The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

After I cut the engine, she reached over and blew the horn and got out and banged on Krauser’s door. When he answered, he was wearing a navy blue suit and dress shirt without a tie, his hair wet-combed, as though he were preparing to go somewhere. I never saw a man look so stunned.

“Step out here, Mr. Krauser,” my mother said.

“Do you want to come in?” he said.

“No, I do not. You come out here right now and you apologize to this boy. You also will promise in front of me and him and Aaron and God and anyone else listening that you will never go near him again.”

I could see the confusion and fear in Krauser’s eyes. But something else was at work in his psyche or his metabolism that was far worse. I was t

oo young to understand how mortality can steal its way without apparent cause into the life of a man who should have been in his prime. His skin was gray and beginning to sag; hair grew from his ears and nose; he had buttoned his shirt crookedly. He looked like he had gone through the long night of the soul.

“I was on my way to the doctor,” he said.

“You should probably call your minister instead,” my mother said.

“Aaron, you and Saber broke into my home, didn’t you?” he said. “Tell me the truth. I won’t hold it against you. I need to know this.”

“No, we didn’t, Mr. Krauser,” I said.

“You step out here right now, you terrible man, or I’ll come in after you,” my mother said.

“Mother, please,” I said.

The next-door neighbors had come out of their house. The postman and a woman on her porch across the street were watching. A car slowed in the street, the driver and a woman looking at us.

“Damn you,” my mother said. I was sure at this moment that she was no longer addressing Krauser but somebody in her past, a featureless man who had violated her in her sleep.

She struck the first cut across his face, then beat him methodically, slashing him every place she could. The quirt was stiff and hard, the leather sewed tightly around a metal rod, with a braided knot on the end. Krauser cupped his hands over his head as though he were being attacked by bees. I had to pin my mother’s arms to her sides to make her stop.

We left Mr. Krauser bleeding in the doorway and drove home, all of us silent, numbed by what we had done or seen.

Back home, my mother went into the bathroom and locked the door and stayed there. When my father came home from work, I told him what had happened. He tapped on the bathroom door, his eyes lowered. When there was no response, he put on his hat and walked to the icehouse.

That night Mr. Krauser managed to get inside one of the tallest buildings in downtown Houston. Then he worked his way up a stairwell and found a fire exit that led to the roof. He plunged fifteen floors to the concrete.

I TALKED TO SABER at Costen’s drugstore the next morning. “It was almost like he wanted us to be the guys who tore up his awards and medals rather than somebody else.”

“Why would he want it to be us?” Saber said, sucking a strawberry milkshake through a pair of straws.

“Because he thought it was somebody Clint Harrelson or his people sent.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“I don’t have the answers, Sabe. My mother stayed home from work, then went to church. She never goes to church.”

“You think Krauser lost sleep while we were in jail? You think he cared about my father getting fired? He was mixed up with Grady Harrelson’s old man. All of them deserve whatever happens to them.”

Through the window I could see our two heaps in the parking lot. Coincidentally, we had parked next to each other, our hoods pointed in opposite directions. A Studebaker was parked next to Saber’s heap. Two Mexicans in drapes were in the front seat, the doors open to let in the breeze.

“I saw Jenks yesterday,” I said. “He asked about you.”

Saber raised his eyes. A big electric fan was oscillating near the comic book rack, flipping hundreds of pages with each sweep. “What’d you tell him?” he said.

“Nothing of importance.”

“Screw him, anyway.”

“Get loose from those guys out there,” I said.