Heaven’s Prisoners Read online

  I touched her foot. I touched her blood-flecked ankle. I put my hands around her fingers. I brushed my palm across her curly hair. I knelt like a child by the bed and kissed her eyes. I picked her hand up and put her fingers in my mouth. Then the shaking started, like sinew and bone separating inside me, and I pressed my face tightly into the pillow with my wet hair against her forehead.

  I don't know how long I knelt there. I don't remember getting up from my knees. I know that my skin burned as though someone had painted it with acid, that I couldn't draw enough air into my lungs, that the room's yellow light was like a flame to my eyes, that all my joints seemed atrophied with age, that my hands were blocks of wood when I fumbled in the dresser drawer, found the.45, and pushed the heavy clip into the magazine. In my mind's eye I was already running through the yard, across my neighbor's pasture, through the sloping woods of oak and pine on the far side where the dirt road passed before it reached the drawbridge over the bayou. I heard a black kid from my platoon yell, Charlie don't want to boogie no more. He running for the tunnel. Blow up their shit, Lieutenant. I saw parts of men dissolve in my fire, and when the breech locked open and I had to reload, my hands shook with anticipation.

  But the voice was not a black kid's from my platoon, and I was not the young lieutenant who could make small yellow men in black pajamas hide in their earthen holes. Batist had his big hands on each of my arms, his bare chest like a piece of boilerplate, his brown eyes level and unblinking and staring into mine.

  "They gone, Dave. You can't do no good with that gun, you," he said.

  "The drawbridge. We can cut across."

  "C'est pas bon. lis sont pa'tis."

  "We'll take the truck."

  He shook his head to say no, then slipped his huge hand down my arm and took the automatic from my palm. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and walked me into the living room.

  "You sit here. You don't got to do nothing, you," he said. The.45 stuck up out of the back pocket of his blue jeans. "Where Alafair at?"

  I looked at him dumbly. He breathed through his mouth and wet his lips.

  "You stay here. Don't you move, no. T'comprends, Dave?"

  "Yes."

  He walked into Alafair's room. The pecan trees in the yard flickered whitely when lightning jumped across the sky, and the wind swept the rain across the gallery and through my shattered front door. When I closed my eyes I saw light dancing inside a dark window frame like electricity trapped inside a black box.

  I rose woodenly from the couch and walked to the doorway of Alafair's room. I paused with one hand on the door-jamb, almost as though I had become a stranger in my preoccupation with my own grief. Batist sat on the side of the bed with Alafair in his lap, his powerful arms wrapped around her. Her face was white and jerking with sobs against his black chest.

  "She all right. You gonna be all right, too, Dave. Batist gonna take care of y'all. You'll see," he said. "Lord, Lord, what the world done to this little child."

  He shook his head from side to side, an unmasked sadness in his eyes.

  6

  IT RAINED THE day of Annie's funeral. In fact, it rained all that week. The water dripped from the trees, ran in rivulets off the eaves, formed brown pools filled with floating leaves in the yard, covered the fields and canebrakes with a dull, gray-green light. Her parents flew down from Kansas, and I picked them up at the airport in Lafayette and drove them in the rain to a motel in New Iberia. Her father was a big, sandy-haired wheat farmer with square, callused hands and thick wrists, and he looked out the car window silently at the sopping countryside and smoked a cigar and spoke only enough to be polite. Her mother was a thick-bodied Mennonite country woman with sun-bright blond hair, blue eyes, and red cheeks. She tried to compensate for her husband's distance by talking about the flight from Wichita, her first experience in an airplane, but she couldn't concentrate on her words and she swallowed often and her eyes constantly flicked away from my face.

  They had had reservations about me when I married Annie. I was a divorced older man with an alcoholic history, and as a homicide detective I had lived in a violent world that was even more foreign to rural Kansas than my Cajun accent and French name. I felt they blamed me for Annie's death. At least her father did, I was sure of that. And I didn't have the strength to argue against that unspoken accusation even with myself.

  "The funeral is at four o'clock," I said. "I'll let you all rest up at the motel, then I'll be back for you at three-thirty."

  "Where's she at now?" her father said.

  "The funeral home."

  "I want to go there."

  I paused a moment and looked at his big, intent face and his wide-set gray eyes.

  "The casket's closed, Mr. Ballard," I said.

  "You take us there now," he said.

  We buried Annie in my family's plot in the old cemetery by St. Peter's Church in New Iberia. The crypts were made of brick and covered with white plaster, and the oldest ones had cracked and sunk into the earth and had become enwrapped with green vines that rooted into the mortar. The rain fell out of the gray sky and danced on the brick street by the cemetery and drummed on the canvas canopy over our heads. Before the attendants from the funeral home slid Annie's coffin into the crypt and sealed it with an inscribed marble slab, one of them unscrewed the metal crucifix from the top and put it in my hands.

  I don't remember walking back to the limousine. I remember the people under the canopy-her parents, Batist and his wife, the sheriff, my friends from town-but I don't remember leaving the cemetery. I saw the rain swirling out of the sky, saw it glisten on the red bricks of the street and the black spiked fence that surrounded the cemetery, felt it run out of my hair and into my eyes, heard a train whistle blow somewhere and freight cars clicking on the tracks that ran through town, and then I was standing in the middle of the manicured lawn of the funeral home, with its hollow wooden columns and false antebellum facade looking the color of cardboard in the dull light, and cars were driving away from me in the rain.

  "The truck over here, Dave," Batist was saying. "Come on, we got supper already fixed. You ain't eat all day."

  "We've got to take her folks back to the motel."

  "They done already gone. Hey, put this coat over your head. You wanta stand out here and be a duck, you?"

  He smiled at me, his cannonball head beaded with raindrops, his big teeth like pieces of carved whalebone. I felt his hand go around my arm, squeeze into the muscle, and lead me to the pickup truck, where his wife stood by the open door in a cotton print dress with an umbrella over her head. I sat quietly between them on the way back to the house. They stopped trying to speak to me, and I stared out the windshield at the muddy pools on the dirt road, the wet sheen on the trunks of the oak trees, the water that rattled down from the limbs overhead, the clouds of mist that hung on the bayou and broke across the truck's hood like the offering of sleep. In the gray light, the row of trees along the road looked like a tunnel that I could safely fall through until I reached a cold, enclosed room beneath the earth where wounds healed themselves, where the flesh did not yield to the worm, where a sealed casket could be opened to reveal a radiant face.

  I went back to work at the dock. I rented boats, filled people's minnow cans with shiners, fixed barbecue lunches, opened bottles of pop and beer with the mechanical smile and motions of a man in a dream. As always, when one unexpectedly loses someone close, I discovered how kind people could be. But after a while I almost wanted to hide from their well-meaning words of condolence, their handshakes and pats on the back. I learned that grief was a private and consuming emotion, and once it chose you as its vessel it didn't share itself easily with others.

  And maybe I didn't want to share it, either. After the scene investigators from the sheriff's department had bagged the bloody sheets from the bed and dug the buckshot out of the bedstead and walls, I closed and locked the door as though I were sealing up a mausoleum filled with pain, which I could resurrect sim
ply by the turn of a key. When I saw Batist's wife heading for the house with scrub brushes and buckets to clean the bloodstains out of the splintered wood, I ran from the bait shop, yelled at her in French with the sharpness of a white man speaking to a Negro woman, and watched her turn back toward her pickup truck, her face hurt and confused.

  That night I was awakened by the sound of bare feet on the wooden floor and a door handle turning. I sat up from the couch where I had fallen asleep with the television on, and saw Alafair sitting by the locked bedroom door. She wore her pajama bottoms without a top, and in her hands was the plastic draw bag in which we kept the stale bread. Her eyes were open, but her face was opaque with sleep. I walked toward her in the moonlight that fell through the front windows. Her brown eyes looked at me emptily.

  "Feed ducks with Annie," she said.

  "You're having a dream, little guy," I said.

  I started to pull the plastic bag gently from her hands. But her eyes and hands were locked inside the dream. I touched her hair and cheek.

  "Let's take you back to bed," I said.

  "Feed ducks with Annie?"

  "We'll feed them in the morning. En la mañana." I tried to smile into her face, then I raised her to her feet. She put one hand on the doorknob and twisted it from side to side.

  "Dónde está?"

  "She's gone away, little guy."

  There was nothing for it. I lifted her up on my hip and carried her back into her room. I lay her down on her bed, put the sheet over her feet, sat down beside her, and brushed her soft, downlike hair with my hand. Her bare chest looked small in the moonlight through the window. Then I saw her mouth begin to tremble, as it had in the church, her eyes look into mine with the realisation that I could not help, that no one could, that the world into which she had been born was a far more terrible one than any of her nightmares.

  "Los soldados llegaron en la lluvia y le hicieron daño a Annie?"

  The only Spanish words that I understood in her question were "soldiers" and "rain." But even if I had understood it all, I could not have answered her anyway. I was more lost than she, caught forever in the knowledge that when my wife had needed me most, I had left the house to sit by a duck pond in the dark and dwell on the past and my alcoholic neurosis.

  I lay down beside Alafair and pulled her against me. I felt the wetness of her eyelash against my face.

  Then, one hot, bright afternoon, exactly a week after I had buried Annie, with no dramatic cause at work, with fleecy clouds blowing across the blue sky, I snapped the cap off a bottle of Jax, watched the foam slide over the amber bottle and drip flatly on the wooden floor of the bait shop, and drank it empty in less than a minute.

  Two fisherman friends of mine at a table looked briefly at me with dead expressions on their faces, and in the silence of the room I heard Batist drag a kitchen match on wood and light a cigar. When I looked at his face, he flicked the match out the open window and I heard it hiss in the water. He turned away from me and stared out into the sunlight, a curl of smoke rising from his wide-spaced teeth.

  I popped open a double-paper bag, put two cartons of Jax inside, poured a small bucked of crushed ice on top of the bottles, and hefted the bag under my arm.

  "I'm going to take an outboard down the bayou," I said. "Close it up in a couple of hours and keep Alafair with you till I get back."

  He didn't answer and continued to look out at the sunlight on the lily pads and the cane growing along the bank.

  "Did you hear me?" I asked.

  "Do what you gotta do, you. You ain't got to tell me how to take care of that little girl." He walked up toward the house, where Alafair was coloring a book on the porch, and didn't look back at me.

  I opened the throttle on the outboard and watched my yellow-white wake slap against the cypress roots on the bank. Each time I tilted a bottle of Jax to my mouth the sunlight danced like brown fire inside the glass. I had no destination, no place of completion for all the energy that throbbed through my palm, no plan for the day, my life, or even the next five minutes. What was the great value in plans, anyway? I thought. A forest fire didn't have one, or a flood that buried a Kentucky town in mud, or lightning that splintered down into a sodden field and blew a farmer out of his shoes. Those things happened and the world went on. Why did Dave Robicheaux have to impose all this order and form on his life? So you lose control and total out for a while, I thought. The U.S. Army certainly understood that. You declare a difficult geographical and political area a free-fire zone, then you stand up later in the drifting ash and the smell of napalm and define with much more clarity the past nature of the problem.

  The gas tank went empty toward evening, and at the bottom of my feet was a melted pile of ice, soggy brown paper, and empty Jax bottles. I rowed the boat to shore, threw the iron anchor weight up on the bank, and walked in the dusk down a dirt road to a Negro juke joint and bought another six-pack of beer and a half-pint of Jim Beam. Then I pushed the boat back out into the center of the bayou and drifted in the current among the trailings of fireflies and the dark tracings of alligator gar just below the water's surface. I sipped from the lip of the whiskey bottle, chased it with the beer, and waited. Sometimes whiskey kicked open a furnace door that could consume me like a piece of cellophane. Other times I could operate for days with a quiet euphoria and kind of control that would pass for sobriety. Then sometimes I looked into memory and saw forgotten moments that I wished I could burn away like film negatives dissolving on a hot coal.

  I remembered a duck-hunting trip with my father when I was thirteen years old. We were in a blind on a cold, gray, windswept day, just off Sabine Pass where it dumped into the Gulf, and the mallards and poules d'eau had been coming in low all morning since dawn, and we had busted them like dirty smudges all over the sky. Then my father had gotten careless, maybe because he had been drunk the night before, had gotten mud in the barrel of the automatic twelve-gauge, and when three Canadian honkers went over, really too high for a good shot, he stood up quickly, turned with the shotgun at an angle over my head, and blew the barrel into a spray of wadding, cordite, birdshot, and steel needles all over the water's surface. My ears rang with the explosion, and bits of hot powder covered my face like grains of black pepper. I saw the shame in his eyes and smelled the stale beer on his breath as he washed my skin with his wet handkerchief. He tried to make light of it, said that's what he got for not going to Mass yesterday, but there was a troubled realisation in his eyes as well as shame, and it was the same look he had whenever he'd been locked up in the parish jail for brawling in a bar.

  It was only a quarter-mile back to the camp; it was right across the bay, up a canal that cut back through the sawgrass and cane, a shack built on stilts that looked out on the Gulf. He would be gone only a short time and bring back the sixteen-gauge. I could start shucking out the ducks, which lay in a soft green and blue pile on the flattened yellow grass at the bottom of the blind. Besides, them honker coming back, yeah, he said.

  But back in the canal he ran the outboard across a submerged log and snapped off the propeller shaft like a stick.

  I waited for him for two hours, my knife bloody from the warm entrails of the ducks. The wind picked up from the south, small waves chucked against the blind, the sky was the color of incinerator smoke. On the Texas side of the shore I heard the dull popping of another hunter's shotgun.

  A pirogue was tied to the back of the blind. I broke open my dogleg twenty-gauge, picked up the string of decoys we had set out in a J-formation, filled the canvas game bag with the stiffening, gutted bodies of the ducks, loaded it all in the pirogue's bow, and shoved off toward the canal and the long expanse of sawgrass.

  But the wind had shifted and was now blowing hard out of the northeast, and no matter how strongly I rowed on both sides of the pirogue, I drifted toward the mouth of the Pass and the slate-green water of the Gulf of Mexico. I paddled until blisters formed on my hands and broke against the grain of the wood, then I threw the
anchor weight overboard, realised when the rope hung straight down that the bottom was too deep to catch, and looked desperately at the Louisiana wetlands sliding farther away from me.

  Foam blew off the waves in my face, and I could taste salt water in my mouth. The pirogue dipped with such force into the troughs that I had to hold on to the gunwales, and my buttocks constricted with fear each time the wooden bottom slammed up into my tailbone. I tried to bail with a tin can, lost the paddle, and watched it float away from me like a yellow stick between the waves. The string of decoys, my shotgun, and the canvas bag of ducks were awash in the bow; uprooted cypress trees and an upside-down wooden shack revolved in the dark current just under the surface beside me. The shack had a small porch, and it broke through the waves into the winter light like a gigantic mouth streaming water.

  The state fish-and-game boat with my father on board picked me up that afternoon. They dried me off and gave me warm clothes, and fixed me fried Spam sandwiches and hot Ovaltine in the galley. But I wouldn't talk to my father until the next day, and I talked with him only then because sleep gave me back the familiar relationship that his explanation about the sheared propeller shaft would not.

  "It's because you was alone out there," he said. "When somebody make you alone, it don't matter why. You suppose to be mad at them. When your mama run off with a bourée man, I didn't care I made her do it, no. I knocked him down on the barroom floor in front of her. When he got up, I knocked him down again. Later I found out he had a pistol in his coat. He could have killed me right there, him. But she didn't let him do it, 'cause she knew I gonna get over it. That's why, me, I ain't mad at you, 'cause I know you suppose to be disappoint with me.

  "The bad thing is when you make yourself alone. Don't never do that, Dave, 'cause it's like that coon chewing off its own foot when he stick it in the trap."

  As I sat in the outboard on the bayou and looked at the red sky and the purple clouds in the west, the breathless air as warm as the whiskey that I raised to my lips, I knew what my father had meant.