BY THE SAME AUTHOR
DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS
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
BILLY BOB HOLLAND NOVELS
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Bitterroot
Heartwood
Cimarron Rose
OTHER FICTION
White Doves at Morning
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict
Two for Texas
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Half of Paradise
Simon & Schuster
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by James Lee Burke
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
See last page for full information on where these stories first appeared.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burke, James Lee.
Jesus out to sea: stories / James Lee Burke.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3552.U723J47 2007
813'.54—dc22 2006100977
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5949-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5949-3
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
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For Paul and Muilee Pai
Contents
Winter Light
The Village
The Night Johnny Ace Died
Water People
Texas City, 1947
Mist
A Season of Regret
The Molester
The Burning of the Flag
Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine
Jesus Out to Sea
Jesus Out to Sea
Winter Light
He lived alone at the head of the canyon in a two-story log house that controlled the access to the national forest area behind his property. His house was built up on a slope above a creek that flowed down from a chain of lakes high up on the plateau, and from his writing desk at his second-story window he could look out over the wide sweep of valley below and see the snow blowing out of the ponderosa on the crests of the hills and the sharply etched tracks of deer that had gone down to drink in the stream during the night. He could also see the long black scar of a road that wound its way up from the interstate, past the one working ranch left in the valley, to the foot of his property, and finally to the public woods behind his house.
The sunlight was red on the snow, the shadows already purple in the trees, the wind colder and flecked with ice crystals against the window glass, and he knew the hunters would be there soon. They almost always came in the late afternoon, because it was only a ten-mile drive from town and with a little luck they could get in a few shots before the official close of the hunter’s day thirty minutes after sunset.
He was fifty-eight and he had taken early retirement from his position as a literature professor at the university, but he had no interest in the activities of retirement or people his own age. Most of his friends were college students, and in one way or another his property always seemed marked more by their presence than his: tepee poles stacked against his toolshed, the willow-stick outline of a sweat lodge by the creek, a communal vegetable garden whose rows were now frozen into iron ridges.
A red Toyota jeep, as bright against the snow as a fire engine, ground in four-wheel drive up the road, then slowed as the driver and his passenger peered through their ice-streaked windows at the signs fastened to the trunks of larch trees at the foot of the professor’s property:
THIS IS A PRIVATE ROAD
NO HUNTING
NO SHOOTING
NO TRESPASSING
But they drove on anyway, and he met them outside his door, with a cup of coffee in his hand, in his worn corduroy pants, lace-on boots, and flannel shirt. He had played basketball for LSU, and he was tall and angular, bareheaded in the wind, his skin red and coarse with the cold.
He was not unkind to them. He never was. Sometimes he invited them inside; usually they simply went away, confused or mildly irritated. But these two were different. The passenger had a dark light in his face and wore an untrimmed beard and spit regularly in the snow. His hands were square and big and seamed with dirt, and he opened and closed them impatiently. The driver was a fat man who wore three shirts that hung outside his pants, galoshes, a neon-orange hunter’s vest, and a narrow skinning knife in a scabbard on his side. He smiled while he talked, but his eyes did not go with his face.
The professor, whose name was Roger Guidry, listened to the driver talk, his slender fingers wrapped around his coffee cup, his head nodding absently as he scraped at the snow with the tip of his boot. Then, when the overweight man had finished, he said, “You can walk in from the other side and hunt, if you want.”
“The other side?” the driver said.
“Yes.”
“How far a walk is that?”
“Fifteen miles.”
“Fifteen miles,” the driver said, nodding his head up and down. “Fifteen miles in snow, you’re saying?”
“That’s right.”
“I told you we’re bow hunters. We’re not going to put a bullet into somebody’s house or shoot somebody’s cows.”
“I know that.”
“Listen—” the driver said.
The passenger hit him on the arm and said, “Forget it. Let’s go.”
“Just a minute,” the driver said. “You’re telling me to walk fifteen fucking miles through snow?”
“It’s your choice.”
“My choice?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve heard about you.”
“Oh?” Roger said.
“Yeah. I just didn’t know it was this canyon.”
“I see.”
“We’ve still got time to go up the Blackfoot. Forget this guy,” the passenger said.
The driver put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and looked around the yard as though he were deciding something. Then he laughed, lit his cigarette, and looked off down the valley.
“Too much,” he said. Then they both got in the jeep, backed it around in the snow, cracking an old tomato stake in the vegetable garden, and crunched down the road over their own long lines of stenciled tire tracks.
The coffee cup was cold in the professor’s hand. He looked down at the creek that flowed out of the dark stands of pine and fir in the national forest. In the center the riffle was a deep blue-green between sheets of ice that looked like teeth. Through the willow frame of the sweat lodge he could see two smooth, round boulders that always reminded him of a woman’s breasts, and behind them a bark-less and polished cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream to form an eddying pool whose pebbled bott
om was always marbled with the shapes of cutthroat and brookie trout. In the spring and summer he and the students would fish the pool, have community dinners among the ferns on the bank, and pack far into the canyon, where the cinnamon bears and white-tailed deer were never hunted and bighorn sheep grazed through the saddles high up on the peaks.
The frozen trunks of the ponderosas creaked in the wind, powdering snow in the twilight.
In the spring, he thought.
He didn’t remember at which particular stage of his dissatisfaction with university life he had decided to take early retirement. Others had tried to dissuade him—he was a wonderful teacher, he would be hurt financially, he would be missed by his students. And there was truth in what they said, but he had reached the age, he told himself, when he no longer had to apologize or defend.
Maybe it had been the interminable department and committee meetings, the jealousies and hatreds that his colleagues kept alive like green wounds for decades, the self-anointed liberals whose pension plans were invested in nuclear energy, South Africa, and the Boeing Company. He tried, at least in his own mind, not to be hard on them, but in reality they filled him with a visceral disgust. There was often a sneer in their laughter, an atmosphere of bitterness and personal failure in their meeting rooms that was almost palpable, like the smell of fear. They denigrated anyone who accomplished anything and tried to sabotage any educational innovation that threatened their own meager positions. If any of them had acquired any wisdom in their years as educators, he had yet to see the instance.
No, he did remember when he made his decision to hang it up. A search committee had to meet during the Christmas holidays to choose from a huge file of applicants for a vacant position. The chair of the committee, Waldo Gates, and one of his allies, consistently gave low ratings to the most qualified candidates and high ratings to people with no publications and little experience. Waldo Gates, who lived across the creek from Roger, was also a hunter. He had even worn his mail-order camouflage fatigues and brown corduroy shooting vest to the meeting. His friend was dressed for the hunt, too, and both of them kept looking at their watches. After they had just sandbagged a Ph.D. from Stanford who had published two collections of critical essays, it was obvious to Roger that the department was about to hire an underqualified and frightened young woman who would be easily controlled by Waldo and his coterie, and Waldo and his committee ally would soon be duck-hunting at the reservoir south of town.
Waldo was sitting at the desk in the front of the room. He wore a red chin beard and horn-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His eyes were lime green, the size of dimes, and they never blinked when they looked over the top of his glasses at someone, which gave him the appearance of candor and directness and which always intimidated students and younger faculty members.
He held a file folder gingerly between his fingers and clicked it up and down on the desk. “I think we’ve found the lady we need here,” he said. “And it seems to me we have more or less a majority agreement on that, sooooooo”—his eyes roved over the five other faces in the room, and two junior faculty members glanced away—“unless anyone else has anything to say, we can be on our way.”
“Going out to make things fall down, are you?” Roger said.
“I beg your pardon,” Waldo said.
“Have you guys ever thought about an open season on people? You could establish these big reserve areas enclosed by electric fences where y’all could go inside and hunt each other for, say, three or four days at a time. Blow blood, brains, and hair all over the bushes and have a fine time. Except it’d be a genuine sport because the prey would have guns, too. What do you think, Waldo?”
“I think your cause is silly and your personal life needs some attention.” Waldo’s eyes were round and lidless in his soft face.
“Would you care to explain that?” Roger said.
“There’s life after divorce. That’s why people have divorces. You end a relationship and you go on with your life. You don’t lay off your problems on your colleagues.”
“Maybe we could talk about that later, Waldo.” Roger cleared his throat slightly. “Outside somewhere. I’ll keep one hand in my pocket. In fact, I’ll turn my back so the position will be more familiar for you.”
“I’m glad you’ve gotten that off your chest, Roger. I’ll report your remarks to the dean. Then you can take it up with him. I believe our committee work is done, ladies and gentlemen. Sooooooo, unless Dr. Guidry has any more entertaining observations to make, we’ll say God bless and good evening.”
They left him alone in the room, feeling foolish and wrong. Did he always have to speak his mind, as a child would, he thought, then spend the rest of the day rationalizing his impetuosity? He looked wistfully out the window at the brown, grassy slope of the mountain behind the campus and the thick stands of ponderosa that grew along the crest and through the saddles. The trunks were orange in the sunlight, wet with melted snow, the pine needles as dark and shiny as clusters of splintered blue glass. High up on the wind stream a hawk floated against the thin wafer of pink, winter sun.
Then Roger heard the janitor knock his broom against one of the wood desks. He picked up his briefcase at his foot, smiled politely, and walked across the empty quadrangle to his pickup truck. His vehicle was the only one in the parking lot, and for some illogical reason that fact struck him as significant.
His son was away at Stanford, and his two daughters had started their own lives in Oregon and Minnesota. They came to see him in the summer, usually with friends, and their conversations were alive with subjects that seemed to exist just beyond the borders of his knowledge or his interest. After the divorce he had thought of his wife only with anger, and when the anger passed he could think of nothing except the ringing winter loneliness in his house.
Young women were available, certainly, both out of affection as well as kindness. He woke hard in the morning, throbbing with desire, and he had to sit quietly on the side of his bed in his underwear and force his mind empty of their shapes, their bare thighs and breasts, their lips, their hands that wanted to stroke his sex. But he managed to live celibate, castigating himself in the silence for his prurient thoughts, on one occasion walking far up the canyon in knee-deep snow, beating his arms in the cold, saying, “Bullshit, bullshit.” A whitetail doe crisscrossed the trail in front of him, staring back at him with brown, curious eyes.
The morning after the visit of the hunters in the Toyota jeep, he walked outside into the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the snow, the air as sharp and cold inside the lungs as ice water, and began stacking firewood in his wheelbarrow to take back to the house. His malamute, Boomer, who was as big and thick through the middle as a small cinnamon bear, frisked in the snow, snorting down in a badger hole by the garden, pulling a stick out of the snow and throwing it in the air.
Then Roger saw that it was not a stick, that it was made of aluminum and the flanged steel tip was the point of a hunter’s arrow. He caught Boomer by the thick nape of skin on the back of his neck and forced him to release the shaft from his jaws. The point of the arrow felt as sharp as a razor against the ball of his thumb.
It could have come from Waldo’s, across the creek, he thought. He looked through the leafless cottonwoods at the stacked hay bales that Waldo and his children used as an archery target. Yes yes yes, Waldo, he thought. Always Waldo. Last summer Waldo had been bothered by a skunk under his woodshed, and he had hired an out-of-work sawyer to tender-trap it inside a vinyl garbage bag. The sawyer had fitted the crimped end of the bag over his exhaust pipe and, while Waldo watched from his window, asphyxiated the animal to make a pair of gloves for Waldo’s oldest son.
But Roger well knew the reason for his deliberate remembrance of a past grievance. The arrow didn’t come from Waldo’s property. Waldo was not a bow hunter, and also the trajectory of the arrow was almost straight down, which meant that it had not bounced off the top of a hay bale and flown across the creek but instead had been fire
d high into the air so that it would drop cleanly into Roger’s yard.
It could have fallen out of their jeep when their doors were opened, he told himself. It could have happened that way. Yes. But he felt his heart clicking against his ribs.
The next day was bright and clear and windless, and the valley was white and dazzling under a bluebird sky. By afternoon, the sun was so warm that the snow had begun to pock in the fields and melt around the base of the ponderosa trunks. All day he waited for them to return. But when the sun finally dropped behind the pines on the valley’s western rim and the snowfields turned as purple as a bruise, only one vehicle had come up the county road, Waldo’s, carrying Waldo and a graduate teaching assistant, a statuesque blond girl named Gretchen whom Waldo had requested as his grader.
Two days later, right at daybreak, he heard a four-wheel-drive transmission grinding up the road, and when he looked through his window, his breath clouding against the glass, he saw the red Toyota jeep stop at the foot of his property. The two hunters got out with shotguns and empty canvas backpacks, cut through the bare cottonwoods, stepped gingerly across the boulders in the creek, and threaded their way through fences, brush, trees, and an abandoned horse corral at the back of Waldo’s property until they reached the trail that led into the national forest.
In minutes he heard their shotguns booming. He put on his glasses and found Waldo’s telephone number in the directory. The phone rang a dozen times before Waldo picked up the receiver, his voice full of sleep.