The Jealous Kind (33 page)

Miss Cisco went into the bedroom to dress. Her drawstring bag was on the table by the window. I had never looked into a woman's purse without permission. The drawstring was loose, the top of the bag drooping over. I put my little finger inside and widened the opening. I was sure I'd find her works—a spoon or a hypodermic needle or a rubber tourniquet, at least a cigarette lighter. Wrong. Among her cosmetics and Kleenexes and wallet and car keys and loose change was an army .45 automatic, the same 1911 model my father had purchased when he thought we were in danger, the same-caliber weapon that killed Grady Harrelson's father.

I stepped back from the bag and folded my arms across my chest, as though I could undo the discovery I had just made.

“What are you doing?” Miss Cisco said.

“Pardon?”

“Are you looking at the flowers in the traffic circle?” she asked. “I water them sometimes.”

She walked toward me. Closer. Then closer. She had put on a long-sleeved magenta rayon shirt that seemed to change in the light, and a pair of khakis that had pockets all over them, and unzipped soft-leather, half-topped boots with white socks that a little girl might wear. I stepped backward.

“Hold still,” she said, her eyes a few inches from mine. She peeled the bandage halfway off my skin and kissed the stitched star-shaped puncture that Original Sin had left with his horn. She smoothed the gauze and tape back into place. She had brushed her teeth or used mouthwash; her eyes were hazy, iniquitous.

“You use redwings?” I said.

“Is that what you call them here?”

“They'll melt your head,” I said.

“You like me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“How much?”

“I came to see you, didn't I?”

“Why?”

“Because I don't think you have any other friends. Because I wanted to help Detective Jenks.”

She leaned forward and put her mouth on mine. I stepped backward, knocking into the table.

“Don't worry,” she said.

“About what?”

“What you're thinking.” She picked up her bag, disconcerted. “If you didn't have a girlfriend, maybe it'd be different. The French call it a transition, from the mother to the girlfriend. Why were you looking in my bag?”

“I didn't mean to.”

“Don't lie, Aaron. You wonder why I carry a gun?”

“No,” I lied.

“Grady's father committed three million to a consortium. It's bottled up in banks somewhere. That money was not only pledged, it's already been spent on two casinos under construction. You think the guys in Kansas City and Chicago are going to let a spoiled shit like Grady keep it?”

“What does that have to do with you?” I asked.

“I'm supposed to get it back.”

“With your looks and brains, Miss Cisco, you could be a movie star. Why do you hang around with troglodytes?”

“Because I don't want acid thrown in my face.”

I tried to follow her logic and my head began hurting. She brushed the hair out of my eyes, studying my features as though putting makeup on someone. It was obvious that I would never understand her frame of reference or the world she lived in. “I think I should leave, Miss Cisco.”

“You can drive my Rocket 88, every teenage boy's wet dream. I think I'll put back the seat and sleep. I'm not myself right now.”

“Why are we going to this Farmacia place?”

“It's where I get well. I need you to help me. Don't argue.”

“I won't.”

“Hold still.” She cupped her hand on the back of my neck and bit softly into my neck, then released me.

“Why did you do that?”

“I'm perverse,” she said. Then she winked. “Tell me I didn't give you a little rise.”

I don't know why I liked Miss Cisco. I guess I figured that what we sometimes call evil is simply a form of need. Plus she had gone out of her way to protect me when she had nothing to gain and everything to lose.

I
DROVE HER INTO
the same neighborhood where I had bought the switchblade knife. It was Sunday morning, and few people were on the streets. A blind woman of color was playing bottleneck guitar under a canopy in front of a liquor store. The neighborhood reminded me of the spells that had caused me so much trouble. They could hit me with a paralysis that left me nonfunctional and barely able to breathe. I didn't want them back, and I didn't want to think about them. Miss Cisco seemed to read my mind. Just before we reached our destination, a drugstore with a perpendicular sign on its facade that stated simply La Farmacia, she turned her head on the seat and said, “What kind of train are you pulling, kid?”

“What kind of what?”

“Don't pretend. Everybody has a secret shame. My mother told me that. She learned it from her clientele. She was a whore in New Orleans.”

“I have blackouts. Later I have holes in my memory I can't fill in. Booze can bring it on. Getting angry can, too. Sometimes I go into a deep sleep and walk around like a zombie and can't wake up till someone gives me a good shaking.”

She closed her eyes again. “Count your blessings. I'd like to forget half the things I did in my life.”

“What I mean is, I don't know what I'm
capable of. So I imagine the worst. Then I'm not sure if I'm imagining things or remembering what happened.”

She felt the Olds slow and looked around. “We're here. Time for a little medication.”

“The store is closed.”

“Not for me,” she said.

“Did you hear what I was saying, Miss Cisco?”

“Yeah, I did. Lose the crap. You wouldn't bruise a butterfly if you were coked to the eyes. I'll be back in a few minutes. I'm about to puke. It has nothing to do with you. Mr. Jones got into my sandbox real bad this morning.”

Fifteen minutes later she had not returned. On a back street I thought I heard the throaty rumble of Saber's twin mufflers echoing off the storefronts. I didn't know if he was living with his criminal friends or not. I had a hard time thinking about Saber and the way our friendship had disappeared like water down a drain. My mother never had friends or a father or a home growing up. Most of her life was spent in misery. That was how I knew the importance of a friend like Saber. We met in the seventh grade. He saw two bullies shoving me around at a bus stop and shot them both in the face with a huge water gun loaded with urine he had collected from the veterinary clinic where he worked.

I heard the twin mufflers thin at the end of a street. A moment later I heard them again. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Saber's heap headed toward me, oil smoke streaming out of the hood and tailpipes. I got out of the Olds and tried to stop him. “Hey, Sabe! It's me!”

I could barely see through the smoke. He passed me, the back bumper almost hitting my leg. I didn't know whether he saw me or not. I began running alongside the car, trying to catch him. “Saber, what are you doing? It's Aaron!”

I was still waving my hands at him when he went through the intersection, running the light. I stood in the middle of the street, dumbfounded, trying to convince myself he hadn't recognized me.
The blind woman playing guitar under the liquor store canopy slid her glass bottleneck along the frets and sang, “I was sitting down by my window, looking out at the rain. Something came along, got ahold of me, and it felt just like a ball and chain.”

As I looked down the street at the empty sidewalks and closed stores and the abandoned filling station under a live oak on the corner and the ragged clouds of oil smoke left behind by Saber's heap, I believed I was looking into the face of death itself, and not in the metaphorical sense. It was as real as a freshly dug grave on the edge of a swamp, the dirt oozing with white slugs.

I knocked on the front door of the drugstore, then rattled it against the jamb. The windows were dirty, the counter and shelves inside coated with dust. I went around to the back door and looked through the glass into a room furnished only with a table and two chairs, lit by a solitary bulb hanging from a cord overhead. Miss Cisco was sitting with her back to me, her black hair tangled on her shoulders. A man with a face the color and shape of a tea-stained darning sock was bending over her, untying a necktie from her upper arm. A stub of a candle flickered inside the neck of a wine bottle. A bent spoon, blackened on the bottom, rested next to it. She turned her face into the light. It was aglow with peace and visceral pleasure, like that of a person in the aftermath of orgasm. I thought I saw her look straight at me, then realized her eyes had become cups of darkness that probably saw nothing.

She opened the door and stepped outside and clung to my arm. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my. The white horsey got loose on poor little me. Walk me to the car and then drive it home. Can you do that, big boy? You know how to drive it home?”

She was beautiful even when impaired, and I had certain thoughts that I would carry into the night, the kind of thoughts I guessed all men had and that made them feel ashamed and treacherous and unworthy of the real woman in their life. But at least I didn't think about acting on my desires, even if I could have. I guess I was learning that when you get close to death, you'll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.

T
HREE DAYS LATER
I drove to Loren Nichols's home in the Heights. Just as I pulled to the curb, I saw him get off the bus at the corner and walk back toward his house, he wearing a white T-shirt and dirty white trousers, a black lunch box swinging from his hand. I never saw a guy who could walk as cool as Loren.

“You just get off work?” I said.

“I'm working at a supper club now.”

“They make you bring your own lunch?”

“You must not have worked in a restaurant.”

“No, I haven't.”

“If you do, you'll never eat out again. Half the people in the kitchen are winos who sleep at the mission. If the meatballs get spilled, somebody sweeps them up in a dustpan and sprinkles them with shredded cheese. They wipe the tables down at night with the bathroom mop because it takes too long to hand-wipe them. You here for your chaps?”

“Yeah. And I wondered how you're feeling.”

“About the kid who got stabbed?”

I didn't reply.

“I saw his picture in the paper,” he said. “To be honest, I cain't get his face out of my head.”

“Valerie and I are going to play miniature golf tonight. We thought you might want to join us.”

“I don't know about that.”

“You don't like miniature golf?”

“It's not my first choice.”

“I brought you something.”

He looked down at my hand. “A book?”

“It's called
The Song of Roland.
”

“What's it about?”

“Courage and the battle of Roncevaux. My cousin Weldon carried it with him during the war. He had three Purple Hearts and the Bronze and Silver Star.”

He scratched his cheek, his gaze leaving mine. He took the book from my hand. “Thanks. You're not trying to talk me into going to church or something?”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

“Come in back a minute.”

We went into his workshop behind the house. He set his lunch box on the workbench and took Grandfather's chaps off a wood peg and handed them to me. “I had to rethink some stuff after that kid was killed. I shouldn't have given you the thirty-two. You don't need blood on your hands. You wouldn't be able to handle it.”

“I really appreciate that,” I said.

“Shut up. A couple of friends came by this morning. They said you're in the wind. Bledsoe, too.”

“In the wind how?”

“Grady Harrelson and Vick Atlas were at Prince's drive-in with a pair of sluts. They're buds now. The word is you called up Atlas and told him Harrelson's friends boosted Atlas's car. One of my friends knows Atlas pretty good. My friend says Atlas saw you with this broad from Vegas. Atlas says she's Mob property.”

“She lives in Atlas's apartment building. I drove her to a pharmacy in the Fifth Ward Sunday morning.”

“She has to go to the middle of colored town to fill a prescription?”

“It's a little more complicated than that.”

“You're talking about Mexican skag?”

“Yep.”

“You busted a vessel in your brain or something?”

“I thought I was doing a good deed. She used to be an item with Merton Jenks. He's dying of cancer or emphysema.”

He tapped at the air with his finger. “That bull, what's-his-name, Original Sin, he must have stepped on your head.”

“I hope you enjoy the book.”

“I'm not done,” he said. “Your man Bledsoe is dealing horse for a couple of Mexicans. They're not piecing it off, either. They're going down, man. Both Bledsoe and the Mexicans. You don't deal heroin in Houston or Galveston without permission.”

“I can't change that.”

“I just tried to join the navy,” he said. “They told me to beat it.”

“You think somebody is going to take you out, too?”

“It's a possibility,” he said.

I hung Grandfather's chaps over my shoulder. “Val and I will pick you up at seven.”

“I don't know how to say this, Aaron. I think they're going to kill you. Atlas's old man might put a bomb in your family car.”

“My father was at the Somme and Saint-Mihiel.”

“I got no idea what that means. Blown apart is blown apart. Dead is dead.”

“Seven o'clock,” I said.

When I fired up my heap, my stomach felt as though I had poured Drano in it.

I
HAD THE NEXT
day off. I called the Houston Police Department and asked for Detective Jenks.

“He's out today,” a sergeant said.

“Is he all right?”

“Who's calling?”

“Aaron Holland Broussard. I'm a friend of his. Could you give me his home number?”