A soapy wine-colored bubble formed on the boy’s lips. A woman who must have been his mother was inconsolable. She beat her fists on a man’s chest as he tried to calm her. One of the boy’s hands was gripped on the wrist of a man in slacks and a clip-on bow tie and a white shirt kneeling beside him, a Bible held open by his thumb. The boy’s face was drained of all color; there was a dark triangle in his jeans where he had soiled himself. The attendants got through the crowd just as the boy looked straight into the ceiling and stopped breathing, as though someone had pulled a plug loose from the back of his head.
Everyone in the crowd became silent, even those who could not see what was happening. They all seemed to sense at the same time that the boy had died. I stepped off the rail into the crowd. A man in front of me whispered to a friend, “Back home, this wouldn’t make the jailhouse.”
Someone touched me on the back. It was Loren Nichols. “What happened?” he said.
I didn’t answer. I grabbed his upper arm and pulled him with me toward the men’s room. He tried to free himself, craning his head to see over the crowd. “Answer me, Aaron. What’s going on?”
“One of those boys from Tomball is dead. Where were you?”
“In the seats. A girl and I used the passes you gave me. Are the cops busting somebody?”
“That’s the least of it.” I pushed him along the wall, away from the crowd. “Don’t look up.”
“What are you doing?”
“They know you. I said don’t look up.”
“Who knows me?”
“The cops.”
“Those are my friends back there.”
“Yeah, and one of them just killed a high school kid.”
“Over what?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s where all this hard-guy crap finally ends up. A kid makes some quacking noises and somebody sticks a knife in him. That was his mother screaming back there. You want to explain to her why her son is dead?”
“Lay off that. I never carry a shank.”
“Yeah, but those guys do. What do you think is going to happen if the crowd gets their hands on them?”
“They’re still my friends.” He started to pull away from me.
“They’re not your friends. They’re pack animals, just like the rich kids who hang with Grady.”
“I’m not like Grady Harrelson, and neither are my friends.”
“Shut up.”
There was a clutch of phone booths against the wall. I pushed him into one and stood in the doorway so he couldn’t get out. His hair was in his eyes, his face flaming. “Let me out.”
“I told you to shut up. Where’s your girl?”
“In the ladies’ room.”
“You have wheels?”
“My brother’s truck.”
I took off my hat and put it on his head. “Walk with me. Look at the ground.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’re too dumb to take care of yourself.”
“You’re sure that kid is dead?”
“The knife wound was to the heart.”
“Jesus. I got to get my girl.”
“So she can get busted or torn apart with you?” I said.
People were streaming past us on their way toward the shoeshine stand. Through a window I saw the emergency lights on an ambulance, its siren dying as though descending into a well. I could almost smell the heat in the crowd, a collective stench that was close to feral.
“I saw one of them,” someone said.
“Where?” someone else said.
“By the can. He was just here. He came in with them.”
“Keep walking,” I said to Loren. “Don’t look back.”
I squeezed his upper arm tighter, but he no longer resisted. Someone heading in the opposite direction knocked against me; he didn’t apologize or even look at me but kept going, with others behind him. I could hear the mother wailing, which was drawing more and more people out of the stands into the concourse.
“I don’t like running away,” Loren said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“There’s another one of them!” someone yelled. “That greaser down there!”
A cop was blowing a whistle. The crowd that had been flowing past us seemed to shift into slow motion, their heads rotating slowly, their eyes coming to rest on us. I pulled Loren along with me. Up ahead was the entranceway that led to the loading area behind the chutes. “Hey, you,” someone yelled. “Somebody stop that guy! That’s their goddamn leader. The one with the duck-ass.”
We went through the entranceway, then through a side door that opened onto an empty space with a dirt floor beneath the stadium seating. I shut the door and pulled off my boots and unbuckled my chaps and peeled them off my jeans. “Put these on. I’ll get them back later. Don’t let anything happen to them. They were my grandfather’s.”
“I ain’t afraid,” Loren said.
“I am,” I said. “Now get these on. If you say anything back, I’m going to hit you upside the head.”
The band began playing “The Eyes of Texas,” then there was a great thumping that shook the floor and the girders, like elephants charging up a staircase, so thunderous it sent dust and grit cascading down on our heads. The crowd was either leaving the stands or flowing back, I couldn’t tell which. Someone kicked open the door and shone a flashlight inside. Behind the glare, I could see his badge and cap and holstered revolver. “What the hell y’all doing in here?” he said.
“Taking a leak,” I said. “We didn’t want to go into that mob in the concourse.”
“Why you got your boots off?”
“I went over the side and got dirt in them.”
“Well, get finished and get out,” he said. “We got a murdered boy up there. Maybe the guy who did it got away.”
“How old was the boy who got knifed?” Loren asked.
Shut up, Loren.
“Seventeen, eighteen, along in there,” the cop said. “He was here with his mother. You know those boys from Tomball?”
“No, sir,” Loren said.
“They’re good boys,” the cop said. “This is a goddamn shame.”
He shone his light over our faces and bodies again, then clicked off the light and went away, leaving the door open. Loren’s legs looked long, like stovepipes, inside Grandfather’s chaps.
“Don’t stop till you get to your brother’s truck,” I said. “Don’t look around, either. No matter how bad you want to.”
“Was that cop trying to say something to me?”
“No, you didn’t have anything to do with it, Loren.”
“That boy must have done something. Maybe he pulled a shank himself.”
“Stop fooling yourself. Those kids from Tomball think a John Deere tractor exhibit in the high school gym is a big event. So is the rodeo. Their only sin is their innocence. They think a fight is with fists.”
I didn’t mean to make his situation worse than it was. But the disbelief and fear in the boy’s face and the helplessness in his eyes were not images I would easily get rid of. Secretly I hoped Loren’s friends were pounded to pulp.
“I feel bad about that kid, man,” he said. “Who takes shit-kickers seriously? If I’d been there, I could have shut it down.”
“Think they’re worrying about you? The switchblade was on the concrete. I bet there’re no prints on it. I bet it’s pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey time.”
“No, the guy who did it will stand up.”
“Yeah, that’s why they were all being cuffed,” I said.
“They were?”
“Getting knocked around, too. Nobody stood up. The guy who knifed that kid was a punk.”
Loren widened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. “What about my girl?”
“Those are reserved seats. I know where she’ll be. I’ll take her home.”
“I got to say something. I went to Gatesville for almost killing a guy with a pellet pistol. He felt up my sister at her junior h
igh picnic and had it coming, but it bothered me just the same. I ain’t that kind, Aaron.”
“I know that.”
“How?”
“You’re like me. You never gave yourself credit for anything.”
He walked down the concourse, my straw hat slanted over his eyes, Grandfather’s chaps swishing on his legs. No one gave him a second look. Then he was out the door and gone.
I never found his girl, but I did find Valerie, and we went up into the stands and sat with my parents. I did not tell them what I had seen in the concourse, nor did I mention Loren. The rodeo resumed, but we left early, and I had twenty-one stitches put in my face in an emergency room, and we went to a barbecue joint and ate a late dinner.
I said a silent prayer for the boy who had been murdered and tried to forget the look I saw in his eyes. After all these years, it is still with me. The look was one of regret, not because of the incautious words he may have uttered but because he had not been given time to appreciate how ephemeral life was. I thought about my father’s account of the Yankee soldiers who tamped their musket stocks on the ground atop Cemetery Ridge and chanted “Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg,” and I wondered if they were stained forever by their visit to the Abyss, or if they had become willing caretakers of it.
For some reason I couldn’t explain, I felt I had gained a greater understanding of my father’s loneliness.
Chapter
25
THE NEXT MORNING I went to Cisco Napolitano’s high-rise apartment building, located on a flower-planted traffic circle in the Montrose district. When she opened the door, she was still in pajamas and not wearing makeup. She leaned against the jamb. I could see the tops of her breasts, but she didn’t seem to care. I wasn’t even sure she was going to speak. “What’s the haps, kid?” she said.
“No haps.”
She didn’t invite me in. Her face looked older, dry, on the edge of flaking, her eyes red-rimmed and set more deeply, as though she were staring out of a mask.
“May I come in?” I said.
“May I? That’s why I love you. Yes, you may come in, you little honey bunny.”
I wondered if she had crashed and burned on some toxic goofballs. She closed the door behind me and pointed at the bandage below my eye. “You get out of line with what’s-her-name?”
“Valerie? We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“You got hurt at the rodeo?”
“I went to the buzzer, but I got disqualified.”
“Let me get dressed. I’m a little sick this morning. I’d like you to drive me somewhere.”
The curtains were closed, the ornateness of the room suffused with a warm yellow light that accentuated its colors and clutter of Oriental and Arabian-style furnishings. “I came here to tell you about Detective Jenks,” I said.
“Him again?”
“I think he’s got emphysema or cancer in his lungs. I think he’s going down for the count.”
She was looking through a crack in the curtains at the traffic circle or the flowers inside it or the cars on the street. “Why tell me about it?”
“Because I know y’all were an item in Reno or Las Vegas. I think he’s a good fellow in spite of his redneck manners.”
“You have your nose in too many things. Where’d you come up with this emphysema stuff?”
“He sounds like he has metal filings in his chest, and there’s blood on his cigarette butts.”
“Let me tell you something about Merton Jenks, kid.”
“Can you call me Aaron?”
“Merton was undercover vice in Vegas. Believe me, he fit right in. Catch my meaning?”
She waited. When I didn’t answer, she said, “He gave me up in court. I spent eleven months in county jail as a material witness. I’m lucky I wasn’t killed.”
“Maybe that’s why you bother him.”
“You’re a laugh a minute.”
“Where are we going?”
“To La Farmacia, in the Fifth Ward, honey bunny. I’ve got a mean case of something.” She paused, her face empty. “Merton’s really going under?”
“What do I know?”
She closed and opened her eyes as though she had lost the thread of the conversation. I could not remember if I had ever seen her arms uncovered. I knew the signs. Drugs were just starting their journey from the slums and the border to middle-class neighborhoods throughout America. The culture had always been in Houston in cosmetic form. Hoods put lighter fluid on a folded handkerchief and walked around sniffing it, both for show and for a 3.2 high. Sometimes there were reefers at a gig. Shit-kickers had been rolling Zig-Zags since they were knee-high to a tree frog. But smack or H or horse or joy juice or tar or China pearl, as we called it indiscriminately, was the dragon just firing up.
Miss Cisco went into the bedroom to dress. Her drawstring bag was on the table by the window. I had never looked into a woman’s purse without permission. The drawstring was loose, the top of the bag drooping over. I put my little finger inside and widened the opening. I was sure I’d find her works—a spoon or a hypodermic needle or a rubber tourniquet, at least a cigarette lighter. Wrong. Among her cosmetics and Kleenexes and wallet and car keys and loose change was an army .45 automatic, the same 1911 model my father had purchased when he thought we were in danger, the same-caliber weapon that killed Grady Harrelson’s father.
I stepped back from the bag and folded my arms across my chest, as though I could undo the discovery I had just made.
“What are you doing?” Miss Cisco said.
“Pardon?”
“Are you looking at the flowers in the traffic circle?” she asked. “I water them sometimes.”
She walked toward me. Closer. Then closer. She had put on a long-sleeved magenta rayon shirt that seemed to change in the light, and a pair of khakis that had pockets all over them, and unzipped soft-leather, half-topped boots with white socks that a little girl might wear. I stepped backward.
“Hold still,” she said, her eyes a few inches from mine. She peeled the bandage halfway off my skin and kissed the stitched star-shaped puncture that Original Sin had left with his horn. She smoothed the gauze and tape back into place. She had brushed her teeth or used mouthwash; her eyes were hazy, iniquitous.
“You use redwings?” I said.
“Is that what you call them here?”
“They’ll melt your head,” I said.
“You like me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“How much?”
“I came to see you, didn’t I?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you have any other friends. Because I wanted to help Detective Jenks.”
She leaned forward and put her mouth on mine. I stepped backward, knocking into the table.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“About what?”
“What you’re thinking.” She picked up her bag, disconcerted. “If you didn’t have a girlfriend, maybe it’d be different. The French call it a transition, from the mother to the girlfriend. Why were you looking in my bag?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t lie, Aaron. You wonder why I carry a gun?”
“No,” I lied.
“Grady’s father committed three million to a consortium. It’s bottled up in banks somewhere. That money was not only pledged, it’s already been spent on two casinos under construction. You think the guys in Kansas City and Chicago are going to let a spoiled shit like Grady keep it?”
“What does that have to do with you?” I asked.
“I’m supposed to get it back.”
“With your looks and brains, Miss Cisco, you could be a movie star. Why do you hang around with troglodytes?”
“Because I don’t want acid thrown in my face.”
I tried to follow her logic and my head began hurting. She brushed the hair out of my eyes, studying my features as though putting makeup on someone. It was obvious that I would n
ever understand her frame of reference or the world she lived in. “I think I should leave, Miss Cisco.”
“You can drive my Rocket 88, every teenage boy’s wet dream. I think I’ll put back the seat and sleep. I’m not myself right now.”
“Why are we going to this Farmacia place?”
“It’s where I get well. I need you to help me. Don’t argue.”
“I won’t.”
“Hold still.” She cupped her hand on the back of my neck and bit softly into my neck, then released me.
“Why did you do that?”
“I’m perverse,” she said. Then she winked. “Tell me I didn’t give you a little rise.”
I don’t know why I liked Miss Cisco. I guess I figured that what we sometimes call evil is simply a form of need. Plus she had gone out of her way to protect me when she had nothing to gain and everything to lose.
I DROVE HER INTO the same neighborhood where I had bought the switchblade knife. It was Sunday morning, and few people were on the streets. A blind woman of color was playing bottleneck guitar under a canopy in front of a liquor store. The neighborhood reminded me of the spells that had caused me so much trouble. They could hit me with a paralysis that left me nonfunctional and barely able to breathe. I didn’t want them back, and I didn’t want to think about them. Miss Cisco seemed to read my mind. Just before we reached our destination, a drugstore with a perpendicular sign on its facade that stated simply La Farmacia, she turned her head on the seat and said, “What kind of train are you pulling, kid?”
“What kind of what?”
“Don’t pretend. Everybody has a secret shame. My mother told me that. She learned it from her clientele. She was a whore in New Orleans.”
“I have blackouts. Later I have holes in my memory I can’t fill in. Booze can bring it on. Getting angry can, too. Sometimes I go into a deep sleep and walk around like a zombie and can’t wake up till someone gives me a good shaking.”
She closed her eyes again. “Count your blessings. I’d like to forget half the things I did in my life.”
“What I mean is, I don’t know what I’m capable of. So I imagine the worst. Then I’m not sure if I’m imagining things or remembering what happened.”