The Jealous Kind Read Free

afternoon?” I said.
    â€œ May I.”
    â€œMay I use the car?”
    â€œI was planning to go to the bowling alley,” he said. “There’s a league today.”
    I nodded. My father didn’t bowl and had no interest in it. The bowling alley was air-conditioned and had a bar.
    â€œCome with me,” he said. “Maybe you can bowl a line or two.”
    â€œI have some things to take care of.”
    My father was a handsome man, and genteel in his Victorian way. He never sat at the dining or the breakfast table without putting on his coat, even if he was by himself. He’d lost his best friend in the trenches on November 11, 1918, and despised war and the national adoration of the military and the bellicose rhetoric of politicians who sent others to suffer and die in their stead. But he drank, and somehow those words subsumed and effaced all his virtues. “You dating a new girl?”
    â€œI don’t have an old one.”
    â€œSo you’re changing that?” he said.
    â€œI’d like to.”
    â€œWho is she?”
    â€œI don’t know her real good.”
    â€œReal well. ”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    I took the city bus up to North Houston. The previous winter a friend of mine had pointed out a one-story oak-shaded Victorian house with a wide porch on a residential boulevard, and said it was the home of Valerie Epstein. I couldn’t remember the name of the boulevard, but I knew approximately where it was. When I pulled the cord for the bus driver to stop, I felt my stomach constrict, a tiny flame curling up through my entrails.
    I stood in the bus’s fumes as it pulled away, and stared at the palms on the esplanade and the row of houses once owned by the city’s wealthiest people, before the big money moved out to River Oaks. I was deep in the heart of enemy territory, my crew cut and dress shoes and trousers and starched white shirt and tie the equivalent of blood floating in a shark tank.
    I started walking. I thought I heard Hollywood mufflers rumblingdown another street. On the corner, a woman of color was waiting for the bus behind the bench, her purse crimped in her hands. She looked one way and then the other, leaning forward as though on a ship. There were no other people of color on the boulevard. These were the years when nigger-knocking was in fashion. I tried to smile at her, but she glanced away.
    One block later I recognized Valerie’s house. There were two live oaks hung with Spanish moss in the front yard and a glider on the porch; the side yard had a vegetable garden, and in the back I could see a desiccated toolshed and a huge pecan tree with a welding truck parked on the grass under it. Behind me I heard the rumble of Hollywood mufflers again. I turned and saw a 1941 Ford that had dual exhausts and Frenched headlights and an engine that sounded much more powerful than a conventional V8. The body was dechromed and leaded in and spray-painted with gray primer. One look at the occupants and I knew I was about to meet some genuine northside badasses, what we called greasers or sometimes greaseballs or hoods or duck-asses or hard guys or swinging dicks.
    What was their logo? An indolent stare, slightly rounded shoulders, the shirt unbuttoned to expose the top of the chest, the collar turned up on the neck, the drapes threaded through the loops by a thin suede belt buckled below the navel, shirt cuffs buttoned even in summer, a tablespoon of grease in the sweeps of hair combed into a trench at the back of the head, iron taps on the needle-nose stomps that could be used to shatter someone’s teeth on the sidewalk, the pachuco cross tattooed on the web between the left forefinger and thumb, and more important, the total absence of pity or mercy in the eyes. I know that anyone reading this today might believe these were misdirected boys and their attire and behavior were masks for their fear. That was seldom my experience. I believed