Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

  Nick opened the screen door and stepped outside. “Wow! You got it back. You slam ole Vernon upside the head with a brick or something?” he said.

  “It’s ruined,” I replied.

  Nick placed his hand on the bottom side of the cloth. The pinkness of his palm showed through the separations in the thread. “What are we gonna do?” he said.

  My father had taught me not only how to care for the flag but also how to dispose of it if it was soiled or damaged. That night, Nick and I conducted a private ceremony under our tree house. We built a fire of grass and decayed oak limbs, and spread our stained flag on top of the flames. We stood at attention like toy soldiers and saluted the thick curds of smoke and black threads of cloth that rose out of the heat, some of them sparking like fireflies among the oaks where people were still eating watermelon. Someone called the fire department, and the owner of the watermelon stand told us he would have our tree house torn down. Almost simultaneously Mr. Dunlop and his sons showed up, enraged that I had stolen and destroyed their flag.

  It was a year of Allied naval victories in the Pacific, rationing about which no one complained, and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller on the jukebox. It was the year in which a group of good-natured firemen and the Dunlop family and the patrons of a watermelon stand stood in a circle around two small boys, like creatures whose exteriors were made of tallow, warping in the firelight, exposing for good or bad the child that lives in us all.

  It was 1943, the year my father died in a duck-hunting accident down at Anahuac and the year Nick Hauser and I beat the world and never told anybody about it.

  Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine

  In 1947, Nick Hauser and I had only two loves in this world—baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests. That’s how we met Benny, one spring night after a double-header out at Buffalo Stadium on the Galveston Freeway. His brand-new Ford convertible, a gleaming maroon job with a starch-white top, whitewall tires, and blue-dot taillights, was stuck in a sodden field behind the bleachers. Benny was trying to lift the bumper while his girlfriend floored the accelerator, spinning the tires and blowing streams of muddy water and torn grass back in his face.

  He wore a checkered sport coat, lavender shirt, hand-painted necktie, and two-tone shoes, all of it now whip-sawed with mud. But it was his eyes, not his clothes, that you remembered. They were a radiant blue and literally sparkled.

  “You punks want to earn two bucks each?” he said.

  “Who you calling a punk?” Nick said.

  Before Benny could answer, his girlfriend shifted into reverse, caught traction, and backed over his foot.

  He hopped up and down, holding one shin, trying to bite down on his pain, his eyes lifted heavenward, his lips moving silently.

  “Get in the fucking car before it sinks in this slop again!” his girlfriend yelled.

  He limped to the passenger side. A moment later they fishtailed across the grass past us. Her hair was long, blowing out the window, the pinkish-red of a flamingo. She thumbed a hot cigarette into the darkness.

  “Boy, did you check out that babe’s bongos? Wow!” Nick said.

  But our evening encounter with Benny and his girlfriend was not over. We were on the shoulder of the freeway, trying to hitch a ride downtown, flicking our Cheerios under a streetlamp, doing a whole range of upper-level yo-yo tricks—round-the-world, shoot-the-moon, rock-the-cradle, and the atomic bomb—when the maroon convertible roared past us, blowing dust and newspaper in our faces.

  Suddenly the convertible cut across two lanes of traffic, made a U-turn, then a second U-turn, horns blowing all over the freeway, and braked to a stop abreast of us.

  “You know who I am?” Benny said.

  “No,” I replied.

  “My name is Benjamin Siegel.”

  “You’re a gangster,” Nick said.

  “He’s got you, Benny,” the woman behind the wheel said.

  “How you know that?” Benny said.

  “We heard your name on Gangbusters. Nick and me listen every Saturday night,” I said.

  “Can you do the Chinese star?” he asked.

  “We do Chinese stars in our sleep,” Nick said.

  “Get in,” Benny said, pulling back the leather seat.

  “We got to get home,” I said.

  “We’ll take you there. Get in,” he said.

  We drove out South Main, past Rice University and parklike vistas dense with live oak trees, some of them hung with Spanish moss. In the south, heat lightning flickered over the Gulf of Mexico. Benny bought us fried chicken and ice cream at Bill Williams Drive-In, and while we ate, his girlfriend smoked cigarettes behind the wheel and listened to the radio, her thoughts known only to herself, her face so soft and lovely in the dash light I felt something drop inside me when I stole a look at it.

  Benny popped open the glove box and removed a top of-the-line chartreuse Cheerio yo-yo. Behind the yo-yo I could see the steel surfaces of a semiautomatic pistol. “Now show me the Chinese star,” he said.

  He stood with us in the middle of the drive-in parking lot, watching Nick and me demonstrate the intricate patterns of the most difficult of all the Cheerio competition tricks. Then he tried it himself. His yo-yo tilted sideways, its inner surfaces brushing against the string, then twisted on itself and went dead.

  “The key is candle wax,” I said.

  “Candle wax?” he said.

  “Yeah, you wrap the string around a candle and saw it back and forth. That gives you the spin and the time you need to make the pattern for the star,” I said.

  “I never thought of that,” he said.

  “It’s a breeze,” Nick said.

  “Benny, give it a rest,” his girlfriend said from inside the car.

  Fifteen minutes later, we dropped off Nick at his house on the dead-end street where I used to be his neighbor. It was a wonderful street, one of trees and flowers and old brick homes, and a horse pasture dotted with live oaks beyond the canebrake that enclosed the cul-du-sac. But when my father died, my mother and I were evicted, and we moved across Westheimer and took up residence in a neighborhood where every sunrise broke on the horizon like a testimony to personal failure.

  Benny’s girlfriend pulled to a stop in front of my house. Benny looked at the broken porch and the orange rust on the screens. “This is where you live?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, my eyes leaving his.

  He nodded. “You need to study hard, make something of yourself. Go out to California, maybe. It’s the place to be,” he said.

  Our next-door neighbors were the Dunlops. They had skin like pig hide and heads with the knobbed ridges of coconuts. The oldest of the five boys was executed in Huntsville Pen; one did time on Sugarland Farm.

  The patriarch of the family was a security guard at the Southern Pacific train yards. He covered all the exterior surfaces of his house, garage, and toolshed with the yellow paint he stole from his employer. The Dunlops even painted their car with it. Then through a fluke no one could have anticipated, they became rich.

  One of the girls had married a morphine addict who came from an oil family in River Oaks. The girl and her husband drove their Austin Healey head-on into a bus outside San Antonio, and the Dunlops inherited two hundred thousand dollars and a huge chunk of rental property in their own neighborhood. It was like giving a tribe of Pygmies a nuclear weapon.

  I thought the Dunlops would move out of their dilapidated two-story frame house, with its piles of dog shit all over the backyard, but instead they bought a used Cadillac from a mortuary, covered their front porch with glitter-encrusted chalk animals and icons from an amusement park, and each morning continued to piss out the attic window on my mother’s car, which looked like it had contracted scabies.

  As newly empowered landlords, the Dunlops cut no one any slack, did no repairs on their properties, and evicted a Mexican family that had lived in the neighborhood since the mid-Depression. Mr. Dunlop also seized upon an opportunity to repay the paroch
ial school Nick and I attended for expelling two of his sons.

  Maybe it was due to the emotional deprivation and the severity of the strictures imposed upon them, or the black habits they wore in ninety-degree humidity, but a significant number of the nuns at school were inept and cruel. Sister Felicie, however, was not one of these. She was tall, and wore steel-rimmed glasses and small black shoes that didn’t seem adequate to support her height. When I spent almost a year in bed with rheumatic fever, she came every other day to the house with my lessons, walking a mile, sometimes in the hottest of weather, her habit powdered with ash from a burned field she had to cross.

  But things went south for Sister Felicie. We heard that her father, a senior army officer, was killed at Okinawa. Others said the soldier was not her father but the fiancé she had given up when she entered the convent. Regardless, at the close of the war a great sadness seemed to descend upon her.

  In the spring of ’47, she would take her science class on a walk through the neighborhood, identifying trees, plants, and flowers along the way. Then, just before 3:00 p.m., we would end up at Costen’s Drugstore, and she would let everyone take a rest break on the benches under the awning. It was a grand way to end the school day, because on some afternoons the Cheerio yo-yo man would arrive at exactly 3:05 and hold competitions on the corner.

  But one day, just after the dismissal bell had rung across the street, I saw Sister Felicie walk into the alleyway between the drugstore and Cobb’s Liquors and give money to a black man who had an empty eye socket. A few minutes later I saw her upend a small bottle of fortified wine, what hobos used to call short-dogs, then drop it surreptitiously into a trash can.

  She turned and realized I had been watching her. She walked toward me, between the old brick walls of the buildings, her small shoes clicking on pieces of gravel and bottle caps and broken glass, her face stippled with color inside her wimple. “Why aren’t you waxing your string for the Cheerio contest?” she said.

  “It hasn’t started yet, Sister,” I replied, avoiding her look, trying to smile.

  “Better run on now,” she said.

  “Are you all right, Sister?” I said, then wanted to bite off my tongue.

  “Of course I’m all right. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. None. I just don’t think too good sometimes, Sister. You know me. I was just—”

  But she wasn’t listening now. She walked past me toward the red light at the corner, her habit and beads swishing against my arm. She smelled like camphor and booze and the lichen in the alley she had bruised under her small shoes.

  Two days later, the same ritual repeated itself. Except this time Sister Felicie didn’t empty just one short-dog and head for the convent. I saw her send the black man back to Cobb’s for two more bottles, then she sat down on a rusted metal chair at the back of the alley, a book spread on her knees, as though she were reading, the bottles on the ground barely hidden by the hem of her habit.

  That’s when Mr. Dunlop and his son Vernon showed up. Vernon was seventeen and by law could not be made to attend school. That fact was a gift from God to the educational system of southwest Houston. Vernon had half-moon scars on his knuckles, biceps the size of small muskmelons, and deep-set simian eyes that focused on other kids with the moral sympathies of an electric drill.

  Mr. Dunlop was thoroughly enjoying himself. First, he announced to everyone within earshot he was the owner of the entire corner, including the drugstore. He told the Cheerio yo-yo man to beat it and not come back, then told the kids to either buy something inside the store or get off the benches they were loitering on.

  His face lit like a jack-o’-lantern’s when he saw Sister Felicie emerge from the alley. She was trying to stand straight, and not doing a very good job of it, one hand touching the brick wall of the drugstore, a drop of sweat running from the top edge of her wimple down the side of her nose.

  “Looks like you got a little bit of the grog in you, Sister,” Mr. Dunlop said.

  “What were you saying to the children?” she asked.

  “Oh, her ladyship wants to know that, does she? Why don’t we have a conference with the pastor and hash it out?” Mr. Dunlop said.

  “Do as you wish,” Sister replied, then walked to the red light with the cautious steps of someone aboard a pitching ship.

  Mr. Dunlop dropped a Buffalo nickel into a pay phone, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His head was shaved bald, his brow knurled, one eye recessed and glistening with pleasure when someone picked up on the other end. “Father?” Mr. Dunlop said.

  His son Vernon squeezed his scrotum and shot us the bone.

  The Cheerio yo-yo man did not come back to the corner and Sister Felicie disappeared from school for a week. Then one Monday morning she was back in class, looking joyless and glazed, as though she had just walked out of an ice storm.

  That afternoon, Benny and his girlfriend pulled into my driveway while I was picking up the trash Vernon and his brothers had thrown out of their attic window into the yard. “I can’t get the atomic bomb right. Get in the car. We’ll pick up your friend on the way out,” he said.

  “Way where?” I said.

  “The Shamrock. You want to go swimming and have some eats, don’t you?” he said.

  “I’ll leave my mom a note,” I said.

  “Tell her to come out and join us.”

  That definitely will not flush, I thought, but did not say it.

  Benny had said he couldn’t pull off the yo-yo trick called the atomic bomb. The truth was he couldn’t even master walk-the-dog. In fact, I couldn’t figure why a man with his wealth and criminal reputation would involve himself so intensely with children’s games. After Nick and I went swimming, we sat on the balcony of Benny’s suite, high above the clover-shaped pool of the Shamrock Hotel, and tried to show him the configurations of the atomic bomb. It was a disaster. He would spread the string between his fingers, then drop the yo-yo through the wrong spaces, knotting the string, rendering it useless. He danced up and down on the balls of his feet in frustration.

  “There’s something wrong with this yo-yo. I’m gonna go back to the guy who sold it to me and stuff it down his throat,” he said.

  “He’s full of shit, kids,” his girlfriend said through the open bathroom door.

  “Don’t listen to that. You’re looking at the guy who almost blew up Mussolini,” he said to us. Then he yelled through the French doors into the suite, “Tell me I’m full of shit one more time.”

  “You’re full of shit,” she yelled back.

  “That’s what you got to put up with,” he said to us. “Now, teach me the atomic bomb.”

  Blue-black clouds were piled from the horizon all the way to the top of the sky, blooming with trees of lightning that made no sound. Across the street, we could see oil rigs pumping in an emerald-green pasture and a half-dozen horses starting to spook at the weather. Benny’s girlfriend came out of the bathroom, dressed in new jeans and a black and maroon cowboy shirt with a silver stallion on the pocket. She drank from a vodka collins, and her mouth looked cold and hard and beautiful when she lowered the glass.

  “Anybody hungry?” she said.

  I felt myself swallow. Then, for reasons I didn’t understand, I told her and Benny what Mr. Dunlop had done to Sister Felicie. Benny listened attentively, his handsome face clouding, his fingers splaying his knotted yo-yo string in different directions. “Say all that again? This guy Dunlop ran off the Cheerio man?” he said.

  It was almost Easter, and at school that meant the Stations of the Cross and a daily catechism reminder about the nature of disloyalty and human failure. When he needed them most, Christ’s men bagged it down the road and let him take the weight on his own. I came to appreciate the meaning of betrayal a little better that spring.

  I thought my account of Mr. Dunlop’s abuse of Sister Felicie and the Cheerio man had made Benny our ally. He’d said he would come by my house the next night and straighten out Mr. Dunl
op and anyone else who was pushing around kids and nuns and yo-yo instructors. He said these kinds of guys were Nazis and should be boiled into lard and poured into soap molds. He said, “Don’t worry, kid. I owe you guys. You taught me the atomic bomb and the Chinese star.”

  The next day, after school, when I was raking leaves in the yard, Vernon used his slingshot to shoot me in the back with a marble. I felt the pain go into the bone like a cold chisel.

  “Got a crick?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said mindlessly, squeezing my shoulders back, my eyes shut.

  “How about some hair of the dog that bit you?” he said, fishing another marble out of his shirt pocket.

  “You screwed with Benny Siegel, Vernon. He’s going to stuff you in a toilet bowl,” I said.

  “Yeah? Who is Benny Sea Gull?”

  “Ask your old man. Oh, I forgot. He can’t read, either.”

  Vernon’s fist came out of the sky and knocked me to the ground. I felt my breath go out of my chest as though it were being sucked into a giant vacuum cleaner. Through the kitchen window, I could see my mother washing dishes, her face bent down toward the sink. Vernon unbuckled my belt, worked the top button loose on my jeans, and pulled them off my legs, dragging me through the dust. The clouds, trees, garage, alleyway, even the dog dumps spun in circles around me. Vernon pulled one of my pants legs inside out and used it to blow his nose.

  Benny and his girlfriend did not show up at my house that night. I called the Shamrock Hotel and asked for his room.

  “There’s no one registered here by that name,” the clerk said.

  “Has he checked out?”

  There was a pause. “We have no record of a guest with that name. I’m sorry. Thank you for calling the Shamrock,” the clerk said, and hung up.