“No, you won’t,” Grady said. He stepped away from us, his hands hanging at his sides. He swallowed.
“What are you doing here?” Loren asked.
“Talking to my friends,” Grady replied.
“This is our place,” Loren said.
“What do you mean, your place?”
“What I said. You don’t have friends here.”
“It’s a free country,” Grady said.
Those were the exact words I had used to Grady when I’d interfered in the argument he was having with Valerie at the drive-in.
“No, it’s not a free country, Harrelson,” Loren said. “You got my cousin Wanda killed, and you got away with it because nobody cares about a Mexican hooker getting her neck broke. You’re a River Oaks punk who couldn’t cut the Corps, so you came back home to Daddy and pretended you were a hard guy by getting it on with a poor girl who went to the ninth grade.”
“I came out here to do a good deed,” Grady said. “I think that was a mistake.”
“You got that right. Go back to your part of town,” Loren said.
“You people are too much,” Grady said.
“?‘You people’? You want me to put you in your car and show you up for the yellow-bellied douchebag you are?”
“Bugger off. I’m leaving,” Grady said.
“Do what?”
“Ask Valerie to take you to the library. They’ve got a book there called a dictionary. You’ll dig it.”
I could see the confusion in Loren’s face, his powerlessness over a word he hadn’t heard before.
“My father dumped us when I was a kid,” he said. “But if he was around today, I wouldn’t be afraid to play my music in front of him.”
Grady’s hands closed and then opened at his sides. His face was turned slightly to one side, as though he were trying to avoid a hot wind. “What are you talking about?”
“One of your friends was laughing about your old man not letting you play Gatemouth Brown in your house,” Loren said. “Wanda was too good for you. I think that’s why you hurt her. Every time you look in a mirror, it doesn’t matter where you are, you see a punk looking back at you.”
If I ever saw someone’s soul flinch, it was then. Grady’s mouth seemed to collapse and his eyes to lose focus, as though the earth had shifted under his feet. “Yeah?”
“Just blow,” Loren said. “It’s our part of town. Those are the rules, man. You should know. Y’all made them.”
Then Grady did the strangest thing I had ever seen a young guy do in public. He worked his golf shirt off his shoulders and turned around, arching his t
anned back at us. VALERIE was tattooed across his shoulder blades, each letter formed by a chain of red hearts. “She’ll always be with me, and there’s nothing you can do about it, Broussard. As for you, Nichols, you were a loser when you came out of the womb. I hope you’re with Broussard when he gets his.”
I felt myself moving toward him.
“I’m going,” he said. “Y’all have a great life. See you, Val. Believe it or not, I thought you were the one.”
He walked away from us bare-chested, his shirt clenched in his hand. I suspected Grady’s father had taught him many lessons, and one of them involved probing for bone and nerve to leave the most ragged of wounds. I caught up with him before he got to his MG. He was smiling to himself.
“I don’t know what it is, but there’s something I missed,” I said. “It was a detail, something you said or Valerie said or a cop named Jenks said. It has to do with your alibi.”
The sky was a dull red now, the campground falling into shadow. His eyes searched my face. “You’d make a lousy poker player.”
“It’s not me who has sweat on his upper lip,” I replied.