Jesus Out to Sea

In truth, Albert’s former colleagues, as well as his current friends, including Joe Bim Higgins, have no idea who he really is.

He never speaks of the road gang he served time on as a teenager, or the jails and oil-town flophouses he slept in from Mobile to Corpus Christi. In fact, he considers most of his youthful experience of little consequence.

Except for one event that forever shaped his thinking about the darkness that can live in the human breast.

It was the summer of 1955, and he had been sentenced to seven days in a parish prison after a bloody, nose-breaking brawl outside a bar on the Texas-Louisiana line. The male lockdown unit was an enormous iron tank, perforated with square holes, on the third floor of the building. Most of the inmates were check writers, drunks, wife beaters, and petty thieves. A handful of more serious criminals were awaiting transfer to the state prison farm at Angola. The inmates were let out of the tank at 7:00 a.m. each day and allowed the use of the bull run and the shower until 5:00 p.m., when they went back into lockdown until the next morning. By 6:00 p.m. the tank was sweltering, the smoke from cigarettes trapped against the iron ceiling, the toilets often clogged and reeking.

The treatment of the inmates was not deliberately cruel. The trusties ladled out black coffee, grits, sausage, and white bread for breakfast and spaghetti at noon. It was the kind of can where you did your time, stayed out of the shower when the wrong people were in there, never accepted favors from another inmate, and never, under any circumstances, sassed a hack. The seven days should have been a breeze. They weren’t.

On Albert’s fourth day, a trailer truck with two huge generators boomed down on the bed, pulled to a stop with a hiss of air brakes, and parked behind the prison.

“What’s that?” Albert asked.

“This is Lou’sana, boy. The executioner does it curb-side, no extra charge,” an inmate wiping his armpits with a ragged towel replied. His name was Deek. His skin was as white as a frog’s belly and he was doing consecutive one-year sentences for auto theft and jailbreak.

But Albert was staring down from the barred window at a beanpole of a man on the sidewalk and was not concentrating on Deek’s words. The man on the sidewalk was dressed western, complete with brim-coned hat, the bones of his shoulders almost piercing his snap-button shirt. He was supervising the unloading of a heavy rectangular object wrapped with canvas. “Say that again?” Albert said.

“They’re fixing to fry that poor sonofabitch across the hall,” Deek replied.

The clouds above the vast swampland to the west were the color of scorched iron, pulsing with electricity. Albert could smell an odor like dead fish on the wind.

“Some night for it, huh?” Deek said.

Without explanation, the jailer put the inmates into lockdown an hour early. The heat and collective stink inside the tank were almost unbearable. Albert thought he heard a man weeping across the hall. At 8:00 p.m. the generators on the truck trailer began to hum, building in velocity and force until the sounds of the street, the juke joint on the corner, and even the electric storm bursting above the swamp were absorbed inside a grinding roar that made Albert press his palms against his ears.

He would have sworn he saw lightning leap from the bars on the window, then the generators died and he could smell rain blowing through the window and hear a jukebox playing in a bar across the street from the jail.

The next morning, the jailer ran a weapons search on the tank and also sprayed it for lice. The inmates from the tank were moved into the hall and the room in which the condemned man had died. The door to the perforated two-bunk iron box in which he had spent his last night on earth was open, the electric chair already loaded on the trailer truck down below. When Albert touched the concrete surface of the windowsill he thought he could feel the residue from the rubber-coated power cables that had been stretched through the bars. He also smelled an odor that was like food that had fallen from a skillet into a fire.

Then he saw the man in the coned hat and western clothes emerge from a café across the street with a masculine-looking woman and two uniformed sheriff’s deputies. They were laughing—perhaps at a joke or an incident that had just happened in the café. The man in the coned hat turned his face up into the light and seemed to look directly at Albert. His face was thin, the skin netted with lines, his eyes as bright and small as a serpent’s.

“You waving at free people?” a guard said. He was a lean, sun-browned man who had been a mounted gunbull at Angola before he had become a sheriff’s deputy and a guard at the parish prison. Even though the morning was still cool, his shirt was peppered with sweat, as though

his body heat created its own environment.

“No, sir.”

“So get away from the window.”

“Yes, sir.” Then he asked the question that rose from his chest into his mouth before he could undo the impulse. “Was that fellow crying last night?”

The guard lifted his chin, his mouth downturned at the corners. “It ain’t none of your business what he was doing.”

Albert nodded and didn’t reply

“Food cart’s inside now. Go eat your breakfast,” the guard said.

“Don’t know if I can handle any more grits, boss. Why don’t you eat them for me?” Albert said.

The guard tightened the tuck of his shirt with his thumb, his expression thoughtful, his shoulders as square as a drill instructor’s. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils. “Let’s take a walk down to the second floor, get you a little better accommodated,” he said. “Fine morning, don’t you think?”

Albert never told anyone of what the guard did to him. But sometimes he smells the guard’s stink in his sleep, a combination of chewing tobacco and hair oil and testosterone and dried sweat that had been ironed with starch into the clothes. In the dream he also sees the upturned face of the executioner, his skin lit in the sunshine, his friends grinning at a joke they had brought with them from the café. Albert has always wanted to believe this emblematic moment in his life was regional in origin, born out of ignorance and fear and redneck cruelty, perhaps one even precipitated by his own recklessness, but he knows otherwise.

Albert has learned that certain injuries go deep into the soul, like a stone bruise, and that time does not eradicate them. He knows that the simian creature that lived in the guard and the executioner took root many years ago in his own breast. He knows that, under the right circumstances, Albert Hollister is capable of deeds no one would associate with the professor who taught creative writing at the university and whose presence at faculty meetings was so innocuous it was not even remembered.

To the east the fog is heavy and white and hangs in long strips on the hills bordering Albert’s ranch. When the early sun climbs above the crest, it seems to burst among the trees like a shattered red diamond. From the kitchen window, where he is drinking coffee and looking down the long slope of his southern pasture, he sees a rust-eaten car coming up the road, its headlights glowing against the shadows that cover the valley floor. One headlight is out of alignment and glitters oddly, like the eye of a man who has been injured in a fight. The passenger window is encased with cardboard and silver duct tape.

The girl from the saloon knocks at his front door, dressed in colorless jeans and a navy-blue corduroy coat. She wears a cute cap and her cheeks are red in the wind. She is obviously awed by the size of his home, the massive amounts of quarried stone that support the two top floors, the huge logs that could probably absorb a cannon shell. Through the rear window of her vehicle, he can see a small boy strapped in a child’s car seat.