The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“No, sir.”

“Good for you. I got to quit these things one day.”

He stiff-armed me through the door. I stumbled against the wall. “I never did anything to Mr. Krauser. You probably cost me my job. Everybody in school hates Mr. Krauser’s guts. He’s a cruel, mean-spirited shithead, and everybody knows it. I want my damn phone call.”

“You’ll get it at the jail.”

I knew that nothing I said would make any difference. He belonged to the huge army of people who believed that authority over others was an achievement and that violence was proof of a man’s bravery.

Hopkins flipped his cigarette through the ripped screen into the yard and led me into a foyer shiny with fresh paint and tracked with shoeprints. He stood on the edge of the foyer and took one of my shoes from the paper bag and squatted down and fitted it inside a print. Then he did the same with the other shoe. “Both shoes fit, wouldn’t you say?”

“What does it matter? I didn’t walk through that paint. I wasn’t here. At least not yesterday or today.”

He didn’t answer. The other cops brought Saber through the back door, one of them carrying his shoes. The cop handed the shoes to Hopkins. It took three tries before Hopkins could fit one of Saber’s shoes into a print. Then he pressed the other shoe inside another print and stood up, flexing his back. “Neither one of you were here? That’s your story?”

“Those tracks could have been put there by anyone,” Saber said.

Hopkins turned up the soles of our shoes. “How’d the same paint get on here?”

“You put it there,” Saber said. “We saw you do it.”

“That paint has been dry for hours.” He squatted down again and touched the floor and rubbed his thumb across his fingertips. “See?”

Through the back door, I saw the SPCA man wrap Krauser’s Doberman in a piece of canvas and carry it out of the yard. Hopkins walked into the weight room and turned around. “Bring those two in here. I want to see if they’re proud of their work.”

I went ahead of Saber, the paint in the foyer sticking to the bottoms of my feet. At first glance, everything in the weight room seemed to be in order. The dumbbells were racked, the weight bar loaded with fifty-pound plates notched on the stanchions above the leather-padded bench, the memorabilia hanging on the walls. As my eyes adjusted to the poor lighting, I saw the methodical thoroughness the vandal or vandals had used in destroying everything that daily reassured Krauser who he was.

They had broken the glass out of the frames on the walls, then cut and shredded the citations and photos and military decorations inside them, reducing them to confetti and miniaturizing Krauser’s life. They had used pliers or vise grips to mutilate Krauser’s medals for valor and his combat infantryman badge. The Confederate battle flag hung in strips from the wall, each strip tied in a bow. The lamp made from a German helmet was upside down on the floor, propped against the wall. Hopkins tipped it with the point of his shoe. A rivulet of yellow liquid ran onto the concrete. The white-handled Nazi dagger with the incised gold SS lightning bolts was gone.

No one spoke. The air-conditioning unit in the window was dripping with moisture, its motor throbbing. As much as I disliked Krauser, I felt sorry for him.

“What would make y’all do something like this?” Hopkins said. “That man served his country. That’s how y’all pay him back?”

“We never did anything to that motherfucker,” Saber said.

“What do you call this?” Hopkins said.

“You’re asking me?” Saber said.

“That’s his Purple Heart by your foot. Yes, I’m asking you.”

“I hung my swizzle stick through a hole in the ceiling above his biology class. I put a dead frog inside his coleslaw. But you want my opinion on this mess here?”

“We’re burning to know,” Hopkins said.

A sound came out of Saber that was like air wheezing from a slow leak in a basketball. He was trying to hold it in, his face splitting; his knees started to buckle, his suppressed laughter shaking his chest, his tear ducts kicking into overdrive.

“What do I call it?” he said. “What do I call it? What do you think, man? It’s a fucking masterpiece.”

I NEVER KNEW THAT jails were loud. The Harris County jail boomed with noise of all kinds: people yelling down corridors and out windows, cell doors slamming, radios blaring, cleaning buckets grating on concrete, a dozen court-bound men coming down a steel spiral staircase on a wrist chain, a lunatic banging a tin tray outside the food slot of an isolation unit. The level of cacophony never grew or decreased in volume; the building seemed to subsume it the way a storm does; you could actually feel the noise if you pressed your palm against the wall, as if the building had a vascular system.

There were eight of us inside a rectangular cell that had four iron bunks hinged and suspended from the walls on chains. The toilet seat was gone, the bowl striped with tea-colored stains. Our compatriots were a drunk who’d started a fight at the blood bank, a handbill passer accused of window peeping, a check writer who had been out of jail six days before he wrote another bad check, a four-time loser picked up for parole violation, and two bare-chested Mexican car thieves whose torsos were wrapped with knife scars and jailhouse art. They all seemed to know one another or have friends in common, and to accept the system for what it was and not argue with either their surroundings or their fate.

I was allowed one phone call. I called my father’s office. He was out and I had to leave the message with a secretary, knowing the embarrassment it would bring him. At four o’clock a trusty in white cotton pants and a white T-shirt with HARRIS COUNTY PRISON stenciled on the back stopped a food cart at the bars and handed a tray through the food slot with eight baloney sandwiches and eight tin cups of Kool-Aid.

“When’s the bondsman come around?” Saber said.

“You got to go to arraignment first.”