The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“Heard you were in the Corps for a while. So was my old man. He was at Iwo Jima. Did you make it over to Korea before you got sent home?”

“Go back to that business about the skunks.”

“Before you know it, they’ll be coming through your mailbox, maybe while you’re muffing the town pump. What do they call that? Climax interruptus?”

“Get out of the car.”

“Up your nose,” Saber said.

I opened the door and stepped out on the asphalt and looked across the roof at Grady. “This is between you and me. Saber isn’t involved. We shouldn’t have come here. We’ll leave.”

“You’ll leave when I tell you to. You haven’t answered the question. Why are you parked in front of my fucking house?”

“I want to know if you sicced Loren Nichols on me,” I said.

I saw a tic under Grady’s left eye, as though someone had touched the skin with a needle. “Who the fuck is Loren Nichols?”

“The guy whose car got burned,” Saber said.

“Step out of your heap, you slit-eyed freak,” Grady said.

The change in his tone was like an elixir to his friends. They tightened the circle around us, their bodies hard and tan, beaded with water. Saber had said Grady’s kind was different, incapable of empathy. He wasn’t wrong. They threw trash out of their cars, were profane around people they believed to be of no value, and were unfazed by the suffering of the poor and infirm. But for me, the open sore on every one of them was unnecessary cruelty. As I looked at them gathered around Saber’s pitiful excuse for a hot rod, I remembered a scene from years before. There was a coulee and a piney-woods pond on the backside of River Oaks Country Club. It contained bream and sun perch, and kids from other neighborhoods came there and fished with bobbers and bamboo poles. One week after Christmas, on a warm, sunny day, a little boy had parked his new Schwinn bicycle at the top of the incline and was fishing among the lily pads when a carful of kids who were country-club members stopped their car. A tall kid got out, picked up the Schwinn, and hurled it end over end down the slope into the water, scratching the paint, denting the fenders. The little boy cried. The kids in the car sped away, laughing.

I thought about Saber’s mention of the tire iron under the seat, and I thought about it not because of the danger we were in but because of the memory of the Schwinn bicycle.

“All is fair in love and war,” I said.

Grady’s gaze shifted sideways into neutral space. “You’re speaking in code?”

“That means do your worst.”

“I think you and Saber need a dip in the pool.”

The passenger door was still ajar. I leaned inside and felt under the seat and pulled out the tire iron. I let it hang from my right hand, the end with the socket touching my knee.

Grady looked at his friends. “Do you believe this asshole?”

“You dealt it, Grady,” I said. “Want to boogie?”

“With one phone call, I can make your life miserable,” he said.

“My life is already miserable.”

“Maybe you need an around-the-world. I’ll call Valerie. She gives the best I ever had.”

I kept my eyes on his and didn’t blink or show any expression. I felt my fingers tightening on the shaft of the lug wrench. He looked again at his friends, as though sharing his amusement with them. None of them met his eyes. He looked back at me. “What’s with you? You got some kind of mental defect?”

“Nothing is with me. I won’t be a senior till next week. You already graduated. You’re a wheel. I’m nobody.”

“You’re trying to provoke an incident and then file a suit. It’s not going to work, Broussard.” He flexed his shoulders and rotated his head like a boxer loosening up. His confidence was starting to slip, and the others knew it.

“Call the shot, Grady. Or apologize for that remark about Valerie.”

“You start a beef at my house and I’m supposed to apologize? That’s great, man. You almost make me laugh.”

The woman in the blue robe stepped out on the swale. She was wearing huaraches. There was a smear of lipstick on one of her canine teeth. She cupped her hand on the back of Grady’s neck, one pointy fingernail teasing his hairline. She was whispering in his ear, but her eyes were on me. He seemed to be listening to her as a child would to its mother.

“Get back in the car, Aaron,” I heard Saber say.