Jesus Out to Sea

How does he speak with such authority and confidence? Did she actually say those things? Is that who she really is?

“I ain’t stole no money out of no office.”

“Tell that to the sheriff when Rodney files charges. Open this goddamn door, bitch. You fixing to go on the installment plan.”

She attacks his face with her nails and he hits her with his fist harder than she ever believed a human being could be hit.

During the next six weeks Lisa comes to believe the person she thought was Lisa perhaps never existed. The new Lisa also learns that Hell is a place without geographical boundaries, that it can travel with an individual wherever she goes. She wakes to its presence at sunrise, aching and dehydrated, the sky like the watery, cherry-stained dregs in the bottom of a Collins glass. Whether picking up a brick of Afghan skunk in a Lafayette bus locker for Herman or tying off with one of his whores, sometimes using the same needle, Lisa moves from day into night without taking notice of clocks or calendars or the macabre transformation in the face that looks back at her from the mirror.

She attends meetings sometimes but either nods out or lies about the last time she drank or used. If pressed for the truth about where she has been or what she has done, she cannot objectively answer. Dreams and hallucinations and moments of heart-pounding clarity somehow meld together and become indistinguishable from one another. The irony is the knocking sound has finally stopped.

Sometimes Tookie Goula cooks for her, holds her hands, puts her in the shower when she is too sick to care for herself. Tookie has started to smoke again and some days looks haggard and hungover. At twilight on a spring evening they are in Lisa’s bedroom and the live oaks along the bayou are dark green and pulsing with birds against a lavender sky. Lisa has not used or gotten drunk in the last twenty-four hours. But she thinks she smells alcohol on Tookie’s breath.

“It’s codeine. For my cough,” Tookie says.

“It’s a drug just the same,” Lisa says. “You go back on the spike, you gonna die, Tookie.”

Tookie lies down next to Lisa, then turns on her side and places one arm across Lisa’s chest. Lisa doesn’t resist but neither does she respond.

“You want to move in wit’ me?” Tookie asks. “I’ll hep you get away from Herman. Maybe we’ll go to Houston or up Nort’ somewhere, maybe open a café.”

But Lisa is not listening. She rubs the balls of her fingers along one of the tattoos on Tookie’s forearm.

“A mosquito bit me,” Tookie says.

“No, you’re back on the spike.”

She kisses Tookie on the mouth and presses Tookie’s head against her breast, something she has never done before. “You break my heart.”

“You’re wrong. I ain’t used in t’ree years, me.”

“Stop lying, stop lying, stop lying,” Lisa says, holding Tookie tighter against her breast, as though her arms can squeeze the sickness out of both their bodies.

It begins to rain and Lisa can smell fish spawning in the bayou and the odor of gas and wet leaves on the wind. She hears the blades of a helicopter thropping across the sky and sees lightning flicker on the tin roofs of her neighbors’ homes. As she closes her eyes, she feels herself drifting upward from her bed, through the ceiling, into the coolness and freedom of the evening. The clouds form a huge dome above her, like that of a cathedral, and she can see the vastness of creation: the rain-drenched land, a distant storm that looks like spun glass, a sea gone wine-dark with the setting of the sun.

Gerald loved me. We was gonna be married by a priest soon as his divorce come through, she says to Tookie.

I know that, Tookie says.

Down there, that’s where it happened.

What happened?

My sister was trying to hand up my l’il boy t’rew the hole in the roof and they fell back in the water. I could hear them knocking in there, but I couldn’t get them out. My baby never got baptized.

These t’ings ain’t your fault, Lisa. Ain’t nobody’s fault. That’s what makes it hard. You ain’t learned that, you?

Directly below, Lisa can see the submerged outline of the house where she and her family used to live. The sun is low on the western horizon now, dead-looking, like a piece of tin that gives no warmth. Beneath the water’s surface Lisa can see tiny lights that remind her of broken Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice or perhaps the souls of infants that have found one another and have been cupped and given safe harbor by an enormous hand. For reasons she cannot explain, that image and Tookie’s presence bring her a moment of solace she had not anticipated.

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A Season of Regret

Albert Hollister likes the heft of it, the coldness of the steel, the way his hand fits inside the lever action. Even though the Winchester is brand-new, just out of the box from Wal-Mart, he ticks a chain of tiny drops from a can of 3-in-One on all the moving parts, cocks and recocks the hammer, and rubs a clean rag over the metal and stock. The directions tell him to run a lubricated bore brush down the barrel, although the weapon has never been fired. After he does so, he slips a piece of white paper behind the chamber and squints down the muzzle with one eye. The oily spiral of light that spins at him through the rifling has an otherworldly quality about it.

He presses a half-dozen .30-30 shells into the tubular magazine with his thumb, then ejects them one by one on his bedspread. His wife has gone to town with the nurse’s aide for her doctor’s appointment and the house is quiet. The fir trees and ponderosa pine on the hillside are full of wind and a cloud of yellow dust rises off the canopy and sucks away over his barn and pasture. He picks up the shells and fits them back in the cartridge box, then puts the rifle and the shells in his closet, closes the door on them, and drinks a glass of iced tea on the front porch.

Down the canyon he can see the long roll of the Bitterroot Mountains, the moon still visible against the pale blueness of the sky, like a sliver of dry ice. He drains his glass and feels a terrible sense of fatigue and hopelessness wash through his body. If age brings wisdom, he has yet to see it in his own life. Across the driveway, in his north pasture, a large sorrel-colored hump lies in the bunchgrass. A pair of magpies descend on top of it, their beaks dipping into their bloody work. Albert looks at the scene with great sorrow on his face, gathers up a pick and a shovel from the garage, and walks down the hillside into the pasture. A yellow Labrador retriever bounds along behind him.