Valerie came down the stairs in her bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her hair. “Who were you talking to?”
“Grady.”
“He’s not worth the effort, Aaron.”
“Did he ever tell you his father was a pederast?” I said.
She looked at me blankly. “No.?
?
“Did he have young guys hanging around his house?”
“I wouldn’t know. I was never there. Mr. Harrelson didn’t like Jews. He didn’t like my father in particular.”
“Grady said his father deserved the way he died. Was Grady molested?”
“If he was, he never mentioned it. He joined the marines to prove he was a man. Then his father got him discharged behind his back. I don’t think Grady ever forgave him.”
“Maybe his father didn’t want him killed in Korea.”
“The discharge wasn’t about Grady. It was about his father. He believed Grady was a coward and would disgrace the family name.”
“Grady knew this?”
“Mr. Harrelson told him he needed him ‘behind the lines,’ helping train these pitiful boys who went to his indoctrination camps.”
“I have a bad feeling, Val. I think we’ve been set up.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You and Saber and me.”
She touched my cheek. “You worry about all the wrong things. You give people dimensions they don’t have.”
She put “Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie-Woogie” on the record player and draped her hands on my shoulders and started to dance, her eyes closed. I began dancing with her slowly, in two-four time, Dorsey’s orchestra swelling around us. I held her against me and put my face in the dampness of her hair.
“Can we go upstairs?” I said, my voice hoarse.
“Stay here. This is so good. I wish we could be like this forever.”
“I’ll turn up the volume.”
“No, hold me. Just like you’re doing.”
Then I realized she was crying. “What is it?”
“Everything. It’s as you say. I try to pretend otherwise. I think something horrible is going to happen. My father—” She couldn’t finish.
“What about your father?”
“He left a note and a hundred-dollar bill. He said if he wasn’t back by supper, I should go to my aunt’s house in Austin. I looked in his closet. His grease gun is gone.”
“His grease gun? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a machine gun with a folding stock. Paratroopers used them in the war.”
“Where was he going?”