“If that’s not the problem, what is?”
“He said a Mexican woman, a prostitute, was killed two blocks from the burned car. He thinks she was mixed up in the burning of the car. He says the cops found the gasoline can that did the job. It was in Saber’s garage.”
There was a long silence. I couldn’t look at him. “Daddy?” I said. But he didn’t answer. “Daddy, say something.”
“What have you got us into, son?”
SABER WASN’T AT school the next day. I didn’t know if his father had beat him up or if he had just cut school. Mr. Bledsoe was from rural Alabama. He wasn’t a bad man, but he was uneducated and insecure and frightened and each day had to scrub off the grime from his job at a rendering plant with Ajax and a bar of Lava soap and a stiff brush. Whenever I saw a bruise on Saber, I didn’t ask about it. I didn’t think Mr. Bledsoe meant to hurt his son. When he was drunk, he made me think of a sightless pig trapped inside a circle of javelins.
At three o’clock I hitched a ride to Saber’s small frame house on the edge of the West University district. He was under his Chevy on a creeper board, his legs on the grass. I grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him out. He had a wrench in one hand; he rubbed at a piece of rust in his eye. “What the hell,” he said.
“Why weren’t you at school?”
“Didn’t feel like answering questions all over campus. Besides, I wanted to put my split manifold on the engine and hang my new mufflers. I filled them with oil first and set the oil on fire. The carbon gives it that throaty sound.”
“You’re thinking about putting dual exhausts on your heap when the cops are trying to send us to Gatesville?”
He pulled his knees up in front of him, his skin dark in the shade of the car. He used his shirt to wipe the grease off his cheek. “I don’t know where that gasoline can came from. I told that to the detective. So did my old man. I was proud of him. He told the detective to pack his shit up both nostrils.”
“I hate to tell you this, Sabe, but that’s not smart.”
“I thought it was. They’re after us, Aaron. I told you.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Ask yourself where all this started.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t play dumb,” he said. “This is about Valerie Eps
tein.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You went to see her, and the next thing you know, Loren Nichols and his greaseballs show up in front of her house. The next day the same guys show up at school and in my driveway. In the meantime, Mr. Krauser is twirling his joint in the punch bowl.”
“I can’t tell you what that image does to my brain.”
“Who’s the guy getting a free pass on all this?” he asked.
“You tell me.”
“Stop acting like a simp. You’re talking to the Bledsoe, the Delphic oracle of Houston, Texas.” He cocked back his head and spat in the air, catching his saliva on the return trip in his mouth.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I know. I also know Grady Harrelson is a prick from his hairline to the soles of his feet. I think we should make some home calls.”
He pulled himself back under the car and finished hanging one of his dual mufflers on a bracket, oblivious to the rest of the world.
RIVER OAKS WAS foreign territory. It wasn’t simply a section of the city that contained some of the most beautiful homes in America or perhaps the world; it was a state of mind. Unlike the Garden District in New Orleans, the mansions of River Oaks were not connected to the antebellum South and not stained by association with the lash and branding iron and auction block. Inside an urban forest were homes as white and pure as a wedding cake, the St. Augustine lawns a deep blue-green in the shade, the gardens and trellises and gazebos blooming with flowers as big as grapefruit, almost all of it bought and paid for by oil that sprang like chocolate syrup from the ground, oceans of it put there by a loving Creator.
Police cruisers rarely patrolled the streets. They didn’t need to; no professional criminal would invade a sanctuary like River Oaks. The afternoon was cooling, the streets dropping into shadow as we motored toward Grady Harrelson’s house, Saber’s new mufflers rumbling off the asphalt. I asked him how he knew where Grady lived.
“A year ago he shoved my cousin into the Shamrock swimming pool with all her clothes on. On prom night I followed him and his girlfriend to his house. His folks were away, and he thought he’d use the opportunity to get his knob polished at home. I bagged up a dead skunk and shoved it through his mail slot with a broom handle.”
“I don’t believe you.”