Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  “I don’t mean to. Can I see you after you get off tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll be tired.”

  “Can I see you in the morning?”

  “Henri is taking me to breakfast.”

  I felt cold and wet and used up, the moldy stink of the jail still on my skin. I looked at the yellow legal tablet on the counter. “What are the first names of the Vickers family again?”

  “Darrel and Rueben.”

  “They’re criminals?”

  “Criminals get charged with crimes. The Vickerses don’t. Get it?”

  I looked again at the first canvas she had shown me. The children’s faces seemed to reach across time, begging for help, a kind word, or just an explanation. I could not take my eyes off the painting.

  She studied my face. “You all right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re a strange one.”

  “I’ve never had high regard for normalcy.”

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll drive you to wherever you’re staying.”

  Chapter Five

  SUNDAY NIGHT I told Spud and Cotton who our attackers were. On Monday morning we had just taken a break from cleaning and harrowing twenty acres, split by a creek lined with cottonwoods, when we saw a dirty yellow race car turn off the two-lane and come hard down the road, troweling a flume of dust so thick it blotted out the sun. The race car was dented and had a big black number 7 painted on the hood and the driver’s door.

  Mr. Lowry was standing with us under a solitary cottonwood tree by a creek bed, drinking from a tin cup he’d just filled from our watercooler, one that had a block of ice floating under the lid. He was a handsome man with thick white hair and the chiseled features I always associated with the revolutionary soldiers who fought at Breed’s Hill. A Rotary Club article in a local newspaper said he had migrated from Massachusetts to Colorado after his return from World War I. The article said he was a recipient of the Medal of Honor. Mr. Lowry never argued or demeaned and reminded me in many ways of my father, who had been at both the Somme and the Marne.

  “Who’s that?” Cotton said.

  “Rueben Vickers and his son,” Mr. Lowry said. “We’re not going to have trouble with them, are we, Cotton?”

  Cotton sipped from his cup, his good eye like a solitary marble on a plate.

  “Cotton?” Mr. Lowry said.

  “It won’t start on my account, Mr. Lowry,” Cotton said.

  “What about you, Spud?” Mr. Lowry asked.

  Spud’s eyes were half-lidded. You could never tell what Spud was thinking. Most of the time it was about women. But he came from East Kentucky, and I believed on occasion his thoughts wandered into the dark hollows of his ancestors. “They hurt us pretty bad, Mr. Lowry. It’s not fair what they got away with.”

  “I’m asking if you’ll put your trust in me for the next few minutes.”

  “Yes, sir, if that’s what you want,” Spud replied.

  “What about you, Aaron?” Mr. Lowry said.

  The cottonwood leaves were clicking in the sunlight. Mr. Lowry didn’t have to wait long for an answer from me. I grew up in Texas and Louisiana and knew better than to mess with rich and powerful people, particularly in the oil business. “You’re the skipper, Mr. Lowry,” I said.

  “Well, good enough, fellows,” he said, his gaze lingering on me, perhaps not entirely convinced.

  The race car pulled onto the grass and into the shade. Rueben, the father, cut the engine and got out. His son, Darrel, followed, but not until his father had closed the driver’s door. Darrel closed his own door quietly, snicking it tight, as though trying not to draw attention. His cheeks and throat were patinaed with soft red stubble, his coppery hair freshly barbered and bright with a light oil. He reached behind the seat and lifted up a coned straw hat and put it on, his face shadowing, as though he had taken on another persona.

  “What can I do for you, Rueben?” Mr. Lowry said.

  Rueben Vickers was probably no more than five nine and had the wiry muscularity of a man for whom physical work was a religion. He wore sandals and a plain beige short-sleeve shirt and unironed brown slacks that flattened against his body in the wind, the kind of dress a self-made and socially indifferent man would wear every day of the week without remembering he’d put them on. His expression was a different matter. It was a lightning bolt, a permanent emotional disfiguration, the flag of a man who kept the wounds green unto the grave.

  “A detective came to our ranch in the middle of dinner,” he said. “His name is Wade Benbow. Know him?”

  “Seems familiar. What’d he do?” Mr. Lowry said.

  “He said somebody here accused my son of attacking your workers,” Vickers replied.

  I knew then that Jo Anne had given the name of Darrel Vickers to Detective Benbow, because I had not.

  “Point out the liar who did that, Jude,” Vickers said.

  I could hear the tree rustling above us. Cotton was sitting on a stump. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and blew out the paper match and puffed on the cigarette. The smoke broke apart in the silence. Cotton spat between his legs.

  “You have a mark on your face, Darrel,” Mr. Lowry said. “Did someone strike you?”

  “That man right there, the one with the dead eye,” Darrel replied.

  Cotton looked asleep, his cigarette hanging between two fingers.

  “You, there,” Vickers said. “With the Bull Durham.”

  Cotton cleared his throat and mumbled.

  Vickers’s face twitched as though a fly had landed on it. “What did you say?”

  Cotton shook his head as though distancing himself from his own words.

  “I asked you a question, boy,” Vickers said.

  “Go easy there, Rueben,” Mr. Lowry said.

  Cotton field-stripped his cigarette and let the tobacco and paper blow away, then rose from the stump and looked at Vickers. “That’s your son, is he?”

  “Who does he look like?” Vickers said. The disjointed glare in his eyes had frozen, as though he knew he had stepped across a line into unknown territory.

  “Then you raised a goddamn liar,” Cotton said.

  Darrel stepped forward. He was taller than his father, his body flaccid, love handles on his hips, his navel showing above his belt buckle. His father took hold of his arm. “Stay put, son. Are the other ones here?”

  “This guy just called me a liar, Daddy.”

  “We’ll make sure he regrets it. Do you see the others or not?”

  “Those two by the water can,” Darrel said.

  “I won’t allow this, Rueben,” Mr. Lowry said.

  “My grandparents pioneered the land you’re standing on, Jude,” Vickers replied. “They were burned to death by the Comanche three miles from here. You will not lecture me, and you will not bring your unions and your politics into the lives of my employees.”

  “It was the bumper sticker on my truck, wasn’t it?” Mr. Lowry said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your son and his friends punished three innocent men for driving a truck that had a United Farm Workers sticker on it.”

  “Don’t start what you can’t finish, Jude,” Vickers said.

  “Mr. Vickers?” I said.

  “What?”

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” he said.

  “I think you know the truth,” I said. “I also think you hit your son in the face.”

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Aaron Holland Broussard.”

  Vickers chewed on the edge of his lip, nodding. “Stay here, Mr. Broussard.” He went to his car and dipped his arm between the driver’s door and the seat, then marched toward me, a horse quirt in his right hand. Mr. Lowry tried to stand in front of him, but Vickers knocked him aside.

  “Don�
�t you hurt that man, Rueben!” Mr. Lowry said at his back, off balance, holding one hand to his chest.

  I was standing on a slope. I could hear the other workers stepping away from me. Vickers was coming straight at me, striding out of the sun’s brilliance into the spangled shade under the cottonwood, his face a feral knot. I kept my hands at my sides, my eyes on his. I heard Mr. Lowry cry out, but his voice was lost inside a gust of wind that turned the cottonwood tree into a thousand green butterflies.

  Vickers slashed the quirt down across my eye and cheek and mouth. Then he hit me again. And again, each blow taking away the pain from the previous blow. I didn’t move, not even to raise my arms. I could feel blood sliding out of my hair, and taste salt on my lips, and hear a ringing sound inside my left ear where he had backstroked me.

  Mr. Lowry tried to pull the quirt from Vickers’s hand, but Vickers shoved him to the ground. “Old man or not, I’ll put it to you, Jude,” Vickers said.

  “Don’t touch Mr. Lowry again,” I said. “If you do, your life may be forfeit.”

  Vickers’s face was slick with sweat, his breath short, his voice wadded with phlegm. “I can have you in prison for that one remark.”

  “Cotton is a recipient of the Silver Star, Mr. Vickers,” I said. “You owe him an apology.”

  He backed away from me into full sunlight. His quirt was marbled with my blood. “You won’t talk to me like that.”

  “I think you have a black soul, sir,” I said.

  He seemed to flinch as if struck by an invisible hand. He turned in a circle, the quirt shaking uncontrollably in his hand. Then he pointed it at me as though he had forgotten where he was. “I can flay you alive.”

  “You’re a bully, Mr. Vickers. I also think you carry an incubus, one that will cost you your soul.”

  He wasn’t ready for it. His face seemed to crumple, like a sheet of paper curling above a flame. His lips were shaking, the top of his exposed chest printed with green veins. He turned to Mr. Lowry. “You’ll pay for this, Jude!”

  “Get off my land, Rueben,” Mr. Lowry said. “Never enter it again.”

  “This is not over,” Vickers said. “No one talks to me like that.”

  “Aaron is right,” Mr. Lowry said. “What you hear is your own evil speaking to you. Be gone with you.”

  Vickers pushed his son toward the car, then got behind the wheel and started the engine. He ground the gears and backed in a circle and crashed over a rock, his wheels fishtailing and scouring dirt and divots of grass in the air. As the dust thinned and the car spun onto the road, his son’s eyes found mine, in the way fellow travelers find each other. I even thought he might show sympathy or offer a kind word. He grinned and mouthed the words “You’re fucked.”

  My face and head felt as though they had been attacked by bumblebees. Mr. Lowry was digging a first-aid kit out of his truck. Spud and a black man eased me down on the tailgate of the truck and put a cup of water in my hand.

  “Why’d you let him hit you like that?” Spud said.

  “Anybody can fight,” I replied.

  Spud stared blankly at the blueness of the mountains, the dry creek bed and the white rocks stenciled with dead hellgrammites, the cottonwoods swelling with wind. “What was that stuff about him putting you in prison?” he said.

  “Vickers was just making noise.”

  “You don’t think he’s coming after us?”

  “Not us. We’re too obvious.”

  “What do you mean ‘not us’? People like Vickers chew up people like us.”

  I tried to stand up. Behind my eyelids, I saw Jo Anne on the sunporch of her house, the warm air of the floor fan blowing the hem of her dress. Then I fell sideways as though one of my legs had been chopped off.

  Chapter Six

  MR. LOWRY DROVE me to the emergency room at San Rafael Hospital and stayed with me while an intern treated the welts on my face and head and stitched a lesion above my ear.

  “Somebody attacked you?” the intern said, dabbing a place above my eye.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We’ll have to report this to the police,” he said.

  “A man named Rueben Vickers hit me with a quirt.”

  Showing no reaction, the intern concentrated on the cut, his hand steady. “There,” he said. “Come back in five or six days and we’ll take your stitches out. It’s been nice meeting you.” He left the cubicle.

  “This grieves me deeply, Aaron,” Mr. Lowry said.

  “It’s not your fault, sir.”

  “Why didn’t you defend yourself?”

  “Fear.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I fear what I’m capable of, Mr. Lowry. Sometimes I go to a dark place in my head, and I don’t know how to get back.”

  “How long have you had this condition?”

  “Since I was a little boy.”

  I took off my hospital gown and put on my shirt. Mr. Lowry’s eyes were a clear blue, his hair as white as cotton, his skin as soft as a baby’s. “You used a term with Rueben that got to him. What do you know about an incubus?”

  “It’s a form of demon from the Middle Ages.”

  “I see. You believe in demons?”

  “I’ve seen enough evil in people without looking for the devil.”

  “After the season, are you going down to the Rio Grande Valley with the other boys?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Got a girl on your mind?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “What young man doesn’t?” he said. “Why have you chosen this kind of life for yourself, Aaron?”

  “It’s the one I do the best,” I replied.

  The intern pulled back the curtain on the cubicle, the plastic rings rattling. “There’s a police detective named Benbow who wants to talk to you,” he said.

  * * *

  DETECTIVE WADE BENBOW was waiting for us by the emergency entrance. He took off his short-brim Stetson when he saw Mr. Lowry. “How do you do, Mr. Jude? I’d like to talk to Aaron in my vehicle if you don’t mind. We won’t be long.”

  “That’s fine,” Mr. Lowry said.

  I sat down in the passenger seat of the unmarked car and left the door partly open. Benbow got behind the wheel. “Close the door,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  His eyes roved over my face. “You took quite a licking.”

  “I’ve been through worse.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Who cares?” I said.

  “Are you pressing charges?”

  “No, sir.”

  He was wearing a gray sport coat and a snap-button purple shirt and a wide leather belt and dark slacks that had flecks of grass on the cuffs. An open package of Lucky Strikes rested on the dashboard. He picked it up and shook a cigarette loose. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He tossed the package back on the dash. “Good for you. I’m trying to quit. Want to tell me why you’re not pressing charges?”

  “I don’t trust y’all or anything you do.”

  “How did you arrive at this great assessment of our system?”

  “I was in a lockdown unit fifteen feet from where a man was electrocuted. I could hear him weeping. The electricity made a warm smell, like someone ironing clothes.”

  Benbow’s eyes were empty. My words seemed to have no influence on him. He took a manila folder from the pouch on the door and opened it on the steering wheel. “I have six photographs I want you to see. Give me any thoughts that cross your mind.”

  The detective’s photos were eight-by-ten, black-and-white, the grotesqueness of the images probably accentuated by a Graflex with a flash attachment. But under the best of circumstances, the dead are not cooperative when a camera disrupts their sleep, particularly when their remains have been exhumed in rain-soaked woods or pulled from a drainpipe or a wall or inside a freezer, the light in their eyes sealed with frost.

  Detective Wade Benbow’s phot
os were no exception. All of them showed the bodies of women or teenage girls, each with a rictus grin or matted hair or fingernails like knife points, or clothes that would have to be peeled from the skin with tweezers, or eyes that had eight-balled.

  “Why are you showing me these photos?” I said.

  “I’ve got a hang-up. I don’t like men who kill women and young girls.”

  “Where’d these murders happen?”

  “Within two hundred miles of here, in both Colorado and New Mexico. Over a period of about three years.”

  “How’d they die?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re singling me out.”

  He leaned across the seat and removed an envelope from the glove box and took a color photo of a little girl from the envelope. She was smiling and had braces and bright yellow hair. A grape sno-cone was clutched in her hand; her cheeks were red and looked heated, as though she had just come from play.

  “Who is she?” I said.

  “My granddaughter. She was twelve years old. Her body was found south of Pueblo.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Before the run-in at the café, you never had any contact with Darrel Vickers?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Say again?”

  “I have blackouts.”

  “That’s a little different from what you told me before.”

  “Sir, I’m done with this.”

  “Would you like to see the picture of my granddaughter when she was lifted out of an oil tank?”

  “I’m not the cause of your problem.”

  “I’m glad you cleared that up for me.” He slipped the photo back in the envelope, his fingers shaking. “Darrel Vickers lived with his mother in Denver when he was a child. A girl on the next street was asphyxiated in an abandoned refrigerator. Darrel was seen with her a few hours earlier.”

  “Why do you keep telling me about Darrel Vickers?”

  “Because I think Darrel killed the little girl. Because I know he and his friends are muling dope from the border. Because I want you to wear a wire.”