Another Kind of Eden

by James Lee Burke

  * * *

  I DROVE HOME BY myself, without saying good night to Jo Anne. My trip back to the Lowry farm was probably the loneliest of my life. The sky was black, the constellations cold and white from one horizon to the other, but I found no joy in them and certainly no light. Up on the hill, the Lowry house was lit as brightly as an amusement park, although I could see no cars parked close by.

  “Mama Bear wants to see you topside,” Spud said. He was sitting on his bunk in his skivvies, buffing his dress shoes.

  “Mrs. Lowry?”

  “In the flesh. Powder and perfume. I thought I was gonna pass out.”

  “She wants to see me tonight?”

  “Want me to write it on the wall?”

  “I don’t need this,” I said.

  “Think about it. She’s probably got the Grand Canyon under her dress.” He looked up. “Sorry. I got a dirty mind.”

  I trudged up the slope and knocked on the door. She pulled it open slowly. “Ah, my darling boy is back. And so dressed up.”

  “I was going to take Jo Anne to dinner. It didn’t work out. You and Mr. Lowry wanted to see me?”

  “No, it was me who wanted to see you. Come in,” she said. She was wearing a dark purple Oriental silk dress with green flowers on it. Her skin was flushed, her dull-red hair tied up with a bandana, like a factory girl’s. “You think I’m going to bite you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Sit on the couch. Don’t talk until I tell you to. When I’m finished, you can be on your way. Or hang around.” Her eyes crinkled.

  “Is Mr. Lowry here?”

  “Of course not.” She pushed me on the couch.

  “Mr. Lowry has already talked to me, Mrs. Lowry.”

  “And he probably left you more confused than ever. You’re an intelligent young man. So I’m going to tell you things I don’t tell other people.”

  I knew there was no way out of her house unless I listened. She sat down next to me with one leg folded under the other. She stroked my cheek.

  “Mrs. Lowry, this is embarrassing,” I said.

  She leaned over and clamped my face in her hands and kissed me on both eyes. She smelled like a garden full of flowers. Then she let go of me with a loud “Umph!”

  By that time I had realized that a grunt from Mrs. Lowry could mean almost anything but probably wasn’t good. “Are you all right, ma’am?” I asked.

  “I’d love to eat you up,” she said. “You remind me so much of the son we lost at Guadalcanal.”

  I hated to think about the implications of that statement. “Mrs. Lowry—”

  “Oh, be quiet. I have to speak with you about the unpleasant realities of commerce, so please put up with my little indiscretions. Since my husband is a gentle soul, I’m the one who has to take care of certain things. Our paradise in the Southern Rockies is in jeopardy. The agricultural corporations are taking the meat off our bones.” She picked up a strand of my hair and tugged on it. “Are you listening?”

  “Y’all are going under?”

  “Not if I can help it. Some call it making a deal with the devil.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She drummed her fingers on the back of my neck. Her eyes were reddish brown, her smile both maternal and flirtatious, of the nature that can make a young man’s viscera melt.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I’m a blank.”

  “Tempted a little bit?”

  “I sure am. I’m not a well person, and I wish you’d stop this, Mrs. Lowry.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you for the world,” she said. “But learn it now, Aaron, if you have money, people will do everything they can to take it from you. The Irish sailed here on the coffin boats and were treated like bilge when they arrived. Then they died in front of Confederate cannons, and not for the slaves, either, but to protect the profits of the textile mills. My husband’s Puritan ancestors got off the Mayflower and set about murdering and spreading disease among the Indians, and when they ran out of Indians, they hanged their neighbors. That’s the bloody truth. Don’t be deceived by the nonsense you were taught in public schools.”

  “I can’t keep up with you, Mrs. Lowry.”

  “A great change is occurring as we speak. Its origins are the Golden Triangle and Latin American.”

  “You’re talking about drugs?”

  “Marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. Great amounts.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

  “We own properties in northern Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley. That’s the equivalent of owning a subway between Mexico City and San Antonio. The traffic is mostly marijuana.”

  I couldn’t speak. I thought I was having a dream. She ran her nails through the back of my hair. “Look at me,” she said.

  “Mrs. Lowry, please—”

  “I just need a yes or no. Would you be willing to stay on with us, knowing what I just told you?”

  “You’re trafficking in drugs and telling me about it?”

  “What’s worse, drugs that do less harm than alcohol or the weapons we export all over the world?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with this, Mrs. Lowry.”

  She took her hand away. “You’re a lovely boy. If my son had lived, I’d want him to be just like you.”

  I was sweating, my head pounding. I got up from the couch. “I wish you had never told me any of this, Mrs. Lowry.”

  “I haven’t made a serious mistake, have I?” she said.

  “Y’all have always treated me right. I’ll always be in your debt.”

  “Translate that for me?”

  “I’m saying good night. You have to pardon my physical situation. I think I had an erection. I’d like to kill myself.”

  “You’re sweet, you surely are. Jo Anne is a lucky girl. Be gone with you, now.”

  I could hardly walk when I left the house. I wanted to rise into the stars and sail over the mountains. I wanted to escape into the world of my father on the banks of Bayou Teche and the night smell of magnolia or jasmine or trumpet vine or orange blossoms. I wanted to be anywhere except where I was. I felt I had just watched the destruction of paradise.

  I cut through the yard, knocking into a birdbath and a sundial and tripping on croquet wickets that were pinned in the grass. A southbound train was blowing down the line. I saw myself on the floor of a boxcar, the wheels rocking on the tracks, Ratón Pass sliding past the open door, a rolled blanket under my head. All I needed to do was close my eyes and I would wake in Albuquerque.

  Then I heard Mrs. Lowry call out from the doorway. The resonance and volume of her voice were operatic. “You’re a babe among the heathens, Aaron.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE NEXT DAY was Tuesday. I heard nothing from Jo Anne. Each time I started to call from Chen Jen’s phone in the dining room, I could not erase the image of Jo Anne walking from behind her house the previous evening, a bottle of Henri Devos’s Tuborg in her hand, as though the flower I had brought her and the dinner we had planned and my desire to marry her were inconsequential. Even worse, she seemed to have dismissed Devos’s treacherous financial behavior and his exploitation of her innocence, as though she did not deserve better.

  I was also having problems with Mrs. Lowry’s revelation about her and her husband’s willingness to involve themselves with Mexican drug traffickers. The respect I’d had for them was gone. I couldn’t believe their naïveté, either. Have you ever taken a nocturnal excursion through the back streets of Tijuana or Juárez? What you see is not human. Forget nuance, latitude, social science, church-basement bromides. The worst that people are capable of is available for a few greasy coins. The violence imposed by the narco gangs on their enemies and sometimes on innocent peasants is something you never want to see or even know about, lest your faith in your fellow man fly away forever.

  Even though we dug postholes all morning, I had no appetite when we went to the dining hall for lunch. I asked Chen Jen
to make me a ham sandwich and sat down with Cotton and Spud.

  “You don’t look too good,” Cotton said.

  “I’m extremely copacetic.”

  “Your gal run off?”

  “Mind your own business, Cotton,” I said.

  A new Classics Illustrated comic, King Arthur and the Nights of the Round Table, lay by his plate. He teased the cover and pages with his thumb, then rolled it up and took his plate to another table.

  “Why’d you have to do that?” Spud said.

  “I had a bad night. I got to ask you something.”

  “How to win friends and influence people?”

  “You hear anything about drugs around here?”

  “Those beatniks are supposed to use them.”

  “I’m talking about on the property.”

  “With Mr. Lowry running things? Who you kidding?”

  I bit into my sandwich but couldn’t swallow. I picked up the pitcher of Kool-Aid we always shared at the table and poured my glass full.

  “What’s eating you, Aaron?” Spud said.

  “Everything.”

  “You shouldn’t ought to have talked to Cotton like that. You and him and me are the Three Musketeers.”

  “You’re right.” I went over to Cotton’s table and told him I was sorry.

  “I didn’t pay it no mind,” he said.

  “What you said was the truth.”

  “You got woman trouble?” he said.

  “A mess of it.”

  “You love her?”

  “Yes, sir, I sure do.”

  He stared at me with his good eye and his white eye at the same time, which was like looking at two different heads that had been sawed down the middle and glued together. “Then get your butt over to her house and tell her that.”

  “You belong back there with King Arthur’s knights, Cotton.”

  “I hear that a lot,” he replied.

  I went back to my table and finished my sandwich and Kool-Aid, then went outside into the wind and the sunshine and started the day all over. Minutes later, I looked up from twisting the handles of a posthole digger in ground that was as hard as concrete, and I saw Wade Benbow’s unmarked car coming up the road in a cloud of dust.

  * * *

  HE PUSHED OPEN the passenger door for me to get in.

  “I’m working,” I said.

  “No, you’re not. Get your butt in here.”

  “You’re the second man in fifteen minutes to say something like that to me.”

  “It’s about your girlfriend.”

  My viscera turned to jelly. I sat down on the passenger seat. The car stank of nicotine. An unfiltered cigarette was burning in the ashtray. “What happened?”

  “She’s okay. I mean physically. Y’all had a fight or something?”

  “Yeah, something. Where is she?”

  “At home.” He reached for a notepad on the dashboard. “This is what I have so far. You were supposed to go out to dinner with her. The art professor was fixing her windows. The school-bus zoo was parked in the field. You got into it with this guy Jimmy Doyle. Then you left by yourself.”

  “That’s right. Can you get rid of that cigarette?”

  He removed it from the ashtray and threw it out his window. “Who would have reason to do Jo Anne McDuffy harm?”

  “You said she was all right. How about telling me what’s going on?”

  “I didn’t say her house was all right. Back to my question—who would want to hurt her?”

  “I’d start with Darrel Vickers.”

  He scratched his forehead. “Yeah, that kid should have been lobotomized years ago. After you left, your girl decided to get in some extra hours at her job. When she came home, the windows in back were broken again, the interior was ransacked and smeared with feces, and all her paintings were stolen.”

  “The paintings she did about the Ludlow Massacre?”

  “Yeah, it seems like a pretty hard blow for her.”

  I doubted if he had any idea how hard. It’s the worst fear of every painter, every photographer, every sculptor, and every writer. I couldn’t imagine what I would feel or do if someone stole or destroyed the only manuscript of my novel. “No witnesses, no clues?” I said.

  “Nope. One other thing, though: I talked to the art professor. He said he left an envelope with four hundred dollars in it on the counter. Some kind of payback for a loan. I found the envelope on the floor.” Benbow looked at his notepad again. “This is what he wrote: ‘Here’s the rest of the money I owe you and a little for interest. I will always remain your student rather than the other way around. Love, Henri.’ The envelope was torn open and the cash taken. Got any thoughts?”

  “Yeah, Henri Devos is the stink on shit. Where is Jo Anne now?”

  “I’d try her house. It’s going to need quite a cleaning.”

  “Where’s this going, Wade?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “Why are you still smoking?”

  “It keeps my mind off chemo.”

  His package of Lucky Strikes was on the dashboard. I picked it up and got out of the car and flung it into the rain ditch. It sank among the cattails.

  “You need to butt out of my life, Aaron.”

  “Is there any brown tar around here?” I said.

  “Mexican skag?”

  “That’s what some call it.”

  “A musician here or there. Why?”

  “No reason. How about angel dust?”

  “Yeah, some,” he said. “Let’s go back to your question about heroin. You know something I don’t?”

  “I’m in a bad place,” I said.

  He gazed at the steely blueness of the mountains, the bales of hay lying in the fields, the Holsteins and red Angus and the white fences and the coffee-brown richness of the land that had been harrowed and the barns that were bigger than most houses and the pebbled, tree-lined stream that could break your heart. “Yeah, being young with your whole life ahead of you is a real torment, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I TOLD MR. LOWRY I had an emergency and needed to leave work early. “Anything I can help with?” he said in the kind way I always associated with him.

  For a moment I wondered if he was unaware of Mrs. Lowry’s pernicious activities on the border. Even so, I knew I would never be able to forget his request that I not tell others of her promiscuity. My relationship with him and my faith in people would never be the same. I thanked him for his offer of help, but I couldn’t look at his eyes. I’d had the same level of respect for Mr. Lowry that I’d held for my father, and his inability to understand that increased the embarrassment and shame I felt for him.

  I drove to Jo Anne’s house. All the windows and the front and back doors were open. She was scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees, her hair tied up with a bandana. There were trash bags, bottles of Clorox, buckets of soapy water, mops, and brooms all over the house, and in the trash bags fecal-streaked clothes and broken plates and shattered glass.

  She did not see or hear me walk in. I squatted down and placed my hands on her shoulders, then took the scrub brush from her and lifted her to her feet and put my arms around her. I could feel her blood humming. “Wade Benbow told me what happened,” I said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You left last night without even saying goodbye. All you seemed to care about was acting crazy.”

  “I felt hurt, Jo. I asked you to marry me, and you let a fraud and a cretin like Devos on your property.”

  “I guess I’m just not good at throwing people out of my house.”

  I pressed my cheek against the top of her head. “That’s why I love you.”

  She didn’t answer. I heard her sniff, then felt the wetness from her eyes through my shirt. “All my paintings are gone,” she said.

  “Benbow told me. We’ll get them back.”

  “How?”

  “The guy who did this plans to sell them. Otherwise, he would have
destroyed them like he did everything else.”

  She rubbed the skin under her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Where would he sell them?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ll find out. I promise.”

  Of course, I had no way of knowing if she would ever see her paintings again. But is there a greater sin than robbing people of hope, particularly when thieves who break in and steal have taken everything from them?

  “Why would anyone smear my home with excrement? It’s not dog feces, either. I think it’s from a human being.”

  “We’re talking about a sick person, Jo. That’s how you have to think about this. The person who did this is not human, he’s a disease. You don’t hate a disease.”

  “You think it was Darrel Vickers?”

  “He’s a good candidate.”

  “Why just a candidate? Who else would do this?”

  “Benbow said the intruder took the envelope of money Henri Devos left for you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And there was a note to you on the outside about the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “That bothers me a little bit.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Why wouldn’t the intruder just put the envelope in his pocket instead of tearing it open and throwing it on the floor, maybe leaving his fingerprints?”

  “Maybe he had gloves on.”

  “If he had gloves on, he wouldn’t waste time digging the bills out of the envelope. He would put the envelope in his pocket.”

  She looked into space, her eyes clouding, as though a fly had swum into her vision.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see the envelope until the cops got here. It was on the floor. Henri must have left it on the counter to surprise me.”

  “So you never saw the money?”

  “No.”

  I looked away. The implications about the torn, empty envelope that had supposedly held money were coming together in her eyes.