“Yeah,” Mouse said in answer to the question about Jackson. “You know I got to like old Blue. He can do things that nobody else can, with them computers and telephone lines. I kinda collect special friends like that—especially if they black, but not only.”
“You still hooked up with Lynne Hua?”
“Not really. She’s gettin’ married to this TV actor dude.”
“And you don’t mind that?”
“It’s okay wit’ me. I mean, she still gimme some’a that sweet thing if I want it. Woman need to be married.… Man too.”
He was inviting me to talk about Bonnie Shay but I didn’t take the bait.
“You wanna drink, Ray?” I asked instead. “I think there might be a bottle in the kitchen closet if Jeff didn’t get at it.”
“No, thanks, Ease. I don’t wanna send you down no wrong path.”
I’d swallowed the eight bites and even had a few French fries. My stomach gave me serious grief but I rode that out.
By late afternoon the room seemed to be fading.
Mouse was telling the story of how I was the first one to bring him out to Los Angeles, when I called EttaMae down in Houston.
“Yo’ ass was in serious trouble,” he reminded me, “but I liked the weather.”
He said more but I don’t remember it. I leaned back and the room receded once more. I was falling for a moment and then there was sudden bliss.
12
In the dream I was sitting beside a flat boulder on a white beach. Black vultures hovered on the sea breeze just at the waterline, thousands of them. As far as the eye could see in either direction the scavengers floated. There was no escape and so I took a very deep, very satisfying breath and remained where I was.
There came a clattering. It didn’t sound like a bird.
I looked around but there was no habitation, animal, or even any plant life to be seen. There was only me and those birds—and now the sound of … of hard surfaces clinking together: glass or metal.
I realized then that I had been sleeping, that sleep was much deeper after the accident. The dream was still there too. I was on that beach resting along with the carrion birds. It was a very peaceful feeling and I was loath to come back into the living world.
When I opened my eyes, the conscious awareness I had in the dream faltered. I saw a modern-looking blue-and-green lamp perched like a bird on the little table standing next to my padded chair. The room looked familiar, but where had that lamp come from? Where was I and where had I been?
More clattering sounds interrupted my bout of pedestrian existentialism.
Maybe it was the squatter making that noise. This thought came seemingly of its own accord, not mine. I wondered what was meant by a squatter. Then the memories came back in a rush: Timbale grief-stricken over her missing son, the police, Raymond … the squatter.
I sat up quickly and the room started to spin. Falling back on the sofa, I remembered that I’d been hurt. There was an intruder in my house and I was wounded and unarmed. The intruder had put a lamp on the table next to the chair. Why did he do that?
I closed my eyes and sat up slowly, thinking as I rose that it was probably better that I was unarmed. I wasn’t strong enough to fire a pistol accurately.
After achieving an upright position on the sofa I opened my eyes. The coffee table was littered with the debris of the Meaty Meat-burger feast. There was an ashtray filled with butts.
I hadn’t quit smoking yet.
More rattling came from the kitchen and I began to believe that I wasn’t under siege.
The dream, the fear, the weakness in every corner of my body came together to form the decision of what I had to do next.
I lurched up from the sofa and reeled toward the kitchen, expecting to see Mouse. But instead it was Feather standing at the sink; the tall-for-her-age biracial beauty whom I had stolen from a perilous fate.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said, trying her best to sound like my little girl.
“How’d you get here?”
“Juice drove me.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Because you drove off the side of a mountain and instead of letting people take care of you, you’re all the way over here all by yourself.”
She was washing the dishes wearing jeans and a tight pink T-shirt. Her breasts were just beginning to form. She’d need looser clothes and a bra before long.
“Where’s Raymond?”
“He wasn’t here. This house is a mess. Has somebody been staying here? There were dirty dishes everywhere, and the sheets on your bed were so soiled that I threw them out.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten thirty. Daddy, you should come back to the big house and rest until you get better. You look sick.”
I put my hands on Feather’s shoulders and stared her in the eye. She was maybe five-seven, but I still dwarfed her.
It was then that I smelled the coffee. The odor brought me unexpectedly back to the dream of the beach. I understood then that the coffee had been part of the dream but not in it. This seemed like a very important piece of information.
“You want some coffee, Daddy?”
“That’d be great.”
“Sit down and I’ll pour it for you.”
We had a table that could squeeze in five at the bay window room attached to the kitchen. My little home was like a tinderbox compared to the big house in Bel-Air, but it was comfortable, and it was mine. Feather poured my coffee and sat down across from me. The morning sun fell on the light brown skin of her right arm.
“Daddy, you have to come home,” she said.
I took her fingers and squeezed them lightly.
“I can’t, baby girl.”
“Why not?”
I looked into my daughter’s face feeling all the fierce love that a father can know, imagining a young man falling for her the way I had been told I’d careened off that coastal cliff. These clashing images elated me.
“You know I come from a hard place,” I said.
“I know,” she replied in an exasperated tone. “Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, where the police left on Friday afternoon and didn’t come back till Sunday morning to count the bodies.”
I laughed and said, “Am I that predictable?”
“I’ve been listening to you tell those stories my whole life. But you have to listen to me sometimes too.”
These last words she learned from Bonnie Shay, I was sure.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll listen, but I want to tell you something first.”
“What?” I appreciated the petulance in her voice. I wanted my little girl to stay a child for a few years more.
“If you got sick,” I said, “or Juice or Essie did, you’d do best to get in the bed until you were better. I’d take you to the doctor and hold your hand if you had to have a shot and I’d give you water with an eyedropper if you were too weak to hold the glass. That would be good for you, but I’m a different breed of fish.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Most fish can sleep after a fashion,” I said. “They get under a rock on the ocean floor or float with a big school of their brethren with guards posted around the edges. But some fish, like the shark, can never stop moving forward. If a shark stops moving he will suffocate in his sleep.
“If I was to stay in the bed in that big house I’d perish just as sure as a shark would in a fish tank. I can feel it, Feather, in my chest and my heart. I was dying in that fancy bedroom until Uncle Ray came up there and held out his hand.”
“But you’re so weak,” Feather protested. She had already been convinced, but this knowledge did not allay her fears.
“I know I am. But I think I can get around that. Yes, sir, I believe I can.”
I sipped my coffee and felt at ease because I had spoken a truth to my daughter that I had not completely understood.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?” I thought she would ask me about how I planned to regai
n my strength.
“You know when you had the accident and they called and said that you were dead.”
“Uh-huh.” I could hear the pain in her words.
“When I thought that you were … that you were gone, I started thinking about if I had a mother somewhere.”
I held my breath, knowing what would come next.
“Juice told me that he remembered the day that you brought me home.”
There’s no rest for the weary, a woman, I forget her name, used to say when I lived in Texas. Six words with one contraction, and there was more truth in there than in the Christian Bible, Das Kapital, and The Interpretation of Dreams rolled up into one.
“Who was my mother?” Feather asked.
It was the question I most dreaded. I loved Feather, but the truth, I feared, would damage her more than all the love in the world could heal.
“Easy!”
Loud knocking came at the front door. I pushed up from the dinette table and moved toward the living room. I had never been happier to hear Mouse’s bark.
13
He was standing on the front porch next to tall and flaxen Peter Rhone.
Peter was carrying a bag full of groceries. He wore faded jeans and a baby blue T-shirt. Mouse had on pearl gray pants and a square-cut green shirt that was short-sleeved and loose-fitting.
“Ray,” I said, moving back to allow the two entrée. “Peter.”
“Mr. Rawlins,” Peter greeted me.
“Me and Pete brought you some food, Easy,” Mouse said, making his way toward the kitchen.
Feather came out and smiled, as most women did, for the enigmatic killer.
“Hi, Uncle Ray.”
“What you doin’ here, Feather? I thought you was in summer school?”
He asked this question while pressing past my daughter into the kitchen.
The rest of us followed.
“I came to take care of Daddy.”
Mouse just nodded while he took groceries from Peter’s arms.
“I got breakfast here,” he said. “Slab bacon, grits, and eggs. If that don’t make him better I don’t know what will.”
“How’s LaMarque?” Feather asked about Raymond’s twenty-two-year-old son.
“Didn’t I tell you? Oh, yeah, that was Juice. Etta send him down to Texas to stay with her brother and his wife. She said that a summer on the farm might firm him up some.”
While he talked Mouse was taking the breakfast ingredients out of the bag and placing them on the counter. He had everything from eggs to butter to salt and pepper. He wasn’t about to rely on any stores that the squatter Jeffrey kept.
“Sit down, you guys,” he said. “I’ll cook up everything. Feather?”
“Yes, Uncle Ray?”
“You clean up this kitchen? ’Cause you know it was a mess last night.”
“Uh-huh.”
While Mouse busied himself with cooking, Peter took a seat across from Feather and me.
“We came together because Mr. Alexander needed me to drive over from Primo’s,” the young man said.
Peter worked part-time for my friend Primo in a garage that the elder, Mexican-born mechanic managed.
“Why?” I asked.
“Bright red nineteen sixty-fi’e two-door Plymouth Barracuda,” Mouse said excitedly. “Sittin’ still that baby look like she goin’ fast.”
While Mouse opined, Peter put the keys down in front of me.
“What?” I said.
“Mr. Alexander said that you needed a car, and Primo had the Barracuda that he planned to sell in Mexico later this month. He and I were going to drive it down, but when he heard you needed a car he made what he called a permanent loan.”
“Ray, you know I don’t do my work in loud cars,” I said.
“Loud car got it ovah a bus that never comes. You better believe that.”
That was all the fight I had in me. I sat back while Mouse cooked breakfast and Peter talked to Feather about her algebra homework. I was floating, like one of those coastal vultures, enjoying a moment of rest on the long migration of life.
The four of us ate heartily, and my stomach hardly protested at all. Ray had some stories about small conflicts that he and Primo had gotten into when they went down to Tijuana once a few years back.
“… mothahfuckahs didn’t think I could talk Spanish,” Ray was saying, “and so when I heard ’em say that they was gonna get the fat Southerner, I warned Primo and we got the hell outta there.”
I could have objected to his language around my daughter, but she knew how I felt, and asking Ray to edit his words was like requiring a porcupine to leave its quills at the door.
By the time breakfast was over I felt almost strong enough to do what I had to in order to keep moving forward.
“I told Primo that I’d have Peter back before the day was over,” Mouse was saying as Feather washed dishes and Peter dried. “So we better be off.”
“Take Feather back up to the Bel-Air house, will you, Ray?”
“I wanna stay here with you, Daddy.”
“I have to do something for Uncle Ray,” I said, “and there was this strange guy hanging around here. I’d feel safer if you were up in there.”
“Okay. But are you coming back home tonight?”
“If I don’t I will certainly call.”
I saw my friends and family off at the front door. They cruised up Genesee in Raymond’s pink Caddy. Feather was waving out the back window as they went.
Seeing them go I had to resist the impression that my lifeblood was draining away in their wake.
Back in the house I called Martin Martins, who was, for lack of a better term, a handyman.
Martins had moved to L.A. from Mississippi in the late forties like I had from Texas. He was a genius at anything mechanical or that had to do with building. Most of his leisure hours were spent studying machines and architectural design by looking at devices of all sorts and watching builders at work. I believe that he could have single-handedly built a skyscraper given enough time and resources—he was that good.
A few years earlier Martins was shot as he came out of a bar on Avalon at around midnight. The bullet, aimed at his heart, was true, but the shooter didn’t know that the mechanic had an iron device, given to him by the bartender, in his left breast pocket. People were always giving Mr. Martins odd gadgets and tools because he loved to study any technology new to him. He liked to get just a piece or section of some larger device and try, from that one puzzle piece, to figure out the function of the machine it came from.
The .45 slug knocked Martin for a loop, and luckily for him, the shooter ran rather than check out his work.
At two that morning Jackson Blue called me asking for a late meeting with his friend Martins.
“Do you know who shot you?” I asked Martins at a few minutes shy of three a.m. We were sitting at a corner table in Cox Bar—an unlicensed establishment hidden off of an unnamed alley in the bowels of Watts.
“It looked like Bill Fern,” the long-limbed master craftsman replied.
Martin was the color of a dark plum and formed from many angles. His face was nearly a perfect triangle set on the point of his chin. He had high cheekbones, long fingers, and a flat plane of chest that spoke of a day laborer’s strength. “But I don’t know why he wanna shoot at me. I mean, we hardly even know each other, and I can’t think of one wrong I’ve done him.”
“What’s this Bill do for a living?” I asked.
“Work for the city, I think, collectin’ trash. At least, that’s what he used to do a few years ago.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“My wife’s coworker Nanette Yomen had a party for all the colored people she knew worked for the city.”
“Did your wife know Bill?”
Even Martin’s eyes were composed of angles. The orbital bones formed squares around the orbs. It’s always a pleasure working with an intelligent man. He squeezed those squares down into thin quadrangles
while peering inside his own mind.
After maybe two minutes he said, “I got twenty-one thousand dollars in the bank.”
That’s all he had to say. We—me, him, and Jackson Blue, who was there for the introduction—all understood what had transpired.
I knew a disbarred lawyer named Milo Sweet who wrote up the divorce agreement. They split everything minus five hundred dollars for expenses. Bill Fern was at the final meeting. He apologized to Martin and said that there was no reason to hold a grudge.
I gave the five hundred to Mouse and asked him to visit Bill at his apartment and impress upon him that if any violence happened to Martin that Ray had already been paid to take Bill’s life.
I didn’t charge a dime for that job. A good handyman in my corner outweighed any fee.
“Hello?” Hela Klineman answered.
Hela was a German woman who came to the U.S. after World War II. She’d been married to a black soldier named Mortimer Revert, but that union foundered at just about the time Martin’s did. They got together but did not wed—both of them having serious reservations about the institution of marriage. They had a child, however, and seemed to be deeply in love.
“It’s Easy, Hela.”
“Hold on.”
“Hey, Easy, how are you?” Martin said when he got on the line. That man loved me.
“I need some help.”
“Name it.”
“Could you install bars on all my windows and new locks, good locks, on the doors?”
“How soon?”
“The sooner the better.”
“I’ll be over there in an hour then.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Materials,” he said. “And I’ll get you my builder’s discount.”
I might have died but the world still remembered me.
After making sure of the security of my home I went out the front door. I made it to the sidewalk, where I stopped and remembered that I had forgotten something, not knowing exactly what that something was. I went back into the house and stood in the front room waiting for insight. Then I smiled.
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