The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“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 o

f 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.

SABER 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?”