Read Online Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online
Authors: James Lee Burke
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sun shone through the rain my father used to say, “That how God tell you it ain’t for long, Him.”
When I got back home the rain was still dancing on the bayou, and Annie had walked Alafair down to the dock to help Batist take care of the fishermen who were drinking beer and eating boudin under the canvas awning. I went up to the house and called New Orleans information for Robin’s number, but she had no listing. Then I called Smiling Jack’s. The man who answered didn’t identify himself, but the voice and the manner were unmistakable.
“She isn’t here. She don’t come in till six,” he said.
“Do you have her home number?”
“Are you kidding? Who is this?”
“What’s her number, Jerry?”
“Oh yeah, I should have known. It’s Fearless Fosdick, isn’t it?” he said. “Guess what? She don’t have a phone. Guess what again? This isn’t an answering service.”
“When’d you see her last?”
“Throwing up in the toilet at three o’clock this morning. I just got finished cleaning it up. Look, fun guy, you want to talk to that broad, come down and talk to her. Right now I got to wash out my mops. You two make a great couple.”
He hung up the phone, and I looked out into the rain on the bayou. Maybe she would be all right, I thought. She had survived all her life in a world in which male use of her body and male violence against it had been as natural to her as the vodka collins and speed on the half-shell that started each of her days. Maybe it was just a vanity that I felt a conversation with me could bring additional harm into her life. Also, I didn’t know for sure that the driver of the Corvette was some Brooklyn character named Eddie Keats.
Saints don’t heed warnings because they consider them irrelevant. Fools don’t heed them because they think the lightning dancing across the sky, the thunder rolling through the woods, are only there to enhance their lives in some mysterious way. I had been warned by both Robin and Minos P. Dautrieve. I saw a solitary streak of lightning tremble like a piece of heated wire on the southern horizon. But I didn’t want to think anymore that day about dope runners and local wiseguys, federal agents and plane crashes. I listened to the rain dripping through the pecan trees, then walked down to the dock in the flicker of distant lightning to help Annie and Batist get ready for the late-afternoon fishermen.
3
IF, AS A child, I had been asked to describe the world I lived in, I’m sure my response would have been in terms of images that in general left me with a sense of well-being about myself and my family. Because even though my mother died when I was young and we were poor and my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked in the parish jail, he and my little brother and I had a home—actually a world—on the bayou that was always safe, warm in the winter from the woodstove, cool in the summer under the shade of the pecan trees, a place that was ours and had belonged to our people and a way of life since the Acadians came to Louisiana in 1755. In describing that world I would have told my questioner about my pet three-legged coon, my pirogue tied to a cypress into which was driven a rusty spike with a chain supposedly used by jean Lafitte, the big, black iron pot in the backyard where my father fried us sac-a-lait and bream almost every night in the summer, the orange and purple sunsets in the fall when the ducks would cover the sky from horizon to horizon, the red leaves spinning out of the trees onto the water in that peculiar gold October light that was both warm and cold at the same time, and the dark, wet layers of leaves deep in the woods where we dug for night-crawlers, the smokehouse in back that glistened in the morning frost and always smelled of pork dripping into smoldering ash, and most of all my father—a big, dark, laughing Cajun who could break boards into kindling with his bare hands, throw a washtub full of bricks
When I got back home the rain was still dancing on the bayou, and Annie had walked Alafair down to the dock to help Batist take care of the fishermen who were drinking beer and eating boudin under the canvas awning. I went up to the house and called New Orleans information for Robin’s number, but she had no listing. Then I called Smiling Jack’s. The man who answered didn’t identify himself, but the voice and the manner were unmistakable.
“She isn’t here. She don’t come in till six,” he said.
“Do you have her home number?”
“Are you kidding? Who is this?”
“What’s her number, Jerry?”
“Oh yeah, I should have known. It’s Fearless Fosdick, isn’t it?” he said. “Guess what? She don’t have a phone. Guess what again? This isn’t an answering service.”
“When’d you see her last?”
“Throwing up in the toilet at three o’clock this morning. I just got finished cleaning it up. Look, fun guy, you want to talk to that broad, come down and talk to her. Right now I got to wash out my mops. You two make a great couple.”
He hung up the phone, and I looked out into the rain on the bayou. Maybe she would be all right, I thought. She had survived all her life in a world in which male use of her body and male violence against it had been as natural to her as the vodka collins and speed on the half-shell that started each of her days. Maybe it was just a vanity that I felt a conversation with me could bring additional harm into her life. Also, I didn’t know for sure that the driver of the Corvette was some Brooklyn character named Eddie Keats.
Saints don’t heed warnings because they consider them irrelevant. Fools don’t heed them because they think the lightning dancing across the sky, the thunder rolling through the woods, are only there to enhance their lives in some mysterious way. I had been warned by both Robin and Minos P. Dautrieve. I saw a solitary streak of lightning tremble like a piece of heated wire on the southern horizon. But I didn’t want to think anymore that day about dope runners and local wiseguys, federal agents and plane crashes. I listened to the rain dripping through the pecan trees, then walked down to the dock in the flicker of distant lightning to help Annie and Batist get ready for the late-afternoon fishermen.
3
IF, AS A child, I had been asked to describe the world I lived in, I’m sure my response would have been in terms of images that in general left me with a sense of well-being about myself and my family. Because even though my mother died when I was young and we were poor and my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked in the parish jail, he and my little brother and I had a home—actually a world—on the bayou that was always safe, warm in the winter from the woodstove, cool in the summer under the shade of the pecan trees, a place that was ours and had belonged to our people and a way of life since the Acadians came to Louisiana in 1755. In describing that world I would have told my questioner about my pet three-legged coon, my pirogue tied to a cypress into which was driven a rusty spike with a chain supposedly used by jean Lafitte, the big, black iron pot in the backyard where my father fried us sac-a-lait and bream almost every night in the summer, the orange and purple sunsets in the fall when the ducks would cover the sky from horizon to horizon, the red leaves spinning out of the trees onto the water in that peculiar gold October light that was both warm and cold at the same time, and the dark, wet layers of leaves deep in the woods where we dug for night-crawlers, the smokehouse in back that glistened in the morning frost and always smelled of pork dripping into smoldering ash, and most of all my father—a big, dark, laughing Cajun who could break boards into kindling with his bare hands, throw a washtub full of bricks
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