The Jealous Kind (39 page)

“You think that's the man I met this morning?”

“Yes, I do. So I'll put him back in the deck and leave him to his fate.”

I thought we were finished. But Mrs. Ludiki, like all people who toy with the delicate membrane that holds the soul together, had unlocked doors that my mother never should have walked through.

“Who is the figure tied upside down on the tree?” my mother asked.

“That's the Hanged Man.” Mrs. Ludiki tried to pick up the card and replace it in the deck before the conversation went further.

“That's the death card, isn't it?” my mother asked. She pressed her finger on the edge of the card.

“The Hanged Man is Saint Sebastian, the first martyr of Rome. He was a soldier executed by his fellow soldiers.”

My mother studied the card carefully. The figure was pale-bodied and effeminate, covered only by a loincloth. “He bears a resemblance to Aaron. Look. It's uncanny.”

“No, we mustn't transfer the wrong meaning from this card, Mrs. Broussard.”

“Are those arrows?”

“They're darts. The Legionnaires fired darts from their crossbows.”

“What's the next card in the deck?”

“I don't know. Let's move on and look at these other things in our wheel,” Mrs. Ludiki said, her eyes veiled. “There is certainly prosperity here. Good health as well. Yes, there are very positive indicators working in your life.”

“No, the Hanged Man is at the apex of the wheel. When there is an ambiguity in the card, you always supplement it with another. Please show me the next card, Mrs. Ludiki.”

Mrs. Ludiki turned over the top card on the deck and placed it below the Hanged Man. It showed a skeleton wearing black armor and riding a white horse.

“That's the Fourth Horseman of the Book of Revelation,” my mother said.

“Yes, it is,” Mrs. Ludiki said.

“Death?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” my mother said. She stood up, groping in her purse. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I forgot how much our session is. I'm sorry. It's a dollar seventy—”

“There's no charge today,” Mrs. Ludiki said. “I'm happy to see you. Please don't take away the wrong ideas from the tarot.”

“Yes, I'm sure you're correct,” my mother said. “It's been an unusual day. I must be running. Aaron, say goodbye to Mrs. Ludiki.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Ludiki.”

Her eyes couldn't meet ours. She rose from her chair, a basically good woman wreathed in scarfs and tinkling jewelry and fumes from her candles and incense bowls, unable to dispel the misery she had helped fuel.

Outside, I took my mother's arm, then opened the car door for her. “Would you like to go for a drive? Maybe to a show?”

“No, I don't feel well. Thank you anyway, Aaron. He looked like you. You saw the resemblance, didn't you?”

“The Hanged Man? Not a chance, Mother. That guy looks like the ninety-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face in the Charles Atlas ad.”

Her face blanched. Could I have chosen a worse metaphor? Nope. I had found the absolute worst.

I drove my mother to a soda shop and bought her a lime Coke. I thought I heard a clock ticking inside my head. I don't think the sound was imaginary.

M
Y ANXIETY HAD
become almost as bad as my mother's. I called Valerie. “I have to talk to your father,” I said.

“He's at his club.”

“What club?”

“The one he hangs out at by the driving range. What is wrong with you, Aaron?”

“What's wrong with
me
?”

“Is it about yesterday?” she said. “About not wanting to do it?”

“No, I understood perfectly,” I said. “Don't worry about a thing. Not for one minute.”

“So why do you want to talk to my father?”

“Because I don't like all this secrecy crap.”

“Come by the house and I'll go with you.”

“No, I need to talk to him on a personal level.”

“You feel you're doing something wrong?”

“I feel like we're slipping around.”

“My father treats me like a grown woman. I don't keep secrets from him.”

“But he does,” I said.

“What?”

“I always have to guess at what he's talking about. He's always indicating that he knows something he's not sharing.”

She gave me the address of his club, then asked if I would be by later.

“If you'd like me to,” I said.

“What do you think?” she replied.

T
HE DRIVING RANGE
was in a semi-rural part of Houston where urbanization had not had its way. The late nineteenth century was still visible, including pastureland and clumps of live oaks wilting in a savannah and a general store and saloon with a wide gallery that had barrels of pecans on it in the season. Mr. Epstein's “club” was a former American Legion bar now owned collectively, mostly by men who had served in World War II. It was dark and cool inside and smelled of tap beer and cheese and heavily seasoned smoked meats. The ceiling was made of stamped tin and hung with wood-bladed fans. The bartender told me Mr. Epstein was in the men's room and that I could wait at the bar and have a soft drink if I wanted.

It was a strange setting, a hybrid one that seemed disconnected from the Texas where I had grown up. There were newspapers printed in Hebrew attached to poles along one wall, and tables for dominoes and cards and chess games, and a long glass case filled with athletic trophies, an inflatable flight vest, a Flying Tiger jacket, a photo of the Times Square celebration on V-J Day, an Israeli flag, a shot of French paratroopers coming down in a rice paddy.

One photo reached out to me like a fist in the face. Six men dressed in military fatigues without insignias, all of them bearded and wearing flop hats, stood with their arms over one another's shoulders in front of a burned tank, a sand dune in the background. The man in the center was Mr. Epstein. The man next to him was either a look-alike or in reality someone I had hoped I would never see again, even in a photo. At the bottom, someone had written “Palestine, 1947.”

I felt rather than saw Mr. Epstein standing behind me.

“Valerie called and said you were on your way,” he said. “Want to sit down in a quiet corner?”

“Is that you in the photograph?” I tried to smile.

He squinted at the glass case. “That's me.”

“You were in the Israeli-Palestinian war?”

“I popped in and out a couple of times. Nothing to write home about.”

“The man next to you looks like my metal-shop teacher.”

“Yeah, that's old Krauser. He was quite a character.” Mr. Epstein sat in a booth and waited for me to sit down across from him, his attention occupied with everything in the room except me. “What's on your mind?”

I tried to suppress the vague sense of resentment I always felt around Mr. Epstein; he seemed to suggest that others were supposed to adjust to his perception of the world, his experience, his knowledge.

“Mr. Krauser was one of the worst people I ever knew,” I said.

“He wasn't everyone's cup of tea.”

“He was OSS?”

“For a while.”

“In my opinion, he should have been on the other side.”

“With the Krauts?”

“No, with the Nazis,” I said.

“What do you know about Nazis?”

“They're bullies. Like Krauser. They feed on the weak.”

“Nazi scientists built our intercontinental missiles,” he said.

He went into a digression about Operation Paperclip and the missile program in Redstone, Alabama, his gaze roving around the room. Then he stopped and picked at his hands as though he had given me more time than he'd intended.

“Mr. Epstein, Valerie said you went off somewhere with a grease gun and then came home and said, ‘All this is going to pass.' What is ‘all this,' sir?”

“I talked with a couple of people.” He paused to see if his meaning had settled in. “I mean I ‘talked' with them. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“People who work for the Atlas family?”

“I didn't say who they worked for.”

“You ‘talked' to them in a way they won't forget?”

“They're not interested in you. They're after the Harrelson money. Stay out of their business and they'll stay out of yours. You also need to stay away from Grady Harrelson. Do that and all this will pass. It's not a complicated idea.”

“I'm not in their business. I never wanted to be around Grady. He was abusing Valerie at a Galveston drive-in. That's how I got involved with him.”

“I'm trying to tell you about the world you've stumbled into, son.”

“How do you know these people, sir?”

“I know them. What difference does it make?”

“Valerie told me why the government let Lucky Luciano out of jail.”

“Yes?” he replied, folding his hands.

“So Luciano could keep the shipyard workers broke. That's how you know these guys? You or your friends worked with the Mafia?”

He told the waiter to bring us two Nesbitt's oranges.

“Why don't you answer the question, Mr. Epstein?” I said.

“Luciano was let out of jail to stop espionage on the docks.”

“I read there was no espionage. Luciano ordered a ship burned so his people could get him released and transformed into a patriot. He introduced heroin to the Negro slums. He murdered people for two decades.”

Mr. Epstein leaned forward, his brow knurled. His skin was dark, his hair like a curly gold wig, his pale blue eyes as mirthless as ice at the bottom of a cocktail glass. “Deal with the world in kind or be its victim, son. But you won't take my daughter down with you.”

“Krauser called me that.”

“Called you what?”

“Son.”

“I'm not getting your point.”

“It was an insult,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I think all this stuff you've told me sucks pipe, Mr. Epstein.”

“Sucks pipe? I don't think I've heard that one.”

The waiter put down our drinks. Mr. Epstein watched him walk away, then his gaze moved back to my face. “Merton Jenks showed you photos of the two men who poured gasoline on Valerie?”

“Yes. They were naked. Their hands were gone.”

“But they had it coming, didn't they?”

“I can't make that kind of judgment.”

“You're still not hearing me. I'm saying they made a mistake.”

I could feel my mouth drying out. Under the table, I kept clenching my thighs with my hands, unsure whether I was more scared than angry. “I don't know if I want to hear more. Who would cut off a man's hands?”

“That's the world you walked into. That's what I'm telling you.”

“Maybe I don't want to hear any more about it.”

“You may not have that choice,” he said.

“I asked Valerie to run away. I suspect we'll get married one day. Nobody is going to run me off, Mr. Epstein.”

“I'm not trying to run you off. Valerie's choice is Valerie's choice. I'm telling you to be careful. You're not a listener.”

“No, sir, you're threatening me.”

He opened a penknife and began cleaning his nails. “Drink your orange.”

“Drink it yourself,” I said.

I got up from the booth and walked outside into the wind. Across the street, men and women and teenagers whacked golf balls high into a sky marbled with crimson-tinted thunderheads, the balls dropping and bouncing like hailstones on a green carpet that once was a feeder lot. I heard the screen door of Mr. Epstein's club swing back into place behind me.

As a young person on the edge of discovering the world and shaking away the scales of your youth, did you ever have a day when you knew that for the rest of your life, you would be grateful that your father was your father and your mother was your mother, no matter how flawed they might be?

T
HAT EVENING SABER
picked me up in his heap and we headed out to Bill Williams's drive-in across from Rice University. Saber also wanted to go to the roller rink.

“Valerie's old man was buds with Krauser?” he said.

“Maybe they were just fellow commandos or intelligence guys, something like that,” I said.

“Lose the doodah, Aaron. You're talking about the guy who might become your father-in-law.”

“Okay, it's a depressing prospect. What's that tinkling sound?”

“I didn't hear anything.”

I looked at the backseat, then down at the floor. “What's in those bottles?”

“Security,” he said. They were dark green, tapered at the neck, plugged with corks, rags tightly wrapped and taped around the bottom.

“Are they Molotov cocktails?”

“For backup, that's all.”

“Your heap is a potential firebomb.”

“That's the breaks. There's worse things than going out in a blaze of glory.”

The summer-evening regulars were dragging South Main—low-riders, hoods, convertibles full of girls, bikers hunting on the game reserve, football jocks, scrubbed kids who went to church on Wednesday night, somebody lobbing a water bomb, music trailing from radios, Hollywood mufflers throbbing on the asphalt.

Saber pulled up to the drive-in and ordered fried chicken for both of us. Jo Stafford was singing “You Belong to Me” through the loudspeakers.

“This song haunts me,” I said.

“What for?” Saber asked.

“Because it's the way things should be. Except they're not.”

“You'd better stay out of your own head.”

“I think we got sucked in, Sabe.”

“Are you kidding? You're a rodeo hero, and I'm back in action and at the top of my game. We're unstoppable.”

I watched a car full of hoods go down the aisle, the radio blaring. “How'd you know Grady was shacked up in that motel?”