The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“I won’t.”

“Hold still.” She cupped her hand on the back of my neck and bit softly into my neck, then released me.

“Why did you do that?”

“I’m perverse,” she said. Then she winked. “Tell me I didn’t give you a little rise.”

I don’t know why I liked Miss Cisco. I guess I figured that what we sometimes call evil is simply a form of need. Plus she had gone out of her way to protect me when she had nothing to gain and everything to lose.

I DROVE HER INTO the same neighborhood where I had bought the switchblade knife. It was Sunday morning, and few people were on the streets. A blind woman of color was playing bottleneck guitar under a canopy in front of a liquor store. The neighborhood reminded me of the spells that had caused me so much trouble. They could hit me with a paralysis that left me nonfunctional and barely able to breathe. I didn’t want them back, and I didn’t want to think about them. Miss Cisco seemed to read my mind. Just before we reached our destination, a drugstore with a perpendicular sign on its facade that stated simply La Farmacia, she turned her head on the seat and said, “What kind of train are you pulling, kid?”

“What kind of what?”

“Don’t pretend. Everybody has a secret shame. My mother told me that. She learned it from her clientele. She was a whore in New Orleans.”

“I have blackouts. Later I have holes in my memory I can’t fill in. Booze can bring it on. Getting angry can, too. Sometimes I go into a deep sleep and walk around like a zombie and can’t wake up till someone gives me a good shaking.”

She closed her eyes again. “Count your blessings. I’d like to forget half the things I did in my life.”

“What I mean is, I don’t know what I’m capable of. So I imagine the worst. Then I’m not sure if I’m imagining things or remembering what happened.”

She felt the Olds slow and looked around. “We’re here. Time for a little medication.”

“The store is closed.”

“Not for me,” she said.

“Did you hear what I was saying, Miss Cisco?”

“Yeah, I did. Lose the crap. You wouldn’t bruise a butterfly if you were coked to the eyes. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m about to puke. It has nothing to do with you. Mr. Jones got into my sandbox real bad this morning.”

Fifteen minutes later she had not returned. On a back street I thought I heard the throaty rumble of Saber’s twin mufflers echoing off the storefronts. I didn’t know if he was living with his criminal friends or not. I had a hard time thinking about Saber and the way our friendship had disappeared like water down a drain. My mother never had friends or a father or a home growing up. Most of her life was spent in misery. That was how I knew the importance of a friend like Saber. We met in the seventh grade. He saw two bullies shoving me around at a bus stop and shot them both in the face with a huge water gun loaded with urine he had collected from the veterinary clinic where he worked.

I heard the twin mufflers thin at the end of a street. A moment later I heard them again. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Saber’s heap headed toward me, oil smoke streaming out of the hood and tailpipes. I got out of the Olds and tried to stop him. “Hey, Sabe! It’s me!”

I could barely see through the smoke. He passed me, the back bumper almost hitting my leg. I didn’t know whether he saw me or not. I began running alongside the car, trying to catch him. “Saber, what are you doing? It’s Aaron!”

I was still waving my hands at him when he went through the intersection, running the light. I stood in the middle of the street, dumbfounded, trying to convince myself he hadn’t recognized me. The blind woman playing guitar under the liquor store canopy slid her glass bottleneck along the frets and sang, “I was sitting down by my window, looking out at the rain. Something came along, got ahold of me, and it felt just like a ball and chain.”

As I looked down the street at the empty sidewalks and closed stores and the abandoned filling station under a live oak on the corner and the ragged clouds of oil smoke left behind by Saber’s heap, I believed I was looking into the face of death itself, and not in the metaphorical sense. It was as real as a freshly dug grave on the edge of a swamp, the dirt oozing with white slugs.

I knocked on the front door of the drugstore, then rattled it against the jamb. The windows were dirty, the counter and shelves inside coated with dust. I went around to the back door and looked through the glass into a room furnished only with a table and two chairs, lit by a solitary bulb hanging from a cord overhead. Miss Cisco was sitting with her back to me, her black hair tangled on her shoulders. A man with a face the color and shape of a tea-stained darning sock was bending over her, untying a necktie from her upper arm. A stub of a candle flickered inside the neck of a wine bottle. A bent spoon, blackened on the bottom, rested next to it. She turned her face into the light. It was aglow with peace and visceral pleasure, like that of a person in the aftermath of orgasm. I thought I saw her look straight at me, then realized her eyes had become cups of darkness that probably saw nothing.

She opened the door and stepped outside and clung to my arm. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my. The white horsey got loose on poor little me. Walk me to the car and then drive it home. Can you do that, big boy? You know how to drive it home?”

She was beautiful even when impaired, and I had certain thoughts that I would carry into the night, the kind of thoughts I guessed all men had and that made them feel ashamed and treacherous and unworthy of the real woman in their life. But at least I didn’t think about acting on my desires, even if I could have. I guess I was learning that when you get close to death, you’ll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.

THREE DAYS LATER I drove to Loren Nichols’s home in the Heights. Just as I pulled to the curb, I saw him get off the bus at the corner and walk back toward his house, he wearing a white T-shirt and dirty white trousers, a black lunch box swinging from his hand. I never saw a guy who could walk as cool as Loren.

“You just get off work?” I said.

“I’m working at a supper club now.”

“They make you bring your own lunch?”

“You must not have worked in a restaurant.”

“No, I haven’t.”