As a young person on the edge of discovering the world and shaking away the scales of your youth, did you ever have a day when you knew that for the rest of your life, you would be grateful that your father was your father and your mother was your mother, no matter how flawed they might be?
THAT EVENING SABER picked me up in his heap and we headed out to Bill Williams’s drive-in across from Rice University. Saber also wanted to go to the roller rink.
“Valerie’s old man was buds with Krauser?” he said.
“Maybe they were just fellow commandos or intelligence guys, something like that,” I said.
“Lose the doodah, Aaron. You’re talking about the guy who might become your father-in-law.”
“Okay, it’s a depressing prospect. What’s that tinkling sound?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
I looked at the backseat, then down at the floor. “What’s in those bottles?”
“Security,” he said. They were dark green, tapered at the neck, plugged with corks, rags tightly wrapped and taped around the bottom.
“Are they Molotov cocktails?”
“For backup, that’s all.”
“Your heap is a potential firebomb.”
“That’s the breaks. There’s worse things than going out in a blaze of glory.”
The summer-evening regulars were dragging South Main—low-riders, hoods, convertibles full of girls, bikers hunting on the game reserve, football jocks, scrubbed kids who went to church on Wednesday night, somebody lobbing a water bomb, music trailing from radios, Hollywood mufflers throbbing on the asphalt.
Saber pulled up to the drive-in and ordered fried chicken for both of us. Jo Stafford was singing “You Belong to Me” through the loudspeakers.
“This song haunts me,” I said.
“What for?” Saber asked.
“Because it’s the way things should be. Except they’re not.”
“You’d better stay out of your own head.”
“I think we got sucked in, Sabe.”
“Are you kidding? You’re a rodeo hero, and I’m back in action and at the top of my game. We’re unstoppable.”
I watched a car full of hoods go down the aisle, the radio blaring. “How’d you know Grady was shacked up in that motel?”
“Manny saw him and followed him there. Then he ran it by me.”
“In a city the size of Houston, Manny just happens to see a guy from River Oaks on the wrong side of town, a guy we happen to hate and whose car you boosted?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You didn’t think there was anything unusual about that?”
“No.”
“Did Manny tell you to boost the car?”
“I forget who had the idea first. What difference does it make?”
The hoods parked at the end of the aisle. One of them got out and walked to the men’s room. He was wearing drapes, a long comb sticking out of his back pocket, his shirt outside his belt, unbuttoned in front. He looked straight at me as he passed the car. He had a narrow face, a small mouth with crooked teeth, bronze-colored hair glistening with oil, and the thickest ducktails I had ever seen.
“Grady once told me he had connections with some Mexican hoods,” I said.
“So you’re saying Manny and Grady were working a scam to get me to steal Grady’s wheels with his money and gold bars inside?”
“No, I don’t guess that makes much sense. But it’s something similar.”
“You’ve got a worry machine in your head instead of a brain. On top of it, you don’t worry about the things you should.”
“Like what?”
“Vick Atlas, a guy who’s not only a psycho but whose father blowtorches people.”
“I cleaned his clock, and so far he hasn’t done anything about it,” I said foolishly.
“Because the cops put a cruiser in front of your house.”
“My father got rid of it. He said it was dishonorable.”
“After y’all went to the cops?”
“He said he didn’t ask for protection. He wanted the cops to do their job and put the Atlas family in jail.”
“I bet they got right on it,” Saber said.
The waitress brought us our chicken dinners and french fries and milkshakes on a tray. The hood came out of the men’s room combing and shaping his hair. Then he abruptly changed directions and walked to my window, sticking his comb in his back pocket. He leaned down, his breath sweet with chewing gum. “What’s happenin’, man?”
“No haps,” I said. “I know you?”
“I used to go to Reagan. I saw you at a couple of football games and a dance or two,” he said. “Loren find you?”
“Loren who?”
“Nichols, man. Loren Nichols. You’re Aaron Broussard, aren’t you?”
“Loren is looking for me?” I said.
“Yeah, he was here earlier. I thought I’d tell you.” He propped his elbow on the roof of the car, the wind riffling his shirt. “He was going to Herman Park with a couple of girls from Bellaire.”
“Loren is going out with girls from Bellaire?”
“I’m just passing the word, man. You guys want to smoke some tea?”
“No, thanks.”
He leaned down farther so he could look into Saber’s face. “Is your name Bledsoe?”
“What about it?” Saber said.
“I heard about you. You hung your johnson through a hole in the ceiling over a teacher’s head. That’s something else, man.”
Saber looked at him. “I just washed my heap.”
“So?”
“Try to keep your pits off it.”
“I’ll tell Loren I saw y’all,” the hood said. He tapped the window jamb and walked away.
“You know that guy?” I said.
“No.”
“You think he’s hooked up with Vick Atlas?”
“You know it,” Saber said. He put the wishbone he was eating back on the tray. “Man, oh, man.” He got out of the car.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I cain’t take this anymore.”
“Take what?”
“Getting jobbed by these guys all the time. Dangle loose.”
“Come back here, Saber,” I said, getting out of the car.
Saber walked to the driver’s window of the hoodmobile and leaned down. “I don’t know what that guy in the backseat told you, but he’s on the stroll. He just propositioned us and tried to get us over to Herman Park. I’m going inside now and call the cops. This is a class joint. If I were y’all, I’d dump this guy somewhere. Talk about no class.”
I thought we were dead. But nothing happened. Saber was glowing. In his innocence, he believed he had confronted evil and defeated it with guile. I don’t think that was the case. I believed the fear of the kids in the hoodmobile was so great that they would eat any insult rather than report back to Vick Atlas with information he didn’t want to hear. They were born poor and hid their insecurities by wearing the clothes of 1940s zoot-suiters, and they didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe the impulses that controlled their lives.
“We stuck it to them, didn’t we?” Saber said as we headed down South Main toward the roller rink.
I looked out the window without answering.
“Did I tell you I had a conversation with the organ player at the rink?” he said. “I think she digs me.”
“You’re the best, Saber,” I said.
The clouds were as yellow as sulfur and roiling in thick curds all the way to the horizon, as though we were trapped beneath an ocean that was sliding over the edges of the earth.
Chapter
31
I COULDN’T FALL ASLEEP that night. I didn’t get up until nine. My parents had already gone to work and my mother had fed our pets, which was usually my job. I made coffee and opened the morning paper. On the first page of the local section was a photograph of a pickup truck that had been hit broadside by a locomotive and mashed int
o scrap. The story stated that the driver of the pickup had tried to beat the rail guard and that he and his passenger probably died upon impact. Their names were Manuel Delgado and Cholo Ramirez, age twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively.
I felt perspiration break on my forehead. My stomach flared as though someone had dragged a match head across the lining. I called Cisco Napolitano. She picked up and cleared her throat before she said hello.
“I need to talk with you, Miss Cisco,” I said.
“You again?”
“Can I come to your apartment?”
“No. Stay out of here.”
“Why?”
“Why? You actually asked that? That wasn’t you who painted Vick Atlas’s shower wall with his head?”
“I need help,” I said. “I have to ask you some questions I can’t ask anyone else.”
I heard her make a brief sound, like air leaving a balloon. “Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Is anyone else there?”
“No, ma’am.” I gave her my address.
“I’m doing this for only one reason,” she said. “I called you a twerp. I regret that.”
“Are you in danger, Miss Cisco?”
“I’m going to bring needle and thread and sew your mouth shut.”
I SCRAMBLED EGGS AND chopped cheese and green onions and made more coffee and cut three roses off the trellis and put them into a bottle of water on the breakfast table. She pulled her Oldsmobile deep into the driveway, past the porte cochere, out of sight from the street. I almost didn’t recognize her. She was wearing a pair of bib overalls and a white T-shirt and checkered boat shoes without socks, her hair tied in a ponytail. I pushed open the back screen. Major and Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs ran inside with her.
“What’s all this?” she said, looking at the food on the breakfast table.
“A late breakfast or an early lunch or an omelet my dog would like.”
“I must have done something unpardonable in a previous incarnation,” she said. She sat down and looked up at me. She was not wearing makeup. The skin around her eyes was gray. “What did you want to know?”
“Last night I think some guys tried to set up Saber and me. I think they were humps for Vick Atlas.”
“They tried to lure you somewhere?”
“Herman Park.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Not much. Saber stuck it in their faces. There were five of them. They didn’t do anything about it.”
“They’re probably punks doing favors for Vick. What else do you want to know?”
“How did you know Saber boosted Grady’s convertible from in front of the motel?”
“One of the ignorant peons with him tried to fence a gold bar at a pawn store.”
I pushed the local section of the newspaper toward her. She glanced down at the photograph of the pickup truck twisted on the tracks.
“The two Mexican guys working with Saber were named Manny and Cholo,” I said.
She looked at the photograph and the lead paragraphs of the story a long time, then at me. “You believe they were murdered?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They weren’t. At least not by Atlas’s people.”
“Atlas’s hirelings have their standards?”
“They don’t disguise their work. They advertise it.”
“You want some coffee? Or eggs? Here.” I scraped them out of the skillet onto her plate. “I’ve got some toast coming up.”
She rested her forehead on her fingers. “All right, here it is. Two guys just arrived from Palermo. Real greaseballs. They never know the hit. The hit doesn’t know them. Their fingerprints aren’t on file. They’ve got figures like dildos and inkwells for eyes. After they do the hit, they go back to Sicily and bounce their children on their knee.”
“Who are they here to kill?” I said. My words sounded apart from me, hollow, deceitful. I didn’t want to hear the answer to my question. No, that was not it. I wanted her to say someone else was the target, not me or my family.
“Whoever Jaime Atlas tells them to kill,” she replied. “You split open his son’s face. It got infected. Maybe the old man will let it slide, maybe not. He wants the Harrelson money from Grady’s convertible. Don’t ask me how this is going to play out. I just want to get a lot of distance between me and people who smell like a garlic farm.” She picked up her fork and ate two bites.
“You look different,” I said.
“Yeah, I just joined the Mormon Choir.”
“You look like a lady who’s been working in her garden. I mean, your hair and your clothes. You look nice.”
I could see the irritation growing in her face. “You’re too young to be talking to me like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got six days off the spike,” she said. “I’m going to meetings where people follow some steps and get rid of the kinds of problems I have. I don’t know if it’s going to work or not. It probably won’t.”
She took a brown envelope from her overalls and set it on the table. It was tied with a piece of red cord. “There’s six hundred dollars in here. Take your parents and yourself on a vacation. Take Bledsoe with you. I’ll try to talk with Vick. The old man is out of the question. Ten years ago he bit the nose off his business partner.”
“I’m supposed to tell my parents we need to hide?” I said.
“If that’s what it takes.”
“That’s not the way my family does things.”
“Know how the South lost the Civil War?” she asked. “They never learned that after you’re dead, you can’t fight anymore. Sit down and eat, will you? You make me nervous. Look, maybe all this will go away. Give it time.”
“That’s what Mr. Epstein said. I think he’s just as much a killer as the Atlases are.”
“I’m not going to tell you what Jaime Atlas has done.”
“Detective Jenks has already told me.”
“Merton doesn’t know the half of it. There was a girl in a brothel in Reno.”
“Go on,” I said.
“You get your mother out of town.”
“Why my mother?”
“Jaime Atlas likes killing women. Who do you think you’re dealing with? Jaime Atlas is the devil.”
The toaster popped behind me. I jerked all over.
“Shit,” she said. Then she stared at the roses. “Did you cut those for me?”
“I was trying to brighten up things.”
“I’ve got no magic, Aaron.” She got up from the table. “Close your eyes.”
“What for?”
“Just do what I tell you.”
“Miss Cisco, I’m not sure this is appropriate.”
“Do it,” she said.
I shut my eyes. Then I felt her place her arms lightly around my shoulders and touch her lips against my cheek. When I opened my eyes, she stuck one of the roses into my shirt pocket. “You’ve got a nice home and family. Hang on to them.”
“Why did you put the rose in my pocket?”
“Probably because you deserve it and I don’t. Or something like that.”
She picked up the envelope with the money inside it and went out the screen door without saying another word. Major went to the screen and watched her walk away.
THAT EVENING I TOOK Valerie to see Viva Zapata! at the Loews Theater downtown. At first I wanted to see High Noon, but Valerie said it was an allegory about the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy and the prosecution of the Hollywood Ten.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“My father said so,” she replied.
Her information was probably correct, but if it came from Mr. Epstein, I didn’t want to hear it.
“I hear Brando is great as Zapata,” I said. “Anthony Quinn plays his brother. Joseph Wiseman plays Judas. I love Joseph Wiseman.”
“Okay, by all means, let’s see Zapata,” she said.
For two hours
we got lost in revolutionary Mexico. When we came out of the theater, the sky was turquoise, the wind flapping an American flag on a building across the street, the image of Marlon Brando in a sitting position and shot to pieces in a cattle lot imprinted upon our memory. I put my arm across Valerie’s shoulders. She looked so beautiful in the glow from the marquee that I ached inside. For just a moment I thought about the two of us throwing our suitcases into my heap and heading west on Highway 66, following the sun to Hollywood and the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu.
Then I saw a man across the street, in a boxlike 1940s four-door black sedan, wearing a suit and fedora despite the heat, his features barely visible in the shadows.
“Why are you stopping?” Valerie said.
“That guy in the black car.”
“What about him?”
“He has a camera. There, see? It has a telephoto lens.”
He pointed the camera at us. I shielded Valerie from his view, my back to the street. A dozen people surged by us on the sidewalk. When I looked again, the car had pulled into the traffic. This time I saw the driver clearly. His face had the texture of bad wallpaper; his eyes were wide-set, his fingers like sausages on the wheel.
A pedestrian collided into me. “Sorry,” I said.
“If I had a gal like that, I’d be distracted, too,” the pedestrian said.
The car turned the corner and was gone. I didn’t have time to get the license number.
“Who was he?” Valerie said.
“Cisco Napolitano says Jaime Atlas has brought in a couple of guys from Sicily.”
“Killers? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought maybe she exaggerated.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“That’s just piling more grief on them.”
“I’ll tell my father.”
“Maybe the guy was a tourist. Let it go.”
“You don’t want my father to know?”
“Everybody has to carry his own canteen,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s a pipeline expression.” I put my arm around her again. The muscles in her back were as hard as brick. “We’ll be okay,” I said. “Straight shooters always win.”
The Jealous Kind Page 31
