“Look me in the face and say that,” I said.
“See you around, kid.”
He walked toward the pickup. I couldn’t let it go. “Listen, Nichols, no matter how this plays out, you’ve got a lot of Kool-Aid. You cut it in Gatesville. That’s not lost on people. But don’t go calling me a kid and acting like you’re hot shit.”
He turned around. “It doesn’t take brains to stack time. It takes brains not to stack time.”
“Square with me. Maybe we’re on the same side. Harrelson has something on you?”
“A punk like that?”
“So how do you know who he is?”
“He’s like all you guys. He slums. He hunts on the game reserve. For him, that’s our neighborhood.”
“I don’t think your neighborhood is a slum. And I’m not Grady Harrelson.”
He gazed at my 1939 Ford. The hood was up, exposing the twin carbs on the V8 Mercury engine. “Those your wheels?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Not bad,” he said. “Do yourself a favor, Holland. Drive your heap, date your girl, stay out of the kitchen. You’re not up to the heat.”
“I didn’t do a bad job with you.”
He stuck his comb into his mouth and combed his hair again, this time with both hands. “You got lucky. Next time bring a blade.”
AFTER I WENT home and bathed and changed clothes, I drove to Valerie’s house and told her about Loren Nichols’s visit to the filling station. “I can’t figure that guy out. He’s got guts. Why does he act like such a shit?”
We were sitting on the porch swing. She was wearing a white blouse with flower-print shorts like a little girl would wear. Her father was inside. She said, “He’s like most of the boys around here. They aren’t afraid of the world they live in. They’re afraid of the world that’s waiting for them.”
“How’d you get so smart?”
She kicked me in the ankle.
“You want to go for some ice cream?” I said.
“Sure.”
I looked over my shoulder. “Would your father like to come with us?”
“He’s going to a movie with a lady friend.” She put a piece of Juicy Fruit into her mouth and looked at me and chewed it with her mouth open. The lawn sprinkler flopped across the flower bed.
“We could go for ice cream another time. I mean when your father is here and can go with us,” I said.
“He wants to talk to you.”
“Pardon?” I felt as though I had just stepped backward into an elevator shaft.
“About what?”
“Guess.”
“Jesus Christ, Valerie.”
“Come on,” she said.
She picked up my hand and led me inside. Her father was talking on the telephone in the kitchen, looking through the hallway at me. Inside a glassed-in case in the hallway was a photo of him on one knee by a campfire, with several bushy-haired and mutton-chopped men who wore filthy clothes and rags wrapped on their heads, all of them armed with U.S. paratrooper grease guns, the kind that had folding wire stocks. Only three men in the photo were clean-shaven. One of them was Mr. Epstein; the second was Marshal Tito; the third resembled the actor who starred in The Asphalt Jungle.