“I don’t believe you.”
“So ask him about it. His girlfriend was screaming, and every light in the house was on when I left.”
I looked at the side of his face. His expression was serene. The Bledsoe never lied, at least not about his one-man crusade against hypocrisy and phoniness. Sometimes I longed to know his secrets, but even at my young age, I knew he had paid a high price for them. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
“You got to do recon,” he said. “Write down license numbers. See who’s going in and out of the house. I’ve got connections at the motor vehicle department.”
“Grady Harrelson’s father will have us ground into salt.”
“That’s my point. We’ll get the coordinates on these guys and call in the artillery.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Grady is out to hurt you, Aaron. I’m not going to let that happen.” He put his hand on my forearm and squeezed it, maybe for longer than he should. “You’re the only real family I got.”
WE WERE NOW on the outer edge of River Oaks, in an area where the yards were banked and measured in acres, the houses three stories high with white-columned porches, the driveways circular and shaded by trees that creaked in the wind. The sky was a soft blue, the lawns deep in shadow, the air scented with flowers and chlorine and meat fires. The interior of every house tinkled with golden light.
Saber began reciting the encyclopedic levels of information he had on the Harrelson family; I would have dismissed most everything he said if it had come from anyone else. But he had a brain like flypaper and never forgot anything.
“See, the old man isn’t just a rice farmer and oil driller. He’s mixed up with these Galveston mobsters who’re moving out to Vegas,” he said. “You know their names.”
“What do you mean, I know?”
“Your uncle is buddies with some of these guys. It’s no big deal, Aaron.”
“Don’t be talking about my family like that. You get this stuff out of men’s magazines with Japs on the cover, strafing naked women tied to stakes in the Amazon.”
“The best source of information in the nation,” he said. “Look at what we read in school, Silas Marner and The House of the Seven Gables. I bet that’s what people in hell have to read for all eternity. Hitler and Tojo and guys like that.”
He coasted to the curb, under the limbs of a spreading oak, the engine coughing like a sick animal. Up ahead we could see the floodlamps shining on the front of Grady’s house and a party taking place by the swimming pool in the side yard. Saber took a pair of binoculars from the glove box. I could feel my heart thudding against my ribs. He read my mind. “They cain’t see us,” he said. “I’m going to read off these license plate numbers. You write them down.”
“This is nuts.”
“Take off the blinders, Aaron. How do you think these people got their money? Hard work? I bet this place is full of gangsters. How did Grady get discharged from the Marine Corps?”
“Grady Harrelson was in the marines?”
“He enlisted after he graduated. Except, when he was about to be shipped to Korea, he discovered he had asthma. His old man pulled strings. The guy’s not just a tumblebug, he’s yellow.”
“He might be a bad guy, but I don’t think he’s yellow.”
Saber began reading off license numbers, then stopped and took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped the lenses and looked through them again. “I don’t need this.”
“Need what?”
He squeezed his scrotum. “My big boy just woke up with a vengeance. Check it out. You ever see a pair of cantaloupes like that? Those bongos were made in heaven.”
I took the binoculars from him and focused them on the pool. Nine or ten guys Grady’s age were swimming or barbecuing or springing off the board. The obvious center of attention was a black-haired, dark-skinned woman who must have been in her late twenties. She was lying on a recliner, her white swimsuit like wet Kleenex.
“Who is she?” I said.
“Mexico’s answer to Esther Williams.” He pulled the binoculars from my hands and looked through again. “Didn’t I tell you the Harrelsons had ties to Galveston?”
“She’s a pro?”
“No, she’s the kindergarten teacher at St. Anne’s Elementary. Say a prayer of thanks you have me to escort you through these situations. Oh, man, I’m about to shoot my wad. Look at that broad. It’s criminal that a woman can be that beautiful.”
“You know those guys?” I asked.
“It’s his regular crowd. Guys who went to military school because their parents don’t want them. Know what makes them different from us?”
“They’re rich?”
“They don’t have feelings. After we do our recon, I’ll drive you over to Valerie’s. That’s what’s really on your mind, isn’t it?”
“I want to tell her we didn’t have anything to do with burning Loren Nichols’s car.”
“Right, otherwise she’d be heartbroken.”
“Lay off it, Saber.”
But his attention had shifted to a kid who’d climbed up to the high board and was looking straight at us.
“Start the car,” I said.
Saber shook a cigarette out of his pack. “Bad form. There’s a tire iron under your seat. I’d love to bash one of these guys. Maybe sling brains all over the bushes.”
“Are you serious? What’s the matter with you? Start the car.”
“Too late. Don’t rattle. You got to brass it out. Look upon this as an opportunity.”
A sea-green Cadillac with fins bounced out of the entrance to the driveway, and a Buick with a grille like a chromium mouth came up behind us, sealing off the street. We were shark meat. Grady’s friends piled out of the cars. Grady, with the woman behind him, walked through the camellia bushes in his yard and opened the door to a piked fence and stepped out on the swale in his swim trunks and a pair of sandals. He tied a towel around his hair, like a turban, exposing his armpits. He was probably the most handsome young guy I’d ever seen. I could not understand how a kid who had so much could be the bastard he was. He leaned down to see who was in the car. “Bledsoe?”
“The chosen one himself,” Saber said. “How’s it hangin’, Harrelson? Love your pad. I hear you bonked the maid in your atom bomb shelter.”
“I dig your pipes.”
“I always knew you had taste.”
“But why is your shit machine parked in front of my house?”
“We got a situation we thought you could help us with,” Saber replied. “Aaron didn’t mean to cause you any trouble at the drive-in restaurant, but you blamed your breakup with your girlfriend on him because he happened to say hello at the wrong time. That’s definitely uncool. In the meantime, somebody has been trying to kick a telephone pole up our asses.”
“A telephone pole? Man, that’s a sad story.”
“Framing us for a car arson, stoking up some hoods in the Heights, that sort of thing.”
Grady propped his hands on the Chevy’s roof and seemed to reflect on Saber’s words. The woman had hung a blue silk robe on her shoulders and was watching from the other side of the piked fence. Her sloe eyes and her black hair curling damply around her neck made me think of a villainous movie actress.
“Do you see anyone else on this street, Bledsoe?” Grady asked.
“Not a soul.”
“Does that indicate the nature of your situation?”
“You mean y’all could rip us apart and stuff us down the storm drain and nobody would care?”
“I can tell nobody is putting anything over on you. But we don’t want to see you hurt. You’re a nice little guy. So I’ll ask you again: What are you doing with your shit machine in front of my house, nice little guy?”
Saber sniffed at the air. “Y’all got skunks around here?”
“What?”
“Smell it? One of them must have come out of the coulee or the sewer. Maybe you could call in the marines and
clean the place up. You know, semper fi, motherfucker, let’s take names and kick ass and exterminate the smelly little varmints before they perfume the whole neighborhood and people stop believing our shit don’t stink.”
Don’t do this, Saber. Please, please, please don’t.
“You been getting high on lighter fluid again, turd blossom?” Grady said.
“Heard you were in the Corps for a while. So was my old man. He was at Iwo Jima. Did you make it over to Korea before you got sent home?”
“Go back to that business about the skunks.”
“Before you know it, they’ll be coming through your mailbox, maybe while you’re muffing the town pump. What do they call that? Climax interruptus?”
“Get out of the car.”
“Up your nose,” Saber said.
I opened the door and stepped out on the asphalt and looked across the roof at Grady. “This is between you and me. Saber isn’t involved. We shouldn’t have come here. We’ll leave.”
“You’ll leave when I tell you to. You haven’t answered the question. Why are you parked in front of my fucking house?”
“I want to know if you sicced Loren Nichols on me,” I said.
I saw a tic under Grady’s left eye, as though someone had touched the skin with a needle. “Who the fuck is Loren Nichols?”
“The guy whose car got burned,” Saber said.
“Step out of your heap, you slit-eyed freak,” Grady said.
The change in his tone was like an elixir to his friends. They tightened the circle around us, their bodies hard and tan, beaded with water. Saber had said Grady’s kind was different, incapable of empathy. He wasn’t wrong. They threw trash out of their cars, were profane around people they believed to be of no value, and were unfazed by the suffering of the poor and infirm. But for me, the open sore on every one of them was unnecessary cruelty. As I looked at them gathered around Saber’s pitiful excuse for a hot rod, I remembered a scene from years before. There was a coulee and a piney-woods pond on the backside of River Oaks Country Club. It contained bream and sun perch, and kids from other neighborhoods came there and fished with bobbers and bamboo poles. One week after Christmas, on a warm, sunny day, a little boy had parked his new Schwinn bicycle at the top of the incline and was fishing among the lily pads when a carful of kids who were country-club members stopped their car. A tall kid got out, picked up the Schwinn, and hurled it end over end down the slope into the water, scratching the paint, denting the fenders. The little boy cried. The kids in the car sped away, laughing.
I thought about Saber’s mention of the tire iron under the seat, and I thought about it not because of the danger we were in but because of the memory of the Schwinn bicycle.
“All is fair in love and war,” I said.
Grady’s gaze shifted sideways into neutral space. “You’re speaking in code?”
“That means do your worst.”
“I think you and Saber need a dip in the pool.”
The passenger door was still ajar. I leaned inside and felt under the seat and pulled out the tire iron. I let it hang from my right hand, the end with the socket touching my knee.
Grady looked at his friends. “Do you believe this asshole?”
“You dealt it, Grady,” I said. “Want to boogie?”
“With one phone call, I can make your life miserable,” he said.
“My life is already miserable.”
“Maybe you need an around-the-world. I’ll call Valerie. She gives the best I ever had.”
I kept my eyes on his and didn’t blink or show any expression. I felt my fingers tightening on the shaft of the lug wrench. He looked again at his friends, as though sharing his amusement with them. None of them met his eyes. He looked back at me. “What’s with you? You got some kind of mental defect?”
“Nothing is with me. I won’t be a senior till next week. You already graduated. You’re a wheel. I’m nobody.”
“You’re trying to provoke an incident and then file a suit. It’s not going to work, Broussard.” He flexed his shoulders and rotated his head like a boxer loosening up. His confidence was starting to slip, and the others knew it.
“Call the shot, Grady. Or apologize for that remark about Valerie.”
“You start a beef at my house and I’m supposed to apologize? That’s great, man. You almost make me laugh.”
The woman in the blue robe stepped out on the swale. She was wearing huaraches. There was a smear of lipstick on one of her canine teeth. She cupped her hand on the back of Grady’s neck, one pointy fingernail teasing his hairline. She was whispering in his ear, but her eyes were on me. He seemed to be listening to her as a child would to its mother.
“Get back in the car, Aaron,” I heard Saber say.
“We’re fine,” I said.
“No, get in the car,” he said.
“Listen to your friend,” the woman said to me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She winked, her lips compressing into a glossy red flower, her eyes darker and more lustrous than they were a second earlier.
I stuck the tire iron under the seat, and in seconds Saber and I were headed down a long tunnel of live oaks, his dual exhausts echoing off the tree trunks. My right hand was trembling, the shaft of the tire iron printed as red as a burn across my palm.
Chapter
5
SABER TURNED NORTH, toward the Heights and Valerie Epstein’s house. “What happened back there?” he said. “Who’s that broad?”
“You got me.”
“It’s like she has some kind of control over them. Why is she wasting herself on guys like that when I’m available? Have you seen me do the dirty bop?”
“I missed that.”
“It’s not funny. I’m a good dancer.” He tugged on his dork, trying to straighten it in his pants. “This is killing me. I’ve got to have some relief.”
“Will you act your age?”
“I am.”
“I didn’t know your father was in the marines.”
“He wasn’t. He was in the Seabees. He spent most of the war in San Diego.”
“Why did you tell Harrelson he was in the marines?”
“To make him feel like he’s worse butt crust than he already is. Any time I can screw up the head of a guy like Harrelson, I’m on it.”
He shifted down, flooring the Chevy, blowing birds out of the trees into a maroon sky as we plowed deep into the Heights.
KNOW WHAT IT was like back then? It’s not the way everybody thinks. Not one person I knew listened to Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby or Perry Como. We thought their music was shit and Lawrence Welk was water torture. In jazz, there was the cool school and the honk school. Pres Young was from the cool school. Flip Phillips was honk, in the best way. He and Pres and Buck Clayton and Norman Granz toured the country with Jazz at the Philharmonic. Hank and Lefty were on every blue-collar jukebox in America. The seminal recording in R&B was Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” featuring Ike Turner on piano. Politics? What was that? My father said Senator McCarthy had the warmth and depth of a bowling ball. Saber asked him who Senator McCarthy was.
The real story was the class war. We just didn’t know we were in it.
“What’s that?” Saber said, slowing the Chevy.
On the street a short distance from Valerie’s house, I saw a scorched area the size of a car and fractured glass and scraps of rubber on the asphalt. I realized that once again Saber had driven us into the belly of the beast.
“That’s where Loren Nichols’s car got burned. Get us out of here,” I said.
“He lives in that dump?”
A sagging nineteenth-century two-story white house, with a dirt yard and rain gutters that had rusted into lace, stood on cinder blocks among live oaks whose lichen-crusted limbs seemed about to crush the roof. Loren Nichols was drinking a beer, bare-chested and wearing suspenders, behind a hair-tangled old woman sitting in a wooden chair. Her skin was shriveled like dry paste, her ne
ck tilted as though she had been dropped from a hangman’s noose. Loren was down the steps in a blink, the beer can in his hand, coming hard across the yard. “Come back here, boy. Your ass is grass,” he hollered.
Saber shot him the bone and kept driving. The beer can smacked against the trunk and rolled across the asphalt.
“Stop the car,” I said.
“Over a beer can?” Saber said.
“Let me out.”
“No, that guy’s a mean motor scooter, Aaron. Anybody is who survives Gatesville.”
I pushed open the door and stepped out with the car still moving. Loren came toward me, his torso as pale and hard-looking as whalebone. I stepped back, raising one hand. “It wasn’t me who torched your heap. Maybe I cut your tires, but I didn’t set the fire.”
“Who did?”
“Probably the guys who threw the Mexican girl out of their car a couple of blocks from here.”
“What do you know about the Mexican girl?”
“Nothing.”
“Then shut your mouth, asshole. She was my cousin.”
“Don’t be calling me names.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“A guy who wasn’t looking for a beef until you and your brother and your friends ’fronted me on the street.”
There were nests of green veins in his forearms and chest. He was breathing through his mouth, his eyes out of focus. He hit me in the sternum with the heel of his hand.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“I’ll do it all day. You got a shank?”
“No.”
“How’d you cut our tires if you don’t carry a shank?”
“I said maybe I cut your tires.”
He thumped me in the forehead. “I can take your skin off, boy.”
“I know that.”
“Admit you burned my car.”
“I didn’t.”
He slapped me. “Lie to me again.”
The side of my face was on fire. I felt tears running down my cheeks. “I didn’t do anything to you guys.”
“You think you can come up to the Heights and wipe your feet on us? You come up here to dip your wick?”
“I didn’t wipe my feet on anyone.”