"I don't know, man. I can't see why someone wanna do that t'anybody."
Tears were coming down Dupree's face. "I do it to the man done it to her." He looked me in the eye. "When I find out who it was, Easy, I'm'a kill that man. I don't care who he is."
"You boys better com'on in," Mouse said from the end of the hall. "Food's on the table."
Bula had rye in the cabinet. Mouse and Dupree drank it. Dupree had been crying and upset the whole evening. I asked him some questions but he didn't know anything. He told us about how the police had questioned him and held him for two days without telling him why. But when they finally told him about Coretta he broke down so they could see that it wasn't him.
Dupree drank steady while he told his story. He got more and more drunk until he finally passed out on the sofa.
"That Dupree is a good man," Mouse slurred. "But he jus' cain't hold his liquor."
"You got your sails pretty far up too, Raymond."
"You callin' me drunk?"
"All I'm sayin' is that you been puttin' it away along wit'im and you could be sure that you wouldn't pass no breath test neither."
"If I was drunk," he said, "could I do this?"
Mouse, moving as fast as I've ever seen a man move, reached into his fancy jacket and came out with that long-barreled pistol. The muzzle was just inches from my forehead.
"Ain't a man in Texas could outdraw me!"
"Put it down, Raymond," I said as calmly as I could.
"Go on," Mouse dared, as he put the pistol back in his shoulder holster. "Go fo' your gun. Les see who gets kilt."
My hands were on my knees. I knew that if I moved Mouse would kill me.
"I don't have a gun, Raymond. You know that."
"You fool enough to go without no piece then you must wanna be dead." His eyes were glazed and I was sure that he didn't see me. He saw somebody, though, some demon he carried around in his head.
He drew the pistol again. This time he cocked the hammer. "Say your prayers, nigger, 'cause I'm'a send you home."
"Let him go, Raymond," I said. "He done learned his lesson good enough. If you kill'im then he won't have got it." I was just talking.
"He fool enough t'call me out an' he ain't even got no gun! I kill the motherfucker!"
"Let him live, Ray, an' he be scared'a you whenever you walk in the room."
"Motherfucker better be scared. I kill the motherfucker. I kill'im!"
Mouse nodded and let the pistol fall down into his lap. His head fell to his chest and he was asleep; just like that!
I took the gun and put it on the table in the kitchen.
Mouse always kept two smaller pistols in his bag, I knew that from our younger days. I got one of them and left a note for Dupree and him. I told them that I had gone home and that I had Mouse's gun. I knew he wouldn't mind as long as I told him about it.
I drove down my block twice before I was sure no one was waiting for me in the streets. Then I parked around the corner so that anyone coming up to my place would think I was gone.
When I had the key in my lock the phone started ringing. It was on the seventh ring before I got to it.
"Easy?" She sounded as sweet as ever.
"Yeah, it's me. I thought you'd be halfway to New Orleans by now."
"I've been calling you all night. Where have you been?"
"Havin' fun. Makin' all kinds'a new friends. The police want me to come down there and live wit'em."
She took my joke about friends seriously. "Are you alone?"
"What do you want, Daphne?"
"I have to talk with you, Easy."
"Well go on, talk."
"No, no. I have to see you. I'm scared."
"I don't blame ya for that. I'm scared just talkin' to ya on the phone," I said. "But I need to talk to ya though. I need to know some things."
"Come meet me and I'll tell you everything you need to know."
"Okay. Where are you?"
"Are you alone? I only want you to know where I am."
"You mean you don't want your boyfriend Joppy to know where you hidin'?"
If she was surprised that I knew about Joppy she didn't show it.
"I don't want anybody to know where I am, but you. Not Joppy and not that other friend that you said was visiting."
"Mouse?"
"Nobody! Either you promise me or I hang up right now."
"Okay, okay fine. I just got in and Mouse ain't even here. Tell me where you are and I'll come get ya."
"You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Easy?"
"Naw. I just wanna talk, like you."
She gave me the address of a motel on the south side of L.A.
"Hurry up, Easy. I need you," she said before hanging up. She got off the phone so quickly that she didn't give me the number of her room.
I scribbled a note, making my plans as I wrote. I told Mouse that he could find me at a friend's house, Primo's. I wrote RAYMOND ALEXANDER in bold letters across the top of the note because the only words Mouse could read were his own two names. I hoped that Dupree came with Mouse to read him the note and show him the way to Primo's house.
Then I rushed out the door.
I found myself driving in the L.A. night again. The sky toward the valley was coral with skinny black clouds across it. I didn't know why I was going alone to get the girl in the blue dress. But for the first time in quite a while I was happy and expectant.
25
The Sunridge was a smallish pink motel, made up of two rectangular buildings that came together in an "L" around an asphalt parking lot. The neighborhood was mostly Mexican and the woman who sat at the manager's desk was a Mexican too. She was a full-blooded Mexican Indian; short and almond-eyed with deep olive skin that had lots of red in it. Her eyes were very dark and her hair was black, except for four strands of white which told me that she had to be older than she looked.
She stared at me, the question in her eyes.
"Lookin' for a friend," I said.
She squinted a little harder, showing me the thick webbing of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
"Monet is her last name, French girl."
"No men in the rooms."
"I just have to talk with her. We can go out for coffee if we can't talk here."
She looked away from me as if to say our talk was over.
"I don't mean to be disrespectful, ma'am, but this girl has my money and I'm willing to knock on every door until I find her."
She turned toward the back door but before she could call out I said, "Ma'am, I'm willing to fight your brothers and sons to talk to this woman. I don't mean her any harm, or you neither, but I have got to have words with her."
She sized me up, putting her nose in the air like a leery dog checking out the new mailman, then she measured the distance to the back door.
"Eleven, far end," she said at last.
I ran down to the far end of the building.
While I knocked on number eleven's door I kept looking over my shoulder.
She had on a gray terrycloth robe and a towel was wrapped into a bouffant on her head. Her eyes were green right then and when she saw me she smiled. All the trouble she had and all the trouble I might have brought with me and she just smiled like I was a friend who was coming over for a date.
"I thought you were the maid," she said.
"Uh-uh," I mumbled. She was more beautiful than ever in the low-slung robe. "We should get outta here."
She was looking past my shoulder. "We better talk to the manager first."
The short woman and two big-bellied Mexican men were coming our way. One of the men was swinging a nightstick. They stopped a foot from me; Daphne closed the door a little to hide herself.
"Is he bothering you, Miss?" the manager asked.
"Oh no, Mrs. Guitierra. Mr. Rawlins is a friend of mine. He's taking me to dinner." Daphne was amused.
"I don't want no men in the rooms," the woman said.
"I'm sure he won't mind waiting
in the car, would you, Easy?"
"I guess not."
"Just let us finish talking, Mrs. Guitierra, and he'll be a good man and go wait in his car."
One of the men was looking at me as if he wanted to break my head with his stick. The other one was looking at Daphne; he wanted something too.
When they moved back toward the office, still staring at us, I said to Daphne, "Listen. You wanted me to come here alone and here I am. Now I need the same feeling, so I want you to come with me to a place I know."
"How do I know that you aren't going to take me to the man Carter hired?" Her eyes were laughing.
"Uh-uh. I don't want any piece of him … I talked to your boyfriend Carter."
That took the smile from her face.
"You did! When?"
"Two, three days ago. He wants ya back and Albright wants that thirty thousand."
"I'm not going back to him," she said, and I knew that it was true.
"We can talk about that some other time. Right now you've got to get away from here."
"Where?"
"I know a place. You've got to get away from the men looking for you and I do too. I'll put you someplace safe and then we can talk about what we can do."
"I can't leave L.A. Not before I talk to Frank. He should be back by now. I keep calling though, and he's not home."
"The police tied him into Coretta, he's probably lyin' low."
"I have to talk to Frank."
"Alright, but we've got to get away from here right now."
"Wait a second," she said. She went into the room for a moment. When she reappeared she handed me a piece of paper wrapped around a wad of cash. "Go pay my rent, Easy. That way they won't bother us when they see us moving my bags."
Landlords everywhere love their money. When I paid Daphne's bill the two men left and the little woman even managed to smile at me.
Daphne had three bags but none of them was the beat-up old suitcase that she carried the first night we met.
We drove a long way. I wanted far from Watts and Compton so we went to East L.A.; what they call El Barrio today. Back then it was just another Jewish neighborhood, recently taken over by the Mexicans.
We drove past hundreds of poor houses, sad palm trees, and thousands of children playing and hollering in the streets.
We finally came to a dilapidated old house that used to be a mansion. It had a great cement porch with a high green roof and two big picture windows on each of the three floors. Two of the windows had been broken out; they were papered with cardboard and stuffed with rags. There were three dogs and eight old cars scattered and lounging around the red clay yard under the branches of a sickly and failing oak tree. Six or seven small children were playing among the wrecks. Hammered into the oak was a small wooden sign that read "rooms."
A grizzled old man in overalls and a tee-shirt was sitting in an aluminum chair at the foot of the stairs.
"Howdy, Primo," I waved.
"Easy," he said back to me. "You get lost out here?"
"Naw, man. I just wanted a little privacy so I figured to give you a try."
Primo was a real Mexican, born and bred. That was back in 1948, before Mexicans and black people started hating each other. Back then, before ancestry had been discovered, a Mexican and a Negro considered themselves the same. That is to say, just another couple of unlucky stiffs left holding the short end of the stick.
I met Primo when I became a gardener for a while. We worked together, with a team of men, taking on the large jobs in Beverly Hills and Brentwood. We even took care of a couple of places downtown, off of Sixth.
Primo was a good guy and he liked to run with me and my friends. He told us that he'd bought that big house so that he could turn it into a hotel. He was always begging us to come out and rent a room from him or to tell our friends about him.
He stood up when I came up the path. He only came up to my chest. "How's that?" he asked.
"You got somethin' with some privacy?"
"I got a little house out back that you and the seńorita can have." He bent down to look at Daphne in the car. She smiled nicely for him.
"How much?"
"Five dollars for a night."
"What?"
"It's a whole house, Easy. Made for love." He winked at me.
I could have argued him down and I would have done it for fun, but I had other things on my mind.
"Alright."
I gave him a ten-dollar bill and he showed us to the path that led around the big house to the house out back. He started to come with us but I stopped him.
"Primo, my man," I said. "I'll come on up tomorrow an' we do some damage to a fifth of tequila. Alright?"
He smiled and thumped my arm before he turned to leave. I wished that my life was still so simple that all I was after was a wild night with a white girl.
The first thing we saw was a mass of flowering bushes with honeysuckle, snapdragons, and passion fruit weaving through. A jagged, man-sized hole was hacked from the branches. Past that doorway was a small building like a coach house or the gardener's quarters on a big estate. Three sides of the house were glass doors from ceiling to floor. All the doors could open outward onto the cement patio that surrounded these three sides of the house, but they were all shut. The front door was wood, painted green.
Long white curtains were drawn over all the windows.
Inside, the house was just a big room with a fallen-down spring-bed on one side and a two-burner gas range on the other. There was a table with a toaster on it and four spindly chairs. There was a big stuffed sofa upholstered with a dark brown material that had giant yellow flowers stitched into it.
"It's just beautiful," Daphne exclaimed.
My face must've said that she was crazy because she blushed a little and added, "Well it could use some work but I think we could make something out of it."
"Maybe if we tore it down …"
Daphne laughed and that was very nice. As I said before, she was like a child and her childish pleasure touched me.
"It is beautiful," she said. "Maybe not rich but it's quiet and it's private. Nobody else could see us here."
I put her bags down next to the sofa.
"I gotta go out for a little while," I said. Once I had her in place I saw how to get things moving.
"Stay."
"I got to, Daphne. I got two bad men and the L.A. police on my trail."
"What bad men?" She sat at the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. She had put on a yellow sundress at the motel, and it showed off her tan shoulders.
"The man your friend hired and Frank Green, your other friend."
"What does Frankie have to do with you?"
I went up to her and she stood to meet me. I pulled my collar down and showed her my gashed throat, saying, "That's what Frankie done to Easy."
"Oh, honey!" She reached out gently for my neck.
Maybe it was just the touch of woman that got to me or maybe it was finally realizing all that had happened to me in the previous week; I don't know.
"Look at that! That's the cops!" I said, pointing at the bruise on my eye. "I been arrested twice, blamed for four murders, threatened by people I wished I never met, and …" I felt that my liver was going to come out between my teeth.
"Oh my poor man," she said as she took me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. She didn't let go of my arm while she turned on the water for the bath. She was right there with me, unbuttoning my shirt, letting down my pants.
I was sitting there, naked on the toilet seat, and watching her go through the mirror-doored medicine cabinet. I felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting.
"Death," the saxophone rasps. But, really, I didn't care.
26
Daphne Monet, a woman who I didn't know at all personally, had me laid back in the deep porcelain tub while she carefully washed between my toes and then up my legs. I had an erection lying flat against my stoma
ch and I was breathing slowly, like a small boy poised to catch a butterfly. Every once in a while she'd say, "Shh, honey, it's all right." And for some reason that caused me pain.
When she finished with my legs she washed my whole body with a rough hand towel and a bar of soap that had pumice in it.
I never felt drawn to a woman the way I was to Daphne Monet. Most beautiful women make me feel like I want to touch them, own them. But Daphne made me look inside myself. She'd whisper a sweet word and I was brought back to the first time I felt love and loss. I was remembering my mother's death, back when I was only eight, by the time Daphne got to my belly. I held my breath as she lifted the erection to wash underneath it; she looked into my face, with eyes that had become blue over the water, and stroked my erection up and down, twice. She smiled when she finished and pressed it back down against my flesh.
I couldn't say a word.
She stepped back from the tub and shrugged off her yellow dress in one long stretch then tossed it in the water over me and pulled down her pants. She sat on the toilet and urinated so loud that it reminded me more of a man.
"Hand me the paper, Easy," she said.
The roll was at the foot of the bathtub.
She stood over the tub, with her hips pressed outward, looking down on me. "If my pussy was like a man's thing it'd be as big as your head, Easy."
I stood out of the tub and let her hold me around the testicles. As we went into the bedroom she kept whispering obscene suggestions in my ear. The things she said made me ashamed. I never knew a man who talked as bold as Daphne Monet.
I never liked it when women talked like that. I felt it was masculine. But, beneath her bold language, Daphne seemed to be asking me for something. And all I wanted was to reach as far down in my soul as I could to find it.
We yelled and screamed and wrestled all night long. Once, when I had fallen asleep, I woke to find her rubbing an ice cube down my chest. Once, at about 3 a.m., she took me out to the cement patio behind the bushes and made love to me as I lay back against a rough tree.
When the sun came up she nestled against my side on the bed and asked, "Does it hurt, Easy?"
"What?"
"Your thing, does it hurt?"
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