I couldn’t concentrate. I saw images of a human face dissolving into porridge, of blood slung across a garbage can, of a guy in drapes begging for his life. I put my Gibson into its case and threw Major’s rubber ball across the yard. When he returned, waiting for me to pull it from his mouth and throw it again, I was lost in my thoughts. The phone rang inside the house.
At first I didn’t want to pick it up. I was sure the person on the other end was an enemy. “Hello?”
“Hey, Aaron. It’s Saber. I’m in a pile of it, man.”
“I heard.”
“Heard what?”
“Grady knows it was you who boosted his convertible. Three guys trapped me in an alley. A guy was going to cut me with a barber’s razor.”
“For real?”
“You think I made this up?”
“How’d you get out of it?” he asked.
“I didn’t. Loren Nichols showed up.”
“Who were the guys?”
“I never saw two of them. The third one was Bud Winslow, the football player. Remember him?” Saber had been chewing gum. I heard him stop and the line go quiet. “Saber?”
“Yeah, I remember him. In ninth grade, he held me down on a wrestling mat and parked his package in my face.”
“Well, he’s a hump for Grady now.”
Saber started chewing again. “Grady’s convertible was leaking money.”
“It was what?” I said.
“A hundred-dollar bill was sticking out of the panel on the driver’s door. We pulled off the panel. The door was loaded. So was every other panel. The same under the floor. Not just cash. Small gold bars were pushed inside the padding in the backseat. Grady was driving Fort Knox on wheels.”
“How much money are you talking about?”
“Nine hundred thousand and change. I don’t know what the gold is worth.”
“Park the car on the street and make an anonymous call to the cops.”
“I don’t have it.”
“What happened to it?”
“We took it to a chop shop that Manny’s uncle runs. Except Manny’s uncle doesn’t know about the money. Manny put everything back and drove off with the convertible before the uncle got wise.”
“You don’t know where it is?”
“No. Neither does Cholo. Why is Grady driving around with all that money in his car?”
“His father probably had it stashed. He owed it to the Mob. There’s probably more stashed somewhere else.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Saber said.
“We have to brass it out.”
“I’m sorry I pulled you into this, Aaron. You were my best friend. I’ve been a real shit.”
“Blame it on the jellyfish,” I said.
“What do jellyfish have to do with it?”
“Everything. Where are you now?”
“At a pay phone.”
“Are you living at home?”
“The old man threw me out.”
“Stay away from Manny and Cholo,” I said.
“They used me, didn’t they.”
“It’s the way things are,” I said. “The good guys put their faith in people they shouldn’t.”
I heard him crying on the other end.
I BROUGHT MAJOR AND Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs inside the house and went into my father’s office. My father had spread twenty pages of manuscript across a table. He had been working on an account of Lee’s failed attack on Malvern Hill. Without artillery, Lee had thrown fifty thousand men at the Union line. The result was a disaster. It would be repeated later at Cemetery Ridge. In his account, my father included a story he had always told me about the rebel yell. He said it was not a yell but a fox call. When he was a little boy on Bayou Teche, there were many Confederate veterans who entertained the children by re-creating the strange warbling sound that rose from the throats of thousands of boys and men dressed in sun-faded butternut and moss-gray rags when they charged through the smoke and dust at the Union line. My father’s point was not the sound itself but what it represented. The sound was like a series of “woo’s,” similar to an owl hooting, the vowel both rounded and restrained, pushed out by the lungs rather than shouted. I tried to imagine advancing with an empty musket through geysers of dirt, trying to control my voice and my fear, while cannon loaded with canister and grape and chain and explosive shells blew my friends and fellow soldiers into a bloody mist. How do you find that kind of courage? Wouldn’t your legs fail? Would not normal men throw their weapons to the ground and run away? Where did you go to learn courage?
I knew the answer. You were brave or you weren’t. You didn’t get the Medal of Honor for swimming through a school of jellyfish. I knew my trek up Golgotha was waiting.
I BOUGHT A QUART of ice cream and drove to Valerie’s house. Her father was on a job at the refinery in Port Arthur. We had the house to ourselves. Valerie owned a Stromberg-Carlson high-fidelity record player. We plugged in an extension cord and took it on the back porch, and she loaded six 78s onto the spindle. We spread a quilt on the grass and ate the ice cream out of the carton, and I laid my head in her lap. The sun was gone, the sky turning from purple to dark blue. I could smell the cleanness of her dress and feel her fingers stroking my hair and tickling the back of my head. I closed my eyes and felt myself drifting away. The record changed, and “Marie” began to play. When the record changed again, the slow momentum of “Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie” rose and fell and filled the yard and echoed off the walls of the house and garage as though we were seated in the midst of the orchestra.
“I didn’t know you had any Tommy Dorsey records,” I said, my eyes still closed.
“Those are the only two I have.”
“Your dad likes Tommy Dorsey?”
“Grady gave them to me.”
“Oh?”
“Oh what?”
“Nothing. I never thought he was a guy who’d like 1940s jazz or swing.”
“He liked it because his father didn’t. His father didn’t like anything connected with Negroes or Jews.”
I picked up her hand and stuck her fingers into my mouth.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“Because you taste good.”
“I’m afraid for you, Aaron.”
“Don’t be.”
“My father left me a gun. He said if any of those guys come to the house, I should call the police.”
“That’s good advice.”
“No, he said I should call the police, then kill the guys who were at the house.”
I opened my eyes. She was looking down at me. “Don’t listen to him. There’s always another way,” I said.
“Do you believe that?”
I wanted to say yes. But I couldn’t. I was carrying a stiletto; under my car seat was a .32 revolver rigged to circumvent forensic examination. I also had revenge fantasies. The truth was, I wanted to forget the New Testament and escape into the orgiastic violence of Moses and Joshua and my namesake Aaron. I wanted to paint houses and the countryside with the blood of my enemies.
“What is the other way?” she said.
I pressed her back down on the quilt and buried my face in her hair. I held her there for a long time, saying nothing, then placed my head against her breast and listened to the quiet beating of her heart.
BEFORE I WENT BACK home, I did something I had never done. I drove into the black district and asked a black man to buy me a six-pack of Lone Star and a half pint of whiskey. Then I drove to Herman Park and sat under a tree in the dark and drank all the whiskey and four of the beers. I think the only reason I didn’t drink the remaining two was because I passed out. When I awoke—or rather, when the world came into view again—I was driving my heap down Westheimer at 11:48 P.M. I did not know how I’d gotten from Herman Park to Westheimer. I passed the Tower Theater and the wood-frame ice cream store and the firehouse where we used to take our used tires and bundled newspapers and clothes hangers for the war effort after the bo
mbing of Pearl Harbor.
When I came in, my mother smelled alcohol on me and was upset. I hated that I had hurt her, but I hated worse the probability that she would punish my father for my drunkenness.
The next day creaked by in slow motion. I could not remember where I had been or what I had done between driving into the park and awakening miles away on Westheimer. At work I listened to the local news on the tiny radio in the office, wondering if I had sought revenge on the three guys who had trapped me in the alley. I bought the early-afternoon edition of the Houston Press and searched the crime reports. Nothing. I convinced myself I worried too much.
Just before five o’clock, Cisco Napolitano’s Rocket 88 pulled to the pumps, the top down. She was wearing black sunglasses and a white peasant blouse that exposed her breasts almost to the nipple. What was new about that? Nothing. But I couldn’t say that about the guy sitting next to her. It was Bud Winslow, the guy who liked to shove the faces of smaller kids into his genitalia.
I went out to the car with a rag and a bottle of window cleaner. “Fill her up?”
“Get in,” Cisco said.
“I’m working,” I replied.
“Better do what she says,” Bud said.
“Didn’t Loren tell you to get lost?” I said.
“What were you doing at Bud’s house last night, Aaron?” Cisco said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I saw your heap,” Bud said. “I saw it twice. You got out with something in your hand. Then you acted like you changed your mind about something and drove away.”
“You live in Bellaire, don’t you?” I said.
“You know where I live.”
“That’s why I don’t go into Bellaire. I heard the neighborhood has turned to shit.”
I saw my boss looking at me through the glass in the office. I unscrewed the gas cap and started fueling, my gaze fixed on the numbers clicking on the face of the pump. She got out of the car and stood behind me. “What were you doing at his house?”
“I wasn’t doing anything. I was home. What do you care, anyway?”
She either lowered her voice or spoke through clenched teeth. “Because his father is a business partner of Jaime Atlas. We want Grady’s car back. Got it?”
“No.”
“You dumb little twerp.”
The gas tank ran over. She stepped back before it could splash on her tiny shoes.
“That’s a dollar seventy-eight,” I said. “Need your oil checked?”
Her nostrils looked like she was breathing the air in a meat locker. “Give my number to your stupid friend and tell him to call me.”
“I think the Sabe left town. He said something about going out to Hollywood.”
She took off her glasses. The skin around her eyes was white and wrinkled, her pupils like drops of ink. “My ass is on the line.”
She didn’t call me “kid”; she didn’t call me by my name. I think her fear was such that she couldn’t muster more words than it took to admit how scared she was.
“What about my family?” I asked.
“They’re grown-ups. Let them take care of themselves. What’d they do for you? It’s obvious that someone did a mind-fuck on you.”
I looked into her eyes. I wondered who lived inside her. No, that’s not true. I thought I knew exactly who lived inside her, the figure from the shade we’ve all been warned about, and the thought of it frightened me.
“I’m sorry for any injury I’ve caused you, Miss Cisco. You seemed like a nice lady. I always thought you were a lot better than the people you ran around with.”
I saw her lips part and her face quiver. She reached into her purse for her billfold to pay for the gas. The top of her right hand was sprinkled with sun freckles or perhaps liver spots. It was trembling.
WHEN I CAME HOME, I found a note from my mother on the icebox door: “Your father and I went to Walgreens. I have a terrible headache. Your dinner is inside. Please do not drink today. I didn’t have time to feed Major and the cats.”
I brought Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy inside and filled their food bowls and put fresh water in the big bowl they shared. My grandfather, the former Texas Ranger, had an axiom all the Hollands followed: Feed your animals before you feed yourself. Then I put on clean jeans and a starched short-sleeved shirt, and took the plate of cold cuts and deviled eggs and potato salad from the icebox, and sat down to eat. I did not want the telephone to ring. I knew of no one except Valerie who had a worthwhile reason to call. I bit into the deviled eggs and eyed the phone in the hallway as though I could force it to remain silent. I had not finished the first deviled egg before it rang.
“Hello,” I said.
“This is the only call of this kind I’m making,” the voice said. “Make the smart move or it hits the fan in the next twelve hours. You think I’m manic? You don’t know manic. You think you can handle shit, I’ll show you shit. You think you’re some kind of rodeo cowboy can steal our money and tell us to fuck off? You’ll learn what getting fucked is all about.”
“Vick?”
“What? You deaf? You got wax? Want me to come over there and unplug your ears?”
“Is this about Grady’s car?”
“Is this about the car, he says. I asked my father to let me have a run at this. That’s the only reason nobody is holding a hot cigar to your eyelid right now. Think I’m kidding? You got a dog and three cats. I saw them in your front yard. How about we put on a warm-up? I don’t like cats. I don’t like funny little bird dogs, either. Are you listening to this? Don’t pretend you’re not listening. Hey, answer me!”
“You’d better not come near my house or my animals or my family, Vick.”
“He says ‘don’t come near my house.’ That takes some nerve. The guy who can’t keep his nose out of other people’s business, he doesn’t like me around his house. The guy who’s taking food out of my family’s mouth.”
“I’m eating dinner now.”
“His lordship is eating dinner now. That’s going to get Little Lord Fauntleroy off the hook. You deliver that car. You deliver it by this time tomorrow. I’ll light you up, man. I’ll pull your insides out with a pair of pliers.”
“Stay away from us, you sick bastard.”
I hung up, then stared at the phone as though it were alive. I took the receiver off the hook and put a pillow over it so I wouldn’t have to listen to the buzzing sound filling the house.
I KNEW WHERE MY father would go when he returned from Walgreens with my mother. I asked if I could go with him.
“I never thought you were keen on the icehouse,” he said. “Thirsty for a Grapette?”
“Yes, sir. I’d like to talk with you about a concern of mine also.”
“What would that be?”
“Sleepwalking and such.”
“Your mother said you had a snootful last night.”
“Better wait till we’re at the icehouse, Daddy.”
We walked the three blocks to his hangout and sat at an outdoor plank table under a striped canopy riffling in the breeze. It was dusk. The sky was speckled with birds slowly descending into the trees that shaded most of the neighborhood.
“Three guys threatened me in an alley up in the Heights,” I said. “One wanted to cut me with a razor. Loren Nichols bailed me out.”
His face never changed expression, but his eyes did. “Who was going to cut you with a razor?”
“I don’t know his name. Bud Winslow was with them. He was a linebacker who used to run interference for Grady Harrelson.”
The waiter brought my father a Jax and a glass and a salt shaker on a tray and set them down one by one in front of him. Then he served me a Grapette and went away. My father’s eyes never left my face. “Go on,” he said.
“I think I might have gone to Winslow’s house in Bellaire last night.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Winslow came to the station today with Cisco Napolitano
and said he saw me get out of my heap in front of his house.”
“You have no memory of that?”
“No, sir.” I paused. “I had a shank.”
“A what?”
“A stiletto.”
He was still, not a hair moving on his head, even though the canopy was flapping. “I think a predictable phenomenon is occurring in your life, Aaron. It’s the nature of evil.”
“The knife?”
“No. Evil is like a flame that has no substance of its own on which to feed. It needs to take up residence within us. You imagine yourself committing acts that are in reality the deeds of others.”
“But what if I harmed someone?”
“You didn’t. You never have. And you won’t, at least not deliberately.”
“Vick Atlas called.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. These people don’t exist. If they come around, we’ll have to make a choice.”
“Sir?” I said.
“Maybe it won’t come to that. You know what we need? A slice of that Hempstead watermelon at the stand on Westheimer.”
He put seventy-five cents on the table to cover the beer and the soft drink and the tip for the waiter. I had never seen my father walk away from a glass or bottle that contained alcohol.
Chapter
28
THE NEXT MORNING Saber moved back into his house. I was surprised. I had thought Mr. Bledsoe was an unforgiving and angry man. He was probably like most people, better than we think they are. It probably took a lot of courage for him to humble himself and go to work as a Jolly Jack ice cream cart driver, on a route in his own neighborhood, where people concluded he had been fired from his job at the rendering plant for drinking, which wasn’t true. Anyway, the Sabe motored into my driveway and parked under the porte cochere and announced he was through with Manny and Cholo and boosting cars and dropping goofballs and smoking Mexican laughing grass. I wasn’t quite sure Manny and Cholo were through with him, and I knew Grady Harrelson and Vick Atlas weren’t.