The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“Long story. You have a key to Grady Harrelson’s house?”

She paused before she spoke. “What do you think?”

“Detective Jenks said he plans to go to Mexico. I bet he’d like to go there in a Caddy convertible. It’s pink. You’ll find it in Grady’s basement.”

The line went silent again.

“Did you hear me, Miss Cisco?”

“Where’s Grady?”

“He just barreled butt down the street. On foot. I don’t think he’ll be back for a while.”

“What’s happened, Aaron?”

“Vick Atlas got blown apart by the Atlas hit men. Vick shot my friend Saber in the foot. He and Grady were going to put us in a junkyard compactor after Vick chain-dragged me behind his automobile.”

“You’re making this up.”

“Suit yourself. It’s going to be raining cops and newspeople in a few minutes. If you’re interested in the Caddy, I’d visit a little later. I doubt they’ll pay it any mind.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You’ve got to do something for kicks,” I replied.

I NEVER SAW GRADY again. He avoided prosecution by tying up the process in the courts and eventually going bankrupt. Some said he was terrified of Jaime Atlas and hired bodyguards who beat him up and raped him and left him naked in a ditch. Five years later, I heard he married a former actress who produced pornographic films and lived in the Hollywood Hills. In 1967 he was found dead in a hotel on East Fifth Street in Los Angeles, a hypodermic needle in his arm.

Eighteen months after the shooting, I received a letter from Mexico City. It read:

How are you doing, kiddo? I hope you got your life straightened out. I can’t necessarily say I have, but at least I’m not putting the joy juice in my arm. You were a sweet kid and you got me a little bit excited on a couple of occasions, so I apologize to you for that, but hey normalcy was never my strong suit, which doesn’t seem to bother M. a lot. He says to tell you hello and to ride it to the buzzer. He’s on radiation and I’m on wrinkle remover, but we have oceans of money courtesy of you-know-who. Am I regretful for having been in the life? I’d have to think on that. As Benny used to say, “It beats the fuck out of pushing a bagel cart.”

The letter was unsigned.

Saber dropped out of school during the fall semester and joined the army. In the spring of 1953, he was MIA at Pork Chop Hill. His name showed up once on a list of POWs at Panmunjom, but he was not repatriated, and nothing was ever learned about his fate. There were rumors about American soldiers having been moved across the Yalu into China and perhaps even the Soviet Union, where they were used in medical experiments. Saber’s father died and his mother went to work at a record store in West University and for years wrote letters to the government and spoke to anyone who would listen about her son’s fate, until she went mad. I have always wanted to believe that Saber survived, that the trickster from classical folklore who had lived in our midst and hung his flop

per through the hole in the ceiling above Mr. Krauser’s head was still out there, screwing up things, ridiculing the pompous and arrogant, getting even for the rest of us. And that’s the way I will always think of him.

The following year the vice president of my father’s company invited him to go on a duck-hunting trip down at Anahuac. He asked because of my father’s genteel manners and his ability to speak with corporate people on any level about any subject. My father looked upon the trip as an obligation, not a pleasure. On the way back to Houston, he was sleeping in the passenger seat of the vice president’s Cadillac. The hour was late, the highway white with fog. The vice president rounded a curve and plowed into the back of a disabled truck. For reasons never explained, the truck driver had not placed reflectors or flares on the asphalt to warn oncoming traffic. My father was flown to Houston. He died the next day from a blood clot, while I was en route from college to be at his bedside.

My mother lived to be one hundred and two years and asked nothing from anyone and took care of herself until the end. I became a writer; I didn’t become a musician. But Loren Nichols did, and he dedicated a song to me and Valerie from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

What about Val and me? There is a certain kind of love that’s forever. It’s not marked by a marital vow, or social custom, or gender identity, or the age of the parties involved. It’s a love that doesn’t even need to be declared. Its presence in your life is as factual as the sun rising in the morning. You do not argue in its defense or try to explain or justify it to others. The other party moves into your heart and remains with you the rest of your days. The bond is never broken, any more than you can separate yourself from your body or soul.

At age seventeen Valerie and I became one person, unable to enjoy pleasure without the presence of the other. The changes in our lives, the geographical separations, the pull of the earth on our bodies, none of these things ever affected the contract and bond that took place in our youth; over the years neither one of us ever suffered a tragedy or bore a burden or celebrated a success without the involvement of the other. I could not draw breath without feeling that Valerie Epstein was at my side.

I guess I’ve learned by now that the past can be a prison. But there are memories you never give up. They remain painted on the air. They come to you in a song, a sunset on the ocean, a palm tree stiffening in the wind. When I hear of wars and rumors of wars and I tire of my fellow man’s destructive ways, I think about Valerie Epstein beside me in my heap on the last day of summer in 1952, the two of us roaring full-out down the boulevard on Galveston Island, the sun a molten ball sinking into the Gulf, the waves slate green, curling with foam just before they burst in an iridescent spray on the beach. The stars were already out, the drive-in where we met wrapped with yellow and red neon, the cars parked under the canopy glowing in the light like hard candy. When she pulled herself against me and held her head tight against my shoulder, her hands squeezing into my arm, I knew that neither of us would ever die, that life was a song, eternal in nature, and the smell and secrets of creation lay in the tumble of every wave that crested and receded into the Gulf. I also knew that the gifts of both heaven and earth would always remain where they had always been, at our fingertips and in the shimmer we see in the eyes of those we love.