Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

“Translate that for me?”

“I’m saying good night. You have to pardon my physical situation. I think I had an erection. I’d like to kill myself.”

“You’re sweet, you surely are. Jo Anne is a lucky girl. Be gone with you, now.”

I could hardly walk when I left the house. I wanted to rise into the stars and sail over the mountains. I wanted to escape into the world of my father on the banks of Bayou Teche and the night smell of magnolia or jasmine or trumpet vine or orange blossoms. I wanted to be anywhere except where I was. I felt I had just watched the destruction of paradise.

I cut through the yard, knocking into a birdbath and a sundial and tripping on croquet wickets that were pinned in the grass. A southbound train was blowing down the line. I saw myself on the floor of a boxcar, the wheels rocking on the tracks, Ratón Pass sliding past the open door, a rolled blanket under my head. All I needed to do was close my eyes and I would wake in Albuquerque.

Then I heard Mrs. Lowry call out from the doorway. The resonance and volume of her voice were operatic. “You’re a babe among the heathens, Aaron.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE NEXT DAY was Tuesday. I heard nothing from Jo Anne. Each time I started to call from Chen Jen’s phone in the dining room, I could not erase the image of Jo Anne walking from behind her house the previous evening, a bottle of Henri Devos’s Tuborg in her hand, as though the flower I had brought her and the dinner we had planned and my desire to marry her were inconsequential. Even worse, she seemed to have dismissed Devos’s treacherous financial behavior and his exploitation of her innocence, as though she did not deserve better.

I was also having problems with Mrs. Lowry’s revelation about her and her husband’s willingness to involve themselves with Mexican drug traffickers. The respect I’d had for them was gone. I couldn’t believe their naïveté, either. Have you ever taken a nocturnal excursion through the back streets of Tijuana or Juárez? What you see is not human. Forget nuance, latitude, social science, church-basement bromides. The worst that people are capable of is available for a few greasy coins. The violence imposed by the narco gangs on their enemies and sometimes on innocent peasants is something you never want to see or even know about, lest your faith in your fellow man fly away forever.

Even though we dug postholes all morning, I had no appetite when we went to the dining hall for lunch. I asked Chen Jen

to make me a ham sandwich and sat down with Cotton and Spud.

“You don’t look too good,” Cotton said.

“I’m extremely copacetic.”

“Your gal run off?”

“Mind your own business, Cotton,” I said.

A new Classics Illustrated comic, King Arthur and the Nights of the Round Table, lay by his plate. He teased the cover and pages with his thumb, then rolled it up and took his plate to another table.

“Why’d you have to do that?” Spud said.

“I had a bad night. I got to ask you something.”

“How to win friends and influence people?”

“You hear anything about drugs around here?”

“Those beatniks are supposed to use them.”

“I’m talking about on the property.”

“With Mr. Lowry running things? Who you kidding?”

I bit into my sandwich but couldn’t swallow. I picked up the pitcher of Kool-Aid we always shared at the table and poured my glass full.

“What’s eating you, Aaron?” Spud said.

“Everything.”

“You shouldn’t ought to have talked to Cotton like that. You and him and me are the Three Musketeers.”

“You’re right.” I went over to Cotton’s table and told him I was sorry.

“I didn’t pay it no mind,” he said.

“What you said was the truth.”