Jesus Out to Sea: Stories

by James Lee Burke

  Cool Daddy pinched his temples, like he was struggling not to hurt the feelings of dumb white people such as ourselves. “Let me strap it on you, boy. I thought maybe she was leaking info about me to the cops, so I had a detective get ahold of her phone records.” Then he mentioned the name of a powerful man he said Kitty Lamar had phoned repeatedly at Sun Records. “I don’t know what you done to her, but I think she fixed yo’ ass good.”

  The only sound in the room was the vibration of the electric fan. Eddy Ray’s eyes looked like brown pools that someone had filled with black silt.

  “He was lying,” I said when we were outside.

  “You’re the one who told me Kitty Lamar was a Judas. You cain’t have it both ways, R.B.”

  “I’m going out west,” I said.

  We were in traffic, headed toward Eddy Ray’s house in the Heights section of North Houston, oak trees sweeping by us on wide boulevards, where termite-eaten nineteenth-century houses with wide galleries sat gray and hot-looking in the shade. I couldn’t believe what I’d just said and the implication it had for my friendship with Eddy Ray. He finally lit the cigarette he’d been fiddling with since Cool Daddy’s office.

  “Am I invited?” he asked.

  “Nobody can help you, Eddy Ray. You don’t think you should have survived the war and I think you’re aiming to take both of us down.”

  “Sorry to hear you say that.” He flipped the dead paper match into the traffic.

  I got out of the Hudson at the red light and went into the first bar I could find. Lone Star and Jax beer might seem like poor solace for busted careers and lost friendships, but I figured if I drank enough of it, it would have to count for something. And that’s exactly what I did, full-tilt, for the next six months.

  I also spent some time in the Houston City Jail for my third arrest as a public drunk. I picked watermelons in the Rio Grande Valley and rode a freight train west and cut lettuce in El Centro. I played Dobro for tips in bars on East Fifth Street in Los Angeles, followed the wheat harvest all the way to Saskatoon, and ended up on Larimer Street in Denver, where I met Cisco Houston and played as a guest on his syndicated radio show, right before he got blacklisted.

  I saw the country from the bottom side up. I may have married a three-hundred-pound Indian woman on the Southern Ute Reservation, but I can’t be sure, because by the time I sobered up from all the peyote buttons I’d eaten, I was in an uncoupled boxcar full of terrified illegal farm-workers, roaring at eighty miles an hour down Raton Pass into New Mexico. And that’s what led to me to one of those moments in life when you finally figure out there are no answers to the big mysteries, like why the innocent suffer, why there’s disease and war, and all that kind of stuff. I also figured out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decisions which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.

  The sky was still black and sprinkled with stars when I crawled off the boxcar at the bottom of the grade in Raton. Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God.

  I found a bar by the railway tracks but didn’t go in. Instead, I walked down to a café built out of stucco, networked with heat cracks, where a bunch of Mexican gandy walkers were eating breakfast. I had one dollar and seven cents in my pocket, enough to order scrambled eggs, a pork sausage patty, fried spuds, and coffee, and to leave a dime tip.

  While I sipped coffee, I thumbed through a three-day-old copy of an Albuquerque newspaper. On an inside page was a story about none other than the Greaser. I had read enough stories about the Greaser’s career to last me a lifetime, but in the third paragraph was a statement that was like a thumbtack in the eye. According to the reporter, the Greaser had left Sun Records at least a year ago and had signed a managerial deal with a guy who used to be a carnival barker.

  “You okay, hon?” the waitress said to me. She was a big redheaded woman with upper arms like cured hams, and perfume you could probably smell all the way to Flagstaff.

  “Me? I’m fine. Except for the fact I’m probably the dumbest sonofabitch who ever walked into your café,” I said.

  “No, that was my ex-husband. There’s some showers for truck drivers in back. It’s on the house,” she said. She winked at me. “Hang around, cowboy.”

  Life on the underside of America could have its moments.

  Five days later, I climbed down from the cab of a tractor-trailer and walked four blocks through a run-down, tree-shaded neighborhood to Eddy Ray’s house. He had scraped up a pile of black leaves and moldy pecan husks in his side yard and was burning them in an oil can, his eyes watering in the smoke.

  I dropped my duffel bag on the gallery and sat down in the glider and waited for him to say hello.

  “It’s me, in case you haven’t noticed the man sitting about ten feet to your rear,” I said.

  “I got your postcard from the Big Horn County Jail,” he said, fanning smoke out of his face.

  I didn’t remember writing a card from jail, but that wasn’t unusual considering the number of organic chemical additives I had been putting into my brain. “Remember when I told you Cool Daddy Hopkins was lying about Kitty Lamar?”

  “I do.”

  “Know why you wouldn’t believe me?” I said.

  “Not interested.”

  “’Cause Cool Daddy fooled me, too. I thought Kitty Lamar had stuck it to us. Know why I thought that?”

  He leaned on a rake handle, shutting his eyes, maybe hoping I’d be gone when he opened them again.

  “’Cause I had a grudge against her from the first time we heard her sing,” I said, answering my own question. “’Cause I didn’t want her coming between us.”

  I felt a little funny saying that and I let my eyes slip off his face. He picked up a huge sheaf of compacted leaves and dropped them into the flames. Thick curds of yellow smoke curled into the tree limbs overhead. “So what’s changed?”

  “When Cool Daddy told us Kitty Lamar had been bad-mouthing us at Sun Records, the Greaser had already been gone from Sun. Kitty Lamar didn’t know anybody at Sun. The only person she knew there was the Greaser. Besides, why would people at the record company want to hurt us? Sun doesn’t do business like that.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “I read it in the newspaper. Then I called the reference lady at the public library to check it out. The Greaser has been managed by this carnival barker or freak show manager or whatever he is for the last year.”

  Eddy Ray sat down on the steps, his back to me. His face and arms were bladed with the sunlight shining through the trees. He rubbed the back of his neck, like a terrible memory was eating its way through his skull.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “The Greaser called up and asked me to send him a demo. He said he’d take it to a studio for us. He said he’d always thought my voice was as good as Johnny Ace’s.”

  “What’d you do?” I said.

  “Told him he was a hypocrite and a liar and to lose my phone number.”

  At least I wasn’t the only one in the band with a serious thinking disorder.

  “Seen Kitty Lamar?” I said.

  “I heard she was singing in a lounge in Victoria.”

  I pushed the glider back and forth, the chains creaking, the worn-out heels of my cowboy boots dragging on the boards.

  “I’m not gonna do it,” he said, looking straight ahead at the yard.

  “Do what?”

  “What you’re thinking. She can ring or come by if she wants to, but I ain’t running after her. Will you stop playing on that glider? You’re giving me a migraine.”

  “You got that 45 rpm we recor
ded on the amusement pier in Galveston?”

  “What about it?”

  “I paid half of the four dollars it cost to make it. I want to take my half to Victoria and let Kitty Lamar hear it. Then I’m going to send my half to the Greaser.”

  I said that to piss him off good, which sometimes was the only way you got Eddy Ray outside of his own head. He went inside the house and came back out with the 45. It was wrapped in soft tissue and taped around the edges, and I knew that Eddy Ray hadn’t given up his music.

  “Does Kitty Lamar still paint her toenails?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I always thought they were real cute.”

  He stared at me as though he’d never seen me before.

  And that’s how our band came back together and that’s how “The Oil Driller’s Lament” went on the charts and stayed there for sixteen weeks. But Eddy Ray Holland and the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City were never an item again. That’s because she married R. B. Benoit, Dobro player extraordinaire, also known as myself, in a little Assembly of God church in Del Rio, Texas. The church was right across the river from the Mexican radio station where, on a clear night, the Carter Family and Wolfman Jack beamed their radio shows high above the wheat fields and the mountains, all the way to the Canadian line, like a rainbow that has nowhere else to go.

  Water People

  Our drill barge was moored out in the middle of this long flat bay, like a big rectangle of gray iron welded onto a cookie sheet. I mean it was so hot anything you touched scalded your hands and the sun was a red ball when it rose up out of the water and you could smell dead things on the wind out in the marsh, amongst all those flooded willows and cypress and gum trees. That was right before Hurricane Audrey hit the Louisiana coast in 1957. The thundershowers we got in the afternoon weren’t anything more than hot steam, and when lightning hit on the sandbars, you could see it dancing under the chop, flickering, like yellow snakes flipping around in a barrel full of dark water.

  Skeeter was our shooter, or dynamite man, and was about forty years old and thought to be weird by everybody on board, partly because he was a preacher over in Wiggins, Mississippi, but also because he had a way of coming up behind you and running his hands down your hips. In other words, he wasn’t apt to make a skivvy run to Morgan City, although that could have been because he was a religious man. The truth is doodlebuggers did the dirtiest work in the oil field and it was no accident other people referred to us as white niggers.

  I watched Bobby Joe, our driller, drop the last six-can stick of explosives down the pipe and feed the cap wire off his palms. Bobby Joe’s chest looked like it was carved from a tree stump; it was lean and hard and tapered, swollen with muscle under the arms, tanned the gold-brown color of worn saddle leather. He had a BCD from the Crotch for busting up a couple of S.P.’s. He told me once his little boy drowned in a public swimming pool in Chicago that was full of colored people and Puerto Ricans. The next day he told me he’d lied because he was drunk and I’d better not tell anybody what he’d said. Like I’m on board to write the history of Bobby Joe Guidry.

  I wrapped the cap wire around the terminals on Skeeter’s detonator and screwed down the wing nuts and said, “You’re lit, pappy,” and everybody went aft or got on the jugboat that was tied to the stern, and when Skeeter gave it the juice, those eighteen cans of hot stuff went off with a big thrummmmmp deep down in the earth and fish jumped all over the bay like they’d been shocked with an electric current. The force of the explosion kicked the drill barge’s bow up in the air and slapped it back against the surface, then a second later brown water and sand and cap wire came geysering out of the pipe the way wildcat wells used to come in years ago, and a yellow cloud of smoke drifted back across the jugboat and filled the inside of your head with a smell like a freshly tarred gravel road.

  Skeeter wore a long-sleeve denim shirt and a cork sun helmet and steel-rim glasses that caused him to crinkle his nose all the time. His face was round as a muskmelon, puffy with the humidity, always pink with fresh sunburn, and his eyes blue and watery and red along the rims, like they were irritated from the smoke that seeped out of the water after he’d zapped the juice into the hole and given things down below a real headache. Bobby Joe was wiping the drilling mud off his chest with a nasty towel he’d gotten out of the engine room. His hair was the color of dry straw under his tin hat and there was a green and red Marine Corps tattoo on his upper arm that was slick and bright with sweat.

  “Y’all put too many cans down, Bobby Joe,” Skeeter said.

  Bobby Joe went on wiping at his hands with that rag and didn’t even look up. “I tell you how to do your job, Skeet?” he said.

  “We’re killing fish we ain’t got to. You can blow the casing out the hole, too,” Skeeter said.

  “You study on things too much.” Bobby Joe still hadn’t looked up, he just kept on wiping at those big, flat hands of his that had scars like white worms on the backs of his fingers.

  “Hit don’t say nowhere we got to blow half the damn bay into the next parish,” Skeeter said.

  “Skeet, you put me in mind of an egg-sucking dog sniffing around a brooder house,” Bobby Joe said. “I declare if you don’t.”

  We knew it was a matter of time before one of those two ran the other off. The party chief would abide any kind of behavior that didn’t hurt the job; that’s why he’d let a liberty boat head for the hot-pillow joints in Morgan City the fifth night out on the hitch, about the time some guys would start messing around in the shower and pretend it was just grab-assing. But he wouldn’t put up with guys hiding vodka in their seabags or fighting over cards or carrying a personal grief out on the drill barge, it got people hurt or killed, like the time this Mexican boy I’m fixing to tell you about fell off the bow and got sucked under the barge just when the skipper kicked over the screws, and not to be overlooked it cost the company a shitload of money.

  His nickname was Magpie because he was missing two teeth up front and he had black hair with a patch like white paint in it. He weighed about three hundred pounds and traveled around the country eating lightbulbs and blowing fire in a carnival act when he wasn’t doodlebugging. Bobby Joe said he saw him cheating in the bouree game and told him to his face. Magpie might have looked like a pile of whale shit but I saw him pick up a six-foot gator by its tail once, whip it around in the air, and heave it plumb across the barge’s deck and leave two or three drillers with weewee in their socks. Magpie told Bobby Joe they were going to have a beer and learn some helpful hints about behavior when they got off the hitch, and Bobby Joe replied he knew just the spot because the dispenser for toilet seat covers in the can had a sign on it that said PEPPERBELLY PLACE MATS.

  A week later we were way down at the mouth of the Atchafalaya, with storm winds capping the surface, and Magpie fell off the drill into the current and was swept down under the hull just as I was running at the bridge, waving my arms and yelling at the skipper, who was looking back over his shoulder at the jugboat with a cigarette in his mouth. This retarded kid on the jugboat was the first to see Magpie surface downstream. He vomited over the rail, then started screaming and running up and down on the deck till his father put him in the pilothouse and wiped his face and held his head against his chest. Think of water that runs by the discharge chute on a slaughterhouse. The thunder and wind were shrieking like the sky was being ripped loose from the earth. I don’t care to revisit moments like that.

  The quarterboat was moored with ropes to a willow island and at sunset Skeeter would stand out on the bow in the mosquitoes by himself, where all the sacks of drilling mud were stacked, or sometimes get in a pirogue and paddle back through the flooded trees. I used to think he was running a trotline but I found out different when he didn’t think anybody was watching him. He had a paper bag full of these little plastic statues of Jesus, the kind people put on their dashboard, and he’d tie fish twine around the feet with a machinist’s bolt on the other end and hold it to
his head with his eyes squinted shut, then sink it in the water and paddle on to the next spot.

  “You been out here long, W.J.?” he said when he was tying the pirogue back up.

  “Not really.”

  I felt sorry for him; it wasn’t right the way some guys made fun of him behind his back. He was at Saipan during the war. That was a lot more than most of us had done.

  “You got something fretting you, Skeet?”

  “A Mexican boy gets shredded up in the propeller and don’t nobody seem bothered.”

  “Bobby Joe says Magpie was fooling around and hanging off the rail taking a whiz. It’s just one of them things.”

  “Nobody else seen hit.”

  “Them ain’t good thoughts, Skeet.”

  “Bobby Joe wasn’t watching his little boy when he drowned in that swimming pool. He blames them other people for not saving him. I was in that bouree game. That Mexican boy wasn’t cheating.”

  At breakfast on the quarterboat we got anything we wanted; you just had to pass through the galley and tell the cook: pancakes, eggs, stacks of bacon and fried ham, grits, coffee, cereal, white bread and butter and jam. Dinner was even better: steaks, fried chicken, meat loaf, gumbo and catfish on Fridays, mashed potatoes, rice and milk gravy, sweating pitchers of Kool-Aid and iced tea, cake or ice cream for dessert.

  Lunchtimes, though, we were out on the drill barge and usually cooked up something pretty putrid, like Viennas and rice, in the small galley behind the bridge and ate it in the lee of the pilothouse. The sky was the color of scorched brass when Bobby Joe sniffed at the air and said to Skeeter, “Is there something dead out where you keep your dynamite at?”

  “Could be,” Skeeter said.

  “It’s mighty strong. You ought to do something about it, Skeet, wash it off in the shallows, slap some deodorant on it.”