“It’s the way things are,” I said. “The good guys put their faith in people they shouldn’t.”
I heard him crying on the other end.
I BROUGHT MAJOR AND Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs inside the house and went into my father’s office. My father had spread twenty pages of manuscript across a table. He had been working on an account of Lee’s failed attack on Malvern Hill. Without artillery, Lee had thrown fifty thousand men at the Union line. The result was a disaster. It would be repeated later at Cemetery Ridge. In his account, my father included a story he had always told me about the rebel yell. He said it was not a yell but a fox call. When he was a little boy on Bayou Teche, there were many Confederate veterans who entertained the children by re-creating the strange warbling sound that rose from the throats of thousands of boys and men dressed in sun-faded butternut and moss-gray rags when they charged through the smoke and dust at the Union line. My father’s point was not the sound itself but what it represented. The sound was like a series of “woo’s,” similar to an owl hooting, the vowel both rounded and restrained, pushed out by the lungs rather than shouted. I tried to imagine advancing with an empty musket through geysers of dirt, trying to control my voice and my fear, while cannon loaded with canister and grape and chain and explosive shells blew my friends and fellow soldiers into a bloody mist. How do you find that kind of courage? Wouldn’t your legs fail? Would not normal men throw their weapons to the ground and run away? Where did you go to learn courage?
I knew the answer. You were brave or you weren’t. You didn’t get the Medal of Honor for swimming through a school of jellyfish. I knew my trek up Golgotha was waiting.
I BOUGHT A QUART of ice cream and drove to Valerie’s house. Her father was on a job at the refinery in Port Arthur. We had the house to ourselves. Valerie owned a Stromberg-Carlson high-fidelity record player. We plugged in an extension cord and took it on the back porch, and she loaded six 78s onto the spindle. We spread a quilt on the grass and ate the ice cream out of the carton, and I laid my head in her lap. The sun was gone, the sky turning from purple to dark blue. I could smell the cleanness of her dress and feel her fingers stroking my hair and tickling the back of my head. I closed my eyes and felt myself drifting away. The record changed, and “Marie” began to play. When the record changed again, the slow momentum of “Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie” rose and fell and filled the yard and echoed off the walls of the house and garage as though we were seated in the midst of the orchestra.
“I didn’t know you had any Tommy Dorsey records,” I said, my eyes still closed.
“Those are the only two I have.”
“Your dad likes Tommy Dorsey?”
“Grady gave them to me.”
“Oh?”
“Oh what?”
“Nothing. I never thought he was a guy who’d like 1940s jazz or swing.”
“He liked it because his father didn’t. His father didn’t like anything connected with Negroes or Jews.”
I picked up her hand and stuck her fingers into my mouth.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“Because you taste good.”
“I’m afraid for you, Aaron.”
“Don’t be.”
“My father left me a gun. He said if any of those guys come to the house, I should call the police.”
“That’s good advice.”
“No, he said I should call the police, then kill the guys who were at the house.”
I opened my eyes. She was looking down at me. “Don’t listen to him. There’s always another way,” I said.
“Do you believe that?”
I wanted to say yes. But I couldn’t. I was carrying a stiletto; under my car seat was a .32 revolver rigged to circumvent forensic examination. I also had revenge fantasies. The truth was, I wanted to forget the New Testament and escape into the orgiastic violence of Moses and Joshua and my namesake Aaron. I wanted to paint houses and the countryside with the blood of my enemies.
“What is the other way?” she said.
I pressed her back down on the quilt and buried my face in her hair. I held her there for a long time, saying nothing, then placed my head against her breast and listened to the quiet beating of her heart.
BEFORE I WENT BACK home, I did something I had never done. I drove into the black district and asked a black man to buy me a six-pack of Lone Star and a half pint of whiskey. Then I drove to Herman Park and sat under a tree in the dark and drank all the whiskey and four of the beers. I think the only reason I didn’t drink the remaining two was because I passed out. When I awoke—or rather, when the world came into view again—I was driving my heap down Westheimer at 11:48 P.M. I did not know how I’d gotten from Herman Park to Westheimer. I passed the Tower Theater and the wood-frame ice cream store and the firehouse where we used to take our used tires and bundled newspapers and clothes hangers for the war effort after the bo
mbing of Pearl Harbor.
When I came in, my mother smelled alcohol on me and was upset. I hated that I had hurt her, but I hated worse the probability that she would punish my father for my drunkenness.
The next day creaked by in slow motion. I could not remember where I had been or what I had done between driving into the park and awakening miles away on Westheimer. At work I listened to the local news on the tiny radio in the office, wondering if I had sought revenge on the three guys who had trapped me in the alley. I bought the early-afternoon edition of the Houston Press and searched the crime reports. Nothing. I convinced myself I worried too much.