the sender to have his name placed on a scroll inside the fuselage of a United States Air Corps bomber.

  My father saw me printing my name on the coupon at the dining-room table. “You sending off for another decoder badge?” he asked.

  I explained how my name would be inside a plane that was bombing the Nazis and the Japanese off the map.

  “Not a good idea, Charlie. Where’d you get that?” he said.

  “Mom brought it home.”

  “I see,” he said. He cracked open a beer in the kitchen and sat down at the table. His package of Lucky Strike cigarettes had a red dot on it with a green circle around the dot.

  “Innocent people are dying under those bombs, Charlie. It’s not a game,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was,” I replied.

  He caught the resentment in my tone and looked at me strangely. “Saw the Christmas-tree forts you boys were building,” he said.

  “Nick and the others are doing that.”

  “What’s going on, son?”

  “They don’t like me.”

  “I don’t believe that. Tell you what. Does Nick have a flag for his fort?”

  “Flag?”

  My father rubbed the top of my head and winked.

  Saturday morning he and I walked down to the end of the block and cut through the canebrake into the pasture. It was a fine morning, crisp and sunny, the live oaks by Westheimer puffing with wind. Kids were hunkered down behind their barricades of stacked Christmas trees, lobbing mud balls at one another, a star-spangled kite that a kid had tied to one fort popping against a cloudless blue sky.

  The exchange of mud balls stopped when the kids saw my father. Nick came out from behind his fort and looked at us, his faded clothes daubed with dirt, his face hot from play.

  “Got room for one more?” my father asked.

  “Sure, Mr. Rourke,” Nick replied. His eyes didn’t meet my father’s, and for the first time I realized Nick had been injured by Vernon Dunlop in ways I had not understood.

  “Do you fellows want to fly this over your fort?” my father asked, unfurling our flag from its staff.

  “That’d be great,” Nick said.

  “But you’ve got to take care of it. Don’t let it get stained or dirty. Make sure you take it inside when you’re done,” my father said.

  While my father walked back home, Nick and I raised the flag on our ramparts, loaded our slingshots with hard-packed mud balls, and opened fire on the enemy. For just a moment, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Vernon Dunlop watching us from the grove of oak trees, his muscular thighs forked across the frame of his bicycle.

  Nick’s father was a decent, religious, blue-collar man who built a clubhouse for us in one of the live oak trees on Westheimer and sometimes walked us to the Alabama Theater on Friday nights. The family did not own a car and Nick’s father rode the city bus to his job as a supervisor at a laundry on the north side of downtown. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer as a teenager in Mobile, and he owned a set of sixteen-ounce boxing gloves that he used in teaching Nick and the other kids to box. But he was a strict disciplinarian and admonished his children to never bring home a mark on their bodies that God didn’t put there. When he took out his razor strop, Nick’s scalp would literally recede on his head, as though it had been exposed to a naked flame.

  At the end of the first afternoon we had flown the flag at the fort, Nick rolled the flag on its staff and handed it to me.

  “My dad wants you to keep it at your house,” I said.

  “Is your dad mad at me?” Nick asked. His dark hair was buzz-cut, his skin still brown from summer, his face round, his cheeks pooled with color. There were dirt rings on his neck, and I could smell the heat and dampness in his clothes from playing all day.

  “Why would my dad be mad at you?”

  “I didn’t help you when Vernon rubbed his spit on you.”

  I felt my eyes film at the image he had used. “I didn’t tell my dad anything,” I said.

  “When I get bigger, I’m gonna break Vernon’s nose. He’s not so tough with big guys,” he said.

  But Vernon was tough with big guys. We found that out the next week when Nick and I started our first afternoon paper route together. The paper corner where the bundles were dropped for the carriers was across Westheimer. Not only was it a block from Vernon’s house, it was the same corner where Vernon and his brothers rolled the papers for their route. I couldn’t believe our bad luck. We sat on the pavement, our legs splayed, rolling our papers into cylinders, whipping mouth-wet string around them to cinch them tight, while Vernon did the same three feet from us.

  A jalopy packed with north side kids, the top cut away with an acetylene torch, ran the stop sign, all of them shooting the bone at everyone on the corner. They parked by the drugstore and went inside, lighting cigarettes, running combs through their ducktails, squeezing their scrotums. Vernon got on his bicycle, one with no tire guards and a wood rack for his canvas saddlebags, and rode down to the drugstore. He calmly parked his bike on its kickstand, flicked opened his switchblade, and sliced off the valve stems on all four of the jalopy’s tires.

  Ten minutes later, when the jalopy’s occupants came out of the drugstore
, Vernon was back on the corner, rolling his papers. They stared at their tires, unable to believe what they were seeing. So they would make no mistake about who had done the damage to them, Vernon stood up, shot them the bone with both hands, followed by the Italian salute and the eat-shit horns of the cuckold sign. Then he bent over and mooned them and shot them the bone again, this time between his legs.

  He took a tire iron from his saddlebags and clanked it on a fireplug until the northsiders got back in their jalopy and drove it on the rims out of the neighborhood.

  For a moment I almost felt Vernon was our ally. He disabused us of that notion by hanging Nick’s bicycle on a telephone spike fifteen feet above the street.

  That spring, Nick and I collected old newspapers, coat hangers, tinfoil, and discarded rubber tires for the war effort, and hauled them down to the collection center at the fire station. We used baling wire to attach the staff of our flag to the wooden slats on the side of Nick’s wagon and worked our way up and down alleys throughout the neighborhood, the wagon creaking under the load of junk stacked inside it, confident that in some fashion we were fighting the forces of evil that had bombed Pearl Harbor, Warsaw, and Coventry.

  At the outset of the war, families in our neighborhood had hung small service flags in their windows—blue stars on a white field, inside a rectangle of blue and red—indicating the number of men and women from that home who had gone to war. Now, in the spring of ’43, some of the blue stars had been replaced by gold ones.

  The Sweeney boy from across the street parachuted into Europe and eventually would be one of the soldiers who captured Hitler’s fortified chalet at Berchtesgaden. My cousin Weldon gave up his ROTC deferment at Texas A&M and came home with the Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, and one lung. Nick and I began to collect meat drippings from people’s kitchens and take them to the local butcher, who supposedly shipped them in large barrels to a munitions factory where they were made into nitroglycerine. Everyone in the neighborhood knew us by the flag on our wagon. My father’s friends at the icehouse bought us cold drinks. Nick and I glowed with pride.

  “Y’all think your shit don’t stink?” Vernon said to us one day on the paper corner.

  Nick and I buried our faces in our work, rolling the top newspapers on the stack, whipping string around them, pitching them heavily into the saddlebags on our bikes. Vernon grabbed my wrist, stopping me in mid-roll. “Which one are you—Frump or Snarf?” he asked.

  “I’m Frump,” I said.

  “Then answer my question, Frump.”

  “My shit stinks, Vernon,” I said.

  “You a wiseass?” Vernon said.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone?” Nick said.

  “What’d you say?” Vernon asked.

  The only sounds on the corner were the wind in the trees and a milk truck rattling down the street.

  “Your brothers went to the pen. That’s why they’re not in the army. Charlie’s cousin won the Silver Star. I heard your sister dosed the yardman,” Nick said.

  I could hear the words no, no, no like a drumbeat in my head.

  “Tell me, Snarf, did you know Hauser is a Kraut name?” Vernon said.

  “My dad says it’s a lot better than being white trash,” Nick said.

  Vernon lit a cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully, then flicked the hot match into Nick’s eye.

  After we threw the route, I put my bike away in the garage and walked unexpectedly through the back door of the house, into the kitchen, where my mother and father were fighting. They both looked at me blankly, like people in whose faces a flashbulb had just popped.

  “Why y’all got to fight all the time?” I said.

  “You mustn’t talk like that. We were just having a discussion,” my mother said. There was baking flour on her hands and arms and a smudge of it on her cheek.

  I went back outside and threw rocks into the canebrake at the end of the street, and did not go home for supper. At sunset, Nick and I sat in the tree house we had built on the edge of Westheimer and watched the electric lights come on in the oak grove where the watermelon stand was. Vernon’s father, with two of his older sons, crossed the street and sat down at one of the tables, a cigar between his fingers, his bald head faintly iridescent, like an alabaster bowling ball. The smoke from his cigar drifted onto another table, causing a family to move. His sons cut in line by pretending they were with a friend, and brought chunks of melon, as red as freshly sliced meat, back to the table. The three of them began eating, spitting their seeds into the grass.

  “I hope the Dunlops go to hell,” I said.

  “Sister Agnes says that’s a mortal sin,” Nick replied. Then he grinned. The burn on his face looked like a tiny yellow bug under his eye. “Maybe they’ll just go to purgatory and never get out.”

  “You stood up for me and I didn’t try to help you,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t have done any good. Vernon can whip both of us.”

  “You were brave. You’re a lot braver than me,” I said.

  “Who cares about Vernon Dunlop? I got a dime. Let’s get a cold drink at the filling station,” Nick said.

  Through the slats of the tree house I could see the Dunlops slurping down their watermelon. “I don’t feel too good. I don’t feel good about anything,” I said.

  “Don’t be like that, Charlie. We’ll always be pals,” Nick said.

  I climbed down the tree trunk and dropped into the tannic smell of leaves that had turned black with the spring rains and that broke with a wet, snapping sound under my feet. Out in the darkness I heard horses blowing and I could see lightning flicker like veins of quicksilver in a bank of storm heads over the Gulf of Mexico. But the nocturnal softness of the season had no influence on my heart and a few minutes later I knew that was the way things would go from there on out. When I got home, my father was gone. That night I slept with my pillow crimped down tightly on my head.

  Early Saturday morning, Nick knocked on my screen window. He was barefoot and wore short pants, and his face looked unwashed and full of sleep.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “The flag. It’s gone,” he replied.

  “Gone?”

  “I left it on the wagon. I forgot to take it in last night,” he said.

  We stared through the screen into each other’s faces. “Vernon?” I said.

  “Who else?” Nick replied.

  I spent the entire day locked inside my own head, my throat constricted with fear at the prospect of confronting Vernon Dunlop. My father had not returned home and I went to the icehouse to see if I could find him. His friends were kindly toward me, and when they sat me down and bought me a cold drink and a hot dog, I knew they possessed knowledge about my life that I didn’t.

  I tried to convince myself that someone other than Vernon had stolen the flag. Maybe it had been one of the colored yardmen who worked in the neighborhood, or the Cantonese kids whose parents ran a small grocery up on Westheimer. Maybe I had been unfair to Vernon. Why blame him for every misdeed in the neighborhood?

  At dusk I rode my bike down his street, my heart in my throat, as though at any moment he would burst from the quiet confines of his frame house, one that was painted the same shade of yellow as the buildings in the Southern Pacific freight yards. A dead pecan tree stood in the front yard, the rotted gray ropes of a swing with no seat lifting in the breeze. Inside the house someone was listening to Gangbusters, police sirens and staccato bursts of machine-gun fire erupting behind the announcer’s voice. But no American flag flew from the Dunlops’ house.

  I made a turn at the end of block and headed back home on a street parallel to Vernon’s, temporarily triumphant over my fears. Then, through a space between two dilapidated garages, I saw our flag and staff nailed at a forty-five-degree angle to a post on the Dunlops’ back porch.

  I pedaled straight ahead, my eyes fixed on the intersection, my face stinging as though it had been slapped. I wanted to find Nick or go look for my fath
er again, or to get hit by a car or do anything that would remove me from what I knew I had to do next. The sun was a molten ball now, buried inside a strip of purple cloud, the sky freckled with birds. I turned my bike around and rode back down the alleyway to the Dunlops’ house, through lines of garbage cans, my heart hammering in my ears.

  Then a peculiar event happened inside me. Like the stories I had heard on the radio of a soldier going over a parapet into Japanese machine-gun fire or an aviator with no parachute leaping from his burning plane, I surrendered myself to my fate and crossed the Dunlops’ yard to their back porch. With my hands shaking, I pried the flagstaff from the wood post, the nail wrenching free as loudly as a rusted hinge, and walked quickly between the Dunlops’ garage and the neighbor’s to my bicycle, rolling the flag on its staff, confident I had rescued the flag intact.

  I stuffed it in one of my saddlebags and kicked my bike stand back into place. Just as I did, I saw Mr. Dunlop shove Vernon from the back door of the house into the yard. Mr. Dunlop wore a strap undershirt and blue serge pants, and he had a dog chain doubled around his fist. He whipped his son with it four times across the back, then threw him to the ground.

  “You stole money out of a nigger’s house? Don’t lie or I’ll take the hide off you for real,” Mr. Dunlop said.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Vernon replied, weeping, his face powdered with dust.

  I thought his father was going to hit Vernon again, but he didn’t. “Folks is gonna say we’re so hard up you got to steal from niggers. What we gonna do with you, son?” he said.

  Then he sat down on the step and stroked Vernon’s head as though he were petting a dog. “What are you looking at?” he said to me.

  I crossed Westheimer and pushed my bike through the oak grove by the watermelon stand and followed the path through the canebrake to Nick’s house. I knocked on the door, then unfurled the flag as I waited. My heart dropped when I saw the streaks of grease and dirt and pinlike separations across one side of the cloth, printed there, I suspected, by the chain or spokes of Vernon’s bicycle. But he had hung it from his porch anyway, like a scalp rather than the symbol of his country.