He raised his hand as though to slap me again. “I’ll knock your head into the storm sewer. I mean it, I’ll tear it clean off your shoulders. Who he’ped you do it?”
“No one,” I said, wiping my face.
Saber had gotten out of the Chevy. The passenger door was still open. I saw him reach under the seat for the tire iron.
“You chickenshit?” Loren said.
“People who fight are weak.”
He tried to catch my nose between two knuckles. “Don’t jerk away from me, boy. You’re about to get on your knees. That’s the only way this is going to end.”
I tried to push his hand aside. Saber was walking toward us now, the tire iron behind his leg.
“Why were you spying on my house?” Loren said.
“Why would I want to spy on your house? I couldn’t care less about your house.”
“Because that’s what dingleberries do. I hear you’re a momma’s boy and your old man is a lush.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Go wash your face. You can use my garden hose.”
“Get back, Saber,” I said.
Loren realized he had forgotten about Saber. He turned in Saber’s direction as though in a dream.
“Put it away, Saber,” I said.
“Well, you little shit,” Loren said, sliding his right hand into his pocket.
“Look at me, Loren,” I said.
“What is it now?” he said.
I thought about saying something clever, but I didn’t. I felt like a helpless child watching his best friend about to cross a line and perhaps ruin his life. The wind was as warm as blood; I could feel the tears drying on my cheeks.
I caught Loren Nichols on the mouth, bursting his lips against his teeth. I never saw anyone look so surprised. He cupped his hand to keep the flow from his mouth off his chest and drapes. I had never been in a fight and did not know what I was supposed to do next. Then I saw the pain and shock go out of his eyes. From that point on, I didn’t think.
I used both fists and hit him so hard, I knew the blood on my knuckles was from me and not from him. He tripped backward over the curb and tried to lift his forearm across his face, but I clubbed his head and the back of his neck and drove one punch into his eye when he looked up at me for mercy.
My mother had been the first to call the blank spaces in my days “spells,” maybe because spells and blackouts ran in her family. The Hollands were a violent people, capable of turning their weapons on themselves as well as others. My grandfather was a Texas Ranger who put John Wesley Hardin in jail, something Wild Bill Hickok tried and couldn’t do. My mother often went to places in her head that no normal person dared visit. I believe Loren Nichols realized his mistake and wanted to undo it even as I drove him across the dirt yard onto the rotting steps of his house, even as I continued to beat and stomp him in front of the old woman, who had madness in her eyes but seemed to see nothing.
For the first time in my life, I understood that I was capable of killing a man with my bare hands. The world turned to a red and purple melt while Loren Nichols’s face was coming apart. Then I felt Saber’s arms grab me from behind, his hands locking on my chest, pulling me backward as I kicked at Loren and missed.
I tried to get loose, but I was finished, the adrenaline gone, my strength draining like water through the soles of my feet. The old woman was making a keening sound, her body shaking. Loren rolled into a ball on the ground. His face didn’t look human.
“We’re in the skillet,” Saber said. “Did you hear me? We’re deep in Indian country, Aaron. Snap out of it. His friends will pull our teeth with pliers.”
He carried me upright to the street as he would an upended hogshead, and body-slammed me on the swale. I stared up at him, the sky and the trees and the houses along the block spinning out of control.
“Is that you, Saber?” I asked. “Did you just throw me on the ground? What in the world is the matter with you?”
I MADE HIM DRIVE me to the alley that led behind Valerie Epstein’s house.
“You’re going up to her door like that?” he said, looking at my clothes and hands.
“I’m going to use her hose.”
Valerie’s yard was deep in shadow, the fronds of the banana plants next to her garage rattling in the wind. The air smelled of fertilizer and the damp soil in the flower beds, an odor like a fresh wound in the earth. An odor like a grave. I heard a siren several blocks away.
“They’re coming,” Saber said.
“Nichols started it.”
“I’m scared,” he said.
“They’re just cops. It’s our word against his.”
“No. It was the look on your face. It wasn’t you.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
But I couldn’t get his words out of my mind.
I squatted down by the garage and removed my shirt and turned on the garden hose. I washed off my hands and arms and soaked my shirt and squeezed it out and put it back on and dried my hands on my pants. I saw Valerie through the back screen. I got to my feet. I didn’t know what to say to Saber.
“I hurt Nichols pretty bad?” I asked him.
“He won’t want to look in the mirror for a while.”
“Was that his grandmother?”
“I think that’s his mother. I heard she was in the asylum in Wichita Falls.”
“If they catch you with me, they’ll put you in the can.”
“You’re telling me to beat it?”
“No, I’m saying I might not go home.”
“Because of Nichols?”
“I’m not supposed to bring problems into my house. It’s an unwritten commandment. My father once said if I ever run away, not to come back.”
“Your old man said that?”
“That’s the way he is sometimes.”
Valerie opened the screen and stepped outside.
“Want me to leave?” Saber asked. “Just tell me.”
“Do what you want.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Don’t be that way,” I said.
He threw his car keys in the air and caught them. “You sure know how to kick a guy in the teeth.”
He fired up his Chevy and drove down the alley, gunning the engine with the clutch depressed, as though the roar of his mufflers could shut out the injury I had inflicted on him.
Valerie was holding the door open with her rump. She wore a white dress with black trim and tiny red hearts all over it. “What happened to you?”
“I got into it with Loren Nichols.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Not really.”
“Did Loren attack you?”
“He thinks I burned his car.”
“That’s ridiculous. You look awful.”
“It’s part of my mystique. Is your father home?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I’m a little embarrassed.”
“Over what?”
“Everything. I busted up Loren Nichols. Where’s your father?”
“Working in Beaumont. You did what?”
“If Saber hadn’t stopped me, maybe I would have finished the job. I don’t feel too good about it.”
I saw the light go out of her eyes. She studied my face and blinked and looked at the alleyway and the dust rising into the sky. “Come in.”
“What for? I just wanted to tell you I didn’t burn his car.”
She pulled me inside and latched the screen. She bolted the inside door and looked through the window at the alley again. I could hear her breathing. “Say all that again.”
“I hit him and then I couldn’t stop. I’ve never felt that way before.”
“I’ll talk to him. I know his brother, too. We have to do something and do it now.”
“You said he wasn’t a hood, just a neighborhood guy.”
“You can’t come into the Heights and beat up somebody and walk away.”
“That’s what I just di
d. He asked for it, too.”
“What you did was insane.”
“You think you know these guys, Valerie, but you don’t. They’re mean to the bone.”
“I grew up here, a Jew in a neighborhood where people like me are called Christ killers. Don’t tell me what they’re like. Sit down.”
“What for?”
“You have a cut in your scalp. I don’t believe you beat up Loren. Or you’re exaggerating about it.”
“Tell him that. I feel sick. I hurt Saber’s feelings. Saber says I’m the only family he has.”
“We’ll call him up. We can go out together. We can play miniature golf.”
I think in that moment I fell in love with Valerie Epstein all over again, and this time I knew I loved her more than life itself.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“Because I can’t stop thinking about you.”
A wood-bladed fan spun above us, its shadows breaking across her face. Her gaze fixed on mine; she didn’t speak.
“You’re the only person in the world I want to be with,” I said. “I care about you more than my parents, more than Saber, more than anyone I’ve ever known. I’d do anything for you.”
She was looking at me in a different way now. She placed her hand on my forehead as though I had a fever. “You’re such a strange boy. You want to believe bad things about yourself. That’s wrong, did you know that?”
“Would you run off with me?”
“Don’t talk foolish,” she said, taking her hand away. “I’ll fix coffee for you. We can make sandwiches.”
“I don’t want any.” I stood up. We were almost the same height, her face inches from mine. I could feel her eyes go inside me. “I want to be with you forever, Valerie. We could go to Louisiana. I could work in the oil field. I know everything about horses and cattle, too.”
I took her wrist and placed her hand on my heart.
“Aaron,” she said.
“You’re stuck with me. For me, there’ll never be another girl. I don’t care if Loren Nichols and his friends kill me.”
“Aaron, please.”
I put my arms around her and spread my fingers over her back and smelled her hair and the heat in her skin. Her head was framed against the window, the late sun lighting the skein of auburn and gold strands in her hair, the shadows from the fan spinning like a vortex around us.
Then I felt her step on top of my feet and mold herself against me. My entire body felt as though it were being lowered into warm water, my phallus rising, my fingers biting into her back. I walked with her on top of my feet into the living room, as though we were dancing. Then she stepped away from me, and I felt my head reel as if I were floating away on the wind, alone, like a balloon with a broken string.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, of course not,” she said. She took my hand and led me up the stairs to her bedroom. The window curtains were open, and I could see the top of the pecan tree in her backyard and clouds that were like streaks of blood in the western sky. We were both trembling as we undressed. My words clotted in my throat, and I can’t remember what I said to her when I saw her naked. I had never seen a woman undress, and I had never been to a burlesque club, and I had never done more with a girl than kiss her, and that was at the drive-in movie.
She pulled back the covers and lay down and waited, her arms at her sides, her fingers curling and uncurling with anxiety. I kissed her on the mouth and eyes and breasts and stomach, my head hammering, the cuts on my knuckles from the fight streaking the pillows and sheets like wisps of pink thread. When she took me inside her, I put my face in her hair and swore I could smell the ocean and hear wind blowing and feel myself slipping into an underwater cave filled with gossamer fans and electric eels, each tidal surge taking me deeper and deeper into a place I never wanted to leave.
Then I closed my eyes and surrendered myself to the fates, and saw a single bottle rocket rise into the sky and burst in a shower of stars that floated down through the ceiling onto our bed.
Chapter
6
I RODE THE CITY bus home. My father had come home from work late and gone to the icehouse. He did not know of my absence from the supper table. My mother met me at the door, her face like a piece of crumpled paper, a mole peeking from the deteriorating makeup on her chin. “I’ve called all over town.”
“I went to see a girl in the Heights and lost my ride. I called twice. The line was busy. I’m sorry.”
“Which girl? Your father doesn’t want you in the Heights.” Her eyes were jittering, her hands clenching.
I started for my room, exhausted, wanting to lie down on my teester bed; I wanted to sleep as if I’d been swallowed by a hole in the earth, safe from all the violence and cruelty surrounding me. My mother circled my wrist with her thumb and forefinger and lifted my arm and studied my knuckles. “Did you hit someone?”
I was surprised. My mother dealt with reality only in teaspoons. She’d had a hysterectomy and a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy, an experience that had left her shaking and filled with dread. I’d realized long ago that there are people who are not liars but are incapable of telling the truth or dealing with it. There is a great difference between the two.
“A run-in with a fellow,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Dr. Bienville increased my medication. It makes me confused. Why did you have a run-in with someone? Has a bully bothered you? Is that what all this strange behavior is about? Go get your father, would you? There’s a television set at the icehouse now. Something to sell more beer.”
“I’ll get him, Mother.”
“Tell him about this trouble you had.”
“I will,” I said.
“And leave that girl in the Heights alone. Your father won’t like it.”
“I understand.”
I went to the icehouse and walked back home with my father. Heat lightning rippled through the clouds; hurricane warnings were up along the Louisiana-Texas coast; and earlier I had lost my virginity and tried to beat a greaseball to death. But there was not one subject of either substance or insignificance that my father and I could discuss. I wondered what it would be like to stroll with one’s father along a sidewalk, like two friends out on a warm evening that smelled of flowers and water sprinklers slapping on the lawns. Maybe one fine evening that would happen, I told myself, if I just had faith.
I LAY IN BED and stared at the ceiling until one A.M. and woke to what I expected to be the worst day of my life—cops at the door, handcuffs, a felony assault charge, or maybe Mr. Epstein charging into the house, enraged at what I had done with his daughter. All day at school I waited for a police cruiser to turn in to the faculty parking lot, then a call to the principal’s office. It didn’t happen. The only unusual element in the morning was Mr. Krauser’s behavior. During metal shop he kept staring at Saber and me as though he wanted to say something to us but couldn’t.
At seven-fifteen that evening, I looked out the window and saw Mr. Krauser park at the curb and get out and stand uncertainly on the edge of the lawn, flattening his tie, straightening his shoulders. There was a young guy I recognized in the passenger seat. His name was Jimmy McDougal; he was an effeminate kid whose body was almost hairless, his eyebrows blond wisps. I’d see him shooting baskets at the YMCA after he dropped out of school, his gym shorts barely clinging to his hips when he leaped to make a shot.
“Who’s that man?” my mother said.
“Satan,” I replied.
“Who?” she asked.
“It’s Mr. Krauser,” I said, more to my father than my mother.
My father was reading under a lamp. The book was Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway. “The teacher who tried to help you with these bad kids from the Heights?” he said.
“They’re more than bad kids, Daddy. And Mr. Krauser doesn’t help anybody with anything.”
He looked at his pocket watch. The ball game would soon be sta
rting on the small-screen television at the icehouse, although my father usually sat at one of the plank tables under the canvas awning and drank by himself and took little interest in the game. “So let’s see what he wants,” he said.
It was obvious that Mr. Krauser had not bathed or changed clothes before coming to the house. As I held the door for him, I could smell the dried sweat in his shirt, an odor that was as thick and gray and palpable as a towel left in a gym locker. His smile made me think of a grin painted on a muskmelon. “I hope I’m not disturbing anyone,” he announced in the middle of the living room. “I like your house. What do you call that overhang on the side?”
My father put away his book and rose from his chair to shake hands. “I’m James Broussard, Mr. Krauser. In Louisiana it’s called a porte cochere. What can I do for you?”
“I understand we have much in common.”
“Oh?” my father said.
“My tank was the first armored vehicle across Remagen Bridge. In the Great War, you were at—”
“No place of any import. What’s the nature of your visit, sir?”
In moments like these I believed my old man was the best guy on earth, although he hated the word “guy.”
“I work as a counselor at one of the summer camps on the Guadalupe River, up in the hill country,” Mr. Krauser said. “There’re a couple of slots available for assistant counselors. I had Aaron and his friend Saber in mind.”
Many high school and junior high school coaches worked at summer vacation camps and received twenty-five dollars for each kid they signed up. I pitied the kid who looked forward to camp all year and arrived only to find out that Mr. Krauser was his cabin supervisor.
“That’s good of you,” my father said. “Why did you choose my son for such an honor? Not to mention Saber.”
“Both have leadership potential. Lots of potential. We start the day with reveille at oh-seven-hundred hours. Boys learn discipline up there, Mr. Broussard. Not that Aaron needs it.”
My father had lean hands that were sun-browned and freckled and webbed on the backs with purplish veins that looked like knotted twine. Whenever he was bothered by an inconsistency in other people’s words, he rubbed the fingers of one hand on the back of the other, his thoughts known only to himself. “If I wanted to start a second American revolution, I’d turn loose ten like Saber Bledsoe in the middle of Boston.”