The Convict and Other Stories

by James Lee Burke

  “Well, you better not chew on these,” he said, grabbing my wrist and pressing into my hand the thin white box with the image of a black Trojan horse on it.

  I stared at it numbly. Both my hand and face felt dead. The boys were all laughing now.

  “This is crazy. I don’t want something like this,” I said, my voice rising, then catching in my throat like a nail.

  “Sorry, they’re yours now,” Arthur said.

  I tried to push the box at Arthur. I felt wooden all over, my skin tainted with something loathsome and obscene.

  “I found them behind Provost’s pool hall. They got a machine there in the men’s room,” Arthur said.

  I was swallowing hard and my heart was clicking in my chest. My face rang with the kind of deadness you feel after you’ve been slapped.

  “You’re my friend, Arthur, but I don’t want in on this kind of joke,” I said. I knew my voice was weak and childlike, and now I felt doubly ashamed.

  “I don’t want in on this joke because I’ll piss my little diapers and my mommy will be mad at me,” one of the other boys said.

  Then a second boy glanced sideways and whispered, “Sister’s looking!”

  Thirty yards away Sister Uberta watched us with a curious, even gaze, her body and the wings of her habit absolutely motionless.

  “Oh, shit,” Arthur said, and shoved the bunch of us around the corner of the building. I tripped on my shoes and revolved in a foolish circle, my hand still trying to give him back the box.

  “Gimme that,” he said, and slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans and walked hurriedly toward the opposite end of the building in the soft rain. His tennis shoes made stenciled impressions in the fine dust under the trees.

  “Fling it in the coulee,” one of the boys called after him.

  “Like hell I will. You haven’t seen the last of these babies,” he answered. He grinned at us like a spider.

  It was raining hard when we came back into the classroom from the playground. The raindrops tinked against the ginning blades of the window fan while Sister Uberta diagrammed a compound sentence on the blackboard. Then we realized we were listening to another sound, too—a rhythmic thumping like a soft fist on the window glass.

  Sister Uberta paused uncertainly with the chalk in her hand and looked at the window. Then her eyes sharpened, the blood drained from her face, and her jaws became ridged with bone.

  Arthur Boudreau had filled the condom with water, knotted a string around one end, and suspended it from the third story so that it hung even with the window and swung back and forth against the glass in the wind. It looked like an obscene, bulbous nose pressed against the rain-streaked pane.

  Some of the kids didn’t know what it was; others giggled, scraped their feet under the desks in delight, tried to hide their gleeful faces on the desktops. I watched Sister Uberta fearfully. Her face was bright and hard, her angry eyes tangled in thought, then she opened her desk drawer, removed a pair of scissors, lifted the window with more strength than I thought she could have, and in a quick motion snipped the string and sent the condom plummeting into the rain.

  She brought the window down with one hand and the room became absolutely still. There was not a sound for a full minute. I could not bear to look at her. I studied my hands, my untied shoelaces, Arthur Boudreau’s leg extended casually out into the aisle. A solitary drop of perspiration ran out of my hair and splashed on the desktop. I swallowed, raised my head, and saw that she was looking directly at me.

  “That’s what you had out on the playground, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “No, Sister,” I said desperately.

  “Don’t you compound what you’ve done by lying.”

  “It was just a box. It wasn’t mine.” I felt naked before her words. Everyone in the class was looking at me. My face was hot, and through my shimmering eyes I could see Rene LeBlanc watching me.

  “Somebody else put you up to it, but you did it, didn’t you?” she said.

  “I didn’t. I swear it, Sister.”

  “Don’t you swear, Claude. I saw you on the playground.”

  “You didn’t see it right, Sister. It wasn’t me. I promise.”

  “You took the box from Arthur, and then you made everybody laugh by bragging about what you were going to do.”

  “I didn’t know what was in it. I gave it—”

  “You ran around the corner with it when you saw me watching.”

  I looked over at Rene LeBlanc. Her face was stunned and confused. I felt as though I were drowning while other people watched, that I was hideous and perverse in her eyes and in the eyes of every decent person on the earth.

  “Look at me,” Sister Uberta said. “You weren’t in this by yourself. Arthur put you up to it, and he’s going to wait for me in Father Melancon’s office at three o’clock, but you’re going to stay here in this room and tell me the truth.”

  “I have to help my daddy at the filling station,” Arthur said.

  “Not today you don’t,” Sister Uberta said.

  Until the bell rang I kept my eyes fixed on the desktop and listened to the beating of my own heart and felt the sweat run down my sides. I couldn’t look up again at Rene LeBlanc. My moment to exonerate myself had passed in failure, the class was listening to Sister talk about the Norman Conquest, and I was left alone with my bitter cup of gall, my fear-ridden, heart-thudding wait in Gethsemane. The three o’clock bell made my whole body jerk in the desk.

  The other kids got their raincoats and umbrellas from the cloakroom and bolted for home. Then Sister sent Arthur to Father Melancon’s office to wait for her. I looked once at his face, praying against my own want of courage that he would admit his guilt and extricate me from my ordeal. But Arthur, even though he was ethical in his mischievous way, was not one to do anything in a predictable fashion. Sister Uberta and I were alone in the humid stillness of the classroom.

  “You’ve committed a serious act, Claude,” she said. “Do you still refuse to own up to it?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “All right, fine,” she said. “Then you write that on this piece of paper. You write down that I didn’t see you with something on the playground, that you don’t know anything about what happened this afternoon.”

  “I hate you.” The words were like the snap of a rubber band in my head. I couldn’t believe I had said them.

  “What did you say?”

  My face was burning, and my head was spinning so badly that I had to grip the desktop as though I were falling.

  “Stand up, Claude,” she said.

  I rose to my feet. The backs of my legs were quivering. Her face was white and her eyeballs were clicking back and forth furiously.

  “Hold out your hand,” she said.

  I extended my hand and she brought the tricorner ruler down across my palm. My fingers curled back involuntarily and the pain shot up my forearm.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  She stared hard, incredulously, straight into my eyes, then gripped my wrist tightly in her hand and slashed the ruler down again. I could hear her breathing, see the pinpoints of sweat breaking out on her forehead under her wimple. She hit me again and examined my face for pain or tears or shock and saw none there and whipped the ruler down twice more. My palm shook like a dead, disembodied thing in her grip. Her face was trembling, as white and shining now as polished bone. Then suddenly I saw her eyes break, her expression crumple, her mouth drop open in a moan, and she flung her arms around me and pulled my head against her breast. Her face was pressed down on top of my head, and she was crying uncontrollably, her tears hot against my cheek.

  “There, there, it’s all right now,” Father Melancon was saying. He had walked quietly into the room and had put his big hands on each side of her shoulders. “Hop on down to my office now and wait for me. It’s all right now.”

  “I’ve done a terrible thing, Father,” she said.

  “It’s not so bad. Go on and wai
t for me now. It’s all right.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You’re going to be all right.”

  “Yes, yes, I promise.”

  “That’s a good girl,” he said.

  She touched her tears away with her hand, widened her eyes stiffly, and walked from the room with her face stretched tight and empty. Father Melancon closed the door and sat down in the desk next to me. He looked tall and strange and funny sitting in the small desk.

  “Arthur told me he’s responsible for all this,” he said. “I just wish he’d done it a little sooner. She was pretty rough on you, huh?”

  “Not so much. I can take it.”

  “That’s because you’re a stand-up guy. But I need to tell you something about Sister Uberta. It’s between us men and it doesn’t go any farther. Understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know, sometimes we look at a person and only see the outside, in other words the role that person plays in our own lives, and we forget that maybe this person has another life that we don’t know anything about. You see, Claude, there was a boy up in Michigan that Sister Uberta almost married, then for one reason or another she decided on the convent instead. That was probably a mistake. It’s not an easy life; they get locked up and bossed around a lot and those black habits are probably like portable ovens.” He stopped and clicked his fingernails on the desk, then focused his eyes on my face. “Last week she got a heavy load to carry. She heard his ship was torpedoed out on the North Atlantic, and well, I guess her sailor boy went down with it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So let’s show her we think she’s a good sister. She’ll come around all right if we handle things right.”

  We sat silently for a moment, side by side, like Mutt and Jeff in the two desks.

  “Father, I told her I hated her. That was a sin, wasn’t it?”

  “But you didn’t mean it, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Claude, think of it this way . . .” His face became concentrated, then he glanced out the window and the seriousness faded from his eyes. “Look, the sun’s out. We’re going to have ball practice after all,” he said.

  He rose from the desk, opened the window wide, and the rain-flecked breeze blew into the room. His eyes crinkled as he looked down on the playground.

  “Come here a minute,” he said. “Isn’t that Rene LeBlanc standing down there by the oak trees? I wonder who she might be waiting for.”

  Two minutes later I was bounding down the steps, jumping over the dimpled puddles under the trees, and waving my hand like a liberated prisoner at Rene, who stood in the sunlight just outside the dripping oak branches, her yellow pinafore brilliant against the wisteria and myrtle behind her, her face an unfolding flower in the rain-washed, shining air.

  Sister Uberta went back north that year and we never saw her again. But sometimes I would dream of an infinite, roiling green ocean, its black horizon trembling with lightning, and I’d be afraid to see what dark shapes lay below its turbulent surface, and I’d awake, sweating, with an unspoken name on my lips—Sister Uberta’s, her drowned sailor’s, my own—and I would sit quietly on the side of the bed, awaiting the gray dawn and the first singing of birds, and mourn God’s people for just a moment lest our innocence cause us to slip down the sides of the world beyond the tender, painful touch of humanity.

  THE PILOT

  Some people around the south Louisiana oil patch say my pontoon plane is just a rust-streaked, window-cracked, baling-wire special, fit only for a winehead pilot or one of those south-of-the-border guys who sniff too much of their own nose candy before they go into Colombia. But it can float like a goose in eight-foot seas, and it’s got an engine that can whip a lake into a dry mudflat. I can juice it and slip sideways on a layer of hot air and set down on a wet handkerchief when I want to. I crop-dusted all over Texas and skywrote in California, and for that reason flying out to offshore wells and doodlebug companies and skimming in on a bayou isn’t anything to me.

  For example, take the day I dropped out of a hot, blue sky, gunned over the trees, and drifted like a paper kite onto Bayou Teche just outside of New Iberia, where I kept my two-story houseboat moored next to a bank thick with cypress. She wasn’t expecting me, at least not straight out of the sky, blowing water in my back draft all over the windows and the wash, entertaining the black people who were cane fishing in the trees. I guess I thought I’d catch her, see her pull on her blue jeans over her flat stomach, watch him try to mix a casual drink at my drain board and tell me he had another job for me in Belize.

  But she was shelling crawfish and drinking Jax out of the bottle at the kitchen table instead. The far door was open, and the outline of her body seemed to shimmer in the brilliant shatter of light off the bayou.

  How do you tell your wife that the guy who’s diddling her is a Nazi war criminal?

  “Klaus Stroessner is what?” she said. Her curly blond hair was sunburned on the tips, and she didn’t wear a bra under her knit shirt. She had long legs like a dancer, and her arms were tan and smooth and her hands always quick and confident when she worked. Through her knit shirt I could see the small American flag tattooed above her heart.

  “Here’s the picture from Life magazine. He’s not from Argentina. He was a guard in Dachau. That’s him standing next to the gallows.”

  She studied the photograph, clicking her nails on the beer bottle. She folded her legs and rubbed the top of a bare foot.

  “How do you know it’s him?” she said.

  “He didn’t even change his name. And look at that arrogant profile. Even thirty-nine years couldn’t change that.”

  “It’s a coincidence and you’re imagining things again. Klaus is a gentleman and he grew up on a ranch in the pampas. His mother still lives in Buenos Aires. He’s very attached to her.”

  “I know that—”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know that—”

  he pulls you on top of him in the Holiday Inn in Lafayette, buys you lobster at the Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans, rubs his hands over you in the surf in Biloxi while you drip with foam and moonlight and wreaths of laughter.

  “I dropped those geologists off at Morgan City early. I thought we might—”

  “What?” she said. Her eyes looked at the willow trees wilting in the heat on the far side of the bayou. Her eyes were blue and empty.

  “Maybe go to—”

  “What is it you want, Marcel?”

  “Maybe go out to eat.”

  “I’ll change clothes.”

  She went into the bedroom and closed the door, and I leaned with my head on my arm against the icebox.

  . . .

  Klaus Stroessner swims a mile a day in his kidney-shaped, turquoise pool, and his skin has the smooth tautness and color of the inside of a clamshell. He glows with health. His gunmetal hair is oiled and combed straight back; the three pale dueling scars glisten dully on the top of his forehead; he smells of chlorine, cologne, imported soap, Bordeaux wine, the South American cuisine he eats, the countries he has occupied; he smells of my wife.

  I’m a Louisiana coonass raised on boudin and couche-couche, rice and garfish balls. What does that mean? I’m short and thick-bodied, overweight from too much beer and crawfish; I’m restless and lonely whenever I leave the Bayou Teche country; I think slow; maybe I’m dumb.

  I stood on the patio by his pool, the turquoise water winking at us in the morning sun, and watched him eating soft-boiled eggs in his seersucker suit. His expensive clothes crinkled with their freshness.

  “I have friends who’ve seen you,” I said. “I’ve got the room-service bill she signed for you in Lafayette.”

  “You drink too much at night, Marcel, then you have these fears and delusions in the morning. If you drink, take vitamins and aspirin before you sleep.” The Times-Picayune was folded to the stock-market section by his elbow, and he read while he spooned the eggs into his mouth.

/>   “Do you know what diddling another man’s wife can get you around here? I could grease you and walk right out of it. Besides, you’re a Nazi war criminal.”

  “Marcel, Marcel,” he said patiently, “sit down and have some coffee and stop talking this nonsense. Do you want to make another run for me to Belize?”

  “You were only nineteen when that picture was taken, but it’s you and you’re in this country illegally and I’m going to expose you.”

  “No one cares about those things, except maybe a few ancient Jews that nobody pays any attention to.”

  “Uncle Sam cares. Wait till they send your butt back to Germany.”

  “I’m a citizen and businessman, Marcel. Would you like me to dial friends of mine in the State Department so you can talk with them? It would make you feel better, I think.” He smiled at me and his rimless glasses were full of light. His dueling scars looked like a small gray bird’s claw at the top of his brow. “You know the businesses I represent. Would they hire a Nazi? Ask yourself that.”

  “Try this one for size, Klaus—I’ve got a nine-millimeter Luger at the houseboat, probably one your pals used to execute some partisans. You try to cook some barbecue with Amanda again and I’m going to stick it in your mouth and turn your brains into marmalade.”

  “She said she’s worried about you. I think you should talk to a psychologist. I know several in Lafayette. I’ll lend you the money if you need it.”

  I left and drove in my pickup to a bar out on Bayou Teche and got drunk and listened to all the Cajun records on the jukebox. I was all bluff with Klaus. I didn’t own a gun, and I never broke the law in my life except when I was a kid and I got those eight months on Angola farm in 1955 for running a bunch of whiskey up to north Louisiana. I was just full of guilt, that’s all, and sick inside because of Amanda. I love this damn country. The Nazis are supposed to be in old black-and-white newsreels. Why is one in New Iberia diddling my wife?

  Because I allowed it. I flew for him.

  He said it was machine parts for Belize. But the Nicaraguan he put on the plane with me in Miami waved me right on through Belize into Guatemala. I started to get mad at this Nicaraguan because I’d been had, then one of the port engines on the DC-6 started to misfire and shudder and blow oil back on the wing, and I had to feather it before the prop sheared off, which meant I had to feather the corresponding engine on the starboard wing, which meant we were carrying about three boxcar loads of metal-filled crates over the mountains at night with half power.