“I went to the gun store where your father bought the army forty-five. That’s the same caliber weapon used to kill Mr. Harrelson.”
“You think my father would commit a murder? That’s insane.”
“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” Jenks said. “Sometimes the state doesn’t care who gets head-shaved and has cotton stuffed up his colon before he’s strapped down and bucked through the ceiling. Sometimes they don’t care if it’s a woman, either. As long as somebody rides the bolt, the average person doesn’t give a shit. You think cops are your problem, son. You’re wrong.”
“I’m not going to talk to you anymore, Detective Jenks.”
He had opened his notebook on the table but had not written one word in it. The wind was blowing the pages on the metal rings. “You know who Jack Hemingway is?”
“Ernest Hemingway’s oldest son.”
“I jumped with him behind German lines on D-day. He was shot and captured by the SS. The SS didn’t take wounded prisoners. Jack was going to be executed, but an SS colonel who’d skied with Jack’s father had him transferred to a hospital. True story.”
“What happened to you?”
“I escaped.”
“Why tell me this?”
“Because you kids in Southwest Houston read a couple of books and think you know it all.”
“Why don’t you stop lying, sir?” I said.
He was wearing his fedora, but the darkness in his face was not from the shadow of the hat. He closed his notebook and lifted his forefinger. “I’m not above hitting you. I’ll do it.”
“You never told me you were a cop in Nevada.”
He got up from the bench, a gray odor like nicotine and antiperspirant and beer sweat wafting off his body. He dropped his business card on the table. “Tell your father to call me. He’s not a suspect. We found his name in a journal kept by Clint Harrelson. Evidently he considered your father a subversive and was going to report him to Harrelson’s fellow paranoids in Dallas. Tell your father I need to ask him a couple of questions so I can eliminate him from the investigation.”
“Was Miss Cisco your girlfriend?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. Or he pretended not to. Instead he sniffed his forearm. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I still think she has qualities. Maybe her life would have been different if she’d gotten a break or two.”
“Kid, you deserve everything that will probably happen to you. By the way, a vice officer told me your friend Bledsoe is dealing goofballs in the Heights. If you see him, tell him he’d better find me before I find him.”
Chapter
21
SABER’S FATHER HAD gotten a job with Jolly Jack ice cream. I suspected it was a terrible humiliation. The Jolly Jack carts were pedal-powered and usually driven by teenagers who had dropped out of school. Each morning Mr. Bledsoe reported to a warehouse next to a horse pasture and, alongside the kids, packed his cart with dry ice wrapped in newspaper and boxes of Popsicles and fudge bars and Dixie Cups, then pedaled off in ninety-five-degree heat, unshaven and unbathed and smelling of bulk wine and sometimes vomit from the previous night. Who could blame Saber for being in a funk?
Of course, the problem was more than a funk. He had given himself over to a couple of bad Mexican huckleberries. I went by his house; his mother told me she had no idea where he was.
“He’s still living here, isn’t he, Miz Bledsoe?” I said.
“Like you give a damn,” she replied, and closed the door in my face.
I knew where to find him, though. At least on a balmy summer evening, I did. Saber had fantasies. One of them involved meeting a beautiful girl at the roller rink on South Main. He would drive his heap out to the big tent filled with organ music and the grinding of roller-skate wheels on the hardwood floor and the steady hum of the giant fans in back, and park by the entrance so he could see the skaters inside. He would comb his hair in the rearview mirror, sweeping it back on the sides, and smoke cigarettes and drink from a quart bottle of Jax and pretend he was waiting for someone. Finally he would wander inside and eat a Baby Ruth and watch the girls roaring past him, all of them holding hands, speeding up and slowing down, sometimes skating backward. They wore pastel angora sweaters and poodle skirts and wide shiny black belts, and the bold ones might have on hoop earrings and uplift bras, and when they went by in a group, he could smell them like a garden full of flowers. Their eyes never met his. He could have been a wooden post.
He would return home and go to bed and probably masturbate and hide his underwear in the bottom of the clothes hamper and, in the morning, resume his role as the carefree trickster who looked down on the romantic rituals that governed every high school in America.
I had to remind myself of all these things about the private world of Saber; otherwise, I would forget the vulnerable and innocent boy who had been my best friend since elementary school. Even though he was hanging with bad guys, I knew Saber would eat a bayonet for me. When you have a friend like that, you never let go of him, no matter what he does.
At sunset I pulled into the parking lot by the tent. There was Saber’s heap, the windows down, the dust blowing inside it. Next to it was a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible with whitewall spoked tires and blue-dot taillights and chrome bells on the twin exhausts. Saber was nowhere in sight. A man in a crisp paper hat was selling hand-shaved sno-cones out of a cart by the entrance. I bought a spearmint cone and went inside the flap and sat down on the wooden seats that had been taken out of baseball bleachers. I saw Saber at the snack counter, paying for his order with bills he took from a hand-tooled wallet attached to a chain. I had never seen the wallet before. The two Mexicans from the jail were standing next to him, sipping sodas through straws, wearing patent-leather stomps and dark drapes sewn with white thread and long-sleeved rayon shirts buttoned at the wrists, the tails hanging outside their belts.
Saber and the two hoods were talking to four girls of about fifteen or sixteen, the kind with bad skin who lived in the welfare project and wore the tightest shorts they could get into and tattooed their boyfriend’s name inside their thighs. They were the roughest girls I ever knew, but at the same time they were easy marks for a slick guy who told them they were beautiful and smart and physically tough and fun to be with, far too good for the project losers they’d been hanging around.
I walked up behind Saber. He was eating a chili dog off a paper plate, dipping into it with a plastic spoon; I didn’t think he saw me.
“What’s happening, Aaron?” he said without turning around.
“Nothing much. Wondering where the hell you’ve been,” I said.
The Mexicans were offering the girls sips from their straws, grinning when the girls took the straws in their mouths.
“I’m in the used-car business these days,” Saber said.
“Whose Ford coupe is that out there?”
“Manny and Cholo’s uncle gave it to them. Want to take a spin?”
“No, thanks. I never liked wearing handcuffs. Who are the girls?”
“They hang out here. We’re going to Prince’s. Want to go?”
“You heard about Grady Harrelson’s father?” I said.
“A tragedy of cosmic proportions. I cried my eyes out. Go to Prince’s with us.”
“No.”
He looked over his shoulder to see if we were out of earshot from the Mexicans. “Are we talking about a racial issue here?”
“No. And quit hiding behind it,” I said.
He shrugged and continued eating.
“Did you know some guys were going to set Valerie on fire?” I said.
The cavalier expression left his face. For just a second I saw the old Saber looking at me, the false exterior pared away. “No, I didn’t hear about that.”
“Maybe Vick Atlas set it up. Two guys ended up dead in a ditch. They were naked and their hands were cut off.”
His gaze went away from me and lingered in space, finding the justification
s he needed to keep doing what he was doing. He started eating his chili dog again. “Manny and Cholo have got connections. Guys who can do some serious payback.”
“Vick Atlas’s crowd wouldn’t let those guys clean their toilets.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t, either,” he said. “Because that’s the signal I keep getting, Aaron.”
“Sell it to somebody else,” I said.
He threw his food into the trash. “Motor on up to Prince’s if you feel like it. I got to get back to my people.”
“Your people?”
“My old man is selling Popsicles. I’m putting food on the table and paying down the mortgage. That wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for Manny and Cholo. They’re good guys. They accept me as I am.”
“They’ll wipe their ass with you.”
“You’re just like your old man,” he said. “You play the Southern gentleman, but you think you’re better than other people.”
He walked away from me, his jaw hooked, his shoulders rounded hood-style.
“Don’t talk about my father like that,” I said at his back.
He paid me no attention. I got into my heap and tooled down South Main toward Herman Park, the lamps coming on along the boulevard and in the live oaks on the Rice campus. I should have kept going, but I couldn’t let it rest. I made a U-turn, horns blowing at me, and went to Prince’s drive-in and drove up and down the aisles. Saber’s heap wasn’t there, and neither was the canary-yellow Ford convertible. They didn’t want to go there without the girls, I thought. It was all about the girls. I headed back to the roller rink.
Was I being unfair? I wondered. Not a chance.
It was almost dark, the heat draining out of the day. I pulled into the parking lot. Saber’s heap and the Ford were still there. I got out and went inside. The tent was more crowded now, the music faster, a tinge of sweat and talcum and hair spray in the air. I went back outside and saw Saber and the Mexicans and the girls gathered between two storage sheds, drinking canned beer, lighting up, giggling. The wind changed and I knew what they were smoking. I started walking toward them.
“Come with me, Sabe,” I said.
“Cain’t do it,” he said. “I’m with my pards.”
The girls were passing hand-rolls around, bending over when they laughed, looking at me as though I were a balloon that had broken its tether and floated into their midst.
“I’m Manny,” one of the Mexicans said. “This is Cholo. Why you keep showing up wherever we’re at, man?”
He was thinner than his friend, wrapped tighter, with darker skin and more ink on his arms and neck. Cholo had eyes that were soft and warm and unthreatening. I believed that either of them was capable of disemboweling me and gargling beer while he did it.
“Hey, you hearing me, gusano?” Manny said. “You were in our cell. Then I see you at the drugstore and now at the roller rink. You just keep coming around, man. It’s starting to upset me.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
“That ain’t no way to talk, man,” Cholo said. “Want to join us? We got a place in the Fifth Ward. The neighborhood ain’t just for coloreds. We get along good there. Hey, you like music? We got all kinds of records, man. You like to dance, too?” His eyes shifted at the girls.
“What’s a gusano?” I asked.
“It means something like compadre,” Manny said.
“It means ‘worm,’ ” I said.
“You pretty smart.”
“He’s okay, Manny,” Saber said. “We’ve been pards a long time.”
“He don’t look like no pard to me. But if you say so, man, that’s cool,” Manny said. His eyes went up and down my body. “We’re friends now? You want a hug?”
I looked back at him and didn’t answer.
His eyes were flat and glassy. He puffed on his reefer, pinching it with two fingers, never blinking. “You think because you’re tall, you’re a macho guy? You was in jail a few hours and now you’re an ex-con? First day up in Huntsville, you’d be in the bridal suite. They’d drive a freight train up your ass.”
“You damn spic,” I said.
I had never used that word before, not once. My mouth went dry. I tried to swallow, but there was nothing in my mouth, just a bitter taste.
“He didn’t mean it,” Saber said.
“Oh, yes, this chico means it, man. Is all right, Saber,” Manny said. He looked back at me. “We like you, man. We don’t got no grudges. I was kidding about Huntsville. You’d like it, man. Somebody would take care of you. Bring scarf to your cell. Introduce you to friends. Give you a cigar.”
“Step over here,” I said.
“Let it slide, Aaron,” Saber said.
Manny was grinning, his teeth as white as Chiclets. Saber stepped between us, then shoved me when I didn’t back up. “Go home, Aaron.”
I looked at him for a long time. The girls stopped giggling. One hung her head. Cholo hooked his thumb on his right-hand pocket. A police cruiser drove fast down South Main, flasher on, siren off. “Have a good life, Sabe.”
“Don’t be like this,” he said at my back. “Come on, Aaron. We’re buds.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, my father was at the icehouse. My mother was washing dishes.
“You should have left those for me,” I said.
“I don’t mind. Detective Jenks called,” she said. “He wants you to call him back.”
“What about?”
“He said he would like to consult with you.”
“ ‘Consult’?”
“That’s the term he used. He was quite gentlemanly.”
“Don’t be taken in,” I said.
“A cynical attitude doesn’t become you, Aaron. He was very nice. He’s obviously a man of breeding, even though he may be of humble origins.”
I had learned long ago that any authority figure who treated my mother with a few words of respect became an immediate substitute for the father she never had. The consequence was almost always a disaster. But I didn’t argue. I used the telephone in my father’s study to call Merton Jenks at the number he had left.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Why don’t you learn some manners?” he replied.
“We’re of no help to you, Detective Jenks. We don’t commit crimes. Why don’t you leave us alone?”
“You know about music. You know what kids listen to. Now shut the fuck up before I have to come out there again,” he said.
“Sir, what do you want?”
“A forty-five was playing on the hi-fi in the game room when Clint Harrelson got blown into the swimming pool. The song was ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp’ by Albert Ammons. You know it?”
“You bet.”
“Here’s the thing. There was no other jazz or swing or boogie-woogie or nigra music in the record racks. People who knew Harrelson say he couldn’t stand any of that stuff and wouldn’t allow it in the house. You got any idea who might have been playing that song on his hi-fi?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Grady Harrelson doesn’t listen to that kind of music?”
“Guys like Grady listen to crap by Pat Boone,” I replied. “Besides, I read that Grady was on a sailboat when he got the news about his father.”
“Nobody in your acquaintance would have motivation to shoot Clint Harrelson?” he said.
I was already remembering my conversation with Saber’s Mexican friends, particularly Cholo, who had said they were living in the Fifth Ward, the heart of the black district. They had a lot of records at their place. Albert Ammons’s music was the kind you bought in a colored barbershop or a beauty parlor, not in a white neighborhood. Saber believed Clint Harrelson was behind Mr. Bledsoe’s firing. He had also stolen Grady’s convertible and sold it in Mexico. Was his desire for revenge so great that he would break into the Harrelson estate and torment the father with a rhythm-and-blues recording, then kill him?
It sounded ridiculous, except he had broken into Mr. Krauser’s house and torn up his
most valued possessions and used a retarded boy, Jimmy McDougal, to help him.
“Are you in a coma?” Jenks said.
“Why are you always insulting me?”
“Because you piss me off.”
In the background I heard a sound like someone sinking an opener into the top of a beer can.
“I piss you off?” I said.
My mother came out of nowhere. “Don’t you dare use that language in this house,” she said. She ripped the receiver from my hand. “Detective Jenks, I could hear you in the kitchen. You are a great disappointment. I feel like washing your mouth out with soap. You are not to call here again.”
She set the receiver in the cradle, releasing her fingers quickly, as though avoiding germs on its surface.
I BATHED AND LAY down on my bed in the current of cool air that the attic fan drew through the screen. Major and the cats were piled beside me, snoring in the wonderful way animals snore. I felt a strange sense of peace about my home. That soon changed.
My father came in late, brushing against the doorway and the pictures on the wall in the hallway. A few minutes later I saw him through the partially open bathroom door. He was sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking a cigarette in his shirtsleeves and undershorts and socks, his garters clipped on his calves. His face was furrowed, his stubble gray, his hand trembling when he lifted his cigarette.
“Daddy?” I said.
He turned his head toward me, as though I were speaking to him from a great distance. “Aaron? What are you doing up? Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”
“Can I help with something?”
He stared into empty space. “No, not really. None of us can. That’s the great joke. It’s all gone. Everything. It was just a dream on Bayou Teche. Parti avec la vent.”
I could hear the paper on his cigarette crisp when he inhaled. I suspected that one day cigarettes would kill him. But that was not the fear I had as I looked at my father. No one had to convince me about the reality of hell. It wasn’t a fiery pit. It lived and thrived in the human breast and consumed its host from night to morning.
Chapter