“You had one of your spells?” he said.
“About three hours’ worth.”
“My folks are going to brown their pants.”
“I can walk.”
“Stay where you’re at. The Army of Bledsoe does not leave its wounded on the field. Did you do anything we need to worry about?”
I reached into my back pocket. The knife was still there. I removed it and pressed the release button. The blade leaped into the air, clean and glazed with a clear lubricant, the way I bought it. “Everything is copacetic.”
“Keep a cool stool. I’m on my way.”
MY PARENTS WERE furious. I told them I fell asleep in the hammock in Saber’s backyard and that he and his parents thought I’d gone home until I knocked on the screen door, confused and mosquito-bitten.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone you were going to Saber’s?” my father asked. He was wearing his pajamas; the lights were on all over the house.
“I’m sorry I made y’all worry,” I said.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he said, his mouth bitter.
My mother’s eyes were full of tears, her nails hooked into the heels of her hands. “You’re going to give me a nervous breakdown. I’ve had a lifetime of your father’s drinking, and now this. I can smell it on you. Where did you go?”
“You saw Saber drive me home,” I replied.
“Don’t lie,” she said.
My father went into his office and turned on the desk lamp and stared at the manuscript pages on the desk blotter. He picked up a page and read it, then sat down at the desk and looked out the window into the darkness, like a man for whom a black box was a way of life.
THE NEXT MORNING I missed the first three periods at school and barely made metal shop before the bell rang. I dropped my book bag on my worktable. With luck, Mr. Krauser would give me a hall pass to the restroom so I could wash my face and sit on the toilet and deliberately turn my head into an ice cube. But hall pass or not, I was safe from my parents and the consequences of my actions, whatever they were, until three P.M. I sat at my worktable and lowered my eyes and tried to doze. The windows in the shop were ajar, and I could smell mowed grass on the wind, like a pastoral hint of summer vacation and release from all my problems at school. When I opened my eyes, I saw Mr. Krauser framed against the open door of his office, his finger pointed at me. “Inside, Broussard,” he said.
He closed the door behind me and turned the key in the lock. There were streaks of color in his face and perspiration on his upper lip, as though he had been standing over the foundry.
“I do something wrong, sir?” I asked.
“I want to get something straight before I walk you across the street to the River Oaks substation.”
“The police station?”
“You guys aren’t dragging me into your shit, you got that?”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about, sir.”
“A plainclothes cop was just here. He called your house, and your mother said you overslept and were on your way to school. I told him I’d deliver you to the station. I also told him you had never been in trouble and were a good kid. You owe me a big favor.”
“What’s a cop want with me?”
“That is not the issue. The issue is the conversation we had with the four hoods in the souped-up Ford. I told them they were on school property without authorization. I told them to get off campus. That was the entire substance of the conversation. Right?”
He was nodding while he spoke, waiting for me to agree with him, his eyes as hard as marbles, locked on mine. There was no window in his office; his body odor seemed to eat up the oxygen in the room.
“You made out I was a snitch. You set me up, Mr. Krauser. Has something happened?”
“Don’t you dare lay this on me, you little son of a bitch.”
“You told Loren Nichols you’d rip out his package and wrap it around his throat. Has somebody hurt him? Is that why you’re so afraid?”
“I hope that cop sticks a baton so far up your ass, you’ll be coughing splinters.”
AT THE SUBSTATION, a patrolman ushered me into a small room and left me alone with a huge thick-necked man gazing through the window at the high school campus across the street. He wore cowboy boots and a brown suit and white shirt and a tie with a swampy sunset painted on it. Behind him, a fedora rested crown-down on an army-surplus metal desk that was otherwise bare. He turned around and stared into my face, his eyes the color of lead. A snub-nose chrome-plated revolver and a badge were clipped on his belt. “I’m Detective Merton Jenks. Sit down,” he said.
“Are my folks here?”
He pawed at his cheek, his gaze never leaving my face. The skin around his eyes was grainy, like scales fanning back into his hairline. I thought of a reptile breaking out of its shell, perhaps millions of years ago. I sat down and looked up at him. He had not answered my question. I tried to hold his stare.
“You carry a shank?” he asked.
“A knife? No, sir.”
“Turn your pockets out. Put everything on the desk.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did I tell you to stand up?”
“No, sir.”
My hands were shaking as I removed my belongings from my pockets. He sat on the corner of the desk and watched me. “What do you call this?” he said.
“It’s a penknife. I use it to cut string at the grocery.”
“You sack groceries?”
“I tote them outside, too. Sometimes I work at a service station.”
“That’s a good job for a boy. Pumping gasoline, fixing tires, and all that,” he said, half smiling. “That’s what you do, right?”
“Yes, sir, oil changes, too.”
“What were you doing last night?”
“Not much. I took a walk.”
“Where’bouts did you walk?”
“I can’t rightly say. I have spells.”
“What kind of spells?”
“Like down in the dumps. They pass. They run in my family.”
“Know who Loren Nichols is?”
“A guy I had trouble with up in the Heights. He came to the school with his friends yesterday.” I straightened my back and took a fresh breath. Maybe this was about Loren Nichols and his buddies, not me.
“Were they in a 1941 Ford that belongs to Loren and his brother?”
“It was a ’41 Ford. I don’t know who owns it.”
“You wouldn’t have vandalized his car, would you?”
“No, I don’t do things like that. Are my folks on their way?”
“You mean ‘no, sir’?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I meant.”
“Loren says he saw you in the Heights last night, not far from his house. Were you in the Heights?”
“I never bothered those guys. They came after me. I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Jenks.”
“Detective Jenks. You didn’t answer my question. Were you in the Heights or not?”
“I don’t know where I was. Did somebody cut their tires? Is that why you asked if I had a knife?”
“You have no memory of where you were or what you did? I’d better get this down.” He felt his pockets as though he didn’t know where his pencil and pad were, then removed them from his shirt pocket and began writing, pressing the pencil hard into the paper, dotting an “i” as if throwing a dart.
“I know I didn’t cut anybody’s tires,” I said.
“If you were in a blackout, how do you know what you did?”
He had me.
“Would you set fire to a car?”
“No, that’s crazy.”
“Because that’s what somebody did. Cutting the valve stems wasn’t enough.”
“Loren Nichols says I burned his car?”
He looked at what he had written on the pad. “One step at a time. You did or did not cut his tires?”
“There’s a girl in the Heights I wanted to see. Maybe that’s why I was in the neighbo
rhood. Her name is Valerie Epstein.”
“You were chasing some new puss? That’s why you were in the Heights? It’s coincidence you were seen in proximity to the Ford, owned by guys you admit to having trouble with?”
“You don’t have the right to talk about Miss Valerie like that.”
“Get up.”
“Sir?”
He ripped the chair from under me and threw it against the wall, spilling me on the floor. “You think I came from downtown over a burned car owned by two punks who were in Gatesville? Are you that dumb?”
I pushed myself up, swaying, my knees not locking properly. “You didn’t have the right to say what you said.”
This time I held his stare and my eyes didn’t water. He picked up the chair with one hand and slammed it down in front of the desk. “Sit down.” When I didn’t move, he opened a desk drawer and removed a telephone book. “I’ll take your head off, boy.”
I sat down but never took my eyes off his face, even though I couldn’t stop blinking. He removed a five-by-seven black-and-white photo from his coat pocket and set it on the desk. “You know this girl?”
“No.”
“Look at the girl, not me.”
“I don’t know her.”
There were two images on the same sheet of paper, a side view and a frontal of the same young woman. She was wearing an oversize cotton jumper with gray and white stripes on it. At the bottom of the frontal photo was her prison number. She was hardly out of her teens, if that. Her hair was awry, like thread caught in a comb. Her eyes seemed to well with sadness and despair.
“You never saw her anywhere? You’re sure about that?” he said.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“You didn’t decide to try some Mexican poon?”
“Why are you asking me questions like this?”
“Her name was Wanda Estevan. She was a prostitute in Galveston.”
“Was a prostitute?”
“Somebody broke her neck. Maybe she was thrown from a car. Or maybe somebody broke her neck in the car, then bounced her in the street. About two blocks from where the Ford was torched.”
“What does her death have to do with the car?”
“There was gasoline and detergent on her jeans. The same combination that was used to burn the car. Quite a puzzle, don’t you think? You have gasoline cans at your filling station?”
“Sure. For people who run out.”
“How about in your garage?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you out with Saber Bledsoe early this morning?”
“Yes, sir, he picked me up in the Heights and drove me home.”
“You said you didn’t know if you were in the Heights or not. Rats must have eaten holes in your memory bank.”
He had me again. He put a Pall Mall in his mouth and scratched a match on the desk, the flame flaring on his cigarette. He took a couple of puffs and removed a piece of tobacco from his lip. “We found a gas can in his garage. The can has soap detergent in it. I’d say your friend has shit on his nose.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, I threw up in the toilet. Then I recovered the stiletto from under my mattress and flicked it open. I saw on one side of the blade, barely visible, a trace of rubber, the kind that might be left from slicing off a valve stem. My father came into the room without knocking. “Want to explain that?”
“This frog sticker?”
“I’d call it a weapon a criminal would have. Where did you get it?”
“In a pawn store.”
His eyes rested on the shelf above my desk where I kept my arrowhead collection and antique fishing lures and minié balls and a rusted revolver that had no cylinder and a cigar box full of Indian-head pennies. He didn’t speak for a long time. “Put it on the shelf. It doesn’t leave the room.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As a rule, when members of our church’s clergy talk about sin, what are they referring to?”
“Sex.”
“That’s correct. They don’t mention much about war, nor about violence in general. But that’s the real enemy, that and greed. Don’t let anybody tell you different. A man who carries a knife like that one is a man who’s afraid.”
When my father spoke this way, he was a different man, more regal and just and clearheaded than any man I ever met. He allowed no guns in our home and hunted ducks only one day a year, with the president of his company, in a blind over by Anahuac. After a prowler broke into our garage a couple of times, my father placed a brick in a hatbox and wrapped the hatbox in satin paper and tied a ribbon on it, then he set the box on the front seat of the automobile. He also put a note in it that read:
Dear Burglar,
While you were stealing this brick, a twelve-gauge shotgun was aimed at your back. If you return, you will not be received in a gracious manner. I do not wish to offend you, but you seem very inept. I suggest you join a church or practice your profession somewhere else. Give serious thought to this.
Best regards,
Your victim,
James Eustace Broussard
Our burglar friend never returned.
I closed the stiletto and placed it on the shelf and sat down on my bed. My Gibson was lying facedown on the spread. I picked it up and propped the curve in the sound box across my knee and formed an E chord on the neck. “I feel a mite sick, Daddy,” I said.
“Your stomach acting up again?”
“It’s not acting up. It’s always like that. Like I have a boil on the lining.”
A shadow slid across his face. “Did that police detective touch you?”
“He tore the chair out from under me and threw me on the floor. That’s not the problem, though.”
“If that’s not the problem, what is?”
“He said a Mexican woman, a prostitute, was killed two blocks from the burned car. He thinks she was mixed up in the burning of the car. He says the cops found the gasoline can that did the job. It was in Saber’s garage.”
There was a long silence. I couldn’t look at him. “Daddy?” I said. But he didn’t answer. “Daddy, say something.”
“What have you got us into, son?”
SABER WASN’T AT school the next day. I didn’t know if his father had beat him up or if he had just cut school. Mr. Bledsoe was from rural Alabama. He wasn’t a bad man, but he was uneducated and insecure and frightened and each day had to scrub off the grime from his job at a rendering plant with Ajax and a bar of Lava soap and a stiff brush. Whenever I saw a bruise on Saber, I didn’t ask about it. I didn’t think Mr. Bledsoe meant to hurt his son. When he was drunk, he made me think of a sightless pig trapped inside a circle of javelins.
At three o’clock I hitched a ride to Saber’s small frame house on the edge of the West University district. He was under his Chevy on a creeper board, his legs on the grass. I grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him out. He had a wrench in one hand; he rubbed at a piece of rust in his eye. “What the hell,” he said.
“Why weren’t you at school?”
“Didn’t feel like answering questions all over campus. Besides, I wanted to put my split manifold on the engine and hang my new mufflers. I filled them with oil first and set the oil on fire. The carbon gives it that throaty sound.”
“You’re thinking about putting dual exhausts on your heap when the cops are trying to send us to Gatesville?”
He pulled his knees up in front of him, his skin dark in the shade of the car. He used his shirt to wipe the grease off his cheek. “I don’t know where that gasoline can came from. I told that to the detective. So did my old man. I was proud of him. He told the detective to pack his shit up both nostrils.”
“I hate to tell you this, Sabe, but that’s not smart.”
“I thought it was. They’re after us, Aaron. I told you.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Ask yourself where all this started.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t play dumb,” he said. “This is about Valerie Eps
tein.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You went to see her, and the next thing you know, Loren Nichols and his greaseballs show up in front of her house. The next day the same guys show up at school and in my driveway. In the meantime, Mr. Krauser is twirling his joint in the punch bowl.”
“I can’t tell you what that image does to my brain.”
“Who’s the guy getting a free pass on all this?” he asked.
“You tell me.”
“Stop acting like a simp. You’re talking to the Bledsoe, the Delphic oracle of Houston, Texas.” He cocked back his head and spat in the air, catching his saliva on the return trip in his mouth.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I know. I also know Grady Harrelson is a prick from his hairline to the soles of his feet. I think we should make some home calls.”
He pulled himself back under the car and finished hanging one of his dual mufflers on a bracket, oblivious to the rest of the world.
RIVER OAKS WAS foreign territory. It wasn’t simply a section of the city that contained some of the most beautiful homes in America or perhaps the world; it was a state of mind. Unlike the Garden District in New Orleans, the mansions of River Oaks were not connected to the antebellum South and not stained by association with the lash and branding iron and auction block. Inside an urban forest were homes as white and pure as a wedding cake, the St. Augustine lawns a deep blue-green in the shade, the gardens and trellises and gazebos blooming with flowers as big as grapefruit, almost all of it bought and paid for by oil that sprang like chocolate syrup from the ground, oceans of it put there by a loving Creator.
Police cruisers rarely patrolled the streets. They didn’t need to; no professional criminal would invade a sanctuary like River Oaks. The afternoon was cooling, the streets dropping into shadow as we motored toward Grady Harrelson’s house, Saber’s new mufflers rumbling off the asphalt. I asked him how he knew where Grady lived.
“A year ago he shoved my cousin into the Shamrock swimming pool with all her clothes on. On prom night I followed him and his girlfriend to his house. His folks were away, and he thought he’d use the opportunity to get his knob polished at home. I bagged up a dead skunk and shoved it through his mail slot with a broom handle.”