Jesus Out to Sea: Stories

by James Lee Burke

  His face was narrow and dark with shadow under the brim of his big rubber fireman’s hat. I felt a fist squeeze my heart.

  But suddenly Sister Roberta was in the midst of everything. Someone had carried word to the school about the fire, and she’d had one of the brothers drive her out to the house. She talked with the deputies, helped us fix cereal at the kitchen table, and made telephone calls to find a place for us to stay besides the welfare shelter. Then she looked in Mattie’s bedroom door and studied the interior for what seemed a long time. When she came back in the kitchen, her eyes peeled the skin off our faces. I looked straight down into my cereal bowl.

  She placed her small hand on my shoulder. I could feel her fingers tapping on the bone, as though she were processing her own thoughts. Then she said, “Well, what should we do here today? I think we should clean up first. Where’s the broom?”

  Without waiting for an answer she pulled the broom out of the closet and went to work in Mattie’s room, sweeping the spilled and unstruck matches as well as the burned ones in a pile by a side door that gave onto the yard. The soot and blackened threads from the rug swirled up in a cloud around her veils and wings and smudged her starched wimple.

  One of the deputies put his hand on the broomstick. “There ain’t been an investigation yet. You can’t do that till the fire chief come out and see, Sister,” he said.

  “You always talked like a fool, Gaspard,” she said. “Now that you have a uniform, you talk like a bigger one. This house smells like an incinerator. Now get out of the way.” With one sweep of the broom she raked all the matches out into the yard.

  We were placed in foster homes, and over the years I lost contact with Sister Roberta. But later I went to work in the oil fields, and I think perhaps I talked with my father in a nightclub outside of Morgan City. An enormous live oak tree grew through the floor and roof, and he was leaning against the bar that had been built in a circle around the tree. His face was puckered with white scar tissue, his ears burnt into stubs, his right hand atrophied and frozen against his chest like a broken bird’s foot. But beyond the layers of mutilated skin I could see my father’s face, like the image in a photographic negative held up against a light.

  “Is your name Sonnier?” I asked.

  He looked at me curiously.

  “Maybe. You want to buy me a drink?” he said.

  “Yeah, I can do that,” I said.

  He ordered a shot of Beam with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side.

  “Are you Verise Sonnier from New Iberia?” I asked.

  He grinned stiffly when he took the schooner of beer away from his mouth. “Why you want to know?” he said.

  “I think I’m your son. I’m Billy Bob.”

  His turquoise eyes wandered over my face, then they lost interest.

  “I had a son. But you ain’t him. Buy me another shot?” he said.

  “Why not?” I replied.

  Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that’s just a poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer’s day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta’s rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people.

  Mist

  Lisa Guillory’s dreams are indistinct and do not contain the images normally associated with nightmares. Nor do dawn and the early-morning mist in the trees come to her in either the form of release or expectation. Instead, her dreams seem to be without sharp edges, like the dull pain of an impacted tooth that takes up nightly residence in her sleep and denies her rest but does not terrify or cause her to wake with night sweats, as is the case with many people at the meetings she has started attending.

  The meetings are held in a wood-frame Pentecostal church that is set back in a sugarcane field lined with long rows of cane stubble the farmers burn off at night. In the morning, as she drives to the meeting from the shotgun cabin in what is called the Loreauville “quarters,” where she now lives, the two-lane is thick with smoke from the stubble fires and the fog rolling off Bayou Teche. She can smell the ash and the burned soil and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou inside the fog, but it is the fog itself that bothers her, not the odor, because in truth she does not want to leave it and the comfort it seems to provide her.

  She pulls to the shoulder of the road and lights a cigarette, inhaling it deeply into her lungs, as though a cigarette can keep at bay the desires, no, the cravings, that build inside her throughout the day, until she imagines that a loop of piano wire has been fitted around her head and is being twisted into her scalp.

  Lisa’s sponsor is Tookie Goula. She is waiting for Lisa like a gargoyle by the entrance to the clapboard church. Tookie takes one look at Lisa’s face and tells her she has to come clean in front of the group, that the time of silent participation has passed, that she has a serious illness and she has to get rid of shame and guilt and admit she is setting herself up for a relapse.

  Lisa feigns indifference and boredom. She has heard it all before. “Talking at the meeting gonna get that knocking sound out of my head?”

  “What’s the knocking sound mean, Lisa?”

  “It means he was rocking around inside the coffin when they carried him to the graveyard. I heard it. Like rocks rolling ’round inside a barrel.”

  Tookie is a thick-bodied Cajun woman with jailhouse tats and a stare like a slap. She is not only inured to financial hardship and worthless men but she did a stint as a prostitute in a chain of truck stops across the upper South. She wears no makeup, bites her nails when she is angry, and doesn’t hide the fact she probably likes women more than men. She is chewing on a nail now, her eyes hot as BBs. “Quit lying,” she says.

  Lisa can feel the heat bloom in her chest. She tries to slip into the role of victim. “Why you want to hurt me like that?”

  “’Cause you ain’t honest. ’Cause you ain’t gonna get well till you stop jerking yourself around,” Tookie replies.

  “The army didn’t want me to see what he looked like. All of him wasn’t in the coffin. Maybe it wasn’t even him,” Lisa says.

  “You like making yourself suffer?”

  Lisa thinks she is going to break down. She wants to break her fists on Tookie’s face.

  “You’re setting yourself up to use, girl,” Tookie says. “You’re gonna see Herman Stanga. I know your t’oughts before you have them.”

  “Least I ain’t got to wear tattoos to hide the needle scars on my arms,” Lisa says. “Least I don’t wake up in the morning wondering what gender I am.”

  During the meeting Tookie keeps raising her dark eyes to Lisa’s, biting on her nails, rubbing the powerful muscles in her forearms, breathing with a sound like sand sliding down a drainpipe. Lisa can’t take it anymore. “My husband got killed nort’ of Baghdad. I know I’m suppose to work on acceptance, but it’s hard,” she blurts out, without introducing herself by name or identifying herself as an alcoholic or an addict. “I got twenty-seven days now. But I start t’inking of Gerald and how he died and what he must have looked like before they shipped him home, and I start having real bad t’oughts. ’Bout scoring a li’l bit of rock, maybe, not much, just a taste. Like maybe I can still handle it. I’m saying these t’ings ’cause my sponsor says I got to get honest.”

  She had believed her statement about her loss would suck the air out of the room and fill her listeners with shock and sympathy and in the ensuing silence make Tookie regret her callousness. But the local National Guard unit lost five members in Iraq in one day alone and no one has a patent now on
stories of wounded and maimed and dead GIs from South Louisiana. In fact, if anything, Lisa’s admission seems either to antagonize or bore those who are not staring out the window, trapped inside their own desperation and ennui. She realizes that in her self-absorption she has interrupted a woman who has recently been gang-raped in a crack house. Her cheeks burn with embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “My name is Lisa. I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”

  “Keep coming back, Lisa. Those first ninety days are a rough gig. Sometimes you got to fake it till you make it,” the chair of the meeting, a white man, says. Then he calls on someone else as though flipping a page in a book.

  Fake it till you make it? Fake what? Being sick all the time?

  After the meeting she heads straight for her car, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but Tookie inserts herself like an attack dog in her path. “What was that pity-pot stuff about?”

  “I made a fool of myself. You ain’t got to tell me,” Lisa replies.

  Tookie’s eyes try to peel the skin off Lisa’s face. “There’s something you ain’t owned up to,” she says.

  “My husband got blown apart. What else I got to tell you?”

  “That was eight months ago. What you hiding, you? What happened in New Orleans?”

  The sunshine is cold and hard on the cane fields, the stubble still smoking, the fog billowing in white clouds off Bayou Teche. Lisa wants to walk inside the great pillows of white fog and stay there forever.

  “I’m okay, Tookie. I’m ain’t gonna use. I promise,” she says.

  “You know how you can tell when drunks and junkies are lying? Their lips are moving. Come to my house. I’ll fix breakfast.”

  “I’m late for my appointment at the employment office.”

  Tookie steps closer to her, her face suddenly feminine, tender, almost vulnerable. Her fingers rest on Lisa’s forearm, her thumb caressing Lisa’s skin for just a moment. “Herman will try to get you in the sack. But getting in your pants ain’t what it’s about. He wants you on the pipe and working his corner. I been there, Lisa. Herman Stanga is the devil.”

  Tookie forms a circle with her index finger and thumb around Lisa’s wrist and squeezes, her mouth parting with her own undisguised need.

  Herman Stanga is full of rebop and snap-crackle-and-pop and knows how to put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, baby. Or at least that is his self-generated mystique as he cruises from place to place in New Iberia’s old red-light district, a leather bag hanging from a strap on his shoulder, a pixie expression on his lean face, his mustache like a pair of tiny blackbird’s wings against his gold skin.

  His girls are called rock queens, although a lot of them have shifted gears and are doing crystal now because it burns off their fat and keeps them competitive on the street corner where they hook. Herman prefers them white, because there are black dudes who will always pay top dollar for white bread, no matter what kind of package it comes in. But, as he is fond of saying, he is “an Affirmative Action employer. Ain’t nothing wrong with giving a country girl a crack at a downtown man.”

  Lisa did not lie to Tookie about her appointment at the state employment office. The problem was the three hundred people ahead of her when she arrived and the piano wire that someone is now tightening around her head with a wood peg. She lasts forty-five minutes in the waiting room, vomits in the bathroom, then drives down Railroad Avenue to the first liquor store she can find. The short-dog she buys may smell like a mixture of hair tonic and kerosene, but it goes down with a rush that is one notch south of the orgasmic moment she experienced when she first shot up with brown skag.

  She finishes the bottle under the shade of a spreading oak by a small grocery store. Gangbangers with black kerchiefs tied down on their heads are taking turns at a weight set under the tree, curling the bar in to their bare chests, their steroid-swollen muscles almost popping out of their skin. Lisa screws the cap on the empty bottle and stares vacantly into space, then takes her time getting out of the car and dropping the bottle in a trash barrel. She has no reason to remain under a lichen-encrusted tree, in New Iberia’s old brothel district, on a morning she should seek work, on a morning that somehow seems like a crossroads that has been set in her path. But the sun-spangled shade under the tree is a pleasant place to be, with her car door open to the wind, on a day that is both warm and cool at the same time, while the boys clank iron and leaves drift down on her windshield like gold coins.

  She shuts her eyes and breathes the heavy odor of the fortified wine in and out of her lungs, and for just a moment, as though she is outside of her body, she sees Gerald kiss her cheek and place the flat of his hand on her belly.

  Without invitation, a grinning man wearing a striped brown suit and an oxblood Stetson opens the passenger door and slides in beside her. He has two sweating cans of Budweiser balanced in his left palm and a fat package of warm boudin in the other. “Hey, darling, want to join me in a li’l snack?” he asks, already spreading the butcher paper open on the seat, filling the car with the delicious smell of ground sausage and spice and onions.

  “I ain’t here to score, Herman,” she replies.

  “I respect folks’ choices. When they get clean, I say more power to them. But that don’t mean I ain’t their friend no more.”

  He peels the tab on one of the beer cans and lets the foam rise through the hole and well over the top and slide down the back of his hand. “Here you go, baby. Sip this while I cut you some boudin chunks. You found a job yet? All them evacuees is kind of messing up the labor market, ain’t they?”

  She is an evacuee, flooded out of the Lower Ninth Ward in Orleans Parish by Hurricane Katrina, shuttled from the Superdome to a shelter in New Iberia’s City Park. In fact, she’d still be there or in a FEMA trailer camp if her aunt hadn’t given her the use of the shotgun cabin in the Loreauville quarters. But Herman already knows that. Herman knows how to flatter, to indicate his listener is different, special, not part of a categorical group whose presence is starting to be resented and feared.

  “That Budweiser is good and cold, ain’t it?” he says. “Lookie here, drive me to my crib and let me make some calls. Can you do receptionist work, answer the phone, maybe seat people in a restaurant, stuff like that?”

  “Sure, Herman.”

  “Then let’s motivate on out of here, baby,” he says, lifting his chin, indicating she should start the engine and drive the two of them to his Victorian home on Bayou Teche.

  Herman acquired the house from a black physician who, for unknown reasons, signed over the deed and left town. No one ever knew where the physician or his family went, nor were they ever heard from again. The wood columns are eaten by termites, the ventilated green shutters askew on their hinges, the second-story rain gutters bleeding rust down the walls. The oak and pecan trees are so thick that sunlight never enters the house and no grass grows in the yard.

  But Herman is not concerned with historical preservation. The swimming pool in his backyard is a glittering blue teardrop, coated with steam, where his girls float on inflated latex cushions, where bougainvillea drips as brightly as drops of blood on his latticework, where potted lime and Hong Kong orchid trees bloom year-round and assure his guests the season is eternal.

  “Sit here and relax while I call in a couple of favors from some business associates,” he says out on the terrace. “Have some of them veined shrimps. Ignore the ladies in the pool. They nice, but they ain’t in your league, know what I mean? Hey, if I get you on in a hostess position, it’s probably gonna be twelve or t’irteen dol’ars an hour. You all right wit’ that?”

  Lisa sits in the coolness of the sunshine and tries to concentrate on what she is doing. It’s only noon and she has gone from the comfort of the fog at sunrise into the meeting at the church, then to the employment office and the liquor store and the shady oak tree where boys clanked iron and admired one another’s bodies as though anatomical perfection were a stay against mortality. No
w she is at the home of Herman Stanga, watching women she doesn’t know swim in a sky-blue pool, while Herman paces back and forth behind the French doors, talking on the phone, undressing down to a thong, kicking his trousers in a rattle of change across the room.

  The bayou is chocolate-brown, the sun a wobbling balloon of yellow flame trapped under its surface. The bayou conjures up images and memories she does not want to revisit. In her mind’s eye she sees people wading in chest-deep water, the surface iridescent with a chemical sheen, fecal clouds rising from the bottom, a stench crawling into her nostrils that makes her gag. Then the knocking sound starts in her head and she has to press both fists against her temples to make it stop.

  Why has she come to Herman’s house? Does she really believe he wants to help her? What would Tookie say if she knew?

  “I’m telling you, this is a nice lady, man,” she hears Herman saying. “No, she ain’t on welfare. No, she ain’t got no personal problems or bad habits. What she got is my recommendation. Don’t give me your trash, Rodney. I’m sending her over. You treat her right, nigger.”

  Herman clicks off the phone and slips on a robe that hangs on his lithe frame like blue ice water. He motions Lisa inside and tells her to sit on a stool at a counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. “My cousin Rodney owns a couple of clubs in Lafayette and caters parties and banquets for rich people out at the Oil Center. All you got to do is supervise the buffet table and the punch bowl and make sure everybody getting the drinks they need. They want somebody know how to deal with the public. I told Rodney that’s you, baby.”

  He’s talking too fast for her. Her ears are popping and she thinks she hears voices yelling and the downdraft of helicopter blades. She realizes Herman is staring at her, his face disjointed. “You gonna get crazy on me?” he says.