The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

Of course, the problem was more than a funk. He had given himself over to a couple of bad Mexican huckleberries. I went by his house; his mother told me she had no idea where he was.

“He’s still living here, isn’t he, Miz Bledsoe?” I said.

“Like you give a damn,” she replied, and closed the door in my face.

I knew where to find him, though. At least on a balmy summer evening, I did. Saber had fantasies. One of them involved meeting a beautiful girl at the roller rink on South Main. He would drive his heap out to the big tent filled with organ music and the grinding of roller-skate wheels on the hardwood floor and the steady hum of the giant fans in back, and park by the entrance so he could see the skaters inside. He would comb his hair in the rearview mirror, sweeping it back on the sides, and smoke cigarettes and drink from a quart bottle of Jax and pretend he was waiting for someone. Finally he would wander inside and eat a Baby Ruth and watch the girls roaring past him, all of them holding hands, speeding up and slowing down, sometimes skating backward. They wore pastel angora sweaters and poodle skirts and wide shiny black belts, and the bold ones might have on hoop earrings and uplift bras, and when they went by in a group, he could smell them like a garden full of flowers. Their eyes never met his. He could have been a wooden post.

He would return home and go to bed and probably masturbate and hide his underwear in the bottom of the clothes hamper and, in the morning, resume his role as the carefree trickster who looked down on the romantic rituals that governed every high school in America.

I had to remind myself of all these things about the private world of Saber; otherwise, I would forget the vulnerable and innocent boy who had been my best friend since elementary school. Even though he was hanging with bad guys, I knew Saber would eat a bayonet for me. When you have a friend like that, you never let go of him, no matter what he does.

At sunset I pulled into the parking lot by the tent. There was Saber’s heap, the windows down, the dust blowing inside it. Next to it was a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible with whitewall spoked tires and blue-dot taillights and chrome bells on the twin exhausts. Saber was nowhere in sight. A man in a crisp paper hat was selling hand-shaved sno-cones out of a cart by the entrance. I bought a spearmint cone and went inside the flap and sat down on the wooden seats that had been taken out of baseball bleachers. I saw Saber at the snack counter, paying for his order with bills he took from a hand-tooled wallet attached to a chain. I had never seen the wallet before. The two Mexicans from the jail were standing next to him, sipping sodas through straws, wearing patent-leather stomps and dark drapes sewn with white thread and long-sleeved rayon shirts buttoned at the wrists, the tails hanging outside their belts.

Saber and the two hoods were talking to four girls of about fifteen or sixteen, the kind with bad skin who lived in the welfare project and wore the tightest shorts they could get into and tattooed their boyfriend’s name inside their thighs. They were the roughest girls I ever knew, but at the same time they were easy marks for a slick guy who told them they were beautiful and smart and physically tough and fun to be with, far too good for the project losers they’d been hanging around.

I walked up behind Saber. He was eating a chili dog off a paper plate, dipping into it with a plastic spoon; I didn’t think he saw me.

“What’s happening, Aaron?” he said without turning around.

“Nothing much. Wondering where the hell you’ve been,” I said.

The Mexicans were offering the girls sips from their straws, grinning when the girls took the straws in their mouths.

“I’m in the used-car business these days,” Saber said.

“Whose Ford coupe is that out there?”

“Manny and Cholo’s uncle gave it to them. Want to take a spin?”

“No, thanks. I never liked wearing handcuffs. Who are the girls?”

“They hang out here. We’re going to Prince’s. Want to go?”

“You heard about Grady Harrelson’s father?” I said.

“A tragedy of cosmic proportions. I cried my eyes out. Go to Prince’s with us.”

“No.”

He looked over his shoulder to see if we were out of earshot from the Mexicans. “Are we talking about a racial issue here?”

“No. And quit hiding behind it,” I said.

He shrugged and continued eating.

“Did you know some guys were going to set Valerie on fire?” I said.

The cavalier expression left his face. For just a second I saw the old Saber looking at me, the false exterior pared away. “No, I didn’t hear about that.”

“Maybe Vick Atlas set it up. Two guys ended up dead in a ditch. They were naked and their hands were cut off.”

His gaze went away from me and lingered in space, finding the justification

s he needed to keep doing what he was doing. He started eating his chili dog again. “Manny and Cholo have got connections. Guys who can do some serious payback.”

“Vick Atlas’s crowd wouldn’t let those guys clean their toilets.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t, either,” he said. “Because that’s the signal I keep getting, Aaron.”