It wasn’t true, of course. Like all depressives, my father suffered from insomnia; he also needed his nicotine, just as he needed his alcohol. I wanted to tell him of my feelings, but I never did, because I knew I would only add to his pain. Instead I told him of my anxiety about easing down in the chute onto the back of Original Sin, eighteen hundred pounds of black lethality.
“I’ll be sitting in the stands,” he said.
“Mother’s not coming?”
“You know how she is. She doesn’t like crowds.”
“She doesn’t like being among what she calls common people.”
“People have their quirks. It’s what makes us human. If we ignore other people’s faults, we don’t have to be defensive about our own.”
In all my years of growing up, I never heard him speak unkindly or critically of my mother, no matter how harshly she spoke of him.
“I was scared about riding Original Sin, but I dreamed about Detective Jenks,” I said. “Now I feel all right. Why’s that?”
“Because when we think about other people’s problems, our own don’t seem so important.”
“I have a feeling he still has a crush on Miss Cisco.”
“The woman from Nevada? That’s one person you need to forget, Aaron. Just like we need to get the Harrelson and Atlas families out of our lives.”
“Who do you reckon killed Mr. Harrelson?”
“Somebody cut from the same cloth he was. Somebody who’s hateful and twisted and thinks he’s the left hand of God.”
He dropped his cigarette hissing into the toilet bowl.
“You think Mr. Epstein could have done it?” I asked.
“Is he capable of killing someone? I’d say yes. Would he shoot an unarmed old man? I doubt it. It’s someone else’s grief. Don’t make it your own, Aaron.”
“It’s hard not to do sometimes.”
“I know,” he said.
Chapter
24
I DID NOT TAKE my father’s advice about not meddling. Early the next morning I drove to Grady Harrelson’s house and knocked on the door. When no one answered, I knocked harder. Grady opened the door in a blue silk Japanese bathrobe covered with green dragons. He was unshaved and bleary-eyed and not happy to be awakened. “What’s your fucking problem, Broussard?”
“My fucking problem?” I said. “Let me see. The fact that you lied to the cops about your whereabouts the night your father was murdered? The fact that Valerie covered for you and got herself in trouble? No, that’s not really what’s on my mind. Can you get me in touch with Cisco Napolitano?”
“Why would Cisco be interested in seeing you?”
“A friend of hers is dying. I want to tell her that.”
“What friend?” he asked.
“What do you care? Try not being a shit all the time, Grady. Do a good deed.”
He tried to grab me by the shirt. “You listen—”
“Touch me again and I’ll rip your hand off and shove it down your throat,” I said.
Behind him, I could see a girl standing at the top of the stairs. She was barefoot and in a slip, and I could see only her knees. Her skin was brown, her knees puckered. Even though I could not see the rest of her, I felt that somehow she was innocent and out of place in Grady’s home. “Go back to bed,” he shouted at her.
“Who’s the girl?” I said.
“You’re always asking questions. A friend. It’s not Cisco, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I knew that,” I said.
He gave me a look. His breath was sour, the whites of his eyes filled with broken capillaries. “Come in. I want to ask you something.”
“About what?”
“Vick Atlas.”
“I don’t want to talk about Vick Atlas.”
“Help me, I’ll help you,” he said.
I stepped inside. He closed the door behind me, the crystal droplets on the chandelier jingling. I followed him to the kitchen. I had a hard time believing he had asked me in. I had taken his girl and hit him in the face and was convinced he bore me nothing but ill will. “I’m sorry about your father,” I said to his back.
“He had the last laugh.”
“Pardon?”
“My old man put everything in a trust. I get a subsistence allowance until I’m forty. It’s like having someone will you a box of diapers. Sit down.” He poured water into a coffeepot and dumped the grinds in the water and set the pot on a burner. “Did Vick sic those hoods on Valerie so he could show up and be a hero?”
“Ask him,” I replied.
“He swears he had nothing to do with it. I don’t know what to believe. The Atlas family is a bunch of psychopaths. They lie when they don’t have to lie. I don’t even know what country they’re from. They look like they’re glued together from other people’s body parts. My father said they brag on murders they didn’t commit.”
“So why’d you get mixed up with them?”
“Money is money. You either have it or you don’t. If you don’t, you get to cut other people’s lawns. You’re a smart guy. You believe the shit you read in the newspaper? Those guys write what they’re told to write. Same thing with business and politics. It’s a stage play put on for the little people.”
He took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and a box of cereal from a cabinet. I began to get the feeling that he hadn’t asked me inside to talk about the Atlas family.
“Tell me the truth about something, Broussard. You and Bledsoe stole my convertible, didn’t you? If you did, I don’t blame you. I gave you guys a bad time.”
“I don’t steal cars.”
“Bledsoe did it?”
“I’m not my brother’s keeper.”
He poured milk into the cereal and sat down. “You want some?”
“No. Who’s the girl upstairs?”
“A Mexican girl. What do you care?”
“Because you’re acting rude to her.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. He got up and walked to the bottom of the staircase and yelled upstairs. “Sophia, you want something to eat?” There was no answer. He returned to the table. “You really have spells?” he said. “People say you have a few beers, or something doesn’t go right, and you wander off and do shit you can’t control.”
“Must be somebody else,” I said.
He studied my face, milk and cereal running off his spoon as he put it into his mouth. “My father was putting three hundred grand into a new casino in Vegas. Then he started having reservations about dealing with greaseballs. When you and I got into it, he told the greaseballs they needed to straighten you out and, more important, straighten out Valerie’s old man. He froze the funds, and I got no idea where they are.”
Through the French doors of the breakfast room, I could see the empty swimming pool and the harshness of the light on the concrete patio and the spartan deck furniture and the potted plants that hadn’t been watered and were starting to turn brown.
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.
“Your uncle is mobbed up, a business partner with Frankie Carbo,” he replied.
“My uncle is a prizefight promoter.”
“Do I have to say it again? He knows Frankie Carbo. Do you know how many people Frankie Carbo has killed? I want that money. Frankie Carbo can get it back for me.”
“So your father dumped all this trouble on us so he could work out his situation with the Mafia?”
“That’s the kind of great guy he was. Plus, he didn’t like you getting the best of me.”
“What do I get out of this besides the whereabouts of Miss Cisco?” I asked.
“Your friend Bledsoe is running with some drug dealers. I can have them put out of business.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with your lowlife friends, and I’m not going to approach my uncle for you, either.”
“Suit yourself.”
“How about a phone number for Miss Cisco?”
He wiped at his nose.
“If you think you’re going to melt her heart, forget it. Behind those king-size jugs is an iceberg.”
“I’m doing this for someone else, Grady, not myself.”
He took a pencil and a piece of paper from a drawer and wrote on it and handed it to me. I folded the number and put it into my pocket. I could see the bare feet of the girl in the slip halfway up the stairs. I wanted to have one more try at his conscience, and I wasn’t thinking just about the girl up the staircase but the girl whose neck had been broken two blocks from Loren’s burned car. “Why do you like Mexican girls?”
“Give it a rest, Dr. Freud.”
“I think Wanda Estevan’s death was probably an accident. Why not own up to it and be done?”
He massaged the back of his neck, widening and closing his eyes as though still waking up. He drank a mouthful of coffee straight from the pot, the grinds congealing on his lips. He leaned toward me. “You ask me why I like Mexican girls? They know when to close their mouths and when to open wide. Got it?”
“You’re a special kind of guy, Grady. Keep your seat. I’ll let myself out.”
I didn’t call Cisco Napolitano. I used the crisscross directory at the city library and found her address. She lived in the same apartment building in the Montrose district that Vick Atlas did. But I had spent enough time on other people’s problems for the day. That evening I would be busting out of the chute on top of Original Sin.
THE STANDS WERE packed with people in their best cotton dresses and starched jeans and short-sleeved shirts. The building hummed with a steady drone, like a beehive. I was behind the chutes, with all the riders milling about. It was a brotherhood not quite like any other. Most of them were from Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, or Canada. No matter their origins, they all seemed to have the same adenoidal accents. They looked sculpted from oak. They were also duck-footed, as though unaccustomed to walking on level ground. I wore chaps, like everyone else, except mine had no fringe and were one color, a sun-faded yellowish brown, because they had been worn by my grandfather as an old man. I had one hour to wait before I would be climbing over the top of the chute and easing down onto Original Sin’s back. In the past hour, I had been to the men’s room three times.
Valerie was sitting with some of her 4-H friends on the other side of the arena, but I didn’t see my father. He always sat in the same places when he attended public events. He sat behind first base at baseball games; he sat in the last pew at Mass; he sat in the last seat of the row at the movie theater; he sat by the rail at horse shows; and he sat ten rows behind the chutes at any rodeo I participated in. I looked up into the stands and didn’t see him anywhere. There were only a few empty spaces in the seats, and most were taken by people who had gone to the concessions. I felt my heart go weak, my resolve begin to drain. Then I saw him escorting my mother down the steps toward two empty seats. She was wearing white gloves and a pillbox hat with the veil turned up. I waved at them, but they couldn’t see me inside the shadows.
I also saw Saber and Manny and Cholo. Saber waved at me and I waved back. His two friends were eating barbecue sandwiches, licking the sauce off their fingers. I went to the restroom. In the concourse, a black man had set up a shoeshine stand with elevated chairs, and a bunch of rodeo boys from the little town of Tomball were getting their boots shined, eyeballing the girls, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, while the shine man popped his rag to the R&B coming out of his portable radio. It should have been an idyllic scene, the kind you saw on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. It wasn’t.
A group of North Houston hoods, wearing drapes, pointy-toed stomps with taps, and greased duck-ass haircuts, sauntered by in what was called the con walk—the shoulders slouched, the length of the stride exaggerated, arms dead at their sides. I saw Loren Nichols among them, wearing cowboy boots and jeans, although low on the hips and without a belt, greaser-style. Just as they passed the shoeshine stand, one of the boys from Tomball went “Quack, quack.”
It was the kind of moment that would not pass. There was no way the insult and the challenge would be undone. The groups despised each other, worse than whites and people of color or Hispanics did, and if you asked them why, they would not be able to explain except to say, “They’re always asking for it, man.”
Loren went into the men’s room by himself. I followed him inside and stood one urinal down from him. He hadn’t noticed me and was looking back at the entrance to the room while he relieved himself.
“Hey,” I said.
“Is that you, Broussard? You look good in that hat and chaps,” he said.
“I’m riding in a few minutes. Loren, get away from those guys.”
“Which guys?”
“The hoods you’re with.”
“Those are my friends. Don’t be calling them names.”
“Okay, I won’t. I know those kids at the shoeshine stand. They’re from Tomball. They don’t mean anything. Blow it off.”
“They do mean it.”
“Don’t get into it, man,” I said. “It’s not worth it.”
“It’s not my call.”
I zipped up my pants and washed my hands and went to the lavatory where he was combing his hair in the mirror. I took out my wallet. “I have two passes, reserved seats. They were for Valerie and a friend, but she went in with her 4-H clubbers. You take them.”
“No, man.”
“Yes, man,” I said. I punched him in the sternum with my finger.
“You worry too much, Broussard.”
“Don’t call me by my last name.”
“Okay, Aaron. You’re from outer space. But you’re not a bad guy.” He took the tickets from my hand.
“I’d better see your butt in one of those seats,” I said.
“What are you riding?”
“Bulls.”
“I knew you were suicidal.” He held up the tickets. “Thanks.”
I walked out of the men’s room ahead of him and didn’t look back. His friends were gathered at a concession about twenty yards from the shoeshine stand. None of them had bought anything. They seemed to be waiting on Loren. I walked through the concourse and a security gate and past the rough-stock pen into the loading area behind the chutes. I looked up into the stands and tried to locate my parents but couldn’t see them in the glare. But I saw Manny, a smirk on his face. He stood up and shot me the bone, then cupped his phallus. Behind me, I heard one of the bulls tearing the chute apart.
WHEN I LOWERED MYSELF down onto Original Sin, my teeth were clicking so loudly I was sure the gate man could hear them. I pulled the bull rope tight and felt Original Sin swell like a thunderstorm between my thighs, then crash against both sides of the chute; I touched my holy medal with my left hand, said the first words of a Hail Mary under my breath, then couldn’t remember the rest of the prayer and hollered, “Outside!”
The gate swung open. Original Sin and I burst out of the shadows into a world of blazing spotlights, bullfighters in football cleats and outrageous costumes and clown grease, the metal bell clanging on the bull rope, Original Sin slamming down on all four feet, bending my spine like a bicycle chain about to snap, the shock so hard I believed I was ruptured, all the while my spurs raking at Original Sin’s neck, my head stretched back to his rump.
The bullfighters seemed to be rotating around me, the spotlights an eye-searing blur, my chaps flapping, my buttocks starting to slip sideways with each bounce as I waited to hear the buzzer and didn’t. I thought I heard my father say Hold on, son. The bull hasn’t been born you can’t ride. Original Sin corkscrewed and reversed his spin. For just a second I saw the other riders up on the boards, their faces full of alarm; I felt blood on my face and knew I had been hooked and was about to go over the side; I also knew my left arm was hung up and there was a good chance I would be rope-dragged under Original Sin’s hooves or impaled and whipped like a rag doll.
But it didn’t happen. I heard the buzzer like the voice of God. Then I was flung through the air, my arm free o
f the rope, and even though I crashed to the ground on my side, I knew I was in one piece and the bullfighters were diverting Original Sin away from me. My hat was still on my head, the slice below my eye a badge of honor, the audience applauding and shouting and coming to their feet, the other riders dusting me off and patting my back and saying things like “One hell of a ride, kid” and “Casey Tibbs better look out.”
But I was disqualified. I had touched the bull during the ride with my free hand on the first bounce out of the chute. It wasn’t important, though. Earning the approval of professional rodeo people is reward enough. A medic cleaned the cut on my face and put a bandage on it. “Get yourself some stitches or you’ll have a scar,” he said.
I heard a sound outside the arena, somewhere down the concourse by the concessions. At first it was a single scream, perhaps a woman’s, then the sound began to grow like a wind swirling through a woods, gaining strength, gathering organic debris in its maw. These are the words I could hear people saying:
“Stabbed.”
“How many?”
“Who was stabbed?”
“A lady out there said it was her son.”
“Somebody’s dead?”
“It ain’t for sure.”
“I hope they kill the bunch who done it.”
“A boy pulled a stiletto, one of those Italian kind. That’s what they’re saying.”
With a three-inch square of gauze taped on my face, I went out in the concourse and headed toward the crowd that had formed around the shoeshine stand. I stepped up on the railing behind the stadium seating so I could see over their heads. A blond kid in jeans and a cowboy shirt and a crew cut, his hat stuffed under his head, was lying on his back, his shirt open, the cellophane from a cigarette package pasted over the wound below his left nipple. Two ambulance attendants were trying to push a gurney through the crowd. An open switchblade, its wavy surfaces rippling with light and streaks of red like fingernail polish, lay on the concrete. Loren’s greaseball friends were lined up and leaning on their arms against the wall while three uniformed cops shook them down, kicking their ankles apart, ripping their pockets inside out, splattering coins and keys and a couple of knives onto the concrete. I didn’t see Loren among them.