Free The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke Page B

the earth, safe from all the violence and cruelty surrounding me. My mother circled my wrist with her thumb and forefinger and lifted my arm and studied my knuckles. “Did you hit someone?”
    I was surprised. My mother dealt with reality only in teaspoons. She’d had a hysterectomy and a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy, an experience that had left her shaking and filled with dread. I’d realized long ago that there are people who are not liars but are incapable of telling the truth or dealing with it. There is a great difference between the two.
    â€œA run-in with a fellow,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
    â€œDr. Bienville increased my medication.It makes me confused. Why did you have a run-in with someone? Has a bully bothered you? Is that what all this strange behavior is about? Go get your father, would you? There’s a television set at the icehouse now. Something to sell more beer.”
    â€œI’ll get him, Mother.”
    â€œTell him about this trouble you had.”
    â€œI will,” I said.
    â€œAnd leave that girl in the Heights alone. Your father won’t like it.”
    â€œI understand.”
    I went to the icehouse and walked back home with my father. Heat lightning rippled through the clouds; hurricane warnings were up along the Louisiana-Texas coast; and earlier I had lost my virginity and tried to beat a greaseball to death. But there was not one subject of either substance or insignificance that my father and I could discuss. I wondered what it would be like to stroll with one’s father along a sidewalk, like two friends out on a warm evening that smelled of flowers and water sprinklers slapping on the lawns. Maybe one fine evening that would happen, I told myself, if I just had faith.
    I LAY IN BED and stared at the ceiling until one A.M. and woke to what I expected to be the worst day of my life—cops at the door, handcuffs, a felony assault charge, or maybe Mr. Epstein charging into the house, enraged at what I had done with his daughter. All day at school I waited for a police cruiser to turn in to the faculty parking lot, then a call to the principal’s office. It didn’t happen. The only unusual element in the morning was Mr. Krauser’s behavior. During metal shop he kept staring at Saber and me as though he wanted to say something to us but couldn’t.
    At seven-fifteen that evening, I looked out the window and saw Mr. Krauser park at the curb and get out and stand uncertainly on the edge of the lawn, flattening his tie, straightening his shoulders. There was a young guy I recognized in the passenger seat. His name was Jimmy McDougal; he was an effeminate kid whose body was almosthairless, his eyebrows blond wisps. I’d see him shooting baskets at the YMCA after he dropped out of school, his gym shorts barely clinging to his hips when he leaped to make a shot.
    â€œWho’s that man?” my mother said.
    â€œSatan,” I replied.
    â€œWho?” she asked.
    â€œIt’s Mr. Krauser,” I said, more to my father than my mother.
    My father was reading under a lamp. The book was Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway. “The teacher who tried to help you with these bad kids from the Heights?” he said.
    â€œThey’re more than bad kids, Daddy. And Mr. Krauser doesn’t help anybody with anything.”
    He looked at his pocket watch. The ball game would soon be starting on the small-screen television at the icehouse, although my father usually sat at one of the plank tables under the canvas awning and drank by himself and took little interest in the game. “So let’s see what he wants,” he said.
    It was obvious that Mr. Krauser had not bathed or changed clothes before coming to the house. As I held the door for him, I could smell the dried sweat in his shirt, an odor that was as thick and gray and palpable as a towel left in a gym locker. His smile made me