The Jealous Kind (19 page)

Mr. Harrelson wrinkled his nose under his glasses and smiled. “This has nothing to do with us,” he said. “At this point I think we should say good evening and next time speak to the authorities if we have questions about my son's behavior or the behavior of his friends. I must say one thing, though, before we conclude: There seems to be little concern about the damage done to the Atlas boy. From what I understand, he's lucky he wasn't decapitated. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get into that again. Grady, would you make sure the outside lights are on for Mr. Broussard and Aaron.”

My father looked into space. His hat lay on the table, crown-down. He picked it up and straightened the brim. Then he rose from the chair. He hadn't slept well the night before and had gotten up early to go to the bank and withdraw the five hundred dollars he needed to pay my bail. He looked ten years older than he was.

“We'll find our way out. Please don't get up,” he said.

Mr. Harrelson nodded and opened his book and began reading. I didn't think I had ever met a more arrogant man in my life.

Grady opened the front door and held it while we walked outside. The night was sweet with the smell of flowers and lichen and the haze from the sprinkler system. Grady started to close the door. My father turned around and stiff-armed it back open. “Ask your father to come out here.”

“He's done talking,” Grady said. “It's just his way. He's a funny guy sometimes.”

My father had not put his hat back on. He held it pinched by the crown and pointed it at Grady. “Go get him, young man. I don't wish to embarrass you, but you need to do as I've asked you.
Now.
”

“If that's what you want.”

Grady went back into the living room and returned a moment later with Mr. Harrelson, who was still holding his book, his thumb marking his place. For the first time I could see the front of the jacket. The book was a collection of essays by Harry H. Laughlin.

“Yes?” he said.

“Your ungracious manner is probably related to a lack of breeding and background, Mr. Harrelson, so you should not be held accountable for it,” my father said. “However, the degree of your rudeness seems to indicate contempt for the civilized world rather than ignorance of it. You seem to lack what William James called ‘the critical sense.' This is the faculty in us that works a bit like God's fingerprint on the soul. It's not a faculty that can be acquired. One is either born with it or he is not born with it. Obviously, in your case, it's the latter.” My father fitted on his hat. “You have a grand place here. As I said, it reminds me of another setting, one I don't think you would understand. Good evening, sir. Come on, son.”

We walked along the gravel drive to our car. I didn't hear the door close behind us. I did not look back. I had the feeling it would take Clint Harrelson a while to absorb what he had just been told. I also had the feeling Grady was about to become a pincushion.

I was right. But I found out about Grady's private torment in a way I never thought possible.

In the meantime, I treated my old man to a cherry milkshake at the Walgreens on Westheimer, where we sat side by side at the counter, the jukebox playing, a big fan on the wall shaking to the beat of the band.

I
KEPT MY JOB
at the filling station, I think in part because the other white kid who worked there had been drafted, leaving only me to handle money when the owner wasn't around. But I had to come in on Sundays, too, which meant if I wanted to attend Mass, I had to go at seven
A.M.
The church was located not far from the eastern border of River Oaks.

I hadn't eaten, and after Mass I went across the street to Costen's drugstore and ordered toast and a cup of coffee at the counter, then realized I had left my missal in the pew. The church was empty. Or at least I thought it was. I gathered up my missal and was going back out the side exit when I heard someone leave the confessional, either knocking the kneeler against the cubicle or banging the door. A moment later Grady Harrelson came through the exit. We were standing a few feet from each other in a shady patch of lawn between the church and the convent and a covered walkway with no one else around. The morning was still cool, the stucco walls of the church and convent streaked with moisture.

“Are you following me?” he said.

His eyes were red, his face pinched, perhaps heated, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps remorseful, I couldn't tell. I didn't feel any anger toward him. Or even resentment. If anything, I felt pity. “How you doin', Grady?”

“I asked if you're bird-dogging me.”

“This is where I go to church. I didn't know you were Catholic.”

“I'm not.”

“Just visiting?” I said.

“You being a wisenheimer?”

“No,” I said. “I'm glad to see you.”

“That's a tough sell.”

“Did something happen in there?” I asked.

He looked at me warily. “Can those guys tell other people about what you say to them? I mean, if you're not Catholic, can they tell?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“What does that mean?”

“No, they can't tell anyone.”

He looked back at the church door, then at me. Then he stared at his convertible parked in the sunlight. The top was down, the white folds snapped against the body, every inch of the paint a creamy pink you could eat with a spoon.

“It's not over between us,” he said.

“What isn't?”

“Nobody slaps me in the face.”

“If I could undo it, I would. Anyway, it's over for me.”

He had tried to change the subject, but it hadn't worked. He humped his shoulders and scratched at his upper arm, narrowing his eyes, imitating the slouch and look of the street hoods he probably envied. “Sometimes you can do some shit you don't set out to, know what I mean?”

“I'm not sure,” I replied.

“That stuff I told you about Valerie, about getting it on with her? It's not true.”

I nodded. I didn't want to say anything more. He wrapped his arms across his chest. “You tell anybody about this, you know what's going to happen, right?”

“Tell anybody about what?” I asked.

“Me being here.”

“Don't get mad at me, Grady, but I've got news for you. Nobody cares whether either one of us is here. A bird just splattered your windshield. Nobody cares about that, either. These are not big events.”

“You've
always got the cute comeback,” he said.

What do you say? I wondered what had occurred inside the confessional. I didn't want to ask, but I thought I knew. “Can I help you, Grady? I've had a few hard times. We got off to a bad start. It doesn't always have to be that way.”

His face was like a portrait painted on air, the eyes flat, the lips still. “No,” he said.

“No, what?”

“No, I don't need help with anything.”

“I'd better get to work. See you another time,” I said.

The sun hadn't climbed above the church, and the air was blue with shadow in the lee of the building. Purple roses bloomed against the stucco wall. He shook his collar as though he had overdressed and his body heat was trapped inside his shirt. He coughed on the back of his wrist. “How's she doing?”

“Who?”

“Val.”

“She's fine.”

“That's good. Make sure she stays that way,” he said.

Why did he say that? What had Valerie told me about the jealous kind? They were unteachable and incapable of change? “What was that last part?”

“What I said.”

“You volunteered for the service,” I said. “You would have ended up in Korea if you didn't have a medical condition. Why don't you drop the hard-guy bullshit?”

“You don't know anything about my military service, so shut your mouth, Broussard.”

“Don't be telling me how I should treat Valerie.”

“You think you have to tell me I'm not yellow? You told my old man I helped tear up those guys who crashed a party on Sunset. Let me give
you
a news bulletin. I didn't gang anybody. The guy behind most of it was Vick Atlas, the same guy who wants to chain-drag you and Bledsoe from his bumper. That's not exaggeration.”

Maybe I shouldn't
have said anything else. I was talking to a kid who would never be anything except a kid. But I had been at the party on Sunset Boulevard and seen what had happened, and I just couldn't abide his lying, or maybe I couldn't abide his proprietary attitude about Valerie. Even now, over sixty years later, I have a hard time with it. He called her “Val”?

“Those were your friends who spread-eagled that guy,” I said. “You could have stopped them. You were laughing when y'all walked off. The guy had to go to the hospital, at Jeff Davis, as a charity case. I thought that was pretty chickenshit.”

He didn't reply. He bit his bottom lip, his body turned sideways, positioned to throw a hook straight into my face.

“You want to say something?” I asked.

“I can't tell you what I feel like doing to you right now.”

“Then do it. I want you to.”

There was a blood clot in the corner of his left eye. His eyelids were fluttering.

“You think you're a swinging dick because your old man told off my father?” he said. “My father could have your old man cleaning toilets, except he wouldn't waste his time. Your old man's a drunk. Your mother has been through electroshock. We could have you ground into paste if we wanted to.”

“The priest told you to turn yourself in,” I said.

His face went white. “What'd you say?”

“You owned up to something bad. Maybe it had to do with the dead Mexican girl. But you won't turn yourself in because you're a bum, Harrelson, and not worth spitting on.”

I walked away from him and didn't look back. At the corner I saw him drive slowly out of the parking lot onto the street, too slow for the traffic. A car blew its horn. Grady didn't react or accelerate and instead pulled to the light as though frozen in thought. When the light changed, he steered with the heel of one hand, not heeding a truck trying to turn in front of him. He seemed to have every characteristic of a man without a past worth remembering or a future worth living.
But the words he had spoken about my father and mother had robbed me of all sympathy for him. The pity and charity I had felt only minutes ago were gone. I was the less for them.

My missal was still in my hand. I wondered what Saint Paul would have to say regarding my role as a bearer of the good news.

T
HE DAYS PASSED,
and Saber's father took out a second mortgage on the Bledsoes' run-down home and used the money to put up Saber's bail and consult with an attorney, one he had found in the Yellow Pages. Saber called me as soon as he got home. I thought he wanted to get together. That wasn't the case.

“We're down to rat cheese and crackers at the house,” he said. “The old man is collecting newspapers to haul out to the mill. Ever been to the paper mill?”

The mill was located on several hundred square acres of piled trash swarming with seagulls. It was a wretched place peopled by the desperate and the poor who eked out a living by going door-to-door, asking others for their old newspapers and cardboard boxes and later selling them for a penny a pound at best. They had the despair in their faces of medieval ragpickers.

“You want me to ask my father if he can get your dad a job on a pipeline?”

“My old man thinks your dad talks to him like he's a nigger. Those were his words.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“If you don't see me for a while, it's not because I ran off to the army,” he said.

“You going somewhere?” I said.

“I made
some connections in the can. Remember the Mexican guys in the holding cell?”

“Those guys are
pachucos.
They'll cut you from your liver to your lights,” I said.

“Been to some KKK meetings lately?”

“You know what I'm talking about,” I replied, my face flushing.

“See you in the funny papers, Aaron. Keep it in your pants. Oops, too late for that. How's Valerie doing?”

I hung up.

I
LOVED THE SUMMERTIME.
The afternoon thunderstorms were the kind you stood in and took joy in the rain. When the sky cleared and turned a soft blue again, the clouds in the west were like strips of fire, or sometimes piles of plums and peaches. Every new day was a cause for celebration, no matter its content. And the explanation for the joy I felt was easy: I was not only in love with the season; I loved Valerie Epstein and I knew Valerie loved me.

I loved her smell and the smoothness of her skin and the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed. There was not enough time in the evening to do all the things that seemed created just for the two of us. Whatever we did was an adventure. We went to the ice rink in one of Houston's poorest neighborhoods and to baseball games at Buffalo Stadium and to R&B concerts at the city auditorium, where whites had to sit in the balcony because the best seats and the dance floor were reserved for Mexicans and people of color.

For a dollar and a quarter we saw B.B. and Albert King, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace. On a Friday night we drove to Galveston and the Balinese Club, run by the Maceo family on a six-hundred-foot pier. The moon was up, the Gulf slate green, the waves tumbling through the pilings. The entranceway was framed with neon and hung with Japanese lanterns, the sky black and sprinkled with stars, the air heavy with the smell of an impending storm. We could hear a dance orchestra playing.

Valerie took my hand as we were about to go inside. “This is really uptown, isn't it?” she said.

“Yeah,
Frank Sinatra has sung here.”

“You're kidding.”

“Bob Hope played here, too.”