Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  He drove onto the grass and got out. “Know a kid goes by the name Moon Child?” he said. “One of those beatniks on the bus?”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T WANT TO hear his account, in the way you don’t want to know what happened to an impaired person you watched walk through traffic when perhaps you could have pulled him back to the curb. I’m sure Wade Benbow took no pleasure in the words and images he used to describe the events that occurred in the early hours that same day, deep in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and west of Ludlow and the site of the 1914 massacre. And I’m sure, as a liberator of a Nazi extermination camp, he did not enjoy passing on more evidence of his fellow humans’ taste for cruelty. But that’s what he did, then coughed into his hand after he finished.

  “Is she going to make it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if she wants to.”

  “Somebody found her on the ground? By herself?”

  “The guy who called it in wouldn’t give his name. The dispatcher said he sounded like a broken record.”

  “But somebody saw the bus leaving the area?” I said.

  “It fits the description of the one at the Farm Workers dinner. You saw it at the dinner, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So they must have gone from the dinner back to Ludlow,” he said. “Why would they do that?”

  “Have you talked to the others?”

  “I’ve got them all in jail, but they’re not saying anything. I have to turn them loose in twenty-four hours. There’s a guy named Jimmy Doyle among them, a real hard case. Ever hear of him?”

  “I talked with him at the dinner. He said he was in Korea.”

  “What’s your take on him?”

  “Bad news.”

  “This guy Marvin Fogel, the driver. He seems wired out of his head.”

  “They all are,” I said.

  I don’t know why, but both of my hands itched, as though I had a rash or had been weeding a garden without gloves and had raked my skin with thorns. I could feel Benbow’s eyes on me. “What are you not telling me?” he said.

  I glanced up the grade at the Lowry house and the rosebushes in Mrs. Lowry’s flower beds. “Nothing,” I replied. “Let me get my coat.”

  * * *

  MOON CHILD’S HEAD and most of her face were encased in bandages. Her arms were striped with bruises where she had been held by someone who had vise grips for hands. Her teeth and ribs were broken, her lips split. She was on a catheter, and a needle was taped to a vein in her forearm. Her face twitched each time she inhaled.

  I sat in a chair two feet from her pillow. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Moon Child,” I said.

  Dried mucus clung to the corners and lashes of her eyes; I could hardly see them inside the depth of the bandages. “Did Marvin do this to you?” I said.

  No answer.

  “I met Jimmy Doyle, Moon Child. Maybe he’s an okay fellow. Or maybe not. What do you think?”

  I saw the fingers of her right hand move on the sheet. I picked them up as I would a handful of broken Popsicle sticks. “Want to tell me something?”

  Her lips moved, but no sound came out. The sutures in them were black and as stiff as wire. I lowered my ear to her mouth. “Say that again?”

  Her breath was like a tiny feather on my skin. I raised my head and eased my hand from under her fingers, then stood up. Benbow looked at me, his face a question mark. I pointed toward the door.

  Outside the room, his right foot was tapping with expectation. “What’d she say?”

  “She said, ‘Where did Daddy go?’ ”

  His face was drawn, his eyes empty. He reached unconsciously in his shirt pocket for a package of cigarettes that wasn’t there. “I’d appreciate you coming down to the jail.”

  “What for?”

  “I can’t understand what the beatniks are saying.”

  * * *

  THE HOLDING TANKS for women and men were at opposite ends of the same corridor. Our first stop was at the women’s unit. Because it was a weekend, the room had a high occupancy. Most of them were DWIs and working girls and street drunks and women who were passed out for undetermined reasons and looked like they had been poured on the concrete floor. Orchid and Lindsey Lou were standing in a back corner, leaning into each other as though escaping a cold wind, their heads bowed.

  I asked Benbow if we could talk to the girls in private.

  “They won’t come out,” he said.

  “Hey, Orchid!” I said.

  No response.

  “How about you, Lindsey Lou? Can you talk to me?”

  They crouched together as though trying to burrow inside each other.

  “Moon Child talked to me,” I said. “Can’t y’all do the same?”

  They looked at me, then at each other.

  “That’s right,” I said. “It took all her strength to do it. Give me two minutes.”

  They hooked hands and walked to the bars. The other prisoners pulled away from them. Orchid had tied her green-and-purple-streaked hair on top of her head. Her drooping left eye had a raw scratch under it. Lindsey Lou curled her fingers around the bars and pressed her narrow face, even her pigtails, between them, as though she wanted to squeeze herself onto the other side of the earth.

  Orchid spoke first, her words hardly audible.

  “You’ll have to speak louder,” I said.

  “Is Moon Child dead?” she whispered.

  “No,” I said. “She’s brave. So are you, Orchid. Who hurt your friend?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she replied.

  “How about you, Lindsey Lou? Can you help Moon Child?”

  “Is she gonna live?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She wants her father. That means she wants to live. You have to help her do that.”

  “Nothing happened on the bus,” Lindsey Lou said. “Marvin says there was a little accident. I was asleep. That’s all I know.” She twisted her face away, her chin in the air.

  “What kind of accident?” I asked.

  “I just told you I don’t know,” she said.

  “Y’all know who did this,” I said. “You have an obligation. Don’t let your friend down.”

  Both of them stared at the floor. When they raised their faces again, their eyes looked like inkwells, and I was convinced no force on earth could pry the truth from them. But I tried. “Was it Marvin?”

  “Marvin takes care of us,” Orchid said. “Unless we’re bad.”

  “What does Marvin do when you’re bad?”

  She folded her arms across her chest and lowered her eyes.

  “Does Marvin punish you when you’re bad, Lindsey Lou?”

  “We love Marvin,” she said.

  “What about Jimmy Doyle?” I said. “Is he a grand fellow, too?”

  “Don’t say any more,” Orchid said to Lindsey Lou. “He’s trying to trick us.”

  “No matter how bad this seems, you can walk away from it,” I said. “You’ve committed no crime. You can be a friend to Moon Child. Just tell the truth.”

  “Get away from us,” Lindsey Lou said.

  I saw Orchid’s eyes take on the same hard look as her friend’s. “Lindsey Lou is right. You’re the enemy. You work for them.”

  “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “Them,” Lindsey Lou said. “Are you stupid? Them.”

  * * *

  WADE BENBOW AND I walked to the men’s holding tank at the far end of the corridor.

  “What’s that about an accident?” I said.

  “You got me,” he said. “None of what they say is reliable, even when they think they’re telling the truth. You know the real problem?” He waited until a trusty passed us with a food cart, then another with a mop and bucket on wheels. “The drug culture is just getting started. Middle-class kids are the target, and flatfeet like me are anachronisms.”

  A uniformed deputy caught up with us. He was holding two pages taken off a teletype machin
e. “Your request from the feds came in,” he said. “Willie Sutton’s legacy is safe.”

  Benbow skimmed over the pages. “I see Marvin Fogel here. There’s nothing criminal on Doyle?”

  “Read his two-fourteen,” the deputy said. “A discharge for the convenience of the service. That’s it.”

  The deputy walked away. A “convenience of the government” separation from the service could mean anything; 214 was the number of the form.

  “What’s Marvin Fogel been in for?” I said.

  Benbow looked back at the pages. “Everything these clowns do. Mostly misdemeanors. Six months in Chino for shoplifting.”

  “I don’t get it about Doyle,” I said. “He has ‘jail’ written all over him.”

  Benbow looked at the pages again. “I hate to tell you the rest of it. The guy has a Bronze Star and was trained as an M.P.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  MARVIN FOGEL WAS sleeping in an embryonic ball on a concrete bunk in the men’s tank. Stoney was talking to a ballpoint drawing of Kilroy on the wall. Even though the room was cold, Jimmy Doyle was sitting shirtless and without shoes on the bare floor, playing cards with four other men. As soon as he saw me, he was on his feet, the veins in his chest and neck and upper arms cording like green spiderwebs.

  “You cocksucker!” he said. He reached down on the floor without bending his knees and picked up a tin cup and flung it at the bars. “I should have known.”

  “Known what?” I asked.

  “You dropped the dime on me.”

  “You got yourself here, Doyle.”

  “I remember you better than you think, Broussard. You screwed up at the listening post. You brought all that firepower down on our heads.”

  “Did you see Moon Child before they put her in the ambulance?” I said.

  “That little bitch with the bangs? No, I don’t know anything about her. I went to sleep. When I woke up, the bus was empty. Wait till I get you outside, motherfucker.”

  “Why do you have an interest in the Ludlow Massacre?” I said.

  He got closer to the bars, his blue jeans buttoned just below his navel, his skin as smooth as an olive, his short arms pumped like bowling pins. “News for you. I couldn’t care less about a bunch of Communists who got killed fifty years ago.”

  “You ever shoot crank?” I said. “I hear it turns your head into a pinball machine.”

  His eyes were fecal brown, lidless, the pupils dilated into black headlights. “You’re gonna wish you were back at Pork Chop Hill.”

  I leaned against the bars, my head down. I stayed that way a long time, at least in terms of the situation. Why is that? The greatest fear and frustration you can engender in a man like Doyle is to ignore his rage.

  “Sorry you feel that way, Doyle,” I said. “I hope things work out for you.”

  Then I left him hanging on the bars and walked down the corridor and didn’t stop until I was out of his view. Benbow caught up with me. “What’s the deal?” he said.

  “Can you get Stoney out of there without getting him in trouble?”

  “The kid with porridge for a brain is going to help us?”

  “Yeah, I think he will.”

  He rotated his short-brim Stetson on his finger. “Let’s get a cup of coffee,” he said. “I’ve been up since four.”

  * * *

  WE GOT IT out of the machine by the dispatcher’s office. It tasted like shellac. Benbow waited fifteen minutes, then sent a deputy down to the men’s tank. I could hear the deputy’s voice in the corridor: “Let’s go, kid, you got your phone call.”

  “Don’t got a phone call… Don’t got a phone call… Don’t got a phone call,” Stoney replied.

  “You get it whether you like it or not,” the deputy said. “Stop talking to the wall and get your ass out here.”

  Benbow and I walked Stoney into an interview room and closed the door behind us. “How you doin’, partner?” I said.

  He was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and polka-dot tennis shoes and purple corduroy pants that were too big for him. I had never seen eyes so blue, so untroubled by knowledge or even awareness of the world. It was hard to separate Stoney’s eyes from the fear and disorder that obviously held sway over his metabolism, if not his soul.

  “They got you in here, too, ice cream guy?” he said.

  “On an earlier beef, but I’m okay now,” I replied. “Can you tell us what happened to Moon Child?”

  He looked like someone had touched him with a cattle prod. He began making a droning sound through his nose, like a car engine going uphill.

  “I think you called the ambulance, Stoney,” I said. “That’s a real good thing you did.”

  The droning shifted into overdrive.

  I ran my fingers down the inside of his arm. “Who’s been shooting you up, partner?”

  The droning turned to a moan, then he began to wheeze.

  “This is Detective Benbow,” I said. “He wants to help you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re one of the good guys. You hearing me on this? Who hurt Moon Child?”

  He stopped moaning and started crying.

  “Stoney?” I said. “You still with us?”

  He leaned sideways and tried to look past me through a small window in the door. His eyes were furtive, like a child’s. “Moon Child’s in the coven.”

  I saw Benbow look at me.

  “The coven?” I said.

  “All the girls are in it. The boys aren’t allowed.”

  “This is a new one on us, Stoney,” I said. “What exactly does the word ‘coven’ mean?”

  “The thing the girls belong to.”

  “I see,” I said. “If you get out of here, where will you go?”

  “The place on the other side,” he replied.

  “Which place is that?” I asked.

  “The place where everybody goes.”

  “Can you tell me where that is?” I asked.

  “Where the spirits are dancing.”

  Before I could speak again, Benbow raised his hand. “Who are these spirits?” he asked.

  Stoney smiled. “Everybody knows that. The Indians.”

  Benbow leaned back in his chair. “With feathers and such?”

  “Yes, sir,” Stoney replied. “They’re the ones building fires up in the cliffs. I’ve seen them.”

  Benbow’s right hand was opening and closing on his knee, his discomfort more than he could hide.

  * * *

  HE WAS SILENT most of the way to the Lowry farm.

  “Why did Stoney’s mention of the Indians bother you?” I asked.

  “Who said it did?”

  “You told me the Comanche did some bad things up the hill behind your house.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. I was speaking in the past tense. The Comanche are dead, we’re alive. End of story.”

  “I think you’re not being truthful with me, Wade.”

  “Good way to get yourself a pop in the face.”

  “You asked me to help you,” I said. “You shouldn’t be talking to me like that, sir.”

  He didn’t reply. That was all right with me. I was sick of the conversation. We had reached the turnoff to the farm. A mile-long freight train was wobbling down the tracks, headed toward Ratón Pass and the grinding slide into New Mexico. For just a moment I wished I had high-balled on through Colorado on the flat-wheeler that had brought me to the Lowry farm. Were it not for Jo Anne, I might have given my jalopy to Cotton or Spud and climbed aboard a hotshot and let the click-a-dee-clack of the wheels roll my troubles away.

  “I’ve seen them,” Wade said.

  “Say again?”

  “I didn’t see them just dancing, either. It was in the middle of the night. I saw firelight up in the trees. I thought maybe dry lightning had sparked a fire, except there hadn’t been any lightning. I took a fire extinguisher up there and saw more than I was planning on.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “What did you see, Wade?�
�

  A solitary drop of rain hit the windshield. He leaned over the wheel, lifting his eyes at the sky as though hoping for a cloud to burst and drench the hardpan and the hills. “I told myself I had a nightmare, one that went back to the death camp in Germany. I’m going to keep believing that.”

  “What about Stoney’s story?”

  “He’s probably on angel dust or brown skag or both. That coven stuff is dog shit.”

  “What were the Comanche doing behind your house?”

  His eyes were shiny. “There’s times when you don’t want to belong to the human race. There’re times when you’d rather eat a bullet than see certain kinds of things. Or talk about them. Now shut up.”

  * * *

  BENBOW DROVE ME to the bunkhouse. I know I have concentrated on the conflicts of Wade Benbow. This is because I had not dealt with my own. Earlier in the day, Spud Caudill had told me he’d gotten the fresh scratches on his face in Mrs. Lowry’s garden. How did a man who had spent a lifetime doing dangerous work of every kind manage to remodel his face pruning a rosebush?

  “You got something on your mind?” Benbow said.

  My heart was racing. “No.”

  “Then why are you looking at me like that?”

  “No reason.”

  “A word to the wise. You’re young. All these problems will drop away one day. Don’t let the shitheads of the world pull you under with them.”

  “Thomas Aquinas?”

  “I owe you one, kid. Watch your butt,” he said, and drove away.

  I looked up the grade at the Lowry house, its immaculate, lacquered, battleship-gray Victorian presence couched among flowers and forest greenery like a testimony to a more innocent time. But it was not a more innocent time, and the sweatshops and textile mills and coal mines and the murder of striking workers were far more honest symbols of the Industrial Age.