The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,110

It’s Saber. I’m in a pile of it, man.”

“I heard.”

“Heard what?”

“Grady knows it was you who boosted his convertible. Three guys trapped me in an alley. A guy was going to cut me with a barber’s razor.”

“For real?”

“You think I made this up?”

“How’d you get out of it?” he asked.

“I didn’t. Loren Nichols showed up.”

“Who were the guys?”

“I never saw two of them. The third one was Bud Winslow, the football player. Remember him?” Saber had been chewing gum. I heard him stop and the line go quiet. “Saber?”

“Yeah, I remember him. In ninth grade, he held me down on a wrestling mat and parked his package in my face.”

“Well, he’s a hump for Grady now.”

Saber started chewing again. “Grady’s convertible was leaking money.”

“It was what?” I said.

“A hundred-dollar bill was sticking out of the panel on the driver’s door. We pulled off the panel. The door was loaded. So was every other panel. The same under the floor. Not just cash. Small gold bars were pushed inside the padding in the backseat. Grady was driving Fort Knox on wheels.”

“How much money are you talking about?”

“Nine hundred thousand and change. I don’t know what the gold is worth.”

“Park the car on the street and make an anonymous call to the cops.”

“I don’t have it.”

“What happened to it?”

“We took it to a chop shop that Manny’s uncle runs. Except Manny’s uncle doesn’t know about the money. Manny put everything back and drove off with the convertible before the uncle got wise.”

“You don’t know where it is?”

“No. Neither does Cholo. Why is Grady driving around with all that money in his car?”

“His father probably had it stashed. He owed it to the Mob. There’s probably more stashed somewhere else.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Saber said.

“We have to brass it out.”

“I’m sorry I pulled you into this, Aaron. You were my best friend. I’ve been a real shit.”

“Blame it on the jellyfish,” I said.

“What do jellyfish have to do with it?”

“Everything. Where are you now?”

“At a pay phone.”

“Are you living at home?”

“The old man threw me out.”

“Stay away from Manny and Cholo,” I said.

“They used me, didn’t they.”

“It’s the way things are,” I said. “The good guys put their faith in people they shouldn’t.”

I heard him crying on the other end.

I BROUGHT MAJOR AND Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs inside the house and went into my father’s office. My father had spread twenty pages of manuscript across a table. He had been working on an account of Lee’s failed attack on Malvern Hill. Without artillery, Lee had thrown fifty thousand men at the Union line. The result was a disaster. It would be repeated later at Cemetery Ridge. In his account, my father included a story he had always told me about the rebel yell. He said it was not a yell but a fox call. When he was a little boy on Bayou Teche, there were many Confederate veterans who entertained the children by re-creating the strange warbling sound that rose from the throats of thousands of boys and men dressed in sun-faded butternut and moss-gray rags when they charged through the smoke and dust at the Union line. My father’s point was not the sound itself but what it represented. The sound was like a series of “woo’s,” similar to an owl hooting, the vowel both rounded and restrained, pushed out by the lungs rather than shouted. I tried to imagine advancing with an empty musket through geysers of dirt, trying to control my voice and my fear, while cannon loaded with canister and grape and chain and explosive shells blew my friends and fellow soldiers into a bloody mist. How do you find that kind of courage? Wouldn’t your legs fail? Would not normal men throw their weapons to the ground and run away? Where did you go to learn courage?

I knew the answer. You were brave or you weren’t. You didn’t get the Medal of Honor for swimming through a school of jellyfish. I knew my trek up Golgotha was waiting.

I BOUGHT A QUART of ice cream and drove to Valerie’s house. Her father was on a job at the refinery in Port Arthur. We had the house to ourselves. Valerie owned a Stromberg-Carlson high-fidelity record player. We plugged in an extension cord and took it on the back porch, and she loaded six 78s onto the spindle. We spread a quilt on the grass and ate the ice cream out of the carton, and I laid my