22
THE NEXT DAY I took Valerie to a hamburger joint for lunch, then dropped her off and went to Loren Nichols’s house without telling her. I had reached a point where I realized I had been a fool. I was raised to believe that good triumphed over evil, that justice ultimately prevailed, and that God was on our side. We had rebuilt the bombed-out countries of our enemies through the Marshall Plan at a time when we could have turned the earth into a slave camp. Wouldn’t it follow that we would do justice to our own at home?
I still believe in those precepts, but as we grow old and leave behind the pink clouds of our youth, we learn that truth often exists in degree rather than in absolutes. I had believed that the people who’d caused us so much harm would be brought to account. Valerie had almost been burned alive, and no one was in custody. I doubted that anyone of importance had been questioned. I thought Jenks believed her, but probably few of his colleagues did. Why should anyone worry about the fate of a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl in the Heights?
It had just started to rain when I knocked on Loren’s door. He came to the screen wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of white trousers, his face blank. The screen was latched, but he made no move to unlatch it. His hair was wet-combed, curled up on the back of his neck. “I’m about to go to work.”
“Where do you work?”
“I’m a busboy at Luby’s cafeteria.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
He looked past me to see if anyone was in my heap, then unhooked the latch. “Come upstairs. My mother is sleeping.”
The inside of his home looked like a mausoleum furnished from a secondhand store. I thought the banister on the stairs would cave before we reached the landing. The interior of his bedroom was another matter. The walls were covered with pencil sketches of people and classic automobiles and animals; the ceiling was hung with models of World War II airplanes, each delicate piece of balsa wood cut and shaved with an X-Acto knife and glued together and pinned down on a blueprint and assembled and covered with cutouts from tissue paper, then painted with a tiny brush and pasted with decals of Nazi swastikas and the American white star inside the blue circle and the rising sun of Imperial Japan. His electric guitar was on his bed, plugged into the amplifier on the rug. Through the window, I could see the tin roofs of his neighbors in the rain, purple with rust, the palm trees and live oaks and slash pines bending in the wind. It looked more like the Caribbean than a run-down part of town in North Houston.
“How much do you want for the thirty-two you showed me?” I asked.
“Is this about those guys who tried to hurt Valerie?”
I didn’t answer.
“I shouldn’t have started this,” he said. “You going after somebody in particular?”
“I think Vick Atlas was behind it.”
“Don’t bet on that, man.”
“Then who tried to burn her?”
“Believe me, if I find out, there’s going to be some guys hurting real bad.”
“How much do you want for the gun, Loren?”
“Nothing. It’s not for sale. Does Valerie know about this?”
“No, she doesn’t. I don’t want you telling her, either.”
“You’re not giving the orders. Who killed Grady Harrelson’s old man?”
“Why ask me?” I said.
“Because you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. Because you’ll probably end up popping the wrong guy.”
“I need the gun. Will you give it to me or not?”
He held me with his stare.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“It’s a big line you’re stepping over, Broussard,” he said.
“That’s another thing that bothers me about you, Loren. You call people by their last name.”
“If you smoke somebody, they visit you.”
“Who visits you?” I said.
“Dead people do. It’s not like in the movies.”
“You’ve killed somebody?”
“Shut up.”
“You offered me the gun. Now honor your word or don’t.”
I could see the heat go out of his face.
“Let me get an umbrella,” he said.
“How are your guitar lessons coming along?”
“Don’t change the subject. You don’t want to go to Gatesville, man. I never talk about it because people won’t believe me. It’s worse than Huntsville, especially in the shower or the toolshed, you get the picture?”
“I don’t get you,” I said.
“What?”
“Your drawings and your model planes are works of art. With your talent, you could be anything you want. Ever think about going to Hollywood? I’m not putting you on.”
He gazed out the window at a garbage can rolling down the street in the rain. “Your father is an engineer or something. You live in the good part of town. You’re a musician and you go steady with the most beautiful girl in Houston. But you’re coming to me for a drop so you can wax a lamebrain like Vick Atlas? I grew up in juvie and Gatesville. I’m the guy needs straightening out?”
“What’s a ‘drop’?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to hate myself for this the rest of my life. Follow me.”
WHAT I DID NEXT was not rational. But I didn’t care. I got the address of the Atlas family’s business office in Galveston and told Valerie I’d see her that night.
“You’re going down there by yourself?” she said.
“Why not? The cops haven’t helped us.”
“Then I’m going, too.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
Bad choice of words.
“Aaron, we’re in this together or we’re not. Tell me which it is.”
One hour later we were in Galveston and motoring down Seawall Boulevard, the Gulf slate green, the waves streaming with rivulets of yellow sand when they crested and crashed on the beach. The air smelled like iodine and brass and salt and seaweed. The Atlas realty and vending machine office was located in a nineteenth-century home, painted battleship gray, close by the water. It had a small pike-fenced lawn with flower beds, and a shell parking lot on the side, lightning rods and a weather vane on the roof, rocking chairs on the porch, a gazebo with an American flag protruding at an angle from one of the wooden pillars. A client could not find a more welcoming and reassuring and wholesome environment in which to conduct business.
A bell tinkled above the door when we entered. No one was at the reception desk. Through the doorway of the dining room, I could see four men eating sandwiches, pushing pieces of meat back into their mouths, wiping off their chins with a smear of the wrist or hand.
I was afraid, and I was even more afraid that others would know I was afraid. Through a side window, I could see the Gulf and the waves swelling over the third sandbar, and I thought about the day I swam through the school of jellyfish.
The three men eating with Jaime Atlas were middle-aged and jowled and had heavy shoulders and paunches and wore their tropical shirts outside their slacks. They were the kind of men who abused their bodies with cigarettes and alcohol and unhealthy food and wore the attrition as a badge of honor. Their eyes had the same deadness I had seen in the eyes of Benny Siegel and Frankie Carbo. I wanted to be back among the jellyfish. Atlas stopped eating, his sandwich crimped in one hand, his eyes close-set, like a ferret’s. “What do you want?” he said.
“To see Mr. Atlas. You’re Mr. Atlas, aren’t you?”
“Who are you? What’s your name? You make an appointment?”
My palms were tingling; my tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I’m Aaron Holland Broussard.”
“The one threw a brick in my boy’s eye?”
“That’s not what happened, Mr. Atlas. Vick tried to throw a firecracker at another car, and it blew up in his face.”
“Where the fuck you get that?”
“The prosecutor’s office or the cops didn’t tell you? Vick did the damage to himself.”
I
saw his face shrink, as though his anger were sucking his glands dry. “Who do you think you are, coming in here talking shit? Answer me. You don’t come in here and talk shit to me about my son. Who told you you could come here and do that? Don’t just stand there. You got a speech defect? You got mutes in your family?”
Then I realized Vick had not only lied to his father, his father had not kept in contact with the authorities. In the meantime, Vick had allowed his father to direct his rage at Saber and me.
“Maybe Vick sent a couple of guys to terrorize my friend Miss Valerie,” I said. “He put his mouth in her hair. Is he around? I’d like to talk to him about it.”
“You were never taught manners?” he said. “You bust into somebody’s luncheon and start making accusations? Where’s your father work? Let’s get him out here. Who is he? What’s he do?”
The accent was an echo of the Bronx or the blue-collar neighborhoods in New Orleans, the vowels as round as baseballs. His eyebrows looked like half-moons of fur glued on his forehead. He wiped mayonnaise off his lip and then wiped his hand on the tablecloth. In the meantime his three friends were visually undressing Valerie, indifferent to my presence or the awkwardness in her face.
“Why don’t y’all show some goddamn manners yourselves?” I said.
Mr. Atlas set his sandwich down. He was breathing hard, his eyes heated, a canine tooth glistening behind his bottom lip. But whatever was on his mind, he didn’t get a chance to say it.
“I did a study on you at Rice University,” Valerie said. “You are known as a terrible person in every place you have lived. Lucky Luciano said you are not to be trusted. You were kicked out of Greece as a pimp and dope smuggler. You killed a taxi driver in New Orleans. You should join a church or a synagogue and see if you can change your life, because people are embarrassed to be around you.”
I stared at her profile. It was like the masthead on a ship plowing through the waves.
“She’s telling the truth,” I said. “I was at the library with her. There’s a ton of material on you.”
Mr. Atlas’s eyes were as black as obsidian. “Out.”
“No, we will not ‘out,’ ” Valerie replied. “Your son has serious mental problems. He may have brain damage. Some people say it was you who scarred his face. You should be ashamed of yourself. What kind of example have you set? Look at the men you’re with. They bully women because they’re moral and physical cowards. Don’t look at me. Look at yourselves. What are you? Nothing. Fat men who smell like salami.”
Atlas went to the front and dialed the phone on the receptionist’s desk. “This is Jaime Atlas,” he said into the receiver, looking back at us. “I got some kids causing trouble in my office. Send an officer over here.”
He hung up and came back into the dining room. “Say that again about the firecracker blowing up in Vick’s face.”
“It’s what happened,” I said.
“If you’re lying . . .” he said.
“People in my family don’t lie, Mr. Atlas. You asked who my father is. He went over the top five times in World War One. That’s who he is.”
AS WE DROVE away, I put my arm around Valerie and pulled her against me.
“What are you laughing about?” she said.
“The faces of those guys when you gave it to them.”
“They got off easy. If my father thinks they were hooked up with the guys who poured gasoline in my car, they’ll be dead. That’s no exaggeration, Aaron.”
We were about to turn onto Seawall Boulevard when Cisco Napolitano’s red-and-black Rocket 88, the top down, came around the corner.
“Stop!” Valerie said.
“What for?”
“I want to tell her something.”
“Tell her what?”
“Did you see the way those men looked at me? I want to take a bath. She’s in the middle of all this, but she never has to pay a price. She also has a way of showing up when you’re around. Now stop the car.”
“Take it easy, Valerie.”
“She wants to get her hooks into you. I’m sick of these people.”
I slowed in the middle of the street. So did Cisco. Her shades were pushed up on her head, her face windburned. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
Before I could answer, Valerie leaned across me so she could speak out the window. “We just left the collection of trash you hang out with,” she said. “When we first got here, they were talking about you. I don’t know what they were saying, exactly, but they were laughing. If I were you, I’d find another sandbox.”
“Nice try, honey,” Cisco said.
“Yeah?” Valerie said. “Try this on for size. They said Merton Jenks got in your bread when he was a cop in Nevada. Maybe they just made that up.”
Cisco’s face drained. Valerie shot her the finger and then mouthed the word “you.” I drove away before anything else could happen.
“I can’t believe you did that.”
“Stay away from her, Aaron. I don’t want you around her.” She laid her head back on the seat and shut her eyes. “I love the smell of the Gulf and the sound of the waves crashing on the sand. Do you want to go swimming? Out past the jetty, maybe all the way to the third sandbar?”
“We didn’t bring our swimsuits.”
“We can go to the end of the island. Nobody is there this time of day.”
“Hammerheads and jellyfish are.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Do you like her?”
“Miss Cisco?”
“Yeah, do you have a thing for her?”
“Not at all,” I lied, unwilling to admit my fascination with her and my hope that she was a better person than others thought.
“Yes, you do. You think she’s good. She’s not. She’s evil. She’ll try to destroy us.”
“I don’t think that’s true at all.”
She took her hand from mine and stared out the window. When I asked her if she still wanted to swim at the far end of the island, she didn’t reply. She did not speak again until we were on the highway and headed back to Houston.
THE NEXT DAY Saber showed up at the filling station wearing drapes instead of jeans, shined patent-leather stomps rather than his half-top boots with chains on the sides, his crew cut tonicked and combed back on the sides. He lit a cigarette with a Japanese lighter I had never seen, one with an image of Mount Fuji carved on the leather case.
“Where’d you get the new threads?” I said.
“At a store on Congress Street,” he said, looking sideways at the street. “They’ve got Mr. C shirts, too, the ones with the big upturned collars.”
“Why not wear a sign that says Arrest Me?” I asked.
There were circles under his eyes. He kept blinking, like a caffeine addict. He released his cigarette smoke a mouthful at a time. I wondered when he’d had his last full night’s sleep.
“I squared a beef for us,” he said.
We were standing under the rain shed that covered the fuel pumps. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was within earshot. “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”
“I think you’ll enjoy it. We boosted Vick Atlas’s Buick. He had a security box around the ignition, so Manny’s uncle let us use his tow truck and we lifted it out of the driveway.” He grinned with self-satisfaction, waiting for me to react.
I folded my arms on my chest. I couldn’t look at him. “When?”
“Last night. A broad in a garage apartment off Montrose hauls his ashes. I wrote ‘Blow me, Fudd’ in chalk on the driveway.”
“Put it back. Or dump it somewhere he can find it,” I said.
He nodded. “Makes sense. Steal the car of the guy who tried to send us to Gatesville, then return it. Should I leave an apology?”
“Valerie and I ’fronted his old man in Galveston yesterday. They’re going to think we did it.”
He looked down the street at the cars passing on either side of the boulevard. He puffed on his cigarette. I wanted to hit him.
Instead I took the cigarette from his fingers and mashed it out with my foot and threw it into the oil barrel that served as our trash can.
“There’s another reason I’m here,” he said. “We stripped the Buick before we passed it on to a guy who’s helping the economy in Juárez. That chain with rope loops in it was in the trunk. Manny wondered what it was.”
“I don’t care about Manny. Why are you telling me this?”
“Manny and Cholo don’t know the Buick belongs to Vick Atlas. See, I’m what they call a spotter. I find the kind of car somebody wants. Then we go to work. The situation might get a little touchy if they find out they boosted a set of wheels owned by somebody in the Atlas family.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
He started to take another cigarette out of his pack, then put it back. “Remember when we went fishing in the surf down at Freeport? You were in waves up to your chest and hooked a devil ray that was probably three feet across. You dragged it up on the sand and went right back in. You were never afraid, Aaron. You thought you were. But you weren’t.”
“Walk away from these guys,” I said. “We’ll start over.”
“I owe them money. I paid off the mortgage on our house.”
“How much?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “They’re muling Mexican brown from the border to San Antone and Houston.”
“Heroin?”
“I stepped in a pile of shit.”
His eyes glistened. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, but he stepped away from me, trying to smile, then got into his heap and fired it up. As he bounced into the street, he gave me a thumbs-up. He went through the Stop sign as though it were not there, then floored the accelerator and disappeared into the shadows of the live oaks that arched over the boulevard.
IN THE DARWINIAN world of American high school culture, I had learned only one lesson: The lights of love and pity often died early, and many friendships were based on necessity and emotional dependency and nothing else. I had the feeling that secretly Vick Atlas and Grady Harrelson despised each other, because each saw in the other his loneliness and the abandonment by his father. In the case of Vick and Grady, however, there was another ingredient: their jealousy over the affections of Valerie Epstein.