“Saber isn’t a bad boy. A little imaginative, maybe, but that’s why I’d like to work with him now. Catch things in the bud.”
“What did you say to all this, Aaron?” my father asked.
“I’m working at the filling station this summer,” I replied.
“So there you have it,” my father said to Mr. Krauser.
“One hundred dollars a month and room and board,” Krauser said.
He waited. My mother stood in the background, her eyes fixed strangely on the back of his head.
“I say something wrong?” Krauser asked.
“Not a thing. Have a fine evening, sir,” my father replied.
“What’s that McDougal boy doing in your car?” my mother said.
“He helps me with household chores and cutting the lawn,” Krauser said.
“He’s ill,” my mother said.
“Ma’am?”
“The boy is an outpatient at a clinic. He had a harsh childhood. He needs care.”
Krauser nodded. “That’s true. That’s why I do what I can for him.”
She stepped closer to him. “I know your kind.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Your kind of man. I’ve seen you on many occasions. The clothes and the rhetoric are different, but the persona isn’t.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Miz Broussard.”
“Oh, you certainly do.”
Krauser’s gaze went from my father to me. He looked through the screen door at our yard and the shadows that fell on our two white cats, Snuggs and Bugs, who each slept in a flower box on the front porch. “I think I shouldn’t have come here,” he said.
“It’s been a pleasure,” my father said. “Have a grand time at summer camp, and tell us about it sometime.”
Then Krauser was out the door. His stink hung in the air like a soiled flag.
“YOUR FOLKS EIGHTY-SIXED Krauser?” Saber said early Saturday morning at the filling station in West University where I worked part-time.
“I don’t think he’s figured it out yet.”
Saber had come to the station with a thermos of coffee at seven A.M., full of forgiveness for my going in the house with Valerie and leaving him alone. I promised myself I would never hurt him again.
“What’s Krauser up to?” he asked.
“You got me. He’s scared about something.”
“You’re right,” he said, watching a long-legged girl in shorts pedal past the station. “He probably knows I got the goods on him.”
“What goods?”
“My sources saw him hanging around the Pink Elephant. He may be a closet stool-packer.”
“Come on, Saber.”
“I’m not knocking those guys. They don’t bother anybody. I’m knocking this ass-wipe who’s declared war on us. What did I ever do to Krauser besides drop my johnson through a hole in the ceiling of his classroom? Did you ever notice how he always looks constipated? I bet he has some kind of blockage that’s backed up into his brain. I got to ask you something.”
“About what?”
“Valerie Epstein.” His eyes went away from mine, then came back. “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“You know.”
“End of conversation.”
“Am I your best friend or not? Who keeps you out of trouble? Huh? Answer that.”
“I appreciate your efforts.”
“You don’t need that kind of grief. When you get the urge, just flog your rod.”
“Shut up, Saber.”
Sometimes Saber had inclinations and said things I didn’t like to dwell on. Saber never had girlfriends or asked a girl to a dance. He didn’t even go on Coke dates. He talked about movie actresses but always eased away from the group when we visited a slumber party or hung out with a mixed crowd in the back row at the drive-in theater, drinking beer and necking and sometimes having to lift a car bumper to get rid of a discomfiting condition.
“Loren Nichols didn’t give us up,” he said.
“Maybe he has character,” I said.
“Save it for Mass. This isn’t nearly over.”
A Cadillac pulled up to one of the pumps; the driver honked. I ignored him and said to Saber, “Will you take the collard greens out of your mouth?”
“This is about Grady Harrelson. It’s always about a guy like Harrelson, not a greaseball from North Houston.”
“You don’t like rich people, Saber.”
“Why should I?” he said.
I thought about it. I couldn’t come up with an answer.
DETECTIVE JENKS PULLED into the station in an unmarked car at six that evening, just as we were closing up. The only other employees, two black men, were rolling dice in back on a flattened cardboard box for fun. In those days white kids were hired in filling stations because black men were not allowed to handle money or deal with the customers. Other than making change, our skills were virtually nil. The owner of the station had already gone home. I looked at the two black men and wondered at the composure that seemed to characterize their lives in spite of the hard times they’d had. The younger man had been with the Big Red One in Korea and come home with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. The older man had a scar like a braided rope on the back of his neck, where he had been stabbed by a cuckolded husband in Mississippi. Both men, like most men of color in that era, knew a cop when they saw one. They put away their dice and began washing up under a faucet, their backs turned to me and Jenks. I was on my own.
“Get in,” Jenks said.
I tossed my sponge into a bucket and slung a chamois over my shoulder. I even tried to smile. “What for?”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
I got into the front seat. The inside of his car was hot and smelled of dust and old fabric. With his fedora and necktie and suit coat on, he looked like he wouldn’t fit inside the car and was about to break the seat or headliner or steering wheel with his size and weight. “Close the door.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You beat the crap out of the Nichols kid?”
“I defended myself.”
“You use a two-by-four?”
“I got lucky. Is he all right?”
“No thanks to you. You ought to be in the ring. Know who Lefty Felix Baker is?”
“The best boxer in Houston. Middleweight Golden Gloves champion of Texas five years running.”
“I was one of his coaches. Lefty is a good kid. He could have gone the wrong road, like some kids he grew up with. But he didn’t.”
“Am I in trouble, Detective Jenks?”
“As a detective, I cover the entire metro area. You know the kids I have the most trouble with? You pissants in Southwest Houston. You think you’re better than other people. I’ll take the nigras or the Mexicans over y’all any day. They might steal, but some of them don’t have much choice. Y’all vandalize property because you think it’s your right. Sometimes I fantasize about stuffing the bunch of you into a tree shredder.”
“What do you want from me?”
“For starters, you’d better choose your words more carefully.”
As bad luck would have it, Saber’s 1936 Chevy roared out of a side street and bounced up the dip into the station lot. Saber had a bottle of Jax in one hand, the radio and the stolen speakers from the drive-in theater blaring. His face lost its color when he saw me in the car with the detective.
“Turn off your engine, lose the beer, and get in the backseat,” Jenks said to Saber.
Saber got out and set the beer down by his front tire.
“I said, lose it.”
“Yes, sir,” Saber said. He threw the bottle up on the patch of lawn by the boulevard and opened the back door of Jenks’s car and sat down as though taking up residence in a tiger’s cage.
Jenks turned around. “You going to give me a bad time, Bledsoe?”
“No, sir,” Saber said.
“When we’re done, pick up that bottle and put it in a trash can.”
<
br /> “Yes, sir.”
“Would you boys like to continue drag racing, feeling up the girls at the drive-in, running your money through your peckers on beer and whores, and maybe even graduating from that brat factory you call a high school?”
“Yes, sir, we’re on board for all of that,” Saber said.
Shut up, Saber.
Jenks went to the trunk of the car and returned with a canvas haversack full of file folders. He sat behind the wheel, the door hanging open, and began sorting through sheaves of typewritten pages and black-and-white photographs. “Here’s a mug shot you’ve already seen. I want you to look at it again. This is one time in your life you don’t want to lie. Did you ever see this girl?”
“That’s the girl named Wanda, Loren Nichols’s cousin, the one whose neck was broken,” I said.
“Where did you see her?”
“I saw her in that mug shot you showed me,” I said.
“Nowhere else? You haven’t changed your mind?”
“No, sir.”
“Because I think she pulled a train for a bunch of high school guys more than once. You know what I mean by pulling a train?”
“No,” I said.
“How about you?” he said to Saber.
“Same as Aaron.”
Jenks scratched the tip of his nose. “Strange she ends up with a broken neck two blocks from where you boys might have torched Loren’s vehicle.”
“We didn’t do that, sir,” I said.
“I admit that might take more smarts than either of you seems to have,” he said. “I got some other photos in here.”
He pulled out about fifteen of them, all of different sizes and origins, like photographs someone had thrown in a box and put away in a closet: elegantly dressed men and women eating in a supper club, evening gowns glittering like melted sherbet; a man in a summer tux with his hair parted down the middle, shaking hands with Tommy Dorsey; a racehorse dripping with roses in the winner’s circle, its owner wearing round glasses as dark as welders’ goggles; a casino under construction in a desert; a jailhouse photo of a man in a wide-brimmed fedora; and a nude woman with glorious breasts leaning back on a polar-bear rug in front of a fireplace, one eye closed in a lascivious wink.
Jenks made each of us look through the photos one at a time. Neither of us spoke.
“Big blank?” he said.
“I recognize the man in the mug shot,” I said.
Jenks looked out at the boulevard, amused or bored, I couldn’t tell which. “Care to tell me his name?”
“Benjamin Siegel.”
“Which magazine did you see his photo in?”
“My uncle introduced me to him at the Shamrock Hotel. My father has never forgiven him for that.”
“What’s your uncle’s name?”
“Cody Holland. Mr. Siegel was at the Shamrock with Frankie Carbo.”
Jenks rolled his eyes. “Cody Holland the boxing promoter?”
“He’s an oilman, too.”
“Do you know who Frankie Carbo is?”
“He’s my uncle’s business partner.”
“Business partner? Where’d you pick up that language, boy? Frankie Carbo was a member of Murder, Incorporated.”
“That’s why my father was upset.”
“You know anyone else in these photos?”
I could see Saber out of the corner of my eye. His upper lip was moist with perspiration. “Not exactly,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I might have seen the lady who’s sitting on the rug in front of the fire.”
“She’s on your paper route and she pays you in trade?”
“I don’t think she’s that type of lady,” I said.
“Son, did your mother’s doctor drag you out of the womb with forceps? Where did you see this woman?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember seeing a woman who seemed kind and looked like her, that’s all.”
“This woman was kind? The woman wearing no clothes?”
“I’m probably mixed up,” I said.
“That photo was taken from the suitcase of a dead man. He was frozen in a snowbank two thousand feet above Reno, Nevada. He was so scared he tried to get over the Sierra Nevada Mountains barefoot with no coat on. You saw this woman in Houston?”
“At Grady Harrelson’s house in River Oaks,” Saber said.
I wanted to yell in Saber’s face, stuff a cork in his mouth, use his head for a kettledrum.
“You’re talking about the home of Clint Harrelson?” Jenks said.
Saber nodded. “Two days ago. They were having a swim party. Grady has a hard-on for Aaron because he thinks Aaron took his girlfriend. We thought we’d straighten things out.”
“You’re sure it was her?”
“How many women look like that?” Saber said.
“You’re in the know when it comes to women?” Jenks said.
“I’ve been around,” Saber said.
Jenks propped the photo on the dashboard and studied it. “This is Cisco Napolitano, boys. She’s screwed every major wop in the Mob. How tight are y’all with the Harrelson kid?”
“Not at all,” I replied.
“You just happened to go to his house in River Oaks while he was having a swim party?”
“I think Grady sicced Loren Nichols on me,” I said.
“Why would Harrelson be mixed up with a northside punk like Nichols?” Jenks said.
“That’s what we cain’t figure out,” Saber said.
“Why didn’t you want to tell me you’d seen the naked woman?” Jenks said.
“She seemed nice. She kept Harrelson’s guys off us,” I said.
“He’s got hard guys around?” Jenks said.
“I’ve seen them spread-eagle a guy on a car hood and put out his lights.”
Jenks crumpled an empty package of Pall Malls and threw it out the window, then fumbled another pack out of the glove box. He peeled off the red cellophane strip while he stared at nothing, my words lost in the wind.
“Sir, did you hear me?” I said. “I’ve seen Grady and his friends gang up on a guy and hurt him real bad.”
“Okay, I got it.”
“What do you want us to do, sir?”
His skin had the texture of ham rind. “Get out. Pick up that beer bottle while you’re at it.”
“Did we say something?” I asked.
“Don’t go near Cisco Napolitano. She’ll have your body parts hung on hooks. How did you dipshits get involved in this?”
“I don’t think we’re the problem,” I said.
He gave me a look, then drove away as though we weren’t there. Saber was writing in the notebook he carried in his shirt pocket. “He said Cisco Napolitano? How do you spell that? I’ll be haunted by those lovely eggplants the rest of my life.”
“She’s mixed up with Vegas and the syndicate,” I said.
“So what? She seems to go for younger guys. Maybe she’s a nympho. Did you see the way she was eyeing my heap? I think she dug us.”
Chapter
7
SIX DAYS LATER, school was out for the summer, and all I could think about was Valerie Epstein. I had three hundred and eighty-five dollars in a checking account and thirteen silver dollars in an army-surplus ammunition box, and because I was now a senior, my father had given me permission to buy a 1939 Ford from a neighbor who’d just been drafted and probably headed for Korea. So I had my own heap and could drive up to the Heights whenever I wanted. The Ford wasn’t just a heap, either. It had twin pipes and Zephyr gears and a Merc engine with milled heads and a hot cam and a high-speed rear end. It could hit sixty in five seconds.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Each evening I bathed and changed clothes after work and motored into the Heights to pick up Valerie Epstein, arguably the most beautiful and intelligent teenage girl in Houston. Her name had the melodic cadence of a sonnet or a prayer. I went to bed with Valerie on my mind and woke with images of her printed
on the backs of my eyelids.
It was the hurricane season, but we had no hurricanes. Instead there were purple and crimson and orange clouds in the sky at sunset, and Gulf breezes that smelled of flowers and rain. We ate fried chicken off paper plates at Bill Williams’s drive-in restaurant by Rice University and skated at the roller rink on South Main to organ music under a tent billowing with the cool air blown by huge electric fans. We went swimming once at the Shamrock Hotel, across the street from a cow pasture spiked with oil derricks pumping fortunes into the pockets of men who had eighth-grade educations. Somehow being in love with Valerie made me fall in love with the whole world.
We danced at one of the many nightclubs that served underage kids, and rode the roller coaster on Galveston Beach in spite of the Condemned sign nailed above the ticket window. I felt anointed by Valerie’s presence, and my fear of hoods and greaseballs disappeared, as though the two of us had a passport to go wherever we wanted. A jalopy packed with rough kids drinking quart beer seemed no more than what it was, a car packed with kids who were born less fortunate than I and wanted to pretend for just one night they were happy.
TEN DAYS AFTER I had seen Jenks, I was in the grease pit draining a crank case when I heard a voice I did not ever want to hear again. My ears popped, and I opened and closed my mouth, hoping the wind inside the breezeway had distorted the voice and words I heard.
Walter, the black man who had been wounded and decorated for bravery in Korea, leaned down so he could see me under the car. “A guy here wants to see you, Aaron.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Ask him.”
I climbed out of the pit, wiping my hands on a machinist cloth. A tall kid was framed against the sunlight; he was wearing drapes and suede stomps and a shirt with the collar turned up on the neck, his hair greased and combed in ducktails. He stepped out of the glare into the shade, a toothpick rolling across his teeth. The swelling and discoloration were almost gone from his face, but one eyebrow looked like a broken zipper.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Did you know my cousin Wanda?”