The following day neither of my parents was home when I got off work. I bathed and put on fresh clothes and tried to think. I had said that my family didn’t lie. That was true most of the time. But in an imperfect world, I figured, there were instances when a lie served virtue better than the truth. I fed Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy, then pulled up a chair to the phone in the hallway and found Vick Atlas’s name in the directory. He answered on the second ring. “Hello!” he barked.
“Hey, Vick. How’s it hanging?” I replied.
“Who’s this?”
“Aaron Holland Broussard.”
There was a pause. “What do you want, wise guy?”
“You stopped those two phony cops from hurting Valerie. I owe you one.”
“You and I aren’t done by a long shot. If you think you can get on my good side, forget it. You’re going to be a long red scrape on the asphalt, Buster Brown.”
“Maybe your father told you that Valerie and I were in his office a couple of days ago.”
“You’re lucky you’re not on a meat hook.”
“Did somebody boost your wheels two nights ago?”
The line went quiet again.
“Did you hear me?” I said.
“Keep talking.”
“I was afraid you’d think it was me and Saber.”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“I know better.”
“How about Spaceman?”
“Saber? The same with him. Would we boost your car and then call you up to tell you we didn’t do it?”
“Then who did? The Montrose district is not the kind of neighborhood where you get your car hot-wired. You got a comment on that, wise guy?”
He had just set a verbal trap. The ignition had not been jumped. Vick was smarter than I thought.
“I was at Prince’s drive-in last night,” I said. “Some of Grady’s buds were talking loud in the next car. I heard one guy say, ‘Vick Atlas was getting laid when we took the Buick. He’s never going to find it.’ ”
“Rich-boy jocks are hot-wiring cars? That’s interesting to know. You’re a gold mine.”
“I thought I’d pass on the information. Do with it what you want.”
“Why would Grady want to steal my car?”
“I don’t know, Vick. Somebody stole his convertible, and maybe he thinks you had something to do with it.”
“No Kewpie doll, earwax.”
“Sorry I bothered you,” I said. “By the way, your car wasn’t hot-wired. Not according to these guys. It had some kind of box around the back of the ignition switch.”
I could hear him breathing against the surface of the receiver. “So how’d they steal it, pinhead?”
“Search me.”
“No, not search you, fuck you. A lot of cars have security boxes, toe cheese.”
“They said they wrote a message on the driveway that would really get to you. I think it was ‘Blow me’ or ‘Blow me, Elmer Fudd.’ Something like that. They said they wrote it in chalk. They thought it was a howl.”
I could almost feel his body heat coming through the receiver. “That cocksucker,” he said.
“I was trying to do the right thing. I’m sorry I upset you, Vick. I like all the things you called me. One day I might want to be a writer. You’ve given me a lot of material.”
The line went dead.
Chapter
23
RODEO PEOPLE REFER to the two-week period before July Fourth and the two-week period following it as Christmastime. That’s when the circuit opens up, and the country remembers a bit of its origins, and the big prize money awaits any cowboy willing to go the longest eight seconds in the world. In Houston the rodeo and the fair and livestock show were grand events. Bottle rockets exploding above the fairgrounds, the Ferris wheel printed against the sky, the smell of caramel corn and hot dogs and cotton candy, the music of the carousel, the popping of the shooting gallery, the spielers in front of the sideshow, a fire-eater blowing clouds of flaming kerosene from his mouth, bull riders eating steak sandwiches under an awning snapping with wind, all the riders wearing butterfly chaps and big-roweled spurs strapped on their boots. For me these images could have fallen from the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but I doubted they would ever be recognized as such.
I took Valerie on the Ferris wheel, which was like rising into the stars, even better, because when the gondola halted at the top to let on more passengers, the whole world seemed to drop away from us, the gondola swaying, the people on the ground no more than stick figures, all of our problems trapped down below us, as though we were cupped inside a divine hand. I hung my arm over her shoulder. “You said Miss Napolitano would try to destroy us. It’s the other way around. She sees herself in you. She believes Jaime Atlas was forcing Mr. Harrelson and Grady to give us a bad time because Saber and I hurt Vick.”
“This woman wants to be me?” Valerie asked. “Where did you get this brilliant insight?”
“You’re everything she’s not. You’re admired and loved by others. She’s not. She’s used by the scum of the earth. You know what the big mystery is, the one I think no one can figure out?”
“No, what is it, Mr. Smarty-Pants?”
“Why a girl like you goes steady with the likes of me.”
She tried to look serious, but I saw her eyes crinkle at the corners.
“When people ask me, I tell people you not only have poor vision but you’re a terrible judge of character,” I said.
She laughed this time. And what a laugh she had. It was like the way she chewed gum. It was an expression of joy.
We ate hamburgers and went to the livestock show. Twice I thought I saw a hulking man in a fedora following us. I sat down on a bench by the entrance to the Coliseum while Valerie looked for the ladies’ room. I was staring at the tips of my cowboy boots when I felt the weight of a big man ease down on the bench. I didn’t need to look up to know who he was. I could see the Pall Mall cigarette protruding from his cupped fingers; I could also smell his odor, a portable fog of nicotine and harsh soap and breath mints or antiperspirant that didn’t work.
“Good evening to you, Detective Jenks,” I said.
“You riding this weekend?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, tomorrow. I drew a bull named Original Sin.”
“You riding in the junior division?”
“I lied about my age. I’ll be with the regulars.”
“Is Miss Valerie with you?”
“You should know. You’ve been following us for the last hour.”
“I must be slipping,” he said.
“You’re a head taller than everybody else.”
“I have some information on those two gunsels who terrorized Miss Valerie. They were running a couple of floating craps games and not piecing off the action. That’s what probably got them killed.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with Vick Atlas or Grady Harrelson?” I said.
“These sons of bitches don’t need much reason to kill each other.” He coughed and took a small bottle wrapped in a paper bag from his coat pocket and drank from it. He seemed to take strength or comfort from it. “This here is codeine. We used to call it GI gin. It clears the pipes.”
“What do you want from us, sir?”
“I’ve got people on my back. Clint Harrelson got blown into his swimming pool in the richest section of River Oaks. The neighbors are not happy with the notion that his killer might be living close by.”
“What does that have to do with us?” I said.
“Maybe everything, maybe nothing. The truth is, I’m not sure who you are, son. I talked to your family physician.”
“Our family physician? He’s a quack who sent my mother to electroshock.”
“He says you have a memory disorder just like you told me, except more serious. He says it’s like an alcoholic blackout without the alcohol, which means the person having the blackout can do a lot more damage than a drunk person can.
Does that seem a fair assessment of your spells?”
“You think I shot Mr. Harrelson?”
“It seems your whole family has shot somebody. I got to have a talk with Miss Valerie, too.”
He dropped his cigarette and covered it on the ground with his shoe. Through the entranceway, I could see the sawdust on the Coliseum floor and the animals in their pens and the lights burning overhead. I wanted to be among them, in the smell of wood chips and dung and ammonia and animal feed in the bins. “Sir, I can’t begin to fathom your reasoning. People like Vick and Jaime Atlas and Grady and his friends are on the street, and you’re questioning Valerie?”
“Grady Harrelson says he was sailboating down by Kemah the night his father was killed. Valerie’s neighbors say Grady was at her house that evening.”
I felt the air go out of my chest. “Maybe they got their dates mixed up.”
“No, they’re aware who Grady is and who his father was. They have no doubt about the date.”
“That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Because Valerie didn’t tell you Grady was at her house?”
I couldn’t look at him. “Maybe she wasn’t home. Maybe Grady came by and left.”
“No, she was home that night,” he said. “All the lights were on. Three neighbors gave the same account.”
I saw Valerie coming through the crowd in her cotton skirt and tennis shoes and denim shirt sewn with cactus flowers. I stood up, as I was always taught to do when a woman approached me. She was smiling, obviously unsure what Detective Jenks was doing there. He stood up, too, offering the place where he had been sitting. She sat down between us. He told her the same thing he had told me. She gazed at the animals inside the Coliseum, showing no reaction while he talked.
“I don’t remember what happened or who I saw that evening,” she said after he finished.
“You don’t keep track of who comes by your house? The same night your ex-boyfriend’s old man is murdered?”
“I stopped seeing Grady, even though he called regularly.”
“Your neighbors gave us false information?”
“Ask them.”
“I did. That’s why I’m here,” Jenks said. “Don’t try to vex me, Miss Valerie.”
“You’re being victimized by a seventeen-year-old high school student?” she said.
“That’s why I used the word ‘vex.’ You’re an expert at it, missy.”
“Was Grady at Kemah or not?” I asked Jenks. But my heart wasn’t in the question. I believed what Jenks had said. Grady had been at Valerie’s house and she hadn’t told me. I felt a chasm opening under my feet.
Jenks coughed as though he had a wishbone in his throat. He put another cigarette into his mouth. “Sounds like somebody is lying. Who’s lying, Miss Valerie?”
“I don’t have any comment,” she replied, turning up her nose.
Jenks lit his cigarette, blowing smoke straight out in front of him. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“Those things will flat kill you, sir,” I said.
“No, you kids will. You’re a goddamn morning-to-night pain in the ass.”
“It’s impolite to swear in a lady’s presence,” I said.
“One or both y’all is on the edge of committing a felony,” he said. “It’s called aiding and abetting after the fact.”
He stood up. His face looked gray, tired, his long nose tubular like a teardrop, his skin rough as emery paper. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, but not before I saw the blood stippled on the butt.
“Miss Valerie, if you’re covering up for Grady Harrelson, you’re making the worst mistake of your life,” he said. “And you, Aaron Holland Broussard, are acting like you were hiding behind a cloud when God passed out the brains. Don’t let that punk con you. You’re a hundred times the man he is. What’s the name of that bull you drew?”
“Original Sin.”
“Hope you have a soft landing.”
He walked into the crowd, his fedora low on his brow, his coat covering the badge on his belt and his holstered snub-nose, his massive shoulders and confident walk a poor disguise for the death he carried in his lungs.
VALERIE AND I WALKED up and down the aisles among the livestock stalls and poultry and rabbit cages, neither looking at the other. I felt a sense of betrayal that was like a flame burning through the center of a sheet of paper, the circle spreading outward, curling the paper into carbon. If you grow up in an alcoholic home, you learn a lesson that never leaves you: The need to satisfy the addiction comes first; everything else is secondary. Daily betrayal becomes a way of life.
We stopped in front of a stall where a huge York/Hamp sow was nursing a row of pink-and-gray piglets. I always loved animals. My favorite story in the Old Testament was the account of Noah and the Flood, which I believed then and believe now is deliberately misinterpreted by both Hebrews and Christians. In the antediluvian world, man was told by Yahweh that the stone knife should not break the skin of an animal. The first creatures loaded on the Ark were not people but animals who marched two by two into their new home made of gopher wood. When the earth was washed clean and the archer’s bow was hung in the heavens, man was made a steward, not an exploiter, and was not allowed to harm his charges. I wanted to tell these things to Valerie. But I couldn’t. I believed she had cut loose her boat from mine and was floating toward a place where Grady Harrelson waited for her.
“Why did you lie for him?” I said.
“I didn’t lie for him,” she said. “I just didn’t offer information that would hurt him.”
“It’s called a lie of omission.”
She folded her arms on top of the stall’s gate and fixed her eyes on the mama hog feeding her babies. “Grady is a child inside. I never should have gone out with him. I knew it was never going anywhere.”
“Then why did you?”
“Because the boy I loved and wanted to marry got killed in Korea.”
A man and woman close by looked at us, then glanced away. Valerie kept closing and opening her hands, her eyes flashing. Children were running up and down the aisle with balloons, their shoes splattered with sawdust and the runoff from the stalls. My head was reeling from the smell of ammonia and the sense that either Valerie was a stranger or I was driven by the same kind of jealousy I found so odious in others. The couple standing close by walked away.
“Why didn’t you tell me you covered up for him?” I asked.
“I know what obstruction of justice is. I didn’t want to make you party to it. Why do you think Jenks said you’re a hundred times the man Grady is?”
“He thinks I feel inferior to a guy like that?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what he thinks. So don’t act like it.”
“Put it on another level,” I said. “What if Grady isn’t an innocent player in his father’s death?”
“That’s silly,” she replied.
“Who broke the neck of the Mexican girl, Wanda Estevan? She didn’t do it to herself.”
I saw her cheeks color, her nostrils flare. It wasn’t from anger, either. I knew fear when I saw it, particularly in a person who was rarely afraid.
“Grady wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“Remember what you said to him when you threw his senior ring in his face at the drive-in? You called him cruel. You also warned me about what he and his friends could do to me. You had it right, Val. Grady and all his friends are cruel, and they’re cruel for one reason only, just like Mr. Krauser was: They know they’re unloved and they’re frauds and others are about to catch on to them.”
I started to say more. I believed that Valerie thought her father capable of killing Mr. Harrelson and she didn’t want to see an innocent person blamed for his death. But this time I kept my observations to myself.
“So you know all this, do you?” she asked, her face in a pout.
“Yes, I do, because I grew up scared, just like Grady, and for the same reasons. But I’m not l
ike that anymore. My life changed because of one person, and that’s the one I’m with now, the most beautiful girl in Texas. Now let’s go see what all these animals have to say about it.”
CONTRARY TO MY demeanor, I wasn’t done with fear. That night I dreamed of bulls. There is no more dangerous event at a rodeo than bull riding, and in the days before padded vests and helmets with face guards, it was even more lethal. You can get hooked, ruptured, tangled up and dragged, stomped into marmalade, and flung into the boards. A bull can corkscrew, spin like a top, stand up on his front legs with his back feet seven feet in the air, levitate straight off the turf, buck you on his horns, and as an afterthought, break your neck or snap your spine. He can reconfigure the entire muscular network along the backbone from eight to eleven inches so the back is not going in the same direction as the feet. Imagine driving a truck along the edge of a cliff at high speed while the wheels are coming off the axles, the brakes are failing, the gears are stripping, and the windshield is coming apart in your face.
Original Sin was notorious. He hooked a rider in Amarillo and crushed a clown in San Angelo and crashed over the boards into the stands in Big D. I woke up in a ball at two in the morning, shaking from a bad dream. I sat on the side of the bed and tried to clear my mind. The dream was not about Original Sin. I had dreamed of Detective Merton Jenks. In the dream Merton Jenks had become me, or I had become Merton Jenks, and one or both of us was about to die. The dream told me something else, too. The breath I drew into my lungs and took for granted was for him a second-by-second ordeal as well as a luxury he was about to lose. He had survived commando raids in Yugoslavia and parachuting behind German lines in France only to die a painful and humiliating death from the Pall Mall cigarettes. Jesus didn’t pass by the blind man on the road when all the travelers did. I felt Merton Jenks was the blind man. In my foolish mind, I wanted to do something to help him.
The light in the bathroom was on, the door half open. My father was sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking a cigarette.
“Can’t sleep?” I said.
“I snore. I thought I’d give your mother some rest,” he replied.