The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“No, that’s what he wants. You wait for him to come to you. And believe me, he will. A dipshit like that wants an audience. So you let him put on his show. You dummy up. You don’t act cute. You don’t try to be a nice guy. You’re D, D, and D. You know what that is, right?”

I nodded.

“So he’s having a ball. About to get his rocks. Maybe his girlfriend is watching. He thinks you’re browning your Fruit of the Looms. That’s when you tag his ass.”

“Tag?”

He put the guitar on the blanket and opened a drawer under the workbench. “This is a thirty-two. All the numbers have been burned with acid. The electrician’s tape is inside out so your prints cain’t be lifted. You put a pill between his eyes. If you have time, you put extras in his ear and mouth. If you take it with you, pour motor oil on it and throw it in a bayou or saltwater. Take it. It’s yours.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“I guess it will just have to be my mistake.”

“A minute ago you said something about a Shroud of Whatever. What is it?”

“The burial cloth of Christ.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said.

“Probably,” I said.

He dropped the revolver in the drawer and shut it. “You don’t want to smoke Atlas, that’s your choice, Broussard. There’s a possibility we didn’t discuss. What if he gets his hands on Valerie? Close your eyes and let your imagination go. Tell me what kind of pictures you see.”

A drop of sweat slid like an icicle down my side into my underwear.

Chapter

17

FIVE DAYS AFTER Mr. Krauser jumped to his death, my mother and I attended his funeral in a small Protestant church near his house. The casket was closed. There were perhaps a dozen people in the pews. One was the assistant principal. Two were faculty members. There were no students. Mr. Krauser’s father, a stooped man with dandruff on his shoulders who carried an oxygen bottle on a strap, placed a yellow rose on the coffin. The minister read three passages from the Book of Psalms that seemed to have little to do with Mr. Krauser. A man from his bowling team tried to read a tribute, then dropped his notes and couldn’t straighten them out and had to ad-lib the rest of the testimonial. He concluded by saying, “Give them hell wherever you’re at, Krausey.” Outside, a woodpecker hammered its beak into a telephone pole.

Maybe Mr. Krauser had virtues. Maybe he refused to deliver up young people to Clint Harrelson’s indoctrination camps and paid a price for it. Maybe he was driven by compulsions he didn’t understand. Regardless, I didn’t feel sorry for him. He used his power to humiliate and degrade and to inculcate shame and self-hatred in others. To me there was no lower form of life on earth, including drug pushers and pimps.

I believed there was only one victim in the church, and that was my mother. Her eyes didn’t see; her speech was lifeless, her attention span nonexistent. The clinical depression that had been passed down in the Holland family like an heirloom had taken up residence in her soul once again. Over the years, pharmaceutical and vitamin injections and hospitalization and electroshock treatments had been like raindrops blowing against the bulletproof glass of her neurosis. I learned early on that people do not have to die to go to hell. As I sat next to her in the pew, I knew she had already departed from us and taken up residence in the privation and abandonment of her youth.

If I felt any emotion toward Mr. Krauser at all, it was resentment. Like most suicides who stage their departure in Technicolor, showering the walls or sidewalk with their blood, Krauser had left a legacy of sackcloth and ashes for someone like my mother to wear. As we walked out of the church, I put my arm around her. Her bones felt as frail and hollow as a bird’s. I wanted to kick Krauser’s coffin off its gurney.

If there was any drama at the funeral, it took place across the street, where I saw Jimmy McDougal sitting on his bike under a live oak. I put my mother into the car and caught him as he was about to pedal away. I believed that Krauser had molested him in one way or another. Jimmy’s parents were uneducated and poor, and often he wore clothes that came from the welfare store. I also believed he was experiencing the same kind of guilt over Krauser’s death as my mother was.

“Where you goin’, partner?” I said.

“Nowhere.”

His legs were forked on either side of the bike frame, his hands clenched on the rubber grips. An ar

my-surplus haversack, one with pockets on it, was in the delivery basket mounted on the front fender.

“You got your lunch in there?” I said. “It smells good.”

“I’m working at the drugstore. I just came by, that’s all. I got to get going.”

“Jimmy, you can’t let this worry you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

“You’re a good guy. Everybody knows that. Mr. Krauser was no good.”