A Red Death

by Mosley, Walter

  Chaim was my friend and he was dead. Poinsettia was my tenant and she was dead too. One way or another both deaths were my fault. Even if it was only because of me not telling the truth or not having compassion when I could have.

  She was shivering, so I put my hand out to cover hers.

  The white cook came out from behind the counter and a few people turned all the way around in their chairs to watch.

  Shirley didn’t notice it.

  She said, “He wanted to get out of the country, Easy.”

  “An’ we gotta get outta here,” I said.

  WHEN WE GOT BACK to my house I asked her in. I don’t know why. I was dirty and hurting and the last thing I wanted was to be entertaining some young woman, but I asked and she accepted, so we walked past the daylilies and the potatoes and strawberries up the dirt path to my house. And when I was fishing around in my pocket for the key she looked up at me and I stopped to look at her for a moment or two. Then I decided to kiss her. I leaned forward kind of quickly …

  It wasn’t the shot that bothered me.

  It wasn’t the hole torn in my front door or the car taking off down the street; nor was it the little yell or the look in Shirley Wenzler’s eye, the look that could break a man’s heart, that got to me. It wasn’t bad luck or broken teeth or the remnants of a hangover or the whisper of a breeze that suggested death at the back of my neck. It wasn’t political ideas that I didn’t care about or understand that made me mad.

  It was the idea that I suffered all of this because I wasn’t, and hadn’t been, my own man. I didn’t even know who it was who was shooting at me in front of my own house! People hanging and shot dead for no real reason; that’s what got me mad. Real mad. Something I could feel, like I felt the stirrings of an erection for Shirley when what I really wanted was a good night’s sleep, a competent dentist, a peaceful death at the hands of a jealous husband or a racist cop.

  Like most men, I wanted a war I could go down shooting in. Not this useless confusion of blood and innocence.

  I stood there looking into Shirley’s frightened face. She was shivering. I put my arms around her and said, “It’s all right.” Then I took her into my house without even looking after who it was that shot at us. I decided then that he was a dead man, whoever he was. I was going to start killing him at the soles of his feet. Whoever he was, he was going to remember me in hell.

  “Do you think it was the government?” Shirley stammered as I helped her get the glass of whiskey to her lips.

  “Prob’ly,” I said, but I really didn’t believe it. “They think you might get away wit’ them papers.”

  “Oh, Easy!” She grabbed my arm. “What can we do?”

  “You gots to run. Run hard.”

  “Where? Where can I go?”

  “There’s a hotel downtown called the Filbert. You go there and take a room. Call yourself Diane Bowers. I once had a girlfriend called that. Call me when you check in. I might not be here right when you call, but if I’m not I’ll get to you under that same name, Diane Bowers.”

  She shuddered and pulled close to me.

  “Let me stay for a while before I go. I’m too scared to drive.”

  And so we took off everything but our underclothes and my pistol. We lay in my bed holding each other until she stopped shivering and we both fell to sleep. I held her tightly, more for my own comfort than hers. I dreamt that there was a trapdoor next to my mother’s deathbed. I fell a long way down a passage that was similar to a well. At the bottom was a long river, but I knew it was a sewer, and there were men, desperate white men, searching for me. Sometimes the men would change into crocodiles and search for me in the water, sometimes the crocodiles would change into men. I was pressing back against a rocky wall, hiding. My hand, every now and then, unconsciously pushed into the recess of the wall, and every time that happened the wall hurt. It was a terrible pain and I came half awake massaging the side of my jaw where Melvin had broken my tooth.

  I winced in pain, almost coming awake when I saw Mofass laughing behind his desk and then asking me about how could the IRS let me off. I saw him bad-mouthing Poinsettia and refusing to help sign my papers over to him.

  Dreams are wonderful things, because they’re a different way of thinking. I came to, for just a moment, with a clear idea of the path I should take. I knew who killed Poinsettia and I knew why. Even in my dream I knew it; even in my dreams I was plotting revenge.

  — 33 —

  WE BEGAN KISSING IN OUR SLEEP. It was passionate and sloppy kissing while we were still unaware. When we came awake it was still dearly felt but neither of us wanted it to go anywhere. She got up and wandered around the room, maybe as her father had. I went up to her and kissed her again. I pressed her against the wall, she wrapped her legs around my hips and held on tight….

  Rather than sex it was a kind of a spasm, like vomiting or cramps. The sounds we made were the sounds boxers make when they take a blow to the body.

  We didn’t whisper about love. We didn’t say anything until it was over.

  Then all I said was that I’d call at the Filbert as soon as I could. I gave her EttaMae’s number and told her to call if she couldn’t get to me.

  “Tell Etta what you need and tell her I said to call Mouse.”

  “Who?”

  “A friend’a mines,” I said.

  “Oh, I remember.” She smiled for the first time. “He’s the man you said reminded you of Poppa.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  I didn’t know what was going to happen with Shirley. All I could think about was vengeance, and, I thought, I knew how to go about getting it.

  It was just getting dark outside and I saw Shirley to her car, pretending all the while that I was looking out for a bad guy. But I knew that shot was meant for me. And I knew who took that shot.

  There was ice in my veins.

  PRIMO’S PLACE was out in East Los Angeles, the Mexican neighborhood. He used to own a big house and rent out rooms to illegal aliens, but the board of health got down on him and condemned the place. So he put three hundred dollars down on a two-story house on Brooklyn Boulevard in Boyle Heights and tore out all the walls on the first floor. He and his wife, Flower, and all their eleven children lived on the upper level while Primo and Flower ran an informal luncheon café downstairs.

  It was a dark room with bare, unfinished beams that were once hidden by walls. A few mismatched tables and chairs here and there. Flower was from Panama originally, but she knew her Mexican cooking well enough to make an egg-and-potato burrito and fried sausages to make you cry. Any Mexican day laborer within three miles came to Primo’s for lunch. There was tequila and beer from the package store next door and smells so good that a Tijuana man might think he was back home with his family.

  It was late when I got there, but I knew the family would be downstairs. Dinner with Primo started at about five and went on until the older children carried their sleeping brothers and sisters to bed.

  “Easy! Hola!” Flower shouted when I stuck my head in the door. I never knocked at the family hour because there was too much noise for that type of pleasantry.

  She crossed the large room and folded me in her soft embrace. Flower was bigger than EttaMae, and obviously a Negro, but we still considered her Mexican because she was from south of the border and cursed in Spanish when she got mad.

  “Easy!” Primo said. He shook my hand and pounded my shoulder. “Get him a drink, somebody. Jesus! It’s your godfather Ezekiel. Get him a bottle of beer.”

  Silent and shy, the little child jumped up, running the obstacle course of children, dogs, and furniture for the kitchen in back. Jesus Peña. Most of the Peña children were light-colored, honey, like their father, with big moonlike eyes. But Jesus was a duller hue with more Asiatic eyes. He wasn’t their natural child. He was a boy I found eating raw flour from a five-pound bag. He’d been abused by an evil white man; a white man who had paid for his evil with a bullet in his heart. I brough
t Jesus to Primo and Flower. They kept him as long as I promised to take him back if anything ever happened to them. We’d drawn up the papers and Jesus was my godchild. I was proud of him, because he was smart and strong and he loved animals. The only thing wrong about Jesus was that he wouldn’t talk. I never knew if he remembered anything about his past, because I couldn’t get him to talk, and whenever I asked him about it he hugged me and kissed me, then he ran away.

  “What’s wrong, Easy?” Primo asked.

  “Somethin’ gotta be wrong fo’me to wanna see my friends and my godchild?”

  “Something wrong if you got a jaw that big.”

  It must’ve swollen while I napped.

  “Got in a fight,” I said. “I won, though.”

  Flower frowned at me. She jabbed the side of my mouth with her finger, and I nearly fainted.

  “That’s infected,” she said. “You gotta see somebody or it’ll get bad.”

  “Soon as I take care of some business.”

  “That tooth going to take care of you,” she said, making her eyes big and round. The children all laughed and mimicked her.

  “Okay!” Primo shouted, then he yelled something in Spanish and waved his hands as if he were making a breeze to blow the children upstairs.

  At first the children resisted, but then Primo started slapping them and shouting.

  Flower got them up the stairs and turned to see Primo waving at her. “You too, woman. Easy’s here to talk to me.”

  Flower laughed and stuck out her tongue, then she turned and stuck her butt at us. She ran up the stairs before Primo could grab something to throw.

  I pulled out the little glass bottle I’d gotten from Jackson Blue. There were five or six tablets left.

  “What you taking for that, Easy?”

  “Morphine,” I said.

  Primo made like he was going to gag. “That’s bad stuff, man, I seen it in the war, in the Pacific. They give the boys that till they got the monkey on the back.”

  The morphine was wearing off. I felt like there was a gorilla in my mouth.

  “I got a serious problem, Primo. After I take care of that maybe I could see a dentist.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “What’s that?”

  “Somebody been on my ass, man. I’ma have t’satisfy myself who it is, an’ then I’ma kill’im.”

  “Who?”

  “I ain’t gonna tell ya, Primo. If you don’t know nuthin’ then cain’t nobody blame you fo’nuthin’.”

  I think that the lack of sleep, the pain, the morphine and liquor were all factors in my craziness then. I could tell that Primo thought I was less than rational, because he spoke softly and in short sentences. He didn’t laugh or make jokes as he usually did.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “Me and my girlfriend, EttaMae, might have to get away after it’s done. I thought maybe you wanna take a vacation down in Mexico, back to that town in the badlands you always talk about.”

  Primo loved to talk about Anchou. It was a town in central Mexico that wasn’t on any map; no one knew where it was but the people who came from there, or the rare few who were invited by one of the inhabitants. He once told me that the town was mobile; that if they knew trouble was coming they could pack up and move in just a couple of hours. But the Federales didn’t want to mess with Anchou. An Anchou woman, Primo said, would bite off a Federal’s prick and serve it to her man for a love potion.

  “Why don’t you just go down to Texas? They won’t find you.”

  “Cain’t. Government in this. They ain’t thought they gone to work ’less they cross a state border.”

  Mr. Peña frowned at me for a while. He took a drink from his beer and then frowned at me some more.

  I was massaging the hinge of my jaw.

  “Take the pills, Easy,” he said at last.

  I took three, washing them down with the beer Jesus had brought. There were three left in the bottle.

  “Take the rest of them,” Primo urged.

  “This is all I got left.”

  “I got more. Take them so it really stops hurting.”

  I downed the rest of the bottle, hoping that the aching would stop and I could sleep well enough to do what had to be done the next day.

  “I’ve got five hundred dollars right here, man,” I said. I pulled a folded envelope from my back pocket and handed it to him.

  Money always made Primo laugh. The more he had the more he laughed. He counted the twenties and tens I’d squirreled away in my walls. Every bill made his grin wider, his eyes glassier.

  Maybe it was the dope kicking in, but I got a flash of fear that Primo was up to no good. Maybe he was in on all that bad luck I was having.

  “You gonna help me, man?” I asked.

  The fears must’ve shown in my voice, because Primo said, “Yes,” very seriously. He handed me a clay jug from the side of his chair.

  “Tequila?” I asked.

  “Mescal.”

  I took a swig. I knew that it was potent liquor because I felt it even through the descending opiate haze.

  Primo told me stories about Anchou.

  “It’s an old town,” I remember him saying. “There was a chief there forty years ago who ran with Zapata before he was hung.”

  Every now and again he’d reach out to poke my jaw. If I told him it hurt he’d pass the jug over. But after a while there wasn’t any pain.

  Primo laughed too. After a while Flower came down and drank with us. She kept me company while Primo rummaged through some old boxes he kept in the corner of the large room.

  “She’s a mighty fine lady, Primo,” I said when he came back. He had something like pruning shears in his hand.

  “I found it,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I continued. I heard him but I was too intent on my own purpose to heed. “I got a woman like’er down in one’a my buildin’s. She got a strong arm like yo’ woman here and she smell like sweet flowers too.”

  I fell forward in my chair, trying to kiss Mrs. Peña on the lips if I remember right. I landed on her and got about as close as her shoulder. Then the room started spinning. I found myself on my back, on the floor with Flower above my head. She was pinning my shoulders down with her considerable weight.

  “… my cousin was a dentist in Guadalajara many years ago. I kept his tools,” I heard Primo say. My stomach was flopping around, and I would have followed it but for Mrs. Peña’s grip.

  “Open wide, Easy,” Primo was saying. He held my nostrils closed with one hand as he held the deadly-looking shears in the other. But they weren’t shears really, they were more like streamlined pliers with an extended, toothy clamp at the nose.

  “This is the one,” Primo said as he frowned.

  That’s when I started fighting. I couldn’t yell because of that damned tool and I couldn’t turn away because of Flower’s hold. But I bucked. I humped and bucked under Primo like he was my first love. I fought him and bit until all the fight went out of me and I felt something far off in my mouth like boulders rolling around in there.

  Jesus Peña was squatting down next to my head. He was staring intently into my face. When he saw that my eyes were open he smiled. I saw that he was missing a tooth, and I moved my own tongue toward the pain in my mouth; at least toward where the pain had been. What I found was a bitter-tasting gauze.

  I sat up and spat the wad of cheesecloth to the floor. Jesus jumped back like a frightened kitten. The cloth was tooth-shaped and filled with tiny branches and leaves. It was also deeply stained with blood.

  The blood reminded me of Poinsettia’s feet and floor, of the hand marks on Chaim’s walls. I lurched up off the cot. They had put me behind some boxes toward the back of the café. A few men were already there, eating buttered wheat tortillas and drinking beer for their breakfasts.

  At least it’s only morning, I remember thinking.

  Flower was standing at the stove, off to my right. She was smiling in the steam that rose from a black
kettle.

  “Come over, Easy.”

  She handed me a bowl of broth topped with a skin of tiny crackers. There was a poached egg toward the bottom of the bowl.

  “Garlic soup,” she smiled.

  I sat on a stool next to her. The first swallow made me gag, but I kept on eating the stuff. I hadn’t been eating very much and I thought I needed the strength.

  The sun was coming through a little window in the back of the kitchen. Tiny motes of dust, like a school of minute silvery fish, floated in the ray. I thought of the Magnolia Street apartments and of Mofass, that shit-brown carp, pulling himself up the long stairs.

  After a while my stomach settled down. My tooth socket barely ached.

  “Here you are,” Flower said. She was holding out a handful of tea bags. “If it hurts, bite down on one of these until it goes away.”

  I pocketed the bags and asked, “Where’s Primo?”

  “He went to see his brother in San Diego. They gonna come up here while we’re down south.”

  So the plan was in action.

  “Thanks for the dentist work, Flower. I guess I was a little outta my head what with the pain and the dope.”

  “We love you, Easy,” was her reply.

  It was all I could do to keep from crying.

  — 34 —

  WHEN I GOT HOME I took a long shower and calmed down. Murder was quieter in my heart. It was still there but softer, a little less insistent. I took a long time toweling off and dressing. I took time to appreciate the crisp lines of my walnut chairs and the spirally grain of the pine floor in the bedroom.

  I put on a nice tan pair of slacks that an old girlfriend had bought me but I had only worn once, and a red Jamaican shirt that was hand-painted with designs of giant green palm leaves. I put on white nylon socks and basketlike woven black leather shoes. My .38 was the last item I chose. It hung unnoticed at the back of my pants, under the billowing red blouse.