Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

“You said you were taking over. Maybe I don’t agree with you shooting Jude, but he could be a difficult man. That was your choice, and I respect it.”

“I lied. I was practicing. I’ll show you.”

Darrel lifted the Luger and fired a round into the center of his father’s forehead. The muscles in Mr. Vickers’s face collapsed or, better said, dissolved into tapioca, as though someone had whispered a dirty secret in his ear. The crowd in the shadows went silent and turned in unison, their features shiny and ghoulish as plastic masks, the eyes and mouths scooped by a spoon. The only sound was the wind. Darrel stared at the body. A dust devil spun through rocks, then lifted into the air and fell apart. “Bet you didn’t think I could pop my old man, did you?” Darrel said to me.

“I feel sorry for you,” I said.

“Why?” he said.

“You only get one father. I think he was telling you the truth.”

“About what?”

“He loved you.”

The change in his eyes was one I didn’t expect. I think, for the first time in his life, Darrel understood the irrevocable nature of loss.

* * *

I WON’T BE FANCIFUL with you about death. It’s a motherfucker no matter how you cut it, and needless to say, a violent death is worse. You don’t have to go to war to find it, either. I saw a blowout on an offshore drilling rig that was the equal of any napalm bombing. The rig began to quiver, then the bolts started popping loose around the wellhead, and the casing jettisoned out of the hole and was clanging in the rigging like a junkyard falling down stairs, followed by a torrent of oil and gas and sludge that suddenly ignited and blew flame through the derrick and wilted the steel spars like licorice. Fourteen men died on the deck; the man racking pipe high up on the monkey board never knew what hit him.

I was on an offshore seismograph rig in ’57 when Hurricane Audrey hit the Louisiana coast at 145 miles an hour, except we rode it out, even though we were loaded with canned dynamite and nitro caps. I don’t think I was ever more frightened, before or since. Many people in Cameron Parish were drowned, and for minimum wage, I helped extract the dead from the swamp with grappling hooks and pull them out of trees. I remember how the dead all smelled like Clorox when you dragged them over the gunwale and into the boat.

I do not mean to assault anyone’s sensibilities, but once you face death or reach out and touch it with your hand, or look into the half-lidded eyes of a woman or child or man whose life has been violently taken, you bond with them and silently try to console them for the theft of their lives. You promise to carry them in your heart and never tell anyone about it. I think that’s what humanity is about.

Why do I talk about these things? I do not want the reader to mourn the fate of any character in this tale. Saber was brave and did not want me to mourn his death. That alone was gift enough for me. Since that night in the box canyon, I have never feared death, nor do I brood upon it. I’ll take it a step further. Since that night, I have never feared anything in this world or the next.

* * *

WE WERE ALMOST to the bus. Henri was now holding Darrel’s Luger. I kept trying to make Jo Anne look at me, with no success. My mind was tired, my body weak, my spiritual resources used up. Why would she not look at me? Had she actually betrayed me? Think, I told myself. What was I not seeing?

The .38 Police Special.

Her bag was still hanging on her waist.

“I want you to take a look inside the bus,” Henri said. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

I stepped up into the vestibule of the bus. Henri and Jo Anne followed me. Henri pulled off his backpack and dropped it heavily on the floor. Young people were eating take-out pizza and smoking dope. Lindsey Lou and Orchid were huddled behind a table stacked with tape-wrapped packages that probably contained cocaine or Mexican skag. Lindsey Lou and Orchid couldn’t bring themselves to look at me.

“How you doin’, girls?” I said. Both of them hung their heads. “This isn’t your fault,” I told them. “You got taken in by a bunch of shitheads.”

“D

on’t test the envelope, Broussard,” Henri said.

“What did you want to show me?” I said.

He pulled down a blanket that was draped on a clothesline. Behind it, Jo Anne’s paintings were propped either against or all over a stuffed couch. The first one I saw clearly was of the children trapped inside the flames at the Ludlow Massacre.

“What do you think about that, Jo Anne?” Henri said.

“Thank you,” she replied.

“You took them out of Jo Anne’s house?” I said.

“No, Darrel did. But I got them back.”

“Are you going to believe this guy?” I said to Jo.