She took my arm from her shoulders and entwined her arm in mine. “It’s not going to pass, is it.”
“You up for a chocolate shake?”
THE NEXT MORNING Loren Nichols came into the filling station. He was driving the skinned-up dirty-vanilla pickup truck owned by his brother. He had washed his hair, and it hung on his head like a black mop. “How’s it dangling?”
“Pretty good. How’s yours dangling?” I replied.
“Got to ask you a favor. I got a job driving a church bus on Sundays, three dollars for the afternoon. They talked me into playing with a quartet at their picnic and assembly tonight. I’m going to be singing lead on two of the songs.”
“That’s great, Loren.”
“Except my guitar shorted out and caught fire.” He gazed at the live oak growing out of the concrete next to the station.
“You want to borrow my Gibson?”
“Valerie told me how much you treasure it.”
“Can Valerie and I come with you?” I said.
“I’d like that.” He pushed his hair back. “You know a plainclothes peckerwood pile of shit named Hopkins?”
“Yeah, I do. He busted Saber and me.”
“He pulled me in. He tried to squeeze me about you and Bledsoe and Vick Atlas and Grady Harrelson’s convertible.”
“Why should you know anything about Harrelson’s convertible?”
“That’s what I told him. He asked me about those two guys Bledsoe was hanging with, the ones who got killed on the train tracks. You heard about that, right?”
“I saw it in the paper.”
“Hopkins said somebody was chasing them when they tried to beat the guard.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know anything. He said, yeah, I did. He said gutter rats like me always had their noses to the sewer grate.”
“What did you say?”
“To shove it up his old lady’s ass because it was obvious she hadn’t been coming across lately.”
“You said that to a plainclothes cop?”
“Another roach hit me in the back of the head with a shoe. That was about it. What’s the deal about Harrelson’s convertible?”
“It’s stuffed with money. The two Mexican guys killed on the train tracks took off with it.”
“How much money?”
“Close to one million. Maybe more.”
“You’re pulling my crank?”
“No, that’s the truth, Loren. The Atlas family brought in a couple of Sicilian hit men to find it.”
He straightened his collar and glanced sideways down the street, his hair blowing in the wind, his shirt flapping. “Hopkins is dirty, isn’t he?”
“Corrupt? I don’t know.”
“He was a vice cop in Galveston. That means he was either on a pad for the Atlas family or he quit or got fired because he was on the square. Does Hopkins strike you as a guy on the square?”
“You think he knows these hit men?”
“A guy like that has his finger in anything that pays a buck. Did Bledsoe boost Harrelson’s convertible?”
“Ask him.”
“That’s what I thought. Okay, why hasn’t somebody picked him up and torn him apart? Why haven’t they torn you apart?”
“Maybe they’re fixing to.”
“Maybe. But why haven’t they done it so far? Wise up.”
“Somebody already knows where the convertible is?”
“See what a smart guy you are?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“Know what I learned at Gatesville? Stack your own time. Don’t let people know what you’re thinking. Silence scares the shit out of them. That’s why the hacks put guys in solitary. It’s the thing they fear most themselves. They’re always playing their radios or yelling at each other in a locker room. When they don’t hear sound, they’ve got to deal with their own problems.”
“What time is your performance?” I said.
“At seven. It’s at the Baptist campground. First I got to pick up all these kids on the bus. I read that book you gave me. The Song of Roland? It’s pretty good. Did all that stuff really happen?”
“It never stopped happening,” I said.
“You’re a weird guy, man. I mean deep-fried weird.”
I STOPPED IN A church on the way home and sat in a pew at the back, deep in the shadows. There was no one else there except a janitor knocking a push broom among the pews. I had come to believe that my spells were not simply blackouts but a way of hiding my true personality from myself. Amid the smell of incense and holy water in the stone founts and the candles flickering in their blue and red vessels, I admitted I wanted to kill Vick Atlas and his father and, for good measure, Grady Harrelson, and I wanted a divine hand to give me permission.
My thoughts seemed obscene, an offense to my surroundings and the powers I believe live on the other side of the veil. If I expected help with my request, it wasn’t there. I walked outside, blind in the glare of the sun.
Chapter
32
I ATE AN EARLY supper with my parents, then picked up Valerie and drove to the campground where Loren’s Baptist friends held their assemblies. A milky brown stream ran through it, and there were cedar and pine trees along the edges of the gulley, and swings and seesaws on a playground, and a big green ramshackle building with Ping-Pong tables and a basketball court inside. I had never been to a Protestant gathering. Back then, at least in the South, Catholics were often looked upon with suspicion. We in turn were taught to avoid regular company with the descendants of Martin Luther and John Calvin.
“I feel like I’m in hostile territory,” I said.
“Why should they be upset with you when they’ve got a Christ killer like me available?” Valerie said.
How do you argue with that?
An empty yellow bus was parked by the building among rows of pickup trucks and old cars. Loren was smoking a cigarette outside the bus door, wearing navy blue slacks high on his hips and a white long-sleeved cowboy shirt with a silver tie and clasp, his hair wet-combed over the collar. I parked by the bus and took my guitar case from the backseat and handed it to him. “There’re a couple flat picks and a thumb pick inside.”
“Thanks,” he said. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it under his shoe. Then he picked it up and field-stripped it and let the tobacco blow apart in the wind. He took a deep breath and worked his neck against his shirt collar.
“Nervous?” I said.
“Sweating through my clothes,” he replied.
“You’re going to do fine,” Valerie said. “I learned this in speech class: Don’t look at any person in particular. Look at the back wall. Everyone will think you’re looking at him or her.”
That was how Valerie talked. She never made a grammatical error; every word she used gave a sentence a more specific meaning than it needed. As I looked at her profile in the twilight, and at the glow on her skin and the happiness in her eyes, I knew I would never be able to separate myself from her, no matter what else occurred in our lives, even death. I felt as though we were already one flesh, one spirit, lovers who were almost incestuous, like brother and sister, companions unto and beyond the grave. It was a funny feeling to have.
“What are y’all singing?” I asked.
“ ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ and ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and a couple of others, if we don’t get thrown out.”
“That’s swell, Loren,” I said.
“You reckon I can do it?” he said.
“We’ll be in the front row,” Valerie said. She didn’t need to say anything else.
He went through the back door of the building with my guitar case, and Valerie and I went through the front and sat down in the bleachers that surrounded the basketball court. In a few minutes the building was packed. Children ran around on the court with balloons on sticks while the musicians set up on the stage. The people sitting by us were sun-browned and had the rough ha
nds and narrow features of people for whom privation and hard physical work were as natural as the sunrise. Their clothes were wash-faded and starched and ironed, their eyes full of expectation and pleasure at attending a function that for them was a communal validation of their lives.
Loren’s band came out on the stage. If he was nervous, he hid it well. Because of his height, he had to lean down to the microphone when he sang “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” The spotlight bathed him, his moist hair black and shining, his cheeks sunken, the range of his voice like Porter Wagoner’s. The audience began to applaud slowly, and then they went crazy. I don’t think anyone was more surprised than Loren. He looked around him as though they were yelling and stomping their feet for someone else. He went immediately into the Carter Family’s theme song, “Keep on the Sunny Side.” Then he did Hank’s “Lovesick Blues.” Then he did “I Saw the Light” and came back for five encores.
Valerie looked around. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I’m going to call Biff Collie tomorrow. Biff’s a good guy.”
“Who?”
“He’s a disk jockey and the master of ceremonies at Cook’s Hoedown.”
“You did this, Aaron.”
“Nope.”
“Loren pretends he has everything under control, but he has no confidence at all. He told me you showed him his first chords. You don’t know how much that meant to him.”
At the intermission, we bought hot dogs and Cokes at a long table covered with food. Loren came through the crowd with my guitar case, shaking hands with people, nodding, embarrassed by their praise and affection. He slipped the handle of the case into my hand. “I’ve got to go outside.”
“What for?” I said.
“My head feels like it’s full of helium. I’m about to faint.”
“Have a hot dog,” Valerie said.
“I did okay, huh?” he said.
Valerie and I both grinned.
“You liked it?” he said.
“What do you think?” I said.
Then the girls were all around him. Valerie and I went outside. The western sky was as red as a forge. A purple MG turned off the state two-lane and drove across the grass and parked not far from the church bus. Grady Harrelson got out and looked over his shoulder, then stared at us without moving. I didn’t know if he was self-conscious about his British sports car or afraid of the class of people he found himself among.
“What’s he doing here?” I said.
“I don’t know, but Loren had better not see him,” Valerie said.
“Loren said something?”
“He thinks Grady is responsible for his cousin’s death.”
“So do I.”
“Let me talk to him,” she said.
“How about we both talk to him? How about we both tell him to leave us alone?”
“Look at him. He’s pitiful,” she said.
I didn’t argue. She was probably right. But I was learning that people who are pitiful and have nothing to lose are the ones who can leave you in shreds.
As it turned out, Grady didn’t want to see “both” of us. “Hi, Valerie,” he said. “What’s happening, Aaron? Take a walk with me.”
“How’d you know where we were?” she said.
“One of your neighbors told me. Can I have a word with Aaron?”
“Talk to both of us or neither of us,” I said.
He was wearing jeans and sandals and a golf shirt with an alligator on the pocket. A thick strand of hair hung across one eye. Somehow Grady always struck a pose that seemed to capture our times—petulant, self-indulgent, glamorous in a casual way, and dangerous, with no self-knowledge. “I’ve got a duck camp south of Beaumont. Why don’t y’all get out of town for a while? Let all this stuff blow over.”
“What stuff?” I said.
He turned around and gazed at the sky. “It looks like the clouds are burning, doesn’t it?”
“What’s bothering you, Grady?” I said.
“Things got out of control. It happens. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want y’all hurt.”
“Then stop acting like an idiot,” Valerie said. “Are you here about those Sicilian murderers?”
The blood drained from his cheeks. “You’ve seen them? They’re here?”
“Did Vick send them or did his old man?” I said.
He stepped backward and didn’t answer.
“Did Vick send them?” I repeated.
“Vick doesn’t confide in me. Talking to y’all is a waste of time. I wish I’d never seen you, Broussard.”
“I never wronged you, Grady,” I said. “I always felt sorry for you.”
“You feel sorry for me?” he said. “Where do you get off with that?”
“Thanks for coming by,” I said.
His face was like a wounded child’s. His gaze shifted to the front of the green building. “I didn’t know you were with him.”
I turned around. Loren was walking toward us.
“Go home, Grady,” Valerie said. “Now.”
“Tell Broussard to go home,” he said. “You were my girl till he messed us up.”
Loren’s stride was eating up the distance between him and us. Grady stepped backward again. Loren pointed his finger at him and said, “You!”
“Go on,” Valerie said to Grady, almost whispering. “I’ll talk to him.”
“No, you won’t,” Grady said. He stepped away from us, his hands hanging at his sides. He swallowed.
“What are you doing here?” Loren asked.
“Talking to my friends,” Grady replied.
“This is our place,” Loren said.
“What do you mean, your place?”
“What I said. You don’t have friends here.”
“It’s a free country,” Grady said.
Those were the exact words I had used to Grady when I’d interfered in the argument he was having with Valerie at the drive-in.
“No, it’s not a free country, Harrelson,” Loren said. “You got my cousin Wanda killed, and you got away with it because nobody cares about a Mexican hooker getting her neck broke. You’re a River Oaks punk who couldn’t cut the Corps, so you came back home to Daddy and pretended you were a hard guy by getting it on with a poor girl who went to the ninth grade.”
“I came out here to do a good deed,” Grady said. “I think that was a mistake.”
“You got that right. Go back to your part of town,” Loren said.
“You people are too much,” Grady said.
“ ‘You people’? You want me to put you in your car and show you up for the yellow-bellied douchebag you are?”
“Bugger off. I’m leaving,” Grady said.
“Do what?”
“Ask Valerie to take you to the library. They’ve got a book there called a dictionary. You’ll dig it.”
I could see the confusion in Loren’s face, his powerlessness over a word he hadn’t heard before.
“My father dumped us when I was a kid,” he said. “But if he was around today, I wouldn’t be afraid to play my music in front of him.”
Grady’s hands closed and then opened at his sides. His face was turned slightly to one side, as though he were trying to avoid a hot wind. “What are you talking about?”
“One of your friends was laughing about your old man not letting you play Gatemouth Brown in your house,” Loren said. “Wanda was too good for you. I think that’s why you hurt her. Every time you look in a mirror, it doesn’t matter where you are, you see a punk looking back at you.”
If I ever saw someone’s soul flinch, it was then. Grady’s mouth seemed to collapse and his eyes to lose focus, as though the earth had shifted under his feet. “Yeah?”
“Just blow,” Loren said. “It’s our part of town. Those are the rules, man. You should know. Y’all made them.”
Then Grady did the strangest thing I had ever seen a young guy do in public. He worked his golf shirt off his shoulders and turned around, arching his t
anned back at us. VALERIE was tattooed across his shoulder blades, each letter formed by a chain of red hearts. “She’ll always be with me, and there’s nothing you can do about it, Broussard. As for you, Nichols, you were a loser when you came out of the womb. I hope you’re with Broussard when he gets his.”
I felt myself moving toward him.
“I’m going,” he said. “Y’all have a great life. See you, Val. Believe it or not, I thought you were the one.”
He walked away from us bare-chested, his shirt clenched in his hand. I suspected Grady’s father had taught him many lessons, and one of them involved probing for bone and nerve to leave the most ragged of wounds. I caught up with him before he got to his MG. He was smiling to himself.
“I don’t know what it is, but there’s something I missed,” I said. “It was a detail, something you said or Valerie said or a cop named Jenks said. It has to do with your alibi.”
The sky was a dull red now, the campground falling into shadow. His eyes searched my face. “You’d make a lousy poker player.”
“It’s not me who has sweat on his upper lip,” I replied.
THE EVENING WASN’T over. After Grady drove away, I spotted a black boxlike sedan parked among the cedar and pine trees bordering the gulley that wound through the campground. A heavyset man in a fedora was behind the wheel. He raised a pair of binoculars to his face.
“Don’t turn around,” I said.
“What is it?” Valerie said.
“The car we saw outside the theater is parked by the trees. A guy is looking at us through binoculars.”
“The one with the camera?” she said.
“I can’t be sure.”
“You’re talking about those hit men?” Loren said, his eyes riveted on mine.
“Just one. The guy in the car,” I said. “That’s the car we saw outside a theater with a guy in it who took our picture.”
“You’re sure it’s the car?” Loren said.
“There’s no doubt about it.”
Then the man behind the wheel made a mistake. He put down the binoculars and lit a cigarette, the flame flaring on his face. Just before he flicked away the match, he turned and looked straight at me and I saw his wide-set eyes and the coarseness in his skin, the fingers that resembled sausages.
The Jealous Kind Page 32