Rose Gold

by Walter Mosley

  34

  Sixteen miles north of Santa Barbara was a turnoff marked by a leaning sign that read FILO’S SANDY HOOK. The winding off-ramp led to another deserted beach. This seaside cove was more hard earth and weeds than sand and shell. Above the ocean was suspended a half-moon that shone brightly in a nearly cloudless sky. Close to the water stood a three-story ruin that had once been a stone and mortar lighthouse. Other than that, there was nothing and no one else around.

  I parked behind some coastal shrubbery and made my way to the onetime tower of light that was ever so slowly turning to dust. There was a doorway with no door that led inside to a cracked stone floor and a rusted-out iron corkscrew-shaped stairway that wound upward.

  When I entered, a large rodent or maybe a feral cat hustled out through a hole in the wall.

  There was no roof and so the inside was illuminated under a steady stream of lunar light relieved here and there by soft shadows.

  I lit a cigarette and perched against a ledge that jutted out from the seaward side. Smoking in the tapered stone building, feeling the night chill of the coast, I allowed my mind to go wandering as I waited.

  First I thought about the hippie girl who had fallen in love with the backwoods witch. She had come reluctantly to help me but then threw her full energy into the task at hand. She believed in peace and love and helping all people everywhere, but Coco also knew how to seduce a man with sidelong glances and subtle movements.

  And then there was our victim, the guy named Petrie possibly looking for a night of passion, or maybe he planned to rob the girl who he thought was a flush dope dealer. Hippies had their crooks too.

  It felt as if I were in the middle of a play that I didn’t want to be in. The story was the search for a woman and a man who were not what they seemed. And even though I would have rather been home with my daughter, I was frustrated that I couldn’t manage to make definite progress in locating my quarry.

  I smiled and lit another cigarette. Careful what you wish for, people said every day for probably as long as there had existed Homo sapiens. Soon, maybe in an hour, I’d find what I was looking for and wish that I had never made it that far.

  My hands were cold. The susurration of the waves filled the air. I didn’t have a work a day job. I was paid for my labors but not really answerable to anyone. The path I was on might lead to my death, but I was consoled by the fact that this was true for every human being that had ever drawn a breath, felt a chill, or looked up at the moon.

  “Coco?”

  It was a hushed call, male and hopeful, coming from just outside the doorless doorway.

  I stayed still.

  A footfall on the gravel brought a soft-edged shadow into range.

  I snubbed out my cigarette against the wall.

  Another step and I could see the form of a man entering the husk of a lighthouse. He was somewhere around five-nine, skinny, beardless with long hair that was probably blond, dressed in jeans and a festive, floral-patterned shirt. It was the shirt that told me that he had come there for romance and not robbery.

  “Petrie?” I said with an upbeat tone to my voice.

  He could have run but instead he came into a pool of moonlight.

  “Who’s there?” he asked the shadows.

  Coming out of the shade, I said, “Coco’s friend—Warren Lull,” picking a name out of the chilly air.

  “Who? Where’s Coco?”

  I chose that moment to show him my pistol.

  He jerked backward, bumping into a wall.

  “I could just as well shoot you in the back as in the front,” I said, cutting to the quick of our conversation.

  “Wha, wha, wha, wha, what you want?”

  “Uhuru-Bob Nolicé,” I said.

  “I don’t know who you talkin’ about, man,” Petrie said, his eyes as big as the moon above our heads.

  I leveled the barrel of the pistol so that it was pointing at him. How could he know that the safety was engaged?

  “Hey, man!”

  “Uhuru Nolicé,” I insisted.

  “We’re pledged, brother. We not s’posed to tell.”

  “That will be your last pledge.”

  “I don’t know nuthin’.”

  I raised my gun hand, now pointing at his crown.

  He started to weep.

  Then I took a calculated risk. I flipped off the safety with my thumb and fired a shot over his head out a window behind him.

  It was stupid of me but I was tired of the runaround. I wanted to get somewhere.

  “He’s in a cabin, he’s in a cabin, he’s in a cabin we use sometimes for parties.” Petrie fell to his knees, crying out loud as he begged.

  I felt bad about breaking him down like that. I didn’t see myself as a bully or a ruffian but there I was treating my fellowman like he was a dog.

  “Get up!” I barked, even while feeling I wanted to console him. “Get the fuck on your feet!”

  He was so scared that it took him a moment to find his feet, but then he did as he was told, sobbing.

  “You gonna take me to that cabin or I will bury you under this floor.”

  He nodded and I took out a pair of handcuffs, handing them to him.

  “Lock one’a these around one wrist.”

  He did as I said and asked, “What about the other one?”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We walked over to where my new-old car was hidden and I had him get into the passenger’s side. I worked the free cuff around the chrome handle on the glove compartment, binding him to my Dodge.

  “Okay,” I said once I was behind the wheel, “which way?”

  It was an extraordinarily beautiful drive. We turned up into the coastal mountains on a series of graded dirt roads, through a vibrant pine forest made even more exquisite by the light of the moon. On the way I saw an owl in flight and a group of six magnificent tule elk crossing our path.

  For the whole ride Petrie rambled and farted.

  “It’s not my fault we put him up here,” he said between directions. “I don’t even like the motherfucker. He took my girl and danced around like some kinda faggot in that African dress talkin’ all kinds’a shit. It was Theodore and Moondog wanted to help him. They said that he was fightin’ the Man but I think it must’a just been some jealous boyfriend shootin’ him when he jumped out a window.

  “You know I’m from Chicago and we just do what we have to do to survive but I never meant to hurt nobody. And I was just comin’ up to meet with that Coco. But I didn’t know what she was up to or nuthin’.… You know I came out here three years ago because I didn’t like the winter. I’m just here for the sun, that’s all.…”

  His blathering had no through-line but, for that matter, neither did his life. I had to open my window because of the flatulence. His cowering made me want to lash out and hit him with the pistol in my hand—I held back, however. I knew that it wasn’t his fault. He was in fear for his life and wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.

  We had driven for forty minutes or so when he finally said, “It’s down in that valley. You could pull off the road up ahead.”

  I drove into a natural recess between the trees and got out. Maybe two hundred feet away and down across a sloping lea sat a lopsided shack with a steady white plume coming out from a smokestack up top. There was light coming through a window. Another car was parked in the recess: a white Ford Falcon.

  “He’s down there?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is this his car?”

  “No. It looks like Meredith Taylor’s.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “She lives at the commune.”

  “What commune?”

  “The house where I met Coco at.”

  I took another pair of handcuffs and attached Petrie’s other wrist to a steel bar under his seat.

  “If I hear one peep out of you I will come back and put a bullet in your head, do you understand me?”

  Nodding, he let
out a long, plaintive fart and I walked away, down toward the smoking shack.

  35

  As I approached the door of the cabin I began to discern a knocking sound: clackety-clack, then a beat of silence before the next clack. One, two, one, space, two—one, two, one, space, two. The rhythm sped up for a few moments then slowed, then sped up again. There came a low feminine moan and I understood what I was hearing.

  The door had a rusty iron latch, not a knob, and there was no keyhole. Gun in hand, I slowly depressed the metal handle then let the door swing inward from its own weight. I took a step into the one-room structure, remembering Petrie coming into the lighthouse.

  There were three kerosene lanterns placed around the disheveled room. In one corner there stood a big iron bed. Against a sidewall there was a cast-iron woodstove that had an exhaust pipe going into and up the fireplace. Opposite the front door there was a rough dark-wood table. Leaning back, spread-legged on the table, was a chubby white woman. Between her legs, moving at an off-tempo to the beat of the knocking sound, was the naked back of a powerful black man: a welterweight.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” she said.

  “That’s it, baby,” he answered, “gimme all’a that shit.”

  The only thing he wore was a bandage around the middle of his left thigh. The dressing was a futile attempt to stanch the bleeding of his wound. It might have worked except for his heart thumping out of control and him doing the shimmy-shake between the girl’s lifted thighs.

  She sat up to embrace him and saw me over a shoulder.

  “Bob!” she shouted.

  “I’m right here, mama. I’m right here.”

  “No! Behind you!”

  “Say what?”

  “There’s somebody behind you!”

  The man turned around quickly, which was a mistake for two reasons. First, there was a good amount of blood at his bare feet. This made for a slippery surface. Second, that amount of blood meant that he was weakened, making him unable to control the abrupt momentum and slide of the turn.

  So Uhuru-Bob Mantle-Nolicé spun around, skidded on his own blood, and crashed to the floor with a grunt and moan, leaving the young woman with her heels still up on the table ledge exposing the place that he had been literally dying to get at.

  “What do you want?” she said, looking from my face to the gun in my hand.

  “For you to put on some clothes and get whatever first-aid kit you got so we can bind this fool’s wound.”

  She grabbed a billowy calico dress from a chair, donned it, and then picked up a box from a corner near the table. The box had a big red cross on it but I didn’t want to take the chance that there was a pistol in there.

  “Leave it closed and bring it over here, then sit down on that chair,” I told her.

  She did as I said.

  “What do you want?” she asked me.

  “Who are you?” Bob said on a heavy breath. Now that he was on the floor, the weakness from his exertions was overtaking him.

  “Turn over on your side,” I said, “on the leg that’s not shot.”

  Bob also followed my commands.

  I opened the first-aid box and checked out the contents.

  “Come here,” I said to the girl. “I want you to pour the alcohol on the gauze and press it against the wound. Wrap the bandage around it twelve times, then tape it. After that, tie another cut of bandage around the leg just above the wound so that it’s loose.”

  They were both addled by the sex and shocked by my sudden appearance in the middle of nowhere, and so offered little resistance.

  I looked around the cabin; under the table and in the corners. There were no weapons in sight.

  “What now?” she asked when she was finished with the initial dressing.

  There was a washbasin on a counter next to the fireplace. I went there and saw a big wooden salad spoon in the drying rack. I took it and returned to the patient and his reluctant nurse.

  “Put this under the loose bandage and twist until it’s real tight,” I said.

  On the fifth turn Uhuru-Bob groaned in pain.

  “Is the bullet still in there?” I asked him.

  “Where else it gonna go?”

  “So you were gonna sit up in here fuckin’ and bleedin’ till you got gangrene and died?”

  “My girlfriend went down to get help. She probably comin’ right now.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m just not that lucky.”

  Some private detectives spend long nights in darkened rooms listening to and taking pictures of the people next door; they sit for days parked down the block from the homes of insurance cheats or adulterers, waiting to get just the right incriminating photograph. Some upscale gumshoes are little more than accountants who go through thousands of pages of financial transactions until they find the one entry that indicts the subject of their investigation.

  That’s not me.

  I’m the guy who helps put the bloodstained white dress shirt on a naked man who has a bullet in his leg. I’m the guy who, with the help of a lusty hippie chick, drags that same man uphill through a field to a car that he had to buy because someone shot the windshield out of his last automobile.

  When we got to the Dodge I had the girl named Meredith sit on the farting Petrie’s lap. Then I made Bob lie down in the back and cuffed his wrists to a metal rod under the driver’s seat.

  That was how I worked. My puzzles had human pieces and no one resolution. I was like the guy with the sack of corn, the goose, and the fox trying get across the river in a boat that could only take two passengers at a time.

  Half the way down to the highway, where there was no human structure in sight, I stopped the car. All the way, Petrie farted and Bob moaned. Meredith kept silent. I liked her for that reason.

  “You two listen to me,” I said to Petrie and Meredith. “Bob here is wanted for robbery, kidnapping, and murder. You guys are what the police call accomplices. If I tell them about you you’ll spend at least five years in the penitentiary. A solid five with no parole, no time off for good behavior. I don’t need the headache, however. I don’t care what you did. So I’m gonna let you out and give each of you a hundred dollars. I suggest that you hike back up to Meredith’s car and drive north or south, anywhere but back to that commune. Because the police will be coming and I won’t lift a finger to help.”

  After freeing Petrie I gave them both money and left them on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.

  Now and again I wonder about Petrie and Meredith. Maybe the trauma of that night brought them closer together and they married and had kids. Maybe they fell asleep in the cabin and Meredith woke up early taking his hundred dollars. It doesn’t matter but I like to speculate—there’s no harm in that.

  “You really a cop, man?” Uhuru-Bob asked from a prone position on the back floor of my Dodge.

  We were headed for Isla Vista.

  “Private,” I said. “I’m working for a guy who thinks that you’ve been set up but he doesn’t know how and he wants me to prove it.”

  “What guy?”

  “He doesn’t want to be identified, for obvious reasons.”

  I figured this was all true. Because, as far as Bob was concerned, I was working for myself.

  “Well, he’s right,” Bob said. “I haven’t done none’a that. I mean I was there when Rose robbed that liquor store but I didn’t even know she was gonna do that.”

  “What about that vice principal you said that you killed?”

  “I never said I killed nobody,” he proclaimed. “I called the paper and told them that he deserved it. I went to a high school where he taught at. Mr. Emerson always had a high-school girlfriend. He was just a dog. Some father or boyfriend prob’ly shot him.”

  “What about the shootout with the police?”

  “The only shootout I had was when they shot me in the leg.”

  36
/>   The name of the coffeehouse where I left Coco was Dylan’s Dawn.

  Uhuru-Bob gave little resistance when I wrapped first-aid tape over his mouth and around his head.

  There was a lovely young woman with natural red hair strumming a guitar and singing about ugly things on a small dais next to the coffee bar. There were probably eighty customers, not one of them over the age of twenty-five. They all, except for the singer, looked my way when I entered. They all, except for Coco, were suspicious of a suited man my age among them.

  Coco was sitting at a table flanked by three young hippie men. They could probably feel the passion she had for Jo and were hoping to get a little of that precious commodity for themselves.

  When I walked up to the table a hale, black-haired, black-bearded young suitor stood and said, “What do you want here, brother?”

  “Not you,” I replied easily.

  “Then maybe you should go,” he suggested.

  He had big muscles under a loose blue shirt and held himself in a military bearing. A vet, I thought, but that didn’t bother me. I was a wartime veteran too—and I had a gun in my pocket.

  “Hi, Uncle Thad,” Coco said as she jumped up and kissed my cheek. “I was getting worried about you.”

  “Uncle?” the standing hippie said.

  “Is something wrong with that, Roger?” my newly minted niece asked.

  “But …” he said.

  “Thad is married to my mother’s sister. He used to change my diapers when I was a baby.”

  “We gotta go,” I said.

  “It was nice meeting you guys,” Coco said as she went to get the purple bag, which was hanging from the back of her chair. “Sorry I can’t go to that Doors concert with you.”

  “How can I call you?” Roger asked.

  “I’ll be back,” she lied.

  I installed Coco in the backseat, where she could keep up the pressure on Bob’s wound while I drove. It wasn’t the first time she had sat in the backseat of my car tending to an injured black man.

  She took the tape from his head.

  “Do you mind if I let you off at Terry’s?” I asked the girl. “I don’t think I have time to go all the way out to Mama Jo’s.”