The Jealous Kind (3 page)

“Why would he quit his job as a chemist because of something that happened on a passenger boat?”

“He was in World War One. The German artillery was knocking their trench to pieces. The German commander came out under a white flag and asked my father's captain to surrender. He said the wounded would be taken care of and the others would be treated well. The captain refused the offer. A German biplane wagged its wings over the lines to show it was on a peaceful mission, and threw leaflets all over the wire and the trench, but the captain still wouldn't surrender. The Germans had moved some cannons up on train cars. When they cut loose, they killed half my father's unit in thirty minutes.

“Ten years later, he was on the ferry headed to Havana when he saw his ex–commanding officer on the deck. My father insisted they have a drink together, mostly because he wanted a chance to forgive and forget. That night his ex–commanding officer jumped off the rail. My father always blamed himself.”

“That's a sad story.”

“Most true stories are.”

“You should be a writer yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because I think you're a nice boy.”

“Somehow those statements don't fit together,” I said.

“Maybe they're not supposed to.”
She smiled, then took a breath, the light in her eyes changing. “You need to be more careful.”

“Because I came up to the Heights?”

“I'm talking about Grady and his friends.”

“I think Grady Harrelson is a fraud.”

“Grady has a dark side. There's nothing fraudulent about it. The same with his friends. Don't underestimate them.”

“I'm not afraid of them.”

She jiggled her sprig of mint up and down in the ice. “Caution and fear aren't the same thing.”

“Maybe I've got things wrong with me that nobody knows about. Those guys might get a surprise.”

“Number one, I don't believe you. Number two, it's not normal to brag about your character defects.”

“Sometimes I believe I have two or three people living inside me. One of them has a horn like Harpo Marx.”

“How interesting.”

“My mother says I'm fanciful.”

I could see her attention fading.

“I have a term paper on John Steinbeck due tomorrow,” she said. “I'd better get started on it.”

“I see.”

“I'm glad you came by.”

I tried not to look as stupid as I felt. I could see her father working on his truck, the muscles in his forearm swelling as he pulled on a wrench. I wanted her to introduce me to him. I wanted to talk about trucks and pipelines and drill bits. I didn't want to leave. “Sunday night is a good time to play miniature golf. The stars are out and the breeze is blowing from the south, and there's a watermelon stand with picnic tables close by.”

“See? You talk like a writer. Let's get together another time.”

“Sure,” I replied. I hadn't finished my lemonade. “I can show myself out. You'd better get started on your paper.”

“Don't be mad.”

“I'm not, Miss Valerie.
Thank you for inviting me in.”

“You don't have to call me ‘miss.' ”

I got up from the table. “My father is from Louisiana. He gets on me about manners and proper grammar and such.”

“I think that's nice.”

I waited, hoping she'd ask me to stay.

“I'll walk out with you,” she said.

We went through a dark hallway that smelled of wood polish. A man's work cap and raincoat, a 4-H Club sweater, and a denim jacket with lace sewn on the cuffs hung from wood pegs on the wall. A man's galoshes and a pair of white rubber boots, the kind a teenage girl would wear, rested on the floor. There was no housecoat or woman's hat or house shoes or parasol or shawl or scarf in the hallway.

Also, there was a solemnity about the living room that I hadn't noticed before. Maybe the effect was created by the nineteenth-century furniture and the radio/record player with a potted plant on top of it and the empty fireplace and the couch and chairs that looked as though no one sat in them. I had thought Valerie Epstein lived in the perfect home. Now I wondered.

“Is your mother here?” I asked.

“She died during the war.”

“I'm sorry.”

“She's not. She did what she thought was right.”

“Pardon?”

“Her brother got left behind when her family fled Paris. My mother had herself smuggled back into the country. The Gestapo caught her. We think she was shipped to Dachau.”

“Gee, Miss Valerie.”

“Come on, I'll walk outside with you,” she said. She put her arm through mine.

The porch glider was swaying in the wind, the trees swelling, yellow dust rising into the sky. I could smell the odor of rain striking a hot sidewalk. “Can I have your phone number?”

“It's in the book. You'd better hurry.”
She glanced at the sky. “Don't get into trouble. You understand? Stay away from Grady, no matter how much he tries to provoke you.”

“My father will let me have the car tonight. We can go to the watermelon stand. I'll pick you up at eight and have you back home in less than an hour.”

“Nobody is this stubborn.”

“I call it conviction.”

“Back home by nine?”

“Promise,” I said.

Her eyes crinkled.

I
T RAINED MOST
of the night. When I woke in the morning, the sun was pink, the sky blue, the sidewalks streaked with shadow and moisture. I loved the dead-end street where we lived in our small brick bungalow. All the houses on the street were built of brick and had fruit trees and flower gardens in the yards, and there was a wall of bamboo on the cul-de-sac and, on the other side, a pasture dotted with live oaks that were two hundred years old. I sat down on the front steps with my sack lunch and waited for my ride to school. Saber Bledsoe, my best friend, picked me up every school day in his 1936 wreck of a Chevy, one he had chopped and channeled and modified and customized and bought junk replacement parts for, although it remained a smoking wreck you could smell and hear coming from a block away.

There was nothing Saber wouldn't do, particularly on a dare. At school he flushed M-80s down the plumbing and blew water out of commodes all over the building, usually between classes, when people were seated on them. The most hated teacher in the school, or maybe the whole city, was Mr. Krauser. Saber sneaked into the teachers' lounge and stuffed a formaldehyde-soaked frog in Mr. Krauser's container of coleslaw and caused him to puke in the faculty sink. Saber also unzipped his pants and got down on his stomach and stuck his flopper through a hole in the floor above Krauser's classroom, letting
it hang there like an obscene lightbulb until Krauser figured out why all his students' faces looked like grinning balloons about to pop.

I was determined this would be a good day. Probably nobody noticed my erection in the middle of the drive-in. So what if I had gotten into it with Grady Harrelson? What could he do? He'd had his chance. The hoods in the Heights? Valerie had said they were just neighborhood guys. I had taken Valerie Epstein to the watermelon stand and driven her back home and sat with her on the glider and even patted the top of her hand when a streak of lightning crashed in the park. Nobody paid any attention to us.

Maybe in the Heights I had found a part of town free of my problems. Maybe I had found a place where fear wasn't a way of life.

Wrong.

As soon as I got into the car, I could tell Saber was agitated. He backed into the street and headed toward Westheimer, the floor stick vibrating in his palm, his T-shirt rolled up to his armpits. He looked at me, then his head started bobbing on a spring, and he gave me what was known as the Saber Bledsoe stare, a cross-eyed, openmouthed reconfiguration of his face indicating disbelief at your stupidity.

“Why mess around? Just join some suicide unit and go to Korea,” he said.

“You have to run that by me again, Sabe.”

“The word is you got into it with Grady Harrelson at a Galveston drive-in. Then you went up to the Heights and were driving around with Valerie Epstein.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Where did I
not
hear it? You told some greaseballs to go fuck themselves, one greaseball in particular?”

“There's no way you can know this.”

“The guy you almost got it on with was Loren Nichols. He shot a man in the chest with a dart gun at Prince's drive-in.”

Saber had light red hair he wore in a flattop combed back on the sides, and green slits for eyes and the innocuous stare of a lizard and a peckerwood accent and a level of nervous energy that made you think
of a door slamming. He pulled a cigarette from a pack of Camels with his mouth.

“They came by my house last night, Aaron,” he said, the cigarette bouncing on his lip. “Somebody must have given them my name.”

“Who came by?”

“Loren and three other greasers.”

I felt a hole yawning open in my stomach. “What did they want?”

“You.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them my old man was drunk and had a baseball bat, and they'd better drag their sorry asses out of my driveway. Guess what? Before I could get the words out of my mouth, the old man came stumbling out of the garage with a Stillson in his hand.”

“We need to forget this, Saber.”

“It'll be all over school by second period. You helped bust up Grady Harrelson and Valerie Epstein?”

“No.”

“Doesn't matter. The story will be a legend by this afternoon. You actually went out with her?”

“More or less.”

“That's like getting laid by Doris Day. You're a hero, man. Does she have a sister? I'm ready.”

F
OURTH PERIOD, SABER
and I had metal shop. The teacher was Mr. Krauser, living proof we'd descended from apes. He had been a tank commander in France and Germany during the war and used to tell stories about how he and his fellow tankers smashed their Shermans through French farmhouses for fun. One of the vandal tanks crashed into a cellar, which Krauser thought was hilarious. He also told us how, as an object lesson for his men, he dragged an elderly German civilian by the collar into the street and occupied his home. Once while drunk at the bowling alley, he borrowed a knife from a student and sawed off a bowler's necktie.

Saber was the only kid in school who knew how to stick porcupine quills in Krauser and keep the wounds green on a daily basis. Krauser believed it was Saber who'd hung his plunger through the hole in the ceiling, but he couldn't prove it and was always trying to find another reason to nail Saber to the wall. But Saber never misbehaved in metal shop, whereas other guys did and in serious fashion.

Our school was located close to River Oaks, a tree-shaded paradise filled with palatial homes. But the school district was huge and extended into hard-core blue-collar areas of North Houston and even over to Wayside and Jensen Drive, where some of the roughest kids on earth lived. Metal shop was a natural for the latter. Three guys commandeered the foundry and cast molds in the sandbox and poured
aluminum reproductions of brass knuckles they sold for a dollar apiece, the outer edges ground smooth or left ragged and sharp. These were things Krauser had a way of not seeing, just as he didn't see bullies shoving other kids around. It wasn't out of fear, either. I think at heart Krauser was one of them. He liked coming up on a spindly kid and squeezing his thumb into the kid's upper arm, pressing it into the bone, then saying, “Not much meat there.”

That was when Saber would find ways to get even for the victim, like going up to Krauser and saying, “What should I do with this paintbrush, Mr. Krauser? While you were taking a whiz, Kyle Firestone told Jimmy McDougal to put his hands in his pockets and shoved the brush into his mouth. Look, it's got spit all over it. You want it, or should I wash it in the lavatory?”

This morning was different. Mr. Krauser wasn't watching Saber; he was looking out the door at a 1941 Ford sprayed with primer that had just pulled up on the shale bib by the baseball diamond. Four guys got out, combing their hair, all of them wearing drapes and needle-nose stomps. They leaned against the fenders and headlights of their car and lit up, even though they were on school property. Krauser rotated his head, then looked over his shoulder. “Come here, Broussard.”

I put down my term project, a gear puller I was polishing on the electric brush, and walked toward him. “Yes, sir?”

Krauser had a broad upper lip and wide-set eyes and a bold stare and long sideburns and black hair growing out of his shirt cuffs. His facial features seemed squeezed together as though he carried an invisible weight on top of his head. As soon as you saw him, you wanted to glance away, at the same time fearing he would know how you felt about him.

“Heard you had an adventure in the Heights.”

“Not me.”

“You know that bunch out there?”

I shook my head, my expression vague.

“You don't want to mess with them,” he said.

“I don't want trouble, Mr. Krauser.”

“I bet you don't.”

“Sir?”

His eyes went up and down my body. “Been working out lately?”

“I have jobs at the neighborhood grocery and the filling station.”

“Not exactly what I had in mind. Tuck your shirt in and come with me.”

“What's going on?”

“I'm going to show you how it's done. They think you were hunting in their snatch patch. Dumb move, Broussard.”

“How did you know I was in the Heights?”

“Heard about it during homeroom. I've seen that bunch before. There's only one way to deal with them, son. If you've got a bad tooth, you pull the bad tooth.”

“I really don't want to do this, sir.”