“ALEXANDER RESIDENCE,” a white man answered on the first ring of my next call.
“Peter?”
“Mr. Rawlins. How are you, sir?”
The transformation of Peter Rhone from salesman to personal manservant to EttaMae Harris would always be astonishing to me. He lost the love of his life in the Watts riots, a lovely young black woman named Nola Payne, and pretty much gave up on the white race. He moved onto the side porch of EttaMae’s house and did chores for her and her husband, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.
Rhone worked part-time as a mechanic for my old friend Primo in a garage in East LA. He was learning a trade and contributing to the general pot for the upkeep of Etta’s home. Peter was paying penance for the death of Nola Payne because in some way he saw himself as the cause of her demise.
“Okay,” I said. “All right. How’s the garage workin’ out?”
“I’m cleaning spark plugs now. Pretty soon Jorge is going to show me how to work with an automatic transmission.”
“Huh,” I grunted. “Raymond around there?”
“I better get Etta for you,” he said, and I knew there was a problem.
“Easy?” Etta said into the phone a moment later.
“Yeah, babe.”
“I need your help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because I loved Etta as a friend and I had once loved her as I did Bonnie. If she hadn’t been mad for my best friend, we’d’ve had a whole house full of children by that time.
“The police lookin’ for Raymond,” she said.
“For what?” I asked.
“Murder.”
“Murder?”
“Some fool name’a Pericles Tarr went missin’, an’ the cops here ev’ry day askin’ me what I know about it. If it wasn’t for Pete I think they might’a drug me off to jail just for bein’ married to Ray.”
None of this was a surprise to me. Raymond lived a life of crime. The diminutive killer was connected to a whole network of heist men that operated from coast to coast, and maybe beyond that. But for all that, I couldn’t imagine him involved in a petty murder. It wasn’t that Mouse had somehow moved beyond killing; just the opposite was true. But in recent years his blood had cooled, and he rarely lost his temper. If he was to kill somebody nowadays, it would have been in the dead of night, with no witnesses or clues left behind to incriminate him.
“Where is Mouse?” I asked.
“That’s what I need to find out,” Etta said. “He went missin’ the day before this Tarr man did. Now he ain’t around and the law’s all ovah me.”
“So you want me to find him?” I asked, regretting that I had called.
“Yes.”
“What do I do then?”
“I’m worried, Easy,” Etta said. “These cops is serious. They want my baby under the jailhouse.”
I hadn’t heard Etta call Ray my baby in many years.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll find him and I’ll do what I have to to make sure he’s okay.”
“I know this ain’t for free, Easy,” Etta told me. “I’m’a pay you for it.”
“Uh-huh. You know anything about this Tarr?”
“Not too much. He’s married and got a whole house full’a chirren.”
“Where does he live?”
“On Sixty-third Street.” She recited the address, and I wrote it down, thinking that I had found more trouble in one day than most men come across in a decade.
I had called Mouse because he and Christmas Black were friends. I had hoped to find help, not give it. But when you live a life among desperate men and women, any door you open might have Pandora written all over the other side.
3
I hadn’t imbibed any alcohol whatsoever in years. But since Bonnie left I thought about sour mash whiskey every day. I was sitting in the living room in front of a dark TV, thinking about drinking, when the phone rang.
Another symptom of my loneliness was that my heart thrilled with fear every time someone called or knocked on the door. I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it, but still I worried about what I could say.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Rawlins?” a girl asked.
“Yes.”
“Is something wrong? You sound funny.”
“Who is this?”
“Chevette.”
It hadn’t been a full day since I’d almost murdered a man over the woman-child, and already I had to reach for her in my memory.
“Hi. Something wrong? Is pig man botherin’ you?”
“No,” she said. “My daddy told me that I should call and say thank you. I would have anyway, though. He says that we gonna move to Philadelphia to live with my uncle. He says that way we can have a new start back there.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” I said with poorly manufactured enthusiasm.
Chevette sighed.
I got lost in that sigh.
Chevette saw me as her savior. First I took her away from her pimp and then I allowed her to see her father in a way he could never show himself.
I got lost trying to imagine how I could see myself as that child saw me: a hero filled with power and certainty. I would have given anything to be the man she had called.
“If you have any problems, just tell me,” that man said to Chevette.
The front door swung open, and Jesus came in with Benita Flagg and Essie.
“Okay, Mr. Rawlins,” Chevette said. “My daddy wanna say hi.”
I waved at my little broken family.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yeah, Martel. She sounds good.”
“I’m movin’ us all out to Pennsylvania,” he said. “Brother says there’s good work at the train yards out there.”
“That sounds great. Chevette could use a new start; maybe you and your wife could too.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Martel said, treading water.
“Is there something else?” I asked.
Essie started crying then.
“You, um, you said that, uh, that the three hundred dollars was for the week you was gonna spend lookin’ for Chevy.”
“Yeah?” I said with the question in my voice, but I knew what was coming next.
“Well, it only took a day, not even that.”
“So?”
“I figure that’s about fifty dollars a day, excludin’ Sunday,” Martel argued. “You could get another job to make up the difference.”
“Is Chevette still there?” I asked.
“Yeh. Why?”
“I tell you what, Martel. I’ll give you two hundred and fifty dollars if Chevy could come spend the next five days with me.”
“Say what?”
I hung up then. Martel couldn’t help it. He was a workingman and had the logic of the paycheck wedged in his soul. I’d saved his daughter from a life of prostitution, but that didn’t mean I’d earned his three hundred dollars. He’d go to his grave feeling that he’d been cheated by me.
“Hey, boy,” I said, rising to meet my son.
“Dad.”
He hugged me and I kissed his forehead. Benita got in on it, kissing my cheek while Essie wailed in her arms.
I took the baby in my hands and heaved her around in a circle. She looked at my face in wonder, reached up to my scratchy cheek, and then smiled.
For a moment I felt nothing but love for that infant. She had Benita’s medium-brown skin and Juice’s straight black hair. There wasn’t one drop of my blood in her veins, but she was my granddaughter. It was because of my love for her that I had been ready to kill Porky.
Looking at her trusting face, I thought of the child that my first wife took away with her to Texas. That shadow of loss brought on the memory of Bonnie, and I handed Essie back to her mother.
“Are you okay, Mr. Rawlins?” Benny asked me.
Hadn’t she just asked me that? No.
“Fine, baby.”
“You need us tonight, Dad?” Jesus asked. He knew that I was hurting and so tried to save me from Beni
ta’s concern. He was always saving me — ever since I first brought him home from the streets.
“No. I found who I was looking for. But you guys could stay anyway. I’ll sleep in your room, Juice.”
Jesus knew that I wanted him to stay, to keep my house filled with movement and sound. He nodded ever so slightly and looked into my eyes.
I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe it was that he could watch TV or sleep in a big bed. But the way I felt then, I was sure that he could see right through me. That he knew I was way off course, lost in my own home, my own skin.
“Juice!” Feather and Easter Dawn shouted.
They ran in to hug the boy who took them on boat rides and taught them how to catch crabs in a net. All the commotion caused Essie to cry again, and Benita brought out her bottle.
I drifted into the kitchen and started dinner. Before long I had three pots and the oven going. Fried chicken with leftover macaroni and cheese, and cauliflower with a white sauce spiced by Tabasco. Easter and Feather joined me after a while and made a Bisquick peach crisp under my supervision.
The whole dinner took forty-seven minutes from start to the table. While the pastry cooled on the sink, Feather and Easter Dawn helped me serve the meal.
Dinner was boisterous. Every now and then Easter got a little sad, but Jesus sat next to her and told her little jokes that made her grin.
EVERYONE BUT ME was in bed by nine.
I sat in front of the dark TV, thinking about whiskey and how good it once tasted.
After a while I forced myself to consider the Vietnamese child who had been taken from her war-torn homeland, whose parents (and all their relatives and everyone they knew) had been murdered by the man who had adopted her — Christmas Black.
The professional soldier’s patriotism had soured when he realized what America’s war had cost him. He was a killer on a par with Mouse. But Christmas was also a man of honor. This made him more dangerous and unpredictable than the homicidal friend of my youth.
If Christmas had left E.D. with me, then he must have been at war somewhere. What he wanted was for me to look after his little girl, but he wasn’t my client. Easter had asked me to assure her that her father was okay. The only way I could do that was to go out and find him.
After that, or maybe blended up in it, I would have to find Mouse and see what was what in those murder allegations. Raymond had once spent five years in the can for manslaughter. He had made it known that he would never go into prison again. That meant if the cops found him first, a goodly number of them were likely to get killed. Even if Etta hadn’t hired me, I’d still try to save the lives that Mouse would take — that was one of my self-appointed duties in life.
4
I was jarred out of a deep sleep by something — a sound. It was very late. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the little yellow dog glaring at me from between the drapes that covered the front window. I wasn’t quite sure that the phone had rung. But then it jangled again. There was an extension in my bedroom, and I was worried about disturbing the baby, so I answered quickly, thinking that it was either Christmas or Mouse calling in from some hazardous position in the street.
“Yeah?” I said in a husky tone.
“Easy?”
The room disappeared for a moment. I was floating or falling into a dark night.
“Bonnie?”
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” she said in that sweet accent. “I could call you tomorrow. . . . Easy?”
“Yeah. Hey, babe. It’s been a long time.”
“A year, almost.”
“It’s great to hear you, your voice,” I said. “How are you?”
“Fine.” Her tone was reserved. But why not? I thought. She was taking a big chance calling me. The last time we spoke, I had kicked her out of my house.
“I was just sittin’ here in front of the TV,” I said. “Jesus and Benita sleepin’ in my bed. Easter Dawn is here. You don’t know her, but she’s the daughter of a friend’a mine.”
Bonnie didn’t reply to all that. I remember thinking that Feather had probably told Bonnie about Easter. She and Christmas had been by a few times. The ex-soldier thought that his little girl needed to have friends, and because he homeschooled her he was worried about her being too influenced by his being a man.
“It’s funny that you should call,” I said in the voice and demeanor of a man alien to me. “I’ve been thinking about you. Not all the time, I mean, but thinking about what happened . . .”
“I’m going to be married to Joguye in September,” she said.
My spine felt like a xylophone being played by a dissonant bebop master. I actually stood up and gasped as the discordant vibrations ripped through me. The spasms came on suddenly, like a downpour or an explosion, but Bonnie was still talking as if the world had not come to an end.
“. . . I wanted to tell you,” she said, “because Jesus and Feather will be part of the wedding and I . . .”
Was that what I had seen in Juice’s eyes? Did he know that Bonnie planned this, this betrayal? Betrayal? What betrayal? I had sent her away. It wasn’t her fault.
“I waited for you to call. . . .”
I should have called. I knew that I should. I knew that I would, one day. But not soon enough.
“Easy?” she said.
I opened my mouth, trying to answer her. The tremors subsided and I eased back onto the sofa.
“Easy?”
I cradled the phone, hanging up on a life that might have been, if I had only picked up a telephone and spoken my heart.
5
You can’t wake up from a nightmare if you never fall asleep. I was out of the house by 4:30 that morning. I had showered and shaved, trimmed my nails, and brushed my teeth. I drank the rest of the pot that Feather had brewed the afternoon before and spent every other minute trying not to think about Bonnie Shay and suicide.
The only big tire on a roof in South Los Angeles at that time was a Goodyear advertisement atop Falcon’s Nest Bakery on Centinela.
The sky was lightening at the edges and traffic was only just picking up. I could feel my teeth and fingertips and not much else.
I wasn’t angry, but if Porky the Pimp had walked by me then, I would have pulled out my licensed .38 and shot him six times. I might have even reloaded and shot him again.
THE BIG BLUE BUILDING across from Falcon’s Nest Bakery was the Pride of Bethlehem Negro People’s Congregational Church. There was a bright red cross on the roof and a yellow double door for the entrance.
These colors seemed hopeful in the dawning light.
I tried for the first time since I was a child to imagine what God was like. I remembered men and women going into apoplectic convulsions in church when the Spirit entered them. That sounded good to me. I’d let the Spirit in if he promised to drive away my pain.
I lit a Camel, thought about the taste of sour mash, tried and failed to push Bonnie out of my mind, and climbed out of the car like Bela Lugosi from his coffin.
THE LONG WHITE BUNGALOWS behind the Pride of Bethlehem were on church property. They looked like the downscale military barracks of an army that had lost the war. There had once been a patch of lawn between the two long buildings, but now there was only hard yellow earth and a few weeds. The white plank walls were dirty and lusterless, and the green tar paper on the roofs had begun to curl as the cheap glue that once held them lost adhesive strength.
The forty-foot-long structures faced each other and were perpendicular to the back of the church.
At the center of each long wall was a plain door. I went up to the door on the right. There were labels on either side that had inked names on them that had faded in the sun.
Shellman was on the left and Purvis on the right.
The opposite door was Black and Alcorn.
I opened this door to the slender entrance chamber.
Alcorn was a regular family. In the dim light of the utility hall, I could see that they had left a
broken hobbyhorse, a filthy mop, and three pairs of worn-down shoes outside their door. There was dust and dirt on the black rubber doormat and a child’s jelly fingerprints under the doorknob.
The Black residence was a whole different experience. Christmas had a stiff push broom leaned up against the wall like a soldier standing at attention. There was a mop in a lime green plastic bucket that exuded the odor of harsh cleanliness. The concrete floor before this entrance had been washed, and the white door was newly painted.
I smiled for the first time that morning, thinking about how Christmas and Easter formed the world around them just as surely as the holidays they were named for.
I knocked and waited and then knocked again. You didn’t just walk in unannounced on Christmas Black.
After a few more attempts, I tried the doorknob. It gave easily. The studio apartment was cleaner than a new hospital wing.
There was a tan couch against the center wall across from a long window that looked out on two lonely pines. On the left side of the far end of the room was an army cot and on the right was a child’s bed with pink sheets and covers. Both were immaculately neat. The floor was swept, the dishes washed and stacked away, the small coffee table in front of the couch didn’t have one ring on it from a water glass or a coffee cup.
The trash can was empty — and even washed.
Not a hair was to be seen on the white porcelain sink in the bathroom. There was a tiny bar of pink soap in the shape of a smiling fish in the dish next to the tub. I was wrapping the soap in a few sheets of toilet paper when I had an inspiration.
I went back into the main room and pulled the couch away from the wall. I remembered that when Jesus was a child he often hid his treasures and mistakes behind the couch, figuring that only he was small enough to fit in that crawl space.
There were a few candy wrappers, a headless doll, and a framed photograph back there. It was the picture of a maybe-beautiful white woman wearing a black skirt, a pink sweater, a red scarf that completely covered her head, and dark, dark sunglasses. The woman was leaning against the rail of a good-sized yacht, looking out over the side. The name of the boat was below her: New Pair of Shoes.
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