Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  “On the Vickerses?”

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  “That kid has been shooting off his mouth in a couple of bars.”

  “About what?”

  “How he kicked our asses.”

  “Kids shoot off their mouths.”

  He smiled. “That’s true. Come on, it’s your move.”

  “You’ve been around the block, Cotton. You know better than to play on the other man’s terms. I’m talking about messing with the Vickers family.”

  He glanced at my guitar case, open on the bed. “The skillet shouldn’t be lecturing to the kettle.” The lid to the compartment in the guitar case where I normally kept my picks and strings and a capo was open. Cotton flipped the lid shut. “Mr. Lowry know you have that?”

  “I don’t remember it coming up in our conversation.”

  “You don’t have no business with a gun.”

  “Wonder why the Second Amendment is in the Bill of Rights.”

  He knitted his fingers, then unknitted and knitted them again. He began placing the checkers back in the box, softly, one at a time. “I’m more tired than I thought. Age sneaks up on you.”

  “Don’t get your thumb infected.”

  He fitted the top on the checker box. “I don’t like people being untruthful to me, Aaron.”

  “Untruthful about what?”

  “Locking and loading and firing an M1 when you’re about to brown your britches.”

  “I’ve got six years in my life that are like Swiss cheese, Cotton. I’m lucky I can tie my shoes.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT EVENING I drove to the hamburger joint where Jo Anne was working. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Like a traveling Visigoth culture that had found a wormhole in the dimension, the people who lived in the school bus were parked behind the Dumpster in back. Through the windows, I could see the whole crew: Stoney and Moon Child and Orchid and Lindsey Lou and Marvin, all of them eating out of Styrofoam containers. I parked on the street, under a row of maple trees, and approached the bus from the back, then stepped into the vestibule.

  The girls looked at me blankly. Marvin wore a wilted black cowboy hat that shadowed the top half of his face, his mouth full of food, his whiskers slick with grease and matted with crumbs. Only Stoney showed any reaction. His face lit up like a pink light bulb. “Hey, it’s you! The ice cream guy! Hey, you guys! It’s him! Come on, ice cream guy, sit down!”

  “Mind if I have a word with you all?” I said.

  “We’ve been looking for you, man,” Marvin said, tapping the air. “We met this guy, see, he’s a prophet. I mean he’s been sent, you dig? I’m talking about illumination, man, on the first day of creation. I’m talking about a burst of light rippling across the fucking universe.”

  “I’d like to talk with y’all about running up Jo Anne’s electric bill,” I said. “The neighbor is a little upset about one of his hogs, too.”

  “We didn’t steal anybody’s hog,” Marvin said.

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “Hogs don’t commit suicide. So if the hog didn’t commit suicide, it must be missing. That means you’re talking about stealing. So, yeah, you did accuse us of stealing. That’s hurtful, man.”

  “Don’t talk to him,” Moon Child said to him. Her eyes were black and swimming with hostility.

  “I think y’all are good people,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

  “Henri Devos is not good people,” I said. “He’s a con man. If he’s around other people, it’s for reasons of money, sex, or control.”

  “Guy’s an artist, maybe a little over the line, but mellow most of the time,” Marvin said. “We heard about you going apeshit in his office. You need to dial your head down a little bit, use restraint, not cram a telephone pole up your own ass. It ain’t smart.”

  “He took Jo Anne for five hundred dollars. That’s why I’m asking y’all not to hurt her any more than she’s been hurt.”

  “Fuck you. We don’t hurt anybody,” Moon Child said.

  As I looked at Moon Child, with her round pie-plate face and cavernous eyes, and at Orchid, with her clean purple and green hair, and Lindsey Lou, the rodeo girl with pigtails and western shirt and figure like a whip, I wondered if they dreamed of an ancient stone bowl that contained magical properties, perhaps carved from the rock in a Judaic mountain and brimming with water that had been snow only yesterday, a balm that rinsed away the injustice done the innocent and made all things new. The bruises on their souls hovered in their eyes, and I was sure that each of them shared a commonality they would pay any cost to forget. The commonality I mean was the moment the father figure in the home placed his hand on top of his daughter’s head and looked into her eyes and said, Be gone from my sight.

  But if my speculation was correct, I did not want to show it. “Can y’all give Jo Anne a break?”

  “We like her,” Lindsey Lou said. “She’s a sister.”

  “See, we own nothing,” Orchid said. Her drooping eyelid gave the affect of someone aiming down a rifle barrel. “By owning nothing, we’re allowed to share in everything. One day we’re going to a tropical place where the people eat the fruit from the trees and the fish from the sea and nothing else. They don’t die, either.”

  “Who taught you this?” I said.

  “Ours to know,” she said. “Why don’t you and Jo Anne join us?”

  “I have to make a living,” I said.

  “Poor you,” she said. She pursed her lips. “We share everything.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “You don’t see anything,” Moon Child said. “And here’s something else for you to chew on, asshole. What we do is none of your fucking business.”

  “Don’t be hard on him, Moon Child,” Lindsey Lou said. “We’ve been living off his girlfriend.” She looked at me. “Did you see the holy man who just left?”

  “Holy man?” I said. “No, I don’t think I did. Does he glow with blue fire?”

  “We’re talking about Bible-thumping Bob,” Marvin said.

  I was starting to lose attention.

  “His face got fried, so he wears a veil or a black hood,” Marvin said. “Depending on the venue.”

  “Nice seeing y’all,” I said.

  “There’s more,” Marvin said. “The hood doesn’t have eyeholes in it.”

  The girls were smiling now.

  “Y’all taking me over the hurdles?” I said.

  “No. Hang around,” Orchid said. “We’ll introduce you.”

  “Hey, ice cream guy,” Stoney said, suddenly erect, as though someone had just clicked a switch on his back. “Stay away from… stay away from… stay away from…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He started twitching, pulling at his shirt as he had done before. Then he wept. The girls put their hands on him.

  “What’s wrong, partner?” I said. “What should I stay away from?”

  “Don’t go near the hills. Where all those miners and children and women got killed.”

  I couldn’t take it any longer. The drug culture had just commenced its long slog across the country, but I was convinced these kids had already dipped their brains in hallucinogens and probably would never undo the damage. I left the bus and went into the hamburger joint. I could see Jo Anne in the kitchen, cooking a wire basket full of french fries, her face bright with sweat, her eyes watering in the smoke. She wiped her eyes on her forearm and blew me a kiss.

  I wanted to lift her on my shoulder and pack her over the mountains into a place where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where men do not break through and steal, maybe the same imaginary kingdom a sad kid like Orchid had described, a haven I had just derided, silently, perhaps, but derided just the same.

  Chapter Fourteen

  DURING HER BREAK, Jo Anne and I had some ice cream in a booth in back. “Ever hear of a holy man named Bible-thumping Bob?” I asked. “A fellow who wears a black hood with no eyeholes?�
�

  “You’re serious?” she said.

  “Our friends in the bus say he was hanging around when God created light.”

  She was cleaning out the bottom of her paper cup with a spoon. “Local?” she said without looking up.

  “I forgot to ask.”

  “When did you see the bus crowd?”

  “Just a while ago. They weren’t in here?”

  “I think I would have noticed.”

  “They were parked by the Dumpster in back,” I said.

  “Yuck.”

  “I asked them to leave us alone,” I said. “They’re not bad kids. Maybe Marvin is a bad fellow, but the kids aren’t.”

  “What makes Marvin so bad?”

  “Maybe that’s too strong. He threatened me with a board that had a nail in it, but he backed down. He’s probably a pimp and a small-time thief and paperhanger. He’s not what you call mainline.”

  “What’s ‘mainline’?”

  “A recidivist or psychopath. The kind of fellow other convicts walk around.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’m just saying most people don’t get to choose who they are. It’s a lesson I’ve never learned very well.”

  She set her feet on top of mine and tapped them up and down, her eyes bright, her fingers twined in mine. Then she looked toward the entrance, and the light went out of her face. “Don’t turn around. Darrel Vickers and his father just came in.”

  “Why are all these people showing up this evening?” I said.

  “Welcome to Trinidad on a weekday night.”

  I started to turn my head. She whacked my knuckles with her metal spoon. “Did you hear me?”

  “That hurt.”

  “Start something with the Vickerses and see what I do later.”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “Headed straight for us. I mean it, Aaron. Don’t say one word to them.”

  “Why would I want to talk with the Vickers family?”

  Her eyes went out of focus.

  Then both the father and son were standing inches from us, Rueben Vickers wearing a smile that was like lipstick painted on a lopsided muskmelon, Darrel fresh-shaved and in a Confederate kepi and a lavender T-shirt scissored off beneath the nipples, his love handles peeking out from his beltless jeans, his coppery hair thick with grease and combed back in ducktails. He rotated his head as though he had a crick in his neck, his eyes rolling around the room.

  Mr. Vickers fitted his hand like a clothespin on my shoulder. “How you doin’, boy?” he said.

  I looked straight ahead. A fat, sweaty man with tats wrapped around both arms was scraping a stove with a spatula. He wiped his face on his shoulder, simultaneously smelling himself.

  Mr. Vickers kneaded my collarbone, his nails dipping into the muscle. “Sorry about what happened at Jude’s place,” he said. “I get my quills up sometimes.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Listen to this kid,” he said. “You got moxie, boy.”

  “Not me,” I said.

  “Does this kid have moxie or not?” Vickers said to his son.

  “Yes, Daddy, he has,” Darrel said.

  “See?” Mr. Vickers said. “I know when a boy’s got sand and when he doesn’t.” He grinned at Jo Anne. “How you doin’ tonight, little lady?”

  “I’m not little, thank you,” she said. “Unless you mean my social status. Is that what you mean, Mr. Vickers? I belong to a lower social class?”

  He coughed out a laugh. “Hey, what’s goin’ on here? I stopped by to be nice.”

  “We’re all right here, Mr. Vickers,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Then that’s good. The way to be. When a guy is having some ice cream with his lady. Isn’t that right, Darrel?”

  “Yes, sir,” Darrel said.

  “I think my boy might want to manage one of these. What do you say, Darrel?”

  “Let’s order, Daddy.”

  “What’s tasty in here, hon?” Mr. Vickers said to Jo Anne. “I mean finger-lickin’ good.”

  “You’ve never been here before?” she said.

  His face was licentious, like soft candy melting in front of a candle. “You’re smart. You know how to handle yourself. I like that. I like that uniform, too. The way it fits.”

  “Why’d you hurt Aaron?” she said.

  I touched the top of her hand. “It’s all right, Jo.”

  “Aaron did nothing to you or your son, Mr. Vickers,” she said. “You beat him with a horsewhip. In the face.”

  “I just told you I was sorry for that. I got a temper. What am I supposed to do?”

  “We’re done, sir,” I said.

  “Fine with me.” But he didn’t take his hand from my shoulder. In fact, he drummed his fingers on it. “I got a favor to ask you. You said I had a demon in me. An incubus or some stuff like that.”

  “Daddy, don’t get into it,” Darrel said.

  “What made you say a thing like that?” Mr. Vickers asked me.

  “You’re cruel when you don’t have to be,” I said.

  His tongue slid along his lips. “What do you mean when I don’t have to be? What kind of talk is that?”

  “You’re pathological,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

  Mr. Vickers looked at his son. “What’s he talking about?”

  “He gets it from her,” Darrel said. “She learned some intellectual words at the juco. She’s the cause of all of this. She made up those lies about us and called the cops.”

  “You told Darrel I served the Prince of Darkness?” Mr. Vickers said.

  “You just got eighty-sixed, Mr. Vickers,” Jo Anne said.

  “I’m eighty-sixed from a teenage dump? How bad does it get?”

  “It’s not funny, Daddy,” Darrel said.

  “Quiet,” Mr. Vickers said. “I’m the one getting barbecued.”

  “Take yourself and your father out of here, Darrel,” Jo Anne said.

  Darrel’s eyes were the rheumy blue of marbles you might see in the murk at the bottom of an aquarium. They slipped across Jo Anne’s face and hair and throat and breasts, then lighted on her mouth. “Bitch,” he said.

  “Hey! None of that!” Mr. Vickers said. He pointed at Jo Anne and me. “Soon as you close, we’ll go for a drink.”

  “Where?” she said.

  I couldn’t believe she would entertain the idea.

  “A new club downtown,” he said. “Strictly class, no riffraff. They got good food.”

  “Wait here.”

  “No, we’re not going to do this, Mr. Vickers,” I said.

  “Listen up,” he said. “We either settle this now, or I’ll give you a boxing lesson you won’t forget. With one hand, kid. In public.”

  I heard a loud rattling and rumbling sound, like metal wheels grinding heavily on a hard surface. Jo Anne rounded a counter dragging a huge bucket sloshing with a foamy aggregate of gray water, Ajax, kitchen grease, liquid floor wax, Lysol, dirt, and the swab-out from the toilet bowls and urinals. The long, thick strings of the mop looked like clumps of dead eels among the bubbles.

  She swung the mop across Mr. Vickers’s face, the strings wrapping around his head, saturating his face and chest, showering the next booth. He fell backward, landing on his spine, a piece of mop string curled on his cheek. She turned in a circle and swung with both hands and bounced Darrel off a table that was bolted to the floor. Before he could get up, she plunged the mop into the bucket and whipped it down on his head. The floor was sopping. Both father and son were gagging and spitting water and string, both slipping and struggling to stand, like drunk ice skaters. A little girl with her mother pointed and said, “Look, Mommy, funny men fall down.” A police car that had been passing by made a U-turn, its flasher on, its siren off.

  Jo Anne prodded the Vickerses out the door, into the night, jabbing them in the face each time they tried to speak.

  “The Golden Arches have nothing on us,” she said. “Come bac
k anytime. Bring the whole family.”

  God, I loved Jo Anne McDuffy.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THAT NIGHT THERE was dry thunder in the hills, then lightning split the sky and hailstones came down like shrapnel on a tin roof. Nonetheless, I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of a place where I did not want to go. In the dream, the moon was down, the hills dark humps in the distance, the night still except for the wind and the Chinese blowing their bugles behind their lines. A command post was perched at the top of the grade above a meandering ditch piled with sandbags and reinforced by telegraph poles that had been sawed down by a railway track and dragged to the firing line. Far down the slope, trip flares popped in the sky, then swung inside their own heat and incandescence above a moonscape that contained not one blade of grass or cup of potable water, a piece of hell that contained no living thing other than the organisms dissolving the dead half-buried in shell holes.

  Two soldiers were running through a byzantine network of trenches up the hillside, trying to get back to their lines from a listening post that a Chinese probe had stumbled on. Covering fire full of tracer round streamed over their heads. Then flamethrowers captured by the Chinese burst alight and arched over the trenches, filling the air with a smell like carbon monoxide and a whooshing sound, followed by a secondary sound like the mewing of a kitten.

  In my sleep, I tried to fight my way out of the dream. I felt I was encased in mud or wet cement. I wanted to fill my head with alcohol or opiates or pornographic images to prevent what I was about to witness. The ground was shaking from the 105 rounds bursting on the hillsides to the north, then someone screwed up and an artillery round came in short and slammed me to the earth, ripping the breath from my lungs. My rifle flew from my hands. My steel pot scissored down on the bridge of my nose. My nostrils and mouth were clogged with dirt that stank of cordite. I knew I was about to die.

  “Wake up,” a voice was saying.

  “Medic!” I heard myself say.

  “You’re having a dream,” the voice said. A hand shook my shoulder, then shook it harder. “It’s Cotton. You got the screaming meemies.”

  “Where am I?”

  “In the bunkhouse. Who’s Saber?”