Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about to take a shower. Then Henri drove up with his friends.”

I looked through the window again. A black man had opened the front door of the bus and stepped down gingerly in the weeds. He began urinating in a patch of yellow light.

“I need to have a conference with Henri,” I said.

“Don’t get into trouble, Aaron. I’ll sit down with him later. He’s not a bad person.”

I went into the field. The temperature had dropped, and a mist was blowing coldly out of the north, and the grass was damp and swishing on the bottoms of my trousers. The urinating man zipped up and turned around, his mouth a circle of nicotine-stained teeth inside his long V-shaped beard, the kind a mountain man might wear. He was tall and wore strap overalls. His eyes went up and down my body. I was wearing a pair of Acme cowboy boots I had bought on Larimer Street in Denver. “Howdy,” he said.

“Howdy,” I said. “I’d like to see Mr. Devos if I could. Aaron Holland Broussard is the name.”

r /> “We’re in the midst of a meditation right now.”

“Could you demeditate? Just for a few seconds, so you can give him my message?”

“You may not know it, but you’re in a holy place, man. The four cardinal points of the universe are pointed right at us.”

“The place you just pissed on?”

He laid his hand on my shoulder. He breathed through his mouth, the whiskers around his lips moving. His breath was bilious, like a living presence on my skin. “I’m Marvin,” he said.

I tried to step back. He tightened his hand on my shoulder and worked each finger deep into the muscle. I was surprised at his strength. “Do you fear your brother?” he asked.

I raised both my hands, forcing his grip from my shoulder. “Let me talk to Henri, then I’ll be gone.”

His eyes were lidless and contained a flickering fever-lit level of darkness and malevolence that a reasonable person does not try to plumb. “Wait here, Dixie Cup.” He stuck his head inside the door. “Henri, got a cat here who talks hush puppy and seems to know you.”

I tried to brush past him and get on the stairwell. “Hey!” he said.

“What?”

“I just said ‘Hey,’ as in ‘Hey, mothafucker.’ You got a race thing, ’cause I got a sense you think your shit don’t stink.”

His breath and spittle hit the side of my face. The combination was horrible. I wiped it off on my shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t look so serious, man. We’re getting it on later. Dig? You’re invited. The whole rainbow is in there.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Ten bucks, man. I’ll give you any combo in there you want.”

“Let me get by,” I said. “Please.”

His eyes were as shiny as obsidian, his teeth slanted sideways. A smile broke at the corner of his mouth. “Had you going, mothafucker. Ain’t nobody gonna hurt those girls, man. What you’re watching is a movement, I mean like a tidal wave. You hearing me, bubba? Shake hands. I won’t hurt you. Stars and Bars forever.”

He let me pass, then began laughing and couldn’t stop until his knees were weak and he was forced to bend over and spit a wad of phlegm on the ground.

* * *

THE SEATS IN the bus had been ripped out and replaced with scarred furniture and stained mattresses and improvised hammocks and wash lines and paper bags soaked through with garbage and a gutted refrigerator bleeding rust from the door and a poster on the ceiling that showed Jesus smoking a joint.

Plastic inhalers were crushed and scattered on the floor. Henri Devos was stretched back in a reclining sun chair, one stamped with the green-and-white logo of Holiday Inn, his left arm crooked behind his neck. “Ah, the unpublished novelist from the mists of Avalon,” he said to me. “I hope you brought your guitar.”

Three girls and a boy were sitting on mattresses by his feet. One look at them and you knew their background. They were the detritus of a Puritan culture, one that made mincemeat of its children and left them marked from head to foot with every violation of the body that can be imposed on a human being: state homes, sexual molestation, sodomy, gang bangs, reformatory tats, fundamentalist churches, Venice Beach, Haight-Ashbury, maybe a porn gig in Vegas, maybe witness to a homicide in a boxcar or hobo jungle. Their hallmark was the solemnity, anger, and pain in their eyes.

“How about we toggle outside and check out the cardinal points of the universe?” I said to Henri.

“Another time,” he said. “Let me introduce my friends.” He repositioned himself but left his hand behind his neck and didn’t bother to sit up as he pointed to the kids one by one.

Stoney had pipe-cleaner arms and jug ears and mindless blue eyes and hair the color and density of cotton candy. Moon Child wore Moe Howard bangs and a T-shirt that had been washed into cheesecloth and showed her nipples. Orchid could have been part black and part Indian or maybe part Asian, and had long clean hair streaked with purple and green dye and a white scar like a piece of string that ran through one eyebrow and caused one eyelid to droop. Lindsey Lou wore pigtails and a cowboy shirt and had the slimness of a barrel-racing rodeo girl and rings on all her fingers and jeans that looked painted on her legs.

“Pleased to meet y’all,” I said.