“Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said, running from Feather’s room. “I have all the dolls set up for you to see.”
IT TOOK ME ALMOST an hour to get dressed for dinner. I closed my door and sat on the bed, trying to will myself into normalcy. Feather’s words had cut so deeply that I couldn’t even think of a place that wasn’t filled with hurt.
Deciding on a pair of socks took me five minutes; putting them on took ten.
FEATHER AND E.D. kissed me good-bye at the door. My daughter looked at me, feeling for the first time what it was like to be in my mind. It was a curse I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy.
14
On the drive to Brentan’s, I tried to imagine myself at Bonnie’s wedding. I got stuck on what color and kind of suit to wear. I knew that I would never be able to go, but I wanted to imagine being there at the ceremony, watching them kiss after promising each other forever. If I could see it in my mind, maybe I could get past it.
I parked on the street and climbed out of my car. It was 7:48 by the gold-and-copper Grumbacher watch on my wrist.
A police car was passing by. The cops slowed down and stared out their window at me. Me: dark as the approaching night, tall, in shape enough for one good round with a journeyman light heavyweight, dressed in a deep gray suit that fit me at least as well as the English language.
The car slowed down to three miles an hour, and the pale faces wondered if they should roust me.
I stood up straight and stared back at them.
They hesitated, exchanged a few words, and then sped off. Maybe it was close to the end of the shift for them, or maybe they realized that I was a citizen of the United States of America. Probably, though, some real crime had come in over the radio and they didn’t have the leisure to bring me under their control.
In the first-floor lobby, another white guard, this one tall and lanky, came up to me.
“May I help you, sir?” he asked.
Manners before insults. Little blessings.
“Goin’ up to the twenty-third floor to grab a bite,” I replied.
“Do you have a reservation?”
“Is the pope Catholic?”
“What?”
I walked past him to the express elevator door. I pressed the button, conflicted about whether I wanted the guard to come over to me so that I could break his jaw, or just to be left alone.
The car came and the doors slid open. The guard was nowhere in my vicinity.
ANOTHER WHITE WOMAN in a lovely gown adorned the podium. The dress was scarlet, and her face contained the beauty of youth. It was full, with green eyes and a nose that stood out like a petite lever on a whole world of laughter.
When the woman-child saw me, the potential for laughter dimmed a little.
“Yes?” she asked, giving me only her insincere smile.
“Rawlins for dinner for two at eight,” I said.
Without looking at the log in front of her, she asked, “Do you have a reservation?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
The pretty thing looked down and moved her finger around.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said very politely.
As she walked away, I lit up a cigarette. Jackson Blue had once told me that cigarette smoke constricts the veins and raises the blood pressure to a dangerous degree. But all I felt was calm. The smoke took off the sharp edge that I’d honed on the way to that restaurant.
A white couple came up behind me.
“Excuse me,” the tall white man said. He wore a tuxedo and had a white cashmere scarf around his neck. He was my age. She was twenty years younger, platinum from head to toe.
“It’s a line, man,” I said, no longer wanting to placate a world seemingly filled with my adversaries.
Hans Green arrived a minute or two after that. He was attended by the young scarlet-clad beauty. The man in the tuxedo went around me and said, “We’re here for our reservation.”
Hans turned to the hostess, saying, “Go change your clothes, Melinda.”
Tears appeared in her eyes and she hurried away.
The man in the tuxedo said, “Excuse me, sir, but we’d like to be seated.”
“Don’t you see this man standing in front of you?” Green asked. “Are you blind or simply an ass?”
The Tux backed up and Hans said, “Come on, Mr. Rawlins, let me show you to your table.”
On our way, Hans touched a waitress on her shoulder and whispered something to her.
“Right away, Mr. Green,” she said, and then made her way to the podium.
THE TABLE Hans had for me was perfect. Removed from the other tables, we were still in sight of everyone. The western view looked down upon an LA that was coming alive with electric light.
I sat and so did Hans.
“How do you do it?” he asked me.
“What?”
“I’m a white man,” he said. “An Aryan. I golf, belong to a men’s club. My parents came to America in order to be free and to share in democracy, but ten minutes with you and I’ve had arguments with four people about their bigotry. If that’s what I face in ten minutes, what must life be like for you twenty-four hours a day?”
“Ten years ago I didn’t have it so bad,” I said.
“Things have gotten worse?”
“In a way. Ten years ago you wouldn’t have been able to seat me. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have been in this neighborhood. Slavery and what came after are deep wounds, Hans. And, you know, healing hurts like hell.”
The ugly restaurateur sat back and stared at me. He shook his head and frowned. “How can you be so calm about it?” he asked.
“Because the other choice would kill me and a dozen other folks don’t know the difference between a fellow citizen and an imminent threat.”
“Hello,” a woman said. “I didn’t know it was going to be a party.”
Tourmaline was wearing a very tight fitting knee-length white dress. There was a blue hat shaped like a delicate seashell on the side of her head. The white high heels did not impede her grace.
Hans and I got to our feet.
I noticed that it was the woman Hans had whispered to who had brought Tourmaline to our table.
“Hi,” I said. “This is Hans Green, the manager here. Hans, this is Miss . . .”
“Goss,” she said, just in case I had forgotten her last name. It’s always nice when your date wants to keep you from being embarrassed.
Hans bowed and kissed her hand. “Easy is a lucky man.”
He held out a chair for Tourmaline, and she sat with exceptional grace. “Is there anything you don’t eat or drink, Miss Goss?” he asked, as I regained my seat.
“I don’t like veal very much,” she said.
“Then leave the rest to me.”
Hans and the new hostess walked off.
“I’m glad we didn’t go to some little place down on Central,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’d have to fight the men off down there. Hans had his eyes poppin’ outta his head and he just told me that he was an Aryan.”
Tourmaline smiled. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Easy Rawlins at your service.”
“I mean, how can you get into a place like this and have the manager visiting at your table? You a gangster or something?”
My blood was thrumming. I smiled and hunched my shoulders.
“Every once in a while I get together with my friends Ray and Jackson,” I said. “We shoot the shit and joke around. Jackson is what he calls an autodidact. That means —”
“Self-educated,” Tourmaline said.
“Yeah. Anyway, Jackson calls the three of us the vanguard, the people up front blazing new trails. We make inroads to all kinds of places. From this restaurant on.”
Tourmaline was impressed, but it hardly showed.
“Where’d you learn all those big words, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Reading and talking. What about you?”
&nbs
p; Before Tourmaline could answer, Melinda, the demoted hostess, came over to our table. She was wearing a green-and-white waitress’s uniform and had her long red hair tied back.
She put glasses of water in front of us.
“Mr. Green and the chef are planning your meal, but is there anything special you want?”
I shook my head without speaking.
“No, thank you,” Tourmaline said graciously.
After Melinda walked away, Tourmaline observed, “She looks sad.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I wonder why.”
THE EVENING was the best I’d had in a year. Tourmaline was only working at the used-car lot for a few months. She was a student at UCLA full-time, getting her master’s in economics.
“Marxist economics or the kind that makes money?” I asked.
“The science,” she said with a smirk. “I’m political but not a revolutionary; interested in a good living, but I have no need to be rich.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you got to admit that the science meets man on the front page of the paper. I just glanced at the headlines today and I saw articles on Vietnam, the USSR, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
“But what about that boy and his brother?” Tourmaline asked.
“I didn’t see that one.”
“It was on the lower left,” she said. “A sixteen-year-old boy carried his dying brother through the snow for ten hours in the San Gabriel Mountains. When the rescuers found them, the younger boy was dead.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lotta good strong hearts out there. Problem is they get lost when they wander too far from home.”
I had made up my mind not to mention the red truck until she did. There was a dance to our date. It was something we both needed. I didn’t know a thing about her as a person, and I was a mystery myself at that table.
Melinda served us duck with cherry sauce, ramps, and potatoes roasted with garlic and parsley. For dessert Hans brought us fresh strawberries in whipped cream with champagne for Tourmaline and Squirt grapefruit soda in a glass for me.
“You don’t drink?” Tourmaline asked.
“No.”
“You sound sad about it.” The way she let her head tilt to the side told me she cared. For the first time in a long time, I felt physically drawn to a woman.
“Whiskey for me is like having an allergy to aspirin along with the worst headache you could imagine.”
Tourmaline didn’t respond to that, not with words. She sipped from her flute and looked at me.
“I have the information you wanted,” she said. “And I’ll give it to you if you promise not to try and pay me.”
“I can’t even try?”
“No.”
15
I was further impressed by Tourmaline because she had taken the bus to make our date. I drove her home with hardly a thought about Christmas Black and the hard men after him, or about Mouse and his war with the LAPD.
It was after eleven when I walked the beautiful young black woman to her door. She lived in an apartment that had been added on to the side of a garage at the back of a home on Hooper.
While she fumbled in her purse for the key, I said, “This has been a really wonderful evening, Miss Goss.”
Almost as an afterthought she took an envelope out of her bag and handed it to me.
“This is what you asked me for,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She looked up at me, waited for more words, and when those words didn’t come, she said, “Is that it?”
“What?”
“I expect a man to at least try and kiss me. You know it took me two and a half hours to look like this.”
Time didn’t exactly stop for me right then. It was more like it slowed down to an excruciatingly sluggish ooze. I could feel my lips wondering what to say — or do.
“Hello,” Tourmaline prodded when I didn’t answer.
And then suddenly everything became normal again. I knew exactly who I was and what I needed to say.
“If I were to kiss you right now, with everything that I’m feelin’, neither one of us would make it through the door. We’d be right out here on the concrete, under the palm trees, making babies.”
Tourmaline gazed at me, deciding how to react to my declaration.
“That’s better,” she said at last.
She opened the door and went in. Before the door closed, she put her head out and kissed the air.
I GOT TO COX BAR a few minutes shy of midnight. Most places in LA were already closed, but Ginny Wright’s bar was just getting started. It was a tin-and-tar-paper structure that would have been condemned on the day it was erected, but Cox was hidden in an alley and no health inspector, no building inspector even knew it was there.
Somewhere around fifteen men and women sat in the dark room, leaning on mismatched tables, perched on chairs, stools, benches, and even a crate or two. The room stank of sour beer and cigarette smoke, but I can’t say that it didn’t feel like home. The dark despair contained within the walls of Cox Bar was the memory and sensibility that were contained within the confines of my skull. The darkness was a place to hide and plot and grieve.
I took a deep breath and walked toward the pine plank set upon two sawhorses that stood for the bar. I expected to see big black Ginny come around the closet that held the liquor bottles, but instead it was my old friend John from Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. John — one of my oldest friends in California. Tall and broad and brown as the mud oozing up between an alligator’s claws.
John was born to be a bartender. For a few years he had tried to make it in the construction business. He bought lots and built houses. At night he’d go home pretending that he was just a regular guy, a businessman who never thought about straight liquor and prostitutes, payoffs and gangsters.
“Easy.”
“Alva’s gone for good, huh, John?”
Alva had been John’s wife for a few years. He had helped raise her son, hired me to save the brooding boy’s life one time there.
“Yeah,” John replied. “She wanted a daytime man, and you know I can’t even talk straight ’fore four in the afternoon.”
I sat on the bar’s one high stool, and he served me a glass of water with three ice cubes in it.
“Where’s Ginny?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever been here when she wasn’t workin’ the bar.”
“Lupus.”
It was only a word, but we both knew that it might well be a death sentence for our old friend from Houston.
After an appropriate span of reverent silence, John asked, “Mouse in trouble?”
I laughed; I had to. Black folk of my generation and before had to be able to see around the corner to ensure their safety. We couldn’t afford to suffer surprise. I had a card that told anyone who was interested that I was a detective, but I was no more a private eye than John or Jackson or Gara or any soul sitting in that dark, dark room. Each and every one of us was examining and evaluating clues all the time, day and night.
“Why you ask?” I asked John’s question.
“He ain’t been in here in eight, nine days, an’ you don’t drink.”
“That’s a big jump.”
“Only if you fall,” John said with certainty.
I laughed again. “Yeah. Cops seem to think that Raymond killed somebody, an’ Etta wants me to check it out.” There was no reason to lie to John. He knew more secrets than a whole monastery of retired confessors.
“Cops just now thinkin’ that Ray killed somebody?” John said, his humor as deep as our history.
“Not just anybody, man.”
“Oh. You mean Pericles.”
“You know Tarr?”
“For three weeks before Raymond stopped comin’, him an’ Pericles was thick as thieves.”
“Friends?”
“Oh, yeah. Ray buy one drink an’ Perry buy the next. Women come up to ’em, an’ they sent ’em away. They was friends, but they was serious too.”<
br />
“How well you know this Pericles?”
“He come in here now and then for a long time, tryin’ to get away for a few minutes,” John said.
“Away from what?”
“All them ugly kids. He had a dozen of ’em an’ said that there was only one he could stand.”
“Leafa?”
It was John’s turn to smile.
“Yeah, that’s what he called her. He said that them kids even made a ruckus in their sleep. His wife always askin’ him for more money, and the kids screamin’ like they was in Bedlam.
“Perry sit down at the end of the bar and nurse two beers all night long. He’d tell his wife he had a second job, but you know he just couldn’t stand them chirren.”
I was thinking that maybe Perry had deserted his family. But why would Mouse be involved with that?
“Then, about three months ago, he hooked up with this woman,” John continued.
“What was her name?”
“Never said. You know how secretive a niggah can be, Ease. Pericles moved to a table when he was with his girl and he always got the drinks at the bar and brought them back to her. She liked scotch — neat.”
16
I got home not long after one. The dog grinned his hatred for me at the door. I could tell by the jumble of cushions on the love seat that Jesus and Benita were still in the house; that made me feel good. Easter and Feather were in Feather’s bed. Essie murmured somewhere in her sleep.
I went to Juice’s old room and undressed. He was a short boy who had grown into a small young man, so I never got him a big bed. The lumpy little mattress was good enough for me, though.
Jesus’s room smelled like the desert. I often thought that he was an ancient soul who found his way back to the land of his people after it had been sundered by the white man — and the white man’s slaves.
AS A RULE, thinking calmed me. I wasn’t afraid of blood or pain. I wasn’t protected as a child and so I knew that I’d die one day. Danger and life were synonyms in my personal thesaurus; dancing and boxing were too.
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