The Jealous Kind (43 page)

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I'm fine.”

“I was having a dream,” he said. “We were back in Louisiana. You were five years old and I was taking you to the circus. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“You were amazed by the giraffe you saw in the animal pens. You couldn't believe there was an animal that tall.”

“I remember.”

“Are you sure everything is all right?” he repeated. “Did you and Valerie go with your friend to the church campground?”

“Yes, sir. We had a grand time.”

“Your friend sang?”

“He sure did. People liked him.”

“That was a fine thing you did, Aaron. I'm sure he will always remember your kindness. Is your mother awake?”

“She's asleep.”

I could see his disappointment. “I guess I'd better take a little walk. If I take a nap before I go to bed, I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep. Lock the door. I have my key.”

“Why don't I heat us some milk and fix some pie. There's a whole apple pie in the icebox.”

“That's too much trouble. I'll be back shortly.”

He removed his hat from the rack by the door and went out on the porch and eased the door shut behind him so as not to wake my mother. Through the window I saw him walking in the moonlight, his shadow moving along the sidewalk like a disembodied spirit that would never find its way home.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I looked in the mirror. I'd had the stitches in my face removed after six days, but I had kept a medicated bandage over the wound to prevent infection. I peeled off the bandage and dropped it into the wastebasket. The scar resembled a broken red exclamation mark that had drained from my eye. I wanted to think of myself as a Prussian duelist or a soldier of fortune or a deputy marshal backing Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp's play at the O.K. Corral. Or maybe I just wanted to be brave in the way Loren had been brave, forgetting about himself and risking time in Huntsville for a friend. But all I saw in my reflection was a seventeen-year-old pale-eyed kid who realized that to help his parents, he would have to accept that he might not reach age eighteen. I barely got my hand to my mouth before the bilious surge in my stomach had its way.

I went to the filling station without figuring out I had reported
to work an hour early. At eleven
A.M.
Merton Jenks drove up in a dented black-and-white cruiser and parked it on the grass by the men's room. The vehicle's disrepair was the kind you saw only in the cruisers driven by Negro patrolmen in the black wards. Jenks didn't get out. I walked to the passenger window. “Yes, sir?” I said.

He put a quarter in my palm. “Get me a Coca-Cola.”

“Anything else?”

“Don't be smart,” he said.

I brought him his Coke and change.

“Get in,” he said.

I sat down next to him, the door open to catch the breeze. He chugged half the Coke and burped. “Where's Loren Nichols?”

“At home or at work, I guess.”

“Lose the act.”

“I don't know where he is, Detective Jenks.”

“After you fled the church campground last night, where'd you take him?”

“To a drive-in. He made a phone call and went off on his own.”

“He went off where?”

“I don't know.”

“Who did he leave the drive-in with?”

“I can't tell you that, Detective Jenks.”

“How'd you like to be sitting in a jail cell?”

I shook my head.

“That means no, you don't want to be in a jail cell or no, you're not going to tell me anything?”

“It means Loren is a good guy and was trying to help us.”

“Right,” he said. “Photo time.”

He opened a manila folder on a black-and-white photograph of a large man in a baggy suit hooked to a wrist chain with several other men stringing out of a police van. “Does this guy look familiar?”

“He was at the church campground.”

“Driving the car Nichols pushed into the ditch?”

“That's the guy.”

“His name is Devon Horowitz. He was doing hundred-dollar hits
when he was fifteen. His partner in bargain-basement murder was Jaime Atlas.”

I could feel my heart thud. “You have him in custody?”

“Would I be here?” he replied.

“They're planning to kill me, aren't they.”

He propped his elbow on the window jamb and kneaded his brow. “The word is that two or three button men are in town. They're here about Clint Harrelson's money. Nobody stiffs the Mob. Maybe they're not after you. Maybe they just want the money. I can't say for sure. I'm trying to be square with you, Aaron. You know why I'm driving this beer can?”

“No, sir.”

“I'm on half-time because of a medical condition. I'm also fixing to pull the pin. So I was given a pile of junk to motor around in. Are we starting to communicate here?”

“What's a button man?” I asked.

“A hit man. He pushes the ‘off' button on people. I asked if you understood why I was driving this pile of junk.”

“Your superiors have no use for you now, so you're going out of your way to help me.”

He fiddled with a pack of Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket, then tossed it onto the dashboard. “I'm going down to Mexico. A place called Lake Chapala. I'll be training some Cubans who're planning to invade their homeland. What do you think of that?”

“Mexico doesn't have very good health care,” I replied.

“You missed your calling. You should have been a funeral director.”

“Miss Cisco told you about the Mob getting stiffed and the button men coming here, didn't she.”

“She didn't have to. I was working vice in Vegas when Siegel built the Flamingo. I knew the guy who popped him. I once hung him out a train window by his heels.”

“She told you,” I said.

He took a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and stuck it into his mouth. “You've got a talent for pissing me off.”

“I'm going to let them do it,” I said.

“Do what?”

“It.”

He removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Want me to slap you?”

“Shoot me. I don't care what you do. Look in my face and tell me I'm lying.”

“Maybe things will get set right. Give it time.”

“Your colleagues are going to help me? You are? The courts are going to put the Atlas family in prison?”

He held his eyes on mine and didn't reply.

I
LEFT WORK EARLY
and went home and bathed and put on a clean pair of khakis and my cowboy boots and a short-sleeved white shirt with a spray of small pink roses on the shoulders. I called Valerie, but no one answered. I wrote my father and mother a note that said “I'll be over at Saber's. See you later.” Then I put on my cowboy hat, the one I wore the night I rode Original Sin, and went into the backyard. The sun was red and veiled with dust. I picked up Major and Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy one at a time and hugged each of them.

When I arrived at Saber's, he was on the swale changing the oil under a flatbed loaded with drill pipe. I wondered how his neighbors liked having an industrial service truck parked in their neighborhood. He crawled out barefoot and bare-chested, flakes of dried road grime in his hair and on his face. “What's shakin', rodeo man?”

“Need you to back me up.”

“Doing what?” he said.

“I have to end all this stuff with all the people who are out to get me.”

He got to his feet. His narrow chest was white and shiny with sweat, his eyes blinking with moisture. “We fight like the Indians. From behind a tree, right?”

“I need somebody to be my witness.”

“Witness to what?”

“To whatever is fixing to happen.”

“I'll get us a couple of RC Colas.”

“I don't have much time, Saber. Are you in or out?”

“I just need something cold to drink. How you like the old man's truck? He got a job delivering pipe in the oil field. I'll be right back.”

Saber walked into the house, his ribs and spine printed like sticks against his skin. Through the front window, I saw him talking with his father, gesturing. He came back out with two sweating bottles of RC Cola. He sat down against the truck tire, one leg stretched out. “So run that by me again.”

“You always said you were backing my action.”

“I meant it, too,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I just don't know what the action is.”

“I'm going to make them hurt me or leave me and my parents alone.”

“Back off and take a second look at what you just said.”

I sat down next to him. I didn't drink from the bottle. “I need your help, Saber.”

“The old man hasn't touched the sauce in four days. I've been racking pipe for him and riding shotgun and such. We might have to go to Beaumont tonight.”

He waited for me to speak, to tell him that I didn't need him, that I was wrongheaded, that it was okay for him to cut me loose and let me down.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “Could I have those two Molotov cocktails that were rolling around in your backseat?”

“Come on, what do you want those for?”

“I'll find a reason.”

“Come on,” he repeated.

“Will you give them to me or not?”

He looked away. “They're not real.”

“What?”

“They're full of water. They were just for show.”

I could hear the chimes of the Popsicle truck at the end of the street. Children were running from their houses with the nickel or dime their parents had given them.

“Forget it,” I said, resting my cola on the grass. “I figured out something the last day or so, Saber. I never could understand why Grady hung with a guy like Vick Atlas. Then I thought about why you and I always hung together. Both of our fathers have problems with alcohol, but we've always stuck with them. That's when I realized where the bond between Grady and Vick came from. Both of them grew up hating their fathers. It's funny, isn't it? We don't think we're anything like those guys, but in some ways we are.” I got up and took off my hat and wiped my brow. My legs felt weak.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“I haven't thought it through, Sabe.” I said. “Check with you down the track.”

I walked to my heap, accidentally knocking over my drink, the cola seeping into the swale.

I
DROVE TO THE
north side of the city and stopped in a dusty park. Mexican children were having a birthday party and hitting a piñata hanging from the crossbar of a swing set. I parked behind the concrete restrooms and took Loren's .32 revolver from under the seat and walked into a cluster of pines behind the backstop of a softball diamond and dumped the shells from the cylinder into my palm and sprinkled them into a trash can. I slipped the revolver back into my pocket and clicked open my stiletto and inserted it under the base of a water fountain and snapped off the blade. Then I closed the stub and put it in my pocket with the revolver. I sat down in the bleachers and watched the children split the piñata into shreds, showering paper-wrapped taffy in the dust.

I do not know how long I sat there. I was sweating inside my hat. I set it crown-down on the bleacher seat and propped my hands on my knees and lowered my head and shut my eyes. There was a red glow inside my eyelids, a warm finger of sunlight on the back of my neck. I could smell a drowsy odor on the wind, like flowers left too long in a vase. My mother's father, Hackberry Holland, used to say death was like a field of poppies. He said every third night he rode deep into them, the husks smearing the legs of his horse, the red petals gluing to its skin. He said that death was a long field that had no fences but led to a precipice the other side of which was a
blue sky. Grandfather had left us the previous year and, I believe, joined the drovers and lawmen and saloon girls and Indians whose companionship had defined his life. I wondered if he waited there to show me the way across.

“Are you okay, mister?” a tiny voice said.

I opened my eyes and looked down at a little Mexican girl. Her shiny black hair resembled a cap. She was wearing a pinafore and had a pink ribbon in her hair. “You looked like you was asleep and about to fall over,” she said.

“I'd better not do that, then,” I said.

“You want some cake?”

“Whose birthday is it?”

“Mine. We have ice cream. You want some?”

“That's nice of you. But I already ate.”

“Did somebody hurt you?”

I had to think about her meaning. “You mean this bandage? A bull did that.”

“Are you a cowboy?”

“Not really. Maybe a weekend cowboy. What's your name?”

“Esmeralda.”

“Happy birthday, Esmeralda.”

“Are you sad about something?”

“No, it's a fine day. A grand one for your birthday.”

“You talk funny.”

“It's the way my father talks.”

“Your father must be funny.”

“You can say that again. I don't have a present for you. But here's a quarter. How's that?” I stood up, the tops of the trees tilting; I wondered if I had been asleep.

“Thank you,” she said. She started to run away, then stopped and said, “Don't get hurt no more. Bye-bye.”

I watched her run back among the other children. I wanted to join them, to give up a decade of life and return to my childhood during the darkest days of the war, when gold stars hung in people's windows
and we were united against those who would extinguish the light of civilization and transform the world into a slave camp. I walked to my heap like a drunk man and drove to a bar and poolroom in the middle of the Heights.