Jesus Out to Sea by Burke James Lee

Author:Burke, James Lee [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2007-06-05T05:00:00+00:00

The party she helps cater that night is held in a refurbished icehouse across the street from a Jewish cemetery shrouded by live oaks. It’s raining outside, but the moon is full and visible through the clouds, and the shell parking lot is chained with rain puddles. A tin roof covers the old loading dock where years ago blocks of ice rushed down a chute into a wood box and once there were chopped into small pieces with ice picks by sweating black men. The roar of the rain on the tin roof is almost deafening and Lisa has a hard time concentrating on her work. She has another problem, too.

Rodney, the caterer, can’t keep his hands off her. When he tells her how to arrange and freshen the salad bar, he keeps his palm in the middle of her back. When he walks her the length of the serving table, he drapes an arm over her shoulder. When she separates from him, he lets his fingers trail off her rump.

“Herman tole me you growed up here’bouts,” he says, slipping his grasp around her triceps.

“My husband’s daddy worked at this icehouse. He chopped up ice out there on the dock, in that wood box there,” she replies.

He nods idly, as though processing her statement. “Your husband got killed in Iraq?”

She starts to answer, then realizes he isn’t listening, that he’s watching another worker pour a stainless-steel tray of okra gumbo into a warmer. His gaze breaks and his eyes come back on her. “Go ahead,” he says.

“Go ahead what?”

“Say what you was saying.”

“Can I get paid after work tonight? I got to hep my auntie wit’ her mortgage.”

“Don’t see nothing wrong wit’ that,” he says.

He squeezes by her on his way to the kitchen, the thick outline of his phallus sliding across her rump.

The party becomes more raucous, grows in intensity, the males-only crowd emboldened by their numbers and insularity. Four bare-breasted women in spangled G-strings and spiked heels are dancing on a stage, fishnet patterns of light and shadow shifting across their skin. Outside, the rain continues to fall and Lisa can see the black-green wetness of the oak trees surrounding the Jewish cemetery, the canopy swishing against the sky, and she wonders if it is true that the unbaptized are locked out of heaven.

Why is she thinking such strange thoughts? She tries to think about her life in New Orleans before the hurricane, before Gerald’s reserve unit was called up, before his Humvee was blown into scrap metal.

She had waited tables in a restaurant in Jackson Square, right across the street from the Café du Monde. There were jugglers and street musicians and unicyclists in the square, and crepe myrtle and banana trees grew along the piked fence where the sidewalk artists set up their easels. It was cool and breezy under the colonnades, and the courtyards and narrow passageways smelled of damp stone and spearmint and roses that bloomed in December. She liked to watch the people emerging from Mass at St.

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