Jesus Out to Sea: Stories

by James Lee Burke

  The Molester

  He told all the kids to call him Frank. He had married into oil money, in this case a stone-deaf woman in the old Memorial District out by Rice University. When she died, Frank moved into a bachelor apartment with a swimming pool not far from the city park where Nick Hauser and I hung out during the summer of 1949. Frank drove a metallic-green Chevy convertible with a white top, rolled leather seats, and a polished walnut dashboard. In the late afternoon he would park it under shade trees and watch the kids playing on the softball diamond or working out on the chained-up sets of iron weights and the heavy bag in the lee of the park house.

  Sometimes a bag of golf clubs was propped up in the backseat of Frank’s car. He was a hard-bodied, athletic man, perhaps forty, his skin sun-browned, his thinning black hair combed straight back on his head. He smoked gold-tipped cigarettes and lit them with a tiny leather-encased lighter. One time he showed the lighter to me and Mary Jo Scarlotti and two other girls; the girls’ shorts were rolled up high on their thighs, almost to their rumps. When the lighter was passed to me, Frank took it out of my hand and gave it to Mary Jo.

  “I got that off a Jap colonel at Saipan,” he said.

  “Did you kill him, Frank?” one of the other girls asked, her mouth turned up at the corner.

  “Not me. I was in Intelligence,” he said, and winked behind his sunglasses.

  Then he took the two other girls for a drive and left Mary Jo and me at the curb. “I’m glad you didn’t go with him,” I said.

  Mary Jo had bongos that made my windpipe close up when I looked at them too long. “I think he’s nice,” she said.

  The next day a new director showed up at the park house. Her name was Terry Anne and she was a magician at Ping-Pong, volleyball, and every kind of handicraft. She had thick, chestnut-colored hair and didn’t have to wear makeup to be pretty. She wore jeans and tennis shoes to work and smelled like strawberry shampoo when her office heated up in the afternoon. I found every excuse to go into Terry Anne’s office.

  The first time she saw Frank unloading three junior high girls at the curb, she headed straight across the grass for his car. We could see her raise her finger in his face, her back stiff with anger, her mouth moving rapidly. Then she strode back to the park house, glancing back over her shoulder to ensure Frank was gone.

  The next afternoon I saw Frank smoking a cigarette in the hot shade of the trees, not far from where Nick was laying it into the heavy bag. “Where’s Terry Anne?” he asked.

  “Inside the park house,” I replied.

  “You saw her yelling at me yesterday?”

  I shrugged, my eyes downcast.

  “Your name is Charlie, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled at the corner of his mouth.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m not a ‘sir.’ Listen, Charlie. Terry Anne’s a dyke. I tried to turn her around but didn’t have any success, know what I mean? That’s why she’s got it in for me. What’s your friend’s name, the guy on the bag?”

  “Nick,” I said.

  “Tell him to get up on the balls of his feet. Your jab’s no good unless your weight is already forward. You box?” he said.

  “A little. I had rheumatic fever in first grade.”

  He flicked his cigarette away and combed his hair, his eyes on Nick.

  Later, I told Nick what Frank had said about getting up on the balls of his feet.

  “He ought to know what he’s talking about. He’s a sponsor for the Golden Gloves,” Nick said.

  “What’s a dyke?” I said.

  “A guy with a male and a female organ. At least I think,” Nick replied.

  “Stay away from that guy,” I said.

  “You worry too much,” Nick said. He grinned from ear to ear, his dun-colored crew cut spiked with sweat, his throat beaded with dirt rings.

  Nick wasn’t afraid of anything.

  The park was an island, a neutral ground, sandwiched between a respectable neighborhood of one-story tree-shaded brick homes and, three blocks away, another neighborhood where the houses were wood-frame and peeling, the yards bare, the early sun like a dust-veiled egg yolk. My mother and I lived in the neighborhood of bare yards. Our neighbors took pride in their lack of schooling, raised their children as livestock, and shot stray cats or dogs with BB guns. After I threw my morning paper route, I always headed straight for the park.

  The park contained not only a baseball diamond and elevated plank seats shaded by live oak trees, but also a fountain and cement wading pool, tetherball poles, picnic tables and barbecue pits. The Popsicle truck arrived daily at 3:00 p.m., ringing with music, and on Monday nights there was a free outdoor movie.

  For Nick and me, the park’s green borders had been the edges of Eden, and no evil should have been able to penetrate them. But I heard stories about events that took place in the park after the field lights had blackened and cooled, when Negroes or Mexicans came into the park to fight white kids with chains, switchblades, and sometimes zip guns. One morning I saw Terry Anne on her knees, trying to scrub a horsetail of tiny red dots off the stucco wall of the park house with bleach and soap.

  “What’s that, Terry Anne?” I asked.

  “Don’t you or Nick hang around here after the park closes,” she said. There was anger and recrimination in her voice.

  “We don’t,” I replied.

  She dropped her scrub brush in a bucket. A gray bar of industrial-strength Lava soap churned to the surface. Her face was hot when she looked up at me. “I saw Nick get in Frank Wallace’s car yesterday. I want both you boys in my office before noon,” she said.

  “Why are you so mad?” I said.

  But she resumed scrubbing the wall, working the bristles hard into the stucco, her jaw as tight as a drumhead.

  Three hours later, in her office, she read us the riot act. Nick listened passively, his eyes looking innocently upward at the walls, the ceiling, the top shelves where Terry Anne kept all her board games and leather-craft tools. “Are you hearing me?” she said.

  “I’m gonna fight in the Gloves. I’m gonna fight Angel Morales,” Nick said.

  “Angel Morales will kill you,” Terry Anne said.

  “I can kick Angel’s butt. Frank says I can,” Nick replied.

  Terry Anne’s mouth was pinched, her face without color, her hands balled into fists on top of her desk blotter. “Frank Wallace does nothing for anyone unless there’s something in it for Frank Wallace. But maybe you’ll have to find that out on your own,” she said.

  “What does it mean ‘to turn somebody around’?” I asked.

  “What? What did you say?” she said.

  Outside, Nick punched me on the arm. “Are you crazy? Why’d you ask her that?” he said.

  “Frank said he tried to turn her around. I didn’t know what that meant,” I replied.

  “You do now.” Then he shook his head and grinned. “You’re an innocent guy, Charlie. That’s why I’m always gonna look out for you.”

  “Why’d you go off with Frank?”

  “I’m gonna be in the Gloves. Frank is Frank. What’s the big deal? Give it a time-out, will you?” he replied.

  Angel Morales’s father was a janitor at the Catholic elementary I had attended. Angel used to ride to work with his father on the bus, his lunch folded inside a paper bag that seemed to always have a grease stain on it. His hair was jet-black, except for a white patch in it that had been caused by malnutrition. He never joined in our games at recess, never spoke in class unless called upon, and never let racial remarks made behind his back register in his face. In seventh grade, Angel and three other Mexican boys robbed a grocery store and shot the owner. Angel spent the next year three years in the Texas State Reformatory.

  When he came out, he wore a pachuco cross tattooed on the back of each thumb and a purple heart inside his right forearm. Some said the purple heart was to hide the needle tracks from the dope he shot in his veins. But anyone who’d ever put on the gloves with Angel knew he wa
s no junkie. His right cross split lips; his left jab could drive an unprotected eye into the skull. He wasn’t a bad kid; he just didn’t take prisoners.

  On Saturday afternoon I paid for Mary Jo Scarlotti’s ticket at the Alabama Theater. In the darkness I placed my hand on top of her left wrist. Her gaze was fastened on the screen and she showed no indication whether she approved or disapproved of my holding her hand. Then I saw her eyes follow a silhouette crossing the space between the screen and front row of seats, a silhouette that was eating popcorn, the shoulders bent in a question-mark posture, the way hoods walked on the north side of town. She took her hand from under mine and turned her head slightly so she could watch the figure walk up the aisle.

  “That’s Angel Morales,” I said.

  “A Mexican has the right to go to the movies, too,” she said.

  “I didn’t say he didn’t,” I replied.

  “I’m gonna get some popcorn. You got fifteen cents?” she said.

  Her rump brushed in my face as she worked her way out to the aisle.

  Early Sunday morning I was throwing my paper route up on Waugh Drive when I saw Angel Morales in a jalopy full of Mexican teenagers. They pulled in to a closed filling station on the corner and went to work on the cold-drink machine, slipping the iron dispenser lock with a coat hanger so they could slide the soda bottles out one at a time without paying. The street was totally deserted, the softness of the morning tinged with the smell of garbage in the alleyways.

  Angel lit a cigarette on the corner, blew smoke at an upward angle, and gestured for me to stop my bike. He wore a short-sleeve maroon shirt unbuttoned on his chest, the collar turned up on his neck, and pointed black shoes we used to call “stomps,” his hair cut short, faintly iridescent with oil.

  “Want a soda?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Your buddy Nick is telling people he’s gonna rip my ass.”

  “Maybe he might do it,” I replied, and instantly regretted my words.

  But Angel only grinned and looked away from me. Then his eyes came back on mine, his mouth still grinning. “You’re stand-up, Charlie. Sure you don’t want a soda?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Tell Nick I’m sorry I got to hurt him. But that’s the way it is. That was you with Mary Jo Scarlotti at the show yesterday?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hear she’s hot to trot.”

  “Screw you, Angel.”

  “Don’t push your luck,” he said.

  Nick’s father was a dutiful religious man and firm disciplinarian from a family of boxers in Mobile. He had given Nick a set of sixteen-ounce Everlast gloves when Nick was only ten, but he worked a six-day week at a laundry service to make an austere livelihood for his wife and three children, and he was often too tired to spend a great deal of time with Nick. So our park director, Terry Anne, became Nick’s coach and I was the cut man, even though I could not forget the fact Nick had gone off with Frank one day and perhaps had made a deal with the devil.

  When the afternoon began to cool and shadows grew across the baseball diamond, Terry Anne unfolded a metal chair among the weight sets and instructed Nick while he smacked the heavy bag, rattling it on its chain, sweat flicking off his hair against the leather.

  “No, no, no, close it up, chin tucked in, head down,” she said, rising from her chair, holding the bag steady. “If he gets you in a clench, he’ll head-butt you and thumb you in the eye. When you’re under his guard, you whack him just below the heart. Then you whack him again. You hook him so hard you make him spit blood on you.”

  “How did you learn all this, Terry Anne?” I said.

  “You know who Lefty Felix Baker is?” she asked.

  “The best boxer in Houston,” I said.

  “He didn’t learn to fight at First Baptist,” she said.

  I’m sure her statement made sense to someone older than I, but Terry Anne was a beautiful riddle, and who was I to require that she make sense or be more than the mentor she was. After Nick had worn himself out on the bag, she draped a towel over his shoulders, then, as an afterthought, blotted the sweat out of his eyes with it. “You know, you might just surprise a lot of folks,” she said.

  That summer was marked by both drought and sudden electrical storms over the Gulf, an unexpected infusion of cold air into the park during a ball game, a burst of rain-flecked wind gusting plumes of dust high in the air. It was also the summer that we heard the Russians had developed the atom bomb. While the night sky pulsed with lightning that made no sound, World War II vets, wearing Hawaiian shirts, drank iced-down bottles of Jax and Pearl beer in the stands and talked about nuclear war. They talked about cities that would be melted into green glass. I wanted to stop my ears.

  Mary Jo Scarlotti had taken to wearing shorts with lace sewn on the hems, and a gold chain and cross that hung inside her cleavage. She tied her shirt under her breasts when she played volleyball and danced up and down after spiking the ball into an opponent’s face. On the Fourth of July she climbed up in a tree to put a bird back in its nest, then plummeted ten feet, her arms outspread, as though she had been crucified on the air, knocking all the wind out of her.

  I tried to shake her awake and not look at the torn button on the top of her shirt. Suddenly her eyes clicked open, like a doll’s.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  “Of course not. Here, listen to my heart,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Silly,” she said, and pressed the side of my head against her breast.

  She stroked my hair while I listened to the whirring sounds inside her chest. Her perspiration smelled like talcum powder and flowers. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw a kid lift a yellow baseball bat in front of him and smack a ball across the grass.

  The next afternoon I bought Mary Jo a banana split at the ice cream store next to the old fire station on Westheimer. We walked back toward the park to play Ping-Pong, then Frank’s convertible pulled alongside us, the dual Hollywood mufflers throbbing softly against the asphalt, the steel curb feelers on his fenders scraping against the concrete. Angel Morales sat in the passenger seat, hunched forward, grinning at nothing, a deck of Luckies folded in the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “Hop in. I’m barbecuing by the pool,” Frank said.

  “We’re going to the park,” I replied.

  “I’m hungry. I didn’t get to eat supper,” Mary Jo said.

  Frank opened the door for her. She squeezed behind him into the backseat, the tops of her breasts bulging out of her shirt. “I got a swimsuit just your size,” he said to her.

  I watched them drive down a long street that was flanged on each side by trees and clipped lawns of St. Augustine grass and brick houses that had turned mauve-colored in the sunset. Mary Jo turned and looked back at me, her face like a white balloon. Then she was gone.

  I went back to the park to find Nick, but he had left for home. I got on my bicycle, one with fat tires and canvas saddlebags inset in wood racks above the rear fender, and rode to Frank’s apartment complex. I could smell meat cooking on a grill and hear water splashing and Frank and Mary Jo’s voices on the other side of a brick wall.

  I climbed a side stairs onto a second-story walkway that overlooked the shallow end of the pool. Frank was showing Mary Jo how to swim on her back. One hand was propped under the nape of her neck, the other moving back and forth from the bottom of her spine to the backs of her thighs, as though only his touch could keep her from sinking. The underwater lights were on, and her hair floated out from her head like black ink while she giggled and spit water from her mouth.

  Behind me, I heard a hiss of released carbonation as someone sank a beer opener into a can.

  “I think he’s AC/DC, so Mary Jo’s not necessarily in danger,” Angel Morales said.

  He upended a can of Grand Prize and looked at me over the bottom as he drank. He wore a pair of yellow swim trunks that stuck wetly to his genitalia and there was a smear o
f salt on his mouth from the top of the beer can.

  “What’s AC/DC?” I asked.

  “It means don’t take a leak next to Frank at a public urinal,” he answered. “What are you doing here, Charlie?”

  I started to answer, then realized I didn’t know why I was there. At first I thought my concern was for Mary Jo. Or at least for Nick. But that wasn’t it. “Frank doesn’t have any business at the park. It’s for kids. It’s supposed to be safe,” I said.

  “Check it out after midnight and tell me about it,” Angel replied.

  “You let Frank use you for bait, Angel.”

  Angel’s eyes were lustrous, like obsidian, unfocused, his thoughts buried deep in his face. He pawed at his cheek with four fingers and balanced his beer can on the railing. Down below, Mary Jo dipped under the water and swam like a giant fish past Frank’s legs. Angel stepped close to my face, his breath touching my mouth.

  “Wake up, Charlie,” he said. “Mary Jo Scarlotti’s family runs whorehouses in Galveston. That park director broad, what’s her name, Terry Anne, was Frank’s pump. You don’t get no free lunch in this world. Now beat it.”

  The next morning I spaded out my mother’s flower bed and didn’t go to the park. At noon Nick came to the house, his baseball glove hooked by its strap through his belt. The sun was white in the sky, the air like a moist cotton glove on the skin, the street blown with dust. The grass in our yard was yellow and there wasn’t a teaspoon of shade on it.

  “You punished or something?” he said.

  “Not really,” I said, pushing the shovel deep into the soil next to the house’s foundation.

  “The fight’s Saturday morning. You’re gonna be there, right?”

  “Did Frank do something to you, Nick?”