Saber’s return home presented another problem, too. Our enemies knew where he was.
“Where’d you get the mouse?” I asked.
The bruise was dark blue and purple, in the corner of his eye. “I had to straighten out Cholo.” He grinned, knowing how absurd he sounded.
“What’d they do with Grady’s car?”
“You got me. They’re out of their league and dumping in their pants. They wanted me to drive it to Mexico. How’s that for smarts? ‘Hello, señor, got anything to declare? Oh, almost one million dollars? Come on in.’ ”
“Vick Atlas said he might do something awful to Major and the cats.”
“He’s been watching your house?”
“He or somebody else,” I said.
“That’s one guy who should be cut off at the knees. You told your folks?”
“My dad.”
“What’d he say?”
“That we might have to make some hard choices.”
“Come on, blow it off,” Saber said.
“I think I had a blackout and went to Bud Winslow’s house with a shiv.”
Saber squeezed his eyes shut as though trying not to hear me. “Let’s play miniature golf tonight. We got to get back to our old ways.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Yeah, it does,” he said. “You got to be upbeat. I’ll pick you up at eight, Gate. Tell Valerie we’ll be motorating over to her place. We’re back in action, Jackson.”
I watched Major and the cats walking down the driveway toward us, trusting, innocent, full of curiosity.
“I got a new one for you,” Saber said. “What did the bathtub say to the commode?”
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“ ‘I get the same amount of ass you do, but I don’t have to take all that shit.’ ”
Saber was Saber. Destiny was destiny. I felt myself falling through a black hole. As he backed out, he gave me a thumbs-up to show that he had everything under control.
BEFORE I LEFT THE house, I called Merton Jenks at home. “How you feeling?” I asked.
“Worry about yourself,” he replied.
“Did Miss Cisco come see you?”
“You got a big problem, Aaron. You want to believe in people.”
“That’s bad?”
“For you it is. You have the judgment of a hoot owl sitting in the middle of the highway on a bright day.”
“Vick Atlas and his father or their people are going to hurt my family or my animals.”
“You know this for sure?”
“I have no doubt about it.”
He waited so long to speak that I thought we had been disconnected.
“Are you there?” I said.
“What the hell are you up to, boy?”
“See you around.”
I hung up and headed for Vick’s apartment building.
I RODE UP TO the penthouse in a birdcage elevator. Vick answered the door in a pair of red Everlast boxing shorts, flat-soled gym shoes, and a strap undershirt. His shoulders and chest were covered with black hair. He had on a pair of blue bag gloves, the kind with a wood dowel inside. “How’d you get up here?”
“On the elevator.”
“What happened to your face?”
“This?” I said, touching the bandage on my cheek.
“Yeah, that.”
“A bull got me.”
“A cow or a cop?”
“Guess.”
Behind him I could see a heavy bag hanging from a steel frame. The air was fetid, his eyes like two ball bearings out of alignment. He looked up and down my person. “Are you calling me out?”
“Why would I call you anything?”
“God, you’re stupid. Are you making a play? You want to mix it up? You want to shoot off your mouth? Tell me what it is.”
“I want you to kill me. Then you’ll be on your way to Old Sparky, and my animals and my family will be safe.”
“You’re a nutcase, man.”
“I guess we’ll never be buds. So in that spirit, see how you like this.”
I hooked my fist just below his eye and felt the skin split against the bone. I’m not proud of the rage and violence of which I now knew myself capable. I know he had no expectation of what was happening to him. I know he got up once and tried to run for the bathroom. I know he knocked the phone off a hall table. I remember his taking the shower curtain with him when he went down in the tub. I also remember the horsetails of blood on the wall. He was mewing on his knees and holding both hands to his nose when I left.
I took the stairs down to the first floor and went out the back exit. A black woman was picking stuff out of a garbage can. A rag was tied on her head to keep her hair out of her eyes. “You hurt, suh?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, suh. There ain’t nothing wrong wit’ me.”
“Don’t you have food at home?”
“My welfare got cut off.”
I gave her two dollars from my wallet. Her palm and the underside of her fingers were the gold-brown color of saddle leather. She closed her little hand on the bills and put them into the pocket of her dress. “There’s a police car out yonder. Don’t be going near them with what you got on you.”
“No, ma’am, I won’t. Thank you.”
I got into my heap and drove away. I thought I heard a fire engine screaming, but I could see no emergency vehicles in the vicinity. At the red light, the sound was so loud that I was sure my heap was about to be cut in half. Then the light changed and the world went silent and I drove home like a man who had been struck deaf.
AFTER I BATHED, I rinsed my clothes clean under the faucet and wrung them dry before I hid them at the bottom of the clothes hamper. Then I scrubbed the tub with Ajax. When my father came home, I told him everything.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said.
“I didn’t see any other way out of it, Daddy.”
“That’s an interesting perspective. Can the rest of us do the same thing? ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like that. So I’ll just punch someone in the face.’ Sound reasonable to you?”
“Not when you put it in that context.”
We were in the kitchen. The backyard was in shadow. The cats were sitting on top of the redwood table, and Major was jumping in the air at a mockingbird that kept dive-bombing him from the telephone wire.
“How bad was the Atlas boy hurt?” my father said.
“I didn’t ask. He’s not a boy, either.”
“It doesn’t matter what he is. You shouldn’t have attacked him.”
I gestured out the window. “How about Major and Skippy and Snuggs and Bugs? Who speaks for them?”
He cut his head. “You make a point.” He opened the icebox and looked inside as though a bottle of beer or wine waited on a shelf. As I said, my mother didn’t allow alcohol in the house. If that was what he was looking for, he was out of luck.
“Want to walk over to the icehouse?” I said.
“No, not really.” He sat down at the breakfast table.
“What are we going to do, Daddy?”
His collar was unbuttoned, and there was a V of bright red sunburn on his chest. His fingernails were clipped and pared and clean, every hair on his head in place. “It’s time to make some people do their job.”
“Which people is that?”
HE MADE AN appointment with Detective Dale Hopkins, the plainclothes investigator who had busted Saber and me for vandalizing Mr. Krauser’s home. We met with him in a tiny windowless room that contained no furniture except a wooden table and three chairs and a D-ring inset in the concrete floor. The door was made of solid metal. Through the crack, I could see officers in uniform walking back and forth in the corridor. Hopkins wore a suit the color of tin. He did not bother to shake hands with me or my father. The skin of his face was as taut as a drumhead. He carried a clipboard with him. Perhaps intentionally, he clattered it on the table when he
sat down. He had the worst nicotine odor I had ever smelled. “This is in reference to Vick Atlas?” he said.
“Vick Atlas and my son,” my father said.
“So what about Vick Atlas and your son?” He smiled as though trying to be polite and pleasant.
“We want to know if Vick Atlas is all right,” my father said. “We want to apologize. You’re the same gentleman I spoke with on the phone, aren’t you?”
“We’re not in the apology business, Mr. Broussard. Vick Atlas isn’t pressing charges. So all sins are forgiven.”
“I don’t think I’ve made myself clear,” my father said. “My son is sorry for what he did. If he’s not, he should be. That is only part of the reason for our coming here. We believe the Atlas family plans to do us harm. What my son did was wrong. But he was acting in defense of his animals. Can you tell me why people like Jaime Atlas and his son and their ilk are allowed to do anything they wish, including the murder of others?”
Hopkins’s eyes were like glass, the pupils like seeds. “I got no opinion on that.”
“That’s remarkable,” my father said.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Isn’t it obvious something besides a teenage squabble is going on? The Harrelson and Atlas families are involved, a schoolteacher has committed suicide, my son lives in fear for his life, and you seem to see or hear nothing.”
“I don’t appreciate your tone.”
“Do you plan on talking to Vick Atlas or his father?”
“No.”
“Do you care to explain that?”
“No charges have been filed. There won’t be any, either.”
“Why not?”
“Vick Atlas and his father told me it was an argument and a fair fight. For them, it’s over.”
“Do you believe them?” my father asked.
“What I believe is irrelevant. If you want my opinion, the issue is your son.”
“Aaron is the catalyst?” my father said.
“The what?”
“Corruption has a smell. It’s an infection a man carries in his glands.”
The room seemed pressurized. I could see a pencil drawing of a cock and balls on the back of the metal door. Down the corridor, someone was yelling for a roll of toilet paper through the bars of a holding cell.
“I went out to the apartment building myself,” Hopkins said. “I talked to the desk clerk who called in the incident. He saw your boy go out the back door. He also saw him talking to a nigger woman by the garbage cans. Your son was giving her money. Know why he would be doing that just after he beat the hell out of someone?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe they had a previous relationship. Is that a possibility?”
“Would you clarify that, please?” my father said.
“She used to work in a crib.”
“I have a hard time following your implication,” my father said.
“The situation speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Hopkins said.
“I gave her two dollars because she had no food,” I said to my father.
He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking at Hopkins in a way I had never seen him look at anyone.
“I say something against the grain?” Hopkins asked. There was a smirk at the corner of his mouth.
My father touched me on the arm. “Let’s go, son.”
Don’t let him get away with it, Daddy, I thought.
But he picked up his fedora from the table, and we walked silently side by side down the corridor. I looked over my shoulder. Hopkins was talking to several cops in uniform, his back to us. They were laughing as though listening to a joke. My eyes were shimmering, my heart a lump of ice.
Then my father said, “Stay here, Aaron.”
He walked back down the corridor. I followed him, disregarding his instruction. The attention of the cops in uniform shifted from Hopkins’s story-in-progress to my father. “Forget something?” Hopkins said. One uniformed cop laughed.
“I’ve known every kind of man,” my father said. “Desperate men in transient shelters, convicts in Angola Penitentiary, psychopaths who enjoyed mowing down German farm boys. But there was an explanation for all of these men. You’re of a different stripe, Detective Hopkins. You flaunt your power and gloat at your misuse of it. You see humor in the suffering of others. You have the tongue and the instincts of both the coward and the bully. One day these men will realize that you dishonor everything they stand for. When that day comes, they’ll turn on you. Don’t you dare come near us, and don’t you dare slander my son.”
We walked away, his arm across my shoulder. There was not a sound in the corridor except the man yelling for toilet paper. Then even he was quiet.
Chapter
29
I HAD THE NEXT day off at the filling station. The police department put a guard on our house. Valerie and I drove down to Freeport and waded into the waves and fished with cane poles and bobbers and shrimp for drum and catfish and speckled trout. The wind was up, the waves yellow and cascading with sand, gulls cawing and wheeling overhead. We caught one gaff-top and one stingray and turned them loose and ate po’boy sandwiches in an open-air beer joint on the beach that had slot machines and a jukebox and a shuffleboard inside. It was wonderful to be away from all the problems that awaited us in Houston.
I didn’t want to think about Vick Atlas and what I had done to him. Nor did I wish to think about possible retaliation. I had started to wonder about all the events that had happened as a result of my argument with Grady Harrelson at the Galveston drive-in. I had thought the issue was jealousy. To an extent, it was. But the larger pattern seemed linked to money or power and not the angst of teenage romance.
How about the shooting death of Clint Harrelson? The more I thought about it, the more I felt there were elements in the story that I hadn’t given adequate scrutiny. For example, the theft of Grady’s convertible, the one loaded with currency and gold. In a city the size of Houston, how had Saber found out where Grady and the wife of the wrecker driver were making out? What about Grady’s ties with Mexican girls and Mexican gang members? Was Grady a lot smarter than I thought? Were Saber and I getting played?
After we got back to Valerie’s, she went upstairs to shower. Her father was gone. I used the phone in her hallway and dialed Grady’s number. “I need a minute of your time,” I said.
“If you’re looking for a life preserver, you called the wrong guy,” he said.
“Why should I want a life preserver?”
“Because you pounded the shit out of a sadist and five-star nutcase? What’s in your head? You thought he was going to leave you alone after you kicked his ass?”
“Harsh words for a guy who was at your side right after your father was killed.”
“I’m looking at my watch. I’ll give you fifteen more seconds,” he said.
“Why aren’t you making a stink about the investigation into your father’s murder?”
“Because I know why he was killed.”
I wasn’t ready for that one. “You know who did it?”
“Not specifically. My father liked boys. Just like that closet stool-packer Krauser. Those kids in his indoctrination camps were given multipurpose roles, get it? He was a geek and deserved to die the way he did. Any other questions?”
“You killed Wanda Estevan.”
“Yeah? Who’s in the cookpot, pal? Get a life. Oh, I forgot. You don’t have one. Vick is about to strip your skin off. That’s not a figure of speech.”
“I think her death was an accident. I think you can get loose from all of this, Grady, if you’re willing to get honest.”
He hung up.
Valerie came down the stairs in her bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her hair. “Who were you talking to?”
“Grady.”
“He’s not worth the effort, Aaron.”
“Did he ever tell you his father was a pederast?” I said.
She looked at me blankly. “No.??
?
“Did he have young guys hanging around his house?”
“I wouldn’t know. I was never there. Mr. Harrelson didn’t like Jews. He didn’t like my father in particular.”
“Grady said his father deserved the way he died. Was Grady molested?”
“If he was, he never mentioned it. He joined the marines to prove he was a man. Then his father got him discharged behind his back. I don’t think Grady ever forgave him.”
“Maybe his father didn’t want him killed in Korea.”
“The discharge wasn’t about Grady. It was about his father. He believed Grady was a coward and would disgrace the family name.”
“Grady knew this?”
“Mr. Harrelson told him he needed him ‘behind the lines,’ helping train these pitiful boys who went to his indoctrination camps.”
“I have a bad feeling, Val. I think we’ve been set up.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You and Saber and me.”
She touched my cheek. “You worry about all the wrong things. You give people dimensions they don’t have.”
She put “Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie” on the record player and draped her hands on my shoulders and started to dance, her eyes closed. I began dancing with her slowly, in two-four time, Dorsey’s orchestra swelling around us. I held her against me and put my face in the dampness of her hair.
“Can we go upstairs?” I said, my voice hoarse.
“Stay here. This is so good. I wish we could be like this forever.”
“I’ll turn up the volume.”
“No, hold me. Just like you’re doing.”
Then I realized she was crying. “What is it?”
“Everything. It’s as you say. I try to pretend otherwise. I think something horrible is going to happen. My father—” She couldn’t finish.
“What about your father?”
“He left a note and a hundred-dollar bill. He said if he wasn’t back by supper, I should go to my aunt’s house in Austin. I looked in his closet. His grease gun is gone.”
“His grease gun? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a machine gun with a folding stock. Paratroopers used them in the war.”
“Where was he going?”