Bad Boy Brawly Brown

by Walter Mosley

  “By the way they shoot you in back’a your head,” I said.

  Mercury moaned and I felt for him. Even if he had been a white man, there would have been little hope for his survival.

  When I called the shop steward at the dockworkers’ union, he laughed at me. That is, until I told him that I was coming down there with Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. Even the criminals in the white community had heard about Mouse.

  I wore denim overalls the night of the meeting. Mercury’s and Chapman’s clothes were so nondescript that I can’t even remember the colors. But Mouse wore a butter-cream gabardine suit. He was a killing man, then and always, but back then Mouse didn’t question himself, didn’t wonder at all.

  “They made a mistake, Bob,” Mouse said to the man who had introduced himself as Mr. Robert. He wore a long coat and hat and stood over Mouse, who, already a smallish man, was seated.

  “That’s not enough —,” Mr. Robert began in his guttural, East Coast snarl.

  Before he could finish, Mouse leapt to his feet, pulled out his long-nosed .41-caliber pistol, and shot the hat right off of Robert’s head. The two men who stood behind him gestured toward their guns but changed their minds when they looked down the barrel of Mouse’s smoking piece.

  Mr. Robert was on the floor, feeling for blood under his toupee.

  “So like I was sayin’, Bob,” Mouse continued. “They made a mistake. They didn’t know that you was who you is. They didn’t know that. Did you, boys?”

  “No, sir!” Mercury shouted like a buck private at roll call. He was a bulky man with cheeks so fat that they made his head resemble a shiny black pear.

  “Uh-uh,” Chapman, the lighter-skinned, smaller, and smarter of the two, grunted.

  “So…” Mouse smiled.

  The shop steward and the three thugs, all of them white men, had their eyes on him. You could see that they wanted to kill him. Each one was thinking that they probably had the upper hand in numbers of guns. And each one knew that the first one to move would die.

  I was biting my tongue because I hadn’t expected a fight. I brought Raymond around for weight, not for violence. Why would those men get angry if we wanted to return their money? Along with the insurance from the legal payroll, they’d make a nice profit on the deal.

  “All me an’ my friends need to know is what the finder’s fee is,” Mouse said.

  “You must be crazy, nigger,” Robert said.

  Mouse pulled the hammer back on his pistol as he asked, “What did you say?”

  The thug was looking up into Mouse’s steel-gray eyes. He saw something there.

  “Ten percent,” he uttered.

  Mouse smiled.

  We walked out of the beachside warehouse with $3,500 in our pockets. Mouse gave five hundred each to Mercury and Chapman and split the remainder with me.

  The burglars gave up their life of crime that very day. I’d never seen anything like it. Usually a thief stays a thief; either that or he becomes a jailbird. But those men set down roots and started a new life. They married two sisters, Blesta and Jolie Ridgeway, and went to work in construction.

  When I heard that John was building, I got them together. Jewelle had set up a traveling crew of workers who went from one site to another among her various investors. But each work site needed a couple of permanent employees to do detail work and prepare for the larger jobs.

  “… and every house gonna be different, too,” John was saying. “Brick, aluminum-sided, wood and plaster. One-, two-, and three-bedroom.”

  “You hate it, don’t you, John?”

  An old hardness came into the ex-bartender’s face, a look that somehow seemed happy.

  “Yeah, Easy. Here I am, out in the sun every day. Damn. You know I’m black enough as it is.”

  “Then why you doin’ it, man? You think you gonna get rich?”

  “Alva Torres,” he said.

  I didn’t know John’s girlfriend all that well. She didn’t approve of his old friends, so he stopped seeing most of them. He talked to me on the phone every once in a while, but we rarely saw each other.

  Alva was tall and spare, her beauty was pure, flawless, and hard — the kind of beauty torn from the pain and ecstasy of what it was to be a Negro in this country.

  Alva didn’t like me but I accepted that because I once saw John grin when someone just mentioned her name.

  “She wants me out of the nightlife and I cain’t say no,” John said meekly.

  “So what you want from me?” I asked.

  “Why’ont you take a ride with me over to our place? We can talk better over there.”

  “Hey, Mr. Rawlins,” Mercury Hall called. He was coming across the graded dirt road, slapping his hands together like two chalky blackboard erasers.

  “Mercury.” I shook his hand and smiled. “I see you still playin’ honest citizen.”

  “Oh yeah,” he proclaimed. “Got to.”

  “Mr. Rawlins!” Kenneth Chapman shouted. He was an ochre-colored man, very thin with the broad features of our race. His smile was the biggest thing I had ever seen in a human mouth.

  “Hey, Chapman. Don’t you go shortchangin’ them nails now.”

  His laugh was immense.

  “Come on, Easy,” John said.

  It was from the tone of his voice that I knew whatever John had to ask was going to require sweat.

  4

  JOHN AND ALVA were living in a box-shaped apartment building near Santa Barbara and Crenshaw. The outside walls were slathered with white stucco that had glitter sprinkled in it. There were bullet holes here and there, but that wasn’t unusual. That part of L.A. was full of Texans. Most Texans carry guns. And if you carry a gun, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.

  The stairway and halls were all external, making the apartment building resemble a cheap motel. John and I made it up to the third floor. While he was fishing around for his keys, I looked out across the street. Three floors was high in L.A. in 1964. I could see all the way to downtown: a small cluster of granite buildings that looked like a thousand movie backdrops I’d seen.

  Across the way was a newly built and empty office building next to a used-car lot. Even that made me smile. I have a soft spot for used cars. They’re like old friends or family members you love even though they always give you trouble.

  “Right in here, Easy.” John had worked his key in the lock and pulled the hollow wooden door open. He gestured for me to walk in and I did.

  The room was the size of a ship’s cabin, hardly wider than it was high. The furniture was cheap bamboo supporting fake blue leather, and the walls, though they had the sheen of being painted, were no color to speak of.

  I sat down on a hammock-like footrest and regarded the bartender-turned-builder.

  He walked into what I thought was a closet and said, “What you drinkin’?”

  It was the question I’d heard most often from John. My most common reply had been whiskey, but my drinking days were over by then.

  I got up to see what kind of bar John had carved out of a closet. But what I found was a kitchen in miniature. A tiny two-burner stove on top of a refrigerator no larger than a picnic cooler. The sink had no drain board or shelves.

  “They call this a kitchen?” I asked.

  “We had to sell the house an’ put our stuff in storage,” he said, as if that somehow answered my question. “To pay for the labor and some’a the legal expense for the buildins.”

  “Damn.” I was amazed by the crowded little cooking closet.

  “Hello, Mr. Rawlins.” I didn’t have to turn to know her voice.

  “Alva.”

  I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Alva Torres. She was a good woman, as far as I ever knew. She just didn’t approve of my old life. What some might have called an economy of trading favors she saw as criminal activity.

  She held out her hand in welcome, and maybe as a peace offering.

  “How are ya?” I asked.

  “Why don
’t you have a seat,” she replied.

  I went back to my footrest.

  “What’s up with you guys?” I asked as amiably as I could.

  The reaction was discomfort and silence. Alva wore a gray pants suit that didn’t hang right on her. She was a woman who needed bright colors and flowing lines. She stared at me as if I had tried to insult her with my question.

  “It’s a pretty long story, Easy,” John said. “It’s got to do with Alva and her first husband —”

  “John,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if this is right.”

  “Well,” John said, a glint of his old hardness coming through. “Make up your mind, then. Easy come over here to help if he can, but he cain’t do a thing if you don’t tell him what it is you want.”

  Alva clenched her long fingers into bony fists. “Can I trust you, Mr. Rawlins?”

  The alarm in my head, the giddiness, the wind through the window of my car — they all came back to me with her question.

  “I have no idea, honey,” I said. “I don’t know what it is that you need.”

  The tension went out of Alva’s long body and she slumped back onto a blue bolster. John stared helplessly at her.

  “My ex-husband,” Alva began. “Aldridge A. Brown. He took care of Brawly when he was a child. I couldn’t do it. A boy needs a man to guide him. That is, if the man will stay around.”

  I had no idea who she was talking about. But she was straining so hard just to get the words out that I decided to let it go for the moment.

  “Aldridge wanted to be a good father. He might have been a good husband — for some other woman — but he was just… just… too much for us.”

  She stopped for a moment, and John went over to sit by her. He put his hand on her shoulder and she crumpled against his chest.

  “Is this your son we’re talkin’ about?” I asked.

  “Brawly,” she said, nodding.

  “He was workin’ for me out at the lots up till a couple’a weeks ago,” John said.

  Alva shed silent tears that rolled down John’s dirty T-shirt as if it were made of wax paper.

  The woman’s grief and her man sharing it moved me out of myself for a moment. In that instant I saw myself, fevered and mindless, reveling in these good people’s pain. But the vision passed and for a long time I forgot that I’d even had it.

  “Where’d he go?”

  Alva’s hard glare was daunting but I didn’t look away.

  “That’s why we need your help, Easy,” John said. “He moved out and she’s afraid — we’re afraid — that he might be in trouble.”

  “How old is Brawly?” I asked.

  “Twenty-three, but he’s young for his age.” The tenderness in her voice was rare.

  “Twenty-three! How old are you?”

  “I had him when I was sixteen. Aldridge was the age Brawly is now.”

  “Excuse me for askin’, honey, but you don’t look nowhere near thirty-nine.”

  Even through that rock-hard perfection a little vanity found a chink. A smile flickered on her lips and then died.

  “Why you think he’s in trouble?” I asked. “I mean at twenty-three he could just be out havin’ a good time.”

  “No, Easy. Not this boy,” John said. “He broods. He did good in high school but then he got in trouble and dropped out. Now he’s in wit’ a bad crowd and Alva’s worried.”

  “So you want me to find him?”

  Alva sat up. The pain in her face almost made me turn away.

  “Yes,” she said. “And maybe, somehow, help us to get him back home.”

  “I’ll do what I can. Sure.”

  “Oh,” she uttered, and I did look away.

  “What kinda crowd you talkin’ about?” I asked John.

  “They call themselves urban revolutionaries or somethin’.”

  “Say what?”

  “The Urban Revolutionary Party,” Alva said. She was sitting erect. Any show of weakness had been wiped away. “They also call themselves the First Men.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They say that they’re freedom fighters but all they want is trouble,” she said. “Talkin’ about the church and civil rights, but when it comes down to it they only want violence and revenge.”

  “Prob’ly communists,” John added.

  “He left some pamphlets they made,” Alva said. “I’ll get them for you.”

  She went through a door opposite the one John and I had entered.

  “You got to do this right, Easy,” he told me when she was gone.

  “How you mean that?”

  “Brawly got to come outta this safe.”

  “How I’m supposed to promise you that if he’s runnin’ around with thugs? You know yourself it’s better not even to look for ’im. Either he’s gonna outgrow it or it’s gonna row him under. That’s the way it is for all young black men.”

  He knew I was right.

  Alva came in with four or five cheaply printed pamphlets clutched to her breast.

  “Here they are.” She made no attempt to hand them over.

  “Can I take them?” I asked.

  She swayed backward slightly. Finally John took them from her.

  “Here,” he said, handing the crumpled leaflets to me.

  “What do you want from me, Alva?” I said loud and clear.

  “I want you to find Brawly.”

  “That’s all? If he’s with these people here, you or John could go do that for yourselves.”

  “I want you to talk to him, Easy,” she said. “If he saw us, he’d be even angrier. I want to know that he’s okay and maybe, if he would listen to you, maybe…”

  “Where he is is easy,” I said. “But what he’s doin’ an’ how he’s doin’ takes a closer look. I’ll look him up, then come back here and tell you what I think. If he’s willing to listen to reason, maybe I’ll even bring him home.”

  “We gonna pay you now, Easy.” John held up his hand as if he were defending himself from attack.

  “Invite me an’ the kids and Bonnie over for dinner and I’ll be paid in full.”

  John laughed. “Still the same, huh, Easy?”

  “If it work, don’t fix it.” It felt good trading words with my friend. “Alva,” I said then. “I need two more things from you.”

  “What?”

  “First I’ma need a picture of Brawly. And next I wanna know what your husband got to do with this.”

  “Nuthin’,” she said. “Aldridge don’t have nuthin’ to do with this. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one that brought him up. You and John.”

  “He said it.” She sounded like a guilty student answering to a strict teacher. “I only meant about Brawly.”

  “You think he mighta gone to his father’s house?”

  “Never.”

  “I thought you said he was a good father? That he raised Brawly?”

  “Brawly ran away from Aldridge when he was fourteen. He went to stay with my cousin; she was livin’ up in Riverside then. Something happened between him and his father and he ran away. I don’t think that they’ve seen each other since then.”

  “Brawly lived with his cousin? Why didn’t he come to you?”

  “That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ nuthin’, Easy,” John said. He’d come up next to Alva and put his arms around her. “That’s ancient history.”

  “Uh-huh. I see. Well, if Brawly didn’t go to his father, how about this cousin?”

  “No,” Alva said.

  “No what?”

  “He’s not with her.”

  “Excuse me, Miss Torres, but you don’t know where Brawly is. That’s why you called me.”

  “Back off, Easy,” John warned. “You got them pamphlets. We told you where he’s been hangin’ out.”

  “Suppose he ain’t there? Suppose I cain’t get in there? Suppose he stayin’ wit’ this cousin an’ sumpin’s wrong? You c
ain’t ask me to do this an’ not tell me nuthin’.”

  Alva walked out again. She might have been angry but I didn’t care.

  “Easy, you don’t know everything,” John said. “Alva’s had a hard time, and this thing with Brawly really hurts her. It’s only been the last few years that they been close again.”

  “I can’t help if you wanna tie me up from the git-go, man.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’ta called you then.” It was a dismissal.

  Alva had returned, again.

  “John,” she said. “He’s right. If I want his help, I have to give him what he needs.”

  Saying that, she handed me a scrap of torn paper and an old photograph of a six- or seven-year-old child. The boy’s hair was cut close to the scalp. He was burly and had heavy features, which made him seem pensive in spite of his smile.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a picture of Brawly and Isolda Moore’s phone number and address.”

  “This Isolda’s your cousin?”

  The thought was so distasteful to Alva that she could only nod.

  “I thought you said that she lived in Riverside?”

  “She moved to L.A. a few years ago. She sent Brawly a card with her number, but he never called it.”

  “Now what about this picture?”

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “You said that Brawly’s twenty-three.”

  “That’s the only picture I have. But it’s him. You’ll see.”

  “She’s right about that, Easy,” John said. “Brawly looks exactly the same today. Only he’s bigger.”

  “You know any place that he might hang out just for fun?” I asked.

  “Brawly like to eat,” John said. “All you got to do is look for the biggest feed bag. He likes Hambones quite a bit. That’s right down the block from them thugs he’s wit’.”

  “Find him for me, Mr. Rawlins,” Alva said. “I know I haven’t been kind to you and that you don’t have any reason to want to help me. I’m sorry that I didn’t treat you right before, but from now on my door will always be open to you.”

  That open door meant more than any money John could offer me. In country terms it was worth the host’s weight in gold. If she was willing to pay such a high price, I wondered what the cost might be.