“They never have to pay a price,” he said. “We do. That’s why we always back off. They’ve got a lock on the game before it starts, and they know it.”
I stared at Saber. He had a gift for seeing the corruption in people’s hearts when others saw only the monk’s robe.
“That’s a breakthrough?” he said. “Why would a rodent like Vick Atlas start a beef in front of a flatfoot?”
“I get the point.”
“No, you don’t get anything, Aaron. My old man said it. You and your old man are water-walkers.”
“Cut it out.”
He found a stick of gum in the glove box. He peeled it and stuck it into his mouth. He sighed. “You should be playing in one of those bands at Cook’s. I was proud of you up there on the stage.”
“Grin and walk through the cannon smoke,” I said. “It drives the bad guys up the wall. A great man said that.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
But he was like a bird that had lost its song. He stared out the window, his eyes dead. In the distance I heard the two cars coming down the road again, engines wide open, headlights whipping around the curve, sweeping across the trees. I rested my hand on the keys, preparing to start the engine.
“Let them get past,” Saber said.
I clicked on the radio. Hank Williams was singing “Cold, Cold Heart.” I thought of Valerie and wanted to cry. The Austin-Healey and Grady’s convertible were barreling toward us, leaves blowing in their wake. I heard another firecracker pop. As they roared past, I started the engine. I saw Saber stick his arm out the window and heave something over the roof. I thought I heard glass break.
“What did you just do?” I said.
“You told me to get rid of the brick.”
I looked in the rearview mirror. The convertible was swaying all over the road; then it slowed as though the engine had died, and coasted onto the grass. People flung open the doors and piled out, silhouetting against the headlights like confused stick figures in an animation.
“Haul ass,” Saber said.
My hands were shaking. I couldn’t think.
“Snap out of it! Get us out of here!” he said.
I started the engine and drove onto the asphalt, slowly accelerating so my twin mufflers didn’t come to life. I followed the bend in second gear, the headlights off. The road was winding and gray and humped, speckled in the moonlight like the scales on a snake. We drove in silence all the way to South Main, neither of us willing to look at the other lest we recognize the deed we had done.
Chapter
10
TWO DAYS PASSED. I called Valerie four times. I would have gone to her house, but I didn’t want more trouble on the northside, at least not until I was sure about what had happened during the incident in Herman Park. (That was the way I had come to think of a brick flying into an oncoming automobile: “The Incident.”) At 9:14 A.M. Wednesday, I glanced through the living room window and saw Detective Merton Jenks pull into our driveway and get out. The fact that he parked in the driveway indicated he knew I was alone and my parents had gone to work. I met him on the front porch. He carried two small ice cream cups and a pair of tiny wood spoons in one hand. “I bought these at that ice cream store by the firehouse on Westheimer. This is a nice neighborhood you have.”
“I’m fixing to go to work,” I lied.
“You need to talk to me. Don’t try to jump me over the hurdles, either. If you cain’t tell me the truth, don’t say anything. But the one thing you need to do is listen. Sit your ass down.”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“I’ll talk to you any way I goddamn please.”
He wore his fedora but no coat. His sleeves were rolled, and I saw a red parachute and the scrolled caption “101 Airborne” tattooed on his forearm. He put an ice cream cup and spoon in my hand.
“Somebody threw a brick at Grady Harrelson’s car in Herman Park. Were you aware of that?”
“No, sir, I haven’t heard talk of it. Is Grady okay?”
“The last I saw him, he was. On occasion do you drive through the park at night?”
“Not often.”
“A couple of guys say your car was parked by the zoo a couple of nights ago. Maybe you and your girl were making out. You see any vandals cruising around?”
“No, sir, no vandals and no smoochers. I don’t hang out at Herman Park at night.”
“How about Bledsoe? Maybe he borrowed your heap and was making out?”
“No, sir, he didn’t do that.”
“Glad to hear that. Eat your ice cream.”
“Was Grady’s car hurt?”
“The brick went through the windshield and caught a guy named Vick Atlas in the eye. He might lose it.”
“Lose his eye?”
“That’s what I said. Makes you wonder why anybody would do that. You got something you want to say?”
“No, sir,” I replied, my insides turning to water.
“This is my guess. If you did it, you’ll tell me. If Bledsoe did it, you won’t. You’ll turn DDD on me.”
“What’s that?”
“Deaf, dumb, and don’t know.”
I didn’t reply.
“Two guys say they saw your car. These are Harrelson’s friends, not Atlas’s. Atlas says he didn’t see anything but the brick. He also says he never heard of you or Bledsoe. What does that tell you, Aaron?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
The ice cream was melting in my cup. I had eaten none of it. I felt sick all over, as though a toxic cloud had invaded my lungs and fouled my blood.
Jenks set his ice cream cup on the brick step. Snuggs and Bugs walked out of the hydrangeas and looked at him. Jenks picked up Bugs and petted her. “I’m going to tell you some things I normally wouldn’t tell a suspect in an investigation. You think your problem is with the Harrelson kid. It’s not. It’s his father. He’s the closest thing to a Nazi we have in Texas. You wonder why Loren Nichols came after you? Nichols’s brother works in one of the Harrelson rice mills. You wonder why Grady is hanging with a lowlife like Atlas? The Mob does Clint Harrelson’s dirty work. Harrelson is building youth camps around the country. If he has his way, your children will be brownshirts.”
“You’re going to arrest me, sir?”
He set Bugs down on the walk. He looked at me for a long time. I had a hard time holding his eyes. His gaze dropped to my stomach. “I like your belt buckle. You a rodeo man?”
“Amateur ranking only.”
“The Atlases will hurt you. Maybe not kill you. But they’ll do something to you that you’ll carry with you a long time. Both the father and the son are depraved. If I had my way, I’d cap both of them. But people like me don’t get their way.”
The sky seemed a darker blue than it should be, too pure and unblemished to be real, more like bottled ink than air, the trees a deeper green, every color of the rainbow spilling out of the flower beds along the street, sunlight dancing crazily on the neighbors’ rooftops, all of it deceptive and not to be trusted. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He put John Wesley Hardin in jail.”
“Talking about what our ancestors did isn’t going to he’p. Talk it over with your parents. Don’t try to handle this on your own. They’ll cannibalize you, boy.”
“My parents don’t need this kind of grief.”
“Then confide in me. Learn who your friends are.”
“Saber Bledsoe is my friend.”
I saw Jenks’s jawbone flex. He placed the cover on his ice cream cup and put it and the spoon into my hand. “Stick this in the trash for me.”
“I know you’re trying to help, Detective Jenks. I just don’t know any good way out of this.”
He wiped his hands with a handkerchief. The tips of his cowboy boots had been spit-shined into mirrors. He cracked his knuckles. “You know why young men go to war?”
“They want to defend their country?”
“No, war
s are there to solve a young man’s problems. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Then he did something I didn’t expect. He patted me on the shoulder. A minute later he was driving away. I looked at the sky. It wasn’t blue at all. It was streaked with rain clouds that resembled dirty rags, the wind filled with dust and desiccated animal manure blowing from the pasture at the end of our street. Drops of water were evaporating on the sidewalk, the air blooming with an odor like fish spawn and stagnant mud and carrion and waste buckets poured in a privy, as though the mystical cycle of creation had been preempted and replaced with a universe at war with itself. I thought I was losing my mind.
I NEEDED TO TALK to Valerie. A thunderstorm had just burst over the city when I drove into the Heights. The rain was blinding, the palm trees on the boulevard thrashing, lightning crashing in the park. On the main boulevard, the drains were plugged with floating trash, and rainwater had already backed over the curbs and sidewalks into people’s yards. The explosions of thunder were deafening. Out in the park a solitary figure splashed through the puddles, bent forward into the wind, a clutch of books held against her breast.
I recognized her from afar as I would have in a crowd the size of China. No one else had auburn hair with gold streaks in it; no one else wore pink tennis shoes without socks and white shorts printed with flowers and a baseball cap and a shirt like cheesecloth with lace sewn on it; no one else would try to cross a softball diamond in the midst of an electric storm while hugging library books to her chest to keep them dry rather than cover her head with them.
I shifted down and pulled onto the swale and drove across the sidewalk into the park, my tires unable to find purchase, spinning water and mud and divots of grass into the air. I left the engine running and the door open and sprinted through the rain, slipping and almost falling. I could see her squinting at me through the rain, the sky black and unmerciful overhead.
I took the books from her hands and grabbed her arm and started running for the car. She tripped and fell, and I picked her up around the waist and held her against me, my arm tight around her ribs. When we reached the car, I pushed her across the seat and jumped in after her and slammed the door, both of us breathless, books spilling on the floor.
“Where did you come from?” she said.
“Home.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Who else would be out in an electric storm in the middle of a field?”
She moved the strings of wet hair from her eyes and stared into my face. She smiled. Slowly at first. Then she looked through the windshield as we worked our way out of the park.
SHE GAVE ME two bath towels so I could dry off in the living room while she changed clothes upstairs. Then she went into the kitchen and got a bowl of potato salad and cold fried chicken out of the icebox. I couldn’t eat, not until I unloaded the nest of fish hooks in my head and the guilt that lived like weevil worms in my heart. “Grady Harrelson said some ugly things about you at the Copacabana.”
“What things?”
“Personal things about y’all being together.”
“Be specific, Aaron.”
“About making love with you.”
“He said he slept with me?”
I looked out the window at the raindrops sliding like quicksilver off the banana fronds, my eyes empty. “He went into detail. I hit him.”
“Whatever he told you, he made up,” she said.
“You didn’t sleep—”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“He claimed you told him we’d broken up.”
“Grady calls every day, no matter how many times I hang up. The other day he asked where you were. I told him I didn’t know because I wasn’t seeing either one of you. I’m sorry I said that.”
She waited for me to speak, but I didn’t.
“You’re still worried I wasn’t a virgin when we met?” she said.
“No, I don’t care about that at all.”
“The boy was a senior and I was a sophomore. We were going to be married. At least that was what we told ourselves. His reserve unit was called up just after his graduation. He was killed at Heartbreak Ridge.”
“I’m sorry, Valerie. I didn’t know any of that.”
“I’m all right now. I wasn’t for a long time.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said. “Maybe you won’t like being around me anymore.”
“It can’t be that bad, can it?”
But I heard the resolve slip in her voice.
“Saber threw a brick out of my car at Grady’s convertible in Herman Park.” I could hear the rain beating on the window in the silence. “It hit a guy named Vick Atlas.”
“Vick Atlas from Galveston?”
“Yes.”
I saw the blood drain from her face.
“He might lose an eye,” I said. “A detective was at my house this morning.”
“Oh, Aaron.”
I looked away from her.
“Do your parents know?” she asked.
“Neither one of them has had a very good life. I try not to add to their problems.” I felt like a fool, someone who had gotten himself in trouble and wanted others to save him from himself. “I don’t see any way out, not unless I give up Saber.”
“He has to go to the cops. On his own. You didn’t do it,” she said.
“They’ll send him to Gatesville.”
“He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. They’ll take that into consideration.”
“Loren Nichols went to Gatesville for shooting a guy with an air pistol after the guy molested his sister.”
“Your friend is not acting like a friend.”
“Saber always stood up for me when nobody else would. He’d always get even with the bullies. He doesn’t have anybody except me.”
It was obvious she didn’t know what to say. How could she? She was seventeen. I wanted to go back into the ferocity of the storm and take her with me so we could disappear inside the rain or be gathered up by a giant funnel and carried out to sea.
“Maybe I could talk with Vick Atlas,” I said.
“My father knows the Atlas family. Don’t go near them.”
“How could your father know them?”
“He was with the OSS. It became the CIA. The Atlas family helped Lucky Luciano get out of prison. They also helped him set up gambling operations close to navy shipyards so the workers would lose their money and stay on the job. You don’t ‘talk’ to people like the Atlases.”
“Can I use your phone? I’m supposed to be at work by three. The traffic lights are probably out.”
“Stay with me,” she said. “You have to stop doing things on your own without talking to somebody first. You understand that?”
“What should I do, Valerie?”
“Nothing. Stay with me. That’s all. Just stay with me. I want you here.”
“I don’t want you hurt.”
“They won’t hurt me. They know better.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody messes with my father.”
“He’s not actually a violent man, is he?”
“He doesn’t have to be,” she replied. She went to the window and looked at the rain and at the wind tormenting the trees. “We come from different worlds. The difference between Jews and gentiles isn’t a religious one. The difference is in our knowledge of what human beings are capable of. Do you know you’re the sweetest boy I’ve ever met?” She turned around. I could almost see her unspoken words in the fogged place she had left on the windowpane. “Do you understand what I just said?”
“I believe the guy who died at Heartbreak Ridge was the best guy on earth.”
She came behind my chair and hugged my head against her, kissing my hair, her breath in my ear. “I’ll always be with you,” she said. “I give you my word. You’re my Pegasus, my winged horse taking me out o
f the storm.”
I tried to twist my head. But she wouldn’t let go of me. I never wanted to leave her embrace; nor did I want the storm to end. And if it had to end, I prayed the world would be washed clean and a light as bright as creation would burst on the ocean’s rim.
But in the morning the sun came up hot and sultry, and the air was leaden with the stench of dead beetles in the drains, and from baitfish that meteorologists claimed had fallen from the clouds. At eight sharp, Saber’s father was fired from the rendering plant where he had worked for nine years.
SABER CAME TO the filling station to tell me. The gas pump island was littered with leaves and twigs, a live oak across the boulevard uprooted from a yard like a raw tooth. We were standing under the shed by the pumps while I fueled a car. Saber kept looking over his shoulder while he talked.
“What did your father’s boss say?” I asked.
“They have to cut back on overhead, and some of the old guys have to go.”
“What did your father say?”
“He’s the only one they canned. What’s to say besides ‘Thanks for the memory, motherfuckers’?”
I looked around to see if anyone had heard. The city bus stopped on the corner. Saber’s face twitched when the collapsible doors opened. Several black people exited from the back door, and the bus pulled away. Saber’s eyes kept blinking, as though the light were too harsh. “Somebody tied black crepe on our doorknob last night. It had dog shit on it so the person who tore it off would get it on his hands.”
“Maybe the cops can lift fingerprints off it,” I said.
“Try dusting dog shit for fingerprints.”
“Maybe it’s kids.”
“Quit it, Aaron.”
“Has Jenks been to your house?”
“No.” He waited, his eyes drawing close together. “Has he been to yours?”
I finished fueling the car and made change for the driver and watched him drive onto the boulevard. “Jenks was at the house yesterday. The brick caught Atlas in the eye.”
Saber made a sound like someone had punched him in the stomach.
“You haven’t told your dad what happened?” I said.
“No. My old man didn’t go past the seventh grade. He doesn’t have a job, and it’s my fault. I want to go to Korea and get killed.”
The Jealous Kind Page 11