“Broussard?”
“Yep.”
“Tell me over the phone.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Mommy and Daddy are standing close by?” he said.
“Don’t be disrespectful of my parents. I think Grady Harrelson killed your cousin. You want to pull your head out of your ass or not?”
“Come up to the Heights and say that.”
“Count on it,” I said, and hung up.
But I didn’t get to keep my word.
Chapter
16
IT STARTED WITH my mother. Some days she took off early from work and rode the bus to a clinic where she talked to a counselor. There she sometimes saw the effeminate and odd kid named Jimmy McDougal. Poor Jimmy. He was the butt of everyone’s jokes, homely and awkward and gullible if someone showed him a teaspoon of kindness. He was in the corner of the waiting room, his hands clenched between his thighs, his face downcast as though he had wet his pants. My mother sat beside him and placed her hand on his back. “What’s wrong, Jimmy? It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, the soles of his shoes tapping up and down. “I’m tops.”
“You don’t have to hide things, Jimmy. You want to tell me what’s troubling you all the time?”
He shook his head adamantly. “I’m doing okay. That’s a fact, Miz Broussard.”
“Has Mr. Krauser hurt you?”
“Mr. Krauser takes me to ball games and shoots baskets with me at the Y. Leastways that’s how it’s been.”
“Tell me the truth, Jimmy.”
He crouched over, his fingers tightening, the blood leaving his knuckles. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Miz Broussard.”
“Come home with me. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’ve already warned Mr. Krauser.”
“Oh, Miz Broussard, I don’t want you doing that.”
“I told that vile man he’d better leave you alone or I’d take a quirt to him.”
“I’m already in trouble, Miz Broussard. I cain’t handle any more.”
“What are you in trouble about?”
“I say the wrong things sometimes. I rehearse the right thing to say, but it always comes out wrong. It doesn’t matter. I end up being a fool in front of others.”
“Is that your baseball cap?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get it,” she said.
They took a crowded bus in traffic and diesel smoke and hundred-degree heat down West Alabama, and got off at the icehouse where my father drank, and walked to our small ivy-covered brick home on Hawthorne Street. I was just about to head for the Heights and Loren Nichols’s house when they came through the front door.
“Aaron, fix us some ice water, please, while I talk to Jimmy,” my mother said. She pulled the long pin out of her pillbox hat and removed the hat and clicked on the ceiling fan in the living room.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I ran into Jimmy at the clinic, and now he and I are going to have a talk.”
I went into the kitchen, but I could hear every word through the open door.
“I know the signs, Jimmy. Where did that man touch you?”
“It was on accident. The first time, I mean.”
“The first time he touched you?”
“I took a shower at his house. We’d been working out. He was waiting for me to finish so he could take his shower. He bumped into me when I was coming out.”
“Out of the shower?” she said. “You were undressed?”
“Was I—”
“Were you naked?”
“Yes, I was naked. He almost knocked me down. He picked me up. That’s when he leaned over me and it touched me. On accident.”
“It? You mean—”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then he did it on another occasion but not on accident?” she said.
“The next week I stayed over at his house. I woke up in the middle of the night on the couch. He was doing something.”
“You don’t have to say any more, Jimmy.”
“I have to, Miz Broussard. He was rubbing my leg. He said I had a charley horse and was yelling in my sleep.”
“It’s all right, Jimmy. Where’s that ice water, Aaron?”
I didn’t want to go into the living room. I didn’t want to bring Jimmy more shame and embarrassment. In those days we didn’t have adequate ways of reporting sexual abuse or pedophilia. The victim was usually blamed or accused of lying; the issue would be buried, and anyone who raised it again was excoriated.
I put two glasses of ice water on a tray and set it down in the living room, then sat on the brick steps in the porte cochere with Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy and Major. The windows were open, and I could still hear my mother talking with Jimmy.
“You’re not fixing to call him up, are you?” he said.
“I’m so angry I can’t rightly say.”
“He’s not going to do it anymore. He’s done with me because of that woman.”
“Which woman?”
“Miss Cisco. She’s got a Rocket Eighty-eight and comes from Las Vegas or somewhere. Mr. Krauser said he’d be spending most of his time with her and I shouldn’t be hanging out at his place. Then she flushed him. I’m glad.”
“She broke up with him?”
“I was there when she did it. I went over there to get my bicycle after he said he was going to fix it and then stuck it in the garage on a nail. She said he’d broke his word to somebody about sending boys to a camp, and he was on Clint Harrelson’s S-list.”
“His what?”
“It’s a bad word.”
“I think I can survive it.”
“She said Mr. Krauser was on Clint Harrelson’s shit list.”
“I don’t care about any of that. I care about you, Jimmy, and what’s been done to you. We’re going to have a talk with Mr. Krauser.”
My mother’s manic personality had just shifted into overdrive. I knew nothing good would come of it. I got up from the steps and went through the side screen into the living room. “Mother, I think we should take Jimmy home and forget this.”
“We will not. Drive us to Mr. Krauser’s house, Aaron.”
“Bad idea, Mother. Mr. Krauser isn’t going to change his stripes because people take him to task.”
“There is only one way you treat white trash,” she replied. “As white trash. This man is not only white trash, he’s a deviant. Now drive us there, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The events that would follow remain among the most embarrassing and tragic in my life. Even today I have a hard time writing about them.
I DROVE THE THREE of us to Krauser’s machine-gun bunker of a house, my mother in the passenger seat, Jimmy McDougal in back. With his high forehead and wispy blond hair and milk-white skin and lack of definable eyebrows, he looked like a space alien that had been trapped and stuck in a cage. My mother was holding her riding quirt in her lap.
“You’re not going to use that, are you?” I said.
“That’s up to him,” she replied.
I pulled to the curb in front of Krauser’s house.
“No, in the driveway,” she said. “So he doesn’t try to escape in his car.”
After I cut the engine, she reached over and blew the horn and got out and banged on Krauser’s door. When he answered, he was wearing a navy blue suit and dress shirt without a tie, his hair wet-combed, as though he were preparing to go somewhere. I never saw a man look so stunned.
“Step out here, Mr. Krauser,” my mother said.
“Do you want to come in?” he said.
“No, I do not. You come out here right now and you apologize to this boy. You also will promise in front of me and him and Aaron and God and anyone else listening that you will never go near him again.”
I could see the confusion and fear in Krauser’s eyes. But something else was at work in his psyche or his metabolism that was far worse. I was t
oo young to understand how mortality can steal its way without apparent cause into the life of a man who should have been in his prime. His skin was gray and beginning to sag; hair grew from his ears and nose; he had buttoned his shirt crookedly. He looked like he had gone through the long night of the soul.
“I was on my way to the doctor,” he said.
“You should probably call your minister instead,” my mother said.
“Aaron, you and Saber broke into my home, didn’t you?” he said. “Tell me the truth. I won’t hold it against you. I need to know this.”
“No, we didn’t, Mr. Krauser,” I said.
“You step out here right now, you terrible man, or I’ll come in after you,” my mother said.
“Mother, please,” I said.
The next-door neighbors had come out of their house. The postman and a woman on her porch across the street were watching. A car slowed in the street, the driver and a woman looking at us.
“Damn you,” my mother said. I was sure at this moment that she was no longer addressing Krauser but somebody in her past, a featureless man who had violated her in her sleep.
She struck the first cut across his face, then beat him methodically, slashing him every place she could. The quirt was stiff and hard, the leather sewed tightly around a metal rod, with a braided knot on the end. Krauser cupped his hands over his head as though he were being attacked by bees. I had to pin my mother’s arms to her sides to make her stop.
We left Mr. Krauser bleeding in the doorway and drove home, all of us silent, numbed by what we had done or seen.
Back home, my mother went into the bathroom and locked the door and stayed there. When my father came home from work, I told him what had happened. He tapped on the bathroom door, his eyes lowered. When there was no response, he put on his hat and walked to the icehouse.
That night Mr. Krauser managed to get inside one of the tallest buildings in downtown Houston. Then he worked his way up a stairwell and found a fire exit that led to the roof. He plunged fifteen floors to the concrete.
I TALKED TO SABER at Costen’s drugstore the next morning. “It was almost like he wanted us to be the guys who tore up his awards and medals rather than somebody else.”
“Why would he want it to be us?” Saber said, sucking a strawberry milkshake through a pair of straws.
“Because he thought it was somebody Clint Harrelson or his people sent.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“I don’t have the answers, Sabe. My mother stayed home from work, then went to church. She never goes to church.”
“You think Krauser lost sleep while we were in jail? You think he cared about my father getting fired? He was mixed up with Grady Harrelson’s old man. All of them deserve whatever happens to them.”
Through the window I could see our two heaps in the parking lot. Coincidentally, we had parked next to each other, our hoods pointed in opposite directions. A Studebaker was parked next to Saber’s heap. Two Mexicans in drapes were in the front seat, the doors open to let in the breeze.
“I saw Jenks yesterday,” I said. “He asked about you.”
Saber raised his eyes. A big electric fan was oscillating near the comic book rack, flipping hundreds of pages with each sweep. “What’d you tell him?” he said.
“Nothing of importance.”
“Screw him, anyway.”
“Get loose from those guys out there,” I said.
“Which guys?”
“The ones in the Studie.”
He stabbed at his milkshake with his straws.
“Did they boost it?” I asked.
“Who’s going to boost a Studie?”
“Somebody who knows they’re already collectibles.”
He glanced at the parking lot, then back at me. I thought he might say something indicating the old Saber was still with me. Come on, Sabe. Two or three words. Or just one.
But the only sound I heard was the comic book pages rippling. I looked through the window at the two Mexicans. They were relaxing, the seats pushed back, their eyes closed. They had unbuttoned their shirts, exposing the hair and ink on their chests. For just a moment I hated them, or at least I hated what they represented.
“Why do you have that look on your face?” Saber asked.
“They’re drug pushers,” I said. “They’re worse than pimps. They betray their own people.”
“Who’s worse? Guys born in a bean field who get called pepper-bellies and spics all their lives, or a ball of shit like that detective who tried to frame us?”
“Why did Krauser want to believe you and I broke into his house?”
“When we have some free time, we can dig him up and ask.”
I got up from the booth. “I’ll see you, Sabe.”
“Aaron?” he said.
He took a long, dry drag off the dregs of his milkshake. I was smiling at him. Say it, Sabe. Be the innocent kid you are. Be my old-time bud.
“I lost my virginity in Reynosa,” he said. “Outlawry has got its upside. The downside is I probably picked up a nail. Krauser was a prick. I hope the devil throws him a beer once in a while.”
He grinned as though he had neutralized the enormous gulf that lay between us.
On the way out of the drugstore, I bought a Captain Marvel comic book so I could pretend to read it and not acknowledge the Mexicans who had been our cellmates. I heard one of them sink an opener into a beer can, then smelled the beer spraying in the air and splattering on the asphalt. When I looked back, both of them were laughing and wiping beer out of their hair, indifferent to the family people wheeling grocery baskets through the parking lot.
I started my engine and headed for Loren Nichols’s house.
AS SABER WOULD have said, I was back in Indian country, more specifically in Loren’s two-track dirt driveway, next to his termite-eaten, two-story nineteenth-century house sitting on cinder blocks. The old woman with the maniacal glare was sitting in her rocking chair, her hair tangled like wire. I got out of the car. “Is Loren home, ma’am?”
She made no reply. Her body was withered, her dugs exposed, her hands little more than bird claws.
“I’m back here, if you want to talk to me,” a voice said.
Loren was standing in the doorway of a paintless garage, bare-chested, a screwdriver in his hand. The woman took no notice of him. I didn’t know if her face was twisted in fear or silent rage. But I didn’t want to be rude and walk away from her. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “There’s Loren now. It was nice meeting you.”
Why did she bother me so? Because I had seen the same look in my mother’s eyes, no different in portent than a cave filled with startled bats. I walked to the garage. “Is that your grandmother?” I asked Loren.
“That’s my mother.”
“Sorry. Is your dad here?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I don’t know. I just asked. I wasn’t thinking.”
“He’s in Huntsville.”
“He’s doing time?” I said.
“No, he’s a gun bull. You ask too many questions. Is this about your teacher who bailed off a building?”
“It’s about your cousin Wanda Estevan.”
“You put me in mind of a hemorrhoid, Broussard. No matter where I go, there you are.”
“You want Vick Atlas and his old man on your case? He threatened to drag me behind his car. You know who Vick Atlas is, right?”
His attention seemed to wander, linger in space. He flipped the screwdriver in the air and caught it. “Atlas said that to your face?”
“More or less.”
“Talk to me while I work. Don’t lean against the wall. The whole place will fall down.” He went inside the garage to a workbench that had an amplifier and a soldering iron and a cherry-red electric guitar on it. He propped his hands on the bench and stared at the motes floating in a shaft of sunlight. His spine was etched against his skin, both sides of his back crosshatched with scars, some as fine as
a cat’s whiskers. When we’d fought, he had been bare-chested, but I hadn’t seen the injury someone had done to his body.
“I’m going to line it out for you,” he said. “You tell anybody we’re talking to each other, you and me are going to have another go at it. Comprendo? Wanda was hooking out of a couple of clubs in Galveston and sometimes in Big D because a lot of political guys live there. The clubs were a setup to blackmail politicians and big shots in the oil business. That’s where she met Harrelson.”
“He was a customer?”
“No, he hangs with Atlas and pretends he’s a hood and a rich-boy badass. He took Wanda out a couple of times, and he probably got it on with her, since that was her line of work. Except she fell in love with him. Then he dumped her and she went nuts. That’s when you came along.”
“At the drive-in in Galveston?”
“Harrelson knew you’d be coming to Valerie Epstein’s house, and he told us to mess you up.”
“And you did it because he told you?”
He began soldering a wire inside the amplifier. Then he set down the iron. The scars across his back looked like lesions that had healed badly. “Harrelson said if we ran you off, he’d get Wanda cut loose from her job and send her to beautician school. He promised to get my brother a Teamster card.”
“Cut her loose?” I said.
“Where’ve you been? You think you resign from the Mafia and file for unemployment?”
“What happened to your back?”
“Poison ivy.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you look like Chet Baker?”
“Yeah, I hear that all the time. What’s with you, man? You got a black carrot growing on your brain?”
“Can I see your guitar?”
“He’p yourself.”
I picked it up and worked the strap over my shoulder. The cherry finish was chipped, but the neck was straight, all the surfaces clean, the tuning pegs lightly oiled, the strings new and hovering just above the frets.
“It’s a little out of tune. Mind?”
“Do whatever you want,” he said, and went back to working on the amplifier. But he was looking out the side of his eye and was not as disinterested as he pretended.
“Know what a problem of conscience is?” I said, twisting the tuning pegs.