The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,65
to pull your head out of your ass or not?”
“Come up to the Heights and say that.”
“Count on it,” I said, and hung up.
But I didn’t get to keep my word.
Chapter
16
IT STARTED WITH my mother. Some days she took off early from work and rode the bus to a clinic where she talked to a counselor. There she sometimes saw the effeminate and odd kid named Jimmy McDougal. Poor Jimmy. He was the butt of everyone’s jokes, homely and awkward and gullible if someone showed him a teaspoon of kindness. He was in the corner of the waiting room, his hands clenched between his thighs, his face downcast as though he had wet his pants. My mother sat beside him and placed her hand on his back. “What’s wrong, Jimmy? It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, the soles of his shoes tapping up and down. “I’m tops.”
“You don’t have to hide things, Jimmy. You want to tell me what’s troubling you all the time?”
He shook his head adamantly. “I’m doing okay. That’s a fact, Miz Broussard.”
“Has Mr. Krauser hurt you?”
“Mr. Krauser takes me to ball games and shoots baskets with me at the Y. Leastways that’s how it’s been.”
“Tell me the truth, Jimmy.”
He crouched over, his fingers tightening, the blood leaving his knuckles. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Miz Broussard.”
“Come home with me. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’ve already warned Mr. Krauser.”
“Oh, Miz Broussard, I don’t want you doing that.”
“I told that vile man he’d better leave you alone or I’d take a quirt to him.”
“I’m already in trouble, Miz Broussard. I cain’t handle any more.”
“What are you in trouble about?”
“I say the wrong things sometimes. I rehearse the right thing to say, but it always comes out wrong. It doesn’t matter. I end up being a fool in front of others.”
“Is that your baseball cap?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get it,” she said.
They took a crowded bus in traffic and diesel smoke and hundred-degree heat down West Alabama, and got off at the icehouse where my father drank, and walked to our small ivy-covered brick home on Hawthorne Street. I was just about to head for the Heights and Loren Nichols’s house when they came through the front door.
“Aaron, fix us some ice water, please, while I talk to Jimmy,” my mother said. She pulled the long pin out of her pillbox hat and removed the hat and clicked on the ceiling fan in the living room.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I ran into Jimmy at the clinic, and now he and I are going to have a talk.”
I went into the kitchen, but I could hear every word through the open door.
“I know the signs, Jimmy. Where did that man touch you?”
“It was on accident. The first time, I mean.”
“The first time he touched you?”
“I took a shower at his house. We’d been working out. He was waiting for me to finish so he could take his shower. He bumped into me when I was coming out.”
“Out of the shower?” she said. “You were undressed?”
“Was I—”
“Were you naked?”
“Yes, I was naked. He almost knocked me down. He picked me up. That’s when he leaned over me and it touched me. On accident.”
“It? You mean—”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then he did it on another occasion but not on accident?” she said.
“The next week I stayed over at his house. I woke up in the middle of the night on the couch. He was doing something.”
“You don’t have to say any more, Jimmy.”
“I have to, Miz Broussard. He was rubbing my leg. He said I had a charley horse and was yelling in my sleep.”
“It’s all right, Jimmy. Where’s that ice water, Aaron?”
I didn’t want to go into the living room. I didn’t want to bring Jimmy more shame and embarrassment. In those days we didn’t have adequate ways of reporting sexual abuse or pedophilia. The victim was usually blamed or accused of lying; the issue would be buried, and anyone who raised it again was excoriated.
I put two glasses of ice water on a tray and set it down in the living room, then sat on the brick steps in the porte cochere with Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy and Major. The windows were open, and I could still hear my mother talking with Jimmy.
“You’re not fixing to call him up, are you?” he said.
“I’m so angry I can’t rightly say.”
“He’s not going to do it anymore. He’s done with me because of that woman.”