Bonnie was taking off her thick gardening gloves, but Jesus kept hacking at the bush. He was doing a good job of it, too. I had taught him when he was Feather’s age. I didn’t need him to work, but he wanted to. He wanted to work with me, eat with me, walk with me down the street. If he was out in the world in trouble, I’d do anything to save him.
By then Bonnie was kissing me.
“Are you okay?” she asked, looking deep into my eyes.
“Okay,” I said, turning away as I spoke.
I went in the house, followed by Feather. Her B-plus paper was about “Betsy Washington” and the flag.
While I made us grilled-cheese sandwiches, Bonnie and Jesus joined us in the kitchen. I offered them sandwiches, but Jesus never had much of an appetite and Bonnie didn’t eat between meals.
“I know,” Feather said when we were all together. “I could read you my paper out loud.”
“Not right now, baby,” I said. “First I got somethin’ to say.”
Feather flashed an angry glance at me. The woman she was to become flickered a moment upon her face. She pouted and looked down. Then she took Jesus’s hand and leaned against his side.
“I wanted to talk to the family,” I said. “I want to say something to the kids.”
They were all looking at me. I took a bite out of my sandwich. I felt a little dizzy.
“School is the most important thing in the world,” I said. “Without an education, you can’t do anything. Without an education, they will treat you like a dog.” I glanced at the cabinet and saw the little yellow dog’s snout sniffing out my scent. “I expect you to go to college, Feather. Either you’ll become a teacher or a writer, or something even better than that. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
We were staring at each other.
Jesus was staring at the floor, clenching his fists.
“All right,” I said. “That’s important because Juice is going to learn in a different way. From now on he’s going to study being a boatbuilder. He’s found his calling in that, and I won’t stand in his way. But if he’s going to do that, he has to study even harder than if he was in school. I know all of the curriculum for school and I’m going to make you read out loud to me for forty-five minutes every night. And after you read, then we’re gonna spend another forty-five minutes talking about what you read. You hear me? And if you ever stop working on that boat, you have to get right back in school. I don’t care if you just turned eighteen, you still have to go back. You hear?”
Jesus looked up then and nodded with the kind of conviction that only young men can have. If he was any other child, I would have dismissed the hard look in his eye. But I knew my boy. Not only would he finish the boat but it would be seaworthy and so would he. And he would read to me every night. And he would love it. I realized that he wasn’t the type of child who could learn from white strangers who couldn’t hide their natural contempt for Mexicans. I had seen it at Sojourner Truth. Most children ignored the signs or connected with the two or three teachers who really did care about them. But Jesus wasn’t like that. He was connected to me, and it was my job to make sure that he learned what he needed to make it through life.
“I’d rather you stay in school,” I said. “’Cause you know it ain’t gonna be easy goin’ through your lessons every day. Some days I might be late. Some days I might miss, and then you’ll have to do double duty the next night.”
Jesus grinned and I realized that this was what he had always wanted.
“I’ll help on nights that you can’t be home,” Bonnie said.
“You got them papers up in your room?” I asked Juice.
He nodded.
“Leave ’em on the table for me. I’ll read ’em after you go to bed.”
ARE YOU REALLY going to do all that, Easy?” Bonnie asked me after I’d signed the papers and we were both in bed.
“What?”
“Read with Jesus every night.”
“Oh yeah. Now that I made the promise, I got to do it. That’s our deal.”
“What do you mean? What deal?”
“When he came to live with me. He couldn’t even talk, because he’d been through so much. But he’d sit by my side and listen to every word I said. And if I said somethin’, then he took it for truth. If I said to jump off a building ’cause he wouldn’t break his leg, then he would jump. And if he hurt himself, he would know that I had tried to tell him what was right but somehow had made a mistake. And if I told him to jump again — he would. That kinda faith makes a truthful man outta you.”
“But suppose you can’t do it?” Bonnie asked. “Can’t do what?”
“Can’t keep your word.”
“But I will keep my word,” I said. “That’s what you don’t understand. I have to keep my word to that boy.”
“But what will you teach him?”
“The Iliad and the Odyssey, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island. Anything with a boat and a man in it. That’s what I’ll teach him first. And then I’ll take whatever math he’s got to know to make the boat and try and make sure he understands it. Work with what you have, that’s what I always did.”
“But wouldn’t it be easier if he just stayed in school?”
“No, baby. I mean, I understand what you sayin’, but what me and the boy got between us is hardscrabble road as far back as we can remember and as far up as we ever gonna go. If Jesus don’t trust you or like you, he won’t let you in. He sure as hell ain’t gonna learn from teachers he doesn’t respect. And anyway, while I been lookin’ around for Alva’s son I found out a couple’a things that helped me come to this decision.”
Bonnie was already convinced. I knew by the way she put her head on my shoulder. But she asked, “What’s that?”
“First it’s just Brawly himself. I haven’t seen the boy more than five minutes but I know from lookin’ that he’s a mess ’cause he didn’t have a mother or a father the way a boy needs to have parents. He was abandoned and then, when he was found, he was abused. He could have the best education in the world, but it wouldn’t help him. I knew that when I saw the diplomas on a killer cop’s wall. He got the education but he ain’t learned a goddamned thing.”
AFTER BONNIE WAS ASLEEP I got up and called Liselle Latour.
“Yeah?” she said in a sleepy voice.
“Hey, Liselle. It’s Easy.”
“What time is it?”
“’Bout ten-thirty,” I said. It was really ten to eleven. “I’m sorry to bother you, honey, but did Tina come back in?”
“They had her in jail.”
“Tell her that I’ma come by tomorrow morning, about eight-thirty. If she doesn’t wanna talk to me, maybe she should already be gone.”
“Okay,” Liselle said.
Her breath sounded as if she might have had a question, but I cut her off with thank-you and hung up the phone.
41
TINA WAS WAITING for me at the door. I liked that. I’ve always been a punctual man. It was my army training. If a man said 7:59, you got there on time because by eight you might be dead.
When she opened the door I saw that she had a raised bruise on her right temple. There was a small scab at the center of the bump, surrounded by yellowish skin.
“Let’s get away from here,” she said to me at the doorstep.
“Where to?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said carelessly. “Down Central.”
We went to the car and drove off.
“How long have you been out?” she asked me.
“They let me go a few hours after they caught us,” I said. “How about you?”
“Just over a day. They had me in a cell with drunks and women livin’ on the street.”
“That’s where you got the knot on your head?”
Instinctively, Tina brought up her hand to cover the injury.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I got in a fight with a woman who got mad at me for not having
a cigarette.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “They shouldn’ta done that to you.”
“How did you get out so fast?” Tina asked.
“I called the man city hall’s got on you. He sent word upstairs and they kicked me aloose.”
“So you were working with the men who arrested us?” she said, not so much accusing me as verifying what she’d already believed.
“No,” I replied. “The men who arrested you think that they’re the ones on you, but really it’s a secret squad, the one I told you about. They got a soldier been to Vietnam runnin’ it. They’re the ones you got to worry about. They tapped me because they think I’ll turn you over.”
“If that’s true, then why would you tell me?”
“Same reason I called Liselle last night,” I said. “Because I don’t wanna push you or trick you. You got enough people on your ass.”
“Who else?”
“Even though he’s dead, there’s Henry Strong. Whatever he was doin’, it might’a looked like it was for you but really it would’a led to your downfall. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that he was a stool for the cops. And then there’s the secret group he was workin’ with inside the First Men —”
“What secret group?” Tina asked. There was a deadness to the question, almost as if she didn’t care if I answered.
“Conrad, Brawly, and Strong are the only ones I’m sure were in it. And whatever they were planning to do, it has to do with them guns Brawly and Conrad were hiding at BobbiAnne’s.”
Christina Montes was quiet for a moment then. She gazed out of the passenger’s window at the stores on Central.
“They had me rent them a house,” Tina said.
“What?”
“Brawly and Conrad. They had me rent them a house on One thirty-six.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. Conrad gave me two hundred and fifty-five dollars.”
“That almost proves it,” I said.
“But you said that Henry was workin’ for the cops,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever they plannin’, I’m sure the police know their every move and that they plan to discredit your group.”
“I don’t believe it,” Tina said. “You should. I’m the only man tellin’ you the truth.”
“It’s too crazy. Why would they go to all that trouble?”
“To make it look like you’re crazy killer criminals. To have people, both black and white, happy when you get run down like dogs and thrown into prison for the rest of your lives.”
There I was, the conservative veteran explaining a campaign of subterfuge to a revolutionary.
“Where’s the house you rented at?” I asked.
“I…I don’t know if I should say.”
“What you should do,” I said, “is give me the address, pack up your boy Xavier, and haul outta town. Go to San Diego or ’Frisco. Anywhere but here.”
“You’re just trying to scare me.”
“Why’d you wait for me to come this morning, Tina?”
“Because…because you asked me to.”
“That means in some way you trust me, right? I mean, you trusted me to come. You trusted me not to bring the cops.”
“No,” she said, in a rather peculiar tone. I turned my head and saw that she had a small pistol pointed at the side of my chest.
“You plan to shoot me?” I asked her.
“You’re the one who’s been against us the whole time,” she said. “You killed Henry and probably Brawly’s father, too. Henry called me to ask me what you had said at the meeting, before the cops came. I told him that you’d talked to Clarissa and she gave me your number. When I was in jail I started thinkin’ about it. Henry was going to see you the night he was killed. That’s why I agreed to meet you.”
“To kill me?”
The fact that she didn’t answer caused sweat to sprout on my brow.
“What do you plan to do?” I asked her.
“Just drive.”
We were still headed south on Central, in the Sixties. I took a deep breath through my nose and gritted my teeth.
I had been in some tough situations in my life, with and without Mouse. And I knew that it wasn’t in the hardest moment that you were likely to lose your life. A small girl with a baby gun might not have frightened most men. But I realized that she could kill me or bring me to my death just as easily as the recently deposed champion, Sonny Liston, could knock my head off.
“So, you been a part of the secret group the whole time?” I asked.
“No, Conrad and them just told me when we got outta jail,” she said. “They told me about you. Conrad told me how you brought Henry out to Compton and shot him in the back of the head.”
“Yeah?” I said. “And how would Conrad know that?”
“He saw you. He was hiding in the house. He said that you must’a fooled him to get him to bring you to where they were meeting, just like you fooled me an’ Xavier into gettin’ arrested.”
“So then they told you to kidnap me?”
“No,” Tina said with a sneer. “You called on me. I would have stayed away from you, but you stuck your nose out once too often.”
“So now you’re in with the gang,” I said. “Now you plan to use those guns Brawly and Conrad stole.”
“Those guns are only for self-defense.”
“Does Xavier know all this, too?”
“No. They only told me. Xavier’s nonviolent. He didn’t even have bullets in his gun the night you saw him.”
“That’s why you were layin’ up in Strong’s bed?” I asked. “Because you needed a man who could resort to violence?”
“You don’t know a thing about me,” she said from the spleen. “I do what I have to do.”
“Did your friends kill Aldridge Brown?” I asked.
“For all I know, you and your cop friends killed him, too.”
We were down around Ninetieth Street. A futile plan was all I had. My old house was on 116th. I still owned it. My friend Primo lived there for free.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Keep driving,” she said.
Two green lights and four red ones later we came to the signal at 116th. It was turning amber when I was maybe three feet from the crosswalk. I gunned the engine to make the light and then suddenly cut across traffic to make a left turn. I used my left hand to steer and with my right I hit Tina in the head much harder than a man should ever strike a woman. Her head hit the window and made a small cracking sound. I hoped that it was glass I was hearing as I sped past the blasting horns toward the deep driveway and front yard of my old house.
Primo was sitting on the porch with his ebony-colored Panamanian wife, Flower. Around them were babies and children, some theirs, some their children’s children.
“Easy,” my old friend shouted.
“Come on over here, man,” I cried.
WE CARRIED THE UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN into the house while Spanish-speaking babies and infants capered around us, wanting to be a part of the game. Tina’s skull had broken the glass, but she didn’t seem all that damaged. While Flower set her in the bed, I rummaged through her purse.
She was the same kind of liar that I had always been — she lied by telling the truth about something distracting while coming to her own conclusion. The only problem was that her conclusions about me were wrong.
Still, she had the receipt for the house she rented on 136th. The landlord, Jaguar Realty, had offices on Crenshaw.
OUTSIDE THE HOUSE Primo and I stood by my car. I was smoking a cigarette while he puffed on a slender cigar.
Primo was shorter than I was and broad in both the shoulders and hips. He was a thick man, but the only fat on him was around his belly. He had a full mane of black hair that hid a portion of his forehead and true-black eyes that were usually filled with mirth — but I had seen them when they were honed down to a killing glint.
He was serious that day, but his eyes still smiled.
“She tried to kill you?” he asked me.
“Kidnap me is more like it,” I said. “Take me to some men who would like to do me in.”
“What men?”
“Revolutionaries,” I said. “Like Zapata.”
“Oh,” Primo said. “Good men for storybooks but you don’t want to be around them when they’re alive.”
I chuckled and then I laughed. Primo laughed with me for a while.
“Can you keep her here a day or two?” I asked him. “Sleeping?”
“Sure,” he said with no conflict, consideration, or question as to why. “I’ll call you if I need to.”
We shook hands and said good-bye.
42
THE HOUSE THAT Christina Montes rented from Jaguar Realty was in the center of the block of a very residential street. There was no nearby nook where a spy could hide and survey them.
There was an alley at the end of the block. I backed in there, partially hidden by a stand of miniature evergreens that the last house had put in to hide the alley from view. I watched the white and blue two-story house and smoked cigarettes.
I’d been at my post for over an hour when Conrad cruised up in his Cadillac. Brawly was with him and so was BobbiAnne. Another man got out of the car, but I didn’t recognize him.
I tried to imagine what was going on inside. Not the mischief they were planning, but the surroundings they were planning it in. There was no indication on the rental receipt that the house was furnished. So they must be in a big empty room, sitting on the floor, surrounded by food containers and bottles. Maybe the guns were stacked in a corner. Their plan was probably tacked up on the wall so they could all see it while they drilled the operation, whatever that was, over and over.
Because the rooms were empty, their voices would make a slight echo, lending to the fervor of their convictions. There was no phone or television but there was probably a radio. Would they be listening to music? I doubted it. The dial was probably turned to a news-oriented station. They were worried about being found out and also wondering where Tina was. Did they know that she was going to bring me to them the same way that Strong brought me to the construction site in Compton? Was she involved with the killing of Strong? No. There was love for him in her voice. She loved both the older and younger leaders.
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