“We’ve got to tell somebody,” I said.
“You’re kidding. Don’t even think that.”
“We can’t hide this, Saber,” I said. “The Atlases are criminals. What if they try to hurt my parents and I don’t warn them first?”
I thought he was going to cry. I finished fueling another car and clanged the hose spout on the pump. Saber stared emptily at the boulevard as though he had no idea where he was. I would have given anything to undo the bad decisions I had made and the pain they had brought my best friend. Just a few weeks earlier we had been part of a postwar era that had no antecedent. No other country had our power or influence. Music was everywhere. Regular was eighteen cents a gallon. All the services on a car—window washing, oil check, tire inflation—were free. Those small and inglorious things somehow translated into a confidence that seemed to dispel mortality itself, even though Joseph McCarthy was ripping up the Constitution and GIs were dying in large numbers in places no one could locate on a map or would take the time to spit on.
I walked over to Saber and placed my hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to trust me, Sabe. If we do the right thing, we don’t need to be afraid.”
“You’re going to tell your dad what happened?”
“What if I do?”
“My old man worries when baloney goes up ten cents a pound. Your old man thinks it’s noble to burn your own house down while the band plays ‘Dixie.’ Gee, who’s about to get it without grease?”
Chapter
11
MY MOTHER DIDN’T allow my father to keep liquor in the house. In order to drink, he went to the icehouse or the bowling alley or the garage, where he kept a bottle under the spare tire in the trunk of the car. It was a shameful way for him to live, and a shameful way for my mother to behave, but it was the only way they knew.
After supper I sat at the redwood table in the backyard and played my Gibson. By chance I once heard Lightnin’ Hopkins playing in front of a bar on Dowling Street, in the heart of Houston’s black district. He was singing “Down by the Riverside.” It was the saddest and most beautiful blues rendition I had ever heard. I did not know the song’s origin, but I understood its content, and when I would feel one of my spells coming on, I would get out my Gibson and sing it:
Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
Down by the riverside,
I ain’t gonna study war no more,
Down by the riverside,
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Somehow I knew he was not singing about war but about something even worse, perhaps the destruction of the spirit or the mortgaging of one’s soul. I wondered how anyone could prevail over the unhappiness that had been imposed on Lightning and his people. I wondered if the Texas prison he had served time in was worse than the prison I had constructed for myself.
I heard my father open the screen door and head for the garage. “Daddy?”
He looked at me, startled.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” I said.
He looked at the garage door. “I might have a low tire. Can it wait a few minutes?”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard him scrape the door back on the concrete, then pause and push the door in place without going inside. He walked across the grass toward me, fishing in his pocket for his Lucky Strikes. He had left them in the house.
“Go get a smoke if you want one,” I said.
“It’s all right. I’m trying to cut down. What’s on your mind?”
Saint Augustine said not to use the truth to injure. I don’t think he used those words lightly. My father tried to remain impassive as I described the events at the Copacabana and in Herman Park, but his expression was like that of a man walking barefoot on a rocky road. There was a tremble in his right hand, the fingertips vibrating slightly on the tabletop, a blue vein pulsing in his temple.
When I finished, he cleared his throat and looked at my mother’s silhouette in the kitchen window, where she was washing dishes. “You and I are supposed to be doing that.”
“I’ll go help her.”
“No, she’ll understand. The boy is going to lose his eye?”
“He’s not a boy.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what the detective said.”
“And Saber wants to keep quiet about it?”
“He’s scared. His father just got fired.”
“Fired? When?”
“This morning.”
“For doing what?”
“Nothing.”
“You think these criminals are behind it?”
“Or Grady Harrelson’s father.”
My father cleared his throat again and stared at the garage.
“Want me to get you a glass of water?” I asked.
“The boy’s name is Atlas?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s no good.”
“Did you have words with his father in the nightclub?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re not to have any contact with them. If they try to talk to you on the street, if they yell insults at you from a car, if they make threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, you do not respond, not under any circumstances. Clear?”
“Yes, sir, but what does it matter?”
“Every word you utter to an evil man either degrades you or empowers him. Evil men fear solitude because they have to hear their own thoughts.” He glanced at the evening sky. The moon was yellow, surrounded by a rain ring that looked like a halo on the painting of a Byzantine saint. “Get an umbrella. I’ll back the car out and meet you in front.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where do you think?”
I was beginning to regret confiding in my father. Maybe Saber had been right. My father belonged to that generation of Southerners drawn to self-destruction and impoverishment as though neurosis and penury represented virtue.
“You want your hat and coat?” I asked.
“Yes, I’d appreciate that. Thank you,” he said. “Tell your mother we’ll be back soon.”
MY FATHER PULLED to the curb in front of Saber’s house. The only light inside came from the television set. The same was true of most of the houses on the street. Saber’s house looked like a railroad shack someone had forgotten to bulldoze before building a modern subdivision around it. The television had a small black-and-white screen encased in plastic and had been manufactured by a man named Madman Muntz, who came to Houston in 1951 and sold thousands of them for fifty dollars apiece. The warranty was thirty days. The lawn mower was dead-stopped in the grass, a long swath behind it. The garbage can, emptied that day or the day before, was still on the swale.
My father removed his hat and tapped on the screen door. I could see Saber and his mother sitting on the cloth-covered couch in front of the television. Neither of them looked away from the program. Mr. Bledsoe got up from his stuffed chair and came to the door in slippers and cutoff shorts and a T-shirt. His hair looked like weeds growing on a rock. He stared straight into our faces and did not unlatch the screen. “I know why you’re here.”
“We’d like to talk with you and Saber,” my father said.
“We’re fixing to go to bed.”
“Our difficulty is not going away that easily, sir,” my father said.
“We don’t have difficulty. Nothing happened.”
Neither Saber nor his mother looked in our direction.
“That’s right, isn’t it, Saber?” Mr. Bledsoe said.
Saber didn’t answer or turn around.
“Obviously your son told you what happened, or you would not know the purpose of our visit,” my father said.
Mr. Bledsoe gazed through the screen, a tired man whose vocabulary was probably no more than a few hundred words, a man with no self-knowledge and neither moat nor castle except for his shack and the broken screen that separated him from the rest of the world.
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“Will you invite us in?” my father said.
“They took my job. They’ll take my house and they’ll take my boy, too. Don’t tell me they won’t, either.”
“We need to go to the police,” my father said.
“Like heck I will.”
“You’re putting the burden on my son, Mr. Bledsoe.”
“It’s not him that’s at risk. If he wants to go to the cops, that’s his damn business.”
“You just admitted Saber threw the brick.”
“I didn’t admit anything. No, sir.”
“My son isn’t an informer.”
Mr. Bledsoe’s gaze had shifted into space, as though he saw content there that no one else did. “We look after our own.”
“Would you step out here and talk to me, please?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. I already took a belt to him.”
“For telling you the truth?”
Mr. Bledsoe tilted up his chin, defiant. “Maybe if you’d disciplined your own son, he wouldn’t have drove Saber to a nightclub, then to a park where they didn’t have no business.”
“So Aaron must either inform on your boy or bear the consequence of Saber’s throwing the brick?”
“I didn’t say anything about a brick. You want to talk about that, you take your conversation somewhere else.”
“I’d like you to forgive me for what I have to say, Mr. Bledsoe.”
“I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
My father started to speak, then stopped. “We wish you and your family the best. If we can be of assistance to you, please call.”
“That won’t be happening,” Mr. Bledsoe said.
My father put his hat back on. It was a classic fedora, the front brim bent down. He had small eyes and dark hair and clean features that belied his age and the alcohol he consumed. I wondered what he would look like if he didn’t drink or smoke. We got into the car and he started the engine. He looked up at the gaseous yellow glow of the moon; it had a peculiar radiance, like a campfire burning inside snow.
“What were you fixing to say to Mr. Bledsoe?” I said.
“That his conduct is dishonorable.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“He’s an uneducated and poor man. We won’t make him a better one by criticizing him.”
We drove home in silence. After he pulled into the garage, I hoped he would follow me into the house and the two of us would clean up the kitchen, working as a team. Instead, he said he had to check the tire. Ten minutes later, I went back outside. The moon had gone behind clouds, and the yard was filled with shadows as pointed as swords. My father was sitting in the passenger seat, the car door open, drinking from a paper cup one sip at a time, his eyes closed as though he were involved in a secular benediction whose nature no one else would ever understand.
I WENT IN TO work early the next morning so I could get off that afternoon and take Valerie to play miniature golf. I wasn’t expecting to see Cisco Napolitano’s black-and-red Olds convertible coming down the boulevard. Miss Cisco was behind the wheel. She turned in to the station and stopped at the pumps. She was wearing a scarf and shades and white shorts and a pink halter that barely contained her breasts. “What’s the haps, darlin’?” she said to me.
“Are you from New Orleans?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because that’s the way people talk in New Orleans.”
She removed her shades and let her eyes adjust on my face. “Take a ride with me. No argument this time.”
“What for?”
“You got yourself in a lot of trouble. I can get you out of it.”
I told the other kid who worked in the station that I’d be back soon. He took one look at the Olds and the gorgeous woman behind the wheel and stared at me in disbelief. I got into her car and settled back in the comfortable softness of the leather. She stepped on the gas before I had the door closed.
“Where we headed?”
She squeezed me on the thigh, grinning behind her shades.
“What are you doing?” I said, alarmed.
“Don’t be so serious. Your virginity is safe. You’re a virgin, right? Anyway, I don’t molest young boys.”
She turned off the boulevard into the Rice University campus and parked in the shadow of the football stadium. She took a small leather-bound photo album from the glove box and marked one page with her thumb, then handed me the album. “Tell me who that is.”
“Benny Siegel and Virginia Hill.”
“Who’s that with them?”
“You?”
“At age twenty.”
“Who’s the guy with you?”
“Who’s he look like?”
I lifted my eyes to her. “Like me?”
“He was an actor. I met him at a lawn party at Jack Warner’s, next door to Siegel’s house. He was my first real love.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died from a heroin overdose. It was probably a hotshot. You know what that is?”
“No.”
“The dealer slips the user some high-grade stuff he’s not ready for. He was going to another studio. Hollywood is a place where you don’t break the rules. Vegas works the same way, Aaron. You come into their world, you play by their rules. You don’t sue the Mafia. You listening?”
“I didn’t choose to be involved in any of this.”
“Jesus, you’re thick. There’s a hot-dog cart by the street. Go get me one.”
“What?”
“I’m hungry. Now go do it. What’s the matter with you?” She handed me three dollars from her purse. “With relish and ketchup and mustard and onions. Buy yourself one. Bring us a couple of Cokes, too. I have to pee. I’m going into the stadium. Hurry up, now.”
I went after the hot dogs. When I got back, she was fixing her hair in the mirror, examining a sun blemish under one eye. She patted the dashboard, indicating where I should place the food and drinks.
“What did you think of Benny Siegel?” I said.
She picked up her hot dog and bit off a huge hunk of sausage and bread and onions, catching the drippings on the back of her hand. “He was a psychopath. Which returns us to the subject at hand.”
“I wish you wouldn’t put it in that context.”
“You fucked yourself, kiddo. Now let’s see if we can unfuck you. Our problem is not Vick Shit-for-Brains. It’s his father, Jaime Atlas. Do not get the idea that he’s a devoted father who wants to get even for his son. Shit-for-Brains is Jaime’s possession, and you and your buddy threw a brick through a windshield into his face.”
“I didn’t throw anything.”
“Your friend did?”
“Why did you bring me here, Miss Cisco?”
“Tell your friend to turn himself in. In the meantime, think about the army. Your parents can sign for you. When you finish your enlistment, this will probably be forgotten.”
She wiped her fingers with a paper napkin. A campus security car pulled up next to us; behind the wheel was a guy wearing aviator shades and a cap with a lacquered bill. “You cain’t park here without a sticker, ma’am.”
“I’m moving in just a minute, Officer.”
“You have to move now, ma’am.”
She shot him the finger without looking at him, then started the engine and drove out to the street and parked under a live oak.
“Is that how you deal with everybody?” I asked.
“Shut up. Do you know what ‘in the life’ means?”
“No.”
“I don’t know why I’m doing this. I should let you drown. I feel like throwing an anchor chain around your neck myself.”
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, either.”
She looked straight ahead and blew out her breath. “Grady Harrelson’s father is a silent partner with some nasty people. Jaime Atlas will get his pound of flesh, or he will no longer be doing business with Clint Harrelson. It’s you or your friend. But th
ere’re no guarantees on that. It could be both of you.”
“I can’t change that.”
She pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. I moved my head away from her hand.
“I go out of the way for you, and that’s how you feel?” she said. “You’re a strange kid. Maybe you’re a lost cause, not worth the effort. What’s your opinion?”
“I didn’t want any of this to happen.”
“Tell that to the people who voted for Hitler.”
She put on her shades and started the engine, then clicked on the radio. I thought she might play some music. She turned the dial to the stock market report and didn’t speak on the way back to the filling station. When I got out, I turned around and thanked her. She drove away without replying.
I WENT HOME AT three P.M. and bathed and changed clothes. I was about to go to Valerie’s house when my father pulled into the driveway and parked in the porte cochere. He got out of the car with a paper bag in his hand.
I met him outside. “You’re home a little early.”
“Where’s your mother?” he said.
“At the grocery.”
“If you have a minute, come in the backyard.”
He opened the gate and sat down on the back steps and waited for me to sit down with him; the bag rested on his knees.
“Yes, sir?”
“The most frightened I’ve ever been was the first time I had to go over the top in early 1918. I went over it four more times, but nothing could equal the fear I felt the first time. No one who was not there can understand what that moment is like. No one.”
He rarely spoke of the Great War, and when he alluded to it, he never mentioned his experiences as a soldier. Most people who thought they knew him well were not even aware he had been to Europe. When others began to speak of war—especially when they spoke in a grandiose fashion—he left the room. The paper bag was folded in an oblong, humped shape, as though it might contain a rump roast or a couple of odd-sized books.
“You think I’m quitting school and joining the army?” I said.
“No, I think you’re worried about evil men coming into your life. That’s what I want to talk to you about. When we went up the steps on the trench wall, it was likely that the man in front of you had soiled himself. You had to breathe his odor and stiff-arm him in the back so he didn’t fall on you, and you hated him for it. Once you were in the open, there was no going back. You had to run through their wire into hundreds of bullets while your chums fell on either side of you. I did it once and thought I could never do it again. I told this to the lieutenant. He was a Brit serving in the AEF and a fine fellow. He said, ‘Corporal Broussard, never think about it before it happens, and never think about it after it’s over.’ I remembered that the rest of the war. It gave me peace when others had none.”