Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

“Hearing problem?” he said.

  “I already answered your questions, sir.”

  The window was open. It was raining, and I could smell the rain and the coldness of the bricks in the street and the water backed up in the storm gutters. The sky was an ink wash. What is the lesson you learn if you’ve even been in the can? You turn compliance into a religion. I lifted my eyes to the detective. “Sir, I don’t know who those fellows were or why they attacked us. That’s the truth.”

  “Fellows?” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The bumper sticker on your truck probably doesn’t endear you to some people here’bouts.”

  “That’s Mr. Lowry’s truck. I didn’t look at the sticker.”

  “You work for Jude Lowry?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I should have known.”

  “I don’t get your meaning,” I said.

  “No other grower in Colorado would put a union sticker on his own truck. Does your friend Cotton Williams always carry a knife?”

  “Yes, sir. For popping bales and such.”

  “A couple of customers in the café say he pulled it before the fight got started.”

  “It wasn’t a fight, sir,” I said.

  “Your friend has a sheet. A homicide in Albuquerque. We don’t have all the details yet.”

  “Cotton?” I said.

  The streets were billowing with fog, the stone buildings on the hillsides like ships on the ocean. I couldn’t imagine Cotton killing someone other than in a war.

  “You’ve been inside, haven’t you?” Benbow said.

  I looked at the mist drifting over the windowsill.

  “No comment?” he said.

  “Jails are like flypaper,” I said. “They stay with you wherever you go.”

  “Got a little bit of temper in you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Stand up.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to hook you up. You bother me, son. I think you might have a warrant on you.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me ‘son.’ ”

  He pulled my left wrist into the small of my back and clapped a cuff around it. The resistance in my arm wasn’t intentional, but it was there. “Count your blessings,” he said.

  * * *

  AFTER EACH OF us was questioned, we were moved to the last cell on the row. Cotton was sitting on a wood bench, his head on his chest. Spud lay on a steel bunk bolted to the wall, a small battery-powered radio resting on his chest. His bottom lip was cut and puffed out of shape and one cheek swollen the size of a baseball. Carl Belew was singing “Am I That Easy to Forget” on the tiny radio.

  “Where’d you get that?” I said.

  “Gave a guy a dollar for it,” Spud said.

  “You okay, Cotton?” I said.

  “I could use some coffee.”

  I sat down next to him. “I’ve got to ask you something.”

  The rain was blowing hard on a window high above us. The walls of the jail were a pale yellow, and the bare bulbs in the corridor ceiling made shadows like bars on Cotton’s face. “So ask me,” he said.

  “You killed somebody in Albuquerque?” My lips felt weak, as though I couldn’t push the words out.

  “My son.”

  “Your—” I said.

  “I killed my own boy.” He fixed his good eye on me, then dropped his head. “My little boy. That’s how I still see him. When he was little and not what he turned into.”

  Spud sat up on the bunk and clicked off the radio.

  “He came home drunk and on drugs and shot me in the lung,” Cotton said. “Then he shot at his mother and little sister. He’d been in the state boys’ home twice. There wasn’t no fixing him.”

  “I’m sorry, Cotton,” I said.

  “It ain’t your fault. He was never right in the head. It ain’t anybody’s fault. You get the hand that’s dealt to you.”

  A trusty stopped the food cart by our cell door and slid Styrofoam cups of black coffee and paper plates of hash browns and scrambled eggs through the iron slit in the door. Spud carried them to the bench and put a cup of coffee in Cotton’s hand. “The trusty said if we eat up, we can get seconds.”

  Cotton pressed the back of his wrist in each eye and stared at nothing, a wisp of steam rising from his cup.

  * * *

  THAT MORNING MR. Lowry came to the jail and got us released. No effort was made to find out who had attacked us, or at least none that I knew of. Spud had to surrender his battery-operated radio to the deputy from whose desk it had been stolen. Wade Benbow had me brought to his office before I was given back my possessions and allowed to leave the building. He was typing at his desk.

  “The waitress at the café left a note for you,” he said. He handed me a folded piece of paper.

  “What’s this about?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t read it.”

  The paper had been torn from a spiral notebook. The message was written in pencil: You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Call me. It was signed Jo Anne McDuffy, with a phone number under the name.

  “Kid?” Benbow said.

  “Sir?”

  “Walk away from this. Don’t let a bump in the road put you in Cañon City.”

  Cañon City was the joint. Two busloads of dirty cops in Denver had just been sent there.

  He resumed typing as though I were not there.

  * * *

  IT WAS SATURDAY, and the rain was still falling, and clouds of white fog were rising from the downtown storm sewers. Cotton and Spud followed Mr. Lowry back to the farm in the truck, and I stayed in town and called the number Jo Anne McDuffy had given me.

  “It’s Aaron Broussard,” I said inside the phone booth. “Can I see you?”

  “See me?” she asked.

  “To talk about the fellows who attacked my friends and me. You said to call you.”

  “I didn’t say anything about you seeing me.”

  “Well, I’d like to, anyway.”

  “It’s not a very convenient time.”

  “How about tonight?”

  “I have to work.”

  “Miss Jo Anne, I’m no trouble.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “Who’s that?” said a man in the background.

  “No one,” she answered.

  “I can’t just walk away from what those fellows did,” I said.

  “Why do you call them ‘fellows’?”

  “My father never let me use the word ‘guy.’ ”

  She gave me an address. It was several miles outside of town. “When are you coming?” she asked.

  “As soon as I can. I don’t have a car.”

  “You say you’re no trouble?”

  “Not in my opinion,” I said.

  I hung up and pulled back the folding door on the phone booth. The air was bright with a clean, cold smell like dark water dipped out of a rain barrel in winter, perhaps a harbinger that the gifts of the earth are many, all of them waiting to be discovered.

  That probably sounds like a foolish way to think. But youth is its own narcotic, its impermanence our greatest worry and greatest loss. So why put on sackcloth and ashes over the memories we should guard like blue diamonds the rest of our lives?

  Chapter Four

  SHE LIVED ON a rural road in an adobe-style house with a flagstone porch and a flat roof and cedar logs protruding horizontally from the tops of the walls. There were big shiny-blue ceramic jars on the porch, dripping bugle and clematis vine; an old black Ford pickup was parked in the porte cochere, a fire-engine-red Mustang behind it. I stepped under the porch roof and knocked. The rain-washed paint job on the Mustang seemed the only splash of color in the landscape. She opened the door. “You came here on the deck of a submarine?”

  “I thumbed a ride.” I saw a man seated behind her at a counter that divided the kitchen and living room. “May I come in?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” she said. �
�I’ll get you a towel.”

  Through a side window I could see a picked cornfield, a three-sided shed with pigs in it, a windmill ginning with the pump disconnected, a chain rattling against the stanchions, a gray, tormented sky.

  I could feel the man on the counter stool taking my inventory. There is a radar in men that is seldom wrong. I suspect we inherit it from our fellow cave dwellers. You go to shake hands with a man whose benign face and relaxed posture are totally disarming. Then his fingers curl around yours, and a toxin enters your pores and flows up your arm and into your armpit and stays there like a prelude to a heart attack.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Ciao,” he said. His boots were hooked on the stool’s rungs. He was tall and lean and wore ironed cargo pants and a leather vest with no shirt, his skin caramel-colored and smooth as clay, his hair long and sun-bleached on the tips, his eyes merry. “That’s ‘hello’ in Italian,” he said, and winked.

  “No kidding?” I said.

  Jo Anne came back with a towel. “This is Henri Devos, my art professor,” she said.

  “How are you doing?” I said. I took off my raincoat and offered my hand. He did not rise from his stool. He didn’t blink, either, the way movie stars don’t blink.

  “Are you the fellow who had a bad time of it last night?” he said.

  “Nothing of historical importance,” I said.

  “Glad you weren’t hurt too seriously. I’d leave the buggers alone.”

  “I didn’t bother the ‘buggers.’ ”

  “Bravo! That gives you the moral high ground,” he said. “I’d let it go at that.”

  I nodded, my gaze in neutral space.

  “What I mean is they’re anachronisms who have no other place to go,” he said.

  I folded my raincoat and placed it on the floor by the door, my back to him. I was never good at hiding my feelings. “They’re victims?”

  He grinned, his eyes indulgent, warm, lingering on the edge of kind. He was obviously a pro and not one to take the bait.

  “Do I have it right, sir?” I said.

  He sniffed and took a breath as though caving in to social necessity. “Their own karma will catch up with them. That’s all I was saying. No great message there.”

  “Like karma caught up with Joseph Stalin?” I said. “Or Hirohito? Boy, those suckers paid the price.”

  He grinned and looked at Jo Anne. Then I saw it. The flash in the corner of the eye, the deferred longing, the predator that would have to wait for another day. “I have to be going,” he said. “But we’re on for tomorrow, right?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Atta girl,” he said. He looked at me. “Can I give you a lift?”

  “I can walk,” I replied.

  “You enjoy sloshing around in stormy weather, splashing through the mud puddles, that sort of thing?”

  “Actually, that’s why I do farmwork. I don’t like to be crowded.”

  “Sending out warning signals, are we?”

  “Does your faculty do student home calls on the weekend?” I said.

  “I live not far from here. I dropped by to see how Jo Anne’s work is coming along. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Stop this,” Jo Anne said.

  “Let him talk,” Devos said. “I have the feeling Aaron is a complex man. Perhaps writing a book on the migrants? Taping folk songs, the John and Alan Lomax routine?”

  “Not me,” I said. “I have a Gibson guitar and play it badly.”

  “Oh, humble man.”

  I could feel a pressure band tightening along the left side of my head. Behind my eyelids, I saw Devos undressing Jo Anne, putting his lips on her breasts, sliding his hand down her stomach. These were the kinds of bizarre images I saw inside my head with regularity; they made me wonder if I was perverse or impaired. The room was swaying. I looked out the window. “Are those the neighbor’s pigs?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Devos said.

  “I know everything there is to know about pigs,” I said. “Hamps, Yorks, Hamp-Yorks, York-Hamps, Poland China, Chester Whites, Red Wattles. Let’s take a walk out to the pen. You might want to paint them. It’s probably cheaper than hiring nude models. Or do you use your students for that?”

  “Leave,” Jo Anne said to him.

  Devos got off the stool and picked up an Australian army campaign hat that rested crown down on the counter. He fitted it on his brow and tightened the chinstrap. “Our friend here is an all-right fellow,” he said to her. “He’s had a rough go of it, and I can’t blame him for his feelings. Give me a ring later, and we’ll talk about your new work. It’s marvelous.”

  My stomach was roiling. But the problem wasn’t his. I had allowed him to be magnanimous at my expense. He opened the door, then turned and gave her a thumbs-up, the rain blowing a nimbus around his head, wetting his skin, the warmth in his eyes and the sensuousness in his mouth undisguised. I felt like a voyeur.

  * * *

  JO ANNE WATCHED Devos drive away in his Mustang, then slapped a legal pad on the counter and began writing with such intensity and anger that the lead in her pencil broke.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “What does it look like?” She started writing again. “Darrel Vickers led the attack on you. His father’s name is Rueben. He’s worse than the son. They’re both buckets of shit.”

  “I’m sorry I offended your friend, or whatever he is.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Meaning I should toggle along?”

  Her face was heated, and she curled her nails into the heels of her hands like someone who wasn’t used to getting angry. “Don’t go near the Vickers family. You’ll lose.”

  “You’re really a painter?”

  My words seemed to break on her face. She was wearing tennis shoes without socks and a denim shirt that hung over a frilly white dress printed with wash-faded pink roses. There was a mole by the side of her mouth and freckles on the backs of her hands.

  “I lied to your friend about writing a book,” I said. “I wrote a novel that has been rejected all over New York.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Henri that?”

  “If you have faith in your gift, you don’t talk about it with people who’ve never paid any dues,” I said. There was a sunporch off the living room, an easel by the picture window, a tarnished silver glow in the sky above a mountain that looked made of slag. “Can I see your work?”

  “What makes you think Henri has never paid dues?” she said.

  “He thinks he’s better than other people. Only one kind of person does that: somebody who hasn’t gotten his ticket punched.”

  Her bluish-green eyes were sullen and receded in her face, perhaps because she wanted to show me her art but felt it would be a betrayal of a friend. How do you recognize a real painter or writer? They’re monks, no matter what they pretend to be. “I don’t like people staring at me,” she said.

  “I came here because I needed to thank you for coming to the jail,” I said. “You’re brave, Miss Jo Anne. It’s written all over you.”

  She looked at me uncertainly, her lips parting, her eyes focusing on me as though I were not the same person who had walked in unannounced from a storm and immediately become a harbinger of trouble in her life. She drew in her breath, a flush of color like the petal of a broken red tulip on her throat.

  “I’ve got to make a confession also,” I said. “I’m twenty-six and a failed English instructor, and with justification, some people would say I shouldn’t be hanging around a girl your age.”

  “I’ll decide who hangs around me and who doesn’t.”

  “Could I look at your paintings?”

  “Help yourself.”

  The light was poor on her sunporch, the barren landscape a playground for dinosaurs, a solitary hill in the distance that resembled a dead volcano, the sun a gaseous imitation.

  She walked among her paintings and turned around slowly. The hem of her dress fluttered fr
om the warm air of a floor fan. There was a softness around her mouth that made my heart ache, and I knew I was straying into a situation that was wrongheaded and maybe exploitive.

  “I was drying my canvas when Henri came over,” she said. “I paint things not many people care about. Maybe they’re not that good. Henri is the only one to see them. What do you think?” She picked up a canvas that was propped against the wall and held it up for me to see. “This is one of a dozen on the same subject.”

  I wasn’t ready for it. The intensity and depth of the image made my stomach clench. I wanted to scrub it from my mind so I would not have to view it in my sleep. The canvas had become an entryway into a ragged pit in the earth where eleven children and two women were assembled like a church choir, their heads shaped like darning socks, backdropped by smoke and flames, their mouths black holes, their screams trapped under the paint.

  * * *

  I LOOKED AT EACH of the paintings, all of them an extrapolation from photographs taken after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre just twelve miles up the road: armored cars mounted with machine guns; soldiers in campaign hats armed with Springfield rifles; the body of a dead miner lying by a train track; incinerated shacks, the families bunched in front of them in their best clothes, as though attending a funeral, their meager belongings—a pipe bed frame, a hand-crank laundry tub, a tin bread box, a tricycle, its tires melted—poking out of the ashes.

  “Not many people know about the Ludlow Massacre,” I said. “At least in Texas, they don’t.”

  “My father talked about it all the time.”

  “He was a miner?”

  “He was a preacher. He was born blind and never saw light except in his sleep. We ran a hotel that was built on the Goodnight-Loving Trail. It looked like a palace.” When Jo Anne smiled, I wanted to touch her face.

  “Are your folks still living?”

  “No, my mother died of cancer, and my father was sucked up from a storm cellar by a tornado. I rode the Greyhound all over the Panhandle looking for him.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I thought maybe the tornado had set him down somewhere and he’d lost his memory, like Moses wandering around in the desert. I spent two years looking for him, then I sold the hotel and came up here and bought this house and enrolled at the junior college.” She stopped. “I told you how I feel about people who stare.”