He drank from his teacup. It looked small in his hand.
“You said you’d shoot Clint Harrelson?”
“That was a mistake. I won’t do it again.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you, sir.”
“You don’t threaten a man. If he comes at you, you put him out of business. An evil man is not scared by threats. He’s scared when you don’t speak.”
He winked at me.
THAT NIGHT I WENT home and sat for a long time in my bedroom without turning on the light. The attic fan was droning above the hallway, drawing the air through the screened windows. I tuned the strings on my Gibson and played one song after another without thinking about the chords my fingers were shaping. I could not believe what had occurred earlier. In his house, within earshot of his daughter, Mr. Epstein had talked about the possibility of killing another man, the father of a student with whom I had gone to school. That the object of his hatred was Clint Harrelson didn’t matter. Mr. Epstein had been talking about murder. To compound my discomfort, I was sleeping with his daughter.
You have to understand that we felt differently about certain things years ago. I was a Catholic, and the idea of killing someone except in self-defense was not tenable. My other problem was Valerie. In the eyes of others, we were breaking a commandment. Except emotionally, that wasn’t how I felt. I loved Valerie, and it was through her that my entire life had changed. There was nothing impure about our love; it was bright and clean and innocent and natural, like the flame on a votive candle. I did not believe that God saw it differently. When I tried to work my way through my thoughts, I felt a pressure band along the side of my head, as though I were wearing a hat.
I had never needed to talk with my father as badly as I needed to talk with him that night. He was reading in the living room, but I didn’t seek him out. I let Snuggs and Bugs and my tabby cat named Skippy and my toy bird dog named Major climb up on the bed with me, each pointing its muzzle into the cool air flowing through the screen.
I tried to imagine a conversation with my father about Mr. Epstein’s threat and about my sleeping with Mr. Epstein’s daughter. How would my father react? Sometimes he went into rages over the use of a vulgar word.
I could try to talk with my mother, except that prospect gave me an even deeper sense of angst and foreboding. It wasn’t her fault. Her father had farmed her out to the kindness of strangers and resentful relatives. The bad memories of her childhood seemed to crawl under her skin. She reminded me of a crystal glass teetering on the edge of the drainboard, about to shatter in the sink. When I deceived her about where I had been or what I had done on a particular day, I did not feel I was committing a sin.
So I added one more day to my conspiracy of silence and put away my guitar and tried to shut Mr. Epstein’s words out of my ears. I turned on my radio with the volume low and, among all my animals, laid my head on my pillow in the breeze and the smells of the night and listened to Jo Stafford sing as she had to millions of GIs.
SABER WAS AT the house early the next morning, after both my parents had gone to work. Saber had two jobs: racking pins in the pits at the bowling alley, a job that only men of color and the roughest white kids in town did; and throwing the Houston Chronicle. For anyone else, a paper route was just a paper route. For Saber, it was similar to Charlemagne fighting his way up the canyons of Roncevaux Pass. After he rolled 115 newspapers with string, he packed them like artillery rounds into the passenger and backseat of his heap, and set out on the route, heaving a paper over the roof through a sprinkler onto a porch, when he easily could have dropped it onto a dry spot on the walk; smacking a leashed bulldog that attacked him while he was collecting; nailing a flowerpot of someone who was in arrears; parking just long enough to run through an entire apartment building with his canvas bag on his shoulder, stomping up and down the stairways, dropping papers in front of doorways, crashing out the back door like a deep-sea diver emerging into light.
He drank a cup of coffee on the back steps and watched me fill the bowls of all my animals. “Things all right with you and Valerie?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
“Because you always busy yourself with your cats and Major when you got something on your mind.”
“Pets can’t fill their own bowls, so give it a break.”
“Krauser is dogging me,” he said.
“Stop it,” I said.
“I saw him in my rearview mirror last night. I saw him this morning, too.”
“It’s coincidence. He lives a few blocks from your house.”
“More like a half mile. I saw his car at the Pink Elephant.”
“Saber, I don’t want to hear this. What were you doing there, anyway?”
“Surveilling Asshole. Jimmy McDougal was sitting in his car. Then Asshole came out of the club and drove away. Remember Jimmy? Two quarts down the day he was born? Why’s Krauser taking him to a dump like the Pink Elephant?”
“It’s not our business.”
“It is when he’s following us around,” Saber said.
“Are you sure about all this?”
“You think I want to believe somebody is copping that poor kid’s joint?”
“You really know how to say it, Saber.”
He looked at the animals eating from their bowls. “I’m thinking about joining the marines.”