“Howard liked to play hard,” I agreed. I handed her three quarters.
“Go right on in, honey,” she smiled.
WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR I was slapped in the face by the force of Lips’ alto horn. I had been hearing Lips and Willie and Flattop since I was a boy in Houston. All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. California was like heaven for the Southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.
But being on the bottom didn’t feel so bad if you could come to John’s now and then and remember how it felt back home in Texas, dreaming about California. Sitting there and drinking John’s scotch you could remember the dreams you once had and, for a while, it felt like you had them for real.
“Hey, Ease,” a thick voice crackled at me from behind the door.
It was Junior Fornay. He was a man that I knew from back home too. A big, burly field hand who could chop cotton all day long and then party until it was time to climb back out into the fields. We had had an argument once, when we were both much younger, and I couldn’t help thinking that I’d’ve probably died if it wasn’t for Mouse stepping in to save my bacon.
“Junior,” I hailed. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Not too much, yet, but stick around.” He was leaning back on a stool, propping himself against the wall. He was five years older than I, maybe thirty-three, and his gut hung over his jeans, but Junior still looked to be every bit as powerful as when he put me on the floor all those years before.
Junior had a cigarette between his lips. He smoked the cheapest, foulest brand that they made in Mexico—Zapatas. I guess that he was finished smoking it because he let it fall to the floor. It just lay on the oak floor, smoldering and burning a black patch in the wood. The floor around Junior’s chair had dozens of burns in it. He was a filthy man who didn’t give a damn about anything.
“Ain’t seen ya ’round much, Ease. Where ya been?”
“Workin’, workin’, day and night for Champion, and then they let me go.”
“Fired?” There was a hint of a smile on his lips.
“On my ass.”
“Shit. Sorry t’hear it. They got layoffs?”
“Naw, man. It’s just that the boss ain’t happy if you just do your job. He need a big smack on his butt too.”
“I hear ya.”
“Just this past Monday I finished a shift and I was so tired I couldn’t even walk straight …”
“Uh-huh,” Junior chimed in to keep the story going.
“… and the boss come up and say that he need me for an extra hour. Well I told him that I was sorry but I had a date. And I did too, with my bed.”
Junior got a kick out of that.
“And he got the nerve to tell me that my people have to learn to give a little extra if we wanna advance.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.” I felt the heat of my anger returning.
“And what is he?”
“Italian boy, I think his parents the ones come over.”
“Man! So what you say?”
“I told him that my people been givin’ a little extra since before Italy was even a country. ’Cause you know Italy ain’t even been around that long.”
“Yeah,” Junior said. But I could see that he didn’t know what I was talking about. “So what happened then?”
“He just told me to go on home and not to bother coming back. He said that he needed people who were willing to work. So I left.”
“Man!” Junior shook his head. “They do it to ya every time.”
“That’s right. You want a beer, Junior?”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “But can you buy it with no job and all?”
“I can always buy a couple’a beers.”
“Well then, I can always drink’em.”
I WENT OVER TO THE BAR and ordered two ales. It looked like half of Houston was there. Most tables had five or six people. People were shouting and talking, kissing and laughing. John’s place felt good after a hard day’s work. It wasn’t quite legal but there was nothing wrong with it either. Big names in Negro music came there because they knew John in the old days when he gave them work and didn’t skimp on the paycheck. There must’ve been over two hundred regulars that frequented John’s and we all knew each other, so it made a good place for business as well as a good time.
Alphonso Jenkins was there in his black silk shirt and his foot-high pompadour hairdo. Jockamo Johanas was there too. He was wearing a woolly brown suit and bright blue shoes. Skinny Rita Cook was there with five men hanging around her table. I never did understand how an ugly, skinny woman like that attracted so many men. I once asked her how she did it and she said, in her high whiny voice, “Well, ya know, Easy, it’s only half the mens is int’rested in how a girl look. Most’a your colored mens is lookin’ for a woman love’em so hard that they fo’gets how hard it is t’make it through the day.”
I noticed Frank Green at the bar. We called him Knifehand because he was so fast to pull a knife that it seemed he always had one in his hand. I stayed away from Frank because he was a gangster. He hijacked liquor trucks and cigarette shipments all over California, and Nevada too. He was serious about everything and just about ready to cut any man he met.
I noted that Frank was wearing all dark clothes. In Frank’s line of business that meant he was about to go out to work—hijacking or worse.
The room was so crowded that there was barely any space to dance, but there were a dozen or so couples wrestling out there between the tables.
I carried the two mugs of ale back to the entrance and handed Junior his. One of the few ways I know to make a foul-tempered field hand happy is to feed him some ale and let him tell a few tall tales. So I sat back and sipped while Junior told me about the goings-on at John’s for the previous week or so. He told me the story about Howard Green again. When he told it he added that Green had been doing some illegal work for his employers and, Junior thought, “It’s them white men kilt’im.”
Junior liked to make up any old wild story, I knew that, but there were too many white people turning up for me to feel at ease.
“Who was he workin’ for?” I asked.
“You know that dude dropped outta the mayor’s race?”
“Matthew Teran?”
Teran had a good chance at winning the mayor’s race in L.A. but he’d just withdrawn his name a few weeks before. Nobody knew why.
“Yeah, that’s him. You know all them politicians is just robbers. Why I remember when they first elected Huey Long, down in Louisiana—”
“How long Lips gonna be here?” I asked, to cut him off.
“Week or so.” Junior didn’t care what he talked about. “They bring back some mem’ries, don’t they. Shit, they was playin’ that night Mouse pulled me off your ass.”
“Thas right,” I said. I can still feel Junior’s foot in my kidney when I turn the wrong way.
“I should’a thanked’im for that. You know I was so drunk an’ so mad that I might’a kilt you, Easy. And then I’d still be on the chain gang.”
That was the first real smile he showed since I’d been with him. Junior was missing two teeth from the lower row and one upper.
“What ever happened to Mouse?” he asked, almost wistfully.
“I don’t know. Today’s the first time I even thought about him in years.”
“He still down there in Houston?”
“Last I heard. He married to EttaMae.”
“What’s he doin’ when you seen’im last?”
“Been so long I don’t even remember,” I lied.
Junior grinned. “I remember when he killed Joe T., you know the pimp? I mean Joe had blood comin’ from everywhere an’ Mouse
had on this light blue suit. Not a spot on it! You know that’s why the cops didn’t take Mouse in, they didn’t even think he could’a done it ’cause he was too clean.”
I was remembering the last time I had seen Raymond Alexander, and it wasn’t something to make me laugh.
I HADN’T SEEN MOUSE in four years when we ran into each other one night, outside of Myrtle’s saloon, in Houston’s Fifth Ward. He was wearing a plum-colored suit and a felt brown derby. I was still wearing army green.
“ ’S’appenin’, Easy?” he asked, looking up at me. Mouse was a small, rodent-faced man.
“Not much,” I answered. “You look jus’ ’bout the same.”
Mouse flashed his gold-rimmed teeth at me. “Ain’t so bad. I got the streets tame by now.”
We smiled at each other and slapped backs. Mouse bought me a drink in Myrtle’s and I bought him another. We traded back and forth like that until Myrtle locked us in and went up to bed. She said, “Leave the money fo’ what you’all drink under the counter. Do’ lock itself on the way out.”
“ ’Member that shit wit’ my stepdaddy, Ease?” Mouse asked when we were alone.
“Yeah,” I said softly. It was early morning and empty in the bar but I still looked around the room; murder should never be discussed out loud, but Mouse didn’t know it. He had killed his stepfather five years earlier and blamed it on another man. But if the law ever found out the true circumstances he’d have been hanging in a week.
“His real son, Navrochet, come lookin’ fo’ me last year. He din’t think that boy Clifton done it even though the law said he did.” Mouse poured a drink and knocked it back. Then he poured another one. “You get any white pussy in the war?” he asked.
“All they got is white girls. What you think?”
Mouse grinned and sat back, rubbing his crotch. “Shit!” he said. “That might be worf a couple’a potshots, huh?” And he slapped my knee like in the old days when we were partners, before the war.
We were drinking for an hour before he got back to Navrochet. Mouse said, “Man come down here, right in this saloon, and come up on me wit’ his high boots on. You know I had t’look straight up t’see that boy. He had on a nice suit wit’ them boots, so I jus’ slipped down my zipper when he walk in. He says he wanna talk. He say les step outside. And I go. You might call me a fool but I go. And the minute I get out there and turn around he got a pistol pointed at my fo’head. Can you imagine that? So I play like I’m scared. Then ole Navro wanna know where he could fine you …”
“Me!” I said.
“Yeah, Easy! He heard you was wit’ me so he gonna kill you too. But I’as workin’ my stomach in and out and you know I had some beer in me. I’as actin’ like I’as scared and had Navro thinkin’ he so bad ’cause I’m shakin’ … Then I pulls out Peter and open up the dam. Heh, heh. Piss all over his boots. You know Navrochet like t’jump three feet.” The grin faded from his lips and he said, “I shot him four times ’fore he hit the floor. Same amount’a lead I put in his fuckin’ son-of-a-whore daddy.”
I had seen a lot of death in the war but Navrochet’s dying seemed more real and more terrible; it was so useless. Back in Texas, in Fifth Ward, Houston, men would kill over a dime wager or a rash word. And it was always the evil ones that would kill the good or the stupid. If anyone should have died in that bar it should have been Mouse. If there was any kind of justice he should have been the one.
“He caught me one in the chest though, Ease,” Mouse said, as if he could read my mind. “You know I was layin’ up against the wall wit’ no feelin’ in my arms or legs. Everything was kinda fuzzy an’ I hear this voice and I see this white face over me.” He sounded almost like a prayer. “And that white face told me that he was death an’ wasn’t I scared. And you know what I told him?”
“What?” I asked, and at that same moment I resolved to leave Texas forever.
“I tole’im that I had a man beat me four ways from sundown my whole life and I sent him t’hell. I say, ‘I sent his son after’im, so Satan stay wit’ me and I whip yo’ ass too.’”
Mouse laughed softly, laid his head on the bar, and went to sleep. I pulled out my wallet, quietly as if I were afraid to waken the dead, left two bills, and went down to the hotel. I was on a bus for Los Angeles before the sun came up.
BUT IT SEEMED LIKE A LIFETIME had passed since then. I was a landowner that night and I was working for my mortgage.
“Junior,” I said. “Many white girls been in here lately?”
“Why? You lookin’ fo’ one?” Junior was naturally suspicious.
“Well … kinda.”
“You kinda lookin’ fo’ one! When you gonna find out?”
“You see, uh, I heard about this girl. Um … Delia or Dahlia or sumpin’. I know it starts with a ‘D.’ Anyway she has blond hair and blue eyes and I been told that she was worth lookin’ at.”
“Cain’t say I remember, man. I mean some white girls come in on the weekends, you know, but they don’t never come alone. And I lose my job wolfin’ after some other brother’s date.”
I had the notion that Junior was lying to me. Even if he knew the answer to my question he would have kept it quiet. Junior hated anybody who he thought was doing better than he was. Junior hated everybody.
“Yeah, well, I guess I’ll see her if she comes in.” I looked around the room. “There’s a chair over there next to the band, think I’ll grab it.”
I knew Junior was watching me as if I left him but I didn’t care. He wouldn’t help me and I didn’t give a damn about him.
CHAPTER 5
I FOUND A CHAIR NEXT to my friend Odell Jones.
Odell was a quiet man and a religious man. His head was the color and shape of a red pecan. And even though he was a God-fearing man he’d find his way down to John’s about three or four times a week. He’d sit there until midnight nursing a bottle of beer, not saying a word unless somebody spoke to him.
Odell was soaking up all the excitement so he could carry it around with him on his job as a janitor at the Pleasant Street school. Odell always wore an old gray tweed jacket and threadbare brown woolen pants.
“Hey, Odell,” I greeted him.
“Easy.”
“How’s it going tonight?”
“Well,” he said slowly, thinking it over. “It’s goin’ alright. It sure is goin’.”
I laughed and slapped Odell on the shoulder. He was so slight that the force pushed him to the side but he just smiled and sat back up. Odell was older than most of my friends by twenty years or more; I think he was almost fifty then. To this day he’s outlived two wives and three out of four children.
“What’s it look like tonight, Odell?”
“ ’Bout two hours ago,” he said while he scratched his left ear, “Fat Wilma Johnson come in with Toupelo and danced up a storm. She jump up in the air and come down so hard this whole room like t’shook.”
“That Wilma like to dance,” I said.
“Don’t know how she keep that much heft, hard as she work and hard as she play.”
“She probably eat hard too.”
That tickled Odell.
I asked him to hold a seat for me while I went around saying hello.
I made the rounds shaking hands and asking people if they had seen a white girl, Delia or Dahlia or something. I didn’t use her real name because I didn’t want anybody to connect me with her if Mr. Albright turned out to be wrong and there was trouble. But no one had seen her. I would have even asked Frank Green but he was gone by the time I worked my way to the bar.
When I got back to my table Odell was still there and smiling.
“Hilda Redd come in,” he said to me.
“Yeah?”
“Lloyd try to make a little time an’ she hit him in that fat gut so hard he a’most went down.” Odell acted out Lloyd’s part, puffing his cheeks and bulging his eyes.
We were still laughing when I heard a shout that was so loud even Lips looked up from
his horn.
“Easy!”
Odell looked up.
“Easy Rawlins, is that you?”
A big man walked into the room. A big man in a white suit with blue pinstripes and a ten-gallon hat. A big black man with a wide white grin who moved across the crowded room like a cloudburst, raining hellos and howyadoin’s on the people he passed as he waded to our little table.
“Easy!” he laughed. “You ain’t jumped outta no windahs yet?”
“Not yet, Dupree.”
“You know Coretta, right?”
I noticed her there behind Dupree; he had her in tow like a child’s toy wagon.
“Hi, Easy,” she said in a soft voice.
“Hey, Coretta, how are ya?”
“Fine,” she said quietly. She spoke so softly that I was surprised I understood her over the music and the noise. Maybe I really didn’t hear her at all but just understood what she meant by the way she looked at me and the way she smiled.
Dupree and Coretta were as different as any two people could be. He was muscular and had an inch or two on me, maybe six-two, and he was loud and friendly as a big dog. Dupree was a smart man as far as books and numbers went but he was always broke because he’d squander his money on liquor and women, and if there was any left over you could talk him out of it with any hard-luck story.
But Coretta was something else altogether. She was short and round with cherry-brown skin and big freckles. She always wore dresses that accented her bosom. Coretta was sloe-eyed. Her gaze moved from one part of the room to another almost aimlessly, but you still had the feeling that she was watching you. She was a vain man’s dream.
“Miss ya down at the plant, Ease,” Dupree said. “Yeah, it just ain’t the same wit’out you down there t’keep me straight. Them other niggahs just cain’t keep up.”
“I guess you have to do without me from now on, Dupree.”
“Uh-uh, no. I cain’t live with that. Benny wants you back, Easy. He’s sorry he let you go.”
“First I heard of it.”
“You know them I-talians, Ease, they cain’t say they sorry ’cause it’s a shame to’em. But he wants you back though, I know that.”
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