“Val.”
“She’s fine.”
“That’s good. Make sure she stays that way,” he said.
Why did he say that? What had Valerie told me about the jealous kind? They were unteachable and incapable of change? “What was that last part?”
“What I said.”
“You volunteered for the service,” I said. “You would have ended up in Korea if you didn’t have a medical condition. Why don’t you drop the hard-guy bullshit?”
“You don’t know anything about my military service, so shut your mouth, Broussard.”
“Don’t be telling me how I should treat Valerie.”
“You think you have to tell me I’m not yellow? You told my old man I helped tear up those guys who crashed a party on Sunset. Let me give you a news bulletin. I didn’t gang anybody. The guy behind most of it was Vick Atlas, the same guy who wants to chain-drag you and Bledsoe from his bumper. That’s not exaggeration.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything else. I was talking to a kid who would never be anything except a kid. But I had been at the party on Sunset Boulevard and seen what had happened, and I just couldn’t abide his lying, or maybe I couldn’t abide his proprietary attitude about Valerie. Even now, over sixty years later, I have a hard time with it. He called her “Val”?
“Those were your friends who spread-eagled that guy,” I said. “You could have stopped them. You were laughing when y’all walked off. The guy had to go to the hospital, at Jeff Davis, as a charity case. I thought that was pretty chickenshit.”
He didn’t reply. He bit his bottom lip, his body turned sideways, positioned to throw a hook straight into my face.
“You want to say something?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you what I feel like doing to you right now.”
“Then do it. I want you to.”
There was a blood clot in the corner of his left eye. His eyelids were fluttering.
“You think you’re a swinging dick because your old man told off my father?” he said. “My father could have your old man cleaning toilets, except he wouldn’t waste his time. Your old man’s a drunk. Your mother has been through electroshock. We could have you ground into paste if we wanted to.”
“The priest told you to turn yourself in,” I said.
His face went white. “What’d you say?”
“You owned up to something bad. Maybe it had to do with the dead Mexican girl. But you won’t turn yourself in because you’re a bum, Harrelson, and not worth spitting on.”
I walked away from him and didn’t look back. At the corner I saw him drive slowly out of the parking lot onto the street, too slow for the traffic. A car blew its horn. Grady didn’t react or accelerate and instead pulled to the light as though frozen in thought. When the light changed, he steered with the heel of one hand, not heeding a truck trying to turn in front of him. He seemed to have every characteristic of a man without a past worth remembering or a future worth living. But the words he had spoken about my father and mother had robbed me of all sympathy for him. The pity and charity I had felt only minutes ago were gone. I was the less for them.
My missal was still in my hand. I wondered what Saint Paul would have to say regarding my role as a bearer of the good news.
Chapter
14
THE DAYS PASSED, and Saber’s father took out a second mortgage on the Bledsoes’ run-down home and used the money to put up Saber’s bail and consult with an attorney, one he had found in the Yellow Pages. Saber called me as soon as he got home. I thought he wanted to get together. That wasn’t the case.
“We’re down to rat cheese and crackers at the house,” he said. “The old man is collecting newspapers to haul out to the mill. Ever been to the paper mill?”
The mill was located on several hundred square acres of piled trash swarming with seagulls. It was a wretched place peopled by the desperate and the poor who eked out a living by going door-to-door, asking others for their old newspapers and cardboard boxes and later selling them for a penny a pound at best. They had the despair in their faces of medieval ragpickers.
“You want me to ask my father if he can get your dad a job on a pipeline?”
“My old man thinks your dad talks to him like he’s a nigger. Those were his words.”
“That’s ridiculous.”