The Jealous Kind (15 page)

“Maybe I could talk with Vick Atlas,” I said.

“My father knows the Atlas family. Don't go near them.”

“How could your father know them?”

“He was with the OSS. It became the CIA. The Atlas family helped Lucky Luciano get out of prison. They also helped him set up gambling operations close to navy shipyards so the workers would lose their money and stay on the job. You don't ‘talk' to people like the Atlases.”

“Can I use your phone? I'm supposed to be at work by three. The traffic lights are probably out.”

“Stay with me,” she said. “You have to stop doing things on your own without talking to somebody first. You understand that?”

“What should I do, Valerie?”

“Nothing. Stay with me. That's all. Just stay with me. I want you here.”

“I don't want you hurt.”

“They won't hurt me. They know better.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody messes with my father.”

“He's not actually a violent man, is he?”

“He doesn't have to be,”
she replied. She went to the window and looked at the rain and at the wind tormenting the trees. “We come from different worlds. The difference between Jews and gentiles isn't a religious one. The difference is in our knowledge of what human beings are capable of. Do you know you're the sweetest boy I've ever met?” She turned around. I could almost see her unspoken words in the fogged place she had left on the windowpane. “Do you understand what I just said?”

“I believe the guy who died at Heartbreak Ridge was the best guy on earth.”

She came behind my chair and hugged my head against her, kissing my hair, her breath in my ear. “I'll always be with you,” she said. “I give you my word. You're my Pegasus, my winged horse taking me out of the storm.”

I tried to twist my head. But she wouldn't let go of me. I never wanted to leave her embrace; nor did I want the storm to end. And if it had to end, I prayed the world would be washed clean and a light as bright as creation would burst on the ocean's rim.

But in the morning the sun came up hot and sultry, and the air was leaden with the stench of dead beetles in the drains, and from baitfish that meteorologists claimed had fallen from the clouds. At eight sharp, Saber's father was fired from the rendering plant where he had worked for nine years.

S
ABER CAME TO
the filling station to tell me. The gas pump island was littered with leaves and twigs, a live oak across the boulevard uprooted from a yard like a raw tooth. We were standing under the shed by the pumps while I fueled a car. Saber kept looking over his shoulder while he talked.

“What did your father's boss say?” I asked.

“They have to cut back on overhead, and some of the old guys have to go.”

“What did your father say?”

“He's
the only one they canned. What's to say besides ‘Thanks for the memory, motherfuckers'?”

I looked around to see if anyone had heard. The city bus stopped on the corner. Saber's face twitched when the collapsible doors opened. Several black people exited from the back door, and the bus pulled away. Saber's eyes kept blinking, as though the light were too harsh. “Somebody tied black crepe on our doorknob last night. It had dog shit on it so the person who tore it off would get it on his hands.”

“Maybe the cops can lift fingerprints off it,” I said.

“Try dusting dog shit for fingerprints.”

“Maybe it's kids.”

“Quit it, Aaron.”

“Has Jenks been to your house?”

“No.” He waited, his eyes drawing close together. “Has he been to yours?”

I finished fueling the car and made change for the driver and watched him drive onto the boulevard. “Jenks was at the house yesterday. The brick caught Atlas in the eye.”

Saber made a sound like someone had punched him in the stomach.

“You haven't told your dad what happened?” I said.

“No. My old man didn't go past the seventh grade. He doesn't have a job, and it's my fault. I want to go to Korea and get killed.”

“We've got to tell somebody,” I said.

“You're kidding. Don't even think that.”

“We can't hide this, Saber,” I said. “The Atlases are criminals. What if they try to hurt my parents and I don't warn them first?”

I thought he was going to cry. I finished fueling another car and clanged the hose spout on the pump. Saber stared emptily at the boulevard as though he had no idea where he was. I would have given anything to undo the bad decisions I had made and the pain they had brought my best friend. Just a few weeks earlier we had been part of a postwar era that had no antecedent. No other country had our power or influence. Music was everywhere. Regular was eighteen cents a gallon. All the services on a car—window washing, oil check, tire inflation—were free.
Those small and inglorious things somehow translated into a confidence that seemed to dispel mortality itself, even though Joseph McCarthy was ripping up the Constitution and GIs were dying in large numbers in places no one could locate on a map or would take the time to spit on.

I walked over to Saber and placed my hand on his shoulder. “You've got to trust me, Sabe. If we do the right thing, we don't need to be afraid.”

“You're going to tell your dad what happened?”

“What if I do?”

“My old man worries when baloney goes up ten cents a pound. Your old man thinks it's noble to burn your own house down while the band plays ‘Dixie.' Gee, who's about to get it without grease?”

M
Y MOTHER DIDN'T
allow my father to keep liquor in the house. In order to drink, he went to the icehouse or the bowling alley or the garage, where he kept a bottle under the spare tire in the trunk of the car. It was a shameful way for him to live, and a shameful way for my mother to behave, but it was the only way they knew.

After supper I sat at the redwood table in the backyard and played my Gibson. By chance I once heard Lightnin' Hopkins playing in front of a bar on Dowling Street, in the heart of Houston's black district. He was singing “Down by the Riverside.” It was the saddest and most beautiful blues rendition I had ever heard. I did not know the song's origin, but I understood its content, and when I would feel one of my spells coming on, I would get out my Gibson and sing it:

Gonna lay down my sword and shield,

Down by the riverside,

I ain't gonna study war no more,

Down by the riverside,

Ain't gonna study war no more.

Somehow I knew he was not singing about war but about something even worse, perhaps the destruction of the spirit or the mortgaging of one's soul. I wondered how anyone could prevail over the
unhappiness that had been imposed on Lightning and his people. I wondered if the Texas prison he had served time in was worse than the prison I had constructed for myself.

I heard my father open the screen door and head for the garage. “Daddy?”

He looked at me, startled.

“I've got to tell you something,” I said.

He looked at the garage door. “I might have a low tire. Can it wait a few minutes?”

“Yes, sir.”

I heard him scrape the door back on the concrete, then pause and push the door in place without going inside. He walked across the grass toward me, fishing in his pocket for his Lucky Strikes. He had left them in the house.

“Go get a smoke if you want one,” I said.

“It's all right. I'm trying to cut down. What's on your mind?”

Saint Augustine said not to use the truth to injure. I don't think he used those words lightly. My father tried to remain impassive as I described the events at the Copacabana and in Herman Park, but his expression was like that of a man walking barefoot on a rocky road. There was a tremble in his right hand, the fingertips vibrating slightly on the tabletop, a blue vein pulsing in his temple.

When I finished, he cleared his throat and looked at my mother's silhouette in the kitchen window, where she was washing dishes. “You and I are supposed to be doing that.”

“I'll go help her.”

“No, she'll understand. The boy is going to lose his eye?”

“He's not a boy.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Yes, sir, that's what the detective said.”

“And Saber wants to keep quiet about it?”

“He's scared. His father just got fired.”

“Fired? When?”

“This morning.”

“For doing what?”

“Nothing.”

“You
think these criminals are behind it?”

“Or Grady Harrelson's father.”

My father cleared his throat again and stared at the garage.

“Want me to get you a glass of water?” I asked.

“The boy's name is Atlas?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He's no good.”

“Did you have words with his father in the nightclub?”

“No, sir.”

“You're not to have any contact with them. If they try to talk to you on the street, if they yell insults at you from a car, if they make threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, you do not respond, not under any circumstances. Clear?”

“Yes, sir, but what does it matter?”

“Every word you utter to an evil man either degrades you or empowers him. Evil men fear solitude because they have to hear their own thoughts.” He glanced at the evening sky. The moon was yellow, surrounded by a rain ring that looked like a halo on the painting of a Byzantine saint. “Get an umbrella. I'll back the car out and meet you in front.”

“Where are we going?”

“Where do you think?”

I was beginning to regret confiding in my father. Maybe Saber had been right. My father belonged to that generation of Southerners drawn to self-destruction and impoverishment as though neurosis and penury represented virtue.

“You want your hat and coat?” I asked.

“Yes, I'd appreciate that. Thank you,” he said. “Tell your mother we'll be back soon.”

M
Y FATHER PULLED
to the curb in front of Saber's house. The only light inside came from the television set. The same was true of most
of the houses on the street. Saber's house looked like a railroad shack someone had forgotten to bulldoze before building a modern subdivision around it. The television had a small black-and-white screen encased in plastic and had been manufactured by a man named Madman Muntz, who came to Houston in 1951 and sold thousands of them for fifty dollars apiece. The warranty was thirty days. The lawn mower was dead-stopped in the grass, a long swath behind it. The garbage can, emptied that day or the day before, was still on the swale.

My father removed his hat and tapped on the screen door. I could see Saber and his mother sitting on the cloth-covered couch in front of the television. Neither of them looked away from the program. Mr. Bledsoe got up from his stuffed chair and came to the door in slippers and cutoff shorts and a T-shirt. His hair looked like weeds growing on a rock. He stared straight into our faces and did not unlatch the screen. “I know why you're here.”

“We'd like to talk with you and Saber,” my father said.

“We're fixing to go to bed.”

“Our difficulty is not going away that easily, sir,” my father said.

“We don't have difficulty. Nothing happened.”

Neither Saber nor his mother looked in our direction.

“That's right, isn't it, Saber?” Mr. Bledsoe said.

Saber didn't answer or turn around.

“Obviously your son told you what happened, or you would not know the purpose of our visit,” my father said.

Mr. Bledsoe gazed through the screen, a tired man whose vocabulary was probably no more than a few hundred words, a man with no self-knowledge and neither moat nor castle except for his shack and the broken screen that separated him from the rest of the world.

“Will you invite us in?” my father said.

“They took my job. They'll take my house and they'll take my boy, too. Don't tell me they won't, either.”

“We need to go to the police,” my father said.

“Like heck I will.”

“You're putting the burden on my son, Mr. Bledsoe.”

“It's not him that's at risk.
If he wants to go to the cops, that's his damn business.”

“You just admitted Saber threw the brick.”

“I didn't admit anything. No, sir.”

“My son isn't an informer.”

Mr. Bledsoe's gaze had shifted into space, as though he saw content there that no one else did. “We look after our own.”

“Would you step out here and talk to me, please?”

“There's nothing to talk about. I already took a belt to him.”

“For telling you the truth?”

Mr. Bledsoe tilted up his chin, defiant. “Maybe if you'd disciplined your own son, he wouldn't have drove Saber to a nightclub, then to a park where they didn't have no business.”

“So Aaron must either inform on your boy or bear the consequence of Saber's throwing the brick?”

“I didn't say anything about a brick. You want to talk about that, you take your conversation somewhere else.”

“I'd like you to forgive me for what I have to say, Mr. Bledsoe.”

“I got no idea what you're talking about.”

My father started to speak, then stopped. “We wish you and your family the best. If we can be of assistance to you, please call.”

“That won't be happening,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

My father put his hat back on. It was a classic fedora, the front brim bent down. He had small eyes and dark hair and clean features that belied his age and the alcohol he consumed. I wondered what he would look like if he didn't drink or smoke. We got into the car and he started the engine. He looked up at the gaseous yellow glow of the moon; it had a peculiar radiance, like a campfire burning inside snow.