No draconian sword fell into the life of Clay Mason, either. He was expelled from Mexico and his property seized, but in a short while he was visiting college campuses again, being interviewed on the Internet, selling his shuck on TV. A patron of the arts bought him a home in the hills outside Santa Fe, where his proselytes and fellow revelers from the 1960s gathered and a famous New York photographer caught him out on the terrace, his face as craggy and ageless as the blue ring of mountains behind him, a sweat-banded Stetson crimped on his head, his pixie eyes looking directly into the camera. The cutline under the photo read, “A Lion in Winter.”
But I think I’ve learned not to grieve on the world’s ways, at least not when spring is at hand.
It rained hard the third week in March, then the sky broke clear and one morning the new season was upon us and the swamp was green again, the new leaves on the flooded stands of trees rippling in the breeze off the Gulf, the trunks of the cypress painted with lichen.
Alafair and I rode her Appaloosa bareback down the road, like two wooden clothespins mounted on its spine, and put up a kite in the wind. The kite was a big one, the paper emblazoned with an American flag, and it rose quickly into the sky, higher and higher, until it was only a distant speck above the sugarcane fields to the north.
In my mind’s eye I saw the LaRose plantation from the height of Alafair’s kite, the rolling hardwoods and the squared fields where Confederate and federal cavalry had charged and killed one another and left their horses screaming and disemboweled among the cane stubble, and I wondered what Darwinian moment had to effect itself before we devolved from children flying paper flags in the sky to half-formed creatures thundering in a wail of horns down the road to Roncevaux.
That night we ate crawfish at Possum’s in St. Martinville and went by the old church in the center of town and walked under the Evangeline Oaks next to the Teche where I first kissed Bootsie in the summer of 1957 and actually felt the tree limbs spin over my head. Alafair was out on the dock behind the church, dropping pieces of bread in a column of electric light onto the water’s surface. Bootsie slipped her arm around my waist and bumped me with her hip.
“What are you thinking about, slick?” she said.
“You can’t ever tell,” I said.
That night she and I ate a piece of pecan pie on the picnic table in the backyard, then, like reaching your hand into the past, like giving yourself over to the world of play and nonreason that takes you outside of time, I punched on Alafair’s stereo player that contained the taped recording of all the records on Jerry Joe’s jukebox.
We danced to “Jolie Blon” and “Tes Yeux Bleu,” then kicked it up into overdrive with “Bony Maronie,” “Long Tall Sally,” and “Short Fat Fanny.” Out in the darkness, beyond the glow of the flood lamp in the mimosa tree, my neighbor’s cattle were bunching in the coulee as an electric storm veined the sky with lightning in the south. The air was suddenly cool and thick with the sulfurous smell of ozone, the wind blowing dust out of the new cane, the wisteria on our garage flattening against the board walls while shadows and protean shapes formed and reformed themselves, like Greek players on an outdoor stage beckoning to us, luring us from pastoral chores into an amphitheater by the sea, where we would witness once again the unfinished story of ourselves.
BY JAMES LEE BURKE
DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS
The Glass Rainbow
Swan Peak
Tin Roof Blowdown
Pegasus Descending
Crusader’s Cross
Last Car to Elysian Fields
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
Purple Cane Road
Sunset Limited
Cadillac Jukebox
Burning Angel
Dixie City Jam
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
A Stained White Radiance
A Morning for Flamingos
Black Cherry Blues
Heaven’s Prisoners
The Neon Rain
BILLY BOB AND HACKBERRY HOLLAND NOVELS
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Bitterroot
Heartwood
Cimarron Rose
Lay Down My Sword and Shi
Rain Gods
OTHER FICTION
Jesus Out to Sea
White Doves at Morning
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict and Other Stories
Two for Texas
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Half of Paradise
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 James Lee Burke
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First Pocket Books ebook edition May 2015
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ISBN 978-1-5011-2213-2 (ebook)
Cadillac Jukebox Page 31
