“If you don’t see me for a while, it’s not because I ran off to the army,” he said.
“You going somewhere?” I said.
“I made some connections in the can. Remember the Mexican guys in the holding cell?”
“Those guys are pachucos. They’ll cut you from your liver to your lights,” I said.
“Been to some KKK meetings lately?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” I replied, my face flushing.
“See you in the funny papers, Aaron. Keep it in your pants. Oops, too late for that. How’s Valerie doing?”
I hung up.
I LOVED THE SUMMERTIME. The afternoon thunderstorms were the kind you stood in and took joy in the rain. When the sky cleared and turned a soft blue again, the clouds in the west were like strips of fire, or sometimes piles of plums and peaches. Every new day was a cause for celebration, no matter its content. And the explanation for the joy I felt was easy: I was not only in love with the season; I loved Valerie Epstein and I knew Valerie loved me.
I loved her smell and the smoothness of her skin and the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed. There was not enough time in the evening to do all the things that seemed created just for the two of us. Whatever we did was an adventure. We went to the ice rink in one of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods and to baseball games at Buffalo Stadium and to R&B concerts at the city auditorium, where whites had to sit in the balcony because the best seats and the dance floor were reserved for Mexicans and people of color.
For a dollar and a quarter we saw B.B. and Albert King, Big Mama Thornton, and Johnny Ace. On a Friday night we drove to Galveston and the Balinese Club, run by the Maceo family on a six-hundred-foot pier. The moon was up, the Gulf slate green, the waves tumbling through the pilings. The entranceway was framed with neon and hung with Japanese lanterns, the sky black and sprinkled with stars, the air heavy with the smell of an impending storm. We could hear a dance orchestra playing.
Valerie took my hand as we were about to go inside. “This is really uptown, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah, Frank Sinatra has sung here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Bob Hope played here, too.”
She started inside, tugging my hand. For no reason that I could explain, I hesitated. It wasn’t because the Maceo family owned the club. They owned casinos, bingo parlors, nightclubs, restaurants, and the slot machines in beer joints all over the island. I felt a vibration in my chest, the pressure band along the side of my head reappearing, warning signs I sometimes experienced before I had a spell. I glanced down the boulevard. “Maybe we should go to the Jack Tar and have a big fried-shrimp dinner.”
“Don’t they serve seafood here? I always heard it was special.”
“It’s real good, all right,” I said, touching the side of my head.
The front door opened, and a blond man in a summer tux and a glamorous woman in an evening dress came down the steps, confetti in their hair. The orchestra had just gone into “Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie.” Valerie had worn a new white dress.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll show you Sinatra’s and Hope’s pictures on the wall.”
Why had I hesitated? It wasn’t the club itself; it was the locale. Galveston was the turf of the Mob. The club was a reminder of something Grady Harrelson had said outside the church, that Vick Atlas wanted to chain-drag me and Saber from his car bumper. It was hard to shake the image from my mind, and I had not told either my father or Saber about Grady’s statement, trying in my futile fashion to avoid giving evil a second life.
At the far end of the pier was a casino. Only select guests and high rollers were allowed inside. But every kind of person was at the dining tables and on the dance floors that telescoped room after room down to the casino area. Seven French sailors were dancing together, unshaved, wearing their caps. We got a table by an open window and could smell the salt in the wind and hear the waves slapping against the pilings under the building. There was a checkered cloth on our table, and a candle burning inside a glass chimney, and silverware wrapped in bright red napkins. Valerie reached across the table and squeezed my hand. I had never seen her so happy. We ordered crab cocktails and a sample tray of everything on the menu and a pitcher of iced tea with spearmint leaves floating in it.
Then I saw him, the way you notice an aberrant person among a crowd of ordinary people, the way you take note of a smile that doesn’t go with someone’s eyes, the way the oily imprint of a man’s handshake can send a wave of nausea up your arm and into your stomach.
She followed my eyes. “Puke-o,” she said.
“You recognize him on sight?”
“He used to go to all the Reagan–San Jacinto games. Nobody wanted him there, especially the cheerleaders. He was always trying to make out with them.”
Vick Atlas was looking at us from a table across the dance floor, grinning in spite of the black patch he wore over one eye. He wiggled his fingers. I pretended not to see him. “Let’s dance.”
“I think we should stay where we are.”
“Why?”
“He’ll try to cut in.”