Jesus Out to Sea: Stories

by James Lee Burke

  The next day at recess I saw Sister Felicie sitting on a stone bench under a live oak in a garden behind the church. Her black habit was spangled with sunlight, and her beads lay across her open palm as though the wind had robbed her of her concentration. Her face looked like ceramic, polished, faintly pink, not quite real. She smelled of soap or perhaps shampoo in her close-cropped hair, which was covered with a skullcap and veil that must have been unbearable in the summer months.

  “You’re supposed to be on the playground, Charlie,” she said.

  “I told Benny Siegel what Mr. Dunlop did to you. He promised to help. But he didn’t show up last night,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Benny is a gangster. Nick and I have been teaching him yo-yo tricks. He built a casino in Nevada.”

  “I’m convinced you’ll be a great writer one day,” she said, and for the first time in weeks she smiled. “You’re a good boy, Charlie. I may not see you again, at least for a while. But you’ll be in my prayers.”

  “Not see you?”

  “Run along now. Don’t hang out with too many gangsters.”

  She patted me on top of the head, then touched my cheek.

  Benny had shown Nick and me color photographs of the resort hotel and gambling casino he had built in the desert. He also showed us a picture of him and his girlfriend building a snowman in front of a log cabin in West Montana. In the photograph she was smiling and looked much younger, somehow innocent among evergreens that rang with winter light. She wore a fluffy pink sweater and knee-high boots stitched with Christmas designs.

  I kept wanting to believe Benny would call or come by, but he didn’t. I dreamed about a building in a desert, its exterior scrolled with neon, a grassy pond on one side of it where flamingos stood in the water, arching their necks, pecking at the insects in their feathers.

  I put away my Cheerio yo-yo and no longer listened to ball games at Buffalo Stadium. I refused to eat, without understanding why, threw my lunch in a garbage can on the way to school, and fantasized about hurting Vernon Dunlop.

  “We’ll set fire to his house,” Nick said.

  “Serious?” I said, looking up from the box of shoes we were shining in his garage.

  “It’s a thought,” he replied.

  “What if somebody gets killed?”

  “That’s the breaks when you’re white trash,” Nick said. He grinned, his face full of play. He had a burr haircut and the overhead light reflected on his scalp. Nick was a good boxer, swallowed his blood in a fight, and never let anyone know when he was hurt. Secretly I always wished I was as tough as he was.

  He and I had a shoeshine route. We collected shoes from all over the neighborhood and shined them for ten cents a pair, using only one color polish—brown; home delivery was free.

  Nick peeled a Milky Way and bit into it. He chewed thoughtfully, then offered the candy bar to me. I shook my head.

  “You got to eat,” he said.

  “Who says?” I replied.

  “You make me sad, Charlie,” he said.

  My father had been an old-time pipeline man whose best friend was killed by his side on the last day of World War I. He read classical literature, refused to mow the lawn under any circumstances, spent more days than he should in the beer joint, attended church irregularly, and contended there were only two facts you had to remember about the nature of God—that He had a sense of humor and, as a gentleman, He never broke His word.

  The last part always stuck with me.

  Benny had proved himself a liar and a bum. My sense of having been used by him seemed to grow daily. My mother could not make me eat, even when my hunger was eating its way through my insides like a starving organism that had to consume its host in order to survive. I had bed spins when I woke in the morning and vertigo when I rode my bike to school, wobbling between automobiles while the sky, trees, and buildings around me dissolved into a vortex of atomic particles.

  My mother tried to tempt me from my abstinence with a cake she baked and the following day with a codfish dinner she brought from the cafeteria, wrapped in foil, butter oozing from an Irish potato that was still hot from the oven.

  I rushed from the house and pedaled my bike to Nick’s. We sat inside the canebrake at the end of our old street, while the day cooled and the evening star twinkled in the west. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, like the taste of zinc pennies.

  “You miss your dad?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t think about it much anymore. It was an accident. Why go around feeling bad about an accident?” I replied, turning my face from his, looking at the turquoise rim along the bottom of the sky.

  “My old man always says your dad was stand-up.”

  “Benny Siegel treated us like jerks, Nick,” I said.

  “Who cares about Benny Siegel?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him, nor could I explain why I felt the way I did.

  I rode my bike home in the dusk, then found a heavy rock in the alley and threw it against the side of the Dunlops’ house. It struck the wood so hard the glass in the windows rattled. Vernon came out on the back porch, eating a piece of fried chicken, his body silhouetted in the kitchen light. He wore a strap undershirt and his belt was unbuckled, hanging loosely over his fly.

  “You’re lucky, dick-wipe. I got a date tonight. But wait till tomorrow,” he said. He shook his chicken bone at me.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I had terrible dreams about facing Vernon in the morning. How could I have been so foolish as to actually assault his house? I wished I had taken the pounding right then, when I was in hot blood and not trembling with fear. I woke at 2:00 a.m. and threw up in the toilet, then went into the dry heaves. I lay in bed, my head under the pillow. I prayed an asteroid would crash into our neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to see the sunrise.

  At around five o’clock I fell asleep. Later I heard wind rattle the roof, then a loud knocking sound like a door slamming repeatedly on a doorjamb. When I looked out my screen window, I could see fog on the street and a maroon convertible with whitewall tires parked in front of the Dunlops’ house. An olive-skinned man with patent-leather hair, parted down the middle, wearing a clip-on bow tie and crinkling white shirt, sat in the passenger seat. I rubbed my eyes. It was the Cheerio man Mr. Dunlop had run off from the parking lot in front of Costen’s Drugstore. Then I heard Benny’s voice on the Dunlops’ porch.

  “See, you can’t treat people like that. This is the United States, not Mussoliniville. So we need to walk out here and apologize to this guy and invite him back to the corner by the school. You’re good with that, aren’t you?”

  There was a gap in the monologue. Then Benny’s voice resumed. “You’re not? You’re gonna deny kids the right to enter Cheerio yo-yo contests? You think all those soldiers died in the war for nothing? That’s what you’re saying? You some kind of Nazi pushing around little people? Look at me when I’m talking, here.”

  Then Benny and Mr. Dunlop walked out to the convertible and talked to the Cheerio man. A moment later, Benny got behind the wheel and the convertible disappeared in the fog.

  I fell sound asleep in the deep blue coolness of the room, with a sense of confidence in the world I had not felt since the day the war ended and Kate Smith’s voice sang “God Bless America” from every radio in the neighborhood.

  When I woke, it was hot and bright outside, the wind touched with dust and the stench of melted tar. I told my mother of Benny Siegel’s visit to the Dunlops.

  “You must have had a dream, Charlie. I was up early. I would have heard,” she said.

  “No, it was Benny. His girlfriend wasn’t with him, but the Cheerio man was.”

  She smiled wanly, her eyes full of pity. “You’ve starved yourself and you break my heart. Nobody was out there, Charlie. Nobody,” she said.

  I went out to the curb. No one ever parked in front of the Dunlops’ house, and because the sewer drain was clogged, a patina of mud always drie
d along the edge of the gutter after each rain. I walked out in the street so I wouldn’t be on the Dunlops’ property, my eyes searching along the seam between the asphalt and the gutter. But I could see no tire imprint in the gray film left over from the last rain. I knelt down and touched the dust with my fingers.

  Vernon opened his front door and held it back on the spring. He was bare-chested, a pair of sweatpants tied below his navel. “Losing your marbles, Frump?” he asked.

  By noon, my skin was crawling with anxiety and fear. Worse, I felt an abiding shame in the fact that once again I had been betrayed by my own vanity and foolish trust in others. I didn’t care anymore whether Vernon beat me up or not. In fact, I wanted to see myself injured. Through the kitchen window I could see him pounding dust out of a rug on the wash line with a broken tennis racquet. I walked down the back steps and crossed into his yard. “Vernon?” I said.

  “Your butt-kicking appointment is after lunch. I’m busy right now. In the meantime, entertain yourself by giving a blow job to a doorknob,” he replied.

  “This won’t take long,” I said.

  He turned around, exasperated. I hit him, hard, on the corner of the mouth, with a right cross that Nick Hauser would have been proud of. It broke Vernon’s lip against his teeth, whipping his face sideways, causing him to drop the racquet. He stared at me in disbelief, a string of spittle and blood on his cheek. Before he could raise his hands, I hit him again, this time square on the nose. I felt it flatten and blood fly under my knuckles, then I caught him in the eye and throat. I took one in the side of the head and felt another slide off my shoulder, but I was under his reach now and I got him again in the mouth, this time hurting him more than he was willing to live with.

  He stepped back from me, blood draining from his split lip, his teeth red, his face twitching with shock. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his father appear on the back porch.

  “Get in here, boy, before I whup your ass worse than it already is,” Mr. Dunlop said.

  That afternoon, Nick Hauser and I went to a baseball game at Buffalo Stadium. When I came home, my mother told me I had received a long-distance telephone call. This was in an era when people only called long distance to inform family members that a loved one had died. I called the operator and was soon connected to Sister Felicie. She told me she was back at Our Lady of the Lake, the college in San Antonio where she had trained to become a teacher.

  “I appreciate what your friend has tried to do, but would you tell him everything is fine now, that he doesn’t need to act on my behalf anymore?” she said.

  “Which friend?” I asked.

  “Mr. Siegel. He’s called the archdiocese twice.” I heard her laugh, then clear her throat. “Can you do that for me, Charlie?”

  But I never saw Benny or his girlfriend again. In late June, I read in the newspaper that Benny had been at her cottage in Beverly Hills, reading the Los Angeles Times, when someone outside propped an M-1 carbine across the fork of a tree and fired directly into Benny’s face, blowing one eye fifteen feet from his head.

  Years later, I would read a news story about his girlfriend, whose nickname was the Flamingo, and how she died by suicide in a snowbank in Austria. I sometimes wondered if in those last moments of her life she tried to return to that wintertime photograph of her and Benny building a snowman in West Montana.

  Vernon Dunlop never bothered me again. In fact, I came to have a sad kind of respect for the type of life that had been imposed upon him. Vernon was killed at the Battle of Inchon during the Korean War. Nick Hauser and I became schoolteachers. The era in which we grew up was a poem and Bugsy Siegel was a friend of mine.

  Jesus Out to Sea

  I grew up in the Big Sleazy, uptown, off Magazine, amongst live oak trees and gangsters and musicians and bougainvillea the Christian Brothers said was put there to remind us of Christ’s blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  My best friends were Tony and Miles Cardo. Their mother made her living shampooing the hair of corpses in a funeral parlor on Tchoupitoulas. I was with them the afternoon they found a box of human arms someone at the Tulane medical school left by the campus incinerator. Tony stuffed the arms in a big bag of crushed ice, and the next day, at five o’clock, when all the employees from the cigar factory were loading onto the St. Claude streetcar, him and Miles hung the arms from hand straps and the backs of seats all over the car. People started screaming their heads off and clawing their way out the doors. A big fat black guy climbed out the window and crashed on top of a sno-ball cart. Tony and Miles, those guys were a riot.

  Tony was known as the Johnny Wadd of the Mafia because he had a flopper on him that looked like a fifteen-inch chunk of radiator hose. All three of us joined the Crotch and went to Vietnam, but Tony was the one who couldn’t deal with some stuff he saw in a ville not far from Chu Lai. Tony had the Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars but volunteered to work in the mortuary so he wouldn’t have to see things like that anymore.

  Miles and me came home and played music, including gigs at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon Street. Tony brought Vietnam back to New Orleans and carried it with him wherever he went. I wished Tony hadn’t gotten messed up in the war and I wished he hadn’t become a criminal, either. He was a good guy and had a good heart. So did Miles. That’s why we were pals. Somehow, if we stayed together, we knew we’d never die.

  Remember rumbles? When I was a kid, the gangs were Irish or Italian. Projects like the Iberville were all white, but the kids in them were the toughest I ever knew. They used to steal skulls out of the crypts in the St. Louis cemeteries and skate down North Villere Street with the skulls mounted on broomsticks. In the tenth grade a bunch of them took my saxophone away from me on the streetcar. Tony went into the project by himself, made a couple of guys wet their pants, then walked into this kid’s apartment while the family was eating supper and came back out with my sax. Nobody said squat.

  Back in the 1950s and ’60s, criminals had a funny status in New Orleans. There were understandings between the NOPD and the Italian crime family that ran all the vice. Any hooker who cooperated with a Murphy sting on a john in the Quarter got a bus ticket back to Snake’s Navel, Texas. Her pimp went off a rooftop. A guy who jack-rolled tourists or old people got his wheels broken with batons and was thrown out of a moving car by the parish line. Nobody was sure what happened to child molesters. They never got found.

  But the city was a good place. You ever stroll across Jackson Square in the early morning, when the sky was pink and you could smell the salt on the wind and the coffee and pastry from the Café du Monde? Miles and me used to sit in with Louis Prima and Sam Butera. That’s no jive, man. We’d blow until sunrise, then eat a bagful of hot beignets and sip café au lait on a steel bench under the palms while the sidewalk artists were setting up their easels and paints in the square. The mist and sunlight in the trees looked like cotton candy. That was before the city went down the drain and before Miles and me went down the drain with it.

  Crack cocaine hit the projects in the early eighties. Black kids all over the downtown area reminded me of the characters in Night of the Living Dead. They loved 9mm automatics, too. The Gipper whacked federal aid to the city by half, and the murder rate in New Orleans became the highest in the United States. We got to see a lot of David Duke. He had his face remodeled with plastic surgery and didn’t wear a bedsheet or a Nazi armband anymore, so the white-flight crowd treated him like Jefferson Davis and almost elected him governor.

  New Orleans became a free-fire zone. Miles and me drifted around the Gulf Coast and smoked a lot of weed and pretended we were still jazz musicians. I’m not being honest here. It wasn’t just weed. We moved right on up to the full-tilt boogie and joined the spoon-and-eyedropper club. Tony threw us both in a Catholic hospital and told this three-hundred-pound Mother Superior to beat the shit out of us with her rosary beads, one of these fifteen-decade jobs, if we tried to check out before we were clean.

  But all these t
hings happened before the storm hit New Orleans. After the storm passed, nothing Miles and Tony and me had done together seemed very important.

  The color of the water is chocolate-brown, with a greenish-blue shine on the surface like gasoline, except it’s not gasoline. All the stuff from the broken sewage mains has settled on the bottom. When people try to walk in it, dark clouds swell up around their chests and arms. I’ve never smelled anything like it.

  The sun is a yellow flame on the brown water. It must be more than ninety-five degrees now. At dawn, I saw a black woman on the next street, one that’s lower than mine, standing on top of a car roof. She was huge, with rolls of fat on her like a stack of inner tubes. She was wearing a purple dress that had floated up over her waist and she was waving at the sky for help. Miles rowed a boat from the bar he owns on the corner, and the two of us went over to where the car roof was maybe six feet underwater by the time we got there. The black lady was gone. I keep telling myself a United States Coast Guard chopper lifted her off. Those Coast Guard guys are brave. Except I haven’t heard any choppers in the last hour.

  Miles and me tie the boat to a vent on my roof and sit down on the roof’s spine and wait. Miles takes out a picture of him and Tony and me together, at the old amusement park on Lake Pontchartrain. We’re all wearing jeans and T-shirts and duck-ass haircuts, smiling, giving the camera the thumbs-up. You can’t believe how handsome both Tony and Miles were, with patent-leather-black hair and Italian faces like Rudolph Valentino. Nobody would have ever believed Miles would put junk in his arm or Tony would come back from Vietnam with helicopter blades still thropping inside his head.

  Miles brought four one-gallon jugs of tap water with him in his boat, which puts us in a lot better shape than most of our neighbors. This is the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish. Only two streets away I can see the tops of palm trees sticking out of the water. I can also see houses that are completely covered. Last night I heard people beating the roofs from inside the attics in those houses. I have a feeling the sounds of those people will never leave my sleep, that the inside of my head is going to be like the inside of Tony’s.