The Jealous Kind (20 page)

She started inside, tugging my hand. For no reason that I could explain, I hesitated. It wasn't because the Maceo family owned the club. They owned casinos, bingo parlors, nightclubs, restaurants, and the slot machines in beer joints all over the island. I felt a vibration in my chest, the pressure band along the side of my head reappearing, warning signs I sometimes experienced before I had a spell. I glanced down the boulevard. “Maybe we should go to the Jack Tar and have a big fried-shrimp dinner.”

“Don't they serve seafood here? I always heard it was special.”

“It's real good, all right,” I said, touching the side of my head.

The front door opened, and a blond man in a summer tux and a glamorous woman in an evening dress came down the steps, confetti in their hair. The orchestra had just gone into “Tommy Dorsey's Boogie-Woogie.” Valerie had worn a new white dress.

“Let's go,” I said. “I'll show you Sinatra's and Hope's pictures on the wall.”

Why had I hesitated? It wasn't the club itself; it was the locale. Galveston was the turf of the Mob. The club was a reminder of something Grady Harrelson had said outside the church, that Vick Atlas wanted to chain-drag me and Saber from his car bumper. It was hard to shake the image from my mind, and I had not told either my father or Saber about Grady's statement, trying in my futile fashion to avoid giving evil a second life.

At the far end of the pier was a casino. Only select guests and high rollers were allowed inside. But every kind of person was at the dining tables and on the dance floors that telescoped room after room down to the casino area. Seven French sailors were dancing together, unshaved, wearing their caps. We got a table by an open window and could smell the salt in the wind and hear the waves slapping against the pilings under the building. There was a checkered cloth on our table, and a candle burning inside a glass chimney, and silverware wrapped in bright red napkins. Valerie reached across the table and
squeezed my hand. I had never seen her so happy. We ordered crab cocktails and a sample tray of everything on the menu and a pitcher of iced tea with spearmint leaves floating in it.

Then I saw him, the way you notice an aberrant person among a crowd of ordinary people, the way you take note of a smile that doesn't go with someone's eyes, the way the oily imprint of a man's handshake can send a wave of nausea up your arm and into your stomach.

She followed my eyes. “Puke-o,” she said.

“You recognize him on sight?”

“He used to go to all the Reagan–San Jacinto games. Nobody wanted him there, especially the cheerleaders. He was always trying to make out with them.”

Vick Atlas was looking at us from a table across the dance floor, grinning in spite of the black patch he wore over one eye. He wiggled his fingers. I pretended not to see him. “Let's dance.”

“I think we should stay where we are.”

“Why?”

“He'll try to cut in.”

“We'll tell him to drop dead.”

We danced, then came back to the table. A green bottle of champagne waited for us in a silver ice bucket. I called our waiter to the table. “This must be for somebody else.”

“No, sir, Mr. Atlas sent it to you with his compliments.” The waiter was wearing a starched white jacket and a black bow tie and high-waisted black trousers. “I think Mr. Atlas wants you to have it.”

“We're hard-shell Baptists. Tell him we appreciate the thought.”

The waiter picked up the bucket with both hands, his expression dead, and walked to the bar, careful not to look in Atlas's direction.

“You shouldn't have done that,” Valerie said.

“We don't have room on the table for it,” I said. “Here comes our food.”

We started eating, neither of us looking up from our plates. I felt rather than saw Atlas walking toward our table. A shadow fell across my arm. “How you doin'?” he said.

“We're doing all right,” I replied.

“You don't like champagne?”

“Not tonight.”

“Because I saw you drinking beer at the Copacabana. Maybe y'all would like a beer. How about some German beer?”

I didn't answer. Valerie was taking small bites of her food, her eyes lowered.

“No?” he said. “If you look out the window, you can see the baitfish jumping in the waves. That's because a sand shark or a barracuda is after them. It's a rough world out there. Underwater, I mean.”

“Those barracuda are bad guys, all right,” I said.

“Not as bad as some I know. Real bums. What do you think of my patch?”

I stopped eating and looked at the flame burning inside the glass chimney of the candleholder. “I didn't notice.”

“What's a guy have to do to get your attention? I might end up with an empty socket.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“I guess that's the breaks. Is that the way you read it? Just a bad break?”

“I didn't do it to you, Vick.”

“Did I say you did?”

“Leave us alone,” Valerie said.

“You're Valerie Epstein,” he said. “You go to Reagan. I know some of your girlfriends.”

She looked out the window at the waves swelling as black and slick as oil under the moon, the candlelight flickering on her face. Her cheeks were red, as though windburned.

“How about a little slack, Vick?” I said.

“You want slack? You got it, Jack. I was just asking about my champagne. I thought maybe you didn't like the year. Next time I'll send over iced tea. Will you dance with me, Miss Valerie?”

“We're eating,” she replied.

“I mean after you eat. I want to dance with you. Okay with you, Aaron?”

“Let's go,” Valerie said to me.

“No,” I said.

“No, he says.
Way to go, Aaron. You're a stand-up guy. Did you know somebody boosted Grady's pink convertible last night?”

“No, I didn't.”

“An expert. Not many people can hot-wire a Caddy. Grady is torn up about it.”

“That's a heartbreaking story,” I said.

“That's why my father has got some of his friends looking for the guy who did it. Can I sit down before we dance?”

“What do you want, Vick? We haven't done you any harm.”

“I know that now because you told me. If a guy like you tells me something, I know it's gold. That's straight up. From the heart. I wouldn't feed you a line.” He dragged a chair from another table and sat down. “Where's the Bledsoe kid tonight? Still in the can? Or out doing mischief? What a card.”

“We need to go,” Valerie said.

“Hang on, little lady,” Atlas said. “We've got to dance. Nobody will believe a story like this. I meet Aaron, get my eye put out, then dance with his girl. I mean, provided he doesn't mind. You're simpatico with that, aren't you, Val?”

“Why did you ask about Saber?” I said.

“He's a fascinating guy. I heard a lot of the parts on his heap are stolen. A guy who steals car parts is probably one jump away from boosting the whole car. But you probably wouldn't hang with a guy like that. Give me an answer on this dancing situation, will you? My lady is waiting over there. You know her.”

I followed his eyes across the dance floor. At a long table in the corner, Cisco Napolitano was sitting with a group of people who looked like they'd just arrived from Miami. She was wearing a strapless black evening gown and a pink corsage. For just a second I thought she was looking back at me.

“So what's it going to be, Aaron?” Atlas said. “I'm not talking about slow dancing. We'll wait for a fast number. I dig the bop. Jitterbug is out, the bop is in. There's even a dirty bop, did you know that? We can do it, Val, you and me. I mean the regular bop.”

“I don't
want to dance with you,” Valerie said. “Do we have that settled now? Please leave our table.”

“The lady is direct. I respect that. Too bad you didn't step up to the plate on that, Aaron.” He leaned closer to me. I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Doesn't matter, though. We're buds. Right? Talk to me. The right kind of bud is a bud for life.” He grinned at Valerie and put his arm across my shoulder. Unconsciously I put my hand on the steak knife that lay by my plate. He jiggled his arm. I could smell the staleness in his armpit. “Friends?”

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes straight ahead.

“That's the way to talk, Jack.”

He removed his arm. I thought he was done. I should have known better. He wet his finger and reached around the side of my head and put his saliva inside my ear.

I had never experienced a greater sense of revulsion and violation. I drove my elbow into Atlas's face and, at the same time, pressed my napkin into my ear. In my mind's eye, I saw myself tearing him apart, stomping his face into jelly, breaking his jawbone, snapping ribs like Popsicle sticks. But I didn't do it. I doubt I drew blood. The orchestra was blowing down the walls with “One O'Clock Jump”; few if any people seemed to notice a problem at our table.

Valerie handed me her napkin. I dipped it in my water glass and cleaned my ear with it. Atlas was pressing his fingers against his cheekbone, otherwise unruffled. Then I realized he had paid a price he hadn't anticipated. His patch had popped up from his eye, exposing the true nature of the injury. The eye was a blue orb the size of a dime, oozing liquid, either infection or medication or both, but the surrounding tissue was not cut or bruised or stitched; the tissue was puckered, the eyelid seared. Atlas's eye had been burned, not hit with a brick.

“It was a firecracker,” I said.

“Firecracker? What are you talking about?” he said, popping the patch back in place.

“Y'all were throwing firecrackers,” I said. “Maybe Baby Giants or M-80s. A firecracker blew up in your face. You and Grady framed us, Vick.”

“You just admitted you were in the park, smart guy.”

“Get away from our table. If you don't, I'm going to do something that will embarrass you for the rest of your life.”

There was a beat. His good eye was watering. His bottom lip had started to puff where my elbow had hit him. “You're going to do what?”

“You don't want to know. Nobody watching will forget it.”

The band finished “The One O'Clock Jump.” Vick looked over his shoulder at the orchestra as though somehow it contained the solution to his problem. “I'm going to write this off for now. But I'm coming for you.”

“No, you'll send somebody else. All you guys are the same. You never go it on your own.”

He rose from his chair and looked around casually. “Good night, Miss Val. You got class. I'm a big respecter of that. Anything I can do for you, let me know. It's an honor to have sat at your table.”

He waited for her to speak. She looked at her plate.

“So be it,” he said. “Good night to both of you. Maybe I'll see Aaron again. Maybe not. Who knows? It's a big universe out there.”

“Not big enough,” I said.

“We'll see, smart guy.”

The band started playing again. He walked through the dancers to his table rather than around the dance floor.

Valerie lifted her face and opened her eyes. “I never saw anything like that in my life. What was the embarrassing thing you were going to do?”

“Nothing.”

She looked at me a long time. “You're the best boy I've ever known.”

There are compliments you never forget and you never tell anyone about; instead, you hide them in an invisible place, and for the rest of your life, when the world about you is in tatters, you take them out and read them to relearn who you are.

A
FTER I PAID THE
check, Valerie and I walked out the front door into the warmth of the evening and the wind blowing the palm trees on Seawall Boulevard. A minute earlier I had seen Cisco Napolitano go out the door by herself, while Atlas was still talking with his friends at the table in the corner. As Valerie and I walked toward my car, Cisco drove a dark blue Buick out of the parking lot and pulled to the curb across the street, waiting for Atlas, I figured.

“Is that the woman you told me about, the one who knew Bugsy Siegel?” Valerie asked.

“That's the one.”

“Why is she staring at us?”

“I think she's messed up. Maybe her life would have been different if she hadn't gotten mixed up with some bad guys. You want to meet her?”

“No.”

But Cisco didn't give us an option. As we passed the Buick, she opened the door and got out. Her sun-browned skin and black evening dress and pink orchid corsage were marbled with the reflection of the neon; her hair was twisted like snakes around her throat. “Is Shit-for-Brains coming?”

“I didn't pay him any mind. What are you doing with a creep like that, Miss Cisco?” I said.

“Doing
penance for being born. Tried to warn you, but you wouldn't listen, kid. Now fuck off.”

How's that for getting the message across?

But it wasn't over. Atlas came out of the club just as we were walking away. When he saw us, he opened the trunk of the Buick and took something out, then got into the passenger seat with it and closed the door. Cisco Napolitano made a U-turn so she could drive past us. Atlas hung a chain out the window. Four rope loops were threaded through the links. He shook the chain as he passed us. “Meet your future, asshole.”

I
CALLED SABER THE
next morning. No one answered. I called that night and Mr. Bledsoe hung up on me. I tried again the next morning and Mrs. Bledsoe answered. “He's not with you?” she said.

Two days later Saber came by the house in his heap. The windows were filmed with dirt, the fenders and hubcaps caked. My parents were at work. He didn't cut the engine until he was in the porte cochere. When he got out, he looked back at the street, even though there was no traffic nor anyone in the yards. An envelope protruded from his back pocket, rounded to the shape of his buttocks. He was chewing gum, smacking it; his eyes were behaving like Mexican jumping beans. “My mom said you were looking for me.”