Jesus Out to Sea: Stories Read online

  “The Coast Guard helicopter took me off the roof. The blades was so loud nobody could hear. I was shouting and nobody could hear.”

  “Shouting what?” Herman asks. “What you talking about?”

  “The Coast Guard man grabbed me around the chest and pulled me up on a cable. I couldn’t t’ink. I could see trash and bodies in the water all the way to where the levee was broke. I cain’t get that noise out of my head.”

  “What noise?”

  “The knocking.”

  Herman brushes at a nostril with one knuckle and huffs air out his nose, his eyes flat, as though he’s studying thoughts of a kind no one would ever guess at. He begins to massage the tendons in her shoulders. “You’re tight as iron, Lisa. That ain’t good for you. Come upstairs.”

  “No.”

  For just an instant, in the time it takes to blink, she sees the light in his eyes harden. Then he bites his lip softly and smiles to himself. “I respect you, darling. Wouldn’t have our relationship no other way.”

  Now he’s the pixie again, his tiny mustache flexing with his grin. He places a mirror on the corner, back side flat, and begins chopping up lines on it with a razor blade, shaping and sculpting each white row like an artwork. “I still got the best product in town. I don’t force it on nobody. They hurting, need some medicine, I hep them out. But I ain’t the captain of nobody else’s soul.”

  “I don’t want any, Herman,” she says, the words catching like a wet bubble in her throat.

  “If you can get by on a short-dog and a beer now and then, I say, ‘Rock on, girl.’ I say you a superwoman.”

  He removes a hundred-dollar bill from the pocket of his robe, rolls it into a crisp tube, and snorts a line up each nostril, the soles of his slippers slapping on the floor. He grabs his thonged phallus inside his open robe and pulls on it. “Tell me them coca leaves wasn’t picked by Indian goddesses.”

  “I got to go, Herman,” she says, because she is absolutely sure the knocking sound that has haunted her sleep and that sometimes comes aborning even in the midst of a conversation is about to begin again.

  At the front door he presses the hundred-dollar bill into her palm and closes her fingers on it. “Get you some new threads. You fine-looking, Miss Lisa. Got the kind of class make a man’s eye wander.”

  He lifts her hand, the one that holds the hundred-dollar bill, and kisses it. The cocaine residue on the paper seems to burn like a tiny ball of heat clenched inside her palm.

  The party she helps cater that night is held in a refurbished icehouse across the street from a Jewish cemetery shrouded by live oaks. It’s raining outside, but the moon is full and visible through the clouds, and the shell parking lot is chained with rain puddles. A tin roof covers the old loading dock where years ago blocks of ice rushed down a chute into a wood box and once there were chopped into small pieces with ice picks by sweating black men. The roar of the rain on the tin roof is almost deafening and Lisa has a hard time concentrating on her work. She has another problem, too.

  Rodney, the caterer, can’t keep his hands off her. When he tells her how to arrange and freshen the salad bar, he keeps his palm in the middle of her back. When he walks her the length of the serving table, he drapes an arm over her shoulder. When she separates from him, he lets his fingers trail off her rump.

  “Herman tole me you growed up here’bouts,” he says, slipping his grasp around her triceps.

  “My husband’s daddy worked at this icehouse. He chopped up ice out there on the dock, in that wood box there,” she replies.

  He nods idly, as though processing her statement. “Your husband got killed in Iraq?”

  She starts to answer, then realizes he isn’t listening, that he’s watching another worker pour a stainless-steel tray of okra gumbo into a warmer. His gaze breaks and his eyes come back on her. “Go ahead,” he says.

  “Go ahead what?”

  “Say what you was saying.”

  “Can I get paid after work tonight? I got to hep my auntie wit’ her mortgage.”

  “Don’t see nothing wrong wit’ that,” he says.

  He squeezes by her on his way to the kitchen, the thick outline of his phallus sliding across her rump.

  The party becomes more raucous, grows in intensity, the males-only crowd emboldened by their numbers and insularity. Four bare-breasted women in spangled G-strings and spiked heels are dancing on a stage, fishnet patterns of light and shadow shifting across their skin. Outside, the rain continues to fall and Lisa can see the black-green wetness of the oak trees surrounding the Jewish cemetery, the canopy swishing against the sky, and she wonders if it is true that the unbaptized are locked out of heaven.

  Why is she thinking such strange thoughts? She tries to think about her life in New Orleans before the hurricane, before Gerald’s reserve unit was called up, before his Humvee was blown into scrap metal.

  She had waited tables in a restaurant in Jackson Square, right across the street from the Café du Monde. There were jugglers and street musicians and unicyclists in the square, and crepe myrtle and banana trees grew along the piked fence where the sidewalk artists set up their easels. It was cool and breezy under the colonnades, and the courtyards and narrow passageways smelled of damp stone and spearmint and roses that bloomed in December. She liked to watch the people emerging from Mass at St. Louis Cathedral on Saturday evening and she liked bringing them the steaming trays of boiled crawfish, cob corn, and artichokes that were the restaurant’s specialty. In fact, she loved New Orleans and she loved Gerald and she loved their one-story tin-roofed home in the Lower Ninth Ward.

  But these thoughts cause her scalp to constrict and she thinks she hears hail bouncing off the loading dock outside.

  “You got seizures or something?” Rodney asks.

  “What?”

  “You just dropped the ladle in the gumbo,” he says.

  She stares stupidly at the serving spoon sinking in the cauldron of okra and shrimp.

  “Take a break,” Rodney says.

  She tries to argue, then relents and waits in a small office by the kitchen while Rodney gets another girl to fill in for her. He closes the door behind him and studies Lisa with a worried expression, then sits in a chair across from her and lights a joint. He takes a hit, holding it deep in his lungs, offering it to her while he lets out his breath in increments. Her hand seems to reach out as though it has a will of its own. She bends over and touches the joint to her lips and feels the wetness of his saliva mix with her own. She can hear the cigarette paper superheat and crinkle as she draws in on the smoke.

  “I got to pay you off, baby.”

  “’Cause I dropped the ladle?”

  “’Cause you was talking to yourself at the buffet table. ’Cause you in your own spaceship.”

  Someone outside twists the door handle and flings the door back on its hinges. Tookie Goula steps inside, the strap of her handbag wrapped around her wrist, her arms pumped. “You put that joint in your mout’ again, I’m gonna break your arm, me. Then I’m gonna stuff this pimp here in a toilet bowl,” she says.

  Moments later, in Lisa’s parked automobile, Tookie stares at Lisa with such intensity Lisa thinks she is about to hit her.

  “Next time I’ll let you drown,” Tookie says.

  Lisa looks at the Jewish cemetery and the oak trees thrashing against the sky and the rain puddles in the parking lot. The puddles are bladed with moonlight and she thinks of Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice, but she doesn’t know why.

  “What do you know about drowning, Tookie?”

  Tookie seems to reflect upon Lisa’s question, as though she, too, is bothered by the presumption and harshness in her own rhetoric. But the charitable impulse passes. “Get your head out of your ass. You want to fire me as your sponsor, do it now.”

  Lisa still has the hundred-dollar bill Herman Stanga gave her, plus the money she was paid by his cousin Rodney. She can score some rock or crystal or brown skag in North Lafayette and
stay high or go on an alcoholic bender for at least two days. All she has to do is thank Tookie for her help and drive away.

  “Where you think Limbo is at?” she says.

  “What?”

  “The place people go when they ain’t baptized. Like all them Jews in that cemetery.”

  Tookie stares wanly at the parking lot, her face marked with a sad knowledge about the nature of loss and human inadequacy that she will probably never admit, even to herself.

  The next morning Lisa stands at the speaker’s podium at the A.A. meeting in the Pentecostal church, her eyes fixed on the back wall, and owns up to drinking, using, and jerking her sponsor around. She says she intends to work the steps and to live by the principles of the program. Both the brevity of her statement and the sincerity in her voice surprise her. She receives a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, then watches it passed around the room so each person at the meeting can hold it in his palm and say a silent prayer over it. She lowers her head to hide the wetness in her eyes.

  “Eat breakfast wit’ me. Up at the café,” Tookie says.

  “I’d like that,” Lisa says.

  “You gonna make it, you.”

  Lisa believes her. All the way to 3:00 p.m., when Herman Stanga pulls up to her shotgun house in the Loreauville quarters and kills his engine by her gallery. His car hood ticks like a broken watch.

  “You ain’t gonna unlatch the screen for me?” he says.

  “I ain’t got no reason to talk wit’ you, Herman.”

  “Got me all wrong, baby. I done a li’l research on your financial situation. You should have gotten at least a hundred t’ousand dol’ars when your husband was killed. The gov’ment ain’t paid you yet?”

  She swallows and the tin rooftops and the narrow houses that are shaped like boxcars and the trees along the bayou go in and out of focus and shimmer in the winter sunlight.

  “Gerald’s divorce hadn’t come t’rew yet,” she says.

  “What you mean?”

  “His mama and his first wife was the beneficiaries on the policy. He didn’t change the policy,” she says, her eyes shifting off of Herman’s, as though she were both confessing a sin and betraying Gerald.

  Herman feeds a stick of gum into his mouth, smacks it in his jaw, and raises his eyebrows, as though trying to suppress his incredulity. “Tell me if I got this right. He’s putting the blocks to you, but he goes off to Iraq and fixes it so you ain’t gonna have no insurance money? That’s the guy you moping around about?”

  He begins to chew his gum more rapidly and doesn’t wait for her to reply. “So what we gonna do about the eight-t’ousand-dol’ar tab you got? Also, what we gonna do about the twenty-t’ree hundred dol’ars you took out of Rodney’s cashbox last night?”

  “Cashbox?”

  His head bounces up and down ironically, like it’s connected to a rubber band. “Yeah, the cashbox, the one that was in the desk in the office where Rodney said to sit your neurotic ass down and wait for him. You t’ink you can rip off a man like Rodney and just do your nutcase routine and walk away?”

  “I didn’t steal no money. I don’t owe you no eight t’ousand dol’ars, either.”

  “’Cause you was so stoned out you got no memory of it.” Then he begins to mimic her. “‘Tie me off, Herman. Give me just one balloon, Herman. I’ll do anyt’ing, Herman. I’ll be good to you, Herman. I’ll pay you tomorrow, Herman.’”

  How does he speak with such authority and confidence? Did she actually say those things? Is that who she really is?

  “I ain’t stole no money out of no office.”

  “Tell that to the sheriff when Rodney files charges. Open this goddamn door, bitch. You fixing to go on the installment plan.”

  She attacks his face with her nails and he hits her with his fist harder than she ever believed a human being could be hit.

  During the next six weeks Lisa comes to believe the person she thought was Lisa perhaps never existed. The new Lisa also learns that Hell is a place without geographical boundaries, that it can travel with an individual wherever she goes. She wakes to its presence at sunrise, aching and dehydrated, the sky like the watery, cherry-stained dregs in the bottom of a Collins glass. Whether picking up a brick of Afghan skunk in a Lafayette bus locker for Herman or tying off with one of his whores, sometimes using the same needle, Lisa moves from day into night without taking notice of clocks or calendars or the macabre transformation in the face that looks back at her from the mirror.

  She attends meetings sometimes but either nods out or lies about the last time she drank or used. If pressed for the truth about where she has been or what she has done, she cannot objectively answer. Dreams and hallucinations and moments of heart-pounding clarity somehow meld together and become indistinguishable from one another. The irony is the knocking sound has finally stopped.

  Sometimes Tookie Goula cooks for her, holds her hands, puts her in the shower when she is too sick to care for herself. Tookie has started to smoke again and some days looks haggard and hungover. At twilight on a spring evening they are in Lisa’s bedroom and the live oaks along the bayou are dark green and pulsing with birds against a lavender sky. Lisa has not used or gotten drunk in the last twenty-four hours. But she thinks she smells alcohol on Tookie’s breath.

  “It’s codeine. For my cough,” Tookie says.

  “It’s a drug just the same,” Lisa says. “You go back on the spike, you gonna die, Tookie.”

  Tookie lies down next to Lisa, then turns on her side and places one arm across Lisa’s chest. Lisa doesn’t resist but neither does she respond.

  “You want to move in wit’ me?” Tookie asks. “I’ll hep you get away from Herman. Maybe we’ll go to Houston or up Nort’ somewhere, maybe open a café.”

  But Lisa is not listening. She rubs the balls of her fingers along one of the tattoos on Tookie’s forearm.

  “A mosquito bit me,” Tookie says.

  “No, you’re back on the spike.”

  She kisses Tookie on the mouth and presses Tookie’s head against her breast, something she has never done before. “You break my heart.”

  “You’re wrong. I ain’t used in t’ree years, me.”

  “Stop lying, stop lying, stop lying,” Lisa says, holding Tookie tighter against her breast, as though her arms can squeeze the sickness out of both their bodies.

  It begins to rain and Lisa can smell fish spawning in the bayou and the odor of gas and wet leaves on the wind. She hears the blades of a helicopter thropping across the sky and sees lightning flicker on the tin roofs of her neighbors’ homes. As she closes her eyes, she feels herself drifting upward from her bed, through the ceiling, into the coolness and freedom of the evening. The clouds form a huge dome above her, like that of a cathedral, and she can see the vastness of creation: the rain-drenched land, a distant storm that looks like spun glass, a sea gone wine-dark with the setting of the sun.

  Gerald loved me. We was gonna be married by a priest soon as his divorce come through, she says to Tookie.

  I know that, Tookie says.

  Down there, that’s where it happened.

  What happened?

  My sister was trying to hand up my l’il boy t’rew the hole in the roof and they fell back in the water. I could hear them knocking in there, but I couldn’t get them out. My baby never got baptized.

  These t’ings ain’t your fault, Lisa. Ain’t nobody’s fault. That’s what makes it hard. You ain’t learned that, you?

  Directly below, Lisa can see the submerged outline of the house where she and her family used to live. The sun is low on the western horizon now, dead-looking, like a piece of tin that gives no warmth. Beneath the water’s surface Lisa can see tiny lights that remind her of broken Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice or perhaps the souls of infants that have found one another and have been cupped and given safe harbor by an enormous hand. For reasons she cannot explain, that image and Tookie’s presence bring her a moment of solace she had not anticipated.r />
  A Season of Regret

  Albert Hollister likes the heft of it, the coldness of the steel, the way his hand fits inside the lever action. Even though the Winchester is brand-new, just out of the box from Wal-Mart, he ticks a chain of tiny drops from a can of 3-in-One on all the moving parts, cocks and recocks the hammer, and rubs a clean rag over the metal and stock. The directions tell him to run a lubricated bore brush down the barrel, although the weapon has never been fired. After he does so, he slips a piece of white paper behind the chamber and squints down the muzzle with one eye. The oily spiral of light that spins at him through the rifling has an otherworldly quality about it.

  He presses a half-dozen .30-30 shells into the tubular magazine with his thumb, then ejects them one by one on his bedspread. His wife has gone to town with the nurse’s aide for her doctor’s appointment and the house is quiet. The fir trees and ponderosa pine on the hillside are full of wind and a cloud of yellow dust rises off the canopy and sucks away over his barn and pasture. He picks up the shells and fits them back in the cartridge box, then puts the rifle and the shells in his closet, closes the door on them, and drinks a glass of iced tea on the front porch.

  Down the canyon he can see the long roll of the Bitterroot Mountains, the moon still visible against the pale blueness of the sky, like a sliver of dry ice. He drains his glass and feels a terrible sense of fatigue and hopelessness wash through his body. If age brings wisdom, he has yet to see it in his own life. Across the driveway, in his north pasture, a large sorrel-colored hump lies in the bunchgrass. A pair of magpies descend on top of it, their beaks dipping into their bloody work. Albert looks at the scene with great sorrow on his face, gathers up a pick and a shovel from the garage, and walks down the hillside into the pasture. A yellow Labrador retriever bounds along behind him.