Saber was the only kid in school who knew how to stick porcupine quills in Krauser and keep the wounds green on a daily basis. Krauser believed it was Saber who’d hung his plunger through the hole in the ceiling, but he couldn’t prove it and was always trying to find another reason to nail Saber to the wall. But Saber never misbehaved in metal shop, whereas other guys did and in serious fashion.
Our school was located close to River Oaks, a tree-shaded paradise filled with palatial homes. But the school district was huge and extended into hard-core blue-collar areas of North Houston and even over to Wayside and Jensen Drive, where some of the roughest kids on earth lived. Metal shop was a natural for the latter. Three guys commandeered the foundry and cast molds in the sandbox and poured aluminum reproductions of brass knuckles they sold for a dollar apiece, the outer edges ground smooth or left ragged and sharp. These were things Krauser had a way of not seeing, just as he didn’t see bullies shoving other kids around. It wasn’t out of fear, either. I think at heart Krauser was one of them. He liked coming up on a spindly kid and squeezing his thumb into the kid’s upper arm, pressing it into the bone, then saying, “Not much meat there.”
That was when Saber would find ways to get even for the victim, like going up to Krauser and saying, “What should I do with this paintbrush, Mr. Krauser? While you were taking a whiz, Kyle Firestone told Jimmy McDougal to put his hands in his pockets and shoved the brush into his mouth. Look, it’s got spit all over it. You want it, or should I wash it in the lavatory?”
This morning was different. Mr. Krauser wasn’t watching Saber; he was looking out the door at a 1941 Ford sprayed with primer that had just pulled up on the shale bib by the baseball diamond. Four guys got out, combing their hair, all of them wearing drapes and needle-nose stomps. They leaned against the fenders and headlights of their car and lit up, even though they were on school property. Krauser rotated his head, then looked over his shoulder. “Come here, Broussard.”
I put down my term project, a gear puller I was polishing on the electric brush, and walked toward him. “Yes, sir?”
Krauser had a broad upper lip and wide-set eyes and a bold stare and long sideburns and black hair growing out of his shirt cuffs. His facial features seemed squeezed together as though he carried an invisible weight on top of his head. As soon as you saw him, you wanted to glance away, at the same time fearing he would know how you felt about him.
“Heard you had an adventure in the Heights.”
“Not me.”
“You know that bunch out there?”
I shook my head, my expression vague.
“You don’t want to mess with them,” he said.
“I don’t want trouble, Mr. Krauser.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“Sir?”
His eyes went up and down my body. “Been working out lately?”
“I have jobs at the neighborhood grocery and the filling station.”
“Not exactly what I had in mind. Tuck your shirt in and come with me.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m going to show you how it’s done. They think you were hunting in their snatch patch. Dumb move, Broussard.”
“How did you know I was in the Heights?”
“Heard about it during homeroom. I’ve seen that bunch before. There’s only one way to deal with them, son. If you’ve got a bad tooth, you pull the bad tooth.”
“I really don’t want to do this, sir.”
“Who said you had a choice?”
I didn’t know what Krauser was up to. He was no friend. Nor did he care about justice. I could hear him breathing and could smell the testosterone that seemed ironed into his clothes. By the time we reached the ball diamond, I was seeing spots before my eyes.
“What are you guys doing here?” Krauser said to them.
The tall guy who had braced me in front of Valerie’s house was combing his hair with both hands as if Krauser weren’t there. He was wearing gray drapes and a black suede belt and a long-sleeved purple rayon shirt. He reminded me of the photographs I had seen of the jazz cornetist Chet Baker: the same hollow cheeks and dark eyes, an expression that was less like aggression than acceptance of death. It was a strange look for a guy who was probably not over nineteen.
“Did you hear me?” Krauser said.
“You got a rule against people having a smoke?” the tall greaser said.
“There’s a ‘no loitering’ sign right behind you,” Krauser said.
“That’s a police station across the street, right? Tell them Loren Nichols is here. Tell them to kiss my ass. You can do the same.”
“You shot a man in a drive-in.”
“With an air-pump pistol. A grown man who put his hand up my sister’s dress at a junior high school picnic. I don’t know if that was in the paper or not.”
I heard the bell ring and classes start emptying out in the hallways and concourses. Neither Loren Nichols nor his friends had looked at me, and I thought the incident might pass, that I might go to the cafeteria with Saber and forget about everything bad that had happened since Saturday evening. Maybe I could even make peace with Loren Nichols. I had to give it to him. He was an impressive guy. The moment was like an interlude in time when the potential for good or bad could go either way.
Mr. Krauser rested his hand on my shoulder. I felt an icicle run down my side. “My young friend Aaron has told me how you boys treated him,” he said. “Now you’re here to pick on him some more. What do y’all think we should do about that?”
Loren’s gaze shifted from Krauser to me, his head tilting. “Buy him a dress? He’s a cute kid, all right.”
“The kids in our school respect authority,” Krauser said. “They report guys like you. They don’t put themselves on your level.”
“I didn’t say anything to anybody. That’s a goddamn lie,” I said, my eyes stinging with moisture, the sunlight dissolving into needles. “Tell them, Mr. Krauser.”
“I want y’all to leave Aaron alone,” he said. “If you bother him again, I’d better not hear about it. Don’t you be bothering Saber Bledsoe, either.”
“You got a sissy farm here?”
“Look at me, boy. I’ll rip out your package and wrap it around your throat,” Krauser said.
Loren propped one foot on the bumper and scratched the inside of his thigh, gazing at the school. “Glad to have made your acquaintance. You got yourself quite a crew here. That’s River Oaks across the street? We’d better get back to our part of town.”
“Smart boy. Keep being a smart boy and leave Aaron and Saber alone,” Krauser said.
They got into their car and drove away, the dual exhausts purring on the asphalt. My knees were shaking with shame and sickness and fear. Krauser squeezed my shoulder with one hand, massaging it, tightening his fingers until they bit into the nerves like a dentist’s drill. “You’re safe now, Aaron, bless your heart. I always like to help out one of Saber’s friends. Let me know if I can do anything else for y’all.”
He dropped his hand from my shoulder and left me standing on the grass like a wood post. I couldn’t hear any sound at all, not even the chain rattling on the flagpole by the ball diamond.
“I’M GOING TO get that cocksucker,” Saber said that afternoon as he drove, a quart of Jax between his thighs.
“Which cocksucker?” I asked.
“Krauser, who else? I’m going to call in a few markers. I know a guy who’s a master of photographic surveillance. I bet Krauser is a sexual nightmare. I’m going to catch him muffing the meter maid or pronging sheep, then air-drop photos all over the school.”
I looked straight ahead and didn’t speak. I could still feel Krauser’s fingers digging into my shoulder, probing for a weak spot.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Saber said. “God, I hate that bastard. You’re a stand-up guy, you hear me? You called Krauser a liar? Nobody in the school has that kind of guts. I bet he won’t sleep tonight. You showed him up in front of th
e greaseballs. You’re a musician, Aaron. What’s Krauser? A nothing.”
“They think I’m a snitch.”
“Fuck them. You’re a model for guys like me. I think there’s a stink to this. Loren Nichols was in Gatesville. Guys with Loren’s record don’t start a beef in this part of town unless they want to pick state cotton.”
“I went into his territory.”
“So does the garbage collector. Trust me, there’s something bigger involved here. Krauser has awakened a sleeping giant—the Army of Bledsoe.”
“He wants to suck you in, Sabe.”
“He succeeded.”
At the red light, Saber began gargling with beer, swallowing it with his neck stretched back on the seat, revving his engine, indifferent to the stares from other cars.
MY FATHER KEPT a small office at the back of the house. He had inherited the secretary bookcase from his father, a lawyer appointed head of the Public Works Administration in Louisiana by Franklin Roosevelt and one of the few men in the state with the courage to testify against Huey Long at the impeachment hearing. My father worked for years on a history of his family, his grandfather in particular, a young Confederate lieutenant who was with Jackson through the entirety of the Shenandoah campaign.
He never typed, writing page after page in longhand, sometimes late into the night, smoking cigarettes he left floating in the toilet bowl. On his shelves were boxes of letters written at First and Second Manassas, First and Second Fredericksburg, Cross Keys, Malvern Hill, Chantilly, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and a prison camp at Johnson’s Island, Ohio. My father’s tragedy was one shared by almost all his family. Their patriarch had been a generous and honest man and, as a result, died a pauper at the onset of World War II. His family believed their genteel, privileged world had died with him, and they began to drink and substitute the past for the present and let their own lives slip away.
I walked into my father’s office and sat down. He wrote with a fat, obsolete fountain pen that leaked ink. A cigarette burned on the cusp of his ashtray; a thermos of coffee rested on his desk; the window was cracked to let the attic fan draw the evening air from outside. The sky was filled with crimson and purple and black clouds that resembled plumes from an industrial furnace. I could probably say a lot about my father’s writing, but for me the most memorable words he ever wrote were contained in a single sentence on the first page of his manuscript: “Never in human history have so many fine men fought so nobly in defense of such an ignominious cause.”
“How you doing there, pal?” he said.
It was a rare moment. He was happy and did not smell of alcohol. I sat next to him.
“I’ve got a problem,” I said.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“I got into it with some guys from the Heights.”
“Try not to say ‘guys,’ Aaron.”
“These aren’t kids, Daddy.”
“They insulted you?”
“They came to school today. Mr. Krauser made me walk with him to their car. He said he was going to show me how to deal with them.”
“Maybe he was acting like a good fellow. I had a teacher like that at St. Peter’s when I was a boy. All the boys looked up to him. I’ve always had fond memories of him.”
“Mr. Krauser shamed me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He said I snitched on them. One guy said I should wear a dress.”
“Your teacher was probably making them accountable.”
“Mr. Krauser is out to get Saber. He went through me to do it.”
“It’s good to stick up for your chum. But Saber can take care of himself. I bet you’ll never see those fellows again.”
“The trouble started over a girl from the Heights. Saturday night I got involved in an argument between her and her boyfriend. He lives in River Oaks. I think he’s a bad guy.”
“Don’t say—”
“I know. But he’s a bad guy, Daddy. I don’t know what to do.”
“Maybe we should all have a talk. I mean if they come back. If there’s going to be a fight, there’s going to be a fight.”
“This isn’t about a fight. This guy Loren Nichols shot a man with an air pistol.”
“A BB gun?”
“The kind that shoots steel darts. It hits like a twenty-two.”
“This sounds like one of Saber’s stories. Do you want me to talk with Mr. Krauser?”
“Mr. Krauser is a liar. Why would he tell you the truth if he lied about me to a bunch of greaseballs?”
“Don’t use language like that. You want to go for a Grapette?”
My efforts were useless. I folded my hands between my legs and hung my head. “No, sir.”
“Let’s sleep on this. Tomorrow everything will look different. You’ll see.”
He adjusted his rimless glasses and looked down at the page he had been working on, his attention already far away, perhaps on a hillside in Virginia where grapeshot and canister hummed louder than bees through the warm air, while a drummer boy about to die stood mute and powerless amid the horror taking place around him.
I went into the kitchen, where my mother was pulling a pie from the oven. She was an attractive woman and often caught the eye of other men, in whom she had no interest, even as flatterers. She always seemed to be waking from a reverie whenever someone walked up to her unexpectedly. On occasion she cried without cause and walked in circles, knotting her hands, her lips moving as though she were conversing with someone. Her peculiarities were so much a part of her life that they seemed normal. “Why, hey there, sleepyhead. Did you have a nice nap?”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Where have you been?”
“Talking with Daddy.”
“Tell him dinner is ready. Have you done your homework?”
“I’m not feeling well. I’d better not eat.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m going outside.”
“Outside? What are you going to do outside? Why are you behaving so strangely?”
“Everything is fine, Mother.”
“Why do you have that wrinkle between your eyes? I don’t like it when you have that. Come back here, Aaron.”
I went out the screen door and down the driveway through the porte cochere and began walking down the block. I walked until my feet hurt. Then I hitchhiked with no destination in mind and by dark was in a part of town where sundowners and people in the life frolicked and Judaic-Christian law held no sway.
THE JUKE AND barbecue joints were loud, the doors wide open, the elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings and littered with paper cups and beer cans, rust-stained where the rain spouts bled across the concrete. Outside speakers at the beauty parlors and barbershops played Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Guitar Slim, LaVern Baker, and Gatemouth Brown. Mexicans and blue-collar whites and people of color melded together in dress and dialect and the addictions and poverty and lucre they shared. The only authority figures were black Houston cops who drove battered patrol cars and parked inconspicuously at an abandoned filling station under an oak tree on a corner and were prohibited from arresting a white person. The prostitutes often carried either a gun or a barber’s razor; the pimps and dope dealers stood on the sidewalks, dressed in the zoot style of the forties; for a free beer, a kind soul was always willing to go inside a liquor store and buy what a white teenager needed. For me that was one can of malt liquor.
I sat down on the curb and drank it. It was hot and tasted like wheat germ with lighter fluid poured in it. I kept hearing a sound like an electrical wire shorting in a rain puddle, and I thought the buzzing sound might be coming from the neon sign over the pawnshop behind me. Except there was nothing wrong with the sign. I got up from the curb and dropped my empty malt liquor can in a garbage barrel and looked at the glittering display of saxophones and trumpets and trombones and drums inside the pawnshop’s windows. There was even a J50 acoustic Gibson in one window, just like mine, along
with rows of private-investigator badges, handcuffs, brass knuckles, blackjacks and slapjacks, and pistols of every kind.
I had seven dollars in my wallet. I went inside and bought a stiletto with a thin black handle and a tight spring and a six-inch rippling blade. One touch of the thumb and the blade sprang to life, and I felt a sense of power in my palm that was almost sexual.
I walked back down the street toward the police car parked at the filling station, the switchblade riding in the back pocket of my jeans. I was sure the cops in the patrol car were watching. But they were black and I was white, and I knew they would not bother me. That I was taking advantage of the unjust way colored police officers were treated made me ashamed, but not enough to cause me to turn back from my destination.
What was my plan? Where was I bound? I had no idea. I knew only that I was going somewhere to do something that seemed disconnected from the person I was. It was like stepping onto a carousel and disappearing inside the music of the calliope and the mirrors on its hub while the horses and children spun round and round, unaware that I had become their guardian.
Or at least that was what I told myself.
Chapter
4
IN THE EARLY A.M. I found myself by a phone booth under a streetlight ringed with humidity somewhere in North Houston. I had fifteen cents in my pocket and no bills in my wallet. The air smelled of sewer gas and dead beetles in the gutters and a coulee where the owners of a filling station had poured fifty-gallon barrels of oil. I dropped a nickel into the pay phone and woke up Saber. “I need a ride.”
“Where are you?” he said.
I looked through the window of the booth at the street signs and gave him their names. “I think I’m not far from North Shepherd. I’ve got some blank spaces in my head.”