Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  But not Bubba's wife. Her breasts hung heavy in a black sun halter that was covered with red hearts, and her jeans were pulled low on her soft, tanned stomach to expose an orange and purple butterfly tattooed by her navel. She saw me through the dancers and walked toward my table, a smile at the edge of her mouth, her hips creasing and undulating with her movement, the top of her blue jeans damp with perspiration against her skin.

  She leaned down on the table and smiled into my eyes. There were sun freckles on the tops of her breasts. I could smell beer on her breath and the faint odor of marijuana in her hair. Her eyes were indolent and merry at the same time, and she bit down on her lip as though she had come to a sensuous conclusion for both of us.

  "Where's the wifey?" she said.

  "Down the street."

  "Will she let you dance with me?"

  "I'm not a good dancer, Mrs. Rocque."

  "I bet you're good at other things, then. Everybody has their special talent." She bit down on her lip again.

  "I think maybe I'm one of those people who was born without any. Some of us don't have to seek humility."

  She smiled sleepily.

  "The sun went behind the clouds," she said. "I wanted to get some more tan. Do you think I'm dark enough?"

  I ate from my paper plate and tried to grin good-naturedly.

  "Some people say my family has colored and Indian blood in it," she said. "I don't care, though. Like my mother's colored girls used to say, 'The black berry got the sweet juice.'"

  Then she touched away a drop of sweat on my forehead with her finger and put it in her mouth. I felt my face redden in the stares from the people on each side of me.

  "Last chance to dance," she said, then put her hands behind her head and started to sway her hips to a Jimmy Clanton song the rock 'n' roll band was playing on the stage. She flexed her breasts and rolled her stomach and her eyes looked directly into mine. Her tongue moved around the edges of her mouth as though she were eating an ice cream cone. A family seated next to me got up and moved. She bent her knees so her rear came tight against her jeans, and held her elbows close against the sides of her breasts with her fingers pointed outward, her wet mouth pouting, and went lower and lower toward the ground with the pale tops of her breasts exposed to everyone at the table. I looked away at the bandstand, then saw Annie walk through the crowd with Alafair's hand in hers.

  Claudette Rocque and Annie looked at each other with that private knowledge and recognition of intention that women seem to have between one another. But there was no embarrassment in Claudette's face, only that indolent, merry light in her reddish brown eyes. Then she smiled at both of us, put her hand idly on a man's shoulder, and in a moment had moved off with him into the center of the street.

  "What was that?" Annie said.

  "Bubba Rocque's wife."

  "She seems to have enjoyed entertaining you."

  "I think she's been hitting on the muta this afternoon."

  "The what?"

  "The reefer."

  "I loved the dancing butterfly. She wiggles it around so well."

  "She learned it at Juilliard. Come on, Annie, no screws today."

  "Butterfly? Butterfly dance?" Alafair said. She wore a Donald Duck cap with a yellow bill that quacked when you squeezed it. I picked her up on my knee and quacked the cap's bill, happy to be distracted from Annie's inquiring eye. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Claudette Rocque dancing with the man she had found in the crowd, her stomach pressed tightly against his loins.

  The next day the doctor snipped the stitches out of my scalp and mouth. When I ran my tongue along the inside of my lip, the skin felt like a rubber bicycle patch with welts in it. Later that afternoon I went to an AA meeting. The air conditioner was broken, and the room was hot and smoky. My mind wandered constantly.

  It was almost summer now, and the afternoon seemed to grow hotter as the day wore on. We ate supper on the redwood table in the backyard amid the drone of the cicadas and the dry rumble of distant thunder. I tried to read the newspaper on the porch, but I couldn't concentrate on the words for more than a paragraph. I went down to the dock to see how many boats were still out, then went back up to the house and closed myself in the back room where I kept my weight set and historical jazz collection. I put on an old Bunk Johnson 78, and as the clear, bell-like quality of his horn lifted out of the static and mire of sound around him, I started a series of curls with ninety pounds on the bar, my biceps and chest swelling with blood and tension and power each time I brought the bar from my thighs up to my chin.

  In fifteen minutes I was dripping sweat on the wooden floor. I took off my shirt, put on my gym trunks and running shoes, and did three miles on the dirt road along the bayou, the soreness was almost completely gone from my genitals, where I had been kicked by Eddie Keats, and my wind was good and my heartbeat steady all the way down the road. I could have done another two miles. Normally, I would have felt good about all the energy and resilience in my middle-aged body, but I well knew the machinery that was working inside me, and it had nothing to do with health or the breathless twilit evening or the fireflies sparkling in the black-green trees or the bream popping the water's surface along the lily pads. Summer in south Louisiana has always been, to me, part of an eternal song. Tonight I simply saw the fading red spark of sun on the horizon as the end of spring.

  It was a strange night. The stars looked hot in the black sky. There was absolutely no wind, and each leaf on the pecan trees looked as though it were etched out of metal. The surface of the bayou was flat and still, the willows and cattails along the banks motionless. When the moon rose, the clouds looked like silver horsetails against the sky.

  I showered with cold water and lay in my underwear on top of the sheets in the dark. Annie traced her fingers on my shoulder. Her head lay facing me on the pillow, and I could feel her breath on my skin.

  "We can work through it, Dave. Every marriage has a few bad moments," she said. "We don't have to let them dominate us."

  "All right."

  "Maybe I've been selfish. Maybe I've wanted too much on my terms."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I've wanted you to be something you're not. I've tried to pretend for both of us that you're finished with police work and all that world back in New Orleans."

  "I left it on my own. You didn't have anything to do with it."

  "You turned in a resignation, but you didn't leave it, Dave. You never will."

  I looked up into the darkness and waited. The moonlight made patterns on our bodies through the turning window fan.

  "If you want to go back to it, maybe that's what we should do," she said.

  "Nope."

  "Because you don't think I can handle it?"

  "Because it's a toilet."

  "You say that, but I don't think that's the way you feel."

  "My first partner was a man I admired a great deal. He had honest-to-God guts and integrity. One time on Canal a little girl was thrown through a windshield and had her arm cut off. He ran into a bar, filled his coat with ice, and wrapped the arm in it, and they sewed it back on. But before that same guy retired he took juice, he-"

  "What?"

  "He took bribes. He shook down whores for freebies. He blew away a fourteen-year-old black kid on the roof of the welfare project."

  "Listen to the anger in your voice. It's like a fire inside you."

  "It's not anger. It's a statement of fact. You stay in it and you start to talk and think like a lowlife, and one day you find yourself doing something that you didn't think yourself capable of, and that's when you know you're really home. It's not a good moment."

  "You were never like that, and you never will be." She put her arm across my chest and her knee across my thigh.

  "Because I got out of it."

  "You thought you did, but you didn't." She rubbed her knee and the inside of her thigh up and down my leg and moved the flat of her hand down my chest and stomach. "I know an off
icer whose physical condition needs some attention."

  "Tomorrow I want to talk with the nuns about enrolling Alafair in kindergarten."

  "That's a good idea, skipper."

  "Then we'll go to the swimming pool and have lunch in St. Martinville."

  "Whatever you say." She pressed tightly against me, blew her breath in my hair, and hooked her leg across both my thighs. "What other plans do you have?"

  "There's an American Legion game tomorrow night, too. Maybe we'll just take the whole day off."

  "Can I touch you here? Oh my, and I thought you were so stoic, couldn't be swayed by a girl's charms. My baby-love is a big actor, isn't he?"

  She kissed my cheek, then my mouth, then got on top of me in her maternal way, as she always did, and stroked my face and smiled into my eyes. The moonlight fell on her tan skin and heavy white breasts, and she raised herself slightly on her knees, took me in her hand, and pressed me inside her, her mouth forming a sudden O, her eyes suddenly looking inward upon herself. I kissed her hair, her ear, the tops of her breasts, I ran my hands along her back and her shaking, hard thighs, and finally I felt all the day's anger and heat, which seemed to live in me like hot sunlight trapped in a bottle of whiskey, disappear in her rhythmic breathing against my cheek and her hands and arms that pressed and caressed me all over as though I could escape from under her love that was as warm, unrelenting, and encompassing as the sea.

  My dreams took me many places. Sometimes I would be in a pirogue with my father, deep in the Atchafalaya swamp, the fog thick in the black trees, and just as the sun broke on the earth's rim, I'd troll my Mepps spinner next to the cypress stumps and a largemouth bass would sock into it and burst from the quiet water, rattling with green-gold light. But tonight I dreamed of Hueys flying low over jungle canopy and milky-brown rivers. In the dream they made no sound. They looked like insects against the lavender sky, and as they drew closer I could see the door-gunners firing into the trees. The downdrafts from the helicopter blades churned the tree-tops into a frenzy, and the machine-gun bullets blew water out of the rivers, raked through empty fishing villages, danced in geometrical lines across dikes and rice paddies. But there was no sound and there were no people down below. I saw a door-gunner's face, and it was stretched tight with fear, whipped with wind, throbbing with the action of the gun. I could see only one of his eyes-squinted, cordite-bitten, liquid with the reflected images of dead water buffalo in the heat, smoking villages, and glassy countryside, where the people had scurried into the earth like mice. His hands were swollen and red, his finger wrapped in a knot around the trigger, the flying brass cartridge casings kaleidoscopic in the light. There were no people to shoot at anymore, but no matter-his charter was clear. He was forever wedded and addicted to this piece of earth that he'd helped make desolate, this land that was his drug and nemesis. The silence in the dream was like a scream.

  I woke to the sounds of dry lightning, a car passing on the dirt road by the bayou, the bullfrogs croaking down by the duck pond. I had no analytical interest in the interpretation of dreams. The strange feelings and mechanisms they represented always went away at dawn, and that was all that mattered. I hoped that one day they would go away altogether. I once read that Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II, slept with a.45. I believe he was a brave and good man, but for some the nocturnal landscape is haunted by creatures forged in a devil's furnace. The Greeks called upon Morpheus to abate the Furies. I simply waited on the false dawn, and sometimes with luck I fell asleep again before it arrived.

  But this night was alive with too many sounds, too many shards of memory that worked on the edge of the mind like rat's teeth, for me to regain sleep easily. I put on my clack sandals, poured a glass of milk in the kitchen, and walked down to the duck pond in my skivvies. The ducks were bunched in the shadows of the cattails, and the moon and lighted clouds were reflected as perfectly in the still water as though they had been trapped under dark glass. I sat on a bench by the collapsed barn that marked the end of my property, and looked out over my neighbor's pasture and sugarcane field in the moonlight. On the barn wall behind me, whose red paint had long since flaked away, was a tin Hadacol sign from thirty-five years ago. Hadacol had been manufactured by a state senator from Abbeville, and it not only contained enough vitamins and alcohol to make you get up from your deathbed, but the boxtop would allow you admission to the traveling Hadacol show, which one year had featured Jack Dempsey, Rudy Vallee, and an eight-foot Canadian giant. I marveled at the innocence of the era in which I had grown up.

  Then I saw the heat lightning flash brightly in the south, and a breeze came up suddenly and broke the moonlight apart in the water and dented the leaves of the pecan trees in my front yard. The cows in the pasture were already bunched, and I could smell rain and sulfur in the air and feel the barometric pressure dropping. I finished the milk in my glass, leaned back against the barn wall with my eyes closed, breathed the wet coolness on the wind, and realised that without even trying I was going to overcome my insomnia that night and go back to bed and sleep by my wife while the rain tinked on the window fan.

  But when I opened my eyes I saw two dark silhouettes move as quickly and silently as deer out of the pecan trees in the front yard, past my line of vision, onto my front porch. Even as I rose to my feet, widening my eyes in the futile wish that I had seen only shadows, my heart sank with a terrible knowledge that I had experienced only once before, and that was when I had heard the klatch of the mine under my foot in Vietnam. Even as I started to run toward the darkened house, even before I heard the crowbar bite into the door-jamb, before the words burst out of my throat, I knew that my nocturnal fears would have their realisation tonight and not be dispelled by a false dawn that only fools waited upon. I tripped on my sandals, kicked them from my feet, and ran barefoot over the hard ground, the litter of broken boards and rusty nails from the barn roof, the cattails that grew up the bank from the pond, shouting. "I'm out here! I'm out here!" like a hysterical man lost on a piece of moonscape.

  But my words were lost in the thunder, the wind, the splatter of raindrops on the tin roof, the crowbar that splintered the door jamb, sprung the hinges, snapped the deadbolt, ripped the door open into the living room. Then I heard my own voice again, a sound like an animal's cry breaking out of a wet bubble, and I heard the shotguns roar and saw the flashes leap in the bedroom like heat lightning in the sky. They fired and fired, the pump-actions clacking loudly back into place with each fresh shell, the explosions of flame dissecting the darkness where my wife lay alone under a sheet. Their buckshot blew window glass and curtain material out into the yard, tore divots of wood from the outside wall, rang off the window fan blades. A bolt of lightning struck somewhere behind me, and my own skin looked white and dead in the illumination.

  They had stopped shooting. I stood breathless and barefoot in my underwear in the rain and looked through the broken window and ragged curtains at the outline of a man who stared back at me, motionless, his shotgun held at an angle across his chest. Then I heard the pump clack back to feed another shell into the chamber.

  I ran to the side of the house, pressed myself against the cypress boards, moved under the windows toward the front, and crouched in the darkness. I heard one of them knock into a wall or door in the dark, trip over the telephone extension, rip the phone from its jack, and throw it down the hall. There was blood on the tops of my feet, a ragged tear in my ankle, but my body had no feeling. My head reeled as though it had been slapped hard with a rolled newspaper, and I could taste the bile rising uncontrollably from my stomach. I had no weapon; my neighbors were away; there was nothing I could do to help Annie. Sweat and rainwater ran out of my hair like insects.

  There was nothing else to do but run for the phone in the bait shop. Then I heard the front screen fly back against the wall and both of them come out on the gallery. Their feet were loud on the wood, their steps going in one direction, then another. I pressed against the side
of the house and waited. All one of them had to do was jump over the side railing of the gallery, and he would have me at point-blank range. Then their feet stopped, and I realised that their attention was focused on something else. A pickup truck was banging down the dirt road toward the dock, the rain slanting in the beam of a single headlight that bounced off the trees. I knew it must be Batist. He lived a quarter-mile down the road, slept on his screened gallery in the summer, and would have heard and recognised the gunfire, even in the thunder.

  "Shit on it. Let's get out of here," one man said.

  The other man spoke, but his voice was lost in the rain on the tin roof and a peal of thunder.

  "So you come back and do him. It's a lousy hit, anyway. You didn't say nothing about a broad," the first man said. "Sonofabitch, the truck's turning in here. I'm gone. Clean up your own mess next time."

  I heard one man jump off the steps and start running. The second man paused, his feet scraped hesitantly on the wood planks, then I heard the step bend under his weight, and a moment later I could see the two of them running at an angle through the trees toward a car parked down by the bayou. With their shotguns at port-arms, they looked like infantry fleeing through a forest at night.

  I raced through the front door into the bedroom and hit the light switch, my heart thundering in my chest. Red shotgun shells littered the doorway area; the mahogany foot and headboards of the bed were gouged and splintered with buckshot and deer slugs; the flowered wallpaper above the bed was covered with holes like black dimes. The sheet, which still lay over her, was drenched with her blood, the torn cloth embedded in wounds that wolves might have chewed. Her curly blond head was turned away from me on the pillow. One immaculate white hand hung over the side of the mattress.