just and clearheaded than any man I ever met. He allowed no guns in our home and hunted ducks only one day a year, with the president of his company, in a blind over by Anahuac. After a prowler broke into our garage a couple of times, my father placed a brick in a hatbox and wrapped the hatbox in satin paper and tied a ribbon on it, then he set the box on the front seat of the automobile. He also put a note in it that read:
Dear Burglar,
While you were stealing this brick, a twelve-gauge shotgun was aimed at your back. If you return, you will not be received in a gracious manner. I do not wish to offend you, but you seem very inept. I suggest you join a church or practice your profession somewhere else. Give serious thought to this.
Best regards,
Your victim,
James Eustace Broussard
Our burglar friend never returned.
I closed the stiletto and placed it on the shelf and sat down on my bed. My Gibson was lying facedown on the spread. I picked it up and propped the curve in the sound box across my knee and formed an E chord on the neck. “I feel a mite sick, Daddy,” I said.
“Your stomach acting up again?”
“It’s not acting up. It’s always like that. Like I have a boil on the lining.”
A shadow slid across his face. “Did that police detective touch you?”
“He tore the chair out from under me and threw me on the floor. That’s not the problem, though.”
“If that’s not the problem, what is?”
“He said a Mexican woman, a prostitute, was killed two blocks from the burned car. He thinks she was mixed up in the burning of the car. He says the cops found the gasoline can that did the job. It was in Saber’s garage.”
There was a long silence. I couldn’t look at him. “Daddy?” I said. But he didn’t answer. “Daddy, say something.”
“What have you got us into, son?”
SABER WASN’T AT school the next day. I didn’t know if his father had beat him up or if he had just cut school. Mr. Bledsoe was from rural Alabama. He wasn’t a bad man, but he was uneducated and insecure and frightened and each day had to scrub off the grime from his job at a rendering plant with Ajax and a bar of Lava soap and a stiff brush. Whenever I saw a bruise on Saber, I didn’t ask about it. I didn’t think Mr. Bledsoe meant to hurt his son. When he was drunk, he made me think of a sightless pig trapped inside a circle of javelins.
At three o’clock I hitched a ride to Saber’s small frame house on the edge of the West University district. He was under his Chevy on a creeper board, his legs on the grass. I grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him out. He had a wrench in one hand; he rubbed at a piece of rust in his eye. “What the hell,” he said.
“Why weren’t you at school?”
“Didn’t feel like answering questions all over campus. Besides, I wanted to put my split manifold on the engine and hang my new mufflers. I filled them with oil first and set the oil on fire. The carbon gives it that throaty sound.”
“You’re thinking about putting dual exhausts on your heap when the cops are trying to send us to Gatesville?”
He pulled his knees up in front of him, his skin dark in the shade of the car. He used his shirt to wipe the grease off his cheek. “I don’t know where that gasoline can came from. I told that to the detective. So did my old man. I was proud of him. He told the detective to pack his shit up both nostrils.”
“I hate to tell you this, Sabe, but that’s not smart.”
“I thought it was. They’re after us, Aaron. I told you.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Ask yourself where all this started.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t play dumb,” he said. “This is about Valerie Epstein.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You went to see her, and the next thing you know, Loren Nichols and his greaseballs show up in front of her house. The next day the same guys show up at school and in my driveway. In the meantime, Mr. Krauser is twirling his joint in the punch bowl.”
“I can’t tell you what that image does to my brain.”
“Who’s the guy getting a free pass on all this?” he asked.
“You tell me.”
“Stop acting like a simp. You’re talking