most valued possessions and used a retarded boy, Jimmy McDougal, to help him.
“Are you in a coma?” Jenks said.
“Why are you always insulting me?”
“Because you piss me off.”
In the background I heard a sound like someone sinking an opener into the top of a beer can.
“I piss you off?” I said.
My mother came out of nowhere. “Don’t you dare use that language in this house,” she said. She ripped the receiver from my hand. “Detective Jenks, I could hear you in the kitchen. You are a great disappointment. I feel like washing your mouth out with soap. You are not to call here again.”
She set the receiver in the cradle, releasing her fingers quickly, as though avoiding germs on its surface.
I BATHED AND LAY down on my bed in the current of cool air that the attic fan drew through the screen. Major and the cats were piled beside me, snoring in the wonderful way animals snore. I felt a strange sense of peace about my home. That soon changed.
My father came in late, brushing against the doorway and the pictures on the wall in the hallway. A few minutes later I saw him through the partially open bathroom door. He was sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking a cigarette in his shirtsleeves and undershorts and socks, his garters clipped on his calves. His face was furrowed, his stubble gray, his hand trembling when he lifted his cigarette.
“Daddy?” I said.
He turned his head toward me, as though I were speaking to him from a great distance. “Aaron? What are you doing up? Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”
“Can I help with something?”
He stared into empty space. “No, not really. None of us can. That’s the great joke. It’s all gone. Everything. It was just a dream on Bayou Teche. Parti avec la vent.”
I could hear the paper on his cigarette crisp when he inhaled. I suspected that one day cigarettes would kill him. But that was not the fear I had as I looked at my father. No one had to convince me about the reality of hell. It wasn’t a fiery pit. It lived and thrived in the human breast and consumed its host from night to morning.
Chapter
22
THE NEXT DAY I took Valerie to a hamburger joint for lunch, then dropped her off and went to Loren Nichols’s house without telling her. I had reached a point where I realized I had been a fool. I was raised to believe that good triumphed over evil, that justice ultimately prevailed, and that God was on our side. We had rebuilt the bombed-out countries of our enemies through the Marshall Plan at a time when we could have turned the earth into a slave camp. Wouldn’t it follow that we would do justice to our own at home?
I still believe in those precepts, but as we grow old and leave behind the pink clouds of our youth, we learn that truth often exists in degree rather than in absolutes. I had believed that the people who’d caused us so much harm would be brought to account. Valerie had almost been burned alive, and no one was in custody. I doubted that anyone of importance had been questioned. I thought Jenks believed her, but probably few of his colleagues did. Why should anyone worry about the fate of a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl in the Heights?
It had just started to rain when I knocked on Loren’s door. He came to the screen wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of white trousers, his face blank. The screen was latched, but he made no move to unlatch it. His hair was wet-combed, curled up on the back of his neck. “I’m about to go to work.”
“Where do you work?”
“I’m a busboy at Luby’s cafeteria.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
He looked past me to see if anyone was in my heap, then unhooked the latch. “Come upstairs. My mother is sleeping.”
The inside of his home looked like a mausoleum furnished from a secondhand store. I thought the banister on the stairs would cave before we reached the landing. The interior of his bedroom was another matter. The walls were covered with pencil sketches of people and classic automobiles and animals; the ceiling was hung with models of World War II airplanes, each delicate piece of balsa wood cut and shaved with an X-Acto knife and glued together and pinned down on a blueprint and assembled and covered with cutouts from tissue paper, then painted with a tiny brush and pasted with decals of Nazi swastikas and the American white star inside the blue circle and the rising sun of Imperial Japan. His electric guitar was on his bed, plugged into the amplifier on the rug. Through the window, I could see the tin roofs of his neighbors in the rain, purple with rust, the palm trees and live oaks and slash pines bending in the wind. It looked more like the Caribbean than a run-down part of town in North Houston.
“How much do you want for the thirty-two you showed me?” I asked.
“Is this about those guys who tried to hurt Valerie?”
I didn’t answer.
“I shouldn’t have started this,” he said. “You going after somebody in particular?”
“I think Vick Atlas was behind it.”