Heaven’s Prisoners

She leaned down on the table and smiled into my eyes. There were sun freckles on the tops of her breasts. I could smell beer on her breath and the faint odor of marijuana in her hair. Her eyes were indolent and merry at the same time, and she bit down on her lip as though she had come to a sensuous conclusion for both of us.

"Where's the wifey?" she said.

"Down the street."

"Will she let you dance with me?"

"I'm not a good dancer, Mrs. Rocque."

"I bet you're good at other things, then. Everybody has their special talent." She bit down on her lip again.

"I think maybe I'm one of those people who was born without any. Some of us don't have to seek humility."

She smiled sleepily.

"The sun went behind the clouds," she said. "I wanted to get some more tan. Do you think I'm dark enough?"

I ate from my paper plate and tried to grin good-naturedly.

"Some people say my family has colored and Indian blood in it," she said. "I don't care, though. Like my mother's colored girls used to say, 'The black berry got the sweet juice.'"

Then she touched away a drop of sweat on my forehead with her finger and put it in her mouth. I felt my face redden in the stares from the people on each side of me.

"Last chance to dance," she said, then put her hands behind her head and started to sway her hips to a Jimmy Clanton song the rock 'n' roll band was playing on the stage. She flexed her breasts and rolled her stomach and her eyes looked directly into mine. Her tongue moved around the edges of her mouth as though she were eating an ice cream cone. A family seated next to me got up and moved. She bent her knees so her rear came tight against her jeans, and held her elbows close against the sides of her breasts with her fingers pointed outward, her wet mouth pouting, and went lower and lower toward the ground with the pale tops of her breasts exposed to everyone at the table. I looked away at the bandstand, then saw A

Claudette Rocque and A

"What was that?" A

"Bubba Rocque's wife."

"She seems to have enjoyed entertaining you."

"I think she's been hitting on the muta this afternoon."

"The what?"

"The reefer."

"I loved the dancing butterfly. She wiggles it around so well."

"She learned it at Juilliard. Come on, A

"Butterfly? Butterfly dance?" Alafair said. She wore a Donald Duck cap with a yellow bill that quacked when you squeezed it. I picked her up on my knee and quacked the cap's bill, happy to be distracted from A

The next day the doctor snipped the stitches out of my scalp and mouth. When I ran my tongue along the inside of my lip, the skin felt like a rubber bicycle patch with welts in it. Later that afternoon I went to an AA meeting. The air conditioner was broken, and the room was hot and smoky. My mind wandered constantly.

It was almost summer now, and the afternoon seemed to grow hotter as the day wore on. We ate supper on the redwood table in the backyard amid the drone of the cicadas and the dry rumble of distant thunder. I tried to read the newspaper on the porch, but I couldn't concentrate on the words for more than a paragraph. I went down to the dock to see how many boats were still out, then went back up to the house and closed myself in the back room where I kept my weight set and historical jazz collection. I put on an old Bunk Johnson 78, and as the clear, bell-like quality of his horn lifted out of the static and mire of sound around him, I started a series of curls with ninety pounds on the bar, my biceps and chest swelling with blood and tension and power each time I brought the bar from my thighs up to my chin.

In fifteen minutes I was dripping sweat on the wooden floor. I took off my shirt, put on my gym trunks and ru

It was a strange night. The stars looked hot in the black sky. There was absolutely no wind, and each leaf on the pecan trees looked as though it were etched out of metal. The surface of the bayou was flat and still, the willows and cattails along the banks motionless. When the moon rose, the clouds looked like silver horsetails against the sky.

I showered with cold water and lay in my underwear on top of the sheets in the dark. A

"We can work through it, Dave. Every marriage has a few bad moments," she said. "We don't have to let them dominate us."

"All right."

"Maybe I've been selfish. Maybe I've wanted too much on my terms."

"What do you mean?"

"I've wanted you to be something you're not. I've tried to pretend for both of us that you're finished with police work and all that world back in New Orleans."

"I left it on my own. You didn't have anything to do with it."

"You turned in a resignation, but you didn't leave it, Dave. You never will."

I looked up into the darkness and waited. The moonlight made patterns on our bodies through the turning window fan.

"If you want to go back to it, maybe that's what we should do," she said.

"Nope."

"Because you don't think I can handle it?"

"Because it's a toilet."

"You say that, but I don't think that's the way you feel."

"My first partner was a man I admired a great deal. He had honest-to-God guts and integrity. One time on Canal a little girl was thrown through a windshield and had her arm cut off. He ran into a bar, filled his coat with ice, and wrapped the arm in it, and they sewed it back on. But before that same guy retired he took juice, he-"

"What?"

"He took bribes. He shook down whores for freebies. He blew away a fourteen-year-old black kid on the roof of the welfare project."

"Listen to the anger in your voice. It's like a fire inside you."

"It's not anger. It's a statement of fact. You stay in it and you start to talk and think like a lowlife, and one day you find yourself doing something that you didn't think yourself capable of, and that's when you know you're really home. It's not a good moment."

"You were never like that, and you never will be." She put her arm across my chest and her knee across my thigh.

"Because I got out of it."

"You thought you did, but you didn't." She rubbed her knee and the inside of her thigh up and down my leg and moved the flat of her hand down my chest and stomach. "I know an officer whose physical condition needs some attention."