Jesus Out to Sea: Stories

by James Lee Burke

  It was quiet a long time. “You trying to hurt me?” he asked.

  “Is it true?”

  “I’m gonna hose Angel Morales in the first round. Then I’m gonna get a shot at the Regionals. But you don’t need to be there, Charlie. Not Saturday, not ever,” he said.

  He walked down the street, peeling off his shirt, popping the dust off it like a whip, his ball glove flopping on his hip.

  Because I lived closer to the park than Nick, Terry Anne had told me to meet her there at 8:00 a.m. Saturday, then we would pick up Nick in her car and drive to the gym on the north side of town. But even though I woke that morning at first light, I found ways not to look at clocks, so that 8:00 a.m. would come and go without my making a deliberate choice to abandon my best friend.

  But by eight-thirty I couldn’t take it any longer. I hurried to the park, only to discover Terry Anne had gone. In her supply closet I found the bucket she had used to scrub blood from a gang fight off the wall of the park house, the bar of Lava soap glued to the bottom, the tin sides crusty from evaporated bleach water. I gathered up a roll of adhesive tape, a box of cotton swabs, a bottle of iodine and one of rubbing alcohol, and, along with two clean towels, put them in the bucket. Then I filled a water bottle from the tap, corked it, and caught the bus on Westheimer.

  Downtown I transferred to another bus that took me into a neighborhood of auto repair shops, vacant lots piled with construction debris, vandalized filling stations, and nineteenth-century frame houses whose tin roofs shimmered in the heat.

  The gym’s windows were layered with white paint, the name of a tire company still faintly legible on one wall. When I opened the door I saw a boxing ring inside a cavernous stone room, the folding chairs filled with people who did not look like fans at a Golden Gloves event.

  “Where you going, bub?” a man at the door said. He wore a white shirt and slacks, and his body was shaped like a huge, upended football.

  “I’m working Nick Hauser’s corner,” I said.

  “That your spit bucket?” he said.

  “Sure. Plus my medical supplies. I’m the cut man,” I replied.

  He smiled at another man, then looked back at me. “Better get on it, cut man. Him and Angel Morales are up next,” he said.

  The room stank of cigars, shower mold, hair oil, and sweaty workout clothes. A blackboard on one wall gave odds on the fighters, and a bone-white man in a fedora, strap undershirt, and tightly belted zoot slacks was taking bets at a plank bar. His arms and shoulders were streaked with body hair, his mouth formed meditatively into a cone when he wrote a wager on a notepad and tore a slip off for the bettor.

  Two fighters, both about seventeen, neither wearing headgear, climbed from the ring and walked down the hallway to the dressing room. One of them had a bloody nose and an eye that had become a knot the size of a duck’s egg. I saw Terry Anne in a folding chair by ringside, biting the corner of her lip, constantly twisting her head to see if Nick had come out of the dressing room. Then she saw me walking toward her, and I could tell by the way she looked past me at the front door, she was hoping Nick’s father was with me.

  “Why weren’t you at the park house? You made us late,” she said.

  “Nick didn’t want me,” I replied.

  “You could fool me,” she said.

  I knew she was taking her frustration and anger out on me because she had nowhere else to put it, but I didn’t hold it against her. She was the only woman in the room, and the men sitting around us made me think of piranhas nudging their snouts against the wall of a fish tank.

  “This isn’t the Gloves, is it?” I said.

  “Go down to the corner pay phone and call Nick’s house. You tell his mother her son has impacted shit between his ears and she’d better get ahold of his father at work.” She took a nickel from her purse and pressed it into my palm. “Do what I say, Charlie.”

  “Nick would never forgive either one of us,” I replied.

  She blew out her breath and gave it up. She had put on makeup and earrings and looked strangely beautiful inside the grayness of the gym, as though she were the only person there possessed of flesh tones and a red mouth and hair that was natural and full of tiny lights. Then I saw her throat swallow, and I realized how someone even as brave and decent as Terry Anne had her limits and didn’t always do well when confronted with forces that sometimes are simply too much for us.

  “Nick’s not afraid. We shouldn’t be, either, Terry Anne,” I said.

  “They’re going to use Nick for shark meat. Now shut up, Charlie,” she replied.

  She was right. Frank Wallace had been sitting in the back of the room with three men who looked like gangsters. When Nick and Angel came out of the dressing room, he got up from his chair like he was going to greet both of them. But he ignored Nick and cupped Angel’s arm, his fingers wrapped all the way around the biceps, whispering in his ear while Nick climbed into the ring. Then Frank hit Angel on the butt and went back to his seat.

  Nick danced up and down in his corner, feigning jabs, huffing air out of his nose. “I knew you’d be here,” he said.

  “I’m your cut man,” I said.

  “You better believe it,” he replied.

  As soon as the bell rang, Angel Morales took him apart. It was awful to watch. Angel kidney-punched him in the clenches, opened a cut over Nick’s right eye, then head-butted it into a split all along the eyebrow. In the third round he knocked Nick’s mouthpiece into the seats, then chopped him against the ropes, driving one punch after another into Nick’s exposed face, while sweat showered like diamonds from Nick’s hair.

  “Stop the fight!” Terry shouted.

  “Bullshit! Bullshit!” Nick yelled.

  Before the bell for the fourth round I wiped Nick down and tried to dress the cut above his eye, then flapped the towel in his face. His eye was swollen shut and his teeth were pink when I fitted his mouthpiece inside his lips.

  “You got to get under his reach,” I said.

  “I look like a pygmy?” he replied, and tried to grin.

  I could hardly watch what Angel did to him in the next round.

  In the background, while Nick was being cut to pieces, Frank was talking with his gangster friends, smoking a gold-tipped cigarette, his legs crossed, telling a joke that made them all laugh simultaneously.

  Before the round ended I leaned forward over the spit bucket, pretending to pour water onto a fresh towel. Instead, I emptied the water bottle into the bucket, splashing it down the sides, washing the residue of dried bleach into the bottom, where the bar of Lava lay glued to the tin. Then I dropped the towel into the water, soaking it with bleach and soap.

  When the bell ended the round I climbed through the ropes with the wood stool, bucket, and towel. I upended the water bottle for Nick to drink, held the bucket for him to spit, then wiped down his chest, forearms, and gloves.

  “Bust him in the eyes. Rub your gloves in his eyes. You hear me?” I said.

  I doubted if Nick understood what I had done, but when the bell clanged he came hard out of the corner, slipped Angel’s first punch, took the second on his shoulder, then unloaded with a right cross that exploded on Angel’s nose.

  Angel stepped backward, his eyes blinking, as though a flashbulb had popped in his face. Nick jabbed him with his left, then ducked as though going in for a body attack. Angel instinctively tucked in his elbows, covering his stomach, and that’s when Nick hooked him in the face with a murderous punch that drenched Angel’s eyes with bleach and soap.

  Angel stumbled around in the ring, unable to see the punches raining down on him. It didn’t take either the crowd or the referee long to figure out what had happened. The crowd began booing, and a cascade of beer cups and half-eaten hot dogs showered into the ring. The referee stopped the fight, and Frank and his friends headed for Nick’s corner and me. I was sure I was about to be lynched.

  In my mind’s eye I saw myself facing them down, shaming Frank Wallace for the degener
ate he was, saving Terry Anne and Nick from the mob. But that’s not what happened. I kicked the bucket and the soaked towel under the ring apron and ran for my life.

  Terry Anne and Nick caught up with me in her car, seven blocks away. Nick was still in his trunks, his face swollen out of shape, his body crawling with stink.

  “We screwed the whole bunch of them! It was beautiful! We’re gonna be legends! Who needs the Gloves?” he said after I was in the car.

  But I saw Terry Anne looking fearfully in the rearview mirror and I knew it was not over.

  That night, while kids played softball under the lights at the park and music played through the speakers on the Popsicle truck, I used the pay phone to call the Italian restaurant owned by Mary Jo’s family. I put a pencil between my teeth when I spoke.

  “Is this Mary Jo Scarlotti’s father?” I said.

  “I’m her uncle. Who’s this?” the voice said.

  “A man name of Frank Wallace bothers kids at the park. He’s been giving Mary Jo swimming lessons at his apartment. Why don’t you people wise up and do something about that?” I said, and hung up, my heart beating.

  One year later the Communists would sweep across the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy and his friends would teach us how to fear one another. Terry Anne would marry a grade-B cowboy actor and open a dude ranch outside of Reno, Nevada. The year after that, Frank Wallace would be found inside a concrete mixer next to the Galveston Freeway.

  Maybe my phone call brought about his death. Or maybe not. I didn’t care either way. Frank was dead and Mary Jo Scarlotti was valedictorian of our class. The park is still there, little different from the way it was fifty-five years ago. Just the other day I drove past the ball diamond and a group of kids were gathered around an ice cream truck, licking cones and Popsicles, convinced the world was a grand place, full of sun-showers and flowery gardens, inside of which the only purpose of a satyr was to make them laugh.

  The Burning of the Flag

  When bombs fell on the ships at Pearl Harbor, we lived on a quiet dead-end street in a city not far from salt water, where palm trees, palmettos, and live oaks grew side by side in meadows that stayed green through the winter months. It was a wonderful street, lined with brick houses, each with a roofed porch, closed off at the end with a cul-du-sac and a dense canebrake, on the other side of which horses grazed in a pasture. On a rainy day, on the far side of the pasture, you could see the lighted tower of a movie theater glowing against the evening sky.

  My best friend was Nick Hauser. If it was a time of privation, we did not think of it as such, primarily because no one in our neighborhood had money and most considered themselves fortunate to have survived the Depression years with their families intact. Wake Island and Corregidor fell and we heard terrible stories about the decapitation of American prisoners. But on our block—and that is all we ever called the place we lived, “our block”—the era was marked not so much by a distant war as it was by the presence of radios in people’s windows and on their front porches, the visits to the block of the bookmobile and the Popsicle man, and games of street ball and hide-and-seek on summer evenings that smelled of flowers and water sprayed from garden hoses.

  One night a week during the summer of 1942 the entire city was blacked out for an air-raid drill. My father sat on the front porch, smoking a cigarette, a white volunteer Civil Defense helmet cocked on his head, sometimes reading the newspaper with a flashlight. Once the drill was over, the theater tower in the distance rippled with neon, and the voices of Fred Allen and Senator Claghorn or Fibber McGee and Molly could be heard all over the neighborhood. I believed no evil would ever enter the quiet world in which we lived.

  But if you crossed Westheimer Street, the soft aesthetic blend of the rural South and prewar urban America ended dramatically. On our side of Westheimer was a watermelon stand among giant live oaks, and on the other side of the street a neighborhood of boxlike, utilitarian houses and unkept yards where bitterness and penury were a way of life, and personal failure the fault of black people, Yankees, and foreigners.

  The kids on the opposite side of Westheimer gave no quarter in a fight and asked for none in return. Some of them carried switchblades and went nigger-knocking with BB guns and firecrackers. Their cruelty was seldom done in heat but instead visited upon the victim dispassionately, as though the perpetrator were simply passing on an instruction about the way the world worked.

  The five Dunlop brothers were legendary in the city’s school system. Each of them was a living testimony to the power of the fist or the hobnailed boot over the written word. The youngest and meanest of them was Vernon—two years older than Nick Hauser and me, bullnecked, his lime-green eyes wide-set, his arms always pumped, his body as hard as a man’s at age fourteen. He threw an afternoon paper route and set pins side by side with blacks at the bowling alley and as a consequence had more money to spend than we did. But that fact did not make us safe from Vernon Dunlop.

  In July and August, Nick Hauser and I picked blackberries and sold them in fat quart jars door-to-door for two bits apiece. Vernon would wait for us on his bicycle behind the watermelon stand, where he knew we would come in the evening, then pelt us with clods of dried clay, never saying a word, sometimes slapping us to the ground, kneeling on one of our chests, frogging our arms and shoulders black and blue. There was neither apparent purpose nor motivation in his attacks. It was just Vernon doing what he did best—making people miserable.

  Then one evening he got serious. His lip was puffed and one eye swollen, his forearms streaked with red welts, his T-shirt pulled out of shape at the neck. Obviously, Vernon had just taken a licking from his father or his brothers. While Nick stood by helplessly, Vernon hit me until I cried, twisting his knuckles with each blow, driving the pain deep into the bone. Then I committed one of those cowardly acts that seems to remain inside you forever, like you give up on being you and admit your worthlessness before the world. “I’ll give you half my money. The blackberries are for everybody anyway. We should have included you in, Vernon,” I said.

  “Yeah? That’s good of you. Let’s see it,” he said.

  He was still straddled on my chest, but he lifted one knee so I could reach into my trouser pocket. I pressed three quarters into his palm, my eyes locked on his. I felt his weight shift on me, his buttocks and thighs clench me tighter.

  He cupped his palm to his mouth, spit a long string of saliva on the coins, and stuffed them inside my shirt, pressing the cloth down on them so they stuck to my skin.

  “I just thought of names for you guys,” he said. “Nick, you’re Snarf. That’s a guy who gets his rocks sniffing girls’ bicycle seats. Charlie, you’re Frump. Don’t know what a frump is? A guy who farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles. Snarf and Frump. Perfect.”

  He wiped his hand on my shirt as he got off my chest. I wanted to kill Vernon Dunlop. Instead, I ran home crying, the wet coins still inside my clothes, sure in some perverse fashion that Nick had betrayed me because he had not been Vernon’s victim, too.

  That evening I sat by myself at the picnic table in the backyard, throwing a screwdriver end over end into the St. Augustine grass. Our lawn was uncut, the mower propped at an odd angle in the dirt alleyway. I threw the screwdriver hard into the grass, so it embedded almost to the handle in the sod. The kitchen light was on, the window open, and I could hear my parents arguing. The argument was about money or the amount of time my father spent with his friends at the icehouse and beer garden on Alabama Boulevard. I went through the side door into my bedroom, and stuffed my soiled shirt and trousers into the clothes hamper. I bathed and put on my pajamas, and did not tell my parents of what Vernon had done to me. I told my mother I was sick and couldn’t eat. Through my screen window I could hear the other kids playing ball in the twilight.

  When I woke the next morning, I felt dirty all over, my skin scalded in the places Vernon’s saliva had touched it. I was convinced I was a weakling and a mo
ral failure. The song of mockingbirds and the sunlight filtering through the mulberry tree that shaded our driveway seemed created for someone else.

  Nick did not come over to play, nor did he come out of his house when the Popsicle man pedaled his cart down the block that afternoon. At 5:00 p.m. my mother sent me to the icehouse to tell my father it was time for supper. He was talking with three other men about baseball, at a plank table under a striped canopy that flapped in the wind, a bottle of Jax and a small glass and salt shaker in front of him.

  He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. He had started his vacation that day and had been at the icehouse since noon. “Is it that time already? Well, I bet we still have time for a root beer, don’t we?” he said, and told the waiter to bring me a Hires and my father another Jax.

  My father was an antithetically mixed, eccentric man who lost his best friend in the trenches on the last day of World War I. He detested war and particularly the demagogues who championed it but had never participated in one themselves. He flew the flag on our front porch, unfurling it from its staff each morning, putting it away in the hall closet at sunset. He taught me how to fold the flag in a tucked square and told me it should never touch the ground or be left in the rain or flown after it had become sun-faded or frayed by the wind. But he attended no veterans’ functions, nor would he discuss the current war in front of me or let me look at the photographs of enemy dead that sometimes appeared in Life magazine.

  My father had wanted to be a journalist, but he had left college without completing his degree and had gone to work for a natural gas pipeline company. After the Crash of ’29, any hope of his changing careers was over. He never complained about the work he did, but each day he came home from the job and repeatedly washed his hands, as though he were scrubbing an irremovable stain from fabric.

  As we walked home from the icehouse, I asked him if we could go fishing down at Galveston.