“Mr. Rawlins,” a faint but deep voice called.
I turned my head slowly, not wanting to witness the demolition of one of my oldest L.A. friends. Mofass stood there leaning on two thick walking canes, one for each hand. He wore a heavy maroon-colored robe and had leather slippers on his ashen-black feet. He was breathing hard and looked like an old oil tanker that had been shipwrecked and washed up on land. He leaned to the side, sighed, and groaned. His breath was like the wind whistling through the rusted-out hull of the wrecked ship he resembled. His yellowy eyes were fog lamps in the deep night of his face.
“Hey, William,” I hailed. “You up and around, huh?”
“Not too much longer. Uh-uh, no.”
“You been sayin’ that fo’ years, man. But I still see you every Christmas.”
“It’s the tent,” he said.
“Oxygen tent?”
“Yeah. JJ got it hooked up over my bed. I gotta gas mask and’a oxygen tank too but I don’t use that too much. An hour under the tent and I can be almost normal for fifteen minutes. Then I got to get back there ‘fore I run outta air an’ cain’t walk no more.”
The hulking wreck lowered himself in the chair opposite me.
“Where JJ?” he asked suspiciously.
“She went to get something to show me,” I said.
Mofass leaned forward in his chair and made a motion that he wanted me to do the same.
“I think she gotta boyfriend, Mr. Rawlins,” he whispered.
“Why you say that?”
“She got this pretty young thing named Rosa come up and take care’a me sometimes when she go out. She says she goin’ to do business. But I smell her perfume and see them high heels. You know JJ was runnin’ around in tennis shoes before Rosa.”
“She was a child before, William. She growin’ up and wants to dress more like a woman, that’s all.”
“Sometimes she out late at night, Mr. Rawlins.” There were tears in the old man’s eyes. “Late. She don’t think I know. She thinks I’m asleep, but I ain’t. I get up and wander around lookin’ for her an’ sometimes I cain’t find her.”
“You ask her where she been?”
“She says that she just run out to pick somethin’ up in Hollywood or that she just took a drive, but I know better. You know I got a long-barrel twenty-two pistol right under my pillow. When I get a good breath I’ma go out an’ find the motherfucker. Kill him too.”
“Uncle Willy,” JJ called from across the football field of a living room. “What you doin’ up?”
Mofass just stared at his girlfriend. He didn’t have enough breath to make himself heard that far away.
She came up to us carrying a small walnut tray with two sodas on it. There was a cardboard box under her arm.
“I brought you a drink,” she said to Mofass. “But you weren’t in your room.”
“Cain’t I come out and see my friend?” he complained.
“Sure you can,” she replied.
She put down the drinks on the table and began fussing with Mofass’s robe. You could see the love those two had for each other. They behaved like people who had been together for decades. Jewelle was barely in her twenties but she had an old soul.
After she had him squared away she handed me the box. “Here it is, Mr. Rawlins.”
“What’s that?” Mofass asked.
“Piece’a mail come for me at Equity,” I said. “Somebody didn’t know my address and then JJ opened it by mistake.”
“That’s why you should be listed,” my old property manager chided. His voice was still deep and raspy but it was also feeble, like the distant rumble of a thunderstorm that has almost passed from earshot.
I took out the bear and the paper it was wrapped in. It was just a tattered old doll made of cotton, sewn with hemp, and given green eyes made from glass. It smelled a little like buttermilk. The newspaper the doll was wrapped in was the Dallas Gazette, dated two weeks before. The postmark on the box was L.A. three days earlier.
“What is that stuff?” Mofass asked.
“Just a joke, Mo,” I said. “Old friend’a mine tellin’ me that she’s in town.”
“Don’t…seem…too…funny….” Mofass gasped between each breath. He reached out with his right hand and JJ was there to catch it. She helped him to his feet. I tried to lend a hand but she pushed me off.
“I’ll take care of him,” she told me.
She put herself under his arm like a human crutch. They made their way across the immense living room and then passed through a door.
While they were gone I considered the box and its contents. I knew a cop who might have been interested but it was slim evidence and there would be no action before the next day when Clovis wanted to close the deal.
I had a pretty clear notion of what to do next but I couldn’t begin until JJ returned. So I sat in the window, drinking my cola.
No complex ideas or deep emotions came to me; just the image of an orphaned child, at the age of eight, on his own and moving fast. He traveled from Louisiana to Houston, and from there to North Africa, Italy, Paris, and finally the Battle of the Bulge. I’d encountered death and destruction from the very start. I came to L.A. to get away from it but death clung to me—–he was my oldest friend, my only constant star. I thought about my years trading in favors on the streets of L.A. I’ll do for you if you do for me, was my motto and creed.
Sitting there in that window, looking out over a city that had no idea I was there, made me feel powerful in a funny way. At the Board of Education they told you the kind of broom you needed and the amount of time it would take you to sweep up a classroom or hallway. They took out taxes and retirement funds from your paycheck and told you what days you could take off and how often you could be sick. Everything was preplanned and managed. The paperback rule book was three-hundred-and-forty-seven pages long.
I yearned to be sitting where I was sitting, to be my own man. Loving freedom and loving danger are one and the same thing for most black men. Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we’re feeling liberation we know that there’s somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.
That’s why I always loved Mouse. He was crazy and a killer and trouble in any circumstances. But he never accepted our slave heritage. He never bowed his head in front of an enemy. “Kill me if you can,” he said more than once. “But if you cain’t you better know how to run.”
“Easy,” JJ said.
I hadn’t noticed her return in my reverie.
“How is he?”
“Sleepin’. You know he can’t be out of that tent more than ten minutes at a time.”
“She’s in L.A.,” I said handing her the doll.
“You think that ’cause’a the postmark?”
“Uh-huh. Yes I do.”
“What should I do, Easy?”
“What time you supposed to get together with them tomorrow?”
“Noon.”
“Call ’em up. Tell ’em you can’t do it before five. Tell ’em Mofass has to get a shot or somethin’.”
“Why?”
“To buy me time. I wanna look at Clovis, see what’s happenin’ at that house of theirs. Do you have a picture of Misty around?”
JJ reached into a fold of her cranberry dress and came out with a faded photograph. The sepia tones revealed a tomboy, with a space between her front teeth, smiling so wide that you wondered if she had ever known sorrow.
I must have grinned when I saw the photo.
“She’s the closest person to me in the world,” JJ said. It was both a vow and a threat.
Clovis shared a big four-story house with her brothers and sisters on Peters Lane, up in Baldwin Hills. They lived there with various other husbands and wives, and some children.
I parked down the street in a run-down old Ford sedan that I borrowed from my mechanic friend, Primo. I got there at four-thirty in the after
noon.
The MacDonald clan was a filthy lot. They parked their cars on the lawn and kept a ratty old sofa out on the front porch. The paint was peeling off the walls. But even though they lived like sharecroppers I knew they had money in the bank. While Clovis had Mofass under her power she’d siphoned off enough money to buy property under her own name.
At six, the brothers, Fitts and Clavell MacDonald, came out of the house with two dark-skinned women, laughing loudly, probably half drunk already, they climbed into a new Buick and drove off.
As the evening wore on I saw most of the whole ugly tribe. Grover, Tyrone, Renee, Clovis and her husband Duke. There were other men, women, and children who seemed to live there. But there was no one who matched up with Misty’s photograph.
I DROVE HOME AT EIGHT O’CLOCK.
Feather had refused to go to bed until I was there. Jesus sat up with her watching some show that was mostly canned laughter.
“Daddy!” my little girl shouted when I came in.
I guess Jesus was worried too. He kissed me, which is something the seventeen-year-old hadn’t done in two years. I put Feather to bed and talked with Jesus about his boat for a while.
“I want to go camping with some friends next weekend,” he told me.
“Where?”
“Around Santa Cruz.”
“Who you goin’ with?”
“A girl and some of her friends.”
“Who’s that?”
“Marlene.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“You can get in trouble behind that shit, boy.”
Again he was silent. Jesus never argued with me. When he disagreed or got angry he just clammed up.
“White girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Friends too?”
He nodded.
I stared at my adopted son. He was my child more than blood might have been. For many years he was mute. He had been molested as an infant and young child, sold to men for sex. I took him out of that. For a while I had him living with Primo because I thought that a Mexican child needed a Mexican family. But Jesus wanted to be with me and somehow it just felt right.
I wanted to protect him but telling him no or which way to go would never work. Jesus had a mind of his own and all I could do was make suggestions.
“Be careful,” I said, feeling as helpless as I feared he might be.
Jesus smiled and hugged me.
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY I was still up, reading Anthem by Ayn Rand in the living room. The little yellow dog had taken up his post at the hallway, guarding Feather’s sleeping place from the grim ogre–—me. As time had gone by I had begun to appreciate the dog. He came to me, the last living testament of a woman who had been murdered. He hated me because he blamed me for his mistress’s death. Now his love was for Feather and he took her protection as his purpose in life. I had grown to respect him for his devotion to my daughter and so our regular standoffs at the door to her room made me smile every evening at bedtime.
The phone rang. I picked it up before it was through the first bell.
“Hello.”
“Easy?” she said in a brittle voice.
“Hey, baby. How are you?”
“A little tired,” Bonnie Shay said. “I just woke up. They’ve been running us ragged.”
“Where are you?”
“In Paris. For the last ten days we’ve been in West Africa so I couldn’t call.”
“The ambassadors and princes been askin’ for your number?” I said in a joking voice.
“No. What do those men care about a stewardess?” she said. But there was fraction of a second of delay in her voice.
“Easy?” she asked in the static of long distance.
“What?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, baby,” I said. “I just miss you. I need you here with me.”
“Can you hear me smiling?” she asked, and I felt ashamed of my suspicious heart.
“Loud as daybreak,” I said.
“How are Feather and Jesus?”
“He’s planning some kind of camping trip and she’s gettin’ bolder every minute.”
“Tell them I love them.”
“Sure will.”
“I love you too, Mr. Rawlins.”
“And I love you.”
There was another pause. We were too old to profess love back and forth, over and over, and too young to just hang up.
Finally Bonnie said, “I should go.”
“I’ll hang up first,” I suggested.
“Okay.”
I LEFT THE HOUSE at four the next morning. The streets were empty and dark. I made good time to the MacDonald residence. The lights were off and four cars were parked on the lawn. I lit up the first of ten Chesterfield cigarettes I allotted for myself per day. I sat back in the smoky haze thinking about how much I loved being a silent watcher.
The dark street looked like a stage after the play is long over and the actors and the audience have gone home. I was thinking about Jesus growing up, and Bonnie so many thousands of miles away. About Mouse being gone from my life, like my dead mother and my father who, in fleeing a lynch mob, also abandoned me.
I imagined my father running into the darkness, his own dark skin blending with the night. A calm came over me as he disappeared because I knew they would never catch him. I knew that he was alive and breathing—–somewhere.
“HEY, MISTER!” the old lady shouted. I started awake. The sun was just coming up. Two cars were already gone from the MacDonald lawn. The woman’s face on the other side of the glass was pocked and haggard, deep molasses brown and relenting to the pull of gravity.
“What?” I said.
She motioned for me to roll down the window.
I did what she wanted and asked, “What do you want?”
“You watchin’ them?” she asked, pointing toward the MacDonald residence.
When you wake up suddenly from a deep sleep, as I just had, part of your mind is still in dreams. And in dreams time is almost meaningless. There are times I’ve dozed off for just a minute and had dreams that covered an hour or more of activity. That’s how it was for me at that moment. I saw the woman, read the lines on her face, deciphered the obvious anger in her tone, and decided that she wasn’t mad at me but at those filthy, uncouth MacDonalds. She was also, I surmised in a fraction of a second, a first-degree busybody who had more information on the kidnappers than the police could gather in seven years.
“Yes I am,” I replied.
“What they do to you?”
“Stoled my car,” I said in good old Fifth Ward lingo.
“Bastids,” she spat. “Make the whole neighborhood a pigsty. Noisy and vulgar, I hate ’em.”
“The man who stoled my ride was with this girl,” I said, showing the angry old woman my photograph of Misty.
“I seen her. Yeah. She was wit’ some guest’a theirs. A man drove a old red truck. It had Texas plates on it.”
“That’s the guy took my car. He asked me could he borrow it. Left me a suitcase to hold. All it had was some underwear and that picture of the girl drove off with him.”
“You wanna use my phone to call the cops?” the woman asked.
“I sure do. But first I wanna wait here and make sure he’s in there. ’Cause if I call and he ain’t there, that old bitch Clovis’ll just say they never heard of him.”
“You got her ticket, brother,” the old woman agreed. “I’m right over there in the white-and-green house. You need somethin’ you just come over to me.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Just as soon as that man show up. He come here much?”
“Almost every day. In the mornin’ too. You probably don’t have long to wait.”
With that the old lady left for her home. I was sure that she’d be watching but that was all right. If I fell asleep again she’d rouse me to the mysterious Texan’s arrival.
HE GOT THERE AT ABOUT E
IGHT. The truck was an interesting combination of dull red paint and brown rust, like lichen rolling over a scarlet stone. The black man at the wheel was large with muscle, about thirty. He wore overalls and a T-shirt. I wondered if there was a straw hat on the seat next to him. He drove right up on the lawn and ran to the front door. Antoinette, the prettiest MacDonald next to JJ, ran out to meet him. Antoinette was a healthy girl. Even under her loose one-piece dress you could see her large upstanding breasts. They hugged and kissed, and kissed again. Clovis came out then, talking in a loud voice, though not loud enough for me to make out the words.
Antoinette stood back, seemingly afraid of what was being said. The big Texan was nodding at every word, listening hard. When she was finished he asked something and Clovis yelled something back. The Texan jumped into his truck and took off. I waited a second and followed him.
Clovis and Antoinette didn’t seem to notice me.
THE TEXAN LED ME on a long drive through L.A. He took side streets, always headed south. We went down into Compton. We were still in L.A. county, but the houses became sparse and the street was barely covered by asphalt. I had dropped almost two blocks behind the Texas truck because there was hardly any traffic. When I saw the red pickup turn right up ahead, I increased my speed to make sure I didn’t lose him.
I turned the corner just in time to see the truck park in the driveway of a small blue house. I went all the way to the end of the block, turned the corner, and pulled to the curb.
My heart was racing but not from fear. I was excited by my proximity to the solution of JJ’s dilemma.
Sitting in the car I wondered how to get past the cowboy’s defenses. I needed a distraction.
My first thought was to set the house on fire. There had recently been a fire at Truth. Everyone always runs out to the curb when threatened by flame and smoke. But maybe, if Misty was a hostage in the house—tied up and gagged—maybe the kidnapper would leave her in there rather than be implicated in the capital crime of kidnapping.
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