The Jealous Kind (29 page)

He hung up and came back into the dining room. “Say that again about the firecracker blowing up in Vick's face.”

“It's what happened,” I said.

“If you're lying . . .” he said.

“People in my family don't lie, Mr. Atlas. You asked who my father is. He went over the top five times in World War One. That's who he is.”

A
S WE DROVE
away,
I put my arm around Valerie and pulled her against me.

“What are you laughing about?” she said.

“The faces of those guys when you gave it to them.”

“They got off easy. If my father thinks they were hooked up with the guys who poured gasoline in my car, they'll be dead. That's no exaggeration, Aaron.”

We were about to turn onto Seawall Boulevard when Cisco Napolitano's red-and-black Rocket 88, the top down, came around the corner.

“Stop!” Valerie said.

“What for?”

“I want to tell her something.”

“Tell her what?”

“Did you see the way those men looked at me? I want to take a bath. She's in the middle of all this, but she never has to pay a price. She also has a way of showing up when you're around. Now stop the car.”

“Take it easy, Valerie.”

“She wants to get her hooks into you. I'm sick of these people.”

I slowed in the middle of the street. So did Cisco. Her shades were pushed up on her head, her face windburned. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

Before I could answer, Valerie leaned across me so she could speak out the window. “We just left the collection of trash you hang out with,” she said. “When we first got here, they were talking about you. I don't know what they were saying, exactly, but they were laughing. If I were you, I'd find another sandbox.”

“Nice try, honey,” Cisco said.

“Yeah?” Valerie said. “Try this on for size. They said Merton Jenks got in your bread when he was a cop in Nevada. Maybe they just made that up.”

Cisco's face drained. Valerie shot her the finger and then mouthed the word “you.” I drove away before anything else could happen.

“I can't believe you did that.”

“Stay away from her, Aaron. I don't want you around her.” She laid her head back on the seat and shut her eyes. “I love the smell of the Gulf and the sound of the waves crashing on the sand. Do you want to go swimming? Out past the jetty, maybe all the way to the third sandbar?”

“We didn't bring our swimsuits.”

“We can go to the end of the island. Nobody is there this time of day.”

“Hammerheads and jellyfish are.”

“I don't care,” she said. “Do you like her?”

“Miss Cisco?”

“Yeah, do you have a thing for her?”

“Not at all,” I lied, unwilling to admit my fascination with her and my hope that she was a better person than others thought.

“Yes, you do. You think she's good. She's not. She's evil. She'll try to destroy us.”

“I don't think that's true at all.”

She took her hand from mine and stared out the window. When I asked her if she still wanted to swim at the far end of the island, she didn't reply. She did not speak again until we were on the highway and headed back to Houston.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Saber showed up at the filling station wearing drapes instead of jeans, shined patent-leather stomps rather than his half-top boots with chains on the sides, his crew cut tonicked and combed back on the sides. He lit a cigarette with a Japanese lighter I had never seen, one with an image of Mount Fuji carved on the leather case.

“Where'd you get the new threads?” I said.

“At a store on Congress Street,” he said, looking sideways at the street. “They've got Mr. C shirts, too, the ones with the big upturned collars.”

“Why not wear a sign that says Arrest Me?” I asked.

There were circles under his eyes. He kept blinking, like a caffeine addict. He released his cigarette smoke a mouthful at a time. I wondered when he'd had his last full night's sleep.

“I squared a beef for us,” he said.

We were standing under the rain shed that covered the fuel pumps. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was within earshot. “I don't know if I want to hear this.”

“I think you'll enjoy it. We boosted Vick Atlas's Buick. He had a security box around the ignition, so Manny's uncle let us use his tow truck and we lifted it out of the driveway.” He grinned with self-satisfaction, waiting for me to react.

I folded my arms on my chest. I couldn't look at him. “When?”

“Last night. A broad in a garage apartment off Montrose hauls his ashes. I wrote ‘Blow me, Fudd' in chalk on the driveway.”

“Put it back. Or dump it somewhere he can find it,” I said.

He nodded. “Makes sense. Steal the car of the guy who tried to send us to Gatesville, then return it. Should I leave an apology?”

“Valerie and I 'fronted his old man in Galveston yesterday. They're going to think we did it.”

He looked down the street at the cars passing on either side of the boulevard. He puffed on his cigarette. I wanted to hit him. Instead I took the cigarette from his fingers and mashed it out with my foot and threw it into the oil barrel that served as our trash can.

“There's another reason I'm here,” he said. “We stripped the Buick before we passed it on to a guy who's helping the economy in Juárez. That chain with rope loops in it was in the trunk. Manny wondered what it was.”

“I don't care about Manny. Why are you telling me this?”

“Manny and Cholo don't know the Buick belongs to Vick Atlas. See, I'm what they call a spotter. I find the kind of car somebody wants. Then we go to work. The situation might get a little touchy if they find out they boosted a set of wheels owned by somebody in the Atlas family.”

“I don't know what to say.”

He started to take another cigarette out of his pack, then put it back. “Remember when we went fishing in the surf down at Freeport? You were in waves up to your chest and hooked a devil ray that was probably three feet across. You dragged it up on the sand and went right back in. You were never afraid, Aaron. You thought you were. But you weren't.”

“Walk away from these guys,” I said. “We'll start over.”

“I owe them money. I paid off the mortgage on our house.”

“How much?”

“You don't want to know,” he said. “They're muling Mexican brown from the border to San Antone and Houston.”

“Heroin?”

“I stepped in a pile of shit.”

His eyes glistened. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, but he stepped away from me, trying to smile, then got into his heap and fired it up. As he bounced into the street, he gave me a thumbs-up. He went through the Stop sign as though it were not there, then floored the accelerator and disappeared into the shadows of the live oaks that arched over the boulevard.

I
N THE DARWINIAN
world of American high school culture, I had learned only one lesson: The lights of love and pity often died early, and many friendships were based on necessity and emotional dependency and nothing else. I had the feeling that secretly Vick Atlas and Grady Harrelson despised each other, because each saw in the other his loneliness and the abandonment by his father. In the case of Vick and Grady, however, there was another ingredient: their jealousy over the affections of Valerie Epstein.

The following day neither of my parents was home when I got off work. I bathed and put on fresh clothes and tried to think. I had said that my family didn't lie. That was true most of the time. But in an imperfect world, I figured, there were instances when a lie served virtue better than the truth. I fed Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy, then pulled up a chair to the phone in the hallway and found Vick Atlas's
name in the directory. He answered on the second ring. “Hello!” he barked.

“Hey, Vick. How's it hanging?” I replied.

“Who's this?”

“Aaron Holland Broussard.”

There was a pause. “What do you want, wise guy?”

“You stopped those two phony cops from hurting Valerie. I owe you one.”

“You and I aren't done by a long shot. If you think you can get on my good side, forget it. You're going to be a long red scrape on the asphalt, Buster Brown.”

“Maybe your father told you that Valerie and I were in his office a couple of days ago.”

“You're lucky you're not on a meat hook.”

“Did somebody boost your wheels two nights ago?”

The line went quiet again.

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“Keep talking.”

“I was afraid you'd think it was me and Saber.”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“I know better.”

“How about Spaceman?”

“Saber? The same with him. Would we boost your car and then call you up to tell you we didn't do it?”

“Then who did? The Montrose district is not the kind of neighborhood where you get your car hot-wired. You got a comment on that, wise guy?”

He had just set a verbal trap. The ignition had not been jumped. Vick was smarter than I thought.

“I was at Prince's drive-in last night,” I said. “Some of Grady's buds were talking loud in the next car. I heard one guy say, ‘Vick Atlas was getting laid when we took the Buick. He's never going to find it.' ”

“Rich-boy jocks are hot-wiring cars? That's interesting to know. You're a gold mine.”

“I thought I'd pass on the information. Do with it what you want.”

“Why would Grady want to steal my car?”

“I don't know, Vick. Somebody stole his convertible, and maybe he thinks you had something to do with it.”

“No Kewpie doll, earwax.”

“Sorry I bothered you,” I said. “By the way, your car wasn't hot-wired. Not according to these guys. It had some kind of box around the back of the ignition switch.”

I could hear him breathing against the surface of the receiver. “So how'd they steal it, pinhead?”

“Search me.”

“No, not
search
you,
fuck
you. A lot of cars have security boxes, toe cheese.”

“They said they wrote a message on the driveway that would really get to you. I think it was ‘Blow me' or ‘Blow me, Elmer Fudd.' Something like that. They said they wrote it in chalk. They thought it was a howl.”

I could almost feel his body heat coming through the receiver. “That cocksucker,” he said.

“I was trying to do the right thing. I'm sorry I upset you, Vick. I like all the things you called me. One day I might want to be a writer. You've given me a lot of material.”

The line went dead.

R
ODEO PEOPLE REFER
to the two-week period before July Fourth and the two-week period following it as Christmastime. That's when the circuit opens up, and the country remembers a bit of its origins, and the big prize money awaits any cowboy willing to go the longest eight seconds in the world. In Houston the rodeo and the fair and livestock show were grand events. Bottle rockets exploding above the fairgrounds, the Ferris wheel printed against the sky, the smell of caramel corn and hot dogs and cotton candy, the music of the carousel, the popping of the shooting gallery, the spielers in front of the sideshow, a fire-eater blowing clouds of flaming kerosene from his mouth, bull riders eating steak sandwiches under an awning snapping with wind, all the riders wearing butterfly chaps and big-roweled spurs strapped on their boots. For me these images could have fallen from the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but I doubted they would ever be recognized as such.

I took Valerie on the Ferris wheel, which was like rising into the stars, even better, because when the gondola halted at the top to let on more passengers, the whole world seemed to drop away from us, the gondola swaying, the people on the ground no more than stick figures, all of our problems trapped down below us, as though we were cupped inside a divine hand. I hung my arm over her shoulder. “You
said Miss Napolitano would try to destroy us. It's the other way around. She sees herself in you. She believes Jaime Atlas was forcing Mr. Harrelson and Grady to give us a bad time because Saber and I hurt Vick.”

“This woman wants to be me?” Valerie asked. “Where did you get this brilliant insight?”

“You're everything she's not. You're admired and loved by others. She's not. She's used by the scum of the earth. You know what the big mystery is, the one I think no one can figure out?”

“No, what is it, Mr. Smarty-Pants?”

“Why a girl like you goes steady with the likes of me.”

She tried to look serious, but I saw her eyes crinkle at the corners.

“When people ask me, I tell people you not only have poor vision but you're a terrible judge of character,” I said.

She laughed this time. And what a laugh she had. It was like the way she chewed gum. It was an expression of joy.

We ate hamburgers and went to the livestock show. Twice I thought I saw a hulking man in a fedora following us. I sat down on a bench by the entrance to the Coliseum while Valerie looked for the ladies' room. I was staring at the tips of my cowboy boots when I felt the weight of a big man ease down on the bench. I didn't need to look up to know who he was. I could see the Pall Mall cigarette protruding from his cupped fingers; I could also smell his odor, a portable fog of nicotine and harsh soap and breath mints or antiperspirant that didn't work.

“Good evening to you, Detective Jenks,” I said.

“You riding this weekend?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, tomorrow. I drew a bull named Original Sin.”

“You riding in the junior division?”

“I lied about my age. I'll be with the regulars.”

“Is Miss Valerie with you?”