Another Kind of Eden
Page 19
I looked over my shoulder to see where Jo Anne was. But she was gone. And I mean gone.
Epilogue
I WOKE IN THE morning by a railroad track miles away, with no memory of how I got there. My car was found by state foresters at the entrance to the box canyon. It had burned with such heat that the steering wheel had melted and all four tires had exploded. I told the cops I knew where several homicides had been committed. They found no evidence of any unusual events in the canyon and locked me in jail for two days because I was deemed a risk to myself.
I asked to see my friend Wade Benbow and was told he was out of town. I was released from jail and immediately went to Jo Anne’s house. Her car was gone, her windows sealed with plywood. The hog farmer next door said he had no idea where she went. That night I got drunk and put back in the can, this time in a tank with a bunch of stewbums. While there, I had a surprise visitor and was allowed to speak with her in a conference room to which only lawyers normally had access.
“How are you, Aaron?” she said. “I’m so sorry to see you in bad straits.”
“That’s very good of you, Mrs. Lowry.” I searched her face. She smiled pleasantly and seemed completely serene. I decided to turn the dial. “How is Mr. Lowry?”
“He’s visiting his family in New England,” she replied. She smelled as fresh as the morning dew.
“Do you know where Jo Anne McDuffy is?” I asked.
“Oh, the young girl you brought to dinner? No, I haven’t seen her.”
“How about Mr. Vickers? Is he out and about?”
“I wouldn’t know. Mr. Lowry and I keep our distance from him. It’s too bad about his son, though.”
“Has Darrel been up to something?” I said.
“I guess you haven’t heard. The Vickers boy and a college professor were found dead on a back road up by Ludlow. Their bodies were mangled. The police think that maybe a log truck ran over them. Are you sure you’re all right, Aaron?”
“I’m fine. I sure wish I could get some news on Jo Anne, though.”
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything. I paid your bail. I also left an envelope with your wages and a little extra in it.”
“I don’t work for you anymore?”
“We’re selling the farm. Your friends Spud and Maisie and Cotton have already moved on. They’re starting up a poultry farm in New Mexico or Arizona, I think.”
“Good for them,” I said.
Mrs. Lowry got up to go. I was handcuffed to a chair by one wrist. She stroked my cheek with the ends of her fingers. I kept waiting for her to give up the ruse, but she didn’t. “The door will always be open for you,” she said, and winked. Then she bent over and blew her breath into my hair. “Sweet boy,” she said. “Good enough to eat, that’s what you are.”
* * *
WHEN I GOT out of the can the second time, I thumbed a ride to the Lowry farm, put my clothes and Smith Corona in a duffel bag and picked up my Gibson guitar and said goodbye to Chen Jen, then headed for the train yard outside Trinidad, hoping to grab a sidedoor Pullman that would take me to Albuquerque and on to a winter job working date palms around Calexico.
I might seem cavalier in my attitude toward the events I have described. However, I see it this way. I’ve acquired little knowledge and even less wisdom in my life, but early on, I learned not to argue with the world. I believed Jo Anne had chosen her father over me, and the two of them had gone on to a better life than the one I could have given her. I think her paintings went with her, too, and I believed that one day I would see them in a gallery or a museum.
I also learned that madness is madness, and we should not question its presence in the majority of the human race. And I learned, as George Orwell once said, that people are always better than we think they are. I was never a criminal, but I was in a southern prison when I was eighteen. A psychiatrist told me I suffered dissociative personality disorder; there were three different people sheltering inside my skin. I have had nonchemically induced blackouts all my life, and I have written and published forty books that I have trouble remembering, as though someone else wrote them. The characters in them are strangers and seem to have no origins; the words are like a rush of wind inside a cottonwood tree.
I do not dream any longer about the events in the box canyon. Even before I started to swing on a freight car for the screeching grind down Ratón Pass, I had almost convinced myself I’d experienced a psychotic break and imagined the monstrous creatures and the murders inside the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But the word is “almost.” I’ll explain why.
I saw the train coming and began running with it, pacing my speed so I could throw my duffel and guitar inside an open car, when a yard bull grabbed me from behind and pulled me away from the tracks.
“I’ll be out of the state in ten minutes, boss,” I said. “How about some slack?”
“Sorry, bud,” he replied. “It’s your misfortune and none of my own.”
“We’re talking about six months on the hard road, boss.”
“Life’s a bitch, then we die,” he said.
He walked me to the freight depot and called the cops. Guess who pulled in?
“How you doin’, Wade?” I said.
“I hear you’ve been busy,” he said.
“I got drunk and let my imagination run away.”
“Where you going?”
“Down on the Cal-Mex line.”
“Stay here a minute.”
Wade walked out of earshot with the yard bull, then shook hands with him and rejoined me. “There’s a highballer leaving out in ten minutes. I’ll stay with you until you climb aboard. Want some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
He reached for his thermos through the driver’s window of his car. “What happened in that box canyon?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Sure about that?”
“Sure as there are no witches except in Joseph McCarthy’s sick mind.”
“Need any money?”
“No, sir. It’s been an honor to know you.”
“Put me in one of your books.”
“What’s that in the back seat?” I asked.
He lit a Lucky Strike and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. “A pilgrim hat.” He reached in the window and put it on his head. “We’re having a Little Theater rehearsal tonight. I play a Puritan judge.”
“No kidding?” I said.
“Keep on the sunny side, kid. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
“Satchel Paige said that.”
“I knew you were smart.”
In the early hours of the next day, somewhere in the Grand Canyon country around Flagstaff, the sliding door of my boxcar open, I woke to the sweet smell of pines and the singing of the rails, just as the morning sun broke over the mountains and, in a blink, gave life to the shadows of the boxcars racing across the desert floor.
Acknowledgments
Once again I would like to thank my editor, Sean Manning, and Tzipora Baitch and Jackie Seow and the rest of the Simon & Schuster team for their help in the production of Another Kind of Eden. My thanks also to my copy editors, E. Beth Thomas and Jonathan Evans, and the Spitzer Agency, and thanks to my wife, Pearl, and our daughter Pamala, whom we lost recently.
I would also like to thank the readers of my work. They are more than just readers; they have become friends of the most loyal kind, sharing in our mutual desire to protect and save the earth and all its inhabitants.
Blessed be God for all dappled things.
James Lee Burke
More from the Author
A Private Cathedral
The New Iberia Blues
Robicheaux
The Jealous Kind
House of the Rising Sun
Cadillac Jukebox
About the Author
Author Photograph © James McDavid
James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award for Best
Novel, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored thirty-nine novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
JamesLeeBurke.com
@JamesLeeBurke
James Lee Burke
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/James-Lee-Burke
@simonbooks
ALSO BY JAMES LEE BURKE
DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS
A Private Cathedral
The New Iberia Blues
Robicheaux
Light of the World
Creole Belle
The Glass Rainbow
Swan Peak
The Tin Roof Blowdown
Pegasus Descending
Crusader’s Cross
Last Car to Elysian Fields
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
Purple Cane Road
Sunset Limited
Cadillac Jukebox
Burning Angel
Dixie City Jam
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
A Stained White Radiance
A Morning for Flamingos
Black Cherry Blues
Heaven’s Prisoners
The Neon Rain
THE HOLLAND FAMILY NOVELS
The Jealous Kind
House of the Rising Sun
Wayfaring Stranger
Feast Day of Fools
Rain Gods
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Bitterroot
Heartwood
Cimarron Rose
Two for Texas
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
OTHER FICTION
Jesus Out to Sea
White Doves at Morning
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict and Other Stories
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Half of Paradise
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Jacket design by Jackie Seow
Jacket photograph by Oliver Henze/Alamy Stock Photo
Names: Burke, James Lee, 1936- author.
Title: Another kind of Eden / James Lee Burke.
Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2021. | Summary: “New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke brings readers a captivating tale of justice, love, brutality, and mysticism set in the turbulent 1960s”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057197 (print) | LCCN 2020057198 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982151713 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982151720 (paperback) | ISBN 9781982151737 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3552.U723 A83 2021 (print) | LCC PS3552.U723 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057197
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057198
ISBN 978–1–9821–5171–3
ISBN 978–1–9821–5173–7 (ebook)