Our next-door neighbors were the Dunlops. They had skin like pig hide and heads with the knobbed ridges of coconuts. The oldest of the five boys was executed in Huntsville Pen; one did time on Sugarland Farm. The patriarch of the family was a security guard at the Southern Pacific train yards. He covered all the exterior surfaces of his house, garage, and tool shed with the yellow paint he stole from his employer. The Dunlops even painted their car with it. Then, through a fluke no one could have anticipated, they became rich.
One of the girls had married a morphine addict who came from an oil family in River Oaks. The girl and her husband drove their Austin-Healey head-on into a bus outside San Antonio, and the Dunlops inherited two hundred thousand dollars and a huge chunk of rental property in their own neighborhood. It was like giving a tribe of pygmies a nuclear weapon.
I thought the Dunlops would move out of their dilapidated two-story frame house, with its piles of dog shit all over the backyard, but instead they bought a used Cadillac from a mortuary, covered their front porch with glitter-encrusted chalk animals and icons from an amusement park, and continued each morning to piss out the attic window onto my mother’s car, which looked like it had contracted scabies.
As newly empowered landlords, the Dunlops cut no one any slack, did no repairs on their properties, and evicted a Mexican family who had lived in the neighborhood since the middle of the Depression. Mr. Dunlop also seized upon an opportunity to repay the parochial school Nick and I attended for expelling two of his sons.
Maybe it was due to the emotional deprivation and the severity of the strictures imposed upon them, or the black habits they wore in ninety-degree humidity, but a significant number of the nuns at school were inept and cruel. Sister Felicie, however, was not one of these. She was tall and wore steel-rimmed glasses and small black shoes that didn’t seem adequate to support her height. When I spent almost a year in bed with rheumatic fever, she came every other day to the house with my lessons, walking a mile, sometimes in the hottest of weather, her habit powdered with ash from a burned field she had to cross.
But things went south for Sister Felicie. We heard that her father, a senior army officer, was killed on Okinawa. Some said the soldier was not her father but the fiancé she had given up when she entered the convent. Regardless, at the close of the war a great sadness seemed to descend upon her.
In the spring of ’47 she would take her science class on walks through the neighborhood, identifying trees, plants, and flowers along the way. Then, just before 3 P.M., we would end up at Costen’s Drug Store, and she would let everyone take a rest break on the benches under the awning. It was a grand way to end the school day because on some afternoons the Cheerio yo-yo man would arrive at exactly 3:05 and hold competitions on the corner.
But one day, just after the dismissal bell had rung across the street, I saw Sister Felicie walk into the alleyway between the drug store and Cobb’s Liquors and give money to a black man who had an empty eye socket. A few minutes later I saw her upend a small bottle of fortified wine, what hobos used to call short-dogs, then drop it surreptitiously into a trash can.
She turned and realized I had been watching her. She walked toward me, between the old brick walls of the buildings, her small shoes clicking on pieces of gravel and bottle caps and broken glass, her face stippled with color inside her wimple. “Why aren’t you waxing your string for the Cheerio contest?” she said.
“It hasn’t started yet, Sister,” I replied, avoiding her look, trying to smile.
“Better run on now,” she said.
“Are you all right, Sister?” I said, then wanted to bite off my tongue.
“Of course I’m all right. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. None. I just don’t think too good sometimes, Sister. You know me. I was just—”
But she wasn’t listening now. She walked past me toward the red light at the corner, her habit and beads swishing against my arm. She smelled like camphor and booze and the lichen in the alley she had bruised under her small shoes.
Two days later the same ritual repeated itself. Except this time Sister Felicie didn’t empty just one short-dog and head for the convent. I saw her send the black man back to Cobb’s for two more bottles. then she sat down on a rusted metal chair at the back of the alley, a book spread on her knees as though she were reading, the bottles on the ground barely hidden by the hem of her habit.
That’s when Mr. Dunlop and his son Vernon showed up. Vernon was seventeen and by law could not be made to attend school. That fact was a gift from God to the educational system of southwest Houston. Vernon had half-moon scars on his knuckles, biceps the size of small muskmelons, and deep-set simian eyes that focused on other kids with the moral sympathies of an electric drill.
Mr. Dunlop was thoroughly enjoying himself. First, he announced to everyone within earshot he was the owner of the entire corner, including the drug store. He told the Cheerio yo-yo man to beat it and not come back, then told the kids to either buy something inside the store or get off the benches they were loitering on.
His face lit like a jack-o’-lantern’s when he saw Sister Felicie emerge from the alley. She was trying to stand straight, and not doing a very good job of it, one hand touching the brick wall of the drug store, a drop of sweat running from the top edge of her wimple down the side of her nose.
“Looks like you got a little bit of the grog in you, Sister,” Mr. Dunlop said.
“What were you saying to the children?” she asked.
“Oh, her ladyship wants to know that, does she? Why don’t we have a conference with the pastor and hash it out?” Mr. Dunlop said.
“Do as you wish,” Sister replied, then walked to the red light with the cautious steps of someone aboard a pitching ship.
Mr. Dunlop dropped a buffalo nickel into a pay phone, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His head was shaved bald, his brow knurled, one eye recessed and glistening with pleasure when someone picked up on the other end. “Father?” Mr. Dunlop said.
His son Vernon squeezed his scrotum and shot us the bone.
The Cheerio yo-yo man did not come back to the corner and Sister Felicie disappeared from school for a week. Then one Monday morning she was back in class, looking joyless and glazed, as though she had just walked out of an ice storm.
That afternoon Benny and his girlfriend pulled into my driveway while I was picking up the trash Vernon and his brothers had thrown out of their attic window into the yard. “I can’t get the Atomic Bomb right. Get in the car. We’ll pick up your friend on the way out,” he said.
“Way where?” I said.
“The Shamrock. You want to go swimming and have some eats, don’t you?” he said.
“I’ll leave my mom a note,” I said.
“Tell her to come out and join us.”
That definitely will not flush, I thought, but did not say it.
Benny had said he couldn’t pull off the yo-yo trick called the Atomic Bomb. The truth was he couldn’t even master Walk the Dog. In fact, I couldn’t figure why a man with his wealth and criminal reputation would involve himself so intensely with children’s games. After Nick and I went swimming, we sat on the balcony of Benny’s suite, high above the clover-shaped pool of the Shamrock Hotel, and tried to show him the configurations of the Atomic Bomb. It was a disaster. He would spread the string between his fingers, then drop the yo-yo through the wrong spaces, knotting the string, rendering it useless. He danced up and down on the balls of his feet in frustration.
“There’s something wrong with this yo-yo. I’m gonna go back to the guy who sold it to me and stuff it down his throat,” he said.