The Jealous Kind (38 page)

“No, I don't.”

“Maybe they had a previous relationship. Is that a possibility?”

“Would you clarify that, please?” my father said.

“She used to work in a crib.”

“I have a hard time following your implication,” my father said.

“The situation speaks for itself, doesn't it?” Hopkins said.

“I gave her two dollars because she had no food,” I said to my father.

He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at Hopkins in a way I had never seen him look at anyone.

“I say something against the grain?” Hopkins asked. There was a smirk at the corner of his mouth.

My father touched me on the arm. “Let's go, son.”

Don't let him get away with it, Daddy,
I thought.

But he picked up his fedora from the table, and we walked silently side by side down the corridor. I looked over my shoulder. Hopkins was talking to several cops in uniform, his back to us. They were laughing as though listening to a joke. My eyes were shimmering, my heart a lump of ice.

Then my father said, “Stay here, Aaron.”

He walked back down the corridor. I followed him, disregarding his instruction. The attention of the cops in uniform shifted from Hopkins's story-in-progress to my father. “Forget something?” Hopkins said. One uniformed cop laughed.

“I've known every kind of man,” my father said. “Desperate men in transient shelters, convicts in Angola Penitentiary, psychopaths who enjoyed mowing down German farm boys. But there was an explanation for all of these men. You're of a different stripe, Detective Hopkins. You flaunt your power and gloat at your misuse of it. You see humor in the suffering of others. You have the tongue and the instincts of both the coward and the bully. One day these men will realize that you dishonor everything they stand for. When that day comes, they'll turn on you. Don't you dare come near us, and don't you dare slander my son.”

We walked away, his arm across my shoulder. There was not a sound in the corridor except the man yelling for toilet paper. Then even he was quiet.

I
HAD THE NEXT
day off at the filling station. The police department put a guard on our house. Valerie and I drove down to Freeport and waded into the waves and fished with cane poles and bobbers and shrimp for drum and catfish and speckled trout. The wind was up, the waves yellow and cascading with sand, gulls cawing and wheeling overhead. We caught one gaff-top and one stingray and turned them loose and ate po'boy sandwiches in an open-air beer joint on the beach that had slot machines and a jukebox and a shuffleboard inside. It was wonderful to be away from all the problems that awaited us in Houston.

I didn't want to think about Vick Atlas and what I had done to him. Nor did I wish to think about possible retaliation. I had started to wonder about all the events that had happened as a result of my argument with Grady Harrelson at the Galveston drive-in. I had thought the issue was jealousy. To an extent, it was. But the larger pattern seemed linked to money or power and not the angst of teenage romance.

How about the shooting death of Clint Harrelson? The more I thought about it, the more I felt there were elements in the story that I hadn't given adequate scrutiny. For example, the theft of Grady's convertible, the one loaded with currency and gold. In a city the size of Houston, how had Saber found out where Grady and the wife of
the wrecker driver were making out? What about Grady's ties with Mexican girls and Mexican gang members? Was Grady a lot smarter than I thought? Were Saber and I getting played?

After we got back to Valerie's, she went upstairs to shower. Her father was gone. I used the phone in her hallway and dialed Grady's number. “I need a minute of your time,” I said.

“If you're looking for a life preserver, you called the wrong guy,” he said.

“Why should I want a life preserver?”

“Because you pounded the shit out of a sadist and five-star nutcase? What's in your head? You thought he was going to leave you alone after you kicked his ass?”

“Harsh words for a guy who was at your side right after your father was killed.”

“I'm looking at my watch. I'll give you fifteen more seconds,” he said.

“Why aren't you making a stink about the investigation into your father's murder?”

“Because I know why he was killed.”

I wasn't ready for that one. “You know who did it?”

“Not specifically. My father liked boys. Just like that closet stool-packer Krauser. Those kids in his indoctrination camps were given multipurpose roles, get it? He was a geek and deserved to die the way he did. Any other questions?”

“You killed Wanda Estevan.”

“Yeah? Who's in the cookpot, pal? Get a life. Oh, I forgot. You don't have one. Vick is about to strip your skin off. That's not a figure of speech.”

“I think her death was an accident. I think you can get loose from all of this, Grady, if you're willing to get honest.”

He hung up.

Valerie came down the stairs in her bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her hair. “Who were you talking to?”

“Grady.”

“He's not worth the effort, Aaron.”

“Did he ever tell you his father was a pederast?” I said.

She looked at me blankly. “No.”

“Did he have young guys hanging around his house?”

“I wouldn't know. I was never there. Mr. Harrelson didn't like Jews. He didn't like my father in particular.”

“Grady said his father deserved the way he died. Was Grady molested?”

“If he was, he never mentioned it. He joined the marines to prove he was a man. Then his father got him discharged behind his back. I don't think Grady ever forgave him.”

“Maybe his father didn't want him killed in Korea.”

“The discharge wasn't about Grady. It was about his father. He believed Grady was a coward and would disgrace the family name.”

“Grady knew this?”

“Mr. Harrelson told him he needed him ‘behind the lines,' helping train these pitiful boys who went to his indoctrination camps.”

“I have a bad feeling, Val. I think we've been set up.”

“Who's ‘we'?”

“You and Saber and me.”

She touched my cheek. “You worry about all the wrong things. You give people dimensions they don't have.”

She put “Tommy Dorsey's Boogie-Woogie” on the record player and draped her hands on my shoulders and started to dance, her eyes closed. I began dancing with her slowly, in two-four time, Dorsey's orchestra swelling around us. I held her against me and put my face in the dampness of her hair.

“Can we go upstairs?” I said, my voice hoarse.

“Stay here. This is so good. I wish we could be like this forever.”

“I'll turn up the volume.”

“No, hold me. Just like you're doing.”

Then I realized she was crying. “What is it?”

“Everything. It's as you say. I try to pretend otherwise. I think something horrible is going to happen. My father—” She couldn't finish.

“What about your father?”

“He left a note and a hundred-dollar bill. He said if he wasn't back by supper, I should go to my aunt's house in Austin. I looked in his closet. His grease gun is gone.”

“His grease gun? I don't understand.”

“It's a machine gun with a folding stock. Paratroopers used them in the war.”

“Where was he going?”

I stared at her. The record ended. In the silence I felt as though I were slipping down the sides of the earth. “Tell me Grady killed his father.”

“Why do you want to believe that?”

“I don't want to think the killer is somebody who wants us dead, too.”

“I don't know what Grady did. He was here a few hours before his father died. His friends say he was on a sailboat that evening, when Mr. Harrelson was killed. Grady is probably telling the truth.”

“Let's go to Mexico.”

“And do what?”

“Get married.”

“You need to go to college.”

“What for?”

“To be a writer.”

“I'll be a writer and your husband. Let's go upstairs.”

She wouldn't meet my eyes. “Can we do it another time?”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied.

“You don't mind?”

I shook my head. “It's not because of me, is it?”

“No, never.”

But I wasn't convinced.

V
ALERIE CALLED ME
at seven
P.M.
Her father had just gotten home and was in the shower.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“He said all this is going to pass.”

“What is he? Some kind of Tibetan holy man?”

“That's not very respectful.”

I paused, trying to suppress my anger. “Want to go out for some ice cream? The sun doesn't set until after nine.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Then I guess I'll say good night.”

“It's still evening.”

“No, it isn't,” I said.

I
N THE MORNING
I looked through the newspaper for stories about violence, bodies discovered in a ditch, a shooting by an unknown assailant at a business property owned by the Atlas family. There was nothing I might link to Mr. Epstein.

My mother's greatest fear was that someone would look at her and see an impoverished little girl standing barefoot by herself in front of a house that was hardly more than a shack.

I was in the backyard when I heard her come home early from work. Through the kitchen window, I saw her trying to boil water to make tea, the pot shaking in her hand. I went inside, closing the door carefully. “You all right, Mother?”

“I had a dizzy spell at work,” she said. “I think I ate some tainted food.” Her vocabulary for depression and her justifications for the pharmaceuticals were endless. Her contradictions were also. She was physically brave and did not fear disease, mortality, or notions about perdition. She believed most men were meretricious by nature, yet these were the same avuncular men who usually ended up victimizing her.

“Sit down. I'll fix that for you.”

“Thank you, Aaron. You're such a good boy. I left that salad too long in the icebox. I'm sure that was it. This man came in. He was from San Angelo. He wanted to open an account. I told him that wasn't one of my duties. He seemed to pay no attention to what I told him. He insisted he knew me.” She was sitting at the table now, looking into space as though speaking to herself. “He used my childhood
nickname with a smirk on his face,” she said. “He told me who my brothers were, as though I didn't know their names. I told him to please go to Mr. Benbow's desk and open his account. I told him I didn't appreciate his presumption. Then I went into the lunchroom and ate that salad even though it had a funny taste. I'm so distressed and angry at myself. I'm sorry to bother you with this, Aaron. I just get so confused.”

“He's just one of those worthless fellows we have to forget about,” I said.

“That is exactly what he is. There is nothing lower than that kind of white man. They abuse Negroes and use social situations to let their eyes linger on a woman's person. They're common and coarse and invasive and enjoy humiliating the defenseless. Sometimes I want to do violent things to them. I really do.” She was knotting her hands, the nails leaving tiny half-moons on the heel. “Would you take me to Mrs. Ludiki's house? I need to order my thoughts. I don't know why I allowed myself to be upset by this common, rude man.”

She had never learned to drive. In my opinion, Mrs. Ludiki was a curse; she was a fortune-teller raised in the caves outside Granada who spoke a dialect she called gitano. She lived in a small paintless frame house surrounded by persimmon and pomegranate trees that left rotting fruit all over the lawn. I didn't believe she was a confidence woman, nor did I believe she practiced black arts. It was the other way around. I believed she had a natural insight into people and their propensities, and her “readings” were foregone conclusions about a person's behavior. The problem was the credulity and desperation of my mother. Mrs. Ludiki listened and gave warnings that grew not out of the zodiac but out of my mother's emotional and mental illness.

I didn't argue, though. There were worse people than Mrs. Ludiki. She had hair like a porcupine that she tried to mash down under a bandana, and she wore so many gold chains and glass necklaces and so much hooped jewelry that she rattled when she walked. Her “reading room” was a gas chamber of incense and perfumed candles. The centerpiece was her deck of tarot cards; the iconography had its origins in Egypt and Byzantium and the legends of Crusader knights
seeking the Grail. The deck was a pictorial history of the Western world's cultural debt to the Middle East.

My mother's conversations with Mrs. Ludiki were always circuitous. She could not bring herself to say she was afraid; she could not admit her addiction to pharmaceuticals; she could not admit that she was forced to quit high school in the tenth grade and go to work, nor that she had married a man much older than she when she was seventeen, as though poverty and loneliness and desperation were unacceptable in the sight of the Creator.

“I've felt terribly out of sorts,” she said to Mrs. Ludiki. “Nothing on a grand scale, of course. Like this morning at the bank. A man was discourteous and kept insisting he knew me when he didn't. Actually, it doesn't bother me. I'm quite all right now, except for a mild case of food poisoning. How have you been, Mrs. Ludiki?”

“I think we can get to the root of these problems quickly, Mrs. Broussard,” Mrs. Ludiki said, laying out the tarot cards in a wheel. “Look. There's the man carrying staves on his back, his burden about to break him. He takes out his unhappiness on others. He resents spirituality and goodness in others and is to be pitied and not feared.”