Jesus Out to Sea

Someone outside twists the door handle and flings the door back on its hinges. Tookie Goula steps inside, the strap of her handbag wrapped around her wrist, her arms pumped. “You put that joint in your mout’ again, I’m gonna break your arm, me. Then I’m gonna stuff this pimp here in a toilet bowl,” she says.

Moments later, in Lisa’s parked automobile, Tookie stares at Lisa with such intensity Lisa thinks she is about to hit her.

“Next time I’ll let you drown,” Tookie says.

Lisa looks at the Jewish cemetery and the oak trees thrashing against the sky and the rain puddles in the parking lot. The puddles are bladed with moonlight and she thinks of Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice, but she doesn’t know why.

“What do you know about drowning, Tookie?”

Tookie seems to reflect upon Lisa’s question, as though she, too, is bothered by the presumption and harshness in her own rhetoric. But the charitable impulse passes. “Get your head out of your ass. You want to fire me as your sponsor, do it now.”

Lisa still has the hundred-dollar bill Herman Stanga gave her, plus the money she was paid by his cousin Rodney. She can score some rock or crystal or brown skag in North Lafayette and

stay high or go on an alcoholic bender for at least two days. All she has to do is thank Tookie for her help and drive away.

“Where you think Limbo is at?” she says.

“What?”

“The place people go when they ain’t baptized. Like all them Jews in that cemetery.”

Tookie stares wanly at the parking lot, her face marked with a sad knowledge about the nature of loss and human inadequacy that she will probably never admit, even to herself.

The next morning Lisa stands at the speaker’s podium at the A.A. meeting in the Pentecostal church, her eyes fixed on the back wall, and owns up to drinking, using, and jerking her sponsor around. She says she intends to work the steps and to live by the principles of the program. Both the brevity of her statement and the sincerity in her voice surprise her. She receives a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, then watches it passed around the room so each person at the meeting can hold it in his palm and say a silent prayer over it. She lowers her head to hide the wetness in her eyes.

“Eat breakfast wit’ me. Up at the café,” Tookie says.

“I’d like that,” Lisa says.

“You gonna make it, you.”

Lisa believes her. All the way to 3:00 p.m., when Herman Stanga pulls up to her shotgun house in the Loreauville quarters and kills his engine by her gallery. His car hood ticks like a broken watch.

“You ain’t gonna unlatch the screen for me?” he says.

“I ain’t got no reason to talk wit’ you, Herman.”

“Got me all wrong, baby. I done a li’l research on your financial situation. You should have gotten at least a hundred t’ousand dol’ars when your husband was killed. The gov’ment ain’t paid you yet?”

She swallows and the tin rooftops and the narrow houses that are shaped like boxcars and the trees along the bayou go in and out of focus and shimmer in the winter sunlight.

“Gerald’s divorce hadn’t come t’rew yet,” she says.

“What you mean?”

“His mama and his first wife was the beneficiaries on the policy. He didn’t change the policy,” she says, her eyes shifting off of Herman’s, as though she were both confessing a sin and betraying Gerald.

Herman feeds a stick of gum into his mouth, smacks it in his jaw, and raises his eyebrows, as though trying to suppress his incredulity. “Tell me if I got this right. He’s putting the blocks to you, but he goes off to Iraq and fixes it so you ain’t gonna have no insurance money? That’s the guy you moping around about?”

He begins to chew his gum more rapidly and doesn’t wait for her to reply. “So what we gonna do about the eight-t’ousand-dol’ar tab you got? Also, what we gonna do about the twenty-t’ree hundred dol’ars you took out of Rodney’s cashbox last night?”

“Cashbox?”

His head bounces up and down ironically, like it’s connected to a rubber band. “Yeah, the cashbox, the one that was in the desk in the office where Rodney said to sit your neurotic ass down and wait for him. You t’ink you can rip off a man like Rodney and just do your nutcase routine and walk away?”

“I didn’t steal no money. I don’t owe you no eight t’ousand dol’ars, either.”

“’Cause you was so stoned out you got no memory of it.” Then he begins to mimic her. “‘Tie me off, Herman. Give me just one balloon, Herman. I’ll do anyt’ing, Herman. I’ll be good to you, Herman. I’ll pay you tomorrow, Herman.’”