Half of Paradise

by James Lee Burke

  He remembered his last year in high school when his father was alive and he had gone out with a girl named Suzanne, and they were always together and they talked about getting married. Her skin was very white and her hair hung to her shoulders like black silk, and at eighteen she looked like a mature woman. There was that Saturday they went fishing together in his boat and he rowed down the bayou with the oaks and cypress and willows on each side, and she sat forward in the bow and her eyes were dark and happy and she lifted the hair from her neck to let the breeze blow on her, and he put into the bank and got out and dragged the boat through the shallows, and he didn’t have to ask or even say anything because she already understood. And for the rest of the spring it was the same. On Saturday morning he would meet her at the levee and they would row to the same place on the green bank among the azaleas and jasmine, and later they would drink wine and fish and he would row her back in the afternoon.

  They graduated from high school and he began to drink more, and there was the weekend they drove to Biloxi in the sports car her father had given her for graduation, and Avery left her in the hotel room to get a package of cigarettes and came back three hours later blind drunk, and she lay in bed with her eyes wet and her hair spread out on the pillow and she turned away from him when he tried to touch her; he left the room and bought a bottle at the bar and went down on the beach and passed out. He woke in the morning with a bad hangover and his clothes and hair were full of sand, and the sun was hot and the white façade of the hotel gleamed in the light. He went to the room, but there was nothing to say or do because when he told her he was sorry it sounded meaningless. She was very hurt and she tried not to show it, and that made him all the more angry and ashamed. So they drove back home not talking, and things were never the same after that. The summer became fall, and she went to school at the state university and he took a job on a shooting crew. She wrote him a few letters during the time she was at L.S.U., and then she went to Spain to study painting and he never heard from her again. It had ended undramatic and unpoetic and unanything, and he wondered why he should think of her now. He had been in prison only for a short time, but everything that had existed before seemed to belong to another world and she with it. The Saturdays that they had together and the things they did were no longer real, nothing was real except the wet clothes and the rain and the mud and the cold in his feet and Daddy Claxton’s coughing and Rainack sitting in the back of the truck in his uniform and slicker with the holster strapped around his waist and the .45 revolver that meant he could crack the barrel across your head if you tried to get out of the rain, and two men somewhere off in the woods running for freedom with an armed search party behind them.

  “I got to take a leak,” Claxton said.

  “Go ahead,” Rainack said.

  “Can’t I go off in the brush?”

  “I got to keep watch on all of you.”

  Claxton looked embarrassed.

  “I ain’t going to run off nowheres,” he said.

  “Act your age. We ain’t going to look at you,” Rainack said.

  “It’ll just take a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  Finally he turned to the side and urinated on the ground. He buttoned his trousers and stared at the irrigation ditch, not wanting to look at anyone.

  “How’s it feel to be a bastard?” LeBlanc said.

  “You ain’t getting a rise out of me,” Rainack said. “Your time is coming when Evans gets back.”

  “If Evans owes you any money you better get it from him while you can,” LeBlanc said.

  “You’re talk, LeBlanc. Guys like you shoot off their mouth. They never do nothing.”

  “Wait around a while.”

  “Evans will be alive to piss on your grave,” Rainack said.

  “Maybe you ought to pay up your debts too.”

  “I should have killed you out in the ditch and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

  The sound of rifle shots came from the woods. They were distant and faintly audible through the rain. There was a single report followed by two more, and then someone was firing in rapid succession. A minute passed and it was quiet except for the even patter of the rain. Rainack got out of the truck with his hand on his revolver and looked at the trees. The front of his khaki clothes, where his slicker was open, was drenched through. Gang five waited and listened. There was a final whaaap of a rifle and almost immediately after a burst from a shotgun and then silence again. A few minutes went by and the woods remained quiet.

  “That’s the end of your pals,” Rainack said. He got back in the truck and shut one door to keep out the rain. He wiped the water off his face with his handkerchief.

  “Them shots was too close,” Daddy Claxton said.

  “They’ve been gone three or four hours,” Avery said. “They should have been in the next parish.”

  “Maybe Evans was having rifle practice on a friend,” LeBlanc said.

  “I know it ain’t them. They’re young. They could make ten or twelve miles in the time they been gone,” Claxton said. “Billy Jo said they had a car waiting for them. They might be over the state line by now.”

  “They’re standing before the Lord,” Brother Samuel said. “They crossed the big river, and the Lord’s sitting in judgment. Tonight their souls will be flying through the dark with the evil spirit dragging them by a chain.”

  “I ain’t going to believe it. They’re young. An old man couldn’t make it, but the young ones got a chance.”

  “I seen the sign this morning. I knowed it wouldn’t do no good to warn them.”

  Daddy Claxton coughed violently. His breath rasped in his throat. He gagged on his shirt sleeve.

  “There ain’t no reason to keep us out here now. Let the old guy get inside,” LeBlanc said.

  “Talk to Evans,” Rainack said.

  “You got no call to keep us in the rain,” LeBlanc said.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a lot worse for you when Evans gets back.”

  “Billy Jo and Jeffry is dead,” Brother Samuel said.

  “I got my orders.”

  “Try using your mind. You’re going to kill the old man,” Avery said.

  “You keep quiet.”

  “Why don’t you throw him in the irrigation ditch? You’ll be sure he catches pneumonia that way,” Avery said.

  “Evans is going to hear about this.”

  “There’s some deep places in there. He probably can’t swim,” he said.

  “Keep it up. You’ll have your name on detention list with LeBlanc,” Rainack said.

  “Or you could take him into the swamp and find some quicksand,” Avery said. “It’s not much different than dying from pneumonia. His lungs would fill up with sand instead of water.”

  “You’re pushing it. I ain’t taking much more.”

  “You ain’t going to do nothing,” LeBlanc said.

  “Keep running off at the mouth and see.”

  “I knowed people like you in the army. You won’t drop your britches to take a crap till you get an order. We’re five to one against you. Lean on one of us and you’ll have to use that pistol. Then there will be an inquiry and the warden will bust you out of a job to save hisself.”

  “It’s your ass when Evans gets back.”

  The warden’s car came back down the line and went past the men. It was splattered with mud. The tires spun in the mire, and the warden steered around the place where he had stuck before. The sheriff sat in the front seat and the two deputies were in back. The end of a rifle barrel showed behind the glass in the back seat. An enclosed truck followed them, the back covered with canvas like an army truck. The guards sat inside, crowded towards the front because the sheet of canvas that closed the rear had been torn loose from its fastenings by the wind and flapped over the top. The captain’s pickup came through the ruts in second gear and hit the soft place where the warden had become stuck. His wheels whined in the mud and he shifted into reverse and fed it gas and shifted into
second again, rocking it, until he got traction and spun out of the soft spot to harder ground. Evans sat next to him. They stopped the truck and got out and went around to the back. Their rifles were propped against the seat by the gear-shift stick.

  “Bring them over here,” Evans said.

  Rainack snuffed out his cigarette and buttoned his slicker. He got down in the rain.

  “You heard him. Start moving,” he said.

  Avery and the others walked unsteadily across the clearing to the pickup. His legs felt loose and uncoordinated from having stood in one position too long. His feet hurt from the cold when he walked. Daddy Claxton wavered from side to side. He coughed and spit up phlegm. There was a tarpaulin laid across the bed of the pickup. Pools of water collected in it and ran down through the folds and creases. There was a dark smear on top of it. Evans had his hand on one end of the canvas to raise it up.

  “I want you to know what happens to guys that think they can bust out of here,” he said. “Look at them and tell everybody back at camp what you saw.”

  He lifted the tarpaulin and exposed the two bodies. They lay on their backs and their faces looked up blank and empty and the rain fell in their eyes. Billy Jo had been shot twice through the chest and a third bullet had cut through the left eye and come out at the temple. Pieces of cloth were embedded in the chest wounds. The blood had congealed and his shirt stuck stiffly to him. He was barefooted and his pants were torn at the knees and stained with mud and grass. His remaining eye was rolled back in his head. The wound where the bullet had emerged from the temple was very large and fragments of bone protruded from the matted skin and hair. Jeffry wore only one shoe. The ankle of his bare foot was broken. It swelled out in a big, discolored lump like a fist and the foot was twisted sideways. His shirt was torn in strips like rags. He had been hit with a shotgun at a close distance and the pellets covered his trunk and part of one thigh. An artery had been severed in his neck and there was a large area of red around the top of his chest like a child’s bib.

  “Where were they?” Rainack said.

  “They fell in a clay pit. They was just climbing out when we saw them. Billy Jo started running for the trees, and me and Jess let go. We missed Jeffry but Abshire got him with the shotgun. It blew him right through a thicket.”

  “Who got Billy Jo in the head?” Rainack said.

  “It’s hard to tell. We was shooting at the same time. Part of him is still sticking to a tree out there.”

  “Cover them up and let’s go back,” the captain said.

  Evans replaced the tarpaulin. The water ran down from the creases in the canvas onto his boots.

  “You goddamn swine,” LeBlanc said. His skin was white and the burn on his forehead turned dark as blood.

  “Shut that man up,” the captain said.

  “I been having trouble with him ever since you left,” Rainack said. “I started to bust him a couple of times.”

  “Can’t you keep control of your men, Evans?” the captain said.

  “I’d like to take him off in the woods and not come back with him,” Evans said.

  “Sonsofbitches.”

  “Do you want to keep shut, or you want something across the mouth?” Evans said.

  Spittle drooled over LeBlanc’s chin. He sprang on Evans and grabbed him by the throat. The guard fell backwards in the mud with LeBlanc on top of him. Evans’ mouth opened in a dry gasp and his eyes protruded from his head. LeBlanc’s hands tightened into the soft pink skin. Evans fumbled weakly at his holster for his pistol.

  Rainack and the captain hit at LeBlanc’s head with their revolvers, and amid the hard bone-splitting knocks he shouted into Evans’ face, the saliva running from his mouth: “You wouldn’t let me wait I had it planned and you wouldn’t give me time goddamn you to hell if you’d only waited I could have done it right—” and then Rainack whipped his pistol barrel across LeBlanc’s temple, and he fell sideways into a pool of water.

  J.P. WINFIELD

  The show had returned to town two months after it began its tour of the southern portion of the state. It was night, and a large flatbed truck, painted firecracker-red, followed a black sedan over a railroad crossing down a dirt road into the Negro section of town. At first there were board shacks with dirt yards and outbuildings on each side of the road, then farther on, the road became a blacktop lined with taverns, pool halls, shoeshine parlors, and open-air markets which stank of refuse and dead fish and rotted vegetables. The doors to the taverns and pool halls were opened, and the night was filled with the noise of loud jukeboxes and drunken laughter. Negroes loitered along the sidewalk under the neon bar signs and called back and forth to each other across the street. A hillbilly band stood on the open bed of the truck with their instruments. A boxlike piano was bolted to the bed with its back against the cab. Several wood casks were stacked along the side of the piano. The firecracker-red truck was painted with political slogans in big white letters:

  LET A HUNGRY MAN KILL A RABBIT

  BRING HONEST GOVERNMENT BACK TO LOUISIANA

  LET THE GOOD CHURCH PEOPLE HAVE THEIR BINGO GAMES

  VOTE FOR JIM LATHROP, A SLAVE TO NO MAN AND A SERVANT TO ALL

  THE COMMON MAN IS KING

  The sedan and the truck stopped by the taverns. The Negroes on the sidewalk looked at them cautiously. More Negroes appeared in the doorways, and small children ran down the road from the shacks to follow the truck.

  “What you want down here?” a Negro said from the sidewalk.

  Jim Lathrop got out of the sedan. He was dressed in a light tan suit with a blue sports shirt buttoned at the throat without a tie. He looked at the Negro.

  “This is campaign night. Don’t you know this is election time?” he said.

  “You ain’t going to get no votes down here,” a woman said.

  “How do you know that, sister?” Lathrop said. “How you know you don’t want to vote for me if you haven’t heard what I got to say? How do you know I’m not the only man running for office that can do something for you? Tell me that, sister, and I’ll go on home. Of course you can’t tell me, because you haven’t listened to what I got to say. And that’s why I’m here tonight. You folks don’t have one friend in Baton Rouge and you don’t have many friends in Washington, and I’m down here to tell you how you can get one; I’m here to tell you that there’s one man in this state who is a slave to nobody and a servant to all, and I mean all, no matter if he’s colored or white.”

  “You ain’t going to do nothing for us,” a Negro man said.

  “You’re wrong, brother. If I get in office you’ll get an even shake. I promise you that. Anyone who ever knew Jim Lathrop will tell you that he takes care of his friends. We got a band tonight and we got plenty to drink. I want you folks to enjoy yourselves while you listen to what I tell you. There’s J.P. Winfield on the truck, star of the Louisiana Jubilee and the Nashville Barn Dance. He’s going to sing you some songs. There’s enough to drink for everybody, so line up at the back of the truck and we’ll get things started.”

  No one moved off the sidewalk. Lathrop watched them a minute and went to the truck and took a carton of paper cups from behind the piano and pulled one from the box.

  “Bring a cask over here, J.P.,” he said.

  J.P. rolled a cask on its bottom to the edge of the truck bed. Lathrop turned on the wood spigot and filled the cup with wine. He drank it empty and crushed the cup in his hand and threw it on the concrete. He filled another and walked to the sidewalk with it.

  “I never knew good colored folks to turn down a cup of wine,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bought all them kegs if I’d thought I was going to have to drink it by myself. What about you, brother? You drinking tonight?”

  “I drinks any time, morning, noon, or night,” the Negro said.

  “See what you can do with this.” Lathrop handed him the cup.

  The Negro drank it off, the wine running down his chin and throat into his shirt. He wiped his mouth and lau
ghed loudly.

  “I’m one up on you,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I never registered. I can’t vote.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “He’s got you there, boss,” someone said. “Ain’t none of us registered. Can’t pass the reading test.”

  “Better go on the other side of town and drink your wine. I told you there ain’t no votes down here.”

  They were all laughing now.

  “I didn’t come down here to make you vote for me,” Lathrop said. “I just want you to listen to me for a little while. If you want to vote and you ain’t registered, by God I’ll take you down to the polls and register you myself. Now go on and line up for some wine. It don’t matter if you vote for me or not; I came here to have some drinking and some singing, and by God we’re going to have it. Sing us a song, J.P., while these people get something to drink.”

  The band started playing and J.P. sang the song he had written for Lathrop’s campaign. The Negroes gathered around the back of the truck, and Lathrop left the spigot of the cask open while they passed their cups under it. The cask was soon empty and another was brought up. J.P. sang three more songs, and April and Seth sang one each. The crowd around the truck became larger. Several Negroes were dancing in the street. Their faces were shiny and purple under the neon. The air was heavy with the smell of sweat and cheap wine. The empty casks were thrown into the gutter, and small children tried to stand on their sides and roll them down the street. The people at the back of the truck began to push each other to get their cups under the spigot. Lathrop smashed in the top of the keg and set it in the street. The Negroes dipped their cups through the top into the wine. The keg was drained in a few minutes. A man tried to pick it up and drink the residue from the bottom. He lifted it with both hands and put his mouth to the rim and tilted it upward. The wine poured out over his face and clothes. He laughed and threw the empty keg into the air. It crashed and splintered apart in the middle of the street.