The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke Page B

in the sink. When I deceived her about where I had been or what I had done on a particular day, I did not feel I was committing a sin.
    So I added one more day to my conspiracy of silence and put away my guitar and tried to shut Mr. Epstein’s words out of my ears. I turned on my radio with the volume low and, among all my animals, laid my head on my pillow in the breeze and the smells of the night and listened to Jo Stafford sing as she had to millions of GIs.
    S ABER WAS AT the houseearly the next morning, after both my parents had gone to work. Saber had two jobs: racking pins in the pits at the bowling alley, a job that only men of color and the roughest white kids in town did; and throwing the Houston Chronicle. For anyone else, a paper route was just a paper route. For Saber, it was similar to Charlemagne fighting his way up the canyons of Roncevaux Pass. After he rolled 115 newspapers with string, he packed them like artillery rounds into the passenger and backseat of his heap, and set out on the route, heaving a paper over the roof through a sprinkler onto a porch, when he easily could have dropped it onto a dry spot on the walk; smacking a leashed bulldog that attacked him while he was collecting; nailing a flowerpot of someone who was in arrears; parking just long enough to run through an entire apartment building with his canvas bag on his shoulder, stomping up and down the stairways, dropping papers in front of doorways, crashing out the back door like a deep-sea diver emerging into light.
    He drank a cup of coffee on the back steps and watched me fill the bowls of all my animals. “Things all right with you and Valerie?” he asked.
    â€œWhy wouldn’t they be?”
    â€œBecause you always busy yourself with your cats and Major when you got something on your mind.”
    â€œPets can’t fill their own bowls, so give it a break.”
    â€œKrauser is dogging me,” he said.
    â€œStop it,” I said.
    â€œI saw him in my rearview mirror last night. I saw him this morning, too.”
    â€œIt’s coincidence. He lives a few blocks from your house.”
    â€œMore like a half mile. I saw his car at the Pink Elephant.”
    â€œSaber, I don’t want to hear this. What were you doing there, anyway?”
    â€œSurveilling Asshole. Jimmy McDougal was sitting in his car. Then Asshole came out of the club and drove away. Remember Jimmy?Two quarts down the day he was born? Why’s Krauser taking him to a dump like the Pink Elephant?”
    â€œIt’s not our business.”
    â€œIt is when he’s following us around,” Saber said.
    â€œAre you sure about all this?”
    â€œYou think I want to believe somebody is copping that poor kid’s joint?”
    â€œYou really know how to say it, Saber.”
    He looked at the animals eating from their bowls. “I’m thinking about joining the marines.”
    â€œYou’re just seventeen.”
    â€œI can forge the old man’s signature. I’ll be at Parris Island before he can do anything about it.”
    â€œStop talking crazy.”
    â€œEvery day we seem to get deeper in a hole. It’s busting us up.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou heard me,” he said.
    â€œDon’t talk like that. We’ve always been buds. I won’t ever let you down.”
    â€œYou told me to beat it because you wanted to get in the sack with a girl. I don’t hold it against you, but it doesn’t make me feel too good, either.”
    â€œI wasn’t thinking.”
    â€œYeah, you were. You thought me right out of the picture,” he said.
    â€œValerie and I are both sorry.”
    â€œ She’s sorry? What the hell does she have to be sorry about?”
    â€œShe’s got feelings. She’s got a conscience. You don’t know her.”
    â€œShe was Grady Harrelson’s girlfriend. She didn’t know he was a dickhead? Why’d they break up? She just