“I think Grady sicced Loren Nichols on me,” I said.
“Why would Harrelson be mixed up with a northside punk like Nichols?” Jenks said.
“That’s what we cain’t figure out,” Saber said.
“Why didn’t you want to tell me you’d seen the naked woman?” Jenks said.
“She seemed nice. She kept Harrelson’s guys off us,” I said.
“He’s got hard guys around?” Jenks said.
“I’ve seen them spread-eagle a guy on a car hood and put out his lights.”
Jenks crumpled an empty package of Pall Malls and threw it out the window, then fumbled another pack out of the glove box. He peeled off the red cellophane strip while he stared at nothing, my words lost in the wind.
“Sir, did you hear me?” I said. “I’ve seen Grady and his friends gang up on a guy and hurt him real bad.”
“Okay, I got it.”
“What do you want us to do, sir?”
His skin had the texture of ham rind. “Get out. Pick up that beer bottle while you’re at it.”
“Did we say something?” I asked.
“Don’t go near Cisco Napolitano. She’ll have your body parts hung on hooks. How did you dipshits get involved in this?”
“I don’t think we’re the problem,” I said.
He gave me a look, then drove away as though we weren’t there. Saber was writing in the notebook he carried in his shirt pocket. “He said Cisco Napolitano? How do you spell that? I’ll be haunted by those lovely eggplants the rest of my life.”
“She’s mixed up with Vegas and the syndicate,” I said.
“So what? She seems to go for younger guys. Maybe she’s a nympho. Did you see the way she was eyeing my heap? I think she dug us.”
Chapter
7
SIX DAYS LATER, school was out for the summer, and all I could think about was Valerie Epstein. I had three hundred and eighty-five dollars in a checking account and thirteen silver dollars in an army-surplus ammunition box, and because I was now a senior, my father had given me permission to buy a 1939 Ford from a neighbor who’d just been drafted and probably headed for Korea. So I had my own heap and could drive up to the Heights whenever I wanted. The Ford wasn’t just a heap, either. It had twin pipes and Zephyr gears and a Merc engine with milled heads and a hot cam and a high-speed rear end. It could hit sixty in five seconds.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Each evening I bathed and changed clothes after work and motored into the Heights to pick up Valerie Epstein, arguably the most beautiful and intelligent teenage girl in Houston. Her name had the melodic cadence of a sonnet or a prayer. I went to bed with Valerie on my mind and woke with images of her printed
on the backs of my eyelids.
It was the hurricane season, but we had no hurricanes. Instead there were purple and crimson and orange clouds in the sky at sunset, and Gulf breezes that smelled of flowers and rain. We ate fried chicken off paper plates at Bill Williams’s drive-in restaurant by Rice University and skated at the roller rink on South Main to organ music under a tent billowing with the cool air blown by huge electric fans. We went swimming once at the Shamrock Hotel, across the street from a cow pasture spiked with oil derricks pumping fortunes into the pockets of men who had eighth-grade educations. Somehow being in love with Valerie made me fall in love with the whole world.
We danced at one of the many nightclubs that served underage kids, and rode the roller coaster on Galveston Beach in spite of the Condemned sign nailed above the ticket window. I felt anointed by Valerie’s presence, and my fear of hoods and greaseballs disappeared, as though the two of us had a passport to go wherever we wanted. A jalopy packed with rough kids drinking quart beer seemed no more than what it was, a car packed with kids who were born less fortunate than I and wanted to pretend for just one night they were happy.
TEN DAYS AFTER I had seen Jenks, I was in the grease pit draining a crank case when I heard a voice I did not ever want to hear again. My ears popped, and I opened and closed my mouth, hoping the wind inside the breezeway had distorted the voice and words I heard.
Walter, the black man who had been wounded and decorated for bravery in Korea, leaned down so he could see me under the car. “A guy here wants to see you, Aaron.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Ask him.”
I climbed out of the pit, wiping my hands on a machinist cloth. A tall kid was framed against the sunlight; he was wearing drapes and suede stomps and a shirt with the collar turned up on the neck, his hair greased and combed in ducktails. He stepped out of the glare into the shade, a toothpick rolling across his teeth. The swelling and discoloration were almost gone from his face, but one eyebrow looked like a broken zipper.