“This is a beautifully crafted and written novel one no one will willingly put down once begun.”
—Miami Herald
“A novel about masculine hard living… Burke’s handling of his raw-knuckled plot, however, is anything but crude. In a manner reminiscent of Hemingway, outward roughness belies skill, sensitivity, and a gift for timely understatement.”
—Roanoke Times & World-News
“Burke has created another American descendant of the romantic hero, who rescues others while tacitly bearing his own grim burdens…. The plot twists and turns like a rushing mountain stream, and it’s nearly as fresh.”
—Dallas Times-Herald
“This is one cool, copacetic book… The writing is stunning…. All the characters are grippingly real.”
—Cafe Cod Times
“Paret finds himself in the middle of a modern range war, an ecological melodrama with all the ritualized violence of an old-fashioned Western. Deserves a wide readership.”
—Chicago Tribune
“This wonderful novel is neither romantic nor cynical in its realism…. It contrasts two very different parts of America’s essence—the hazy bayou and a resolute valley in the beautiful West.”
—Publishers Weekly
THE
LOST
GET-BACK
BOOGIE
THE
LOST
GET-BACK
BOOGIE
A Novel
JAMES LEE BURKE
With a Foreword by CHRISTINE WILTZ
Copyright © 1986 by James Lee Burke
Foreword copyright © 2004 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Originally published 1986; three printings
Updated edition, 2004
First printing
Designer: Laura Roubique
Typeface: Galliard
Typesetter: G&S Typesetters, Inc.
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Chapter One appeared in slightly different form as “Discharge
Day” in Cutbank II (Fall/Winter, 1978), published by the
Associated Students of the University of Montana.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Burke, James Lee, 1936-
The lost get-back boogie.
I. Title.
PS3552.U723L6 1986 813′.54 86-10662
ISBN 0-8071-3032-X
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
For John and Judy Holbrook
Frank and Linda Loweree
and Dexter Roberts
You know, the blues is something that’s hard to get acquainted with. It’s just like death. Now, I tell you about the blues. The blues dwells with you every day and everywhere. See, you can have the blues about that you’re broke. You can have the blues about your girl is gone. The blues comes so many different ways until it’s kind of hard to explain. But whenever you get a sad feeling, you can tell the whole round world you got nothing but the blues.
—Sam “Lightning” Hopkins
FOREWORD
Eighteen years ago The Lost Get-Back Boogie, James Lee Burke’s sixth work of fiction, found a home at Louisiana State University Press after nine years of making the publishing rounds and 111 rejections. For Jim Burke, there’s a good story in everything, even rejection; he likes to tell how the manuscript would be returned torn and gouged and stained, as if the editors who’d read it had worked out their anger on its pages, and their assistants had been careless with their coffee before putting it back in the mail.
There’s no anger or residual bitterness when Jim tells the travels and travails of The Lost Get-Back Boogie. There is only humor—his wide grin and infectious laugh as he describes with relish the various work-overs received by his beleaguered manuscript—and gratitude to the people at LSU Press. He always mentions each by name—Martha Lacy Hall, Les Phillabaum, John Easterly, and the late Michael Pinkston—those who revived his flagging career by publishing his collection of short stories, The Convict, in 1985, followed by The Lost Get-Back Boogie in 1986, which was critically acclaimed and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Prior to The Convict, Jim’s work had gone unpublished in hardback for thirteen years.
The story gets better. In 1987, the first of Jim’s series of novels featuring Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, The Neon Rain, was published to more critical kudos. A book a year followed; by 1990, with the third in the series, Black Cherry Blues, Jim won his first Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America. He is only the second writer in the history of the awards to win two Edgars for Best Novel of the year. (In 1998, Cimarron Rose, the first in the Billy Bob Holland series, also won the Edgar.)
Then the movie people discovered the complex characters who move his pack-a-punch plots and inhabit his lush Louisiana landscapes. The Robicheaux series had offers rolling in from Hollywood, with the deal and the role going to Alec Baldwin, who played Robicheaux in Heaven’s Prisoners. The Lost Get-Back Boogie—set in two of the places Jim loves best, Louisiana and Montana—was also in development.
To my way of thinking, this recognition of one of our country’s great prose stylists was inevitable. But when I first met Jim here in New Orleans in 1988, at a hotel on Canal Street where the Popular Culture Association conference was meeting, none of us knew that Jim was on the cusp of fame and the New York Times Bestseller List. We stood in a hallway outside a meeting room, each awaiting our turn to be interviewed about our work in front of a full house of academics from across the country. Jim was still teaching at Wichita State University then, and he wore a plaid shirt and cowboy boots, along with the easy-going, confident demeanor of someone used to speaking in front of a crowd. My nerves felt like one of those strings of blinking red-hot chilipepper lights.
Soon enough, though, we were talking about all sorts of things and joking around with Rhoda Faust, owner of Maple Street Book Shop, who was at the conference selling books. Jim helped her move boxes while he went off on an entertaining riff about Bourbon Street having become a raunchy Disneyland with theme restaurants and nightclubs next to the daiquiri stands and corn dog vendors and the T-shirt and G-string shops. I forgot my nerves.
Jim was so engaging with his easy smile and seemingly endless repertoire of stories about growing up on the Louisiana/Texas Gulf Coast, that he completely won over his audience. After the interview, I heard Pat Browne—who ran the Popular Press at Bowling Green University and is the wife of Dr. Ray Browne, founder of the PCA—say, “Can’t you just hear his mama fussin’ at him and calling him ‘Jimmy Lee?’”
If you’ve read any of his twenty-three books, you might not be able to feature that too easily. Jim Burke’s fiction is gritty and realistic; his novels are loaded with action and shot through with violence; they are darkly concerned with good and evil and morality; as in the novels of Graham Greene, there are Catholic undercurrents and struggles with faith and demons. The demons sometimes come in the form of satanic villains, but they are as likely to be manifestations of the past. In a Burke novel the characters who grab our attention and gain our affection and admiration are those who will face their demons squarely, who will not shirk the dark night of the soul. Jim is at his very best when he allows his characters self-reflection. As readers, we are fascinated by their efforts, disappointed yet comforted by their failures, heartened by their determination not to allow the demons to beat them, but to live another day to fight. “On my best day,” Dave Robicheaux says in Jolie Mori’s Bounce, “I can’t even take my own in
ventory.” But he continues the struggle, often at a high price. His choice is mandated by his code of honor, his ability to face the truth about himself and stand up to his vulnerabilities, which has much to do with the fact that Dave is a recovering alcoholic.
The psychology of misfits and criminals and an understanding of the society that produces them is a Burke specialty, and his sixth sense of a place and its culture is a large part of Jim’s ability to get to the essence of character. In turn, his characters drive their actions through very specific locales. Simply put, these stories couldn’t happen anywhere else. My favorite commentary on this comes from Clete Purcel, Robicheaux’s friend and fellow edge-dweller: “This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it’s the United States. Life will make more sense.” Such a striking statement could also be made about Billy Bob Holland’s Texas, the Civil War landscape of White Doves at Morning, and the Bitterroot Valley of Montana in The Lost Get-Back Boogie.
This new edition of The Lost Get-Back Boogie arrives from LSU Press in the same year as Jim Burke’s twenty-fourth novel. Certainly it was the turning-point in Jim’s career when the Press published it eighteen years ago. Readers now will recognize in it all the explosive elements that have turned James Lee Burke’s entire body of work into one brilliant display of fireworks after another.
This powder-keg of a novel has all the familiar Burke leitmotifs—the struggle between good and evil, and the uneasy definitions we often force upon these concepts; the legacy of the past and the demons it creates, along with rage of the demons against self and the world; violence and its consequences, and questions about why the world we live in continues to become more violent; friendship and loyalty; race, class, arrogance and revenge; the environment; addiction and regret; faith, family, love and heartbreak. The protagonist of The Lost Get-Back Boogie, Iry Paret, stands in the ranks with Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland: he is a hero who is given to self-reflection, who asks himself the hard questions and doesn’t shrink from the answers, who is sometimes helpless against his own rage, who has a built-in dislike of authority, is irreverent and wary of others, but whose compassion and humanity reside just below the surface and close to the heart.
Iry Paret is a young man trying to go straight after serving time in Angola for manslaughter. The more he tries to avoid violence and trouble, the more he keeps walking into other people’s messes and having to deal with the consequences. He’s a country musician, and since his time in Angola he’s been trying to finish his only original song, “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” a song about “all those private, inviolate things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time.”
For Iry, the song won’t come. He remembers what an old Negro preacher said of his son who went to jail, “I tried to keep him out of the juke joint. But he just like a mockingbird. He know every song but his own.” For Iry to finish his song, he must learn to stay out of the juke joint and find his own voice.
When James Lee Burke was named Louisiana Writer of the Year at the 2002 Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, he accepted this honor at the historic old State Capitol, in the House Chambers, standing room only. Wearing his trademark western attire—dark suit and boots, holding his Stetson at his side—he gave the most gracious speech I’ve ever heard, brimming with heartfelt love for the state and its people. He has brought them to literary life in a Louisiana landscape that no writer before him has evoked in all its raw and violent beauty.
Afterwards, a young woman in the audience asked if he ever mentored writers. Jim’s answer should be printed and hung on the wall of every writer just starting out and of any writer who experiences doubt or block during his career. A writer, he said, makes a contract with himself that he’s going to write, and only he can honor that contract by writing every day, honing his craft, and becoming the best writer he can be. A writer mentors himself.
Writing novels is a lonely profession, and it’s possible that a writer’s success largely depends on how much joy he experiences as he plies his trade. Whenever Jim talks about writing, his excitement about the process is apparent. He once wrote me a card—he likes to type letters to his friends on postcards showing Montana’s Blackfoot and Bitterroot Valleys or the Clark Fork River Gorge—when he was writing the screenplay for A Morning for Flamingos. “I’m also trying to finish the new novel [A Stained White Radiance],” he wrote, “which I think is a whammeroo.”
This is a writer who is enjoying every surge of his creative power. He finds a way to be grateful and to keep his humility and his unfailing sense of humor with him even on the bad days: “There are worse things, I guess, like putting one’s head in the microwave for ten minutes each morning to get a jump-start on the day.”
Then there’s success. Some writers falter and freeze or become arrogant when sales rise and the movie people knock at the door. Jim knows how to keep his priorities straight. “I just concentrate on whatever I’m working on at the present and let the rest take care of itself… What counts is the present writing project.”
For that young woman at the old State Capitol and anyone else who might need one, Jim Burke is a mentor by example. In his quiet and unassuming way, he goes into his room every day and writes from “cain’t-see to cain’t-see,” as his grandfather used to say, grateful that his work touches so many people, and grateful for the love and support of his strong family—his wife, Pearl, and their four children.
It seems to me that for Jim, The Lost Get-Back Boogie was finding his song. Its title reflects his love of music and the struggle that runs through all of Jim’s work—getting lost and getting back—the song that his characters dance to in every book. With the creation of Iry Paret, Jim recognized his unique power to write our vulnerabilities and flaws and show us how they can ennoble us if we so choose. But as Iry says, “when you try to catch all of something, particularly something very good, it must always elude you in part so that it retains its original mystery and magic.”
James Lee Burke continues to try to catch all of it, and thus we have the growing body of work of a great American novelist.
Christine Wiltz
New Orleans
May 2004
THE
LOST
GET-BACK
BOOGIE
ONE
The captain was silhouetted on horseback like a piece of burnt iron against the sun. The brim of his straw hat was pulled low to shade his sun-darkened face, and he held the sawed-off double-barrel shotgun with the stock propped against his thigh to avoid touching the metal. We swung our axes into the roots of tree stumps, our backs glistening and brown and arched with vertebrae, while the chain saws whined into the felled trees and lopped them off into segments. Our Clorox-faded, green-and-white-pinstripe trousers were stained at the knees with sweat and the sandy dirt from the river bottom, and the insects that boiled out of the grass stuck to our skin and burrowed into the wet creases of our necks. No one spoke, not even to caution a man to step back from the swing of an ax or the roaring band of a McCulloch saw ripping in a white spray of splinters through a stump. The work was understood and accomplished with the smoothness and certitude and rhythm that come from years of learning that it will never have a variation. Each time we hooked the trace chains on a stump, slapped the reins across the mules’ flanks, and pulled it free in one snapping burst of roots and loam, we moved closer to the wide bend of the Mississippi and the line of willow trees and dappled shade along the bank.
“OK, water and piss it,” the captain said.
We dropped the axes, prizing bars, and shovels, and followed behind the switching tail of the captain’s horse down to the willows and the water can that sat in the tall grass with the dipper hung on the side by its ladle. The wide, brown expanse of the river shimmered flatly in the sun, and on the far bank, where the world of the free people began, white egrets were nesting in the sand. The Mississippi was almost a half mile across at that point, and there was a
story among the Negro convicts that during the forties a one-legged trusty named Wooden Unc had whipped a mule into the river before the bell count on Camp H and had held onto his tail across the current to the other side. But the free people said Wooden Unc was a nigger’s myth; he was just a syphilitic old man who had had his leg amputated at the charity hospital at New Orleans and who later went blind on julep (a mixture of molasses, shelled corn, water, yeast, and lighter fluid that the Negroes would boil in a can on the radiator overnight) and fell into the river and drowned under the weight of the artificial leg given him by the state. And I believed the free people, because I never knew or heard of anyone who beat Angola.
We rolled cigarettes from our state issue of Bugler and Virginia Extra tobacco and wheat-straw papers, and those who had sent off for the dollar-fifty rolling machines sold by a mailorder house in Memphis took out their Prince Albert cans of neatly glued and clipped cigarettes that were as good as tailor-mades. There was still a mineral-streaked piece of ice floating in the water can, and we spilled the dipper over our mouths and chests and let the coldness of the water run down inside our trousers. The captain gave his horse to one of the Negroes to take into the shallows, and sat against a tree trunk with the bowl of his pipe cupped in his hand, which rested on the huge bulge of his abdomen below his cartridge belt. He wore no socks under his half-topped boots, and the area above his ankles was hairless and chafed a dead, shaling color.
He lived in a small frame cottage by the front gate with the other free people, and each twilight he returned home to a cancer-ridden, hard-shell Baptist wife from Mississippi who taught Bible lessons to the Sunday school class in the Block. In the time I was on his gang, I saw him kill one convict, a halfwit Negro kid who had been sent up from the mental hospital at Mandeville. We were breaking a field down by the Red Hat House, and the boy dropped the plow loops off his wrists and began to walk across the rows toward the river. The captain shouted at him twice from the saddle, then raised forward on the pommel, aimed, and let off the first barrel. The boy’s shirt jumped at the shoulder, as though the breeze had caught it, and he kept walking across the rows with his unlaced boots flopping on his feet like galoshes. The captain held the stock tight into his shoulder and fired again, and the boy tripped forward across the rows with a single jet of scarlet bursting out just below his kinky, uncut hairline.