Another Kind of Eden Read online

  Chapter Eight

  I FELT BAD ABOUT it. That night I took Jo Anne to dinner down the Pass in Ratón. Afterward, we drove out on the hardpan and looked at the sweep of the stars arching over the Great American Desert, disappearing beyond the blackness of the mountains in the north. I told her I had talked to her employer about his dishonesty, and I also told her I had dumped a cup of fishhooks inside Darrel Vickers’s head.

  “My boss can’t act any worse than he has,” she said. “That business with Darrel is different. He used to come around.”

  We were sitting in the Chevrolet, in a roadside park not far from the entrance to a horse ranch that had no buildings on it, only windmills and stock tanks and horses nickering in the sun’s afterglow. “ ‘Come around’ how?” I asked.

  “Calling me up, hanging around the restaurant, following me home. He had it in for Henri, too. He called him a cradle robber in front of people at the college.”

  I moved closer to her and put my hand on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back and moved her neck back and forth against my hand. Her skin was warm, her hair soft on the backs of my fingers. I wanted to kiss her, but I was feeling guiltier and guiltier about my behavior. I was a hypocrite. I had taken her employer to task for wronging a fine girl, forgetting that our differences in age and education had not deterred me from accepting the gift of Jo Anne’s body. As I had these thoughts, I longed for her again.

  “Jo Anne?”

  She opened her eyes. A gate on a cattle guard was tinkling in the wind, the horses blowing in the grass. “What?”

  “Think I’m taking advantage of you?”

  “You’re about to get a slap.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, my foot. Talk down to me like that again and see what happens.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She picked up my hand and folded her fingers inside mine. “You don’t have to worry about me, Aaron. You’re a good soul. It’s in your eyes. But you don’t know your own mind. I think that’s going to bring you a lot of grief.”

  “It’ll be my grief, then.”

  “You’ve stirred up Rueben Vickers,” she said. “He tried to take me home once.”

  “Rueben Vickers? Not the son?”

  “He was waiting outside the restaurant at two in the morning. He said he wanted to give me a ride. That a storm was coming.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told him no thanks, I had my own car.”

  “That was it?”

  “The next day the state police found a barmaid’s body outside Clayton. Her neck had been broken. She’d also been raped.”

  “Clayton is more than a hundred miles from Trinidad.”

  “I need to go home, Aaron. I don’t feel well.”

  * * *

  BUT OUR EVENING wasn’t over. Up the Pass, between two craggy, steep-sided mountains, were the ruins of a Spanish-style church with a small bell tower. The stucco walls were yellow in the moonlight, and the ceiling had caved in, and tall deep-green pine trees had grown out of the rubble inside. “You know what that is?” Jo Anne said.

  “A Jesuit mission?”

  “It was paid for by John D. Rockefeller in 1917, three years after his goons killed the miners at Ludlow. My father would never let us buy gasoline from a Standard Oil filling station.”

  “Your dad must have been quite a fellow,” I said.

  “I think one day he’s coming back. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  I looked at her, even though I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off the road. She was staring at my headlights tunneling up the canyon, her face transfixed. “Jo Anne?”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “I have to be back at Mr. Lowry’s tonight. Would you mind if I hang around a little while before I head up the road?”

  “I’ve got to clear my head, Aaron.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Not as much as I, I thought.

  We didn’t speak the rest of the way to her house.

  * * *

  I WOKE EARLY THE next morning and went into the dining hall with Cotton and Spud and sat down for a big breakfast of eggs and biscuits and bacon and any kind of juice and cereal we wanted. Mr. Lowry and his red-haired, jolly Irish wife fed their employees right. Plus, Mrs. Lowry, with her South Boston accent, always had a good word for everyone in the serving line. She also had the fresh, clean smell of a strawberry cake. No one used profanity in her dining hall. Some of the Mexican families leaned toward one another and said grace. In the coolness of the morning and the softness of the light and the white clouds bunched on the royal-blue magnificence of the mountains, I wondered if the earth could be any better.

  I also wondered if this plateau high above the Great American Desert wasn’t more than just the earth, in the same way you wonder sometimes if we are not already inside eternity. I wondered if the columns of sunlight spearing through the clouds on the hillsides and the meadows and the dairy barns and the freshly plowed acreage and the cottonwood trees along the stream were not indeed the pillars of heaven, rising into a kingdom where our predecessors were at work and play in the fields of the Lord.

  “What are you thinking about?” Cotton asked. He was sitting across from me, eating scrambled eggs with a spoon, his palm wrapped around the handle.

  “I guess we’re bucking bales today,” I said.

  “You’re not thinking about that waitress, are you?” Spud asked. Both of them were grinning now.

  “I can’t remember what I was thinking about,” I said.

  “Right,” Spud said. “The preacher at our church used to call that impure thoughts. He was the same preacher who baptized me by immersion in the Cumberland River and was so drunk he dropped me in the current. A colored woman in the bulrushes pulled me out with a fishnet. That’s a true story.”

  “You and Moses?” I asked.

  “I’m glad you caught that,” he said. “Us Caudills have friends in high places.”

  Cotton took out his cigarette papers and a bag of Bull Durham and cupped a single paper with his index finger and poured tobacco into it. He wet the glue along the rim and rolled the trough into a tight tube and put it in his mouth. “When do you get your stitches out?”

  “Three or four more days.”

  “Word of caution?” he asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The Vickerses will get theirs down the line,” he said. He struck a paper match and lit his cigarette, his eyes on mine.

  “You mean I shouldn’t go after them?” I asked.

  He blew out the match. “I didn’t say nothing one way or the other.”

  “Then what did you mean, Cotton?”

  “Everybody gets the same six feet of dirt in the face. There’s some need it earlier than others.” He opened a Classics Illustrated comic book he had just bought and began reading. Spud’s eyes were as big as quarters.

  Chapter Nine

  PEOPLE WHO ARE unknowledgeable about agriculture often refer to farm labor as unskilled. Take bucking bales. Try inserting your fingers inside the twine on ninety pounds of compacted grass after it has been rained on, then flinging it up on the flatbed of a truck and repeating the process every four minutes for eight hours. If you want to up the ante, do it in an electric storm.

  That’s not all that’s involved. Second-cut hay is usually high-octane and can cause pasture bloat in your cows. Bad grass can also sour their milk. Red clover can give Angus the scours or what is called the bloody shits, whichever term you prefer. That said, and all science aside, if you want sciatica or a slipped disk or a double hernia, there is no better way than bucking bales to fix yourself up proper.

  Cotton and Spud and I were stacking them four layers high on a flatbed truck driven by a tiny Japanese woman who, regardless of the weather, always wore baggy blue jeans and a denim coat with a scarf tied under her chin and
, for extra protection, sunglasses and a straw hat. She wore so many clothes and hats and scarves, I wasn’t actually sure what she looked like.

  The breeze was cool and warm at the same time, the leaves on the cottonwoods turning gold and flickering in the sunlight, the shadows of sparrow hawks gliding across the pasture. I wondered if Eden had been like this. I also wondered if the founders of our country had this very scene in mind when they envisioned the agrarian republic. And I wondered if they regretted staining it, just as Eden had been stained, when they placed a portion of the human family in shackles and chains and murdered unknown numbers of indigenous people.

  I guess these are strange thoughts to dwell upon, but they were the thoughts I was having when I saw Detective Benbow in his unmarked car with two cruisers coming up the dirt road, thumping across the wood bridge over the stream that rippled as clear as green Jell-O through the entirety of Mr. Lowry’s property.

  Spud took off his hat and wiped his face with an oversize bandana, one of several he’d bought down on the border. He was shirtless, his fat shiny with sweat and flecks of hay. “It’s that same cocksucker, isn’t it?”

  “Lay off the language, Spud,” I said. “This isn’t the time for it.”

  “I know what’s going on,” he replied. “They get you once, they get you for all time. They keep their foot on the neck of the little people.”

  He took his shirt off the taillight of the truck and popped it on his chest and back, drying and cleaning his skin, then put it on and buttoned it. The unmarked car and two cruisers turned off the dirt road and came toward us, the grass whipping under their bumpers.

  Detective Benbow got out of his car and crooked a finger at Spud. “Over here,” he said.

  “What for?” Spud said.

  “Because I said so.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Spud said. One of the deputies started toward him. “Okay, you win,” Spud said. “I’m coming.”

  Benbow was wearing his Stetson hat and a white dress shirt with puffed sleeves and a dark vest and black trousers; his lean face was unshaved, his eyes tired. In the patches of sunlight and shadow, he looked like a frontier marshal. He yawned and gazed at the hills on the far side of the Lowry house. “Want to tell me about your legal troubles in Kentucky?”

  “I didn’t have any legal troubles in Kentucky,” Spud replied. “Least not more than kid stuff.”

  “You were in the reformatory?”

  “Ninety days in the county jail.” He twisted his bandana on the corners, blinking, looking at nothing.

  “Why were you in the county jail?”

  “A misunderstanding.”

  “When did child molestation become a misunderstanding?” Benbow said.

  “It wasn’t any such thing.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “This girl and me were in the motion picture. She was fifteen and I was sixteen. I put my hand in the wrong place and she made a big deal out of it.”

  “Where were you two nights ago?”

  Spud squinted. “I get my days mixed up. Ciphering was never my strong suit.”

  “You don’t remember what you did night before last?”

  “I went into Trinidad for a little R and R.”

  “Getting your ashes hauled? I’d believe that.”

  “Having a few beers,” Spud said, his chin in the air.

  Benbow stared at the ground thoughtfully, his thumbs in his belt. “Where in Trinidad?”

  Spud gave the name of a pool hall. The woman driving the flatbed cut the engine and got out of the cab. Her nickname was Maisie. She was Nisei Japanese and had been in an internment camp during the war. “What wrong?” she said.

  Benbow ignored her. “Were you looking to get even with somebody?” he said to Spud.

  “Not me,” Spud said, jerking on the ends of his bandana.

  “You nervous about something?”

  “I don’t like people calling me a child molester.”

  “I had a talk with the sheriff’s office in Hazard, Kentucky,” Benbow said. “The sheriff told me you got it on the brain.”

  “What on the brain?”

  “It.”

  Spud looked away as though he wanted to will himself across the fields and into the mountains. He tied the bandana around his neck.

  “He good man,” the Japanese woman said. “He don’t hurt nobody.”

  Benbow smiled at her, then turned back to Spud. “Know a fellow named Rizzo Marx?”

  “No.”

  “He’s the inmate who stole a transistor radio off a deputy’s desk and sold it to you for one dollar. Two nights ago somebody flattened all four of his tires behind that same pool hall in Trinidad. Most likely with an ice pick.”

  “There’s a lot of bad people here’bouts, all right,” Spud said, looking into the distance.

  “The same night a wino saw a man walking on the next block with his arm in a sling. He had a big cardboard box under his other arm. A woman stopped to help him, and the two of them walked off. You weren’t in Trinidad then?”

  The wind gusted, causing the brim of Spud’s hat to tremble like a tobacco leaf.

  “The same woman was found in an alley about four the next morning,” Benbow said. “Her panties were around her ankles. Her blouse and one shoe were pulled off. She was obviously raped. I won’t tell you what was done to her face. We can’t tell the cause of death yet, because too many things could have done it.”

  Spud looked seasick.

  “You don’t know anything about it?” Benbow said.

  “No, sir.”

  “But you were in the poolroom?”

  “Early. For just a few games of pool.”

  “Did you vandalize the man’s tires?”

  “I got nothing to say on that.”

  “Will your arm fit in that bandana?”

  “This ain’t right,” Spud said, shaking his head. “Nosirree, it ain’t right.”

  “Did you vandalize the vehicle behind the poolroom?” Benbow said. “Establish your credibility. Get in front of this.”

  “If I say I did, you’ll try to hang a murder rap on me.”

  “Maybe I’m on your side,” Benbow said. “You think of that?”

  Before Spud could reply, Maisie charged into the circle. “He here every night!” She pointed to her eye. “I see him here! You stop making up stories about good man!”

  The second deputy took her by the arm and pushed and pulled her to the truck cab while she hit at him with her free hand. He stuffed her in the driver’s seat. But the opportunity had been lost for Detective Benbow. Spud had gotten control of his fear and shame and obviously was not going to be tricked into making an admission that could keep him in jail for months because he couldn’t make bail. Benbow opened and closed his right hand, his cheek ridging.

  “Detective?” I said.

  “Whatever it is, I’m not interested,” he said.

  “You’ve got Spud wrong,” I said. “Why are you doing this, sir?”

  “Some crazy-ass guy known as Bible-thumping Bob called me up and said you told Darrel Vickers his father worked for the Prince of Darkness. Darrel told his father, and his father beat the shit out of him for not beating the shit out of you. Does that make you happy?”

  “Why is the preacher reporting to you about the Vickers family?”

  “I’m a half inch from hooking you up, son.”

  “Try it. I’ve given up on my pacifist beliefs.”

  “Are you after Jude Lowry’s money? Is that why you’re here?”

  I stepped back from him. I felt a surge of bile in my stomach and saw a flash of light behind my left eye and heard a whirring sound in my ears, an old prelude to a state of mind whose aftermath could steal my sleep for years.

  “You got nothing to say?” he asked.

  “I’m going to walk away,” I said.

  “You’re going to do what?”

  “I think you’re a man who can’t deal with mirrors, Detective Benbow,
and a son of a bitch on top of it.”

  I walked toward the bunkhouse. He caught up with me and grabbed me by the shirt. A warm breeze was blowing out of the south, yet the sunlight felt cold on my skin and the sun’s glare like a laser in my eyes. “Be advised,” he said. “You get a free pass this time. Sass me again and I’ll fix it so you’re a long-term visitor at our gray-bar hotel chain.”

  Chapter Ten

  THAT EVENING MR. Lowry sent word that he wanted to see me. As I walked up the slope to the Victorian home where he and Mrs. Lowry lived, there was a chill in the air, a dimming of light in the hills, as though the season were unfairly shutting itself down. The house was two and a half stories high, painted battleship gray, with verandas and small balconies and lightning rods and weather vanes and dormer windows, the glass coppery with the sun’s last rays, and, most oddly, towers with round peaked roofs you would expect to see only on a medieval castle.

  Just above the front steps, an American flag hung from a staff that protruded in an upward angle from an eagle-shaped brass socket screwed into a wood pillar on the gallery. I twisted the bell on the door. Mr. Lowry opened it in under five seconds, as though he had been looking through the window. Past the hallway, I could see firelight flickering on the deep leather couches and stuffed chairs and wood furniture in the living room. I had never been inside his home. The floor creaked like a mausoleum’s.

  “Thank you for coming up, Aaron,” he said. “I thought you might be visiting a certain young lady in Trinidad.”

  “I was fixing to, unless you need me for something.”

  “I’d just like you to have some cake and coffee with me.”

  “That’s good of you, sir,” I said.

  I followed him into the living room. A glass table was set with a coffee service and a chocolate cake that had already been cut, the white icing cracked by the knife blade, the slices bleeding with torn cherries. Through a side door, I could see a big desk and a heavy wood chair, a lamp with a green-tinted glass shade on the ink blotter, the shelves on the walls lined with books.

  “How is Spud doing?” he asked.

  “A little in the dumps.”