Another Kind of Eden Read online

  “I don’t blame him,” Mr. Lowry said. He pointed for me to sit down, in a kind rather than authoritarian way. “Wade Benbow has been unfairly hard on you boys. There’s a reason for it, but not a good one.” He watched my expression to see if I understood. His wife looked at me from the kitchen door, then stepped out of the light before I could lift my hand to say hello.

  “You know about the death of Wade’s granddaughter?” Mr. Lowry said.

  “Yes, sir, he told me.”

  “Did he tell you it was a homicide?”

  “Yes, sir, up by Pueblo.”

  “They were at a picnic. The little girl wandered off when Wade was supposed to be watching her. Someone found her in an oil storage tank after sunset. The cap was probably left open by the maintenance man.”

  “It wasn’t the work of a serial killer?”

  “People believe what they need to,” he said. “Wade isn’t the exception.”

  I tried not to look at my watch. But he read my mind. “Have one cup of coffee and I’ll let you go.”

  He poured some into a cup before I could respond, his face tight, a nervous twitch in his hand.

  “Mr. Lowry, can I help you with something?”

  “Yes, you can. I need a new foreman. The pay is a hundred eighty-five dollars a week, plus your board.”

  “I don’t know as I’d qualify,” I said.

  “Well, I asked you here this evening for another reason, too. I think you carry a burden of some kind. My boy did the same thing. He brooded and brooded, and rather than share his secret, he lied about his age and joined the army. He died at Guadalcanal when he was seventeen.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to talk about myself, and an apology for the death of his son twenty years ago seemed an insult to his ability to accept loss. I apologized anyway.

  But he wouldn’t let go. “What bothers you, Aaron?”

  “A psychiatrist said I have a personality disorder,” I said, and tried to smile. “In my case that means multiple personalities.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “It’s just the way I am, sir.”

  He got up from the couch and went to the mantel. He returned with a framed photo. In it a soldier was wearing a field jacket and a steel pot with a camouflage cover on it; he carried a puppy on his shoulder. “That’s our son,” Mr. Lowry said.

  “He’s a fine-looking fellow,” I said.

  “He bears a strong resemblance to you.”

  I didn’t see it, but I didn’t want to contradict him.

  “He caused a girl to have an abortion. Do you know what bothers me most? Somehow he thought he had to be perfect in my eyes. I laid that cross on the shoulder of my own son.”

  He put the picture back on the mantel. “Think it over about the job. The life of a rambling man is fun when you’re young. Down the track, it can get mighty tiresome. Ask Cotton Williams.”

  “I have holes in my memory, Mr. Lowry. I dream about things that maybe I did but can’t remember. I don’t trust myself or know who I am. I think maybe I’ve done really bad things.”

  “Know what faith is?” he said.

  “I can’t really say.”

  “It amounts to believing others when they tell you you’re a good fellow. Give that some thought.”

  * * *

  I FINISHED MY COFFEE and shook hands with Mr. Lowry and went outside. I didn’t get far. Mrs. Lowry was waiting for me in the shadows. She was wearing a white dress with big pink roses printed on it, her dull-red hair piled in swirls on her head. “I heard everything in the kitchen,” she said.

  “I hope I didn’t say anything wrong.”

  “Can I put in my two cents?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “You have such good manners. You had a good upbringing.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Mrs. Lowry.”

  “That’s not the two cents I had to put in.”

  “Oh.”

  “He thinks the world of you,” she said. “Stay with us and keep on being the kindhearted boy you are.”

  Mrs. Lowry had an Irish smile and green eyes that could light up the dark side of the moon.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE SUN HAD set when I arrived at Jo Anne’s house. The sky was the color of tin, striped with purple and black clouds. I thought perhaps she and I could be alone for the evening or go for ice cream in town. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Henri Devos’s Mustang was parked in the gravel driveway, and an old school bus was parked in the field, not far from the neighbor’s hogpen. At least two lanterns were burning inside the bus. I knocked on Jo Anne’s front door.

  “Hi,” she said upon opening it.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Her hand didn’t leave the doorknob. “Hello?” I said.

  “Oh, come in.”

  I stepped inside and closed the door. She was wearing a flannel shirt and khaki pants without a belt. “I’m a little confused right now. We were going somewhere tonight?” she asked.

  “Not necessarily. I just said I’d come by. Who are those people in the bus?”

  “Some friends of Henri’s.”

  “He’s out there with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe they’re beatniks. They’re hardly more than children. Henri said they need a place to stay a few days. I’m a little overwhelmed right now.”

  “By what?”

  “Maybe I made a mistake. It’s not his fault.”

  “What are we talking about, Jo Anne?”

  “I lent Henri five hundred dollars.” She took a breath after she said it.

  “Your professor asked you for five hundred dollars?”

  “He said he’d pay me back in a few weeks. That was two months ago. I asked him if I could have it back, or at least part of it. He said his ex-wife put a lien on his car and bank account.”

  She sat down at the counter, one foot on the floor, the other tangled in a rung on the stool. She propped her forehead on the heel of her hand, her face in despair.

  “There’s more?” I said.

  “He wants me to mortgage the house. He says he can double my money in a month. He says that’s the only way he can make up the five hundred.”

  I looked out the window at the bus. I could see people inside, their silhouettes moving jerkily, like sticks, against the glow of the lanterns. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. This time they looked normal. “How is he going to double your money?”

  “Buy into an art business in Dallas. He knows Bunker Hunt.”

  “Bunker Hunt the oilman?”

  “Or whatever. He’s a John Bircher.” The top of her shirt was unbuttoned, her hair unbrushed. She pushed the loose button through its buttonhole with her thumb, hardly aware of what she was doing, the way people act when they have been betrayed or used or played for fools. I wanted to twist off Henri Devos’s head and flush it down a commode.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about to take a shower. Then Henri drove up with his friends.”

  I looked through the window again. A black man had opened the front door of the bus and stepped down gingerly in the weeds. He began urinating in a patch of yellow light.

  “I need to have a conference with Henri,” I said.

  “Don’t get into trouble, Aaron. I’ll sit down with him later. He’s not a bad person.”

  I went into the field. The temperature had dropped, and a mist was blowing coldly out of the north, and the grass was damp and swishing on the bottoms of my trousers. The urinating man zipped up and turned around, his mouth a circle of nicotine-stained teeth inside his long V-shaped beard, the kind a mountain man might wear. He was tall and wore strap overalls. His eyes went up and down my body. I was wearing a pair of Acme cowboy boots I had bought on Larimer Street in Denver. “Howdy,” he said.

  “Howdy,” I said. “I’d like to see Mr. Devos if I could. Aaron Holland Broussard is the name.”
r />   “We’re in the midst of a meditation right now.”

  “Could you demeditate? Just for a few seconds, so you can give him my message?”

  “You may not know it, but you’re in a holy place, man. The four cardinal points of the universe are pointed right at us.”

  “The place you just pissed on?”

  He laid his hand on my shoulder. He breathed through his mouth, the whiskers around his lips moving. His breath was bilious, like a living presence on my skin. “I’m Marvin,” he said.

  I tried to step back. He tightened his hand on my shoulder and worked each finger deep into the muscle. I was surprised at his strength. “Do you fear your brother?” he asked.

  I raised both my hands, forcing his grip from my shoulder. “Let me talk to Henri, then I’ll be gone.”

  His eyes were lidless and contained a flickering fever-lit level of darkness and malevolence that a reasonable person does not try to plumb. “Wait here, Dixie Cup.” He stuck his head inside the door. “Henri, got a cat here who talks hush puppy and seems to know you.”

  I tried to brush past him and get on the stairwell. “Hey!” he said.

  “What?”

  “I just said ‘Hey,’ as in ‘Hey, mothafucker.’ You got a race thing, ’cause I got a sense you think your shit don’t stink.”

  His breath and spittle hit the side of my face. The combination was horrible. I wiped it off on my shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t look so serious, man. We’re getting it on later. Dig? You’re invited. The whole rainbow is in there.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Ten bucks, man. I’ll give you any combo in there you want.”

  “Let me get by,” I said. “Please.”

  His eyes were as shiny as obsidian, his teeth slanted sideways. A smile broke at the corner of his mouth. “Had you going, mothafucker. Ain’t nobody gonna hurt those girls, man. What you’re watching is a movement, I mean like a tidal wave. You hearing me, bubba? Shake hands. I won’t hurt you. Stars and Bars forever.”

  He let me pass, then began laughing and couldn’t stop until his knees were weak and he was forced to bend over and spit a wad of phlegm on the ground.

  * * *

  THE SEATS IN the bus had been ripped out and replaced with scarred furniture and stained mattresses and improvised hammocks and wash lines and paper bags soaked through with garbage and a gutted refrigerator bleeding rust from the door and a poster on the ceiling that showed Jesus smoking a joint.

  Plastic inhalers were crushed and scattered on the floor. Henri Devos was stretched back in a reclining sun chair, one stamped with the green-and-white logo of Holiday Inn, his left arm crooked behind his neck. “Ah, the unpublished novelist from the mists of Avalon,” he said to me. “I hope you brought your guitar.”

  Three girls and a boy were sitting on mattresses by his feet. One look at them and you knew their background. They were the detritus of a Puritan culture, one that made mincemeat of its children and left them marked from head to foot with every violation of the body that can be imposed on a human being: state homes, sexual molestation, sodomy, gang bangs, reformatory tats, fundamentalist churches, Venice Beach, Haight-Ashbury, maybe a porn gig in Vegas, maybe witness to a homicide in a boxcar or hobo jungle. Their hallmark was the solemnity, anger, and pain in their eyes.

  “How about we toggle outside and check out the cardinal points of the universe?” I said to Henri.

  “Another time,” he said. “Let me introduce my friends.” He repositioned himself but left his hand behind his neck and didn’t bother to sit up as he pointed to the kids one by one.

  Stoney had pipe-cleaner arms and jug ears and mindless blue eyes and hair the color and density of cotton candy. Moon Child wore Moe Howard bangs and a T-shirt that had been washed into cheesecloth and showed her nipples. Orchid could have been part black and part Indian or maybe part Asian, and had long clean hair streaked with purple and green dye and a white scar like a piece of string that ran through one eyebrow and caused one eyelid to droop. Lindsey Lou wore pigtails and a cowboy shirt and had the slimness of a barrel-racing rodeo girl and rings on all her fingers and jeans that looked painted on her legs.

  “Pleased to meet y’all,” I said.

  “Wow, far out. I like the way you talk, man,” Stoney said. “I’ve been down south myself, man. That way of talking is cool shit, man. It’s definitely got musical qualities.” His eyes had an ethereal glow, the pupils little more than fly specks.

  “You here to fuck?” Moon Child said.

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” I replied.

  “Whoa, you guys,” Henri said. “Our friend Aaron doesn’t know when we’re kidding.”

  “Then why is he here?” Moon Child said.

  “He’s a flatlander,” Orchid said. “Visiting the zoo.”

  “You got a guitar?” Lindsey Lou said.

  “I own a Gibson acoustic. But I didn’t bring it.”

  “Far out,” Stoney said.

  “What kind of music do you play?” Lindsey Lou asked.

  “Bluegrass and country, Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston stuff.”

  “You mean the Cisco Kid, the guy who rides around with that fat slob who’s always saying ‘Let’s went, Cisco’?” she said.

  I saw Moon Child push a bong under a chair with her foot. “I didn’t mean to break in on your meditation,” I said.

  “If you’re not here to fuck or meditate,” Moon Child said, “why are you here?”

  “I dropped by to take Miss Jo Anne for some ice cream.”

  The boy and three girls stared at me as though looking at a memory they couldn’t quite recall. Henri brushed a fly out of his face. Orchid reached into a small Indian-beaded drawstring purse and took out a joint and put it between her lips. “Ice cream?”

  “Yeah, Trinidad has a great ice cream store,” I said.

  “Fucking far out, man,” Stoney said.

  Orchid half grinned at me, then lit the joint, the rings on her fingers a tangle of color under a lantern that hung from the ceiling. She took a deep hit and offered the joint to me with a lascivious wink. “We share everything.”

  “Thanks, I can’t handle it,” I said. “Same with alcohol.”

  “He’s a narc,” Moon Child said. “Ask him.”

  “Are you a narc?” Orchid said.

  “I’m a migrant. From the San Joaquin down to the Rio Grande and everywhere in between.”

  “That’s heavy, man,” Stoney said. “Like a poem. I mean like ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ or some shit.”

  “Y’all want to go for a walk?” I said. “We can knock on Jo Anne’s door and pile into my car and get us some chocolate sundaes. My treat.”

  “What do you say, Henri?” Lindsey Lou asked.

  “I’ll have to pass,” he said. He slapped at the worrisome fly again.

  Lindsey Lou looked at me. “Sorry, Kemo Sabe.”

  “Because the professor doesn’t want to go?” I said.

  The kids dropped their eyes. Henri grinned at me. “Maybe another time, Natty.”

  “Natty?”

  “Natty Bumppo,” he said. “Braving the frontier, descending among the savages, showing us the way. I did a little research on you, pal. A friend of mine was a colleague of yours at your last teaching job.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “You’re a drunk. Know what a drunk is? A titty baby. Always looking for the nipple. Read Freud on the subject.”

  “I have,” I said. “He nailed it, cocaine addict that he was.”

  “You were hired because your grandfather was hot shit in Louisiana.”

  “That’s probably true.” I reached down in my pocket and opened the main blade on my Swiss Army knife. I sharpened it every three days. The blade could cut a stiff piece of paper as cleanly as a barber’s razor.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Not much. Natty Bumppo–type stuff.”

  He took his arm from behind his h
ead and started to get up.

  “I’d stay where you are,” I said.

  “Hey, fellow,” Lindsey Lou said. “Yeah, you! Look at me. Cut this shit out. This is our home.”

  Orchid was getting to her feet. “She’s right. Come on, man. You want to take a drive? That’s cool. Hey, Marvin, Mayday in here! Stop playing pocket pool!”

  “I told you he was a do-gooder,” Moon Child said. “One with a twenty-four-hour hard-on.”

  I sawed the lantern loose from the ceiling. It was a Coleman, heavy in my hand, loaded with fuel. I unscrewed the cap on the base and poured kerosene oil all over Henri’s head.

  Stoney was crying and picking at his clothes as though they were filled with insects. “Don’t do that! That’s bad, and I mean really bad and not made-up bad, and the kind of shit crazy people do! What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?” His needle was stuck, his face terrified. He hammered his feet up and down on the floor; his hands flailed in the air.

  I shoved the lantern into Henri’s hands, the wick still burning. “Early merry Christmas, you bastard,” I said. “Pay Jo Anne the money you owe, or I’ll rip out your spokes.”

  “What are you guys doing in here?” Marvin said behind me. He held a splintered board in his hand, a nail in the tip.

  I pushed him backward off the bus, into the dark, then stepped down with him and pushed him again. He stumbled and righted himself, his mouth agape. The hogs were grunting and snuffing in the pen. A star dropped across the sky and disappeared behind a blue-black butte shaped like a chimney. “Lay off my threads, man,” he said.

  “You want to take the professor’s fall?”

  He dropped the board. It made a thunk when it hit the ground. He raised his palms so the light from Jo Anne’s house would reflect on them. “I got no beef, chief.”

  “A big ten-four on that.”

  I started toward Jo Anne’s house.

  “Hey, man, I’m conwise and know where you got your rebop,” he said at my back. “The pay is rotten when you pick state cotton. You been on the hard road, Joad. Way to go, Moe. We got your back, Jack. I didn’t mean you no pain, Wayne.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”