“The next thing I knew I had dirt in my mouth and a knot in my back like a mothahfuckah. I sat up and the dirt from the shallow grave fell down around my shoulders. Doc Halberman said that the bullet must have had a weak charge and wedged in a bone, and I was just lucky that when I fell I hit my head and knocked myself out so they thought I was dead.
“Halberman told me to rest, but you know I had business to take care of, so I had him put a plaster patch on the wound and I went right out to Bill’s little farm to warn him about Lorelle and Vince. You know when he come to the back door and saw me he turned another whole shade’a white.
“ ‘Are you a ghost?’ he asted me, and I told him, ‘Close, but not quite yet.’
“Then he give me a shot’a whiskey and took two for himself and led me down to the storm cellar. There was Vince’s corpse and Lorelle all tied up like a turkey hen before you throw her in the oven. The minute Lorelle and Vince walked in on Bill he shot the boy and bound the girl. I had told him from the begin that I’d be the only one to bring him any loot. He told me that we had to kill her but that he didn’t have the heart to shoot no woman, even if she was colored.
“You know I had got me some good pussy off that girl and I knew that it was Vince had pulled the trigger, so I just dragged Vince’s body out to Bill’s hog pen and let them get rid of the evidence, such as it was. Then I took Lorelle to this place I knew and told her that if she could bring a smile to my dead lips then maybe I’d just let her go.”
I was at the butt end of my cigarette and so dropped it in a glass of water on the night table while Mouse lit me another. I took a deep draw and then asked, “So what happened?”
“You know, Easy, the threat of death has a miraculous effect on some poor souls. Lorelle loved me harder that night than any woman has ever done before or since. She had me strainin’ so hard over that stuff that I give myself what they call a hemorrhoid. Shit, that thing hurt me longer than the bullet wound.”
“And did you kill her?” I asked. Before that cricket night I wouldn’t have dared ask Mouse a question like that, but right then I felt beyond petty fears of mortality or guilt.
“Naw, man,” Mouse said. “She couldn’t do nuthin’ to me. She saw her boyfriend gunned down by a white man that she could never lay blame on and then I saved her. After that she joined Calvary Baptist in Galveston. You know she get down on her knees to thank God ever goddamned day. And me? I rose up out the grave a dead man among the livin’. And you know that wasn’t the only time.”
Mouse grinned, shook his head, and took another drag off his cigarette.
I smoked, slowly contemplating the man who had carried me out from my grave.
“Why are you here, Raymond?”
“What kinda question is that, Easy? You my friend, my best friend.”
“That might be true, but Mama Jo already told you I’ma be okay, and Lynne must’a called you to say I was out of that coma. You runnin’ over here in the middle’a the night when a sick man should be gettin’ his rest mean that there’s something you want, no … something you need from me.”
Raymond Alexander sat back in the boxy padded chair and smiled, then grinned.
“They say Jackson Blue is some kinda genius, but there ain’t a man I evah met knows people better than you, Ease. You read a man’s face like a little kid readin’ Dick and Jane.”
“So what is Jane and her boyfriend up to?” I asked.
Mouse’s good humor faded as it had in my dream. A serious look crossed his face, and he stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray he had in his lap.
“There’s a woman live two maybe three blocks from your Genesee house named Timbale Noon. She got three kids. The oldest one, who she named Evander, is nineteen, twenty. He should be a man but he’s immature for his age. You know that’s a bad combination. He’s gone missin’. I haven’t talked to Timbale directly, but I heard from a friend’a hers that a few days ago Evander called his mama from up on the Sunset Strip and told her that he met this girl, that he might be late because they were goin’ to listen to some music at a club up there.
“That was the last Timbale heard from Evander, and she is heartbroken. The police won’t even take down a report. And you know a thirty-four-year-old black woman is not gonna get anything outta them hippies up there. I spent two days lookin’ for him, but I couldn’t turn up a damn thing. I mean, if I knew who to shoot it’d be different, but I need that Easy magic, that readin’ faces like a child’s primer.”
I tried to imagine getting up out of the bed, putting on a pair of pants, and walking out of a door. Just thinking about it exhausted me.
“Can you do this for me, Easy?” Mouse asked.
If it was anyone else I would have said no. But Raymond had crawled out of a grave with a bullet in his back; he had shimmied up a seaside mountain with my body across his shoulders. And there were other, as yet unarticulated reasons too.
“I’ll do it,” I said, and then I passed out.
4
My next bout of consciousness was announced by sunlight battering up against my eyelids. It was warm and red. A breeze was still wafting but it wasn’t chill. I opened my eyes and saw clearly the room I was in for the first time. It was quite large, with a cream-colored bureau against one wall and a solid oak desk next to an open sliding glass door. The bed I was in was king-size, and the chair next to it was ivory, not white. Dark blue carpeting covered the floor, and the ceiling was high and light blue enough to almost be a sky.
Inhaling, I picked up the sour smell coming from under the covers. The fresh morning breeze was the perfect counterpoint to the odor rising from my recently deceased and then partially resurrected body.
I lay still for a while, thinking about Lynne Hua and Mouse. Had they been there or were they phantoms my mind used while paving its way back to consciousness? I didn’t remember much about the accident that Lynne had spoken of. I couldn’t imagine little Raymond carrying my hundred and eighty-some pounds up a seaside cliff.
And when a man ran off the side of a mountain in a three-ton car he died. Didn’t he?
These thoughts made the circuit of my mind six or seven times before I realized that I would never come up with the answer on my own. I decided then that I’d have to see what was outside of the well-appointed, unfamiliar blue bedroom.
I raised up on one elbow and fell back with a thump. The pain going through my head felt like a jagged lightning bolt come out of nowhere on a perfectly clear afternoon. That was okay. I’d had hangovers before that made rising a two-effort affair. I tried again, but this time I didn’t make it as far up as on the first attempt. My next effort was more a thought than any kind of physical motion.
Finally I decided to roll to the edge of the bed and swing my legs over the side one at a time. The tug of gravity helped to pull my torso into a mostly upright position. The billowing curtains from the glass sliding doors seemed to be cheering me on.
The last thing I remembered I was a mature man with the sap still running, driving a car in the night. Now I was middle-aged and achy, dizzy too. It was a foregone conclusion that I would never be young again.
I took six deep breaths, tried to rise to my feet, failed, took another deep inhalation and succeeded. I was a bit wobbly but made it to the door without falling. It felt like victory just standing there holding on to the brass doorknob.
I don’t know how long I lingered at the doorway, but at one point I leaned against the knob and rode the door out into the vestibule at the top of a white wood and blue carpeted stairway. The walls were white and hung with oil paintings of still lifes and of poor and rural black men and women. It struck me that I had rarely seen such intimate renditions of poor black folk. I wondered again where I was. Maybe I had died and gone to a kind of colored heaven, a big house on the edge of the estate where the white people went when they passed on.
There were three closed doors on that landing, but I didn’t want to waste my strength investigating them. So, grasping
the banister with both hands, I took the downward-cascading stairs one at a time, trying to keep from stumbling while studying the faces of sharecroppers and day laborers, laundresses and just folks at rest—most of them looking almost as tired as I felt.
One thing that kept me upright was a sharp pain in my right ankle. Every time that foot hit the floor, the shooting sensation would travel almost to the knee. Rather than resent this ache, I welcomed it, because with each second step I was shocked back to clarity. It was like a bright red spot on a fading gray plain, a distant sun—a jabbing reminder that my blood was still pumping, that life, if not a certainty, was at least a possibility.
I passed three floors and more than a dozen paintings before the staircase ended. On the first floor of the enormous house I felt a little lost. There were hallways with quite a few doors, a living room off to the right that had broad windows and was three steps lower than the floor on which I stood. There were no sounds, no indication of other human beings inhabiting this unlikely architecture.
I was wearing light blue pajamas. These too were unfamiliar to me. My dark brown hands reaching out from the pale sleeves seemed like they didn’t belong in my clothes or that home. I stood there drifting through these aimless thoughts, waiting for a sign.
I didn’t have the strength to go exploring. It felt as if I had a certain but undisclosed number of steps and breaths left in me. I had to husband these resources so as not to give out before reaching my goal—whatever that was.
A muted laugh came from somewhere. I looked around, but the white walls and pine flooring, the many doors and the awkward array of sunlight and shadows remained still and lifeless.
A louder laugh was emitted, and a direction suggested itself.
To my left, on the right half of a broad wall, was an overwide pink door. It was from behind this portal, I was almost sure, that the laughter had come. I released the banister and staggered to a piece of wall next to the pink door. Leaning my head against the white plasterboard I heard speech that was muffled by the barrier. Then there was another high-pitched laugh—a female exhortation of near hilarity.
I hesitated.
This wasn’t my house. This wasn’t the home of any Negro I had ever known. It was familiar, but no more so than my body, which seemed to have aged a generation from the last time I knew myself.
After a moment of cracked logic I decided that I should go through the door and ask the white people on the other side why I was there in their house wearing somebody else’s pajamas and staggering around like Max Schmeling after his first-round decimation by Joe Louis.
My decision made, I reached for the doorknob but realized that there was none. This simple detail flummoxed me. How could I get through a door if there was no way to open it? I stood there for well over a minute trying to think my way around the problem. I went over it again and again. Early on I thought that maybe I could just push against the pink panel, but for some reason I rejected this simple solution. I considered knocking, looking for another door around the corner, calling out for someone to come let me in, and simply giving up and sitting on the floor until somebody came out and found me. Only after deep consideration of each of these approaches did I finally decide to push the door.
It swung open as easily as the curtains blew inward in the upstairs bedroom.
Laughter and friendly talk were issuing from inside.
5
The door swung inward but didn’t hit the wall, so no one turned my way. Revealed was a sunlit kitchen about twice the size of most houses I’d lived in. Two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and windows: One side looked out on a long swimming pool and the other onto a broad lawn lined by various citrus trees: grapefruit, tangerine, lemon, lime, and navel orange.
To the right of the cavernous kitchen was a blond table, and on the other side was a built-in eight-foot-square stove that could be accessed from all four sides. Benita Flagg, a slight brown girl in a shapeless calico dress, was flipping pancakes with her profile turned toward me. She was concentrating on her task and so wasn’t aware of my peripheral presence.
“I never said that,” my adopted daughter, Feather, was saying. There was laughter in her young voice, nesting her words with warmth and feeling.
“Yes, you did,” Benita said, still intent on her flapjacks.
Jesus, my other adopted child, now a young man, sat across from Feather, smiling silently as usual.
No one in the room had noticed me yet. This added to my feeling of being dead but not quite gone. I was like the ghosts that so many of my superstitious elders believed inhabited their homes and neighborhoods: blurry images down dark corridors, fleeting and semitransparent, morose, lost, and jealous of the living.
Then there came a yipping cry.
A chubby light brown baby in a pine crib was grinning through the slats, maybe at me. I thought it possible that only speechless infants could see the dead.
“I’m just telling you,” Feather said, “that Aunt Jewelle said that Uncle JB wouldn’t come over because he said that there must be some kind of voodoo curse here, and he’s never going to go back where people practice things like that. But I never said I believed it.”
Jesus began speaking in mellifluous Spanish, explaining something that I struggled to understand from his hand gestures, but failed. Feather answered in the same tongue. At twelve years old she already spoke three languages fluently.
“If you two are gonna start in talkin’ like that I’ma take Essie upstairs and eat my pancakes with Jack LaLanne.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Jesus apologized. He would have said more, but in turning toward his common-law wife he caught a glimpse of me.
“Dad,” he said, frozen from the sight of me in the pink doorway.
“Daddy!” Feather cried. She leaped to her feet and ran toward me.
Essie began bawling. Jesus and Benita followed the fleet child in her collision course for my beleaguered body.
Watching the speed of Feather’s approach, I girded myself.
The impact against my side made me feel like a matador when the torquing head of a bull hits its mark. I would have fallen over if Jesus hadn’t rushed up and caught me by the arm. He was a small young man, but years of work on his little fishing boat had hardened his muscles and honed his coordination.
“Hold up, little sister,” he said to Feather. “Dad’s not a hundred percent yet.”
“Not even fifty” were my first words.
“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” Feather said while clinging to my other arm.
My back was against the doorjamb. Essie hollered from her crib. Benita had stopped halfway between me and her frightened daughter.
There was life all around me, and I became aware of an ache on the inner side of my left forearm which at least gave me a semblance of living.
“How are you, Daddy?” Feather said.
“Come on, Dad,” Jesus added, pulling me so that my right arm wrapped around his shoulders.
Leaning heavily on my son, I moved toward the sunlit table, taking deep breaths and wondering how sick I was. Jesus let me down on a hard wood chair, while Feather pulled her seat up next to mine. Benita had Essie in her arms, and Jesus stood over me, a son at least temporarily taking the headman’s role.
I sat back and felt a knot in the left side of my back. This dull pain reminded me of Mouse being shot and buried alive. My friends and I had lived hard lives. I was happy that my children didn’t have to go through that.
“How are you feeling, Daddy?” Feather asked.
She had light brown hair and café-au-lait skin, the daughter of a black man and a white woman, both murdered before she could utter a word.
Maybe, I thought, my life was easier than some of them coming up behind me.
“How long?” I asked.
“A little more than two months,” Jesus said. “The doctor said it wasn’t a real coma, but you were unconscious and sleeping a lot.”
I remembered then th
at Lynne had told me the same thing.
“I don’t remember any of it.”
“Doctor said it was the concussion combined with exposure,” Benita said. The chubby brown baby in her arm was trying to stick her fingers up her mother’s nose, but Bennie made her face a moving target while talking.
“So why am I not in a hospital bed?”
“Jo told Raymond that hospitals kill more poor people than they cure, and so he hired this nurse he knows and got Dr. Barstow to come by every few days.”
Barstow was an army doctor I knew from the war. He took care of the children and most of my friends.
“But how did you feed me?”
Feather sidled up to my left side and rolled up my pajama sleeve. There was the needle of an IV taped to the center of my arm.
“It got infected once,” she said, “but Dr. B gave you penicillin when it got too red.”
“I smell like a whole barrel of sour pickles,” I said.
“Antigone only gave you sponge baths every third day,” Jesus told me. “And I turned you every six hours so you didn’t get bedsores and the blood didn’t settle.”
“Antigone?”
“That’s the nurse Raymond done hired,” Benita said.
“So I’ve been up in that bed all this time?”
“Yes,” Feather said, stroking my hand. “Except three days they had you in the hospital. Uncle Ray took you there first. But then we brought you here with Dr. B and Antigone. Everybody was really worried, Daddy.”
Putting a hand on my daughter’s shoulder, I said, “Can I get a half a pancake.”
Eating was almost as difficult as coming downstairs. My stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut, and it ached when just a teaspoon worth of pancake made its way down.
“Don’t you like it, Mr. Rawlins?” Benita asked.
“My mouth thinks it’s great, but the gut says that it’s on strike.”
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