The Jealous Kind (12 page)

“Are you out of your mind?” she said. “Why are you looking through the windows?”

“I've been calling
all morning. Where have you been?”

“I went to the grocery.”

“I have to talk with you. It's urgent. Call it of global significance.”

“I thought we were going to Galveston,” she said.

“Once we get some things out of the way.”

“Stop shouting.”

She went to the back door and pushed it open. I brushed against her as I stepped into the house. I could smell a scent like strawberries on her skin. She was dressed in faded jeans and a short-sleeve blue denim shirt with cacti and yellow and red flowers sewn on it. She had unwrapped the towel from her head. Her hair was damp and hung in ringlets on her cheeks and neck.

“Let's go for a cherry milkshake,” I said.

“Cherry milkshake? We're not going to Galveston?”

“I can't think straight. I just talked with a woman who's probably in the Mob. She was talking about cherry milkshakes, so I have milkshakes on my mind. She was talking about you. Or seemed to be. So was Saber. How long did you go out with Grady Harrelson?”

“What does that have to do with anything now?” When I didn't answer, she said, “I went out with him for two months. Why?”

“It took you that long to discover what kind of guy he is?”

“
Yes,
it did. What is wrong with you?”

“I don't believe it would take that long.”

“I don't care what you believe. It's the truth. Grady can be thoughtful and kind when it suits his purpose. But I saw another side to him the night you walked up on us at the drive-in.”

“Saw what side to him?”

Her mouth was a tight seam, as though she were deciding how long she would tolerate my behavior. “A Mexican girl got out of one of the cars and came over to say hello. She had a
pachuco
cross on the web of her left hand, like a street kid might wear. She got confused and didn't know what to say and kept looking around. I felt sorry for her. She walked off, humiliated in front of Grady's worthless friends. He swore to me he didn't know who she was. So I went to the restroom. When I came back, he was talking to one of his friends, the guy who
flipped a cigarette against your back. Grady didn't see me. He said, ‘Get that bitch out of here. Tell her she's going to be a grease spot if she bothers me again.' ”

“You never had a clue about him before that?”

“I don't know what's gotten into you, but if you're trying to hurt me, you're doing a good job of it.”

“I just wondered why you were with a guy like Grady. It doesn't make sense. How could it? You're everything that's—”

“A woman in the Mob said something about me?”

“I saw her at Harrelson's house. She was asking me if I had a girlfriend.”

“Why are you telling me all this crap? Why now? We were going fishing on the jetties.”

“I was trying to tell you you're everything that's good. That's why I couldn't understand how you could go out with Harrelson. I'm not the same since that night at the drive-in.”

“Don't talk stupid. People don't change,” she said. “They grow into what they've always been. They just stop pretending, that's all.”

My head felt small and tight. My cheeks were burning. I couldn't speak.

“Some people are the jealous kind,” she said. “They don't love themselves, so they can't love or trust anyone else. There's no way to fix them. That's why you're really upsetting me.”

“I think that's the worst thing anyone ever said to me.”

“I'm going upstairs now and lie down,” she said. “I don't feel well. Or maybe I'm going to take a long walk by myself. You can let yourself out.”

I don't know how long I stood in the middle of the living room while the house swelled with wind and her footsteps creaked across the ceiling. “Come down, Valerie!” I shouted.

I heard a door slam and thought perhaps she was having a tantrum, which meant her mood would pass and at some point we would make up. But doors began slamming all over the house, and I realized the wind was perpetrating an innocent deceit upon me, unlike the pernicious deception I had just perpetrated on myself. I had let suspicion
winnow away my faith in the girl I loved, and as a consequence the gift presented to me had been taken away and probably would be given to someone else. Worse, I knew the fault was my own.

That's about as close to a definition of hell as it gets, if there is such a place.

M
Y MOTHER WORKED
in a bank and each afternoon came home earlier than my father. I was sitting at our redwood picnic table in the backyard with the cats and Major and my Gibson when I saw her through the back screen, a glass of sun tea in each hand. She came down the steps and sat across from me, her expression thoughtful rather than irritated or anxious. “Are you worried about something, Aaron?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Worry robs us of happiness and gives power to the forces of darkness.”

“You learned that in a log-house church in San Angelo. I'd leave it there.”

“I learned it in 1931, picking cotton from cain't-see to cain't-see. If you have enough to eat for the day, the next day will take care of itself.”

I looked at the simplicity and repose in her face. These moments came to my mother rarely, but when they did, the transformation in her manner was as though she had undergone an exorcism. Today it's called bipolar. Back then, people didn't have a name for it.

“I went to Mr. Krauser's house,” I said. “He told me he had been protecting Jimmy McDougal from a homosexual who hangs out at the Pink Elephant. He said Saber hangs out at the Pink Elephant, too.”

“Mr. Krauser believes Saber is a homosexual?”

“That's what I gathered.”

She ticked her nails on the side of her glass. “What's your opinion?”

I was hesitant to confide in her. Her mercurial nature was similar to my father's, but rather than rage, she would find pills in the cabinet or solitude and darkness in her bedroom. My mother's prison was her mind, and she took its dark potential with her wherever she went.

“One time at Saber's
house when we were fifteen, he asked if we could get naked and wrestle.” I gazed at my hands, my ears ringing in the silence. I saw her pick up her glass and remove the napkin from it and slowly wad the napkin in her palm.

“So what did you all do?” she asked.

“I made a joke about it. Then he said he was just kidding.”

“And that's the way to remember it. It's nothing to worry about. What occurred then was not bad, and it's not bad now. That's the way you must think about it.”

“Really?” I said, looking her in the face.

“Mr. Krauser said he's protecting Jimmy McDougal?” she said, the subject already behind her.

“Do you know something about Mr. Krauser I don't?”

“You could put it that way. I know a liar and a bully and white trash when I see it. Is Mr. Krauser in the directory?”

O
UR TELEPHONE WAS
in the hallway. I sat in the living room and could hear her dialing Krauser's number. The cats and Major had followed us inside. They perched on the furniture like an audience anticipating a stage presentation. My mother's voice was clear, without emotion, her accent less like Texas than the boarding school she briefly attended in New Orleans through the generosity of a charitable family.

“This is Mrs. Broussard, Aaron's mother, Mr. Krauser. I understand you think his friend Saber Bledsoe is of questionable character. . . . You saw him at the Pink Elephant? Can you please tell me what you were doing there? I see. Why would you have Jimmy McDougal in your automobile at the nightclub if in fact you did not want Jimmy to be in the company of the men who frequent the nightclub? Mr. Krauser, I'm not going to report you for your activities. Instead, if I hear you have lied about or mistreated either my son or any of his friends, I'm going to take a horse quirt to you in public, in front of witnesses. Then you can explain your shameful behavior to others, in particular the superintendent of schools. Thank you for your time.”

There are good days you never forget. There are also days when people can throw a cup full of kerosene into a smoldering, wood-fueled stove, not pausing to think about the evaporation process and its effect when they casually toss a match through the grate.

That evening I called Saber and told him I was sorry I had ever hurt his feelings or done anything bad to him. I also told him he was the best guy I ever knew, and that Valerie felt the same about him, although that was a lie. I also told him it was time to visit one of our favorite nightspots, Cook's Hoedown, the honky-tonk where Elvis said he loved to perform more than any other. I snapped my Gibson into its case and put it into the backseat of my heap and headed for Saber's house. It was a bad choice.

T
HE CLUB WAS
on Capitol Street, and all the big Western bands and stars played there during the 1930s and '40s, including Hank Williams. A disk jockey named Biff Collie used to let me in through the back door and allow me to sit in with a couple of the bands at the back of the stage. To this day I tell people I played with Floyd Tillman, who wrote “Slipping Around,” and Jimmy Heap, who recorded the most famous song in the history of country music, “The Wild Side of Life.” I don't tell them I sat in the shadows, my acoustic Gibson lost among the drums and amplified instruments of the band.

It was a beer joint with a small dance floor and an earthy crowd. My parents wouldn't have approved of my being there, and few kids from my section of Houston wanted to go there unless they had an agenda that had to do with the availability of uneducated blue-collar girls. But for me the coarse physicality of the culture, the hand-painted neckties, the slim-cut trousers, the two-toned needle-nose boots, the drooping Stetsons, the sequined snap-button shirts that sparkled like snow, all somehow created a meretricious artwork that was greater than itself, one that told the audience that fame and the glitter of stardom were only a callused handshake away. Even Saber seemed in awe of me when I stepped down from the back of the stage and returned my Gibson to its case. “Jesus Christ, I cain't believe it's you up there with those people,” he said.

“It's
not a big deal,” I said.

“Fuck it's not. That's Leon Payne.”

Payne wrote “The Lost Highway” for Hank Williams. I didn't want to let on how proud I was, so I didn't say anything.

“Let's get a beer,” Saber said. “My best friend plays acoustic guitar for Leon Payne. How about that, music fans everywhere? Hey, those girls over there are looking at us.”

They weren't, but I didn't want to disillusion poor Saber. Cook's Hoedown wouldn't serve minors, as many of the nightclubs and beer joints did. So we went to a place called the Copacabana, over on Main. It had fake palm trees, the cloth trunks wrapped with strings of white lights by the entrance, and shades made of bamboo on the windows. It was a dark, refrigerated club, with only a jukebox on weekday nights. You could order beer or Champale from the waitress or at the bar; if you wanted anything harder, you had to bring your own bottle and order setups, which meant glasses, a small bucket of ice, and carbonated water or Coca-Cola or Collins mix at premium prices. Also, the bottle had to stay behind the bar. On Friday and Saturday nights there was a jazz trio and sometimes a female singer. There was a uniformed cop stationed by the men's room, but he never interfered with the sale of alcohol to minors or bothered the patrons unless someone started a fight or he recognized a parolee.

Saber and I sat in the darkest corner of the room and ordered two bottles of Champale from the waitress. Saber lit a cigarette, bending his face to the cupped match, his eyes tiny with secret knowledge. “Did you see who was in the parking lot at Cook's?”

“Whoever it was, why did you wait until now to tell me?”

“I didn't want to stoke you up.”

“Then I don't want to know.”

“It was Harrelson. With three other guys. They were in his pink convertible.”

“What's Harrelson doing at Cook's?”

“Girls from the welfare project are always hanging at the back door. He gets them to blow him, then drops them on a country road.”

“Stop making up lurid tales,
Saber. The guy is bad enough as it is.”

“Anyway, I shot him twin bones and double eat-shit signs, plus the Italian up-your-ass salute. I don't know if he saw me or not. Man, it's cold in here. Check out those guys in the corner.”

A conversation with Saber was like talking to the driver of a concrete mixer while he was backing his vehicle through a clock shop. “Which guys?”

“In the suits. Tell me they're not gangsters.”

“Lower your voice,” I said.

“The flight from Palermo must have just landed.”

I turned around slowly, as though looking for the men's room. The waitress had brought out a tray on wheels and was setting silverware and a battery-powered electric candle on a table. Three men sat around a bottle of champagne wedged into an ice bucket. She served steaks with Irish potatoes wrapped in tinfoil to the two older men, although the club had no kitchen and to my knowledge never served food. The younger man wasn't served a meal; he sipped from a champagne glass, one arm hanging on the back of the chair. None of the men spoke. When the waitress went away, the oldest of the three men tucked a napkin into his collar and bent to his food.

He was Frankie Carbo, my uncle's business partner, the man who fixed fights the way Arnold Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series. I had shaken hands with both him and Benny Siegel, and it would take years before I could acquire the words to describe the peculiarity in both men's eyes. They saw you but did not see you; or they saw you and dismissed you as not worth seeing; or they saw you and filed you into a category that involved use or self-gratification.