Half of Paradise

He remembered his last year in high school when his father was alive and he had gone out with a girl named Suzanne, and they were always together and they talked about getting married. Her skin was very white and her hair hung to her shoulders like black silk, and at eighteen she looked like a mature woman. There was that Saturday they went fishing together in his boat and he rowed down the bayou with the oaks and cypress and willows on each side, and she sat forward in the bow and her eyes were dark and happy and she lifted the hair from her neck to let the breeze blow on her, and he put into the bank and got out and dragged the boat through the shallows, and he didn’t have to ask or even say anything because she already understood. And for the rest of the spring it was the same. On Saturday morning he would meet her at the levee and they would row to the same place on the green bank among the azaleas and jasmine, and later they would drink wine and fish and he would row her back in the afternoon.

They graduated from high school and he began to drink more, and there was the weekend they drove to Biloxi in the sports car her father had given her for graduation, and Avery left her in the hotel room to get a package of cigarettes and came back three hours later blind drunk, and she lay in bed with her eyes wet and her hair spread out on the pillow and she turned away from him when he tried to touch her; he left the room and bought a bottle at the bar and went down on the beach and passed out. He woke in the morning with a bad hangover and his clothes and hair were full of sand, and the sun was hot and the white façade of the hotel gleamed in the light. He went to the room, but there was nothing to say or do because when he told her he was sorry it sounded meaningless. She was very hurt and she tried not to show it, and that made him all the more angry and ashamed. So they drove back home not talking, and things were never the same after that. The summer became fall, and she went to school at the state university and he took a job on a shooting crew. She wrote him a few letters during the time she was at L.S.U., and then she went to Spain to study painting and he never heard from her again. It had ended undramatic and unpoetic and unanything, and he wondered why he should think of her now. He had been in prison only for a short time, but everything that had existed before seemed to belong to another world and she with it. The Saturdays that they had together and the things they did were no longer real, nothing was real except the wet clothes and the rain and the mud and the cold in his feet and Daddy Claxton’s coughing and Rainack sitting in the back of the truck in his uniform and slicker with the holster strapped around his waist and the .45 revolver that meant he could crack the barrel across your head if you tried to get out of the rain, and two men somewhere off in the woods running for freedom with an armed search party behind them.

“I got to take a leak,” Claxton said.

“Go ahead,” Rainack said.

“Can’t I go off in the brush?”

“I got to keep watch on all of you.”

Claxton looked embarrassed.

“I ain’t going to run off nowheres,” he said.

“Act your age. We ain’t going to look at you,” Rainack said.

“It’ll just take a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Finally he turned to the side and urinated on the ground. He buttoned his trousers and stared at the irrigation ditch, not wanting to look at anyone.

“How’s it feel to be a bastard?” LeBlanc said.

“You ain’t getting a rise out of me,” Rainack said. “Your time is coming when Evans gets back.”

“If Evans owes you any money you better get it from him while you can,” LeBlanc said.

“You’re talk, LeBlanc. Guys like you shoot off their mouth. They never do nothing.”

“Wait around a while.”

“Evans will be alive to piss on your grave,” Rainack said.

“Maybe you ought to pay up your debts too.”

“I should have killed you out in the ditch and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

The sound of rifle shots came from the woods. They were distant and faintly audible through the rain. There was a single report followed by two more, and then someone was firing in rapid succession. A minute passed and it was quiet except for the even patter of the rain. Rainack got out of the truck with his hand on his revolver and looked at the trees. The front of his khaki clothes, where his slicker was open, was drenched through. Gang five waited and listened. There was a final whaaap of a rifle and almost immediately after a burst from a shotgun and then silence again. A few minutes went by and the woods remained quiet.

“That’s the end of your pals,” Rainack said. He got back in the truck and shut one door to keep out the rain. He wiped the water off his face with his handkerchief.

“Them shots was too close,” Daddy Claxton said.

“They’ve been gone three or four hours,” Avery said. “They should have been in the next parish.”

“Maybe Evans was having rifle practice on a friend,” LeBlanc said.

“I know it ain’t them. They’re young. They could make ten or twelve miles in the time they been gone,” Claxton said. “Billy Jo said they had a car waiting for them. They might be over the state line by now.”

“They’re standing before the Lord,” Brother Samuel said. “They crossed the big river, and the Lord’s sitting in judgment. Tonight their souls will be flying through the dark with the evil spirit dragging them by a chain.”

“I ain’t going to believe it. They’re young. An old man couldn’t make it, but the young ones got a chance.”

“I seen the sign this morning. I knowed it wouldn’t do no good to warn them.”

Daddy Claxton coughed violently. His breath rasped in his throat. He gagged on his shirt sleeve.

“There ain’t no reason to keep us out here now. Let the old guy get inside,” LeBlanc said.