“Fine,” I assured. “Just workin’ a job. I was thinking that maybe it would be good for you to stay with Jewelle and Jackson one more night, maybe two. I mean if they could put up with a wild child like you.”
She giggled and then laughed. “Cilla York wanted me to stay at her house tonight so I could help her with her French homework.”
A feeling akin to despair rose up in my chest. I didn’t want to miss a single moment of my daughter’s life. I didn’t want to be shot down in some alley over another man’s troubles. I’d lost Bonnie but I still had Feather.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I?”
“Can you what?”
“Stay at Cilla’s tonight.”
“Is she nice?”
“You met her and her parents at the school orientation. Mr. York is the one that knew you because he saw you at P9.”
A building that thousands of people walked through every day but Jordan York remembered me, one of two suited black men who ever got past their corporate barricade.
“You can stay if you want, honey, but let Aunt Jewelle take you over.”
“Okay.”
“And tell Jewelle that I’ll be picking you up from school tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“I love you, Daddy,” she said and then banged the phone down on its table.
“Easy?” Jewelle said a few moments later.
“Hey, J, thanks for keeping my girl.”
“She’s so good with the baby. I think I might want to borrow her some more.”
“If you and Jackson ever wanna get away me an’ Feather can take the baby. You know I’m good with diapers.”
“Maybe after a few months. What can I do for you?”
“Where’s your old man?”
“Up in Oxnard with a few of the other senior vice presidents. He’ll be back at the office soon.”
“Feather wants to go stay at a girlfriend’s house tonight. Can you drop her off and maybe go in to see that it’s okay?”
“You’re a good man, Easy Rawlins.”
—
Rush hour in L.A. in the sixties wasn’t too bad. I took surface streets again, wanting to give Jackson the time to get back from whatever company business he was handling. He’d be coming back on the company helicopter but still I wasn’t in a hurry.
—
P9 was on Wilshire Boulevard in the heart of downtown.
I parked on the street because after 6:00 p.m. downtown was almost abandoned. P9 was one of the few corporations that had people working twenty-four hours a day; this because their investment base was international and their president, Jean-Paul Villard, wanted to keep his position on the multinational playing field.
“Can I help you?” a big white man in a private security uniform asked me.
It was a self-negating question because he put his body in the glass doorway to block my passage. My lower brain perceived this action as a threat, so I had to pause a moment to keep my fists from getting me into trouble.
“I said,” the guard repeated, “can I help you?”
“No,” I replied, cheerfully moving as if I was going to walk around him.
He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “This is private property, soul brother.”
Though shorter, the guard had at least fifteen pounds on me. The tan of his skin was natural coloration, not sun-induced, and his hair was both brown and greasy. His breath smelled of the roast beef he’d had for lunch.
I noticed all these things because in the United States you had to fight for your freedom every damn day; and sometimes that struggle was keeping from hurting somebody—no matter how good that hurt might have felt.
“Jim!” someone shouted. “Jim! Jim!”
Each exhortation got louder.
Finally my nemesis-of-the-moment turned his head.
Running toward us was another uniformed white guard. This one was slender. His movements were herky-jerky, reminding me of a marionette.
“Jim,” he said again, a little out of breath.
“What?” the larger guard demanded.
The newcomer took a gulp of air and then said, “This man is Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins and you do not want to have your hands on him.”
I think I must have smiled at that point. There wasn’t one person in a hundred that knew me who could recite my full name; but Jackson Blue had put a bulletin downstairs telling the guards and interns to let me by when I came to the door.
The chubby guard regarded me.
“Get out of my way,” I said.
He winced and then obliged.
“What is going on ’ere?” a young woman inquired.
Asiette Moulon was five-three in stocking feet with black hair and gray eyes. Her skin identified her white ancestry, millennia in the making. A Frenchwoman from central France, she was quite fetching in her little black dress.
“Not a thing, Miss Moulon. Jim was just showing Mr. Rawlins in.”
Mr. Rawlins. Times were changing.
“You are okay, Easy?” she asked me.
“I am lookin’ at you.”
“You are,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah. Jim here didn’t know me and was makin’ sure I wasn’t gonna sneak in the toilets and steal the copper pipes.”
She smiled, understanding me better than Jim ever could.
“Come on back to my office,” she said, taking me by the arm.
When I’d met Asiette she was just another intern guarding the front desk from salesmen and hustlers. The only difference was that she loved black Americans because, when she was a child, she first met us as soldiers liberating her nation.
—
I sat in the same green visitor’s chair while she perched on top of the same orange desk she’d had the last time I was there.
“Overtime?” I asked her.
“Just putting my papers away,” she said. “I am very sad, you know.”
“Sad about what?”
“That you ’aven’t called.”
“Called?”
“The last time I saw you you said that we would ’ave lunch.”
“Oh….”
“Don’t worry. I am not angry. ’Ow ’ave you been?”
Her gray eyes disarmed me somehow. I tried to say that everything was fine but there was a catch in my throat and I was only able to say, “Okay.”
“Can I ’elp?” she asked, hearing the far-off distress in a single word.
“Maybe later,” I said.
Asiette’s response was a smile on partially pouted lips.
—
Jackson’s office was on the thirty-first floor of the P9 building.
The most difficult time Jewelle and I had making him take the job was the floor number. His superstitions told him that 31 was just 13 backward.
His secretary was gone by then so I walked to his private door, which was open, and called out, “Hey, Jackson.”
He was seated nearly forty feet away behind a huge white desk, his back turned toward the entrance as he gazed out of the window that comprised the outer wall.
“Easy?” he called out, his back still turned.
“Yeah.”
“Have a seat on the sofas, baby.” He turned and sprang up walking toward me, his gait determined to be that of a man.
Jackson was an odd product of the American ghetto. He was a genius and he was small. Impoverished and outcast, he was also afraid of almost everyone and everything. This fear however could not daunt his intelligence and so he was in trouble more times than not. And even though he was now a corporate kingpin with a six-figure salary, he was still haunted by the fears heaped upon him since the first day he could remember.
Toward the entrance of his office Jackson had two long yellow sofas facing each other over a glass coffee table. I took the couch on the left and he took the other.
“Asiette called,” he told me. “That girl likes you.�
�
“I need to talk, Jackson.”
“Talk about what?” he said, trying to master his natural dread of anything new.
“Rufus Tyler.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like that.”
I told Jackson the whole story, leaving out nothing. It’s not that I’m so honest or anything but Jackson was too smart for me to lie.
“Mouse on one side and Charcoal Joe on the other,” Jackson declared. “That’s the definition of a rock and a hard place.”
“Tomorrow morning I get the young professor out of jail and I was wondering if you knew anything that would help me.”
“Like what?”
“Anything about Joe. I know you still make the rounds of the old neighborhood now and then. Maybe you heard something.”
“Not about Joe,” he said. “But I know that Seymour all right.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, man. Black PhD at twenty-one…I’m into that shit. I could work in my field a hundred days in a row and not meet a black scientist. They more rare than a Negro violinist in a big city orchestra.
“I had him right here on this couch. You know computers read paper cards today, but soon they be on the phone lines and radio waves. I wanted to come up with somethin’ that would let a program stay in the air and we could call it down whenever we want. Seymour’s a physicist so I wanted to get his ideas, maybe hire him. But he liked the university too much so we didn’t get nowhere.”
“You think he could be a murderer?”
“Anybody be a killer, Ease. You know that. Shit, there’s grandmothers poison their own husbands after fifty years in the same bed.”
“But did Brathwaite seem bent?”
“No. He was pretty innocent and sheltered. Didn’t even talk like a brother.”
“And nothing about Joe?” You had to ask Jackson any important question twice.
“Look, Easy, I don’t even mention that mothahfuckah’s name. I don’t want him and me in the same breath, talked about in the same room. Because if he sets his sights on me and P9 there’d be some fireworks for sure.”
I could see his argument.
“Thanks, Jackson.” I stood to take my leave.
“How’s Bonnie?” he asked, before I could take a step.
“Why?”
“Jewelle called and said you two broke up.”
I told him the tale.
When I was through he nodded as if this was somehow expected.
“Did you know about it?” I asked him.
“About the boyfriend? No. But it was obvious about you and Bonnie.”
“Obvious how?”
“All you got to do is look, Easy. All you got to do is look. She like a granite cliff and you the ocean poundin’ away. Seein’ you together was beautiful, but you know in the end one’s unable to leave and the other always got one foot out the door.”
That was the closest I came to crying over losing Bonnie. When he wasn’t afraid, Jackson didn’t only have a mind, he also had a very smart heart.
“Oh yeah, man,” he said. “Here.”
He handed me a slip of notepaper that was folded in half. Written on the outside was the word grandmamma.
I pocketed the paper, sniffed back a tear, and walked down to the elevator wondering if I would live long enough to forget my pain.
18
“Easy?” she said when I had almost reached the exit door.
Asiette walked up to me and smiled.
The white guard standing at the door, Jim, shifted a bit. I was very much aware of his discomfort because when I was a boy and then a young man down in Texas and Louisiana, Asiette smiling like that could have gotten me killed.
“You still here, girl?” I asked lightly, pushing down the fear.
“I was waiting.”
“For what?”
“You said that I could ’elp you later.”
—
We took my car.
She moved close to me and put a hand in my lap. This was another danger. Any policeman that saw us was at liberty to stop the car. In a courtroom that cop would say that he was suspicious of white slavery from just seeing us cruise down Wilshire Boulevard.
I was aware of the risk but not as much as her hand upon my upper thigh.
“I feel that,” I said as we crossed Western.
“I do too,” she whispered. The pressure of her hand increased ever so slightly.
“Are all French girls so bold as you?”
“You were there,” she said.
“That was wartime,” I said and then grunted softly.
“I like you.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You are so patient.”
“Patient?”
She squeezed and pressed down. “Yes.”
“How do you mean?” I asked, trying to keep a clear mind and both eyes on the road.
“When the white men insult you, you do not lose your tempair. When I tell you I want to see you, you say okay but there is no ’urry and that makes me want you more.”
—
At the house she asked me if I had a shower; she wanted to clean up after a long day at work.
“Upstairs,” I said.
“Come with me,” she offered. “I will wash you.”
That shower was the best part of a mostly nice visit. The physicality seemed particularly familiar; an intimacy far beyond what I usually experienced on the first night of sex with a new friend.
Holding my erection, Asiette guided that intimacy into the bedroom and for quite a while my worries retreated—the spontaneous, if temporary, remission of a broken heart.
—
There came the single note of a silver chime in the middle of my sleep.
“Easy?”
“Shhh.”
I pulled on my boxer shorts, went to the window of the second-floor hall, and looked down. There were three of them standing at my front door.
“Easy.” She had come up behind me already wearing her little black dress.
“Back stairs,” I said.
One of the deciding factors in buying the new house was the fact that the upstairs had a back way out. It was a little doorway that looked more like it led to a closet than a set of stairs.
Asiette and I went through, locking the door behind us. We got to the back porch where I kept a .45 revolver on the doorsill. Before we made it outside I heard a window break and another silver chime.
Clad in only boxer shorts, I led my barefoot lover toward a dense stand of Texas privet at the northwest end of my yard. The eight-foot-high, twelve-foot-wide hedge stood against a fairly tall redwood fence.
Both hidden and cornered, I cocked my pistol and waited.
Asiette stood by me, silent and still.
For three or four long minutes we stood in the shadow of the hedgerow.
A light came on in one of the upper windows of the house.
After a few more minutes the back door came open.
Three men entered the backyard. Two of them had handguns. The nightlight above the garage illuminated the invaders. They were white men in dark clothes, two large and one not so big. They ambled around awhile, looking for me no doubt.
One came close to our hiding bush. I aimed the hidden muzzle at his head.
The moment passed. The men got together, said words I couldn’t make out, and then went back into the house.
“We’re gonna wait a quarter hour,” I whispered to Asiette.
She nodded her assent.
My breath came cold and clear as I wondered who those men could have been; who might have sent them?
—
“Asiette.”
“Yes?”
“They could still be in the house waiting for me. I’m gonna go in through that back way and see. You stay right here. Don’t do nuthin’ till I get back. If they kill me they’ll think I was alone. If I kill them or they ain’t there I’ll come back.”
She nodded and
squeezed my left forearm.
—
Ever so slowly I moved from the hiding place to the back door that led from the house. It took me two minutes to pull that door open and five to creep up the stairs.
They had broken the lock of the back-exit door.
Though the house was silent and cool, the palm of my gun hand was sweating.
The lights were still on upstairs but the rooms were empty.
I went to the top of the stairs looking down on the first-floor foyer and waited five minutes, ten.
The silence seemed final. My nostrils were open wide. I was thinking that the only way those men would have been this quiet was if they had heard me coming up the back stair. But they outnumbered me. This wasn’t a squad of crack commandos, just a bunch of thugs who broke out windows and shook locked front doors. They wouldn’t have had the patience to sit in silence in the dark.
Convincing myself that this logic was good only took three minutes, or maybe seven. I came downstairs ready to shoot. But they weren’t there. The house was empty and the thugs gone.
—
“Asiette,” I called into the shrubs.
Seeing her emerge from the dark shrubbery in that black dress, barefoot and pale, made me realize that we’d survived. I took her in my arms and hugged her too tightly.
She didn’t complain.
She put on her shoes while I dressed in T-shirt and jeans. After gathering my wallet, car keys, and Mama Jo’s letter from yesterday’s suit, I took a deep breath and said, “We better get to it.”
The hardest thing either one of us did that night was walk down to my car. I had parked at the curb because Asiette’s restless hand on my thigh made turning into the driveway a little difficult.
There didn’t seem to be anyone lying in wait for us in some unfamiliar car, but I had my gun out and to my side when we scurried down the slight incline of my front lawn. I had given Asiette the keys because I wanted to be ready for the firefight if it came.
Three blocks away we changed seats and I drove.
“I ’eard music,” Asiette said after a few more blocks. “Before those men broke in, there was a bell.”
“That’s you,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Jackson convinced the head of the home insurance department of P9 to give people a break on their rates if they got this new burglar alarm that he read about.”
Charcoal Joe Page 10
