“A drink, Mr. Rawlins?” Her dress was the simple blue kind that the French girls wore when I was a GI in Paris. It was plain and came down to just below her knee. Her only jewelry was a small ceramic pin, worn over her left breast.
“No thanks.”
Her face was beautiful. More beautiful than the photograph. Wavy hair so light brown that you might have called it blond from a distance, and eyes that were either green or blue depending on how she held her head. Her cheekbones were high but her face was full enough that it didn’t make her seem severe. Her eyes were just a little closer than most women’s eyes; it made her seem vulnerable, made me feel that I wanted to put my arms around her—to protect her.
We looked at each other for a few moments before she spoke. “Would you ’ave something to eat?”
“No thanks.” I realized that we were whispering and asked, “Is there anybody else here?”
“No,” she whispered, moving close enough for me to smell the soap she used, Ivory. “I live alone.”
Then she reached out a long delicate hand to touch my face.
“You ’ave been fighting?”
“What?”
“The bruises on your face.”
“Nuthin’.”
She didn’t move her hand.
“I could clean them for you?”
I put my hand out to touch her face, thinking, This is crazy.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I brought you twenty-five dollars.”
She smiled like a child. Only a child could ever be that happy.
“Thank you,” she said. She turned away and seated herself on the brown chair, clasping her hands on her lap. She nodded at the couch and I lowered myself.
“I got the money right here.” I went for my pocket but she stopped me with a gesture.
“Couldn’t you take me to him? I’m just a girl, you know. You could stay in the car and I would only take a little time. Five minutes maybe.”
“Listen, honey, I don’t even know you …”
“But I need ’elp.” She looked down at the knot of hands and said, “You do not want to be bother by the police. I do not either …”
I’d heard that line before. “Why don’t you just take the taxi?”
“I am afraid.”
“But why you gonna trust me?”
“I ’ave no choice. I am a stranger ’ere and my friend is gone. When Coretta tells me that you are looking for me I ask her if you are a bad man and she says no to me. She says that you are a good man and that you are just looking, how you say, innocent.”
“I just heard about ya,” I said. “That’s all. Bouncer at John’s said that you were something to see.”
She smiled for me. “You will help me, yes?”
The time for me to say no was over. If I was going to say no, it should have been to DeWitt Albright or even to Coretta. But I still had a question to ask.
“How’d you know where to call me?”
Daphne looked down at her hands for maybe three seconds, long enough for the average person to formulate a lie.
“Before I gave Coretta her money I said that I wanted to ’ave it, so I could talk to you. I wanted to know why you look for me.”
She was just a girl. Nothing over twenty-two.
“Where you say your friend lives?”
“On a street above Hollywood, Laurel Canyon Road.”
“You know how to get there?”
She nodded eagerly and then jumped up saying, “Just let me get one thing.”
She ran out of the living room into a darkened doorway and returned in less than a minute. She was carrying an old beaten-up suitcase.
“It is Richard’s, my friend’s,” she smiled shyly.
I DROVE ACROSS TOWN to La Brea then straight north to Hollywood. The canyon road was narrow and winding but there was no traffic at all. We hadn’t even seen a police car on the ride and that was fine with me, because the police have white slavery on the brain when it comes to colored men and white women.
At every other curve, near the top of the road, we’d catch a glimpse of nighttime L.A. Even way back then the city was a sea of lights. Bright and shiny and alive. Just to look out on Los Angeles at night gave me a sense of power.
“It is the next one, Easy. The one with the carport.”
It was another small house. Compared with some of the mansions we’d seen on the ride it was like a servant’s house. A shabby little A-frame with two windows and a gaping front door.
“Your friend always leave his door open like that?” I asked.
“I do not know.”
When we parked I got out of the car with her.
“I will only be a moment.” She caressed my arm before turning toward the house.
“Maybe I better go with ya.”
“No,” she said with strength that she hadn’t shown before.
“Listen. This is late at night, in a lonely neighborhood, in a big city. That door is open and that means something’s wrong. And if something happens to one more person I know, the police are gonna chase me down into the grave.”
“Okay,” she said. “But only to see if it is alright. Then you go back to the car.”
I closed the front door before turning on the wall switch. Daphne called out, “Richard!”
It was one of those houses that was designed to be a mountain cabin. The front door opened into a big room that was living room, dining room, and kitchen all in one. The kitchen was separated from the dining area by a long counter. The far left of the room had a wooden couch with a Mexican rug thrown across it and a metal chair with tan cushions for the seat and back. The wall opposite the front door was all glass. You could see the city lights winking inside the mirror image of the room, Daphne, and me.
At the far left wall was a door.
“His bedroom,” she said.
The bedroom was also simple. Wood floor, window for a wall, and a king-sized bed with a dead man on it.
He was in the same blue suit. He lay across the bed, his arms out like Jesus Christ—but the fingers were jangled, not composed like they were on my mother’s crucifix. He didn’t call me “colored brother” but I recognized the drunken white man I’d met in front of John’s place.
Daphne gasped. She grabbed my sleeve. “It is Richard.”
There was a butcher’s knife buried deep in his chest. The smooth brown haft stood out from his body like a cattail from a pond. He’d fallen with his back on a bunch of blankets so that the blood had flown upward, around his face and neck. There was a lot of blood around his wide-eyed stare. Blue eyes and brown hair and dark blood so thick that you could have dished it up like Jell-O. My tongue grew a full beard and I gagged.
The next thing I knew I was down on one knee but I kept myself from being sick. I knelt there in front of that dead man like a priest blessing a corpse brought to him by grieving relatives. I didn’t know his family name or what he had done, I only knew that he was dead.
All the dead men that I’d ever known came back to me in that instant. Bernard Hooks, Addison Sherry, Alphonso Jones, Marcel Montague. And a thousand Germans named Heinz, and children and women too. Some were mutilated, some burned. I’d killed my share of them and I’d done worse things than that in the heat of war. I’d seen open-eyed corpses like this man Richard and corpses that had no heads at all. Death wasn’t new to me and I was to be damned if I’d let one more dead white man break me down.
While I was down there, on my knees, I noticed something. I bent down and smelled it and then I picked it up and wrapped it in my handkerchief.
When I got to my feet I saw that Daphne was gone. I went to the kitchen and rinsed my face in the sink. I figured that Daphne had run to the toilet. But when I was through she hadn’t returned. I looked in the bathroom but she wasn’t there. I ran outside to look at my car but she was nowhere to be seen.
Then I heard a ruckus from the carport.
Daphne was there pushing the old suitcase into the trunk of a pink S
tudebaker.
“What’s goin’ on?” I asked.
“What’a ya think’s goin’ on! We gotta get out of here and it’s best if we split.”
I didn’t have the time to wonder at her loss of accent. “What happened here?”
“Help me with my bag!”
“What happened?” I asked again.
“How the hell do I know? Richard’s dead, Frank’s gone too. All I know is that I have to get out of here and you better too, unless you want the police to prove you did it.”
“Who did it?” I grabbed her and turned her away from the car.
“I do not know,” she said quietly and calmly into my face. Our faces were no more than two inches apart.
“I cain’t just leave it like this.”
“There’s nothing else to do, Easy. I’ll take these things so nobody will know that I was ever here and you just go on home. Go to sleep and treat it like a dream.”
“What about him?” I yelled, pointing at the house.
“That’s a dead man, Mr. Rawlins. He’s dead and gone. You just go home and forget what you saw. The police don’t know you were here and they won’t know unless you shout so loud that someone looks out here and sees your car.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Drive his car to a little place I know and leave it there. Get on a bus for somewhere more than a thousand miles from here.”
“What about the men lookin’ for you?”
“You mean Carter? He doesn’t mean any harm. He’ll give up when they can’t find me.” She smiled.
Then she kissed me.
It was a slow, deliberate kiss. At first I tried to pull away but she held on strong. Her tongue moved around under mine and between my gums and lips. The bitter taste in my mouth turned almost sweet from hers. She leaned back and smiled at me for a moment and then she kissed me again. This time it was fierce. She lunged so deep into my throat that once our teeth collided and my canine chipped.
“Too bad we won’t have a chance to get to know each other, Easy. Otherwise I’d let you eat this little white girl up.”
“You can’t just go,” I stammered. “That’s murder there.”
She slammed the trunk shut and went around me to the driver’s side of the car. She got in and rolled down the window. “Bye, Easy,” she said as she popped the ignition and threw it into reverse.
The engine choked twice but not enough to stall.
I could have grabbed her and pulled her out of the car but what would I have done with her? All I could do was watch the red lights recede down the hill.
Then I got into my car thinking that my luck hadn’t turned yet.
CHAPTER 14
YOU LETTIN’ THEM STEP ON YOU, Easy. Lettin’ them walk all over you and you ain’t doin’ a thing.”
“What can I do?”
I pulled onto Sunset Boulevard and turned left, toward the band of fiery orange light on the eastern horizon.
“I don’t know, man, but you gotta do somethin’. This keep up and you be dead ’fore next Wednesday.”
“Maybe I should just do like Odell says and leave.”
“Leave! Leave? You gonna run away from the only piece’a property you ever had? Leave,” he said disgustedly. “Better be dead than leave.”
“Well, you say I’ma be dead anyway. All I gotta do is wait fo’ nex Wednesday.”
“You gotta stand up, man. Lettin’ these people step on you ain’t right. Messin’ with French white girls, who ain’t French; workin’ fo’ a white man kill his own kind if they don’t smell right. You gotta find out what happened an’ set it straight.”
“But what can I do with the police or Mr. Albright or even that girl?”
“Bide yo’ time, Easy. Don’t do nuthin’ that you don’t have to do. Just bide yo’ time an’ take advantage whenever you can.”
“What if …”
“Don’t ask no questions. Either somethin’ is or it ain’t. ‘What if’ is fo’ chirren, Easy. You’s a man.”
“Yeah,” I said. Suddenly I felt stronger.
“Not too many people wanna take down a man, Easy. They’s too many cowards around for that.”
The voice only comes to me at the worst times, when everything seems so bad that I want to take my car and drive it into a wall. Then this voice comes to me and gives me the best advice I ever get.
The voice is hard. It never cares if I’m scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.
THE VOICE FIRST CAME to me in the army.
When I joined up I was proud because I believed what they said in the papers and newsreels. I believed that I was a part of the hope of the world. But then I found that the army was segregated just like the South. They trained me as a foot soldier, a fighter, then they put me in front of a typewriter for the first three years of my tour. I had gone through Africa and Italy in the statistics unit. We followed the fighting men, tracing their movements and counting their dead.
I was in a black division but all the superior officers were white. I was trained how to kill men but white men weren’t anxious to see a gun in my hands. They didn’t want to see me spill white blood. They said we didn’t have the discipline or the minds for a war effort, but they were really scared that we might get to like the kind of freedom that death-dealing brings.
If a black man wanted to fight he had to volunteer. Then maybe he’d get to fight.
I thought the men who volunteered for combat were fools.
“Why I wanna die in this white man’s war?” I’d say.
But then one day I was in the PX when a load of white soldiers came in, fresh from battle outside Rome. They made a comment about the Negro soldiers. They said that we were cowards and that it was the white boys that were saving Europe. I knew they were jealous because we were behind the lines with good food and conquered women, but it got to me somehow. I hated those white soldiers and my own cowardice.
So I volunteered for the invasion of Normandy and then later I signed on with Patton at the Battle of the Bulge. By that time the Allies were so desperate that they didn’t have the luxury of segregating the troops. There were blacks, whites, and even a handful of Japanese-Americans in our platoon. And the major thing we had to worry about was killing Germans. There was always trouble between the races, especially when it came to the women, but we learned to respect each other out there too.
I never minded that those white boys hated me, but if they didn’t respect me I was ready to fight.
IT WAS OUTSIDE NORMANDY, near a little farm, when the voice first came to me. I was trapped in the barn. My two buddies, Anthony Yakimoto and Wenton Niles, were dead and a sniper had the place covered. The voice told me to “get off yo’ butt when the sun comes down an’ kill that motherfucker. Kill him an’ rip off his fuckin’ face with yo’ bayonet, man. You cain’t let him do that to you. Even if he lets you live you be scared the rest’a yo’ life. Kill that motherfucker,” he told me. And I did.
The voice has no lust. He never told me to rape or steal. He just tells me how it is if I want to survive. Survive like a man.
When the voice speaks, I listen.
CHAPTER 15
THERE WAS ANOTHER CAR parked in front of my house when I got home. A white Cadillac. No one was in it but this time it was my front door that was open.
Manny and Shariff were loitering just inside the door. Shariff grinned at me. Manny looked at the floor so I still couldn’t tell about his eyes.
Mr. Albright was standing in the kitchen, looking out over the backyards through the window. The smell of coffee filled the house. When I came in he turned to me, a porcelain cup cradled in his right hand. He wore white cotton pants and a cream sweater, white golf shoes, and a captain’s cap with a black brim.
“Easy.” His smile was loose and friendly.
“What you doin’ in my house, man?”
“I had to talk to you. You know I expected you to be home.” There was the slightest hint
of threat in his voice. “So Manny used a screwdriver on the door, just to be comfortable. Coffee’s made.”
“You got no excuse to be breakin’ into my house, Mr. Albright. What would you do if I broke into your place?”
“I’d tear your nigger head out by its root.” His smile didn’t alter in the least.
I looked at him for a minute. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, “Bide your time, Easy.”
“So what you want?” I asked him. I went to the counter and poured a cup of coffee.
“Where have you been this time of morning, Easy?”
“Nowhere got to do with your business.”
“Where?”
I turned to him saying, “I went to see a girl. Don’t you git none, Mr. Albright?”
His dead eyes turned colder and the smile left his face. I was trying to say something that would get under his skin and then I was sorry I had.
“I didn’t come here to play with you, boy,” he said evenly. “You got my money in your pocket and all I got is an earful of smartass.”
“What do you mean?” I stopped myself from taking a step backward.
“I mean, Frank Green hasn’t been home in two days. I mean that the superintendent at the Skyler Arms tells me that the police have been around his place asking about a colored girl that was seen with Green a few days before she died. I want to know, Easy. I want to know where the white girl is.”
“You don’t think I did my job? Shit, I give you the money back.”
“Too late for that, Mr. Rawlins. You take my money and you belong to me.”
“I don’t belong to anybody.”
“We all owe out something, Easy. When you owe out then you’re in debt and when you’re in debt then you can’t be your own man. That’s capitalism.”
“I got your money right here, Mr. Albright.” I reached for my pocket.
“Do you believe in God, Mr. Rawlins?”
“What do ya want, man?”
“I want to know if you believe in God.”
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