Charcoal Joe shrugged and held up the palms of both hands.
“Information comes to me,” he said. “Knowledge is the only real wealth any man can have; knowledge and the will to power.”
I wondered if the gambler/killer/artist was referring to the German philosopher or just heard those words and instinctively understood their authority.
“You tell me what I need to know and I will go out to either prove or disprove Dr. Brathwaite’s innocence,” I said. “I won’t lie or fake evidence but you can be sure that I’ll give it my best.”
Joe stared at me a moment. I was fully aware that such a look had probably meant the death of some men.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I mean I say it’s all right because I know Seymour is innocent and I believe Raymond when he tells me that you’re the best.
“There ain’t too much to add. The police know about the murders and you got an in with them I hear. Anything else you need you can get from Jasmine Palmas-Hardy.”
“Who’s that?”
“She was Seymour’s foster mother up until he was eleven or twelve.”
“What’s her number?”
“She lives behind a house and up a stairway on Hauser.” He gave me an address. “Just go there anytime today and she’ll be waitin’ for ya. Anything she says, treat it like you heard it from me. Anything you need: introductions, information, or cash—you just ask her.”
Joe opened his eyes wide. This meant that the meeting was over. I realized that he had not introduced me to the medium-sized guy that stood at his side. I didn’t ask because I understood that Rufus Tyler/Charcoal Joe never did, or did not do, anything in error.
12
At the end of Tucker Street, in a far corner of Compton, there was thick barrier of eucalyptus and avocado trees buttressed and interspersed by thorny bushes that might have been colloquially called barbed wire scrubs. Through this jungle there was a path that was barely passable. You were bound to get scratched and there were moments when a man of my height couldn’t stand up straight. You definitely needed a long-sleeved jacket, and some boughs were stronger than Ox Mason.
But if you persevered for just three or four minutes you would reach a yellow door that had cracked veins of green lichen branching out here and there.
I had never been to that door without it opening before I could knock. I stood there maybe thirty seconds waiting for the yellow portal to swing inward. When it didn’t oblige I rapped with my knuckles and then counted to twelve, breathing in the sharp scent of the leaf-heavy woods.
Even before she answered I knew that something was wrong, but when I saw her my concern made me forget my mission—at least for a while.
As a rule Mama Jo stood six foot three, two inches and a bit taller than I. Her stature had always been erect and unbending. Her skin was kissed by night, and her eyes were dark enough to see evil that poor mortals like me couldn’t even imagine. She was nineteen years older than I, but, as a rule, no one would know that by looking at us.
That day Jo sagged and looked every one of her sixty-seven years. Sadness leaked from those barrier eyes; weakness too. She reached out for my shoulder and touched me lightly, showing none of the physical strength I knew she possessed.
“Easy?” she said. “Baby.”
She fell forward into my arms, and I held her tightly as she cried and moaned a deep and painful lament that was beyond my ken.
“It was the earth that brought you here,” she whispered.
The earth was her Goddess; not a sentient being but rather a concoction of forces that moved in mathematical precision, organizing spiders and grains of sand, human beings and clouds.
Her tears were hot on my neck, and I was reminded of the intimacy we shared twenty-nine years before in the swamplands between Texas and Louisiana.
“Baby,” she said over and over.
“Maybe we should go inside,” I suggested.
The sigh coming from her was deeper than Charcoal Joe’s grumbling. She lifted up from my shoulder and I put an arm around her waist to help her into the medieval abode.
It wasn’t until we were inside that I noticed that all she wore was a man’s long-sleeved and navy blue dress shirt. It fit her as well as any modest dress; this was because it belonged to her son Domaque Jr. He was a monster of a man, deformed and different, with a soul as deep as his mother’s and an innocence that had little use for his nearly impossible strength.
Jo was wearing that shirt because she needed love, and the love for her son was the gravity granted her by the earth spirit she revered.
The dwelling hadn’t changed much. The floor was packed ocher earth. The ancient bench and alchemist’s table still dominated. Small armadillos wrestled in their corner under the watchful eye of a cat that looked very much like a miniature lynx. A full-grown raven croaked at me from his shoulder-high stand and the bedding was still made from straw bound by thick hemp and coarse material. My regular chair, cobbled together from rough tree branches and animal hide, was there and the fireplace, which never emitted smoke above the forest keep, was crackling low.
The only real difference was the mantle above the hearth. The last time I was there it had been lined with thirteen candles all lit and winking. But now the previous inhabitants had returned: twelve armadillo skulls, six on each side of a man’s head that had been cured in a barrel of salt for seven years after his death. Domaque Sr. yowled there. Jo had removed the macabre setting when Helen Ray, called Coco by her friends, moved in. Young, white, collegiate Coco was disturbed by the ex-lover’s skull watching her and Jo writhing in passion on the straw mattress.
I moved to sit in my usual chair but Jo took me by the arm and said, “Come sit next to me on the bench, baby.”
We held each other for long minutes. She’d stopped crying but the depths of her pain thrummed in our embrace. Her sorrow leached into me. I could read it on the mantelpiece and her nakedness under that beloved shirt. I knew it when she wasn’t at the door waiting for me as she always had been, and in the emptiness of the cottage that would have been in style at any time in the last thousand years—somewhere.
—
“Go sit in your chair, baby,” she said after our long embrace.
I did as she bade and our eyes met in the pleasant gloom of her otherworldly hideaway.
“How long she been gone?” I asked.
“Three days.”
“What happened?”
“I, I wanted a baby. I guess that was too much for her.”
“Some orphan?” I asked, being an orphan myself.
“We agreed that if there was to be a father it would be you.”
I frowned and Jo peered into me and then gasped.
“Bonnie done gone,” she said as a revelation. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. Here I’m such a mess I didn’t see what was written on your heart.”
I never asked how Jo interpreted the world. I didn’t believe in voodoo or black magic, Jesus Christ nor any of his relatives or counterparts. But even though I had my own worldview I couldn’t deny that Jo knew things and did things that I could not explain.
“Can I help?” she asked me.
There was no one else in the world that could ask me that question and give me pause. Jo had power in her potions, notions, and hands. I could ask her to help me forget or maybe even how I might get Bonnie back. I could ask her anything, confident that she would never take an action that would hurt me or mine.
“No,” I said after stumbling through the corridor of those thoughts. “Bonnie’s left me and that’s the right thing for her. It’s right for me too. I love her but her need is not me.”
Tears flowed down Mama Jo’s black cheeks. I believe that she saw my truth in her own breast. This feeling was a balm because I had never before felt on equal footing with the backwoods witch.
“Then why are you here?” she whispered.
“Maybe it’s that thing about the earth spirit you’re always talking about.”
&nbs
p; “But even then you had to have a reason to come,” Jo offered.
I told her the whole story of Joguye Cham and my ex.
“Hard to be angry in the face’a true love,” Jo said. “Add to that how generous Bonnie is and your heart could break three times over.”
“You know people who could take her and her husband in,” I said, “people that could hide him from whatever assassins the governments might shake out the woodwork.”
“America might grab him,” Jo agreed. “Kill him in his cell or deport him to his enemy. Money could do that in its sleep.”
“Do you know a place?”
“I do. I’ll call Raymond and have him make the right moves. By Saturday morning nobody’ll find them.”
“You need to call Jewelle or Jackson,” I said. “They put them somewhere safe until I got in touch with you.”
“You wanna know where I’m sendin’ ’em?” Jo asked.
“No.”
She smiled and reached for me even though I was too far away to touch.
“But I need somethin’ from you too,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I ran Coco outta here ’cause I loved her too much. I could see the mother in her and the changes a baby would bring out. I could feel the strength of her womanhood and the hidden mind that was sleeping inside the mind she knew. I know better than to try and wake a woman up to what she is, what she can be. But you know love’s a fool; they tell you that on the radio a thousand times a day. We hear it but that don’t matter. We done heard it so often that it’s just sounds in the air.”
I was surprised that Jo knew anything about a radio.
Jo stopped talking and stared at the dirt floor. The raven vocalized some kind of complaint and the cat pounced on something in a corner.
After maybe three minutes I said, “You wanted me to do something for you, Jo?”
She smiled and then looked up.
“I wrote a letter,” she said.
She turned on the bench and rummaged around the jars and bottles, bunches of branches and dried dead things. Finally she came out with a stack of blue-lined school paper, maybe eighteen, twenty sheets. These she handed to me.
She had written on both sides of each sheet. Her tiny script made up two lines for each space provided. I didn’t read the words.
“I been writin’ it since she walked out the door,” Jo said.
“You want me to take it to her?”
“She’s at that hippie house above the Sunset Strip.”
“No problem.” I folded the tome and put it in my jacket pocket.
Jo stared at me for a few long seconds.
“What else happenin’ with you, Easy?”
I told her about Charcoal Joe, Mouse, and the boy they wanted me to vindicate.
“I know Rufus,” she said. “The poor man done let his soul overrun his heart.”
“As long as it doesn’t overrun me,” I said.
“Would you like some tea, Easy?” she asked then. Her voice sounded as if a great weight had been lifted.
“Lipton or special?”
“It’s a little potion help when the heart is all beat up,” she said. “You don’t get high or nuthin’, just look at things in a way that’s a little more real.”
“Can I drive?”
“Oh yeah. Give you enough time and you could probably fly a jet plane.”
I liked Jo’s medicines. She brewed the tea in an iron pot on her pink porcelain and black iron woodstove while we talked about little things.
“Your friend Jackson Blue come out to talk to me a week ago,” she said while handing me my tea mug.
“Oh yeah?” I said and sipped.
“He was worried that maybe Jewelle’s child wasn’t his.”
“What did he want from you?”
“To know if he should look for the truth.”
“And what did you say?”
“That the only truth about chirren is that they’re yours if you love them.”
—
I drank my tea. It tasted like lemons and rhubarb steeped in wildflower honey. I didn’t feel high or happy. I was the same as before and that was just fine with me.
13
You could walk down the main street of a tiny little town like New Iberia ten thousand times and every time you do you might see something new to you, my father had said to me forty-one years before. Sometimes things be different like new paint or a puppy dog in a flower garden. But many times you see things you never noticed before because, even in the smallest place, there’s just too much for one man to see and remember all at once, or even in his whole lifetime.
—
Hauser Boulevard turns into a hill on the way from Pico up to Wilshire. I’d driven that route more times than I could remember but that day, when I got to the address Charcoal Joe had given me, I saw an orange and blue house that I’d not noticed before. Behind the house was a long staircase that led to another house that was situated between Hauser and South Ridge Drive to the east. The house was painted white, set on forty-foot stilts hoisting it high in the sky.
I had been down that street, driven past that high house a hundred times at least but I had never noticed it. Seeing it and remembering my father preparing me for that experience made his love a palpable thing; like the steering wheel under my palms. I realized then and there that Jo’s tea had opened me up in such a way that all things had an equal weight.
—
“Who are you?” a man said in a voice that hadn’t been friendly to strangers in a very long time.
I was a little surprised, not by the unfriendliness, but by the fact that I’d gotten out of the car and walked to the wire gate without really thinking about it. In my mind I was down home in Louisiana, a boy with two parents and the best food I ever ate.
“I’m here to see Jasmine Palmas-Hardy,” I said.
“I’m Uriah Hardy,” the smallish black man said.
His physique was thin and knotty; his color like copper that needed a polish.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hardy. Jasmine your wife?”
“What’s it to you?” he said. He had on blue jeans faded by time, not design, and a T-shirt that had gone from white to gray.
“I’m just here to speak to the woman,” I said.
Mr. Hardy puffed up his chest and shoulders, trying, it seemed, to be taller than his five feet eight.
“What’s your name?” he asked in a tone that plainly expressed that he expected a lie.
I reached into the breast pocket of my shirt, producing my PI’s license for him to see.
He read the little card closely, looking at the picture and my face, comparing them suspiciously.
Handing the card back, he said, “So?”
“Your words asked me who I was,” I said. “Your tone told me that you wanted to know my business. I’m Easy Rawlins, a private detective. I’m on a case and I believe your wife has some information for me.”
“Who told you that?” he asked, making no move to open the gate.
“Man named Rufus Tyler.”
Bonnie Shay and Joguye Cham were way at the back of my mind. They were there like that house hovering up and to the left of the smaller orange and blue place guarded by Uriah.
The out-of-uniform sentry leered at me with anger and suspicion as his musket and dagger.
“What’s Joe want?” Uriah asked.
“You have to ask him that yourself.”
This was not an option that the maybe-husband of Jasmine Palmas wanted to entertain.
“Listen, man,” I said. “If you’re worried about me being on your property—that’s okay. I’ll wait here and you can go and ask Jasmine if she wants to talk, and if she wants you with her. I got time.”
“She not here,” he said. It was almost a question.
“Okay. Rufus said that she would be so I’ll go back out to Venice and tell him he was wrong.” I was enjoying the banter way too much.
Uriah, maybe ten yea
rs my senior, was actually sneering, he was so upset. He was like a domestic animal cornered and slowly turning feral.
“Uriah!” a woman shouted.
We both looked to the elevated white house.
There was a black woman in an off-white dress looking down at us.
“Yeah?” the angry man answered.
“Is that Mr. Rawlins?”
He hesitated before shouting, “Yeah!”
“Let him up!”
The look Uriah Hardy gave me was not inviting, and so when he pulled the gate open I felt that I’d won a little victory. There was no pleasure in the triumph however, because I knew that this was only the first skirmish in what promised to be a great war.
—
There were eighty-seven steps from the street-level house up to Jasmine Palmas-Hardy’s aerie. Now that I was down to one cigarette a day the climb hardly left me breathless. She was waiting on the unfinished wooden platform that was three steps down from the front door of the nosebleed house.
Also five-eight, and well formed, Jasmine was dark-skinned and handsome with almond-shaped eyes that could, I believed, say certain things while her mouth engaged in a completely different conversation. Her summer dress was sleeveless and very, very short. Her moccasins were cut from white leather.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I presumed that Jasmine and Uriah had been married but were now separated by eighty-seven stairs instead of some legal notice. He inherited access to the street while she got the view and all the charm.
She smiled at my down-home manners and said, “Come on in.”
—
We entered the main room of the small house. It was a little larger than my office, sporting three doors. I assumed the portals I had not passed through led to a back exit of some sort and a bathroom. There was a red sofa and a green sofa chair perpendicular to each other and facing a glass-topped coffee table. In a far corner there hummed a squat refrigerator under a wide shelf with two hot plates, a blender, and a waffle iron. Next to the kitchen area stood a six-tiered bookcase jammed with books in every possible space and nook.
Charcoal Joe Page 7
