The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,66

woman?”

“Miss Cisco. She’s got a Rocket Eighty-eight and comes from Las Vegas or somewhere. Mr. Krauser said he’d be spending most of his time with her and I shouldn’t be hanging out at his place. Then she flushed him. I’m glad.”

“She broke up with him?”

“I was there when she did it. I went over there to get my bicycle after he said he was going to fix it and then stuck it in the garage on a nail. She said he’d broke his word to somebody about sending boys to a camp, and he was on Clint Harrelson’s S-list.”

“His what?”

“It’s a bad word.”

“I think I can survive it.”

“She said Mr. Krauser was on Clint Harrelson’s shit list.”

“I don’t care about any of that. I care about you, Jimmy, and what’s been done to you. We’re going to have a talk with Mr. Krauser.”

My mother’s manic personality had just shifted into overdrive. I knew nothing good would come of it. I got up from the steps and went through the side screen into the living room. “Mother, I think we should take Jimmy home and forget this.”

“We will not. Drive us to Mr. Krauser’s house, Aaron.”

“Bad idea, Mother. Mr. Krauser isn’t going to change his stripes because people take him to task.”

“There is only one way you treat white trash,” she replied. “As white trash. This man is not only white trash, he’s a deviant. Now drive us there, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The events that would follow remain among the most embarrassing and tragic in my life. Even today I have a hard time writing about them.

I DROVE THE THREE of us to Krauser’s machine-gun bunker of a house, my mother in the passenger seat, Jimmy McDougal in back. With his high forehead and wispy blond hair and milk-white skin and lack of definable eyebrows, he looked like a space alien that had been trapped and stuck in a cage. My mother was holding her riding quirt in her lap.

“You’re not going to use that, are you?” I said.

“That’s up to him,” she replied.

I pulled to the curb in front of Krauser’s house.

“No, in the driveway,” she said. “So he doesn’t try to escape in his car.”

After I cut the engine, she reached over and blew the horn and got out and banged on Krauser’s door. When he answered, he was wearing a navy blue suit and dress shirt without a tie, his hair wet-combed, as though he were preparing to go somewhere. I never saw a man look so stunned.

“Step out here, Mr. Krauser,” my mother said.

“Do you want to come in?” he said.

“No, I do not. You come out here right now and you apologize to this boy. You also will promise in front of me and him and Aaron and God and anyone else listening that you will never go near him again.”

I could see the confusion and fear in Krauser’s eyes. But something else was at work in his psyche or his metabolism that was far worse. I was too young to understand how mortality can steal its way without apparent cause into the life of a man who should have been in his prime. His skin was gray and beginning to sag; hair grew from his ears and nose; he had buttoned his shirt crookedly. He looked like he had gone through the long night of the soul.

“I was on my way to the doctor,” he said.

“You should probably call your minister instead,” my mother said.

“Aaron, you and Saber broke into my home, didn’t you?” he said. “Tell me the truth. I won’t hold it against you. I need to know this.”

“No, we didn’t, Mr. Krauser,” I said.

“You step out here right now, you terrible man, or I’ll come in after you,” my mother said.

“Mother, please,” I said.

The next-door neighbors had come out of their house. The postman and a woman on her porch across the street were watching. A car slowed in the street, the driver and a woman looking at us.

“Damn you,” my mother said. I was sure at this moment that she was no longer addressing Krauser but somebody in her past, a featureless man who had violated her in her sleep.

She struck the first cut across his face, then beat him methodically, slashing him every place she could. The quirt was stiff and hard, the leather sewed tightly around a metal rod, with a braided knot on the end. Krauser cupped his hands over his head as though he were being attacked by bees.