Another Kind of Eden by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

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SHE WAS WEARING a cute cap and a pink gingham dress and a charcoal-gray suede jacket and robin’s-egg-blue tennis shoes without socks, as though she had pulled her clothes at random from a series of driers in a washateria. A thermos hung from one hand and a metal lunch box painted with the faces of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans hung from the other. “What’s going on, big boy?”

“What are you doing here?” I answered.

“Thought you’d like to take a ride.”

“Where?”

“My house. I have a present for you.”

“What’s going on, Jo Anne?”

She tossed me the thermos. It was heavy, and I barely caught it. “I’m going to straighten you out,” she said. “What do you think about that, Buster Brown?”

A dense white fog was rolling on the stream that ran through the center of Mr. Lowry’s property. I could smell the German browns and brook trout spawning inside the fog. They were the only trout that spawned in the fall, and the cold, fecund odor was of a singular kind, like a conduit into creation, the iridescent spray off the boulders so mysterious and lovely and improbable that I wondered if it was borrowed from a rainbow. Or maybe that was just the way I thought about things when I was with Jo Anne.

She opened the driver’s door of her car and threw the lunch box on the seat. “Daydreaming?” she said.

“What’s in the lunch box?”

“A scrambled-egg sandwich.”

She started the engine but didn’t put the transmission into gear. She ran her nails through the back of my hair. “You trust my driving?”

“Sure.”

“How about in other things?”

“Yes, I trust you in all things.”

“We’ll see about that.”

I had no idea what Jo Anne was up to. We drove down the dirt road through the fog and rumbled across the cattle guard. In a half hour we were at her house. The sun was orange, the wind cold, the sky blue. I had already eaten the sandwich and drunk half the coffee in the thermos. “Thanks for the breakfast,” I said.

“De nada,” she said, cutting the engine.

We went inside. Plyboard was still nailed across the back windows that were probably broken by Darrel. “What happened to the glazier?” I asked.

“He said he’ll get here when he gets here.”

Somehow the cavalier remark of the glazier made me angrier than the probability that Darrel Vickers had vandalized Jo Anne’s house.

“You have a number for this fellow?” I said.

“Get in the house and shut up,” she replied.

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