The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,19

his and didn’t blink or show any expression. I felt my fingers tightening on the shaft of the lug wrench. He looked again at his friends, as though sharing his amusement with them. None of them met his eyes. He looked back at me. “What’s with you? You got some kind of mental defect?”

“Nothing is with me. I won’t be a senior till next week. You already graduated. You’re a wheel. I’m nobody.”

“You’re trying to provoke an incident and then file a suit. It’s not going to work, Broussard.” He flexed his shoulders and rotated his head like a boxer loosening up. His confidence was starting to slip, and the others knew it.

“Call the shot, Grady. Or apologize for that remark about Valerie.”

“You start a beef at my house and I’m supposed to apologize? That’s great, man. You almost make me laugh.”

The woman in the blue robe stepped out on the swale. She was wearing huaraches. There was a smear of lipstick on one of her canine teeth. She cupped her hand on the back of Grady’s neck, one pointy fingernail teasing his hairline. She was whispering in his ear, but her eyes were on me. He seemed to be listening to her as a child would to its mother.

“Get back in the car, Aaron,” I heard Saber say.

“We’re fine,” I said.

“No, get in the car,” he said.

“Listen to your friend,” the woman said to me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She winked, her lips compressing into a glossy red flower, her eyes darker and more lustrous than they were a second earlier.

I stuck the tire iron under the seat, and in seconds Saber and I were headed down a long tunnel of live oaks, his dual exhausts echoing off the tree trunks. My right hand was trembling, the shaft of the tire iron printed as red as a burn across my palm.

Chapter

5

SABER TURNED NORTH, toward the Heights and Valerie Epstein’s house. “What happened back there?” he said. “Who’s that broad?”

“You got me.”

“It’s like she has some kind of control over them. Why is she wasting herself on guys like that when I’m available? Have you seen me do the dirty bop?”

“I missed that.”

“It’s not funny. I’m a good dancer.” He tugged on his dork, trying to straighten it in his pants. “This is killing me. I’ve got to have some relief.”

“Will you act your age?”

“I am.”

“I didn’t know your father was in the marines.”

“He wasn’t. He was in the Seabees. He spent most of the war in San Diego.”

“Why did you tell Harrelson he was in the marines?”

“To make him feel like he’s worse butt crust than he already is. Any time I can screw up the head of a guy like Harrelson, I’m on it.”

He shifted down, flooring the Chevy, blowing birds out of the trees into a maroon sky as we plowed deep into the Heights.

KNOW WHAT IT was like back then? It’s not the way everybody thinks. Not one person I knew listened to Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby or Perry Como. We thought their music was shit and Lawrence Welk was water torture. In jazz, there was the cool school and the honk school. Pres Young was from the cool school. Flip Phillips was honk, in the best way. He and Pres and Buck Clayton and Norman Granz toured the country with Jazz at the Philharmonic. Hank and Lefty were on every blue-collar jukebox in America. The seminal recording in R&B was Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” featuring Ike Turner on piano. Politics? What was that? My father said Senator McCarthy had the warmth and depth of a bowling ball. Saber asked him who Senator McCarthy was.

The real story was the class war. We just didn’t know we were in it.

“What’s that?” Saber said, slowing the Chevy.

On the street a short distance from Valerie’s house, I saw a scorched area the size of a car and fractured glass and scraps of rubber on the asphalt. I realized that once again Saber had driven us into the belly of the beast.

“That’s where Loren Nichols’s car got burned. Get us out of here,” I said.

“He lives in that dump?”

A sagging nineteenth-century two-story white house, with a dirt yard and rain gutters that had rusted into lace, stood on cinder blocks among live oaks whose lichen-crusted limbs seemed about to crush the roof. Loren Nichols was drinking a beer, bare-chested and wearing suspenders, behind a hair-tangled old woman sitting in a wooden chair. Her skin was shriveled like dry paste, her