I could feel my eyes shining, the room going out of shape.
“You okay?” Detective Jenks said.
“Yes, sir, I think so.”
“No, you’re not. Pure evil has come into your life through no fault of your own. That’s how people are destroyed. They blame themselves as though somehow they deserve what’s happening to them.”
“What can I do?”
“Not a thing. You wanted the truth. That’s the truth.”
He coughed into his hand as though a piece of glass were caught in his lungs. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed his hand on his knee. I felt helpless, floating away. Supposedly the courts, the police and sheriff’s departments, the prosecutors, the FBI, the parole system, and the jails and hospitals for the criminally insane were there to protect the innocent. Why was my family being made a sacrificial offering to evil men? Outside, the wind was blowing from the Gulf, the air peppered with salt and rain, the pine trees glistening in the sunlight.
“I’d like to kill them all,” I said.
“Kill who?”
“Jaime Atlas. His son. The people who work for him. The people who allow these guys to stay on the street. Every one of these sons of bitches.”
“You’re starting to worry me.”
I got up to go. “Who’s going to take care of you?”
“Take care of me?”
“It’s obvious you don’t have anybody. There’s blood on your cigarettes. Your lungs sound like a junkyard.”
“Cisco told you I did her dirty?”
“What?” I said, unable to follow the way his mind worked.
“That I betrayed her?”
“Not in those words.”
“You’ve got a lot of anger in you, son,” he said. “Don’t let it turn on you. It’ll flat tear you up.”
Chapter
26
BY THE TIME I got home, the sky was turning black and the house creaked with wind, even though it was made of brick. I brought Major and Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs inside and sat with my guitar in my father’s study. His manuscript pages were placed neatly in a stack on his desk pad. I began to read the account told him by his grandfather about the events at Marye’s Heights on December 13, 1862. The boys in butternut were entrenched with muskets and artillery behind a stone wall at the top of the rise. All afternoon, Union troops went up the hill, wave after wave, and were slaughtered by the thousands, to the point where they slipped in their own gore and the Confederates no longer wanted to fire upon them.
I wondered how anyone could be so brave. I also wondered why I could not rid myself of the well of fear that seemed to draw me into its maw. The answer was simple
: I feared for my family, and I resented myself for placing them in harm’s way. I was also experiencing a syndrome that I would one day learn was characteristic of almost everyone who has been a victim of violent crime.
I had no answers. I was just short of eighteen. I loved my mother and father and Valerie and my animals. All I wanted to do was be with them and forget the Atlases and Harrelsons of this world. Unfortunately, the fury and mire and complexity of human veins do not work like that.
THE RAIN HAD started falling in solitary drops when Saber’s heap bounced into the driveway, its pair of fuzzy dice swinging from the rearview mirror. He got out, laughing before he could start his narrative.
“What is it?” I said.
He was shaking his head, unable to stop laughing. He fell back against the car, trying to catch his breath.
“Are you loaded?” I said.
There were tears in his eyes. “You won’t believe it.”