Jesus Out to Sea

“We’ll take you there. Get in,” he said.

We drove out South Main, past Rice University and parklike vistas dense with live oak trees, some of them hung with Spanish moss. In the south, heat lightning flickered over the Gulf of Mexico. Benny bought us fried chicken and ice cream at Bill Williams Drive-In, and while we ate, his girlfriend smoked cigarettes behind the wheel and listened to the radio, her thoughts known only to herself, her face so soft and lovely in the dash light I felt something drop inside me when I stole a look at it.

Benny popped open the glove box and removed a top of-the-line chartreuse Cheerio yo-yo. Behind the yo-yo I could see the steel surfaces of a semiautomatic pistol. “Now show me the Chinese star,” he said.

He stood with us in the middle of the drive-in parking lot, watching Nick and me demonstrate the intricate patterns of the most difficult of all the Cheerio competition tricks. Then he tried it himself. His yo-yo tilted sideways, its inner surfaces brushing against the string, then twisted on itself and went dead.

“The key is candle wax,” I said.

“Candle wax?” he said.

“Yeah, you wrap the string around a candle and saw it back and forth. That gives you the spin and the time you need to make the pattern for the star,” I said.

“I never thought of that,” he said.

“It’s a breeze,” Nick said.

“Benny, give it a rest,” his girlfriend said from inside the car.

Fifteen minutes later, we dropped off Nick at his house on the dead-end street where I used to be his neighbor. It was a wonderful street, one of trees and flowers and old brick homes, and a horse pasture dotted with live oaks beyond the canebrake that enclosed the cul-du-sac. But when my father died, my mother and I were evicted, and we moved across Westheimer and took up residence in a neighborhood where every sunrise broke on the horizon like a testimony to personal failure.

Benny’s girlfriend pulled to a stop in front of my house. Benny looked at the broken porch and the orange rust on the screens. “This is where you live?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes leaving his.

He nodded. “You need to study hard, make something of yourself. Go out to California, maybe. It’s the place to be,” he said.

Our next-door neighbors were the Dunlops. They had skin like pig hide and heads with the knobbed ridges of coconuts. The oldest of the five boys was executed in Huntsville Pen; one did time on Sugarland Farm.

The patriarch of the family was a security guard at the Southern Pacific train yards. He covered all the exterior surfaces of his house, garage, and toolshed with the yellow paint he stole from his employer. The Dunlops even painted their car with it. Then through a fluke no one could have anticipated, they became rich.

One of the girls had married a morphine addict who came from an oil family in River Oaks. The girl and her husband drove their Austin Healey head-on into a bus outside San Antonio, and the Dunlops inherited two hundred thousand dollars and a huge chunk of rental property in their own neighborhood. It was like giving a tribe of Pygmies a nuclear weapon.

I thought the Dunlops would move out of their dilapidated two-story frame house, with its piles of dog shit all over the backyard, but instead they bought a used Cadillac from a mortuary, covered their front porch with glitter-encrusted chalk animals and icons from an amusement park, and each morning continued to piss out the attic window on my mother’s car, which looked like it had contracted scabies.

As newly empowered landlords, the Dunlops cut no one any slack, did no repairs on their properties, and evicted a Mexican family that had lived in the neighborhood since the mid-Depression. Mr. Dunlop also seized upon an opportunity to repay the paroch

ial school Nick and I attended for expelling two of his sons.

Maybe it was due to the emotional deprivation and the severity of the strictures imposed upon them, or the black habits they wore in ninety-degree humidity, but a significant number of the nuns at school were inept and cruel. Sister Felicie, however, was not one of these. She was tall, and wore steel-rimmed glasses and small black shoes that didn’t seem adequate to support her height. When I spent almost a year in bed with rheumatic fever, she came every other day to the house with my lessons, walking a mile, sometimes in the hottest of weather, her habit powdered with ash from a burned field she had to cross.

But things went south for Sister Felicie. We heard that her father, a senior army officer, was killed at Okinawa. Others said the soldier was not her father but the fiancé she had given up when she entered the convent. Regardless, at the close of the war a great sadness seemed to descend upon her.

In the spring of ’47, she would take her science class on a walk through the neighborhood, identifying trees, plants, and flowers along the way. Then, just before 3:00 p.m., we would end up at Costen’s Drugstore, and she would let everyone take a rest break on the benches under the awning. It was a grand way to end the school day, because on some afternoons the Cheerio yo-yo man would arrive at exactly 3:05 and hold competitions on the corner.

But one day, just after the dismissal bell had rung across the street, I saw Sister Felicie walk into the alleyway between the drugstore and Cobb’s Liquors and give money to a black man who had an empty eye socket. A few minutes later I saw her upend a small bottle of fortified wine, what hobos used to call short-dogs, then drop it surreptitiously into a trash can.

She turned and realized I had been watching her. She walked toward me, between the old brick walls of the buildings, her small shoes clicking on pieces of gravel and bottle caps and broken glass, her face stippled with color inside her wimple. “Why aren’t you waxing your string for the Cheerio contest?” she said.

“It hasn’t started yet, Sister,” I replied, avoiding her look, trying to smile.

“Better run on now,” she said.

“Are you all right, Sister?” I said, then wanted to bite off my tongue.

“Of course I’m all right. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. None. I just don’t think too good sometimes, Sister. You know me. I was just—”