The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,1
I’d feel shame and guilt and anger and not know why. I’d sit in my bedroom, wanting to hold something that was heavy and hard in my palm, I didn’t know what. My uncle Cody was a business partner of Frankie Carbo of Murder, Inc. My uncle introduced me to Bugsy Siegel when he was staying at the Shamrock Hotel with Virginia Hill. Sometimes I would think about these gangsters and the confidence in their expression and the deadness in their eyes when they gazed at someone they didn’t like, and I’d wonder what it would be like if I could step inside their skin and possess their power.
The day I swam through the jellyfish without being stung was the day that changed my life forever. I was about to enter a country that had no flag or boundaries, a place where you gave up your cares and your cautionary instincts and deposited your heart on a stone altar. I’m talking about the first time you fall joyously, sick-down-in-your-soul in love, and the prospect of heartbreak never crosses your mind.
Her name was Valerie Epstein. She was sitting in a long-bodied pink Cadillac convertible, what we used to call a boat, in a drive-in restaurant wrapped in neon, near the beach, her bare shoulders powdered with sunburn. Her hair wasn’t just auburn; it was thick and freshly washed and had gold streaks in it, and she had tied it up on her head with a bandana, like one of the women who worked in defense plants during the war. She was eating french fries one at a time with her fingers and listening to a guy sitting behind the steering wheel like a tall drink of water. His hair was lightly oiled and sun-bleached, his skin pale and free of tattoos. He wore shades, even though the sun was molten and low in the sky, the day starting to cool. With his left hand he kept working a quarter across the tops of his fingers, like a Las Vegas gambler or a guy with secret skills. His name was Grady Harrelson. He was two years older than I and had already graduated, which meant I knew who he was but he didn’t know who I was. Grady had wide, thin shoulders, like a basketball player, and wore a faded purple T-shirt that on him somehow looked stylish. He had been voted the most handsome boy in the school not once but twice. A guy like me had no trouble hating a guy like Grady.
I don’t know why I got out of my car. I was tired, and my back felt stiff and dry and peppered with salt and sand under my shirt, and I had to drive fifty miles back to Houston and return the car to my father before dark. The evening star was already winking inside a blue band of light on the horizon. I had seen Valerie Epstein twice from a distance but never up close. Maybe the fact that I’d swum safely through a school of jellyfish was an omen. Valerie Epstein was a junior at Reagan High School, on the north side of Houston, and known for her smile and singing voice and straight A’s. Even the greaseballs who carried chains under their car seats and stilettos in their drapes treated her as royalty.
Get back in the car and finish your crab burger and go home, a voice said.
For me, low self-esteem was not a step down but a step up. I was alone, yet I didn’t want to go home. It was Saturday, and I knew that before dark my father would walk unsteadily back from the icehouse, the neighbors looking the other way while they watered their yards. I had friends, but most of them didn’t know the real me, nor in reality did I know them. I lived in an envelope of time and space that I wanted to mail to another planet.
I headed for the restroom, on a path between the passenger side of the convertible and a silver-painted metal stanchion with a speaker on it that was playing “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Then I realized Valerie Epstein was having an argument with Grady and on the brink of crying.
“Anything wrong?” I said.
Grady turned around, his neck stretching, his eyelids fluttering. “Say again?”
“I thought maybe something was wrong and y’all needed help.”