The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,93

You had it right, Val. Grady and all his friends are cruel, and they’re cruel for one reason only, just like Mr. Krauser was: They know they’re unloved and they’re frauds and others are about to catch on to them.”

I started to say more. I believed that Valerie thought her father capable of killing Mr. Harrelson and she didn’t want to see an innocent person blamed for his death. But this time I kept my observations to myself.

“So you know all this, do you?” she asked, her face in a pout.

“Yes, I do, because I grew up scared, just like Grady, and for the same reasons. But I’m not like that anymore. My life changed because of one person, and that’s the one I’m with now, the most beautiful girl in Texas. Now let’s go see what all these animals have to say about it.”

CONTRARY TO MY demeanor, I wasn’t done with fear. That night I dreamed of bulls. There is no more dangerous event at a rodeo than bull riding, and in the days before padded vests and helmets with face guards, it was even more lethal. You can get hooked, ruptured, tangled up and dragged, stomped into marmalade, and flung into the boards. A bull can corkscrew, spin like a top, stand up on his front legs with his back feet seven feet in the air, levitate straight off the turf, buck you on his horns, and as an afterthought, break your neck or snap your spine. He can reconfigure the entire muscular network along the backbone from eight to eleven inches so the back is not going in the same direction as the feet. Imagine driving a truck along the edge of a cliff at high speed while the wheels are coming off the axles, the brakes are failing, the gears are stripping, and the windshield is coming apart in your face.

Original Sin was notorious. He hooked a rider in Amarillo and crushed a clown in San Angelo and crashed over the boards into the stands in Big D. I woke up in a ball at two in the morning, shaking from a bad dream. I sat on the side of the bed and tried to clear my mind. The dream was not about Original Sin. I had dreamed of Detective Merton Jenks. In the dream Merton Jenks had become me, or I had become Merton Jenks, and one or both of us was about to die. The dream told me something else, too. The breath I drew into my lungs and took for granted was for him a second-by-second ordeal as well as a luxury he was about to lose. He had survived commando raids in Yugoslavia and parachuting behind German lines in France only to die a painful and humiliating death from the Pall Mall cigarettes. Jesus didn’t pass by the blind man on the road when all the travelers did. I felt Merton Jenks was the blind man. In my foolish mind, I wanted to do something to help him.

The light in the bathroom was on, the door half open. My father was sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking a cigarette.

“Can’t sleep?” I said.

“I snore. I thought I’d give your mother some rest,” he replied.

It wasn’t true, of course. Like all depressives, my father suffered from insomnia; he also needed his nicotine, just as he needed his alcohol. I wanted to tell him of my feelings, but I never did, because I knew I would only add to his pain. Instead I told him of my anxiety about easing down in the chute onto the back of Original Sin, eighteen hundred pounds of black lethality.

“I’ll be sitting in the stands,” he said.

“Mother’s not coming?”

“You know how she is. She doesn’t like crowds.”

“She doesn’t like being among what she calls common people.”

“People have their quirks. It’s what makes us human. If we ignore other people’s faults, we don’t have to be defensive about our own.”

In all my years of growing up, I never heard him speak unkindly or critically of my mother, no matter how harshly she spoke of him.

“I was scared about riding Original Sin, but I dreamed about Detective Jenks,” I said. “Now I feel all right. Why’s that?”

“Because when we think about other people’s problems, our own don’t seem so important.”

“I have a feeling he still has a crush on Miss Cisco.”

“The woman from Nevada? That’s one person you need to forget, Aaron. Just like we need to get the