The Jealous Kind (46 page)

“I don't want it,” Grady said.

“Yeah, you do,” Vick said. “You were born for the life. You were always one of us.”

“What about
him
?” Grady asked, glancing at me.

“This baby is mine,” Vick said. “We're going out to a junkyard run by a friend of mine.”

“I don't get it. What's the plan?” Grady said.

“I got to keep my word on something. About Broussard. He knows what I mean.”

“You're going to drag him? That's sick, man,” Grady said.

“Look at what he did to my face,” Vick said. “Think he doesn't have it coming? I got pus running out of this bandage every day.”

“What about Val?” Grady asked.

Vick shone a light on her face. Her eyes watered in the glare. He grinned at Grady.

“Knock that off,” Grady said.

“You develop qualms?”

“Maybe I have.”

“You got an easy choice, Grady,” Vick said. “You can stay a rich man or go to work sacking groceries.”

“I'll talk to her. She's practical.”

“By now she's figured out you killed your father. How practical is she going to be about that?”

“You better put a cork in it, Vick,” Grady said.

Yes, yes, yes, provoke him some more, Vick.
But I underestimated him. Vick was a survivor who had spent a lifetime dealing with a disfigured face and the insults it drew.

“I'm just kidding,” he said. “Your old man brought it on himself. You're a stand-up guy, Grady. You proved that when you joined the Corps. I think secretly your old man was afraid you'd show him up.”

“Grady, please stop and try to think about what you're doing,” Valerie said. “You've made mistakes. But this isn't you.”

“Tell her,” Vick said.

“Tell me what?” she asked.

“About the Mexican girl,” Vick replied.

“Lay off that,” Grady said.

“Tell her.”

“He's talking about Wanda Estevan,” Grady said. “It was an accident. We set fire to Loren Nichols's car. She tried to jump out of my car. I was trying to pull her back in. I grabbed her neck the wrong way. I feel terrible. I went to Broussard's church about it.”

“Then don't let this creep ruin your life,” she said.

“Time to go,” Vick said. “I'm going to move Broussard's heap. I'll take Val and the freak with me. Put Broussard in my trunk and follow me. In three hours, we're going to be eating pancakes and sausages and eggs. This won't exist anymore.”

“What's the hypo for?” Grady asked.

Vick looked at Valerie again. “You never can tell.”

H
OW DO YOU
surrender to death? Or to the idea that your fate lies in the hands of evil men? When these events occurred that dark night in River Oaks, I had no preparation. Death had always been an abstraction, a vague presence that held no sway in my life. The stories that came back from Korea were always heroic in nature; the newsreels showed American F-80s coming in low over white hills at the Chosin Reservoir, sliding balls of flaming napalm into the thousands of Chinese troops that had crossed the Yalu and surrounded the First Marine Division. We cheered inside the warmth of the theater and took heart at the sight of marines with frozen beards who gave the thumbs-up to the cameraman. Death and suffering had been visited on our enemies, not us.

I think there is a clock in all of us that most choose not to see or heed. The clock has a date and an hour and minute and a second on it that are not subject to change. I knew my hour had come, but I couldn't accept it. The thought made my mouth go dry, my colon constrict, my throat back up with bile, my vision go out of focus. I felt like my blood had been fouled. The person I thought of as Aaron Holland Broussard seemed to have taken flight from my breast, and I wondered if the real me was indeed a coward, a pathetic creature whose only accomplishments in life were to ride a dumb animal for eight seconds and to swim terrified through a school of jellyfish.

Vick pulled open the door. All the other houses on the street were without power. Rain was sweeping across the Harrelson lawn and the live oaks and the swimming pool and blowing into the foyer. Grady struggled to get Saber to his feet. Saber tripped and fell and pulled Valerie down with him.

“Get him up,” Grady said.

“Let them go. It's me Vick wants,” I said.

“It's over. Accept it, Broussard,” Grady said.

I lifted Saber to his feet. He kept his weight on one leg, holding on to me, his face buried in my shoulder. “Two guys in a woody,” he whispered. “One block south. Greaseballs.”

I didn't know how the information could help. But I knew that somehow the two assassins were related to our mutual fate, that their presence was part of the design, that somehow there was a doorway out of the black box we were in.

“Grady?” Valerie said.

“Yes?”

“Look at me.”

“There's no point talking about it, Val.”

“Look at me, Grady.”

“What is it?”

“When you're done with us, you'll always be Vick Atlas's tool. He'll take everything you have. You're weak. You need him, but he doesn't need you. Why do you let him do this to you?”

“Shut your mouth,” Grady said.

“That's it,” Vick said. He pushed Valerie and Saber out the door. Then he looked at the rain swirling in the trees. He picked up my hat from the floor and put it on. “Okay, you two, let's take a ride. See you in a minute, Grady.”

I watched the three of them walk through the puddles in the driveway toward my heap. Saber was holding on to Valerie, his left leg almost collapsing with each step. Grady shoved me between the shoulder blades onto the porch. “We'll cut through the side yard to the carriage house.”

A long ragged bolt of lightning split the clouds, and I saw the reflection glimmer on a station wagon parked one block south, just as Saber had said. We were about to enter the gate that gave on to the side yard and the swimming pool and the carriage house and Vick's parked car. I was supposed to climb into the trunk and let Grady lock me inside. Down the street I heard the station wagon start up, backfiring once, like a wet firecracker. Then I knew what was going to happen. I was not prescient; I didn't have an epiphany; it was the opposite.

I was at the side of my father the first time he went over the top. I was in a wheat field golden with heat and misty with blood, and among the martyrs like Felicity and Perpetua who died in a Carthaginian arena, and at the limestone wall among the farm boys from Ohio who charged into Confederate artillery with empty muskets. I knew that death wasn't that bad after all, that it freed me from the earth and united me with brothers and sisters who were among the finest in the family of man.

I began running toward Valerie and Saber, waiting for Grady to take aim and fire at my back. But it didn't happen. Instead, the driver of the station wagon pulled to the center of the asphalt and accelerated toward us, the car's wake rippling over both curbs onto the lawns along the street. There was only one passenger. He was in the backseat, rolling down the window.

As he positioned himself and fitted the automatic rifle to his shoulder, I could see his white shirt, the bloodless pallor of his face, the delicacy of his hands, the flawless sweep of his hair over his tiny ears, the ease with which he sighted on his target and prepared to pull the trigger.

The weapon he held was known formally as the Browning automatic rifle and informally as the BAR. Its effect was devastating. As the station wagon closed on us, the line of fire was perfect. Probably two bursts would kill the four of us.

The driver clicked on his headlights, then hit the high beams, silhouetting Vick, my cowboy hat slanted on his head, his bandaged
cheek as white as snow. I piled into Saber and Valerie and knocked them both to the ground and covered them with my body. The shooter opened up. There must have been at least one tracer round in the magazine. It streaked away into the darkness, maybe hitting the bathhouse in the side yard. The other rounds chewed Vick Atlas into pieces. His flesh, his hair, his clothing seemed to dissolve in the headlights, as though he were caught on wires. I could hear the ejected shells pinging against the station wagon's window frame, the bullets thudding into a tree behind us. Then the station wagon drove away slowly, the profile of the shooter as sculpted and serene and immobile as a statue's.

Vick had fallen into the water. I got up and pulled his body onto the swale and found the handcuff key in his pocket. I unlocked the cuffs from Valerie's and Saber's wrists and put Saber into the passenger seat of my heap. My hands would not stop shaking. I thought Valerie was crying. Or maybe laughing. Saber was grinning. I was sure about that.

Behind me I saw Grady running down the sidewalk, staring back at us like a frightened child.

T
HE POWER WENT
back on, and one house after another filled with light, as though the Angel of Death held no dominion in this green-gray, moss-hung urban forest on the rim of the industrial world. I went back into the house and called the police. Then I made a second call, one I have never told anyone about until now.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, Miss Cisco.”

“Aaron? What kind of mess are you in now?”

“Long story. You have a key to Grady Harrelson's house?”

She paused before she spoke. “What do you think?”

“Detective Jenks said he plans to go to Mexico. I bet he'd like to go there in a Caddy convertible. It's pink. You'll find it in Grady's basement.”

The line went silent again.

“Did you hear me, Miss Cisco?”

“Where's Grady?”

“He just barreled butt down the street. On foot. I don't think he'll be back for a while.”

“What's happened, Aaron?”

“Vick Atlas got blown apart by the Atlas hit men. Vick shot my friend Saber in the foot. He and Grady were going to put us in a junkyard compactor after Vick chain-dragged me behind his automobile.”

“You're making this up.”

“Suit yourself. It's
going to be raining cops and newspeople in a few minutes. If you're interested in the Caddy, I'd visit a little later. I doubt they'll pay it any mind.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You've got to do something for kicks,” I replied.

I
NEVER SAW GRADY
again. He avoided prosecution by tying up the process in the courts and eventually going bankrupt. Some said he was terrified of Jaime Atlas and hired bodyguards who beat him up and raped him and left him naked in a ditch. Five years later, I heard he married a former actress who produced pornographic films and lived in the Hollywood Hills. In 1967 he was found dead in a hotel on East Fifth Street in Los Angeles, a hypodermic needle in his arm.

Eighteen months after the shooting, I received a letter from Mexico City. It read:

How are you doing, kiddo? I hope you got your life straightened out. I can't necessarily say I have, but at least I'm not putting the joy juice in my arm. You were a sweet kid and you got me a little bit excited on a couple of occasions, so I apologize to you for that, but hey normalcy was never my strong suit, which doesn't seem to bother M. a lot. He says to tell you hello and to ride it to the buzzer. He's on radiation and I'm on wrinkle remover, but we have oceans of money courtesy of you-know-who. Am I regretful for having been in the life? I'd have to think on that. As Benny used to say, “It beats the fuck out of pushing a bagel cart.”

The letter was unsigned.

Saber dropped out of school during the fall semester and joined the army. In the spring of 1953, he was MIA at Pork Chop Hill. His name showed up once on a list of POWs at Panmunjom, but he was not repatriated, and nothing was ever learned about his fate. There were rumors about American soldiers having been moved across the
Yalu into China and perhaps even the Soviet Union, where they were used in medical experiments. Saber's father died and his mother went to work at a record store in West University and for years wrote letters to the government and spoke to anyone who would listen about her son's fate, until she went mad. I have always wanted to believe that Saber survived, that the trickster from classical folklore who had lived in our midst and hung his flopper through the hole in the ceiling above Mr. Krauser's head was still out there, screwing up things, ridiculing the pompous and arrogant, getting even for the rest of us. And that's the way I will always think of him.

The following year the vice president of my father's company invited him to go on a duck-hunting trip down at Anahuac. He asked because of my father's genteel manners and his ability to speak with corporate people on any level about any subject. My father looked upon the trip as an obligation, not a pleasure. On the way back to Houston, he was sleeping in the passenger seat of the vice president's Cadillac. The hour was late, the highway white with fog. The vice president rounded a curve and plowed into the back of a disabled truck. For reasons never explained, the truck driver had not placed reflectors or flares on the asphalt to warn oncoming traffic. My father was flown to Houston. He died the next day from a blood clot, while I was en route from college to be at his bedside.

My mother lived to be one hundred and two years and asked nothing from anyone and took care of herself until the end. I became a writer; I didn't become a musician. But Loren Nichols did, and he dedicated a song to me and Valerie from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

What about Val and me? There is a certain kind of love that's forever. It's not marked by a marital vow, or social custom, or gender identity, or the age of the parties involved. It's a love that doesn't even need to be declared. Its presence in your life is as factual as the sun rising in the morning. You do not argue in its defense or try to explain or justify it to others. The other party moves into your heart and remains with you the rest of your days. The bond is never broken, any more than you can separate yourself from your body or soul.