Heaven's Prisoners (18 page)

There was nothing else to do but run for the phone in the bait shop. Then I heard the front screen fly back against the wall and both of them come out on the gallery. Their feet were loud on the wood, their steps going in one direction, then another. I pressed against the side of the house and waited. All one of them had to do was jump over the side railing of the gallery, and he would have me at point-blank range. Then their feet stopped, and I realised that their attention was focused on something else. A pickup truck was banging down the dirt road toward the dock, the rain slanting in the beam of a single headlight that bounced off the trees. I knew it must be Batist. He lived a quarter-mile down the road, slept on his screened gallery in the summer, and would have heard and recognised the gunfire, even in the thunder.

“Shit on it. Let’s get out of here,” one man said.

The other man spoke, but his voice was lost in the rain on the tin roof and a peal of thunder.

“So you come back and do him. It’s a lousy hit, anyway. You didn’t say nothing about a broad,” the first man said. “Sonofabitch, the truck’s turning in here. I’m gone. Clean up your own mess next time.”

I heard one man jump off the steps and start running. The second man paused, his feet scraped hesitantly on the wood planks, then I heard the step bend under his weight, and a moment later I could see the two of them running at an angle through the trees toward a car parked down by the bayou. With their shotguns at port-arms, they looked like infantry fleeing through a forest at night.

I raced through the front door into the bedroom and hit the light switch, my heart thundering in my chest. Red shotgun shells littered the doorway area; the mahogany foot and headboards of the bed were gouged and splintered with buckshot and deer slugs; the flowered wallpaper above the bed was covered with holes like black dimes. The sheet, which still lay over her, was drenched with her blood, the torn cloth embedded in wounds that wolves might have chewed. Her curly blond head was turned away from me on the pillow. One immaculate white hand hung over the side of the mattress.

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 simply 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.