Bad Boy Brawly Brown

by Walter Mosley

  “What you doin’ here, man?” a voice said from behind.

  I wasn’t worried. If it was one of the revolutionaries, I would have already been either dead or unconscious.

  The man who spoke was short and wore matching ochre pants and shirt. He had a protruding belly and small hands with stubby fingers. Only his voice held any kind of threat.

  “Hey,” I said, sticking out my hand. “I’m Troy. This your house?”

  “Yes, it is,” the little man replied. He took my hand out of reflex but let it go before I could complete the perfunctory shake.

  “You must be wonderin’ what I’m doin’ out here,” I said.

  “Yes,” the little man said.

  “It’s ’cause’a my girl — Royetta.”

  “I don’t know any Royetta.”

  “She’s my girl,” I said again. “At least that’s what she tells me. But I heard from Lucas that she been seein’ a man on this block. Yeah, every day, Lucas said, she drive down to this block to see some man. He didn’t have the address, so I decided to come down and use these here nice trees of yours so that she didn’t see me or my car when she come down to meet her sidetrack.”

  It felt good to be lying again. It was as if I disappeared behind a cloud of black ink like the squid or cuttlefish.

  The man I spoke to was muddy brown with many folds in his face. His head widened as it went toward his neck; with the folds, his head and face resembled a brown candle slowly melting down toward his shoulders.

  “I don’t want no trouble,” the man told me. “This here is my property.”

  The alley was a public throughway and not his property, but I didn’t say that.

  “I don’t want no trouble, either,” I said. “But you see, Royetta got a sister named Cindy, and me and Cindy been messin’ around ourselves. Now if I can prove to Royetta that I know about her man, then when I leave her and take up with Cindy she cain’t get all that mad.”

  “Can’t you just get your friend that…that —”

  “Lucas,” I said. “Lucas.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a gold-colored Ford Galaxy drive past. I turned to my right to see where the car was headed.

  “Can’t Lucas just say that he saw her with this man and that’ll be it?” the little man was saying.

  But I was watching as Mercury Hall climbed out of his car and walked up to the revolutionaries’ house.

  “No,” I said, returning to my fiction. “Lucas don’t wanna get in between us where he’s got to be there in the skin. No. I got to see for myself.”

  “Well,” the little man said. “I don’t want you here.”

  “I tell you what,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Foreman.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Foreman”— I reached into my pocket and came out with a twenty-dollar bill —“I’ll give this here double saw-buck for the right to stand around in this public alley and look for my girlfriend to pass.”

  If he had turned me down, I would have driven down to the other end of the block, but Henry Strong’s money was good. Foreman grabbed the twenty-dollar bill and shoved it in his pocket.

  “How much longer you gonna be out here?” he asked.

  “Two hours, tops,” I said.

  We talked a moment or two more and he retreated with his reward.

  I WAS THERE for more than three hours when the tribe finally showed their faces again. Mercury took BobbiAnne in his Ford while Conrad climbed in the Cadillac with Brawly and the man I did not recognize. They drove right past me and off toward Central.

  With them gone, I should have called John. I should have called the cops. I should have gone home and started Jesus’s lessons and made it to bed early so the next morning I could get to work on time.

  Instead, I walked straight to the hideout. I walked down the driveway and into the backyard. The back side of the home had a large porch that was walled in and had its own door. This door was unlocked. The porch contained a washing machine and dryer, modern luxuries down in the ghetto. There was a radio playing loud, too loud, so the sound of me forcing the lock might not have been heard if there had been anybody home to hear it.

  The back entrance of the home was a slender hallway that was also the kitchen, small stove on one side, sink on the other.

  I’d been right about the circumstances of the revolutionaries. The big living room was empty, except for white food cartons and paper plates used for ashtrays. There was a piece of blue-lined note-book paper tacked to the wall. Drawn in pencil was a square that stood for a building with a truck approaching and a car parked across the street from the door. Here and there X’s were in position to overpower the guards.

  It was a frightening document mainly because it looked like the notations of a grade-schooler playing cops and robbers on paper.

  There were army duffel bags in the entranceway closet. There were toothbrushes and towels in the bathroom. And a stack of smut magazines hidden under the sink.

  One of the canvas bags belonged to Brawly. He had a pair of black and white tennis shoes and a pocketknife along with two shirts, a copy of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and a small spiral-bound notebook. Just flipping through those pages told me more about Brawly than anyone else seemed to know.

  It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a diary, but every once in a while there was a journal-like entry with a date at the top of the page. The first such entry, which appeared on the third page of the two-hundred-sheet notebook, was dated January 19, 1958 — more than six years earlier.

  He wrote about BobbiAnne and how he could see her only at school because he had to return to Sunrise House, the halfway home, by four p.m. He also wrote, I miss Aunt Isolda but I know it’s better if I don’t see her. She only gets mad when I tell her how I feel.…

  The first thirty pages were in very dark blue ink from the same thick ballpoint pen. The next forty pages or so were in black. After that, he went back to blue pen. I was amazed that the young man could hold on to that one small notebook, each page covered with his tiny scrawl.

  Along with his sporadic journal entries he had made small drawings of buildings, notes on school assignments, lists of resolutions on how to be a better man (a few of those were on how to be friends with Isolda), and sometimes there were simple reminders of where to go, what to buy, and what to say.

  Less than six months earlier he had penned an entry separated halfway down the page. The top half was a list of requirements for service in the paratroopers. He had an ideal weight, number of pushups he should be able to do, and the reading level expected of new recruits. The bottom half seemed to be a comparison between superheroes. On the left side he’d listed Superman, Plastic Man, and Batman. On the right he had Thor, Mister Fantastic, and Spider-Man.

  Three months later he was writing about the black revolution in America. Henry Strong had been giving him private instruction, telling him that his strength and intelligence had put a heavy weight of responsibility on his shoulders.

  “It’s up to us young men,” Brawly wrote. “To lead the rest to freedom. We must be strong and willing to die for what’s right.”

  A little later on he had received orders to “make contact with friends who could aid in the procurement of revolutionary funds and the maintenance of emergency refuge.”

  Brawly came from a very different generation than mine. He was intelligent and ambitious, where I had been crafty and happy if I made it through the day. I never questioned the white man’s authority — that was a given.

  But what really separated us was a need for love and his trust in people. He believed that there was a place for him and his in the world. I knew, from reading his words, that the only way to truly save him was to shatter this belief.

  In one of the bedrooms there was a canvas cot with sheets and a pillow strewn across it. I imagined Conrad and BobbiAnne slipping away now and then to have sex on that cot. For some reason it reminded me of Isolda and her bedroom pictures. It was in that moment that I rea
lized where those photographs had been taken.

  I slipped out of the back door and walked across the street to my car.

  43

  JESUS WAS SITTING on the front porch waiting for me when I got home. He’d already set up a place in the living room for me to sit while he stood and read.

  “You could sit down, Juice,” I said. “Forty-five minutes is a long time and I want you concentrating on the words, not your feet.”

  Jesus grinned. I had missed that grin. It was a brief thing, like sighting a rare scarlet bird in the deep woods. A flit of the wing and it was gone again.

  I had gotten a large hardcover copy of Moby-Dick from the Robertson library for our first reading. While Feather and Bonnie puttered and played in the kitchen, Jesus read to me about Ishmael and his ill-fated voyage.

  The reading was difficult. For many of the words he had to stop and use the Webster’s Dictionary we kept under the coffee table. But when it was over I was surprised at Jesus’s understanding of the story and its implications. We were twelve pages into his education and already we were a success.

  Jackson called a few minutes after dinner. Jesus and Feather were working on the dishes while Bonnie hovered over them, making sure they didn’t miss any spots.

  “How’s it goin’, Easy?” he asked. Before I could answer he said, “I been workin’ my butt off earnin’ that two-fifty.”

  “All I need to know is about the payroll.”

  “Manelli pays his men once a month. It’s always a Saturday payroll,” Jackson said. He paused and then added, “Except for this week.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I went in to the assistant secretary, in the office bungalow, and made friends. She said that she was studyin’ for her bookkeeper’s two-year degree and I showed her how she could make a couple’a shortcuts in a year-end tax application with deductions.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Jackson had studied accounting. Since he was both brilliant and a thief, it stood to reason that he’d study stealing from the inside out.

  “After I was so helpful,” Jackson continued, “I asked her if I could get a partial paycheck tomorrow because my rent was due and the landlord needed at least a li’l taste. She told me that maybe she could process it for Monday because they had heard that tomorrow’s payday was going to have to be put off until Monday. She asked me not to tell nobody ’cause it was a secret. She was upset because she knew the men needed the money, especially since they had to balance everything on a once-a-month nut. I asked her why the delay, but she didn’t know. I got an idea, though.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Easy,” he said, “I don’t know what you into, but if the payroll is switched secretly at the last minute, then it’s got to be something big. You know them construction workers like to riot if they don’t get tomorrow’s cash. I think it’s a setup and I think you know why.”

  “Thank you, Jackson,” I said. “I’ll bring your money by in a couple’a days.”

  “What you into, Easy?” he asked. “You gonna start hittin’ payrolls?”

  “Jackson, how could you be so smart and so stupid at the same time?”

  I DROVE PAST the gang’s hideout later that evening, but it looked empty. I went in through the back porch. Everything but the food containers had been cleared out — even the girly magazines were gone.

  BUT ISOLDA WAS AT HOME. She was still in her bathrobe, but her hair was done and she had put on her makeup. I was carrying a small satchel that was open so I could get to my pistol quickly.

  “Mr. Rawlins?” she said, looking down at the brown leather bag. “What is it?”

  “Can I come in?”

  Her pouting lips curled back into a smile, but I felt nothing. Young men respond to women purely by animal instinct. But in maturity our minds are sometimes able to short-circuit those impulses.

  We went to her window. Even though the sun was down, there was a bright light shining in from a street sign. She poured me an iced tea, which I put down on the jury-rigged, sheet-covered table.

  “I’m surprised you came by again,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. I was surveying the corners of the room. There didn’t seem to be any place where a grown man could hide.

  “You were so angry — you know, about me and Brawly.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Brawly. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, revealing from her choice of words that she was a daughter of the South.

  “Oh yeah, baby,” I said. “You know damn well where he is, or at least you know who knows. So let’s not fuck around.”

  “Mr. Rawlins,” she protested.

  “I said, don’t fuck with me, Issy. This is not the time to be coy. This is the time to talk turkey.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m sayin’ that you are the one that holds it all together.”

  “Holds what together?”

  “You’re the one who knows everybody. Brawly,” I said, holding up one finger, “Mercury —”

  “I told you I only met him in passing.”

  “— Henry Strong,” I said, putting up the third digit. “And you been with Aldridge on and off for years.”

  “Aldridge, yes,” she said. “But I don’t have anything to do with the other men.”

  “No,” I said. “You were with Henry Strong. You met him through Brawly and you let him stay over a night or two. But he didn’t know that Brawly told you everything. He didn’t know that Brawly told you that he was planning a robbery just like his old man.”

  “You’re crazy,” Isolda said, and then she moved to stand.

  “I already knocked out one woman today,” I said. “And I liked her.”

  Hearing that, Isolda settled back down.

  “Like I said,” I continued, “Brawly told you what he was doin’ and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that you found out that Henry was a spy. He was going to run with you on the day before the robbery.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” Isolda said. She wouldn’t even look in my direction.

  “Your bikini says different.”

  She turned to me, the question in her eyes.

  “I saw the pictures,” I said. “You in a tan bikini on a bed that I didn’t come across for a few days. It didn’t strike me at first, but then I was in another bedroom and I remembered.”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Strong took pictures of you in his bedroom,” I said. “I bet you were modeling for him, practicing for how it was gonna be down in the islands.”

  “Who told you that?” Issy’s neck twitched.

  “The same little bird who told me about Aldridge being Brawly’s uncle’s partner in that robbery.”

  “What do you mean that Hank was a spy?” she asked. “You didn’t know?” I asked. And then, “Of course you didn’t. If you did, they’d’ve called off the robbery by now.”

  “What are you talking about?” Isolda said. By then they were just words. She knew she was caught. Now she was just looking for the way out.

  “He fell for you and all,” I said. “He was plannin’ to run with you, to get away forever down on the beach. But he didn’t tell you that he was a rat. No. Proud man like old Hank wouldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “No. But you got the idea. I can see that in your eyes,” I said. “Strong told you that you were leaving on the boat the day before the job. For all he knew, you didn’t know about the plans he’d made with Brawly and Conrad. He didn’t have to tell you that he was a stool pigeon the whole time. He didn’t have to tell you that he set up members of the First Men to hit a payroll, get caught in the act, and so discredit the whole organization.”

  My little speech made Isolda restless. I might not have been one hundred percent correct, but I had too much for her to dismiss me. She clasp
ed her hands and turned her head from side to side. Then suddenly she hit a serious calm.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I got the outline,” I said. “What I need from you is to fill it in with names and addresses.”

  “And what do I get out of it?”

  “First of all, I don’t call up Hank’s police masters and tell them that you’re in on the plan. Second, I don’t call John and tell him that you tried to frame Brawly for killing his father.”

  “I’m not afraid of that,” she lied. “I’m innocent.”

  “No,” I said. “You haven’t been innocent since you were a school-girl. What you think is that you can run away. But that’s wrong. If you don’t tell me what I wanna know, I’ma hit you upside your head, tie you up like a hog, and drive you down to police headquarters in the trunk’a my car.”

  I wasn’t lying and Isolda knew it. I didn’t want to have to get so violent, but then again, this was the only chance I had to find out what was going on.

  I must have impressed Isolda because she said, “And if you hear what you want, you gonna leave me be?”

  “Let’s hear what you got to say,” I said.

  Watching her was the most astonishing thing. The beauty just drained right out of her face. It was like a facade, a mask. Suddenly she was hard and angry — close to downright ugly.

  “You were right about me an’ Hank,” she said. “The minute I saw him I knew that he was the man for me. He had that voice and knew how to dress. You know most’a the Negroes ’round here are country boys with holes in their jeans and shit on their shoes. They like it like that.”

  “But not Henry,” I prodded.

  “Brawly brought him by —”

  “So you and Brawly still talked?”

  “Of course we did. I was close as a mother to that boy. He’d get jealous when I had a man around. That’s why him and Aldridge fought —”

  “So that did happen?”

  “Yeah,” Isolda said. “Only it was just a push-fight. They were gettin’ close again already. It was just the whiskey that made them mad.”