In spite of my admonition, Loren turned around. Then he looked back at me. “That’s the guy?”
“I’d bet on it.”
“Start your heap,” he said.
“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t do it,” I said.
“Thinking makes my head hurt.”
“The cops will send you to Huntsville, Loren,” Valerie said. “If they don’t kill you first.”
“They’re not interested in fender benders,” he said.
“Fender benders?” Valerie said.
Loren walked away, spinning a key ring on his finger.
I COULD HAVE STOPPED him. I didn’t want to see him hurt or beat up by the cops or sent to a mainline prison, although I didn’t know that any of those things would happen. I guess I respected him too much to stand in his way.
But I tried. “Loren! Come on back! A lot of people inside want to talk to you! I’m going to call Biff Collie! I’m not kidding you, I know him!”
I suspect I sounded like a fool, shouting about a local disk jockey. Valerie put her hand on my arm and squeezed it. “Let him go. It’s just Loren’s way. That’s why he’s not like the others.”
My father said that those who are crucified usually seek their fate, because it is only after we murder them that we make them our light bearers. I hoped Loren wasn’t trying to find his own set of hammer and nails. He got behind the wheel of his bus and began revving the engine. With the door open, he backed in a semicircle, straightened out, aimed in the outside mirror, and floored the accelerator.
It was beautiful to watch. The bus whined in reverse across the grass, swaying and bouncing over the bumps, bearing down on the man in the boxlike sedan. At first the man seemed unable to grasp what was happening. Then his mouth opened in dismay and he recoiled backward as though a wrecking ball were swinging into his face. The impact flattened the doors and running board and front fender and tilted the car halfway over. Then the car fell back on all four tires, the front windshield bursting like crushed ice on the hood.
Loren shifted into first, straightened out, then backed the bus into the sedan again and began pushing it in bulldozer fashion over the rim of the gulley. The sedan tipped sideways and slid down the embankment in a cloud of dust and landed in the water. People began running from the building and the parking area. The driver of the sedan crawled up the opposite embankment, his shoes digging for purchase in the dirt, his fedora gone, exposing his tight gray haircut. He grabbed a tree root and pulled himself onto flat ground, then got to his feet, his suit and dress shirt streaked with mud. He was a huge man, his cheeks swollen like a chipmunk’s, his neck ringed with fat. He stood still, as though making a decision, then disappeared into the cedar and persimmon trees, sticks and dead limbs breaking in his path.
Loren jumped down from the bus and ran to my heap. He piled into the backseat. “What are you waiting for?”
I couldn’t move. Neither could Valerie.
“Fire it up,” he said. “Time to boogie.”
Valerie shook my arm. “He’s right. Let’s go, Aaron. Snap out of it.”
I wasn’t thinking about the damage he had just done to the church bus, or the chaos in the parking area, or that Loren might soon be on his way to jail. He had said the word I couldn’t remember, the key to the lockbox, the detail I had missed, one that had lain in plain sight and would expose the blood-bespattered world of regicide and guilt and ambition in which Grady Harrelson lived.
Chapter
33
WE WENT TO a northside drive-in and parked in the shadows, away from the glow of the neon and the lighted dining area inside. Loren kept looking out the back window. “Y’all stay here. I’m going to use the pay phone and get my brother to pick me up. This stuff will die down in a couple of days.”
“Die down?” I said.
“This is how it will go. The car I smacked is probably hot. The guy driving it wasn’t hurt and doesn’t want to talk to cops. The cops couldn’t care less about the guy or the car. I’ll square the bus damage with the preacher who gave me the job. I probably won’t be driving the bus anymore. End of story.”
“It’s that simple?” I said.
“I’ll get lost for a few days,” he said.
“You said ‘boogie’ back there.”
“What about it?” he asked.
I looked at Valerie. “You told me Grady gave you his Tommy Dorsey records because his father didn’t want jazz or Negro music in his house.”
“That’s right.”
“He gave you ‘Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie’ and ‘Marie’?”
She nodded.
“When did he give them to you?” I asked.
“On the afternoon his father was killed.”
“Those were the only records he had with him?”
“No, he had a stack of them. He said he got them from some Mexicans.”
“Did he have another boogie-woogie record?”
She looked out the car window at the shadows and the strips of neon wrapped around the restaurant. “He had an Albert Ammons record.”
“What was the title?”
“ ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp,’ ” she replied. “He loved that recording.”
I shuddered. “That was the song playing in the Harrelson house when somebody blew Mr. Harrelson apart.”
She stared at me. “He went from my house and killed his father, then went out on the sailboat?”
“That’s what it sounds like,” I said.
“Y’all are surprised by this?” Loren said. He got out of the car and leaned on the roof. “Let me make a suggestion. Don’t let Harrelson know you’re on to him. Don’t tell the cops, either.”
“Why not?” Valerie said.
“You think they’re on our side? Even your old man knows better than that.”
“Merton Jenks is on the square,” I said.
Loren looked at the dining room window and at the people eating inside. “That’s why I like you, Aaron. When the whole world is a cinder, you’ll still be a believer. You kill me.”
I watched him walk away. “You know what that guy could do if he went to school?”
Valerie squeezed the back of my neck and laid her head on my shoulder.
“Did you hear me?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. She pulled herself closer to me and held my hand and rubbed the top of her head against my cheek.
“Why the silence?” I asked.
“You believe. Others don’t. Loren knows that. You don’t. That’s why I love you.”
She said nothing else until Loren returned from making his call.
WHEN I WENT HOME, the house was dark except for the desk lamp in my father’s office. I unlocked the front door and walked through the living room and past my parents’ bedroom and into my father’s office. He was sleeping with his head on his arms. A cigarette had burned to ash and collapsed in the tray. His uncapped fountain pen and an empty coffee cup sat by the edge of his manuscript. I picked up the cup and smelled it. He kept the whiskey bottle hidden in either the garage or the trunk of his car. He never took it into the house. To my knowledge, this was the first time he’d drunk whiskey in the house.
I sat down in the spare chair by the wall. The attic fan was drawing a nice breeze through the screen. Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy were sitting on the sill. I wanted to wake my father and tell him about the hit men the Atlases may have brought to town; I also wanted to tell him about Loren plowing the car into the gulley. But I knew nothing good would come of it. Had he been at Cemetery Hill, he would have gone straight up the slope with the others, Yankee canister and grape ripping holes the width of barn doors in their lines. And every confession to him of my own fear only added to the burden that sent him back to the icehouse or into the garage after my mother had gone to bed.
I heard Major’s nails clicking on the floor, then his tail knocking against the bookshelves as he walked into the office. My father raised his head from the desk. “Oh, hi, Aaron, I didn’t
hear you come in.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I’m fine.”
“I was having a dream,” he said. “We were back in Louisiana. You were five years old and I was taking you to the circus. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“You were amazed by the giraffe you saw in the animal pens. You couldn’t believe there was an animal that tall.”
“I remember.”
“Are you sure everything is all right?” he repeated. “Did you and Valerie go with your friend to the church campground?”
“Yes, sir. We had a grand time.”
“Your friend sang?”
“He sure did. People liked him.”
“That was a fine thing you did, Aaron. I’m sure he will always remember your kindness. Is your mother awake?”
“She’s asleep.”
I could see his disappointment. “I guess I’d better take a little walk. If I take a nap before I go to bed, I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. Lock the door. I have my key.”
“Why don’t I heat us some milk and fix some pie. There’s a whole apple pie in the icebox.”
“That’s too much trouble. I’ll be back shortly.”
He removed his hat from the rack by the door and went out on the porch and eased the door shut behind him so as not to wake my mother. Through the window I saw him walking in the moonlight, his shadow moving along the sidewalk like a disembodied spirit that would never find its way home.
THE NEXT MORNING I looked in the mirror. I’d had the stitches in my face removed after six days, but I had kept a medicated bandage over the wound to prevent infection. I peeled off the bandage and dropped it into the wastebasket. The scar resembled a broken red exclamation mark that had drained from my eye. I wanted to think of myself as a Prussian duelist or a soldier of fortune or a deputy marshal backing Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp’s play at the O.K. Corral. Or maybe I just wanted to be brave in the way Loren had been brave, forgetting about himself and risking time in Huntsville for a friend. But all I saw in my reflection was a seventeen-year-old pale-eyed kid who realized that to help his parents, he would have to accept that he might not reach age eighteen. I barely got my hand to my mouth before the bilious surge in my stomach had its way.
I went to the filling station without figuring out I had reported to work an hour early. At eleven A.M. Merton Jenks drove up in a dented black-and-white cruiser and parked it on the grass by the men’s room. The vehicle’s disrepair was the kind you saw only in the cruisers driven by Negro patrolmen in the black wards. Jenks didn’t get out. I walked to the passenger window. “Yes, sir?” I said.
He put a quarter in my palm. “Get me a Coca-Cola.”
“Anything else?”
“Don’t be smart,” he said.
I brought him his Coke and change.
“Get in,” he said.
I sat down next to him, the door open to catch the breeze. He chugged half the Coke and burped. “Where’s Loren Nichols?”
“At home or at work, I guess.”
“Lose the act.”
“I don’t know where he is, Detective Jenks.”
“After you fled the church campground last night, where’d you take him?”
“To a drive-in. He made a phone call and went off on his own.”
“He went off where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who did he leave the drive-in with?”
“I can’t tell you that, Detective Jenks.”
“How’d you like to be sitting in a jail cell?”
I shook my head.
“That means no, you don’t want to be in a jail cell or no, you’re not going to tell me anything?”
“It means Loren is a good guy and was trying to help us.”
“Right,” he said. “Photo time.”
He opened a manila folder on a black-and-white photograph of a large man in a baggy suit hooked to a wrist chain with several other men stringing out of a police van. “Does this guy look familiar?”
“He was at the church campground.”
“Driving the car Nichols pushed into the ditch?”
“That’s the guy.”
“His name is Devon Horowitz. He was doing hundred-dollar hits when he was fifteen. His partner in bargain-basement murder was Jaime Atlas.”
I could feel my heart thud. “You have him in custody?”
“Would I be here?” he replied.
“They’re planning to kill me, aren’t they.”
He propped his elbow on the window jamb and kneaded his brow. “The word is that two or three button men are in town. They’re here about Clint Harrelson’s money. Nobody stiffs the Mob. Maybe they’re not after you. Maybe they just want the money. I can’t say for sure. I’m trying to be square with you, Aaron. You know why I’m driving this beer can?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m on half-time because of a medical condition. I’m also fixing to pull the pin. So I was given a pile of junk to motor around in. Are we starting to communicate here?”
“What’s a button man?” I asked.
“A hit man. He pushes the ‘off’ button on people. I asked if you understood why I was driving this pile of junk.”
“Your superiors have no use for you now, so you’re going out of your way to help me.”
He fiddled with a pack of Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket, then tossed it onto the dashboard. “I’m going down to Mexico. A place called Lake Chapala. I’ll be training some Cubans who’re planning to invade their homeland. What do you think of that?”
“Mexico doesn’t have very good health care,” I replied.
“You missed your calling. You should have been a funeral director.”
“Miss Cisco told you about the Mob getting stiffed and the button men coming here, didn’t she.”
“She didn’t have to. I was working vice in Vegas when Siegel built the Flamingo. I knew the guy who popped him. I once hung him out a train window by his heels.”
“She told you,” I said.
He took a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and stuck it into his mouth. “You’ve got a talent for pissing me off.”
“I’m going to let them do it,” I said.
“Do what?”
“It.”
He removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Want me to slap you?”
“Shoot me. I don’t care what you do. Look in my face and tell me I’m lying.”
“Maybe things will get set right. Give it time.”
“Your colleagues are going to help me? You are? The courts are going to put the Atlas family in prison?”
He held his eyes on mine and didn’t reply.
I LEFT WORK EARLY and went home and bathed and put on a clean pair of khakis and my cowboy boots and a short-sleeved white shirt with a spray of small pink roses on the shoulders. I called Valerie, but no one answered. I wrote my father and mother a note that said “I’ll be over at Saber’s. See you later.” Then I put on my cowboy hat, the one I wore the night I rode Original Sin, and went into the backyard. The sun was red and veiled with dust. I picked up Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy one at a time and hugged each of them.
When I arrived at Saber’s, he was on the swale changing the oil under a flatbed loaded with drill pipe. I wondered how his neighbors liked having an industrial service truck parked in their neighborhood. He crawled out barefoot and bare-chested, flakes of dried road grime in his hair and on his face. “What’s shakin’, rodeo man?”
“Need you to back me up.”
“Doing what?” he said.
“I have to end all this stuff with all the people who are out to get me.”
He got to his feet. His narrow chest was white and shiny with sweat, his eyes blinking with moisture. “We fight like the Indians. From behind a tree, right?”
“I need somebody to be
my witness.”
“Witness to what?”
“To whatever is fixing to happen.”
“I’ll get us a couple of RC Colas.”
“I don’t have much time, Saber. Are you in or out?”
“I just need something cold to drink. How you like the old man’s truck? He got a job delivering pipe in the oil field. I’ll be right back.”
Saber walked into the house, his ribs and spine printed like sticks against his skin. Through the front window, I saw him talking with his father, gesturing. He came back out with two sweating bottles of RC Cola. He sat down against the truck tire, one leg stretched out. “So run that by me again.”
“You always said you were backing my action.”
“I meant it, too,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I just don’t know what the action is.”
“I’m going to make them hurt me or leave me and my parents alone.”
“Back off and take a second look at what you just said.”
I sat down next to him. I didn’t drink from the bottle. “I need your help, Saber.”
“The old man hasn’t touched the sauce in four days. I’ve been racking pipe for him and riding shotgun and such. We might have to go to Beaumont tonight.”
He waited for me to speak, to tell him that I didn’t need him, that I was wrongheaded, that it was okay for him to cut me loose and let me down.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Could I have those two Molotov cocktails that were rolling around in your backseat?”
“Come on, what do you want those for?”
“I’ll find a reason.”
“Come on,” he repeated.
“Will you give them to me or not?”
He looked away. “They’re not real.”
“What?”
“They’re full of water. They were just for show.”
I could hear the chimes of the Popsicle truck at the end of the street. Children were running from their houses with the nickel or dime their parents had given them.
“Forget it,” I said, resting my cola on the grass. “I figured out something the last day or so, Saber. I never could understand why Grady hung with a guy like Vick Atlas. Then I thought about why you and I always hung together. Both of our fathers have problems with alcohol, but we’ve always stuck with them. That’s when I realized where the bond between Grady and Vick came from. Both of them grew up hating their fathers. It’s funny, isn’t it? We don’t think we’re anything like those guys, but in some ways we are.” I got up and took off my hat and wiped my brow. My legs felt weak.