Half of Paradise

by James Lee Burke

  “I was going to give it to you.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You spent all the last money we got at the blood bank on a whore.”

  “So what?” the man with one eye said.

  “It was half mine.”

  “You’d be in jail in Baton Rouge if I hadn’t talked the dicks out of it and told them we’d clear town.”

  “Let me have half of it.”

  “I’ll give it to you later.”

  “You’ll get juiced with a woman and I won’t see none of it.”

  “I let you carry the port, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I don’t let nobody give you no shit, do I?”

  “What if the dicks grab you and I get away? I don’t get no dough.”

  “You tried to steal it from me. That don’t give you no rights.”

  “Come on, Jess.”

  “Piss on it. Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked off arguing through the trees.

  J.P. became completely conscious late that afternoon. His eyes opened and he looked at the ants crawling on the ground and the tin cans and bits of moldy newspaper. He pulled his arm out from under him. The back of his hand was swollen and purple. He sat upright and let the hand lie limply in his lap. He felt something hard roll inside his mouth and spit the broken tooth on the ground. He looked at it dumbly and touched the side of his face with his good hand. The pain ripped along his jawbone and into his ear. When he swallowed some blood it made him retch, but he could only heave dryly, out of breath, the muscles in his chest and throat straining violently from the effort. He saw his bare feet and the old pair of shoes the tramp had left. He stood up, holding his bad hand at the wrist, and looked around. The blood raced in his head and everything went out and away from him and blurred and then came back again. He didn’t know where he was. He walked through the dust-powdered trees and knocked against the trunks with his body, and the branches swung back against his face. He had to get someone to help him before he passed out again. He could die out there and no one would find him until the smell got so bad that the parish health man would be sent out to investigate it. He stepped on a sharp rock and bruised his foot. He looked through the trees and saw the railroad tracks, and on the other side, the brothel. He was in the jungle behind the tracks. They had worked him over and dumped him in the jungle. That big sonofabitch with the flat scarred face. J.P. thought of what he would do in retribution to the man and the madam and the two prostitutes. He became confused and thought he was back home. He saw Clois and the other men from the billiard hall and himself packed in a coupé at night with the cans of coal oil on the floorboards, riding out in the country to the brothel; they would park the car on the road and move quietly up to the building and saturate the porch and the walls from the cans and set a torch to it. He could see the building burn against the dark sky and the whores climbing out the windows and the big man with the club rolling on the lawn trying to put his clothes out.

  He walked in an uneven line to the railroad and crossed the tracks. The rocks cut his feet. The sun was low in the sky, and it shone just above the freight cars in the yard. He heard a whistle blow in the distance. He went through the vacant field by the side of the brothel to the street. He stepped on some thorns and he could hardly bear to put his weight down on his feet. His breath rasped in his throat and there was a close feeling in his chest. He held his hand by the wrist, and when he walked the movement made his whole arm throb. He came out of the field onto the dirty side street that ran past the train yard in front of the brothel. There was nobody on the street. He saw a brakeman locking the door on a freight car in the yard. An automobile came down the street, and as it passed J.P. waved his arm to stop the driver. The man looked at him strangely and drove on.

  Goddamn lousy bastard.

  A few minutes later J.P. lay on the sidewalk unconscious. He didn’t know that he had had a heart attack. He hadn’t had time to think about it. He felt his heart twist inside him, and there was one great pain that exploded in his chest, and then the cement rushed up to hit him and that was all. A taxi that had just let down a man at the brothel stopped and the driver got out and came over. He knelt on one knee beside J.P. and felt his wrist for the pulse. He went back to his cab and called the dispatcher at his company on the radio and told him to send an ambulance. The sun went down, and one of the locomotives in the yard was pushing a string of freight cars off on a siding. A Negro boy walked down the street, throwing a baseball up in the air and catching it in a fielder’s glove. He stopped on the other side of the street and looked at the cab-driver and J.P. The long cream-colored ambulance glided down the street with the siren low and parked by the curb. The two attendants took the stretcher out of the back and put J.P. on it and strapped down his legs and chest with the cloth belts. They put him into the ambulance, and one rode in back with him and the other drove.

  They took him to the emergency receiving room at the charity hospital, which was an old building in the poor section of town built by Huey Long during the depression. There was a big green lawn in front and trees along the walkway and the walls were orange like rust. The emergency room was overcrowded, and the nurse told the ambulance driver that all the doctors were busy at the moment and they would have to put J.P. in an oxygen tent and wait until the intern on the floor was free. There were two Negroes in the waiting room who had been cut in a razor fight, an emaciated three-year-old girl, and a man with a compress on his head who had been hurt in an auto accident.

  The ambulance men pushed the stretcher down the hall on its rubber wheels to one of the rooms with an oxygen tent. The ambulance men were tired and they wanted to put J.P. in the tent and go to coffee before they were called out again. Having been exposed to death often, they had learned that the end of man’s life is as significant and tragic as water breaking out the bottom of a paper bag. The doctors worked on J.P. for several hours. Two of the heart chambers had ruptured and filled and couldn’t expel the blood back into the arteries. One of the doctors suggested opening the cavity and massaging the heart, but there wasn’t a surgeon available at the time who could perform the operation. J.P. died alone in the room shortly after midnight, and when the nurse found he was dead she called the intern and the body was removed, because the space was needed for others.

  AVERY BROUSSARD

  It was Friday evening and they were having a barbecue and beer party at the apartment. The afternoon sun had already died in the west as he walked down Dauphine, and the old stucco buildings and the iron-railed balconies stood out against the acetylene-blue glow of the sky after dusk. He had gotten a haircut and a shoeshine at the barbershop, and he felt good after the day’s work on the pipeline. He walked under the green colonnade in front of a corner grocery store and went inside and bought twelve bottles of beer in a paper bag. An old man was selling the Picayune, and there was a hurdy-gurdy playing on the other side of the street. Avery carried the beer in the sack down to the apartment and went through the gate under the willow tree into the courtyard.

  Suzanne was cooking chickens on a small portable barbecue pit she had set up on the flagging. She wore a blue and white summer dress, and there were drops of perspiration around her temples. She had borrowed some Japanese lanterns from a friend and had strung them over the court. There was a large tin tub of crushed ice and beer by the stone well. Several other people sat in deck chairs or on the steps, sipping highballs and drinking beer and talking. Wally was telling a couple that the Paris Review had accepted two of his poems and that the Atlantic Monthly was considering one of his short stories. He was drinking Scotch and soda, and his face was flushed and his English accent kept becoming more pronounced. Avery went over to Suzanne and smiled at her and put the bottles in the crushed ice. She had washed her hair the night before and it was loose and soft around her shoulders.

  “I was waiting for you,” she said.

  “We worked overtime today.”

  “You loo
k nice.”

  “I had a haircut.”

  “Taste the sauce.”

  He tasted it with the wooden spoon.

  “C’est pas trop chaud pour toi?” she said.

  “I thought you had forgotten French.”

  “Dis moi de la sauce.”

  “It’s good.”

  The light of the paper lanterns, which swung slowly in the breeze, flickered on her face. Her dark eyes were bright and cheerful. Her arm brushed against him and he wished they were alone and not at the party. He opened a beer and drank out of the bottle. She took a sip and turned the chickens on the grill. The grease dripped down into the fire and sputtered on the coals. Wally came over with a highball glass in his hand.

  “Hi, fellow. What did you bring?” he said.

  “Dago red. Would you like some?”

  “There’s a bottle of Vat 69 upstairs in the cabinet,” Suzanne said.

  “Were you speaking French?”

  “I don’t know any French,” Avery said.

  “Seriously. Can you speak French?”

  “We were practicing our Church Latin. We’re thinking of taking holy orders,” Avery said.

  “That’s right. You are a Catholic, aren’t you? Denise told me. I say, have you read any of Joyce?”

  “Why don’t you get another highball, Wally?” Suzanne said.

  “What do the Jesuits think of Joyce?”

  “I didn’t go to school under the Jesuits,” Avery said.

  “You look like a Jesuit. Melancholy eyes and that sort of thing.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Wally. Get a highball,” Suzanne said.

  “I’ve been doing some work on the Trinity theme in Ulysses. I think Joyce was actually orthodox in his Catholicism. Tell me, do Catholics really have to accept all of the Nicene Creed?”

  “I’m not Catholic,” Avery said.

  “Suzanne’s roommate told me you were.”

  “Wally, go upstairs and get the Scotch. I’d like a drink, too,” Suzanne said.

  “I’m sure there’s a relation between the Trinity and the Bloom family.”

  “Who is the Bloom family?” Avery said.

  “Isn’t it true that you’re Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “You are, aren’t you, Suzanne?” Wally said. “Once in a while.”

  “Well, do you have to accept all the Nicene Creed?”

  “I suppose. What does that have to do with anything?”

  Wally forgot why he had asked. He began talking about Baudelaire.

  “I’ve been reading him in French. You lose a lot in the translation,” he said. “Have you read The Flowers of Evil in French?”

  “I read Ring Lardner and Rudyard Kipling my last year in high school,” Avery said.

  “You don’t consider Lardner a serious writer, do you?”

  “I’d like a highball. Would you fix me one, Wally?” Suzanne said.

  “Do you really compare Lardner with someone like Baudelaire?”

  “I liked his short stories,” Avery said.

  “Tell me if you think Lardner could be compared with any French writer of worth.”

  “You’re tight,” Suzanne said.

  “I just want to know if anybody can believe Ringgold Lardner was a good writer.”

  “If you won’t get the Scotch, open a beer for me, please,” she said.

  “Lardner never wrote a decent page of prose in his life,” Wally said.

  “Wally, will you please be quiet.”

  “And Kipling, for God’s sake. Can you tell me of anyone more undeserving who has received as much attention?”

  Avery looked at his whiskey-red face and didn’t say anything. A young man came over from the steps and put his arm on Wally’s shoulder. He winked at Suzanne.

  “Come talk to us, old sock,” he said. “We want to hear about your poems.”

  “They’re completely worthless.”

  “Also about your short story in the Atlantic,” the young man said.

  “It’s worthless, too. The Atlantic has a policy of not publishing anything of merit.”

  “Come sit down and have a Scotch with us,” the young man said. He was a portrait painter who had done well with the Saint Charles Avenue upper class. His hair was black and he had a good suntan and his teeth were white when he smiled.

  “Stop this goddamn patronizing attitude,” Wally said. “If there is anything I can’t stand, it’s to be patronized when I’m drunk.”

  The others in the courtyard stopped talking and looked at Wally. The young portrait painter felt that attention was being focused on him, also. He smiled and put his hand on Wally’s shoulder again. His teeth shone, and he gave an appearance of composure and easiness of manner.

  “I’m not patronizing you,” he said in a low voice, smiling.

  “Do you know one thing about the amount of work that goes into a good piece of fiction?”

  “Come over and tell us about it.”

  “Do you think that painting some aristocratic pig on Saint Charles is art?”

  “Now look, Wally.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll discuss it with you when you’re not crosseyed.”

  “You don’t know anything about art, whether I’m sober or not.”

  “Let’s have a drink. This is rather pointless, isn’t it?”

  “Hell it’s pointless. I want to know right now if you think painting these pigs is art.”

  Suzanne turned to Avery and spoke quietly. “Take him outside for a while. I’ll serve dinner.”

  “I’m going out for cigarettes. Do you want to come?” Avery said to Wally.

  “How am I in any way involved with your smoking habits?”

  “I thought you might like to take a walk.”

  “All right. I know I’m obnoxious. I’ll leave,” he said. “I apologize, painter. You’re an artist. Your pigs will be hung in the Louvre someday.”

  They went out of the courtyard into the street. They walked along the sidewalk in the dark under the balconies and colonnades in front of the apartments with the trees hanging over the walk, the tattoo parlors, antique shops, the small lighted restaurants with the steamed windows, the ten dollar a week rooming houses that catered to the Tony Bacino clientele, the pool halls and bars and Salvation Army missions, past the girls who stood in the darkened doorways and smiled woodenly, and across the street to the grocery store on the corner with the big screen doors and the green shutters and coarse-grained floors and the rusted Hadacol sign and the glass cases of chewing tobacco and cigars.

  Avery bought a package of Virginia Extra and poured the tobacco into the wheat-straw paper. He and Wally walked back towards the apartment. Avery struck a match and lighted the cigarette and watched the paper curl away from the flame.

  “How do you feel?” he said.

  “Nonrepentant,” Wally said.

  “You made it a little hard on Suzanne.”

  “I didn’t mean to, old pal. My bile is directed only towards pretentious painters. I can’t tolerate that fellow. He’s such a goddamn boor.”

  “Do you think you can go back in now?”

  “I’m in excellent shape. By the bye, can we forget that Lardner business?”

  “Sure.”

  “I know I’m bloody insulting when I get on the grog.”

  “Forget about it.”

  “It’s merely that I don’t like Kipling or Lardner. Neither of them could write. I can’t understand how these people are given attention.”

  “Do you want a smoke?” Avery said.

  “Lardner wrote Saturday Evening Post fiction.”

  Avery walked on listening and not answering.

  They passed a package store just before they got to the apartment.

  “I say, could you let me have a couple of dollars?” Wally said. “I’m out of booze and I don’t like drinking off the others all evening.”

  Avery gave him the money. Wally bought a pint bottle and put it in his co
at pocket, and they went back into the courtyard. The guests were eating the barbecued chickens from paper plates with their fingers, and Suzanne was serving several other people who had just arrived. Avery looked at her damp temples and the way her body moved against her dress. He took a beer out of the tub of crushed ice and opened it. The foam came out over the top of the bottle and slid down the side onto his hand.

  “How is he?” she said.

  “Still plastered.”

  “Get a plate. You haven’t eaten anything.”

  “Can we be together later?” Avery said.

  “We’ll have to go somewhere else. Denise is going to be home.”

  “Let’s go to the beach.”

  “All right. Maybe everyone will leave early.”

  “We can rent the beach cabin,” he said.

  “Ssssh.” She smiled.

  “They can’t hear us. Wally is talking too loud.”

  “We’ll have to get him to leave early, too. He’s always the last one to go. He spent the night on our sofa one time.”

  “Maybe we can send him home with the painter. They seem to get along well.”

  “Excuse me a minute, darling. I have to go upstairs and get some more chickens.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “I can do it by myself.”

  “I’ll help you, anyway,” he said. She smiled back at him.

  They went up the stone steps to the apartment. When they were inside he closed the door behind them. He kissed her on the cheek and mouth in the darkened living room.

  “Ummmmm,” she said. “You’re nice.”

  She put her arms around his neck and held him close.

  “Do you think they would miss us for a few minutes?” he said.

  “Oh, darling, wait until tonight.”

  “It would only take a few minutes.”

  “We can’t. Someone might come in.”

  “Let’s stay at the beach house all night, then.”

  “Won’t you be too tired to work tomorrow?”

  “We probably won’t get to work a full day. It’s supposed to rain.”

  “We haven’t gotten a whole night together in a long time. Won’t it be lovely?” she said.