The Jealous Kind (42 page)

“Did Vick send them?” I repeated.

“Vick doesn't confide in me. Talking to y'all is a waste of time. I wish I'd never seen you, Broussard.”

“I never wronged you, Grady,” I said. “I always felt sorry for you.”

“You feel sorry for
me
?” he said. “Where do you get off with that?”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said.

His face was like a wounded child's. His gaze shifted to the front of the green building. “I didn't know you were with
him.
”

I turned around. Loren was walking toward us.

“Go home, Grady,” Valerie said. “Now.”

“Tell Broussard to go home,” he said. “You were my girl till he messed us up.”

Loren's stride was eating up the distance between him and us. Grady stepped backward again. Loren pointed his finger at him and said, “
You!
”

“Go on,” Valerie said to Grady, almost whispering. “I'll talk to him.”

“No, you won't,” Grady said. He stepped away from us, his hands hanging at his sides. He swallowed.

“What are you doing here?” Loren asked.

“Talking to my friends,” Grady replied.

“This is our place,” Loren said.

“What do you mean, your place?”

“What I said. You don't have friends here.”

“It's a free country,” Grady said.

Those were the exact words I had used to Grady when I'd interfered in the argument he was having with Valerie at the drive-in.

“No, it's not a free country, Harrelson,” Loren said. “You got my cousin Wanda killed, and you got away with it because nobody cares about a Mexican hooker getting her neck broke. You're a River Oaks punk who couldn't cut the Corps, so you came back home to Daddy and pretended you were a hard guy by getting it on with a poor girl who went to the ninth grade.”

“I came out here to do a good deed,” Grady said. “I think that was a mistake.”

“You got that right. Go back to your part of town,” Loren said.

“You people are too much,” Grady said.

“ ‘You people'? You want me to put you in your car and show you up for the yellow-bellied douchebag you are?”

“Bugger off. I'm leaving,” Grady said.

“Do what?”

“Ask Valerie to take you to the library. They've got a book there called a dictionary. You'll dig it.”

I could see the confusion in Loren's face, his powerlessness over a word he hadn't heard before.

“My father dumped us when I was a kid,” he said. “But if he was around today, I wouldn't be afraid to play my music in front of him.”

Grady's hands closed and then opened at his sides. His face was turned slightly to one side, as though he were trying to avoid a hot wind. “What are you talking about?”

“One of your friends was laughing about your old man not letting you play Gatemouth Brown in your house,” Loren said. “Wanda was too good for you. I think that's why you hurt her. Every time you look in a mirror, it doesn't matter where you are, you see a punk looking back at you.”

If I ever saw someone's soul flinch, it was then. Grady's mouth seemed to collapse and his eyes to lose focus, as though the earth had shifted under his feet. “Yeah?”

“Just blow,” Loren said. “It's our part of town. Those are the rules, man. You should know. Y'all made them.”

Then Grady did the strangest thing I had ever seen a young guy do in public. He worked his golf shirt off his shoulders and turned around, arching his tanned back at us.
VALERIE
was tattooed across his shoulder blades, each letter formed by a chain of red hearts. “She'll always be with me, and there's nothing you can do about it, Broussard. As for you, Nichols, you were a loser when you came out of the womb. I hope you're with Broussard when he gets his.”

I felt myself moving toward him.

“I'm going,” he said. “Y'all have a great life. See you, Val. Believe it or not, I thought you were the one.”

He walked away from us bare-chested, his shirt clenched in his hand. I suspected Grady's father had taught him many lessons, and one of them involved probing for bone and nerve to leave the most ragged of wounds. I caught up with him before he got to his MG. He was smiling to himself.

“I don't know what it is, but there's something I missed,” I said. “It was a detail, something you said or Valerie said or a cop named Jenks said. It has to do with your alibi.”

The sky was a dull red now, the campground falling into shadow. His eyes searched my face. “You'd make a lousy poker player.”

“It's not me who has sweat on his upper lip,” I replied.

T
HE EVENING WASN'T
over. After Grady drove away, I spotted a black boxlike sedan parked among the cedar and pine trees bordering the gulley that wound through the campground. A heavyset man in a fedora was behind the wheel. He raised a pair of binoculars to his face.

“Don't turn around,” I said.

“What is it?” Valerie said.

“The car we saw outside the theater is parked by the trees. A guy is looking at us through binoculars.”

“The one with the camera?” she said.

“I can't be sure.”

“You're talking about those hit men?” Loren said, his eyes riveted on mine.

“Just one. The guy in the car,” I said. “That's the car we saw outside a theater with a guy in it who took our picture.”

“You're sure it's the car?” Loren said.

“There's no doubt about it.”

Then the man behind the wheel made a mistake. He put down the binoculars and lit a cigarette, the flame flaring on his face. Just before
he flicked away the match, he turned and looked straight at me and I saw his wide-set eyes and the coarseness in his skin, the fingers that resembled sausages.

In spite of my admonition, Loren turned around. Then he looked back at me. “That's the guy?”

“I'd bet on it.”

“Start your heap,” he said.

“Whatever you're thinking, don't do it,” I said.

“Thinking makes my head hurt.”

“The cops will send you to Huntsville, Loren,” Valerie said. “If they don't kill you first.”

“They're not interested in fender benders,” he said.

“Fender benders?” Valerie said.

Loren walked away, spinning a key ring on his finger.

I
COULD HAVE STOPPED
him. I didn't want to see him hurt or beat up by the cops or sent to a mainline prison, although I didn't know that any of those things would happen. I guess I respected him too much to stand in his way.

But I tried. “Loren! Come on back! A lot of people inside want to talk to you! I'm going to call Biff Collie! I'm not kidding you, I know him!”

I suspect I sounded like a fool, shouting about a local disk jockey. Valerie put her hand on my arm and squeezed it. “Let him go. It's just Loren's way. That's why he's not like the others.”

My father said that those who are crucified usually seek their fate, because it is only after we murder them that we make them our light bearers. I hoped Loren wasn't trying to find his own set of hammer and nails. He got behind the wheel of his bus and began revving the engine. With the door open, he backed in a semicircle, straightened out, aimed in the outside mirror, and floored the accelerator.

It was beautiful to watch. The bus whined in reverse across the grass, swaying and bouncing over the bumps, bearing down on the man in the boxlike sedan. At first the man seemed unable to grasp
what was happening. Then his mouth opened in dismay and he recoiled backward as though a wrecking ball were swinging into his face. The impact flattened the doors and running board and front fender and tilted the car halfway over. Then the car fell back on all four tires, the front windshield bursting like crushed ice on the hood.

Loren shifted into first, straightened out, then backed the bus into the sedan again and began pushing it in bulldozer fashion over the rim of the gulley. The sedan tipped sideways and slid down the embankment in a cloud of dust and landed in the water. People began running from the building and the parking area. The driver of the sedan crawled up the opposite embankment, his shoes digging for purchase in the dirt, his fedora gone, exposing his tight gray haircut. He grabbed a tree root and pulled himself onto flat ground, then got to his feet, his suit and dress shirt streaked with mud. He was a huge man, his cheeks swollen like a chipmunk's, his neck ringed with fat. He stood still, as though making a decision, then disappeared into the cedar and persimmon trees, sticks and dead limbs breaking in his path.

Loren jumped down from the bus and ran to my heap. He piled into the backseat. “What are you waiting for?”

I couldn't move. Neither could Valerie.

“Fire it up,” he said. “Time to boogie.”

Valerie shook my arm. “He's right. Let's go, Aaron. Snap out of it.”

I wasn't thinking about the damage he had just done to the church bus, or the chaos in the parking area, or that Loren might soon be on his way to jail. He had said the word I couldn't remember, the key to the lockbox, the detail I had missed, one that had lain in plain sight and would expose the blood-bespattered world of regicide and guilt and ambition in which Grady Harrelson lived.

W
E WENT TO
a northside drive-in and parked in the shadows, away from the glow of the neon and the lighted dining area inside. Loren kept looking out the back window. “Y'all stay here. I'm going to use the pay phone and get my brother to pick me up. This stuff will die down in a couple of days.”

“Die down?” I said.

“This is how it will go. The car I smacked is probably hot. The guy driving it wasn't hurt and doesn't want to talk to cops. The cops couldn't care less about the guy or the car. I'll square the bus damage with the preacher who gave me the job. I probably won't be driving the bus anymore. End of story.”

“It's that simple?” I said.

“I'll get lost for a few days,” he said.

“You said ‘boogie' back there.”

“What about it?” he asked.

I looked at Valerie. “You told me Grady gave you his Tommy Dorsey records because his father didn't want jazz or Negro music in his house.”

“That's right.”

“He gave you ‘Tommy Dorsey's Boogie-Woogie' and ‘Marie'?”

She nodded.

“When did he give them to you?” I asked.

“On the afternoon his father was killed.”

“Those were the only records he had with him?”

“No, he had a stack of them. He said he got them from some Mexicans.”

“Did he have another boogie-woogie record?”

She looked out the car window at the shadows and the strips of neon wrapped around the restaurant. “He had an Albert Ammons record.”

“What was the title?”

“ ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp,' ” she replied. “He loved that recording.”

I shuddered. “That was the song playing in the Harrelson house when somebody blew Mr. Harrelson apart.”

She stared at me. “He went from my house and killed his father, then went out on the sailboat?”

“That's what it sounds like,” I said.

“Y'all are surprised by this?” Loren said. He got out of the car and leaned on the roof. “Let me make a suggestion. Don't let Harrelson know you're on to him. Don't tell the cops, either.”

“Why not?” Valerie said.

“You think they're on our side? Even your old man knows better than that.”

“Merton Jenks is on the square,” I said.

Loren looked at the dining room window and at the people eating inside. “That's why I like you, Aaron. When the whole world is a cinder, you'll still be a believer. You kill me.”

I watched him walk away. “You know what that guy could do if he went to school?”

Valerie squeezed the back of my neck and laid her head on my shoulder.

“Did you hear me?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. She pulled herself closer to me and held my hand and rubbed the top of her head against my cheek.

“Why the silence?” I asked.

“You believe. Others don't. Loren knows that. You don't. That's why I love you.”

She said nothing else until Loren returned from making his call.

W
HEN I WENT HOME
, the house was dark except for the desk lamp in my father's office. I unlocked the front door and walked through the living room and past my parents' bedroom and into my father's office. He was sleeping with his head on his arms. A cigarette had burned to ash and collapsed in the tray. His uncapped fountain pen and an empty coffee cup sat by the edge of his manuscript. I picked up the cup and smelled it. He kept the whiskey bottle hidden in either the garage or the trunk of his car. He never took it into the house. To my knowledge, this was the first time he'd drunk whiskey in the house.

I sat down in the spare chair by the wall. The attic fan was drawing a nice breeze through the screen. Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy were sitting on the sill. I wanted to wake my father and tell him about the hit men the Atlases may have brought to town; I also wanted to tell him about Loren plowing the car into the gulley. But I knew nothing good would come of it. Had he been at Cemetery Hill, he would have gone straight up the slope with the others, Yankee canister and grape ripping holes the width of barn doors in their lines. And every confession to him of my own fear only added to the burden that sent him back to the icehouse or into the garage after my mother had gone to bed.

I heard Major's nails clicking on the floor, then his tail knocking against the bookshelves as he walked into the office. My father raised his head from the desk. “Oh, hi, Aaron, I didn't hear you come in.”

“I didn't mean to wake you,” I said.