“You know you got to go to her, baby,” Jo said after many long minutes of silence.
“Yeah,” I said again. “I know.”
“Man cain’t be a man without a woman and chirren to love him,” she said. “You got to take her up or let her go.”
A loud screech tore through the room. I leaped to my feet, and Blackie, Jo’s pet raven, spread his wings in alarm. The ebony bird had been so still in his dark corner I hadn’t noticed him.
My heart was beating fast, and I was tired, very tired.
“Do you ever make love potions, Jo?” I asked the witch.
“You don’t need a love charm, Easy. You got more love than you know how to handle now.”
I slumped down on the bench, placing my elbows on my knees. Jo put her hand to the back of my neck the way she had when we made love so long ago.
“It’s like wakin’ up in a shallow grave, baby,” she whispered. “There’s dirt in your mouth, and you so cold that you cain’t even feel it. You wanna go back to sleep, but you know that can only bring death.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“What you doin’, child.”
I laughed. “What I’m doin’ is runnin’ full throttle without sense or worry,” I said.
“You always know what’s right, Easy,” she said softly. “Always. If you runnin’, then there’s a reason for it, even if you don’t know what that reason is.”
A sweet, frightening shock went through my mind like a live wire cut loose from its stem. Suddenly I had my bearings. I knew where I was — and I wasn’t at all happy to be there.
“I’m lookin’ for Ray, Jo,” I said, no longer sad or heartbroken or unsure.
“You two always lookin’ for each other,” she said sagely. “I don’t know where he’s at right now. He come by a couple’a weeks ago sayin’ that he was gonna be gone awhile — on business.”
We both knew what that meant: Somewhere some bank or armored car or payroll was going to be robbed, or maybe there was a soul destined to die.
“If he gets in touch with you, call me,” I said, standing up and feeling strong.
Jo rose with me and kissed me gently on the lips. This made me smile, grin even.
“You mostly see the truth,” she said. “But sometimes you like a man stranded on a island, lookin’ across a wide stretch’a ocean at a faraway shore.”
25
I could see the truth, all right. It was like swimming in a peaceful lake and suddenly seeing the beady eyes of a crocodile bearing down upon me.
I didn’t speed on the ride back to my house because I didn’t want to be stopped by the police and therefore lose time. Going to see Mama Jo was always a revelation. That’s why people shied away from her. Who wants to see the truth? Not the condemned man, the dying woman, the child who will be orphaned.
I decided somewhere in a corner of my mind to let go of Bonnie and move on. I would not go to the wedding. I would not grieve for my loss. The world did not revolve around me or my pain.
I went through a whole list of decisions that I had put on hold for the past year, mainly so that I wouldn’t think about what might have happened while I was wallowing around like a pig in its sty.
Sammy Sansoam, otherwise known as Captain Clarence Miles, knew my name and office address. And even though I was unlisted, it wouldn’t take much time for him to find my house. If he suspected for any reason that I was a friend of Christmas Black, then he might come for me. Jesus would die protecting Easter, so might Feather and Benita.
Fighting the men that killed Faith’s husband was like fighting organized crime or the FBI. They had limitless resources and were ruthless.
I pulled to the curb and jumped out of the car with my pistol in my hand. I ran to the front door, and burst in.
Jesus’s body looked like fresh kill spread out on the couch, with the fingers of one hand grazing the floor and the other hand over his forehead. His eyes were closed and in shadow.
“Juice!”
The dead boy opened his eyes and sat up with a quizzical look on his face.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” he asked.
Feather came running in with Easter and Benita right behind her. My heart thudded against its cage and the room shimmied. I lurched over to the couch and sat as Jesus moved his legs. I would have fallen otherwise.
Sitting there, I tried to control my breathing but could not. My heart was going so fast that I believed I was going to die right then. If there had been whiskey in the house, I would have drunk it. If there had been opium in the house, I would have swallowed it.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Feather asked.
She sat down beside me and wrapped her arms around my head while Easter sat on Jesus’s lap and put her hands on my thigh.
My heart thundered through all of that. My ears were hot, and I wanted to kill Clarence Miles.
All men are fools. The words came into my head, but I could not remember where I had heard them. The source did not matter, because the content was true. All men were fools and me most of all.
My children could have died while I was out acting like a child.
I stood up. Jesus did too, taking hold of my right arm. I put the gun in my pocket and said, “Pack up everything you need for a trip.”
“Where are we going?” Feather asked.
“Away for a while. There’s some bad men out there and they might come here.”
“But why?” Benita asked.
Jesus took his common-law wife by the hand and led her into the back room. Feather needed no direction. She packed her things in a small blue suitcase and put Frenchie in a bag made for the transportation of small dogs. Easter started to gather her things with military precision.
I took in a deep breath. I was a fool, but I was lucky too. Just that thought made me laugh. I lit a cigarette while Benita and Jesus argued and the girls packed. Fifteen minutes later, we were all crowded in the car, headed west.
WE ARRIVED AT A DOORWAY half a block from the Pacific Ocean on a street named Ozone. I knocked and rang and knocked again. Jewelle came to the door, wearing a yellow dress that perfectly accented her dark brown skin. As the years had passed, the plain-Jane girl had been supplanted by a subtly beautiful maiden. She had been the lover of my property manager Mofass until he died heroically and now she was with Jackson Blue, who was both the smartest and the most cowardly man I knew.
“Easy,” Jewelle said, looking at the brood that surrounded me. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I need help, baby. I need it bad.”
Jewelle smiled, and I remembered that she loved me in a way that she felt for no other man. She wasn’t sexually attracted to me, but she felt a connection like a daughter feels for her dad.
“Come on in.”
The doorway led to a long set of stairs that went down two floors to the apartment below. The ceilings were twenty feet at least, and the walls sported bookshelves from top to bottom.
Jackson Blue had read every book on those shelves at least twice. He kept only books that he intended to read again, and again. Jewelle had been working her way through Jackson’s library, having long discussions with him about the meanings and ramifications of the texts. Jackson was the first man she met who proved that he was smarter than she, and she loved him for it.
“HEY, EASY, what’s happenin’?” Jackson asked when we got to the main room at the bottom of the long stairway. He was wearing a dark red silk robe that was tied carelessly about his slender waist. He was yawning even though it was late afternoon.
“I wake you up?” I asked.
“I been workin’ day and night for the past three days at Proxy Nine,” he said. “They was puttin’ in this special line to pass information over the phone, but the technicians didn’t have it right. You know I had to roll up my sleeves, baby.”
“You installed a computer line all the way from France?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.” Jackson sighed. He was lazy in everything but his mind. Phy
sical labor was an abomination to him, but Immanuel Kant was a piece of cake.
“You don’t have any training in that,” I said, not because I believed it but to pull him out of his stupor so that I could ask for his help.
“Ain’t so hard, Easy,” he said. “The thing that gave me the most trouble was learnin’ French so that I could talk with the technicians overseas.”
“You speak French?” my daughter asked.
“Oui, mademoiselle. Et tu?”
“Un peu,” she replied modestly.
“Jewelle, can you take the kids out on the patio for a while?” I asked. “I need to talk to Jackson here.”
Feather, Jesus, Easter, and Benita with Essie followed the lady real-estate genius outside into her garden at the bottom of a well-like yard.
When they were gone, I told Jackson what had been happening.
“Damn, Easy,” he said when I was through. “Why don’t you get into somethin’ sensible? Shit. You think that they woulda really killed the kids?”
“I’m sure they would, man. Will you keep ’em for me?”
“Okay. No problem. I mean, it’a mostly be Jewelle takin’ care of them. I’m workin’ at the office, but she do most of her work over the phone.”
“How’s it goin’ with her?”
“She’s a silent partner in that new Icon International hotel goin’ up downtown,” he said proudly. “If it fly, she be so rich that we could live in downtown Rome, and I don’t mean Rome, New York.”
“I might need to call on you again, Jackson,” I said.
This request caused fear to rise in the small man’s face. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me. He had a good job and made more money than anyone we knew, except Jewelle. He wanted to kick me out of his house, but even a coward like Jackson knew when his debts had come due.
“I hope not, Easy,” he said. “But I’ll be there.”
I WENT OUTSIDE and explained to my extended family that they were to stay away from their friends and neighborhoods, their homes and schools. They shouldn’t make phone calls or answer them or tell anyone where they were.
“What if my mama wanna talk to me?” Benita asked.
“Tell her that Juice is taking you to Frisco for a few days, by boat. Tell her that, and she’ll wait for you to come back.”
“Are these men really all that bad?” Benita asked.
“They make Mouse look like Juice,” I said, and she didn’t ask any more questions.
26
Once I was in my car again, I felt a moment of exhilaration. My children were safe, my family protected from the assassins of Christmas Black’s world.
Also, I was shocked out of the melancholy that had settled in on me. I remembered what it was to be a man living in the cracks: a slave, nigger, jigaboo, coon, spade, spear-chucker, darky, boy. Walking down the streets of white gentility, I was always a target. And a target couldn’t afford roots or a broken heart. A target couldn’t fire back on the men who used him for sport.
All a man like me could do was to wait for the sun to go down, move through darkness, and hope.
The validity of this litany of the past was fading, but it had not gone away. It was true — I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools.
It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge. And if that truth was an old friend and the common basis for all your people all the way back to your origins, then at least you found yourself on familiar ground; at least you couldn’t be blindsided, ambushed, or fooled. They could try and kill me, but I’d see them coming. They might see me too, but I would see them first.
I WASN’T EVEN THINKING about Faith Laneer, but there I was parked in front of her courtyard apartment complex. It was logical that I came to her. She was the closest link to Christmas and the men he had somehow fooled into thinking that they were stalking him.
The sun was just a red glow on the horizon, and I sat in my car with no particular thoughts in mind. Bonnie would pass through now and then, but I had left her in the light of day, where people made lives like marble statues that couldn’t be moved.
I was a shadow and the sun was going down. In this transition I remembered a book that Gara, Jackson Blue, and I had read passages from some while before, Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Hegel, a German philosopher who had no respect for Africa. Gara and I had found the dense prose hard going, but Jackson took to it like a vulture clawing through the guts of a dead elephant. He explained how Hegel saw a thing and its opposite as connected and that this connection was what caused progress.
“It’s like turnin’ into a skid, Easy,” Jackson Blue had said. “You slidin’ right and turn in the same direction. Logic tell ya that you gonna go even farther over, but the truth is, you straighten right out.”
The darkness was my negative freedom. While everyone else feared and avoided night, I saw it as my liberation. I lived a life opposite from Hegel’s bright light of truth, and so, I realized, he, my enemy, and I agreed on the path that set us at each other’s throats.
SHE OPENED THE DOOR without asking who it was. The charcoal-colored dress was shapeless, but her figure would not be denied.
“Mr. Rawlins,” she said, the catch in her voice telling me that she had been alone for too many days and needed the company of a man who would buy her strawberry shortcake to sweeten her bitter lot. “Come in.”
The living room was small, but the window faced the vastness of the Pacific.
“All I have is water,” she told me.
“Want me to take you shopping?” I offered.
“Let’s sit for a while,” she said.
The small sofa was coral colored, built for two and a half people. She sat at one end and I at the other, but we were still close.
“Have you found Chris?” she asked.
“No. I got worried about my family, though, and moved them out of my house.”
“You’re married?”
“No. I adopted some kids. One’a them has a girlfriend, and now they have a kid. And then there’s Easter Dawn.”
“You’re like me, Mr. Rawlins,” Faith said.
“How’s that?”
“You have a little orphanage that you care for and love.”
I held out my hand, palm upward, and she took it with both of hers.
“I had a girlfriend,” I said. “But she was torn. There was a man, an African prince she saw now and again. I left her.”
“Did she love him?”
“Yeah. But, but not like she loved me and our little family.”
“Then why leave her?”
Her question grabbed me like a pair of pliers working on a rusty lug nut. At first I resisted her, but then I gave way.
“Did you ever feel like there was something you wanted?” I asked Blonde Faith. “A way you wanted someone to make love to you? A way you wanted to be touched?”
Faith breathed in deeply. I could feel the grip on my hands tighten ever so slightly.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“That was me and Bonnie. The way we came together was everything I had wished for but never known. In a way, she created my desire and then satisfied it.”
One of Faith’s hands moved up to my wrist. It tickled, but I didn’t want to laugh.
“And then I found out about him and everything was tainted. And even though I loved her more than I ever did anyone else, the fact that she wasn’t all there meant that I was always gonna be unhappy when I looked at her and thought about him. . . . And then I met you.”
“Me?” Faith moved closer, an effect of gravity as much as anything else.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking about shadows negating the darkness in my life. “You gave your love to a man despite his flaws. You gave him a chance and then he betrayed you, but you didn’
t, not even one time, say something bad about him. You listened to that man who wanted the loan while he bad-mouthed you and shouted, and you still smiled; you even felt for him.
“That’s what Bonnie taught me. She taught me that you can care for somebody and it isn’t the end of the world. That’s why I loved her.”
“How did you know that Mr. Schwartz was looking for a loan?” Faith asked.
“You were just talking,” I said. “The other guy, the one with the glasses —”
“Mr. Ronin.”
“Yeah. He was looking over forms and stuff and giving his guy a passbook and a checkbook. You were saying no.”
I suppose that insight was reason enough for Faith to kiss me. Her mouth was the texture of a ripe fruit that begged to be eaten. I tried to put my arms around her, but she held them away.
“Craig was always so, so brutal,” she said as she pushed me down on the sofa, kissing me and unbuttoning my shirt.
“You want me to just lie here?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. I felt her tug at my zipper and then reach inside.
I realized I was getting older, not because I didn’t respond to her caress but because for the first time in a long time I had the erection of a teenager.
Smelling the sweet peach-scented shampoo in her hair, I said, “I need to take a shower.”
Holding on to my manhood, she guided me to the shower in the bathroom. I reached to take off her clothes, but she shook her head. I understood. She took off the gray dress, revealing one of those bodies you see only in magazines and on movie screens. Her nipples were the size of apricots; she was beyond gravity’s reach.
We didn’t talk for a long time. I stood in the small shower while she hunkered down, washing me with a soft sponge. My erection got harder and harder, but I didn’t feel urgent at all.
“Do you want me to powder you?” she asked after we were dry.
“Can I touch your face?”
I let my fingers travel from her temples to her breasts. She shuddered and wavered.
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