Odyssey

by Walter Mosley

  He missed Toni, not the lover but the giggling young woman who walked with him down the streets of New York and protected him from harm.

  After a long while he fell into a deep sleep, something close to a child’s slumber—even hibernation. He dreamed that he was a big hulking fish that burrowed under the sand on the ocean floor. From there he peeked out at the water above, safe from predators. The chill of the water was a comfort to him; it meant that he was safe. The currents above made a kind of sibilant music that was almost subliminal. For a long time he lay there nestled under the sand.…

  And then there came a tickle and a disturbance. Something was stroking his underside like the dorsal fin of a larger creature buried even deeper, coming up after his millennial nap. Sovereign the fish moved left and then right but he could not escape the feeling of a pressure that, while not unpleasant, worked against his peaceful retreat.

  Finally the erection roused him from his sleep.

  Toni was sitting next to him on the bed, naked and gently teasing his manhood.

  “I wondered when you was gonna wake up,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Pullin’ on yo’ dick is what.”

  Sovereign took her by the wrist.

  “Move your hand away, Sovereign,” she said. “I’m doin’ what I wanna do right now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Because I liked you evah since that day I came ovah an’ you gave me that money. You didn’t have to do that, but I know you did ’cause you liked me. You only saw me for a minute but you liked me more than people known me my whole life.”

  Somewhere between the words and the quick feathery motions of her fingers, a powerful orgasm rose up in James. He grunted and bucked from his hips and she grabbed on hard.

  “That’s right, baby,” she said. “Uh-huh, yeah, just like that.”

  She started moving her hand again and he reached out to stop her.

  “Move your hand, Sovereign,” she said again. “This is my dick right now.”

  Obeying her, he smiled at his own submission.

  “What you laughin’ at?” she asked with a sour, sweet turn to her lips.

  “You say you always liked me?” he replied.

  “Uh-huh. And I only realized it when you hung up on me. Everybody’s tellin’ me that I should do what the prosecutor say, but where were they when you were takin’ me to dinner and the movies and sittin’ next to me when I was watchin’ TV and you was blind?

  “When you hung up on me I felt like somebody just slammed the do’ in my face and there I was, out in the cold.”

  “Are you saying that you love me, girl?”

  “I don’t know about love or whatever, but I like you and you like me and that’s more than I got from anybody else.”

  Sovereign saw the words she spoke written out in a single line. In the jagged horizon the letters made he saw a long and slender key to the questions he had been asking for days.

  “You gettin’ hard again, daddy.”

  Sovereign wondered if Lena Altuna’s brown hair was dyed. It looked to be the same color it had been when they were at school. But that was a long time ago. He’d had some short, curly gray hairs grow out in the past five years. These silver ghosts had also appeared on his chin and chest.

  “We need to know every person’s name who can testify to your blindness and your character,” she was saying.

  “Like doormen and doctors?” James asked.

  “Neighbors, store clerks, and anyone else who saw you on a regular basis,” Altuna added. “We have the medical reports, and the prosecution might even bring in the group suing you at your job if they think that it speaks to your trustworthiness. Do you have any family who might shed light on your condition?”

  “I haven’t seen my family in years.”

  Lena sat up straight and away from the high back of her chair. They were in a fifty-fifth-floor conference room, the exterior wall of which was made from a thick sheet of glass. Through this he could see half a dozen jets circling in a holding pattern over the eastern airports.

  “What about Toni Loam?” Altuna asked.

  “We’ve become lovers, I guess.”

  “The prosecution is pressing her to testify against you.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe your relationship will muddy the waters of her testimony.”

  “I want you to argue with the judge that we should be tried together,” Sovereign said.

  “Why?”

  “Because the only way there could have been a crime is if we planned it together. But we didn’t, and I want to be guilty or not based upon what I did or didn’t do. And I don’t want to be exonerated if Toni isn’t also released.”

  As the jets went through their slow-motion waiting dance over Queens, Long Island, and Brooklyn, Lena frowned. Sovereign identified with the aircraft, thinking that his whole life had been one long holding pattern after another. He was waiting right now—for clearance to enter yet another queue: If he was shunted down the path to the right he would be convicted and sent to a prison, where he would be locked away, periodically pummeled, and bored to tears by purposelessness and mental inactivity; to the left he would be free, probably unemployed, occupying a life that no longer had meaning or direction. Either way, happiness and satisfaction were improbable. He’d leave the courtroom looking for another line to wait in—and another after that.

  “I understand it,” Lena said. “But what do we say when the prosecution tries to make it seem like you were going to turn over your lover to get out from under the crime you planned together?”

  “But I’m not indicting her.”

  “She brought Johnson into your house, at least with the intent of mischief and theft.”

  “I always told Toni that my house was hers. Even if she felt that she was doing something wrong it doesn’t matter. She had the key, the access, and the right to do whatever she wanted. She can’t be responsible for a friend who decided to attack me.”

  “You would have made a good lawyer, Sovereign.”

  “I hardly even make a patchwork human being.”

  That afternoon James made it back to his office. Shelly Monteri—wearing a clamshell-colored square-cut dress and a locket made from pure gold—was at her station, talking on the phone and examining her dark blue nails when Sovereign came upon her.

  “I have to go, Mom,” the young woman said, hanging up. “Hello, Mr. James. How are you today?”

  “Anybody looking for me?”

  “No, sir. But the applicant files are piling up in your in-box.”

  “Send them over to Ms. Malloy. Tell her that I’ve been preoccupied with my trial and that I didn’t think I could give this batch the proper attention.”

  He could see that the receptionist wanted to ask about the upcoming court case but couldn’t find the words in their professional relationship to bring it up. Sovereign smiled at her dilemma and went by her post into his office.

  The red plastic folding chairs were still arrayed before his desk. In them he could see the young, and not so young, black faces that he had confessed to. He perched at the edge of his chair, elbows on the desk. There he imagined a longer conversation with the unofficial Black Workers’ Union. They discussed the discontinuity between generations and the intangible nature of psychic disruptions. They talked about slavery and prisons, Bosnia and Rwanda. They tried to place their experience and his actions into an acceptable mode of behavior, and even though they failed at this, the imaginary process retained some innate value. After sitting in that position, having that pretend conference for an hour or more, he got up and left the office, passing Shelly but not speaking to her.

  Six weeks passed. Sovereign did not return to his office. Seventeen days after he left Techno-Sym for the final time he received a letter informing him that he’d been placed on indefinite, and paid, medical leave. The forms were signed by Martin L
eRoy and Seth Offeran.

  Every second or third day Toni Loam would come over. She’d been given a full-time position at the beauty shop and moved to a room on 128th Street near Morningside Park. They made love and watched television, went out to eat and had sex. She learned that he became excited when she talked about what they were doing, especially when she would tell him what he was seeing.

  “You like that ass?” she’d ask when she found him looking, or knew it. “Say it and you can have it all night long.”

  “You know you don’t have to talk to me the way you do sometimes,” he said to her at an outside table at an Italian restaurant on 6th Avenue.

  “You don’t like it?” she asked, tilting her head doubtfully.

  “I don’t want you to think that I only see you as an object.”

  “I don’t object.”

  “I mean that it’s not just the sex why I like you, Toni.”

  “You don’t like havin’ sex with me?”

  “I love it.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “Sometimes I think you’re just doing it and saying it because you know that’s what I like—what I need.”

  “So? You don’t think I need this dinner? You don’t think I need to see your eyes bright up when you look at me in them tight purple panties?”

  “It seems so … so primitive.”

  “Primitive like animals?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ain’t you a animal, Sovereign?”

  “I’m not going to win this argument, am I?”

  “You could win it and lose me.”

  “No, thanks.”

  That was on a Tuesday evening. Toni left the next morning near noon for her job at the hairdresser’s. Sovereign spent the afternoon exercising and listening to a collection of Chopin piano concertos, took a cab up to 86th Street, met with Offeran, and came home.

  It was a little before five when the buzzer from the downstairs doorman sounded.

  “Yes?”

  “A Drum-Eddie to see you, sir.”

  Sovereign’s mind went blank for a few moments. He stood there holding the phone with one hand and pressing his chin with the middle finger of the other.

  “Mr. James?” the doorman said.

  “Send him up, Jolly.”

  His fists were clenched again. Sovereign waited in the hallway, holding the door open with his shoulder. The wait seemed interminable. There was a thrumming in the muscles of his back and a return of the ache between the knuckles of his hands.

  He knew, was sure, that this was not his brother coming up the elevator. Maybe the FBI had sent an agent, or it could have been another personal representative like Monte. The moth and the bumblebee vied over control of his chest. He was hoping that Toni would come over and protect him.

  Protect him?

  The man coming down the hallway was tall, slender, and bald. Clad in a dark shirt and trousers, he wore a white waistcoat and had a festive scarf hanging loosely about his neck.

  He had the right coloring for Eddie.

  The mustache wasn’t evident until he was only a few feet away. It wasn’t razor-thin but well trimmed. His smile almost annihilated the meager swath of lip hair.

  “You look exactly the same, JJ.”

  “Drum … is it really you, man?”

  The taller, more slender man embraced Sovereign and whispered, “You never did see it comin’, bro.”

  Arm in arm the brothers walked into the apartment. They sat side by side on the white sofa, all four hands holding on to one another.

  Sovereign had the urge to kiss his brother on the lips but did not, this prohibition brought about by a dream he once had of kissing his father’s corpse good-bye.

  “Eddie.”

  “Yeah, Jimmy J?”

  “You said that they called you Jinx nowadays.”

  “I been lucky.”

  “I don’t know whether I should ask you where you’ve been or why you’re here.”

  They released hands.

  Drum-Eddie got up from the sofa and moved to the red chair, where he sat back expansively and crossed his left leg over the right.

  “Nice place you got here,” he said. “How long?”

  “More than twenty years.”

  “I’ve changed countries more often than you’ve moved out of neighborhoods.”

  Eddie’s eyes were the same. He’d lost his hair but maintained a young man’s physique. His eyes still danced and played.

  Sovereign felt like Scrooge in the presence of a magical sprite that had come out of time to laugh at him.

  “I missed you, man,” Sovereign said.

  “I knew it must’a hurt you when I ran but I didn’t have a choice. My, um, confederates weren’t of the proper quality, and so when the law got their hands on one of ’em I had to go.”

  “But you could have come back. There’s a statute of limitations, isn’t there?”

  “Once the law marks you there’s no loophole big enough to wriggle through, Sovy. Shit. Feds throw you in jail for havin’ knowledge of a crime or for crossin’ a border without proper notice. Anyway, North America’s all right, but there’s fun to be had on at least four other continents—fun and profit.”

  Tears flowed from Sovereign’s eyes and he was not ashamed.

  “Damn, JJ, where’d you learn how to cry?”

  “It was goin’ blind. Blindness opened up my eyes.”

  The brothers talked well into the night. When Sovereign suggested that they go out for dinner, Eddie said that he’d rather have delivery pizza.

  “You know the one thing I always miss the most about the U.S. is its pizza. Thirty years go by and pepperoni and tomato sauce is still the same.”

  The man named Drum spent a long time explaining his crime.

  “It just happened,” he began. “You know I had that job for the construction gang in downtown L.A. that summer—the one that Pops made me do when the lawyer got me off of that joyridin’ beef. That’s where I met Landry and Peters.”

  “Who were they?” the older brother asked.

  “Two white ex-cons got jobs through this federal program. They told me all about prison and robbin’ liquor stores. I was young and thought their stories were cool.

  “And then I got to know this girl work in the main office named Tricks. I think it was Trixie at first but it just got cut down. She took a likin’ to me, and because she was five years older she thought that maybe she could give me a biology lesson or two. It was up in her bed that I learned about the deal that a whole group of construction companies had with Manufacturers Bank. They would switch off which branch they’d use for the money when the workers cashed their checks. That way a bank robber couldn’t predict where to hit. But they hired a teenager, two white ex-cons, and a young white woman hungry for a boy like I was. You know, it seemed like a perfect setup, and I made the plans with Landry and Peters. And it would have gone off without a hitch, but Landry liked to drink and he talked about me in some bar.”

  “You?” Sovereign asked.

  “Yeah, man. He hated black people before he met me, but once we started hangin’ out he realized that he was wrong. He was braggin’ on how smart I was, bein’ a fool in doin’ so.”

  “That’s how the FBI found out about you?”

  “The morning after the robbery they grabbed Peters and he told them that I was the mastermind, which was true, and that I had stoled the money for the Black Panthers, which was not true. He said that we were buyin’ guns and was gonna kill cops in Culver City or sumpin’. Landry disappeared. I think he was killed. He had expensive tastes and was in debt to some rough people. They held Peters for a long time while lookin’ for me. He confessed to the crime but never had to face his day in court.”

  “So they think you’re a terrorist?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “ ’Cause I’m worried about you, my brother. I’m worried about you.”

  “Tha
t’s like the raja worried ’bout the earthworm,” Sovereign said.

  “You remembah that story?” Eddie asked. “Granddad loved that one.”

  It was a tale that someone had told their grandfather about an East Indian king who was so steeped in his belief in God that he wouldn’t even step on an earthworm. The story was supposed to explain a reverence for life, but Eagle James just laughed.

  A man cain’t kill a earthworm would starve in three days. You know he wouldn’t be able to eat a rabbit or even a potatah. Shit. Scientists say that there’s all kindsa life too little to see in your water. Man cain’t kill a earthworm really have to love God, ’cause he’ll be up in heaven before you know it.

  The boys loved telling the story to their grandfather because he used the word shit and that was taboo in their house.

  “You’re my brother,” Eddie said, “and I had to come to make sure you’re all right.”

  “Are you in danger of being arrested?”

  “Some. But you know the men lookin’ for me don’t have any idea of who I am or where I might be. They lookin’ for a smell rather than a style, and so we could pass each other in the street and they would never know.”

  “I’m okay, Eddie. I mean, it was worth a few months being blind if when I opened my eyes you were here like you are right now. I missed you.”

  “What about this Toni Loam?” Drum-Eddie asked.

  “Monte told you about her?”

  “That’s why he was here … to find out about you.”

  “What’d he say about Toni?”

  “That she was street. That she seemed to care about you. That you reached out and touched her every few minutes or so and she smiled whenever you would.”

  “I did?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I’ve been in kind of a dream, Eddie. I know what I’m thinking but that’s about it. I like Toni. I like her a lot. And she likes me but it’s complicated. Her boyfriend, the one I almost killed, is still in her life. He’s in a coma but she’s worried about him. And I don’t know what to think.”