The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,92

to swear in a lady’s presence,” I said.

“One or both y’all is on the edge of committing a felony,” he said. “It’s called aiding and abetting after the fact.”

He stood up. His face looked gray, tired, his long nose tubular like a teardrop, his skin rough as emery paper. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, but not before I saw the blood stippled on the butt.

“Miss Valerie, if you’re covering up for Grady Harrelson, you’re making the worst mistake of your life,” he said. “And you, Aaron Holland Broussard, are acting like you were hiding behind a cloud when God passed out the brains. Don’t let that punk con you. You’re a hundred times the man he is. What’s the name of that bull you drew?”

“Original Sin.”

“Hope you have a soft landing.”

He walked into the crowd, his fedora low on his brow, his coat covering the badge on his belt and his holstered snub-nose, his massive shoulders and confident walk a poor disguise for the death he carried in his lungs.

VALERIE AND I WALKED up and down the aisles among the livestock stalls and poultry and rabbit cages, neither looking at the other. I felt a sense of betrayal that was like a flame burning through the center of a sheet of paper, the circle spreading outward, curling the paper into carbon. If you grow up in an alcoholic home, you learn a lesson that never leaves you: The need to satisfy the addiction comes first; everything else is secondary. Daily betrayal becomes a way of life.

We stopped in front of a stall where a huge York/Hamp sow was nursing a row of pink-and-gray piglets. I always loved animals. My favorite story in the Old Testament was the account of Noah and the Flood, which I believed then and believe now is deliberately misinterpreted by both Hebrews and Christians. In the antediluvian world, man was told by Yahweh that the stone knife should not break the skin of an animal. The first creatures loaded on the Ark were not people but animals who marched two by two into their new home made of gopher wood. When the earth was washed clean and the archer’s bow was hung in the heavens, man was made a steward, not an exploiter, and was not allowed to harm his charges. I wanted to tell these things to Valerie. But I couldn’t. I believed she had cut loose her boat from mine and was floating toward a place where Grady Harrelson waited for her.

“Why did you lie for him?” I said.

“I didn’t lie for him,” she said. “I just didn’t offer information that would hurt him.”

“It’s called a lie of omission.”

She folded her arms on top of the stall’s gate and fixed her eyes on the mama hog feeding her babies. “Grady is a child inside. I never should have gone out with him. I knew it was never going anywhere.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because the boy I loved and wanted to marry got killed in Korea.”

A man and woman close by looked at us, then glanced away. Valerie kept closing and opening her hands, her eyes flashing. Children were running up and down the aisle with balloons, their shoes splattered with sawdust and the runoff from the stalls. My head was reeling from the smell of ammonia and the sense that either Valerie was a stranger or I was driven by the same kind of jealousy I found so odious in others. The couple standing close by walked away.

“Why didn’t you tell me you covered up for him?” I asked.

“I know what obstruction of justice is. I didn’t want to make you party to it. Why do you think Jenks said you’re a hundred times the man Grady is?”

“He thinks I feel inferior to a guy like that?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what he thinks. So don’t act like it.”

“Put it on another level,” I said. “What if Grady isn’t an innocent player in his father’s death?”

“That’s silly,” she replied.

“Who broke the neck of the Mexican girl, Wanda Estevan? She didn’t do it to herself.”

I saw her cheeks color, her nostrils flare. It wasn’t from anger, either. I knew fear when I saw it, particularly in a person who was rarely afraid.

“Grady wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“Remember what you said to him when you threw his senior ring in his face at the drive-in? You called him cruel. You also warned me about what he and his friends could do to me.