“The girl whose neck was broken? No, why would I know her?”
“You cracking wise?”
“I’ve got a better question for you. You said ‘Go get him, boy’ to Walter?”
“The nigger?”
I threw the machinist rag aside. “He has the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. How would you like to have your face broken again?”
“Just take it easy and hear me out.”
“I’m through with this stuff, Loren.”
“Somebody gave you permission to call me by my first name?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Nichols. I didn’t know you were so important.”
“You better climb down off it, man.”
A skinned-up dirty-vanilla pickup was parked in the shadow of a live oak by the boulevard. The driver was wearing a denim shirt and a baseball cap and looked like a farmworker. He had been among Nichols’s group when they badgered me earlier. For the first time, I noticed the resemblance.
“Is that your brother out there?”
“I’m here about my cousin. The cops aren’t going to lose sleep over a dead Mexican girl. But my brother and me do. I think you know something.”
“You’re asking me about your cousin? I was walking down the street in the Heights on a Sunday morning when you guys decided to mess up my life. I don’t know anything about you or your family, and I don’t want to.”
“You set fire to my car or you didn’t. Which is it?”
“I didn’t do it, and neither did Saber.”
He took the toothpick from his mouth and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Your family is connected?”
“Connected?”
“I hear your uncle knows people.”
“He’s an oilman and he manages prizefighters. That doesn’t mean he’s a criminal.”
“Yeah, but he knows people. Maybe you know people, too.”
I couldn’t believe his naïveté. In his mind I belonged to a world where the solutions to his troubles were easily available to people who lived in high-income neighborhoods, which I didn’t.
I said, “I don’t think anything I say to you is going to work. I’m sorry I hurt you. You could have snitched me off, but you didn’t. I think that’s stand-up, man.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Grady Harrelson told you to bird-dog me, didn’t he?”
He combed his ducks. “No, motherfucker, he didn’t tell me anything.”
“Then why did you and your brother and hard-guy friends try to get it on with me in front of Valerie’s house?”
“General principles.”
“Look me in the face and say that,” I said.
“See you around, kid.”
He walked toward the pickup. I couldn’t let it go. “Listen, Nichols, no matter how this plays out, you’ve got a lot of Kool-Aid. You cut it in Gatesville. That’s not lost on people. But don’t go calling me a kid and acting like you’re hot shit.”
He turned around. “It doesn’t take brains to stack time. It takes brains not to stack time.”
“Square with me. Maybe we’re on the same side. Harrelson has something on you?”
“A punk like that?”
“So how do you know who he is?”
“He’s like all you guys. He slums. He hunts on the game reserve. For him, that’s our neighborhood.”
“I don’t think your neighborhood is a slum. And I’m not Grady Harrelson.”
He gazed at my 1939 Ford. The hood was up, exposing the twin carbs on the V8 Mercury engine. “Those your wheels?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Not bad,” he said. “Do yourself a favor, Holland. Drive your heap, date your girl, stay out of the kitchen. You’re not up to the heat.”
“I didn’t do a bad job with you.”
He stuck his comb into his mouth and combed his hair again, this time with both hands. “You got lucky. Next time bring a blade.”
AFTER I WENT home and bathed and changed clothes, I drove to Valerie’s house and told her about Loren Nichols’s visit to the filling station. “I can’t figure that guy out. He’s got guts. Why does he act like such a shit?”
We were sitting on the porch swing. She was wearing a white blouse with flower-print shorts like a little girl would wear. Her father was inside. She said, “He’s like most of the boys around here. They aren’t afraid of the world they live in. They’re afraid of the world that’s waiting for them.”
“How’d you get so smart?”
She kicked me in the ankle.
“You want to go for some ice cream?” I said.
“Sure.”
I looked over my shoulder. “Would your father like to come with us?”
“He’s going to a movie with a lady friend.” She put a piece of Juicy Fruit into her mouth and looked at me and chewed it with her mouth open. The lawn sprinkler flopped across the flower bed.
“We could go for ice cream another time. I mean when your father is here and can go with us,” I said.
“He wants to talk to you.”
“Pardon?” I felt as though I had just stepped backward into an elevator shaft.
“About what?”
“Guess.”
“Jesus Christ, Valerie.”
“Come on,” she said.
She picked up my hand and led me inside. Her father was talking on the telephone in the kitchen, looking through the hallway at me. Inside a glassed-in case in the hallway was a photo of him on one knee by a campfire, with several bushy-haired and mutton-chopped men who wore filthy clothes and rags wrapped on their heads, all of them armed with U.S. paratrooper grease guns, the kind that had folding wire stocks. Only three men in the photo were clean-shaven. One of them was Mr. Epstein; the second was Marshal Tito; the third resembled the actor who starred in The Asphalt Jungle.
Mr. Epstein hung up the phone and motioned for me to enter the kitchen. He was olive-skinned, his hair flaxen and curly on the tips, his short sleeves tight-fitting on his biceps. “Sit down.”
“Is anything wrong?” I asked.
“We’ll see. What do you have to say?”
“About what?”
“You and Valerie.”
“About us going out?” I replied, my vocal cords beginning to atrophy.
“Call it that if you want. You seem like a nice kid. At least that’s what my daughter thinks, and that’s all that counts. Here are the rules in my house. I don’t impose my way on Valerie. She’s like her mother. Not afraid and not receptive to control by others. That said, she’s still my little girl, and that means no boy or man will ever abuse or disrespect her. If that happens, I get involved. Are you reading me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have any questions?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s it.” He picked up a teacup and drank from it.
“That’s it?”
“Yep.”
How about that for clarity of line?
“Is that Sterling Hayden in the photograph?” I asked.
He nodded and waited for me to go on. But I thought the less said, the better.
“What do you know about him?” he asked.
“He gave names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
“What are your thoughts on that?” he asked.
“I don’t have any.”
“How about your parents? What do they think?”
“My father said the ones who gave names should have taken their medicine. My father hates war. He was in the trenches in 1918. He says Russia’s objective is to bleed us white through its proxies.”
Mr. Epstein nodded, his eyes hazing in the way of adults when they’re no longer listening. “You ever meet Clint Harrelson?”
“Grady Harrelson’s father? I know who he is.”
“He’s the founder of a right-wing organization that would enjoy seeing people like me put in a soap dispenser. I’ve had a couple of personal run-ins with him. His organization called me a Communist in i
ts newspaper.”
“You’re not a Communist, are you, Mr. Epstein?”
“Not now.”
“Sir?”
“I think his son was after Valerie to prove something to his father. I told the father in front of the Rice Hotel that if either he or his son brought harm to my family, I’d shoot him.”
He drank from his teacup. It looked small in his hand.
“You said you’d shoot Clint Harrelson?”
“That was a mistake. I won’t do it again.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you, sir.”
“You don’t threaten a man. If he comes at you, you put him out of business. An evil man is not scared by threats. He’s scared when you don’t speak.”
He winked at me.
THAT NIGHT I WENT home and sat for a long time in my bedroom without turning on the light. The attic fan was droning above the hallway, drawing the air through the screened windows. I tuned the strings on my Gibson and played one song after another without thinking about the chords my fingers were shaping. I could not believe what had occurred earlier. In his house, within earshot of his daughter, Mr. Epstein had talked about the possibility of killing another man, the father of a student with whom I had gone to school. That the object of his hatred was Clint Harrelson didn’t matter. Mr. Epstein had been talking about murder. To compound my discomfort, I was sleeping with his daughter.
You have to understand that we felt differently about certain things years ago. I was a Catholic, and the idea of killing someone except in self-defense was not tenable. My other problem was Valerie. In the eyes of others, we were breaking a commandment. Except emotionally, that wasn’t how I felt. I loved Valerie, and it was through her that my entire life had changed. There was nothing impure about our love; it was bright and clean and innocent and natural, like the flame on a votive candle. I did not believe that God saw it differently. When I tried to work my way through my thoughts, I felt a pressure band along the side of my head, as though I were wearing a hat.
I had never needed to talk with my father as badly as I needed to talk with him that night. He was reading in the living room, but I didn’t seek him out. I let Snuggs and Bugs and my tabby cat named Skippy and my toy bird dog named Major climb up on the bed with me, each pointing its muzzle into the cool air flowing through the screen.
I tried to imagine a conversation with my father about Mr. Epstein’s threat and about my sleeping with Mr. Epstein’s daughter. How would my father react? Sometimes he went into rages over the use of a vulgar word.
I could try to talk with my mother, except that prospect gave me an even deeper sense of angst and foreboding. It wasn’t her fault. Her father had farmed her out to the kindness of strangers and resentful relatives. The bad memories of her childhood seemed to crawl under her skin. She reminded me of a crystal glass teetering on the edge of the drainboard, about to shatter in the sink. When I deceived her about where I had been or what I had done on a particular day, I did not feel I was committing a sin.
So I added one more day to my conspiracy of silence and put away my guitar and tried to shut Mr. Epstein’s words out of my ears. I turned on my radio with the volume low and, among all my animals, laid my head on my pillow in the breeze and the smells of the night and listened to Jo Stafford sing as she had to millions of GIs.
SABER WAS AT the house early the next morning, after both my parents had gone to work. Saber had two jobs: racking pins in the pits at the bowling alley, a job that only men of color and the roughest white kids in town did; and throwing the Houston Chronicle. For anyone else, a paper route was just a paper route. For Saber, it was similar to Charlemagne fighting his way up the canyons of Roncevaux Pass. After he rolled 115 newspapers with string, he packed them like artillery rounds into the passenger and backseat of his heap, and set out on the route, heaving a paper over the roof through a sprinkler onto a porch, when he easily could have dropped it onto a dry spot on the walk; smacking a leashed bulldog that attacked him while he was collecting; nailing a flowerpot of someone who was in arrears; parking just long enough to run through an entire apartment building with his canvas bag on his shoulder, stomping up and down the stairways, dropping papers in front of doorways, crashing out the back door like a deep-sea diver emerging into light.
He drank a cup of coffee on the back steps and watched me fill the bowls of all my animals. “Things all right with you and Valerie?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
“Because you always busy yourself with your cats and Major when you got something on your mind.”
“Pets can’t fill their own bowls, so give it a break.”
“Krauser is dogging me,” he said.
“Stop it,” I said.
“I saw him in my rearview mirror last night. I saw him this morning, too.”
“It’s coincidence. He lives a few blocks from your house.”
“More like a half mile. I saw his car at the Pink Elephant.”
“Saber, I don’t want to hear this. What were you doing there, anyway?”
“Surveilling Asshole. Jimmy McDougal was sitting in his car. Then Asshole came out of the club and drove away. Remember Jimmy? Two quarts down the day he was born? Why’s Krauser taking him to a dump like the Pink Elephant?”
“It’s not our business.”
“It is when he’s following us around,” Saber said.
“Are you sure about all this?”
“You think I want to believe somebody is copping that poor kid’s joint?”
“You really know how to say it, Saber.”
He looked at the animals eating from their bowls. “I’m thinking about joining the marines.”
“You’re just seventeen.”
“I can forge the old man’s signature. I’ll be at Parris Island before he can do anything about it.”
“Stop talking crazy.”
“Every day we seem to get deeper in a hole. It’s busting us up.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that. We’ve always been buds. I won’t ever let you down.”
“You told me to beat it because you wanted to get in the sack with a girl. I don’t hold it against you, but it doesn’t make me feel too good, either.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Yeah, you were. You thought me right out of the picture,” he said.
“Valerie and I are both sorry.”
“She’s sorry? What the hell does she have to be sorry about?”
“She’s got feelings. She’s got a conscience. You don’t know her.”
“She was Grady Harrelson’s girlfriend. She didn’t know he was a dickhead? Why’d they break up? She just discovered out of nowhere what kind of guy he is? ‘Oh, hey, Grady, a flashbulb just went off in my head. You’re a prick. Here’s your class ring.’ ”
“I never asked her.”
“I bet there’s a lot you didn’t ask her.”
“Say that again?”
“Did she get it on with Harrelson before she got it on with you? Were there other guys before him?”
“You can’t talk about her like that.”
“Why are you letting these people hurt us, Aaron?”
There were tears in his eyes. I tried to catch him in the porte cochere, but he fired up his Chevy and peeled rubber down the street, an acrid black cloud blooming from his pipes.
Chapter
8
NO MATTER WHICH way I turned, I saw only darkness. A Mexican girl was dead, and her death may have been related to me. My girlfriend’s father was threatening to kill a man and telling me about it in advance. Saber believed Mr. Krauser was part of a conspiracy involving homosexuality or pedophilia, and that he was following us around. Worse, Saber had made me doubt the nature of Valerie’s relationship with Grady Harrelson. She was too intelligent not to have realized the kind of guy he was. Why did she let him take her virginity? Or had someone else already done that? br />
I could not rid myself of the image of Grady and Valerie entwined naked in each other’s arms. I called her house, but no one answered. Didn’t she remember it was my day off? We had talked about cane-pole fishing off the jetties in Galveston. I called her house three times within ten minutes.
Think, I told myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Or at least I hadn’t intended to do anything wrong. I had a right to confront the people who were working out their problems on my back and Saber’s. Suddenly the man who had always seemed a scourge in my life seemed a minor player, someone whose job security demanded he conform to masculine and brutish parameters, a man who was more dolt than villain and not a threat. I’m talking about Mr. Krauser.
He lived by himself in a squat gravel-roofed house that resembled a machine-gun bunker, built of glazed brick that looked like plastic. There were no shrubs or flower beds in the yard; the St. Augustine grass was chemical green and as stiff and unnatural in appearance as the spikes in a rubber mat. The backyard contained an archery target stuffed with straw, a swimming pool made of plastic tarps, and a doghouse where a Doberman stayed unless it was killing the neighbors’ cats or the wild rabbits that lived in the neighborhood. The grass was pocked with yellow depressions from the mounds of dog shit that Krauser shoveled into a garbage can humming with flies.
He answered the door in a sweat-soaked Texas A&M jersey cut off at the armpits and a pair of gym trunks rolled to the crotch. He seemed surprised to see me, even pleased. “Broussard, what’s up, big man?”
“Need to talk to you, Mr. Krauser.”
“About what?”
“A delicate subject.”
“Come in. Get yourself in girl trouble?”
“No, sir.”
He closed the door behind me and turned the dead bolt, then cracked the curtain and looked through the window. The air conditioners were turned up full blast, the air frigid. “Where’s Saber?”
“He’s part of the reason I’m here.”
“If this is about the counselor job, it’s too late. Come in back. I’m lifting. Get yourself a soda out of the icebox.”
I followed him into a windowless room. The floor was concrete. There was a sweat-printed, leather-padded black bench in it, and a rack of barbells along the wall, and at least two hundred pounds of steel plates on the weight bar racked above the bench. On the wall were certificates of merit from booster organizations, a framed collection of military medals and ribbons and chevrons and a unit patch, a pair of women’s black panties pressed on pink felt under glass with a card that said “Liberating France one piece at a time,” a plaque with crossed cavalry swords on it, photos of Krauser bowling and performing on a trapeze and hitting softballs to young boys and playing with the Doberman, a letter of commendation from a group in Dallas called Patriots Unlimited, and a Confederate battle flag. In the corner was an old wooden desk with a lamp on it made from a German helmet and an artillery shell. There was an SS insignia on the helmet and a silver-smooth bullet hole an inch from that. A chrome-bladed dagger, the white handle inlaid with gold lightning bolts, lay on the desk blotter.