We walked along the gravel drive to our car. I didn’t hear the door close behind us. I did not look back. I had the feeling it would take Clint Harrelson a while to absorb what he had just been told. I also had the feeling Grady was about to become a pincushion.
I was right. But I found out about Grady’s private torment in a way I never thought possible.
In the meantime, I treated my old man to a cherry milkshake at the Walgreens on Westheimer, where we sat side by side at the counter, the jukebox playing, a big fan on the wall shaking to the beat of the band.
I KEPT MY JOB at the filling station, I think in part because the other white kid who worked there had been drafted, leaving only me to handle money when the owner wasn’t around. But I had to come in on Sundays, too, which meant if I wanted to attend Mass, I had to go at seven A.M. The church was located not far from the eastern border of River Oaks.
I hadn’t eaten, and after Mass I went across the street to Costen’s drugstore and ordered toast and a cup of coffee at the counter, then realized I had left my missal in the pew. The church was empty. Or at least I thought it was. I gathered up my missal and was going back out the side exit when I heard someone leave the confessional, either knocking the kneeler against the cubicle or banging the door. A moment later Grady Harrelson came through the exit. We were standing a few feet from each other in a shady patch of lawn between the church and the convent and a covered walkway with no one else around. The morning was still cool, the stucco walls of the church and convent streaked with moisture.
“Are you following me?” he said.
His eyes were red, his face pinched, perhaps heated, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps remorseful, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t feel any anger toward him. Or even resentment. If anything, I felt pity. “How you doin’, Grady?”
“I asked if you’re bird-dogging me.”
“This is where I go to church. I didn’t know you were Catholic.”
“I’m not.”
“Just visiting?” I said.
“You being a wisenheimer?”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”
“That’s a tough sell.”
“Did something happen in there?” I asked.
He looked at me warily. “Can those guys tell other people about what you say to them? I mean, if you’re not Catholic, can they tell?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“What does that mean?”
“No, they can’t tell anyone.”
He looked back at the church door, then at me. Then he stared at his convertible parked in the sunlight. The top was down, the white folds snapped against the body, every inch of the paint a creamy pink you could eat with a spoon.
“It’s not over between us,” he said.
“What isn’t?”
“Nobody slaps me in the face.”
“If I could undo it, I would. Anyway, it’s over for me.”
He had tried to change the subject, but it hadn’t worked. He humped his shoulders and scratched at his upper arm, narrowing his eyes, imitating the slouch and look of the street hoods he probably envied. “Sometimes you can do some shit you don’t set out to, know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied.
“That stuff I told you about Valerie, about getting it on with her? It’s not true.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to say anything more. He wrapped his arms across his chest. “You tell anybody about this, you know what’s going to happen, right?”
“Tell anybody about what?” I asked.
“Me being here.”
“Don’t get mad at me, Grady, but I’ve got news for you. Nobody cares whether either one of us is here. A bird just splattered your windshield. Nobody cares about that, either. These are not big events.”
“You’ve always got the cute comeback,” he said.
What do you say? I wondered what had occurred inside the confessional. I didn’t want to ask, but I thought I knew. “Can I help you, Grady? I’ve had a few hard times. We got off to a bad start. It doesn’t always have to be that way.”
His face was like a portrait painted on air, the eyes flat, the lips still. “No,” he said.
“No, what?”
“No, I don’t need help with anything.”
“I’d better get to work. See you another time,” I said.
The sun hadn’t climbed above the church, and the air was blue with shadow in the lee of the building. Purple roses bloomed against the stucco wall. He shook his collar as though he had overdressed and his body heat was trapped inside his shirt. He coughed on the back of his wrist. “How’s she doing?”
“Who?”
“Val.”
“She’s fine.”
“That’s good. Make sure she stays that way,” he said.
Why did he say that? What had Valerie told me about the jealous kind? They were unteachable and incapable of change? “What was that last part?”
“What I said.”
“You volunteered for the service,” I said. “You would have ended up in Korea if you didn’t have a medical condition. Why don’t you drop the hard-guy bullshit?”
“You don’t know anything about my military service, so shut your mouth, Broussard.”
“Don’t be telling me how I should treat Valerie.”
“You think you have to tell me I’m not yellow? You told my old man I helped tear up those guys who crashed a party on Sunset. Let me give you a news bulletin. I didn’t gang anybody. The guy behind most of it was Vick Atlas, the same guy who wants to chain-drag you and Bledsoe from his bumper. That’s not exaggeration.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything else. I was talking to a kid who would never be anything except a kid. But I had been at the party on Sunset Boulevard and seen what had happened, and I just couldn’t abide his lying, or maybe I couldn’t abide his proprietary attitude about Valerie. Even now, over sixty years later, I have a hard time with it. He called her “Val”?
“Those were your friends who spread-eagled that guy,” I said. “You could have stopped them. You were laughing when y’all walked off. The guy had to go to the hospital, at Jeff Davis, as a charity case. I thought that was pretty chickenshit.”
He didn’t reply. He bit his bottom lip, his body turned sideways, positioned to throw a hook straight into my face.
“You want to say something?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you what I feel like doing to you right now.”
“Then do it. I want you to.”
There was a blood clot in the corner of his left eye. His eyelids were fluttering.
“You think you’re a swinging dick because your old man told off my father?” he said. “My father could have your old man cleaning toilets, except he wouldn’t waste his time. Your old man’s a drunk. Your mother has been through electroshock. We could have you ground into paste if we wanted to.”
“The priest told you to turn yourself in,” I said.
His face went white. “What’d you say?”
“You owned up to something bad. Maybe it had to do with the dead Mexican girl. But you won’t turn yourself in because you’re a bum, Harrelson, and not worth spitting on.”
I walked away from him and didn’t look back. At the corner I saw him drive slowly out of the parking lot onto the street, too slow for the traffic. A car blew its horn. Grady didn’t react or accelerate and instead pulled to the light as though frozen in thought. When the light changed, he steered with the heel of one hand, not heeding a truck trying to turn in front of him. He seemed to have every characteristic of a man without a past worth remembering or a future worth living. But the words he had spoken about my father and mother had robbed me of all sympathy for him. The pity and charity I had felt only minutes ago were gone. I was the less for them.
My missal was still in my hand. I wondered what Saint Paul would have to say regarding my role as a bearer of the good news.
Chapter
14
THE DAYS PASSED, and Saber’s father took out a second mortgage on the Bledsoes’ run-down home and used the money to put up Saber’s bail and consult with an attorney, one he had found in the Yellow Pages. Saber called me as soon as he got home. I thought he wanted to get together. That wasn’t the case.
“We’re down to rat cheese and crackers at the house,” he said. “The old man is collecting newspapers to haul out to the mill. Ever been to the paper mill?”
The mill was located on several hundred square acres of piled trash swarming with seagulls. It was a wretched place peopled by the desperate and the poor who eked out a living by going door-to-door, asking others for their old newspapers and cardboard boxes and later selling them for a penny a pound at best. They had the despair in their faces of medieval ragpickers.
“You want me to ask my father if he can get your dad a job on a pipeline?”
“My old man thinks your dad talks to him like he’s a nigger. Those were his words.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“If you don’t see me for a while, it’s not because I ran off to the army,” he said.
“You going somewhere?” I said.
“I made some connections in the can. Remember the Mexican guys in the holding cell?”
“Those guys are pachucos. They’ll cut you from your liver to your lights,” I said.
“Been to some KKK meetings lately?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” I replied, my face flushing.
“See you in the funny papers, Aaron. Keep it in your pants. Oops, too late for that. How’s Valerie doing?”
I hung up.
I LOVED THE SUMMERTIME. The afternoon thunderstorms were the kind you stood in and took joy in the rain. When the sky cleared and turned a soft blue again, the clouds in the west were like strips of fire, or sometimes piles of plums and peaches. Every new day was a cause for celebration, no matter its content. And the explanation for the joy I felt was easy: I was not only in love with the season; I loved Valerie Epstein and I knew Valerie loved me.
I loved her smell and the smoothness of her skin and the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed. There was not enough time in the evening to do all the things that seemed created just for the two of us. Whatever we did was an adventure. We went to the ice rink in one of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods and to baseball games at Buffalo Stadium and to R&B concerts at the city auditorium, where whites had to sit in the balcony because the best seats and the dance floor were reserved for Mexicans and people of color.
For a dollar and a quarter we saw B.B. and Albert King, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace. On a Friday night we drove to Galveston and the Balinese Club, run by the Maceo family on a six-hundred-foot pier. The moon was up, the Gulf slate green, the waves tumbling through the pilings. The entranceway was framed with neon and hung with Japanese lanterns, the sky black and sprinkled with stars, the air heavy with the smell of an impending storm. We could hear a dance orchestra playing.
Valerie took my hand as we were about to go inside. “This is really uptown, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah, Frank Sinatra has sung here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Bob Hope played here, too.”
She started inside, tugging my hand. For no reason that I could explain, I hesitated. It wasn’t because the Maceo family owned the club. They owned casinos, bingo parlors, nightclubs, restaurants, and the slot machines in beer joints all over the island. I felt a vibration in my chest, the pressure band along the side of my head reappearing, warning signs I sometimes experienced before I had a spell. I glanced down the boulevard. “Maybe we should go to the Jack Tar and have a big fried-shrimp dinner.”
“Don’t they serve seafood here? I always heard it was special.”
“It’s real good, all right,” I said, touching the side of my head.
The front door opened, and a blond man in a summer tux and a glamorous woman in an evening dress came down the steps, confetti in their hair. The orchestra had just gone into “Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie.” Valerie had worn a new white dress.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll show you Sinatra’s and Hope’s pictures on the wall.”
Why had I hesitated? It wasn’t the club itself; it was the locale. Galveston was the turf of the Mob. The club was a reminder of something Grady Harrelson had said outside the church, that Vick Atlas wanted to chain-drag me and Saber from his car bumper. It was hard to shake the image from my mind, and I had not told either my father or Saber about Grady’s statement, trying in my futile fashion to avoid giving evil a second life.
At the far end of the pier was a casino. Only select guests and high rollers were allowed inside. But every kind of person was at the dining tables and on the dance floors that telescoped room after room down to the casino area. Seven French sailors were dancing together, unshaved, wearing their caps. We got a table by an open window and could smell the salt in the wind and hear the waves slapping against the pilings under the building. There was a checkered cloth on our table, and a candle burning inside a glass chimney, and silverware wrapped in bright red napkins. Valerie reached across the table and squeezed my hand. I had never seen her so happy. We ordered crab cocktails and a sample tray of everything on the menu and a pitcher of iced tea with spearmint leaves floating in it.
Then I saw him, the way you notice an aberrant person among a crowd of ordinary people, the way you take note of a smile that doesn’t go with someone’s eyes, the way the oily imprint of a man’s handshake can send a wave of nausea up your arm and into your stomach.
She followed my eyes. “Puke-o,” she said.
“You recognize him on sight?”
“He used to go to all the Reagan–San Jacinto games. Nobody wanted him there, especially the cheerleaders. He was always trying to make out with them.”
Vick Atlas was looking at us from a table across the dance floor, grinning in spite of the black patch he wore over one eye. He wiggled his fingers. I pretended not to see him. “Let’s dance.”
“I think we should stay where we are.”
“Why?”
“He’ll try to cut in.”
“We’ll tell him to drop dead.”
We danced, then came back to the table. A green bottle of champagne waited for us in a silver ice bucket. I called our waiter to the table. “This must be for somebody else.”
“No, sir, Mr. Atlas sent it to you with his compliments.” The waiter was wearing a starched white jacket and a black bow tie and high-waisted black trousers. “I think Mr. Atlas wants you to have it.”
“We’re hard-shell Baptists. Tell him we appreciate the thought.”
The waiter picked up the bucket with both hands, his expression dead, and walked to the bar, careful not to look in Atlas’s direction.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Valerie said.
“We don’t have room on the table for it,” I said. “Here comes our food.”
We started eating, neither of us looking up from our plates. I felt rather than saw Atlas walking toward our table. A shadow fell across my arm. “How you doin’?” he said.
“We’re doing all right,” I replied.
“You don’t like champagne?”
“Not tonight.”
“Because I saw you drinking beer at the Copacabana. Maybe y’all would like a beer. How about some German beer?”
I didn’t answer. Valerie was taking small bites of her food, her eyes lowered.
“No?” he said. “If you look out the window, you can see the baitfish jumping in the waves. That’s because a sand shark or a barracuda is after them. It’s a rough world out there. Underwater, I mean.”
“Those barracuda are bad guys, all right,” I said.
“Not as bad as some I know. Real bums. What do you think of my patch?”
I stopped eating and looked at the flame burning inside the glass chimney of the candleholder. “I didn’t notice.”
“What’s a guy have to do
to get your attention? I might end up with an empty socket.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I guess that’s the breaks. Is that the way you read it? Just a bad break?”
“I didn’t do it to you, Vick.”
“Did I say you did?”
“Leave us alone,” Valerie said.
“You’re Valerie Epstein,” he said. “You go to Reagan. I know some of your girlfriends.”
She looked out the window at the waves swelling as black and slick as oil under the moon, the candlelight flickering on her face. Her cheeks were red, as though windburned.
“How about a little slack, Vick?” I said.
“You want slack? You got it, Jack. I was just asking about my champagne. I thought maybe you didn’t like the year. Next time I’ll send over iced tea. Will you dance with me, Miss Valerie?”
“We’re eating,” she replied.
“I mean after you eat. I want to dance with you. Okay with you, Aaron?”
“Let’s go,” Valerie said to me.
“No,” I said.
“No, he says. Way to go, Aaron. You’re a stand-up guy. Did you know somebody boosted Grady’s pink convertible last night?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“An expert. Not many people can hot-wire a Caddy. Grady is torn up about it.”
“That’s a heartbreaking story,” I said.
“That’s why my father has got some of his friends looking for the guy who did it. Can I sit down before we dance?”
“What do you want, Vick? We haven’t done you any harm.”
“I know that now because you told me. If a guy like you tells me something, I know it’s gold. That’s straight up. From the heart. I wouldn’t feed you a line.” He dragged a chair from another table and sat down. “Where’s the Bledsoe kid tonight? Still in the can? Or out doing mischief? What a card.”
The Jealous Kind Page 15
