Half of Paradise

by James Lee Burke

  The wind was cool coming through the trees, and he sat in the shade and looked at the sun reflect on the water. The river had overrun the bank around the sawmill and the outer door to the logging chute was partly under water and wood chips stacked in a pile by the wall were lapped over and pulled out in the current. He could see the gars turning in the water, their backs and tails just fanning the surface, and he picked up his line and moved it to another place between the logs and then the cane jerked hard in his hand and the float went under. The line was taut and pulling from side to side in the water as the catfish tried to tangle it in the logs. J.P. stood up and pulled the catfish out of the river, swinging him in the air clear of the logs onto the bank beside him. The fish flipped in the grass with the hook protruding from the corner of his mouth and tangled himself in the line. J.P. lifted him up carefully, putting his fingers behind the stingers, and removed the hook. It was a mud cat, pale yellow from living on the bottom of the river, with whiskers and a wide-slitted mouth. J.P. cut a forked twig from a bush and shaved it clean of bark and sharpened one end to a point. He ran the pointed end through the fish’s third gill and out the mouth and dropped him in the water and stuck the other end of the twig firmly in the side of the bank. The fish ginned the water with his tail and tried to get off the twig.

  J.P. put another worm on the hook and threw his line out among the logs. He caught three sun perch, another catfish, and two cottonfish which he threw back. He wanted to catch some bass but it was too early in the year. The time to catch bass was in the early fall when the weather was cool and he could go upriver in a boat beyond the sawmill to those deep ponds cut back in the bank and surrounded by trees and the water was dark and still. About evening he would fish the reeds with a flyrod and the fly would rest motionless on the surface and he would snap it back over his head and whip it dry in the air and cast again; there would be a flick of silver in the water when the bass hit and the rod would throb in his palm, and he would take up the slack in the line with one hand and use the automatic reel with the other. The bass would fight hard and finally J.P. would dip him out of the water with his net and put him in the straw creel in the bottom of the boat.

  He caught two bullheads, and it was late afternoon and the sun was red in the west over the green of the trees. He took the forked twig out of the water and slid the fish off and laid them on the bank. He cleaned the perch first, scaling them and leaving the heads, and then he cleaned the catfish. He slit their stomachs open from the gills back to the tail and scooped out the entrails and threw them in the river, then he snapped the heads off cleanly by breaking the vertebras backwards; then he cut two long slices along the dorsal fin from front to back and peeled the skin off in strips. He washed each of the fish in the water and wrapped them in the paper sack his tackle had come in.

  He walked the two miles back to town along a dirt road with trees and fields and farmhouses on each side. The sun was now setting and the day had become cool and the wind dried the sweat on his neck. There were a few rain clouds beginning to build and the sky looked green, the way it does before it rains at evening during the summer. The fish felt moist in his hand through the paper sack. He wanted to come back tomorrow and fish farther upstream for the bass, even though he knew it was too early. He looked at the sky and hoped that the rain would only be a shower so the fishing would still be good the next day. He walked into town and stopped at a café and had the cook prepare the fish for him. They were fried in cornmeal, and he ate them with his hands, the grease hot on his fingers, and drank two bottles of beer. He gave the cook a dollar and paid for the beer and picked up his pole, which he had left outside, and went to the hotel.

  It started to rain after he reached the hotel, and he looked out his window and watched the water streak down the glass and the evening twilight diminish from green to lavender and the neon sign come on over the billiard hall. The street and the high sidewalks and the courthouse lawn and the one-story brick buildings were empty of people. The afterglow of the sun faded in the wet sky, and the small crack of red in the clouds low on the horizon sank out of sight, then it was dark.

  He went down to the billiard hall, since everything else in town was closed after seven o’clock except the gas station, the café, and a couple of taverns. He went inside and drank a beer at the bar. Some of the men he had been with earlier were still there. He listened to the crack of the billiard balls and the squeak of the cues being chalked and the cursing when someone missed a shot. Clois, the man who could switch a pair of dice in a game or make them walk up a backboard and come back sevens so often that he was required to throw with a cup, come over to J.P. and asked him to join the others in back.

  “What are you playing?”

  “Craps. We never play nothing else,” Clois said. “Like the nigger says, them galloping dominoes ain’t done me wrong yet.”

  They walked the length of the bar past the pool tables and went through a door in the back. There was a room bare of any furniture with no windows and a single light bulb with a green shade like those over the pool tables. A dirty blanket was spread on the floor, and six or seven men were kneeling around in a circle and one was bouncing the dice off the wall back onto the blanket.

  “Mind if me and J.P. gets in?” Clois said.

  The men looked at them and then back at the game. The man who was shooting smacked the dice off the wall.

  “Ain’t you fellows ready to let some more money in the game?” Clois said.

  “Shut up. Can’t you see I’m shooting?” the man with the dice said.

  He hit them off the wall again and crapped out.

  “All right. You done made me lose my point. You can get in now,” he said.

  “Whose dice?” Clois said.

  “You got money?” a man said.

  “What the hell do you think I come in here for?”

  “Put it on the board.”

  Clois dropped two crumpled one-dollar bills on the blanket and took the dice.

  “None of your stuff, neither. This is a straight game,” the man said.

  “I ain’t pulling nothing on you boys,” Clois said, and rolled his sleeves up over his elbows.

  The bets went down on the blanket. Clois knelt on one knee and rubbed the dice between his hands. J.P. watched and didn’t bet. Clois rolled.

  “Six is my point. Right back the hard way,” he said, and put two more dollars on the blanket. He cracked the dice between his palms. “Come on, cover it. I ain’t got all night.”

  He shot four times. His shirt collar was damp with sweat. There were small beads of perspiration over his face and in the stubble of his beard. He retrieved the dice and on the fifth throw he made his point.

  “Thirty-three, the hard way,” he said. He picked up the bills and put them in front of him. “Shooting it all.”

  The others covered him. He rolled a seven.

  “Let it ride,” he said.

  He made three more passes and he had a good pile of bills and change in front of him.

  “I’ll shoot five this time,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” a man said.

  “The dice ain’t good forever.” He picked up all the money except a five-dollar bill and put it in his pocket. He bounced the dice off the wall.

  “Boxcars. You get some of your green back,” he said.

  “You always drag at the right time,” a man said.

  “It’s part of knowing how to play.”

  “Give me the goddamn dice,” the man said.

  “You fellows don’t know how to lose.”

  “You talk too much.”

  “Roll the dice.”

  “You want in, J.P.?” a man said. “All right.”

  He knelt in the circle with the others and put three dollars in the center of the blanket. He rolled a four.

  “Little Joe at the cathouse do’,” Clois said. “I’m betting he makes it.”

  “Put your money down, smart man.”

  “Ten bucks
. Give me three to one,” Clois said.

  “You’re on,” the man said.

  J.P. made it on the second pass. He let his money ride and crapped out. The bartender brought in a tray of sandwiches and beer. One of the men put a bill on the tray. The dice came around to J.P. again and he shot five dollars and threw a three.

  “I ain’t hot tonight,” he said.

  “You ain’t made your point yet. You still got another shot,” Clois said.

  “Shooting ten,” J.P. said.

  “Fade,” a man said, covering his bet.

  He rolled an eleven and doubled his money. He shot the twenty and doubled again.

  “I’ll drag half of it,” he said.

  “Let it ride,” Clois said. “You can break the game.”

  “I ain’t hot.”

  “You done made two passes.”

  “Dragging half of it,” J.P. said to the others.

  “You ain’t making no money like that,” Clois said.

  “I ain’t feeling it tonight.”

  “One more pass and it’s eighty bucks.”

  “Shut up and let him play,” a man said.

  “Coming out,” J.P. said.

  He crapped out on a deuce. The other men split up the twenty dollars he had left remaining on the blanket. J.P. put the rest of the money in his wallet.

  “You quitting?” Clois said.

  “I reckon.”

  “Wait a minute. I’ll go with you.”

  Clois picked up the bills in front of him and folded them neatly and put them in his shirt pocket and buttoned it. The others didn’t want him to leave. He was ahead a good bit.

  “That’s too goddamn bad,” he said, looking at them with his dull gray eyes. He and J.P. left the room.

  They drank a beer at the bar and watched the pool games. It was still raining outside. The light from the neon sign was red and green on the front window.

  “Let’s go out on the highway,” Clois said.

  “Are they still doing business out there?”

  “The sheriff raided it a while back but it’s open again now. They caught one of the church deacons trying to zip up his britches and hide in a closet. I reckon they figure they better not raid it no more unless they want to find the preacher and the mayor next time.”

  They finished the beer and went outside in the rain to Clois’s car, a 1941 Ford with a smashed fender, one headlight, and a broken back window. They drove down the main street out of town with the windshield wipers switching against the glass and the rain falling in the light of the single headlamp. Clois opened the glove compartment and took out a half-empty pint of bourbon and unscrewed the cap and drank. He passed it to J.P. They went on for several miles and turned off the highway onto a dirt road, the mud and the gravel banging under the fenders. There was no moon, and the fields on each side of them were wet and dark. Ahead, there was a large two-story white house that was set back from the road with nothing around it. It looked like one of those big frame farmhouses built during the early part of the century. The shades were drawn, and there were two cars parked in the yard. Clois stopped by the side of the house, and they got out and walked through the rain to the front porch and knocked. The door opened a small space and a dark-haired woman of about forty-five looked out at them. She had a gold tooth and her face was thin-featured and pale. She opened the door wider and let them in.

  “Good evening, Miss Sarah,” Clois said.

  “Wipe your feet before you track up my rug,” she said.

  “You remember J.P., don’t you?”

  “I don’t keep count of who comes in here. You still got mud on your feet.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sony.”

  They went through the hallway into a big living room that was lighted by a single lamp in the corner. The only furniture was a sofa, a scarred coffee table, and a few uncomfortable chairs. Three women sat on the sofa, and there was a drunk oil-field worker in one of the chairs trying to make another woman sit on his lap.

  “Business ain’t too good tonight,” Clois said.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Miss Sarah said.

  “I don’t reckon.”

  She looked at him hard.

  “A couple of beers will be all right,” he said.

  She went into the back of the house and returned with two bottles.

  “That’s one dollar,” she said.

  He gave it to her. J.P. looked at the women on the sofa. Two of them looked old and a little used. The third, a big blond woman, sat at one end. She wore white shorts and a silk blouse, and she had good thighs and her breasts were heavy and loose, and he could see that she wore no underwear. He put his beer down on the table and went in back with her.

  Her room was near the back porch, and he could hear the rain falling against the side of the house. She turned on a table lamp and tilted the shade so that most of the light would fall in the corner away from the bed. She undressed without looking at him or speaking. Her breasts were very large. She lay down on the bed and put a pillow under her.

  It had stopped raining the next morning, and the sun was bright outside the hotel window when he awoke. He thought about the prostitute from the night before, and for a moment he wanted her again. There was a bad taste of whiskey in his mouth. He went into the bath and brushed his teeth. He had gone back to the billiard hall with Clois after they left the brothel, and both of them had gotten drunk on a bottle of cheap bourbon, and now he was thirsty and dry inside. He drank too much water from the tap and it made him dizzy again. He went back to bed and lay on the cool sheets under the ceiling fan and put the prostitute out of his mind and didn’t think of anything except the coolness around him. He slept for a while and awoke and the fan was turning over him, its long flat wood blades making a flicking circle of shadow and light on the ceiling. The breeze felt very good and he went to sleep again. By noon he was feeling much better, and he showered with cold water and went out to eat.

  Later, he returned to the hotel and picked up his fishing tackle. He felt pleasant after eating, the day was fairly cool from last night’s rain, and the whiskey taste was gone from his mouth. He walked the two miles along the farm road to the river, with the fields of cotton and corn and watermelon and the red dirt land on each side and the Negro shacks and the big cotton gin made from tin and the pine and oak trees that grew back from the river bank in the distance. He walked through the trees to the river, and the ground felt soft under his feet. He saw an armadillo move through the grass looking for insects; its hard armored shell was hunched on its back, and it had a spike tail and a small head with little ears and shrunken black eyes. He remembered when he used to hunt them with a .22 after the rains.

  He came out of the trees by the sawmill. The river was higher than it had been yesterday, and it swirled around the door of the logging chute that hung open in the water. He looked along the bank for grasshoppers, but the grass was too wet for them to be jumping. A Negro boy of about fourteen came down the bank on the other side of the river and got into the pirogue tied to a willow tree. He wore a ragged wash-faded shirt and short pants that hung to his knees. He sat in the stern of the pirogue and pushed it out in the current from the bank with the paddle. J.P. called to him.

  The boy stroked across the river and held the boat steady in the back current along the bank by sticking the paddle in the soft clay at the water’s edge.

  “You want to make fifty cents?” J.P. said.

  “What I got to do?”

  “Let me use your boat for a while.”

  “My daddy don’t let nobody else use it.”

  “Then I’ll give you the fifty cents to row me down to the ponds.”

  The boy looked at him, unsure.

  “You want the fifty cents, don’t you?” J.P. said.

  “Yes, sir. I wants it, but I don’t want no whipping when I get home.”

  “Come up here and help me dig some worms.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The boy got out of t
he boat into the shallows and dragged the bow onto the bank. He took the bailing can from under the seat and squatted on his haunches by J.P. and helped him dig in the ground. They filled the can with worms, and the boy got into the pirogue’s stern and took up the paddle while J.P. slid them off the mud back into the water and jumped in. The boy swung them into the current and headed downstream towards the ponds. There were oaks and cypress on each side of the river leaning out over the water. It was cool in the shade of the trees, and when they went around a bend close to the bank the overhanging moss swept across the bow of the boat. J.P. put his pole together and fixed his line as they neared the place where the river widened and cut back into the ponds. The water was dark from the rain. He could see the gars breaking the surface with their backs. He hoped there were none around the ponds. The fishing was never any good when the gars were near, since they preyed on smaller fish. The boy paddled them into a cove that was fairly large and shaded by the trees. The water was covered with lily pads along the bank, and they rose and swelled in the waves from the boat. The boy grabbed a willow limb and pulled them close to the bank and tied the painter to the trunk of the tree. J.P. threw his line near the lily pads. Bass always stayed in the shady places in hot weather. The boy touched him on the back and pointed to the bailing can with the worms. He had a throw line in his hand with three hooks and a lead washer for a weight. J.P. handed him the can. The boy baited only one of his hooks and let the line hang over the side down in the mud. He waited a few minutes and pulled his hook out of the water and spit on the bait and put it back in again. It was a Negro superstition. They believed that fish would bite if you spit on the hook, even a bare one.

  They fished for an hour and a half. J.P. caught one sun perch and one smallmouth black bass. It had rained too much for the fishing to be any good The boy caught a gar. The line was wrapped around his wrist, and it cut his skin when the gar hit and started to run. The boy pulled with both hands, the veins standing up hard in his wrist, as the gar thrashed the water with his tail and tangled himself in the line. The boy got him against the side of the boat and held him partly out of the water and got his pocketknife open with one hand and worked the point into the weak spot in the back of the gar’s neck where the armored skin joined the head. He pushed the knife to its hilt and pulled it free and then plunged it in again. The gar snapped his long pointed jaws at the line, and then his body went weak when the vertebra was cut and his tail stopped ginning the water. The boy pulled the gar into the boat by the gill and laid him in the bottom. He smiled at J.P. His face and neck were beaded with sweat, and a thin rivulet of blood ran down from his wrist over the back of his hand. He took the knife off the board seat and cut down the back of the gar and pulled the hard skin away, then he slit open the belly and scooped out the entrails and threw them onto the bank. He let the head remain. The gar was a big one even after he had been dressed. The eyes looked like glass now and the jaws were open, exposing the long rows of teeth. The boy would take him home and his family would barbecue the meat over an open fire on a spit. J.P. had never tasted gar; only Negroes would eat it (along with mullet and cottonfish and coon and possum), but they said it was good. The boy was quite happy. He rowed them back down the river and talked about the fish. He asked J.P. if he had ever seen one that large. J.P. said he hadn’t. The boy was very pleased and he wanted to give J.P. part of the meat.