She felt the Olds slow and looked around. “We’re here. Time for a little medication.”
“The store is closed.”
“Not for me,” she said.
“Did you hear what I was saying, Miss Cisco?”
“Yeah, I did. Lose the crap. You wouldn’t bruise a butterfly if you were coked to the eyes. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m about to puke. It has nothing to do with you. Mr. Jones got into my sandbox real bad this morning.”
Fifteen minutes later she had not returned. On a back street I thought I heard the throaty rumble of Saber’s twin mufflers echoing off the storefronts. I didn’t know if he was living with his criminal friends or not. I had a hard time thinking about Saber and the way our friendship had disappeared like water down a drain. My mother never had friends or a father or a home growing up. Most of her life was spent in misery. That was how I knew the importance of a friend like Saber. We met in the seventh grade. He saw two bullies shoving me around at a bus stop and shot them both in the face with a huge water gun loaded with urine he had collected from the veterinary clinic where he worked.
I heard the twin mufflers thin at the end of a street. A moment later I heard them again. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Saber’s heap headed toward me, oil smoke streaming out of the hood and tailpipes. I got out of the Olds and tried to stop him. “Hey, Sabe! It’s me!”
I could barely see through the smoke. He passed me, the back bumper almost hitting my leg. I didn’t know whether he saw me or not. I began running alongside the car, trying to catch him. “Saber, what are you doing? It’s Aaron!”
I was still waving my hands at him when he went through the intersection, running the light. I stood in the middle of the street, dumbfounded, trying to convince myself he hadn’t recognized me. The blind woman playing guitar under the liquor store canopy slid her glass bottleneck along the frets and sang, “I was sitting down by my window, looking out at the rain. Something came along, got ahold of me, and it felt just like a ball and chain.”
As I looked down the street at the empty sidewalks and closed stores and the abandoned filling station under a live oak on the corner and the ragged clouds of oil smoke left behind by Saber’s heap, I believed I was looking into the face of death itself, and not in the metaphorical sense. It was as real as a freshly dug grave on the edge of a swamp, the dirt oozing with white slugs.
I knocked on the front door of the drugstore, then rattled it against the jamb. The windows were dirty, the counter and shelves inside coated with dust. I went around to the back door and looked through the glass into a room furnished only with a table and two chairs, lit by a solitary bulb hanging from a cord overhead. Miss Cisco was sitting with her back to me, her black hair tangled on her shoulders. A man with a face the color and shape of a tea-stained darning sock was bending over her, untying a necktie from her upper arm. A stub of a candle flickered inside the neck of a wine bottle. A bent spoon, blackened on the bottom, rested next to it. She turned her face into the light. It was aglow with peace and visceral pleasure, like that of a person in the aftermath of orgasm. I thought I saw her look straight at me, then realized her eyes had become cups of darkness that probably saw nothing.
She opened the door and stepped outside and clung to my arm. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my. The white horsey got loose on poor little me. Walk me to the car and then drive it home. Can you do that, big boy? You know how to drive it home?”
She was beautiful even when impaired, and I had certain thoughts that I would carry into the night, the kind of thoughts I guessed all men had and that made them feel ashamed and treacherous and unworthy of the real woman in their life. But at least I didn’t think about acting on my desires, even if I could have. I guess I was learning that when you get close to death, you’ll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.
THREE DAYS LATER I drove to Loren Nichols’s home in the Heights. Just as I pulled to the curb, I saw him get off the bus at the corner and walk back toward his house, he wearing a white T-shirt and dirty white trousers, a black lunch box swinging from his hand. I never saw a guy who could walk as cool as Loren.
“You just get off work?” I said.
“I’m working at a supper club now.”
“They make you bring your own lunch?”
“You must not have worked in a restaurant.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“If you do, you’ll never eat out again. Half the people in the kitchen are winos who sleep at the mission. If the meatballs get spilled, somebody sweeps them up in a dustpan and sprinkles them with shredded cheese. They wipe the tables down at night with the bathroom mop because it takes too long to hand-wipe them. You here for your chaps?”
“Yeah. And I wondered how you’re feeling.”
“About the kid who got stabbed?”
I didn’t reply.
“I saw his picture in the paper,” he said. “To be honest, I cain’t get his face out of my head.”
“Valerie and I are going to play miniature golf tonight. We thought you might want to join us.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You don’t like miniature golf?”
“It’s not my first choice.”
“I brought you something.”
He looked down at my hand. “A book?”
“It’s called The Song of Roland.”
“What’s it about?”
“Courage and the battle of Roncevaux. My cousin Weldon carried it with him during the war. He had three Purple Hearts and the Bronze and Silver Star.”
He scratched his cheek, his gaze leaving mine. He took the book from my hand. “Thanks. You’re not trying to talk me into going to church or something?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Come in back a minute.”
We went into his workshop behind the house. He set his lunch box on the workbench and took Grandfather’s chaps off a wood peg and handed them to me. “I had to rethink some stuff after that kid was killed. I shouldn’t have given you the thirty-two. You don’t need blood on your hands. You wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
“I really appreciate that,” I said.
“Shut up. A couple of friends came by this morning. They said you’re in the wind. Bledsoe, too.”
“In the wind how?”
“Grady Harrelson and Vick Atlas were at Prince’s drive-in with a pair of sluts. They’re buds now. The word is you called up Atlas and told him Harrelson’s friends boosted Atlas’s car. One of my friends knows Atlas pretty good. My friend says Atlas saw you with this broad from Vegas. Atlas says she’s Mob property.”
“She lives in Atlas’s apartment building. I drove her to a pharmacy in the Fifth Ward Sunday morning.”
“She has to go to the middle of colored town to fill a prescription?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“You’re talking about Mexican skag?”
“Yep.”
“You busted a vessel in your brain or something?”
“I thought I was doing a good deed. She used to be an item with Merton Jenks. He’s dying of cancer or emphysema.”
He tapped at the air with his finger. “That bull, what’s-his-name, Original Sin, he must have stepped on your head.”
“I hope you enjoy the book.”
“I’m not done,” he said. “Your man Bledsoe is dealing horse for a couple of Mexicans. They’re not piecing it off, either. They’re going down, man. Both Bledsoe and the Mexicans. You don’t deal heroin in Houston or Galveston without permission.”
“I can’t change that.”
“I just tried to join the navy,” he said. “They told me to beat it.”
“You think somebody is going to take you out, too?”
“It’s a possibility,” he said.
I hung Grandfather’s chaps over my shoulder. “Val and I will pick you up at seven.”
“I don’t know how to say this, Aaron. I think they’r
e going to kill you. Atlas’s old man might put a bomb in your family car.”
“My father was at the Somme and Saint-Mihiel.”
“I got no idea what that means. Blown apart is blown apart. Dead is dead.”
“Seven o’clock,” I said.
When I fired up my heap, my stomach felt as though I had poured Drano in it.
I HAD THE NEXT day off. I called the Houston Police Department and asked for Detective Jenks.
“He’s out today,” a sergeant said.
“Is he all right?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Aaron Holland Broussard. I’m a friend of his. Could you give me his home number?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard him speak of you,” the sergeant said. He hung up.
I waited an hour and put a pencil crossways into my mouth and called again. The same cop picked up.
“This is Franklin W. Dixon, features editor at the Houston Press. Our photographer is supposed to do a shoot at Detective Jenks’s home. Evidently he screwed up the address, and the staff writer is out of the office. Can you confirm Detective Jenks’s address for me?”
“Hang on,” the sergeant replied. “I got it in the file.”
THE HOUSE WAS located in an old rural neighborhood off the Galveston highway. It was a place of tin roofs and slash pines and dirt streets and a volunteer fire department and a general store. At night you could see wisps of chemical smoke that hung like wraiths above the electric brilliance of the oil refineries in Texas City. Jenks lived in a decaying biscuit-colored bungalow with ventilated storm shutters on the windows, a tire swing suspended from a pecan tree in the front yard. The pillars on the porch were wound with Fourth of July bunting, the path to the front steps lined with rosebushes.
The inside door was open, the screen unlatched. I tapped on the jamb. Jenks came to the door in his socks, a newspaper in his hand, glasses on his nose. “How’d you know where I live?”
“I think you told me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Can I have a few minutes?”
He pushed the screen open and went back into the living room. There was a flintlock rifle over the mantel, a framed array of medals on another wall, a rack of magazines and paperback books by an upholstered couch. On the coffee table was a bouquet of flowers wrapped with blue and silver foil. I didn’t see or hear anyone else in the house; there was no sign of a woman’s presence.
“You’ve been pretty busy,” he said, indicating the flowers.
“Sir?”
“Look at the card.”
I picked it up from the pot.
“Read it aloud,” he said.
“ ‘Merton, you’re probably a dick on several levels, but I’ve known worse. Call me if you need your battery charged. I’ve always been a sucker for losers.’ ” I put the card back on the flowers. “Pretty poetic.”
“You told Cisco I was sick?” he said.
“Yes, sir, I passed on my impressions.”
“I love the way you put things.”
“She said you did her dirty.”
“You came here to tell me that?”
“No, sir, I don’t believe you’d do her dirty.”
He sat in a stuffed chair and put his feet on a cloth-covered stool. “Sit down.”
I sat on the couch. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and looked through the window at a bird on the porch rail. He seemed to forget I was in the room.
“I got something weighing on my mind,” I said. “I can’t take it to anybody else, at least not anybody who’d understand.”
His eyes refound me in the gloom. “Maybe you should talk to a preacher.”
“Most of them aren’t built for serious problems.”
“I never thought about it like that.” He pulled the red strip off the cellophane on his cigarettes.
“You’re going to smoke those?” I said.
“When you’re on third base, you don’t tend to worry about a cigarette or two.” His face held no emotion, neither fear nor animus nor pity nor regret. After he lit the cigarette, he gazed at me through the smoke.
“I have dreams,” I said. “In one of them I see Mr. Harrelson dying by his swimming pool. In the dream I have a forty-five in my hand. You told me you could smell a killer and I wasn’t one.”
“You think you killed Mr. Harrelson?”
“Not me. Maybe another me, one that I don’t let come out except in my dreams.”
“That crap belongs in motion pictures.”
“That’s the kind of thing ignorant people say. You’re not ignorant.”
I waited for him to get mad. But he didn’t. He drew in on his cigarette, the ash reddening. “What else did you want to know?”
“Loren Nichols says Vick Atlas’s father might put a bomb in our family car.”
“He told you that, did he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you want to know if Jaime Atlas is that vicious or crazy?” I nodded. He stared into space. “You want something to eat or a cup of coffee?”
“No, sir, I want you to tell me the truth.”
“Jaime Atlas was an enforcer for the Mob in Chicago and New York. He crushed a man’s head in a vise. He used a blowtorch on others. He’d start with the armpits and work down to the genitalia.”
I could feel my eyes shining, the room going out of shape.
“You okay?” Detective Jenks said.
“Yes, sir, I think so.”
“No, you’re not. Pure evil has come into your life through no fault of your own. That’s how people are destroyed. They blame themselves as though somehow they deserve what’s happening to them.”
“What can I do?”
“Not a thing. You wanted the truth. That’s the truth.”
He coughed into his hand as though a piece of glass were caught in his lungs. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed his hand on his knee. I felt helpless, floating away. Supposedly the courts, the police and sheriff’s departments, the prosecutors, the FBI, the parole system, and the jails and hospitals for the criminally insane were there to protect the innocent. Why was my family being made a sacrificial offering to evil men? Outside, the wind was blowing from the Gulf, the air peppered with salt and rain, the pine trees glistening in the sunlight.
“I’d like to kill them all,” I said.
“Kill who?”
“Jaime Atlas. His son. The people who work for him. The people who allow these guys to stay on the street. Every one of these sons of bitches.”
“You’re starting to worry me.”
I got up to go. “Who’s going to take care of you?”
“Take care of me?”
“It’s obvious you don’t have anybody. There’s blood on your cigarettes. Your lungs sound like a junkyard.”
“Cisco told you I did her dirty?”
“What?” I said, unable to follow the way his mind worked.
“That I betrayed her?”
“Not in those words.”
“You’ve got a lot of anger in you, son,” he said. “Don’t let it turn on you. It’ll flat tear you up.”
Chapter
26
BY THE TIME I got home, the sky was turning black and the house creaked with wind, even though it was made of brick. I brought Major and Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs inside and sat with my guitar in my father’s study. His manuscript pages were placed neatly in a stack on his desk pad. I began to read the account told him by his grandfather about the events at Marye’s Heights on December 13, 1862. The boys in butternut were entrenched with muskets and artillery behind a stone wall at the top of the rise. All afternoon, Union troops went up the hill, wave after wave, and were slaughtered by the thousands, to the point where they slipped in their own gore and the Confederates no longer wanted to fire upon them.
I wondered how anyone could be so brave. I also wondered why I could not rid myself of the well of fear that seemed to draw me into its maw. The answer was simple
: I feared for my family, and I resented myself for placing them in harm’s way. I was also experiencing a syndrome that I would one day learn was characteristic of almost everyone who has been a victim of violent crime.
I had no answers. I was just short of eighteen. I loved my mother and father and Valerie and my animals. All I wanted to do was be with them and forget the Atlases and Harrelsons of this world. Unfortunately, the fury and mire and complexity of human veins do not work like that.
THE RAIN HAD started falling in solitary drops when Saber’s heap bounced into the driveway, its pair of fuzzy dice swinging from the rearview mirror. He got out, laughing before he could start his narrative.
“What is it?” I said.
He was shaking his head, unable to stop laughing. He fell back against the car, trying to catch his breath.
“Are you loaded?” I said.
There were tears in his eyes. “You won’t believe it.”
“Believe what?”
He started to speak again, then went weak all over and had to open the car door and sit on the seat. “I just pissed inside Grady Harrelson’s head,” he said, losing control again. “Oh, it was beautiful. It’ll take him weeks to figure everything out. He’s royally screwed six ways from breakfast and in serious danger.” He was doubling over, laughing so hard he had to hold his ribs, his face turning red.
“What did you do?” I said.
“Grady’s been shacking up in a motel on Wayside Drive with the wife of a guy who drives a wrecker on the night shift, a total animal who’s been in Huntsville twice for felony assault. Grady bought a convertible just like the one we boosted and sold in Mexico. I followed them to the motel last night and waited until they went to eat, then gave the maid two dollars to put a plateful of chocolate fudge laced with Ex-Lax in their room.” He started laughing again.
“Will you stop it?” I said.
He wiped at his face with a handkerchief. “Hang on. It gets better. I boosted his new convertible, then waited a couple of hours for the Ex-Lax to kick in so they’d be fighting to get on the bowl. I called the husband’s emergency number and told him Grady was putting the blocks to his old lady and gave him the motel address.” Saber was stamping on the driveway. “I watched it from across the street. The animal arrives and kicks the door off its hinges. Grady is inside in his Jockey underwear, and the broad is going nuts, and Grady is trying to explain himself, then he realizes his new car is gone and accuses the animal of stealing it.” Saber tried to stand up, then fell back on the car seat wheezing, his nose running, his entire face slick with tears.