“Lay off that stuff, man.”
“I hear you. I can’t take unctuous people.”
“Take what kind?”
“When we fought, I wanted to kill you, Loren. I would have done it if Saber hadn’t stopped me.”
“I told you to shut that down, didn’t I? I don’t owe anybody, and that means they don’t owe me. You asked about my old man. My mother had me when she was forty. That was when my father traded her in on a pair of twenties. I grew up rolling winos and breaking into vending machines. Anything Gatesville could throw at me, I’d already seen. I said fuck you to all of them then; I say fuck you now. That’s my flag, a big fuck-you in capital letters. You got my drift?”
“You bet.” I took a plectrum from my watch pocket and formed an E chord on the guitar neck. I drew the plectrum across the strings. “Where’d you get it?”
“Eddy Pearl’s pawnshop on Congress.”
“It has a nice touch. No rattle in the frets.”
Again, he pretended not to care about my interest in his instrument. He bent over the amplifier, smoke from the soldering iron rising into his face, his scars stretching into pale wisps.
“You ever see a photo of the Shroud of Turin?” I asked.
“The what?”
“Forget it.”
“Pardon me for asking this, but do you drop yellow jackets?” he said. “Because frankly, you’re a little strange. No, don’t say anything else. Plug the guitar in. Let’s see what happens. I’m not kidding you, man. I think you fried your Spam somewhere along the track.”
“Thanks,” I said. He rolled his eyes.
I plugged the guitar into the jack on the amplifier and stroked the E chord again. All six notes of the configuration bloomed like magic from the speakers. For the first time since I met him, Loren Nichols smiled. “Man,” he said.
I started to take off the strap and hand him his instrument.
“No, I learned G and D, but that’s it,” he said.
“I’ll show you something,” I said. “You already know D. So this is how you make E, except you turn it into what is called a covered E and run it up and down the neck. Watch, I’m just using E and D.”
I began picking out “The Steel Guitar Rag.” He folded his arms on his chest and raised his eyebrows. “That’s something else, man.”
“You know ‘Malaguena’? Same key of E.” I ran through the first three chords of the famous Andalusian song by Ernesto Lecuona.
“Shit, man,” Loren said.
“Try it.” I handed him the guitar.
He struggled with the chords at first. I fitted his fingertips on each string, then showed him how to slip the chord up the frets, covering all six strings.
“You’re better than you thought,” I said.
“I don’t know about that.” He took a cigarette from behind his ear and put it into his mouth. He slipped a match folder from his jeans, then flipped it onto the workbench without lighting his cigarette and tried sliding the chord up and down the guitar neck again.
“I need to square with you about something, Loren. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t worried about Vick Atlas’s threat.”
“You scared?”
“Call it what you want.”
“You want it straight up?” he said.
I waited.
“You should be worried,” he said. “Atlas has brain damage. His old man hit him in the head or something. When you ’front a guy like that, you don’t let him deal the play.”
“I’m supposed to go after him?” I said.
“No, that’s what he wants. You wait for him to come to you. And believe me, he will. A dipshit like that wants an audience. So you let him put on his show. You dummy up. You don’t act cute. You don’t try to be a nice guy. You’re D, D, and D. You know what that is, right?”
I nodded.
“So he’s having a ball. About to get his rocks. Maybe his girlfriend is watching. He thinks you’re browning your Fruit of the Looms. That’s when you tag his ass.”
“Tag?”
He put the guitar on the blanket and opened a drawer under the workbench. “This is a thirty-two. All the numbers have been burned with acid. The electrician’s tape is inside out so your prints cain’t be lifted. You put a pill between his eyes. If you have time, you put extras in his ear and mouth. If you take it with you, pour motor oil on it and throw it in a bayou or saltwater. Take it. It’s yours.”
“No, thanks.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“I guess it will just have to be my mistake.”
“A minute ago you said something about a Shroud of Whatever. What is it?”
“The burial cloth of Christ.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said.
“Probably,” I said.
He dropped the revolver in the drawer and shut it. “You don’t want to smoke Atlas, that’s your choice, Broussard. There’s a possibility we didn’t discuss. What if he gets his hands on Valerie? Close your eyes and let your imagination go. Tell me what kind of pictures you see.”
A drop of sweat slid like an icicle down my side into my underwear.
Chapter
17
FIVE DAYS AFTER Mr. Krauser jumped to his death, my mother and I attended his funeral in a small Protestant church near his house. The casket was closed. There were perhaps a dozen people in the pews. One was the assistant principal. Two were faculty members. There were no students. Mr. Krauser’s father, a stooped man with dandruff on his shoulders who carried an oxygen bottle on a strap, placed a yellow rose on the coffin. The minister read three passages from the Book of Psalms that seemed to have little to do with Mr. Krauser. A man from his bowling team tried to read a tribute, then dropped his notes and couldn’t straighten them out and had to ad-lib the rest of the testimonial. He concluded by saying, “Give them hell wherever you’re at, Krausey.” Outside, a woodpecker hammered its beak into a telephone pole.
Maybe Mr. Krauser had virtues. Maybe he refused to deliver up young people to Clint Harrelson’s indoctrination camps and paid a price for it. Maybe he was driven by compulsions he didn’t understand. Regardless, I didn’t feel sorry for him. He used his power to humiliate and degrade and to inculcate shame and self-hatred in others. To me there was no lower form of life on earth, including drug pushers and pimps.
I believed there was only one victim in the church, and that was my mother. Her eyes didn’t see; her speech was lifeless, her attention span nonexistent. The clinical depression that had been passed down in the Holland family like an heirloom had taken up residence in her soul once again. Over the years, pharmaceutical and vitamin injections and hospitalization and electroshock treatments had been like raindrops blowing against the bulletproof glass of her neurosis. I learned early on that people do not have to die to go to hell. As I sat next to her in the pew, I knew she had already departed from us and taken up residence in the privation and abandonment of her youth.
If I felt any emotion toward Mr. Krauser at all, it was resentment. Like most suicides who stage their departure in Technicolor, showering the walls or sidewalk with their blood, Krauser had left a legacy of sackcloth and ashes for someone like my mother to wear. As we walked out of the church, I put my arm around her. Her bones felt as frail and hollow as a bird’s. I wanted to kick Krauser’s coffin off its gurney.
If there was any drama at the funeral, it took place across the street, where I saw Jimmy McDougal sitting on his bike under a live oak. I put my mother into the car and caught him as he was about to pedal away. I believed that Krauser had molested him in one way or another. Jimmy’s parents were uneducated and poor, and often he wore clothes that came from the welfare store. I also believed he was experiencing the same kind of guilt over Krauser’s death as my mother was.
“Where you goin’, partner?” I said.
“Nowhere.”
His legs were forked on either side of the bike frame, his hands clenched on the rubber grips. An ar
my-surplus haversack, one with pockets on it, was in the delivery basket mounted on the front fender.
“You got your lunch in there?” I said. “It smells good.”
“I’m working at the drugstore. I just came by, that’s all. I got to get going.”
“Jimmy, you can’t let this worry you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said.
“You’re a good guy. Everybody knows that. Mr. Krauser was no good.”
“How come you’re here?”
“My mother feels bad. But she shouldn’t feel that way, and neither should you.”
“I’m late, Aaron.”
“Come by if you feel like it. We can go to a show or out to Buffalo Stadium for a ball game. How about that?”
“Sure, Aaron. Thanks. I’ll see you.”
He put his right foot on the pedal and was almost gone when I saw a smooth white cylindrical object protruding from a pocket on the haversack. I grabbed the handlebars. “Hold on.”
“Let go,” he said.
“No, what’s that sticking out of your bag?”
“Nothing,” he said, pulling the flap down.
But I had already seen the two gold SS lightning bolts inlaid in the handle of the knife that had been on Krauser’s desk.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
“Mr. Krauser gave it to me.”
“A guy like Krauser doesn’t give away his war souvenirs.”
“He did. I swear he did.”
“You and Saber broke into his house and tore up his things. Tell me the truth. Come on, buddy.”
He tried to twist the handlebars from my grasp, then bounced the front tire up and down, rattling the basket. “I’ve got to go. I’ll get fired.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone, Jimmy. But you have to level with me. Saber has been taking me over the hurdles. Now he’s running with some really bad guys. In the meantime, I got arrested for what you guys did.”
“I’ll go to Gatesville. You ever hear what it’s like in there? Why are you doing this to me? You know what they’ll do to me?”
He was right. The law was enforced on the people it could be enforced on. In this case it was a retarded boy who hadn’t had a chance from the day he was born. I let go of the handlebars. “You were just getting back at Mr. Krauser for what he did to you, Jimmy. Come with me to the rodeo. I’m riding bulls this year in the adult competition.”
I tried to smile. But Jimmy was terrified. He pushed off with one foot, careening out of the shade, fighting to gain control of his bike, his pale skin and wispy hair almost translucent in the raw light of the sun.
THAT EVENING I TOOK Valerie to a movie. I don’t remember the name of the movie or what it was about. I discovered that my memory had taken on an odd aspect. When I was with Valerie, I remembered only having been with Valerie. Everything else was an adverb. Wherever we went, I was conscious of her touch, the smell of her hair, the light in her eyes.
She wore pleated skirts and oxfords and pink tennis shoes and white blouses with frills, and was easily recognizable as a member of her generation, but she was somehow always above it. She chewed gum constantly. I never knew anyone who chewed so much gum, boxcar loads of it. She was a member of the National Honor Society, the drama club, 4-H, the chess club, and the debate team. I felt proud any place I went with her. I always wondered if her dead mother or her widowed father had the greater influence on her. Perhaps neither of them did. The Nazis had killed her mother during the war, and Mr. Epstein’s work caused him to be out of town more than he was at home. As far as I knew, she had raised herself. That night I asked her what kind of rules her dad had taught her.
“None,” she replied, as though surprised by the question. “He took me dancing when I had my first period. He said I was a young woman now, and that meant he would always honor my choices as a woman and he would not impose his way upon me. He said he would never judge me but would always be there in my defense, regardless of the circumstances. He said if a man ever violated or tried to molest me, he would kill him and the people with him.”
The gospel according to Mr. Epstein.
She kissed me on the cheek.
“What’s that for?”
“For being the good boy you are,” she replied.
“I’ll be eighteen this fall.”
She kissed me again.
You wonder why I always wanted to be with Valerie?
Valerie’s greatest time commitment wasn’t to her clubs or school assignments; it was to reading in the public library. The great gift of the government to our generation was the WPA program known simply as the bookmobile. Those of us who loved books didn’t learn to love them at school; we learned a love of literature by reading the adventures of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Richard Halliburton. One day Valerie would probably become a librarian. For now she had formed an almost religious faith in the knowledge a person could discover on her own in the musty shelves of a small library in North Houston.
We went for a soda after the show, and I told her that Saber and Jimmy McDougal had vandalized Krauser’s home and that Saber had betrayed me.
“You can’t be sure of that, can you?” she said. “Jimmy what’s-his-name didn’t actually tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to. I always thought Saber was involved. When I asked him, he slipped the punch. The funny thing is that Krauser wanted to believe we did it.”
“Why?”
“Because he was afraid of Clint Harrelson and the kind of people who work for him. He probably thought he and Saber and I were being set up, and Cisco Napolitano dumped him because he wouldn’t use his influence to get kids into Harrelson’s indoctrination camps. A guy who went all the way to the Elbe River killed himself for no reason.”
Maybe my reasoning was self-serving and I was exonerating my mother at the expense of a suicide victim, but I didn’t care. She had paid enough dues in this world, and Krauser had not, no matter how many Nazis he had killed.
She pushed aside her black cow and took a pencil and pad from her purse. “What was the title of that book Clint Harrelson was reading when you and your father went to his house?”
“I saw the word ‘eugenical’ on the cover. It was written by a guy named Laughlin.”
She wrote it down. “I’ll get right on this.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t get too involved,” I said.
She gave me a look that made me blink. That was the downside of being in love with Valerie Epstein. You didn’t tell her what to do.
“I mean, Detective Jenks has evidently been after these guys for years. The only thing he’s gotten for it is indigestion.”
“Where is Saber now?”
“With a couple of Mexican drug dealers.”
“Tell him I want to talk to him.”
“What about?”
“He let you get arrested for a crime he committed. I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”
“Let’s take a pass on that,” I said.
Under the table, she put both of her tennis shoes on top of my cowboy boots.
“If I see him, I’ll tell him,” I said.
She pounded her feet up and down.
“I’ll call him,” I said.
“You never know when I’m kidding you, do you,” she replied.
I never saw anyone who had so much light in her eyes.
SHE MADE CLINT Harrelson the subject of her private investigation at her neighborhood public library, then expanded her operation to the library at Rice University. The filling station where I worked was a short distance away. The campus was green through the summer and winter and filled with oak trees, the buildings deep in shadow at sunset. As I approached her in the reading room and saw her at one of the tables, writing in her notepad, books spread open around her, I was reminded of Nancy Drew waging war with her fountain pen against the sinister forces that threatened to destroy River Heights. Even though Valerie’s mother had been murdered b
y Nazis, she believed that people were basically good. I did not think she would find anything in either a public or university library that would tell us anything we didn’t know about Clint Harrelson or the people who ran the Galveston underworld. But I dared not tell her that.
“What’d you find?” I said, sitting down across from her, still wearing my green-and-white-striped gas station shirt.
“Clint Harrelson went to a military academy in Virginia,” she said. “He had a senatorial appointment to West Point, but he was expelled for hazing another cadet. Guess what? He did it again at Northwestern. Mr. Harrelson and his fraternity brothers hung a boy by his feet off a pier and ending up dropping him on the rocks. They not only killed him and hid the body, they did the same thing to another kid later on, although he survived.”
“Where’d you get all this?”
“The Chicago newspapers are on microfilm. Guess what Mr. Harrelson has a degree in. Anthropology. Look what I found on the Atlas family and the Mob’s operations on the Gulf Coast.”
I didn’t want to see it. I had no doubt about the kind of people the Harrelson and Atlas families were. They and others just like them did business with baseball bats while the law and decent people looked the other way. There were brothels and gambling joints along the entire rim of the Gulf of Mexico, even in Mississippi, which was supposedly a dry state, and they operated openly and with sanction by the authorities. Slot and racehorse machines were everywhere, and Louisiana cops in uniform with their badges pinned to their shirts worked behind the bar and served mixed drinks to underage kids. But I didn’t want Valerie to know how I felt about the information she had worked so hard to find. Who wanted to offend Nancy Drew?
I read her notes and looked at the marked pages in the books and feigned as much interest as I could. “I haven’t eaten supper yet. How about we go over to Bill Williams’s for some fried chicken?”
“I have to go home and help my father with the income tax,” she said.
“You have time for a cold drink?”
“I’d better not. I’ll see you tomorrow, Aaron.”
I walked her to her car. It was her father’s, a four-door Chevrolet. Back then most families had only one car; many had none. The Epstein car was parked in a cul-de-sac in the shadows of slash pines silhouetted against the sun. It had just rained, and the windows and roof were showered with pine needles. The lights were on in the dormitories and the offices of a few professors; I wanted to believe they were a reminder that civilization was a constant and evil was not. But I couldn’t shake the trepidation in my chest. It was the way I had felt before I swam out to the third sandbar south of Galveston Island into a school of jellyfish. I didn’t want to let go of her.