The Jealous Kind (11 page)

He drank a cup of coffee on the back steps and watched me fill the bowls of all my animals. “Things all right with you and Valerie?” he asked.

“Why wouldn't they be?”

“Because you always busy yourself with your cats and Major when you got something on your mind.”

“Pets can't fill their own bowls, so give it a break.”

“Krauser is dogging me,” he said.

“Stop it,” I said.

“I saw him in my rearview mirror last night. I saw him this morning, too.”

“It's coincidence. He lives a few blocks from your house.”

“More like a half mile. I saw his car at the Pink Elephant.”

“Saber, I don't want to hear this. What were you doing there, anyway?”

“Surveilling Asshole. Jimmy McDougal was sitting in his car. Then Asshole came out of the club and drove away. Remember Jimmy?
Two quarts down the day he was born? Why's Krauser taking him to a dump like the Pink Elephant?”

“It's not our business.”

“It is when he's following us around,” Saber said.

“Are you sure about all this?”

“You think I want to believe somebody is copping that poor kid's joint?”

“You really know how to say it, Saber.”

He looked at the animals eating from their bowls. “I'm thinking about joining the marines.”

“You're just seventeen.”

“I can forge the old man's signature. I'll be at Parris Island before he can do anything about it.”

“Stop talking crazy.”

“Every day we seem to get deeper in a hole. It's busting us up.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” he said.

“Don't talk like that. We've always been buds. I won't ever let you down.”

“You told me to beat it because you wanted to get in the sack with a girl. I don't hold it against you, but it doesn't make me feel too good, either.”

“I wasn't thinking.”

“Yeah, you were. You thought me right out of the picture,” he said.

“Valerie and I are both sorry.”

“
She's
sorry? What the hell does she have to be sorry about?”

“She's got feelings. She's got a conscience. You don't know her.”

“She was Grady Harrelson's girlfriend. She didn't know he was a dickhead? Why'd they break up? She just discovered out of nowhere what kind of guy he is? ‘Oh, hey, Grady, a flashbulb just went off in my head. You're a prick. Here's your class ring.' ”

“I never asked her.”

“I bet there's a lot you didn't ask her.”

“Say that again?”

“Did she get it on with
Harrelson before she got it on with you? Were there other guys before him?”

“You can't talk about her like that.”

“Why are you letting these people hurt us, Aaron?”

There were tears in his eyes. I tried to catch him in the porte cochere, but he fired up his Chevy and peeled rubber down the street, an acrid black cloud blooming from his pipes.

N
O MATTER WHICH
way I turned, I saw only darkness. A Mexican girl was dead, and her death may have been related to me. My girlfriend's father was threatening to kill a man and telling me about it in advance. Saber believed Mr. Krauser was part of a conspiracy involving homosexuality or pedophilia, and that he was following us around. Worse, Saber had made me doubt the nature of Valerie's relationship with Grady Harrelson. She was too intelligent not to have realized the kind of guy he was. Why did she let him take her virginity? Or had someone else already done that?

I could not rid myself of the image of Grady and Valerie entwined naked in each other's arms. I called her house, but no one answered. Didn't she remember it was my day off? We had talked about cane-pole fishing off the jetties in Galveston. I called her house three times within ten minutes.

Think,
I told myself. I hadn't done anything wrong. Or at least I hadn't intended to do anything wrong. I had a right to confront the people who were working out their problems on my back and Saber's. Suddenly the man who had always seemed a scourge in my life seemed a minor player, someone whose job security demanded he conform to masculine and brutish parameters, a man who was more dolt than villain and not a threat. I'm talking about Mr. Krauser.

He lived by himself in a squat gravel-roofed house that resembled
a machine-gun bunker, built of glazed brick that looked like plastic. There were no shrubs or flower beds in the yard; the St. Augustine grass was chemical green and as stiff and unnatural in appearance as the spikes in a rubber mat. The backyard contained an archery target stuffed with straw, a swimming pool made of plastic tarps, and a doghouse where a Doberman stayed unless it was killing the neighbors' cats or the wild rabbits that lived in the neighborhood. The grass was pocked with yellow depressions from the mounds of dog shit that Krauser shoveled into a garbage can humming with flies.

He answered the door in a sweat-soaked Texas A&M jersey cut off at the armpits and a pair of gym trunks rolled to the crotch. He seemed surprised to see me, even pleased. “Broussard, what's up, big man?”

“Need to talk to you, Mr. Krauser.”

“About what?”

“A delicate subject.”

“Come in. Get yourself in girl trouble?”

“No, sir.”

He closed the door behind me and turned the dead bolt, then cracked the curtain and looked through the window. The air conditioners were turned up full blast, the air frigid. “Where's Saber?”

“He's part of the reason I'm here.”

“If this is about the counselor job, it's too late. Come in back. I'm lifting. Get yourself a soda out of the icebox.”

I followed him into a windowless room. The floor was concrete. There was a sweat-printed, leather-padded black bench in it, and a rack of barbells along the wall, and at least two hundred pounds of steel plates on the weight bar racked above the bench. On the wall were certificates of merit from booster organizations, a framed collection of military medals and ribbons and chevrons and a unit patch, a pair of women's black panties pressed on pink felt under glass with a card that said “Liberating France one piece at a time,” a plaque with crossed cavalry swords on it, photos of Krauser bowling and performing on a trapeze and hitting softballs to young boys and playing with the Doberman, a letter of commendation from a group
in Dallas called Patriots Unlimited, and a Confederate battle flag. In the corner was an old wooden desk with a lamp on it made from a German helmet and an artillery shell. There was an SS insignia on the helmet and a silver-smooth bullet hole an inch from that. A chrome-bladed dagger, the white handle inlaid with gold lightning bolts, lay on the desk blotter.

Krauser began curling a ninety-pound bar, his biceps swelling into white cantaloupes corded with veins. “Spit it out.”

“Saber and I have bad people on our backs, Mr. Krauser. The problem is, we don't know why.”

“This is about those punks from the Heights?”

“I think it has to do with people in the underworld.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“I don't think it is.”

He continued to pump the bar, eight and nine and ten times, the steel plates rattling, sweat popping on his face, his odor blooming.

“Sir, I'm asking for your help,” I said.

“You think too much.”

“This isn't just a beef with some rough guys from the Heights. I think we're dealing with evil people, people with no mercy. There's some things about you that don't make sense, Mr. Krauser.”

He dropped the bar on a rubber pad, breathing deeply, his nostrils dilating. “What was that again?”

“Saber says you were following him.”

“What, I follow Mongolian idiots around town in my off hours?”

“Why would you come to my house and offer Saber and me jobs? You don't like either one of us.”

“I tried to do a good deed, that's why. I didn't exactly get a warm welcome from your parents.” He picked up a thirty-pound dumbbell in each hand and began pumping, his eyes sinking in his face.

“Saber saw you at the Pink Elephant with Jimmy McDougal.”

Krauser inverted the dumbbells, lifting them straight out from his chest, counting to ten under his breath, a drop of moisture hanging off his nose. He dropped them heavily on the rack. “Get this straight. There're kids who frequent that neighborhood because nobody else
cares about them. Others go down there because they like beating up queers. Most of them are queers themselves but don't know it. Jimmy McDougal is a kid with nobody to take care of him. I told the faggot who picked him up what I'd do if he ever tried it again. I even gave him a preview. By the way, the reason Bledsoe saw me at the Pink Elephant is that's where he hangs out, even though he pretends he's got some other reason to be there. Tell me if I'm right or wrong on that.”

“You're wrong.”

“Good try, son.”

He gave me a threatening stare. I looked him straight in the face and didn't blink. His stare broke. He blotted the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. “I got to shower. A lady friend is coming over. I don't want you here when she arrives.”

“Why'd you bolt the door?”

“We have break-ins. Now get out of here.”

“I think you're scared, Mr. Krauser.”

“Scared?” His forehead was strung with tiny knots. He pulled up his jersey and pointed. “That's where an SS lieutenant cut me open. I took his knife away from him and sliced off his nose. Then I put a bullet through his brain. That's his helmet on my desk, his knife on the blotter. I wouldn't wipe my ass with you, Broussard.”

It was classic Krauser: the self-laudatory rhetoric, followed by the attack on the sensibilities. This time I was ready for him. I stepped closer to him, holding my breath so I wouldn't have to breathe his fog of testosterone and BO and halitosis. Involuntarily he stepped backward, as though unsure of his footing.

“You're cruel because you wake up scared every day of your life, Mr. Krauser. I know this because I used to be like you. Now I'm not. So I owe you a debt. You're the model for what none of us ever want to become.”

I unbolted the door and went outside into the heat. I thought he might follow me into the yard and take a swing at me. But he didn't. I even waited by my car to see if he would come out. The sun went behind a cloud, and I got into my heap and drove away, no plan in mind.

Headed toward home, I saw a black-and-red Oldsmobile Rocket 88 convertible with a starched-white top. The driver was slowing as though looking for a house number. The Rocket 88 was state-of-the-art, hoodoo cool, too cool in my opinion for losers like Mr. Krauser and his friends. I slowed my car until I was abreast of the driver. She came to a complete stop and took off her sunglasses and shook out her hair, then removed a strand from her mouth. “What's the haps?” she said.

“You're the lady who was at Grady Harrelson's house,” I said. “You're Miss Cisco.”

“Who told you my name?”

“A Houston police detective.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Must have been a slow day at the precinct.”

“Are you looking for Mr. Krauser?”

“Maybe. Want to take a ride? I'll let you drive. How about a cherry milkshake? I can drink them all day long.”

“I'm pretty tied up right now.”

“Bussing tables?”

“I work at a filling station.”

“You have a girlfriend? I bet you do, a handsome kid like you. Clean-cut and wholesome. A little reckless, maybe. Girls like that. I always did.”

“Why are you talking to me like this?”

“Because you remind me of someone I used to know. Hop in. Don't be scared.” She was wearing a white blouse that exposed her shoulders, the kind Jane Russell wore in her films. There was a mole by her mouth, a purple shine to her hair.

“If you like nice guys, why do you hang around with douchebags like Grady Harrelson?”

“Boy, you have a potty mouth, don't you? Get in. Live dangerously. I dare you.”

I felt foolish and stupid in front of her but didn't know why. “I knew Benny Siegel.”

“You shot craps with him at the Flamingo?”

“My uncle is Cody Holland.
He was a runaway and a vagabond when he was twelve years old. He became a bouncer at the Cotton Club and a bodyguard for Owney Madden and put himself through NYCC on a boxing scholarship. He's business partners with a guy who was in Murder, Incorporated.”

She laughed. “You're cute. I just wish you weren't a fly in the ointment.”

“I'm a what?”

“You're getting yourself into stormy weather, kiddo. You should stay in your part of town.”

“What kind of crap is that?”

“I knew a boy who looked and talked just like you. I'm not making fun of you. You could be his twin. Tell your sweetheart she's a lucky girl. I wasn't fooling about that cherry shake.”

“You pick up high school guys?”

“What's a girl to do? Will you not look so serious? By the way, you're right about Grady Harrelson and his friends. They're shitheads. That's my point. Why let them fuck up your life?”

“So why are you with them?”

“It beats getting your ass pinched in a cocktail lounge. Your parents did a good job. You're a good kid. Keep me in mind if you want that cherry shake.”

She blew a kiss at me, then drove off to park in front of Krauser's house. My head was a basket of snakes by the time I reached the Stop sign.

A
HALF HOUR LATER
I pulled into the deep shade of Valerie's driveway rather than park on the street, where my heap might be recognized and vandalized by Loren's friends. I twisted the bell on the door. No answer. I walked up the driveway, beneath the tall windows, and tried to see inside by jumping above the ledges. I saw Valerie's face behind a dining room screen, a towel wrapped around her hair.