“I’m so sorry, Easy,” Terry said, turning to me. “I try to keep my house open to anyone who needs a place to crash, but some people just can’t throw off the straight world.”
“You think the straight world is full of thieves?” I asked.
“It is based on theft.”
Ruby and I were naked. Terry noticed Ruby’s body with some interest. She saw his look and smiled. I experienced a rush of jealousy before remembering where I was and why I was there.
“Come on downstairs and I’ll make you guys breakfast,” Terry said to Ruby.
The girl and I showered together. It was almost platonic except for a kiss or two.
While we were dressing she said, “You’re a surprise, Easy.”
“In what way?”
“Usually when I ball a straight guy he wants to talk about it afterward. You know, to apologize for something or say that he likes me or some lie.”
“To tell you the truth, girl, I was so out of it last night that I don’t remember what it is I should be sorry for.”
Ruby laughed, and I wondered if we would know each other after that morning.
Terry was cracking enormous eggs into a big white ceramic bowl in the kitchen. It wasn’t as big as the kitchen of the place where my family was staying, but there was an eight-burner stove and a table big enough for twelve. The room only had one window, but there was also a door that was open wide, letting in the sunlight that California is famous for.
“Those are some big eggs,” I said, coming up to him at the cream-and-maroon-tiled counter.
“Duck eggs,” the ugly young man said. “I get them from a woman named Nugent. She’s an organic farmer from up around Isla Vista.”
“Never had a duck egg.”
“They taste like chicken eggs should.”
He made cheddar cheese omelets and bacon, buttered toast with apple butter, and fresh squeezed orange juice. He had an electric machine where all you did was drop the orange through a hole in the top and the juice came out of a spout on the side.
He was right about the eggs. They reminded me of the ones I ate when I was a child in Louisiana and my mother’s smile met me every morning at the breakfast table.
“You live here with your family, Terry?” I asked.
“My dad lives back east,” he said. “My mom is dead.”
“And this is your house?”
“When Mom died Dad decided to move back to New York, but I wanted to finish high school, so he let me stay here. He gives me money in a bank account and I let anybody stay who wants to crash for at least a few nights.…” He glanced over at Ruby. “Or more if they want.”
Ruby was sitting next to me, but she was leaning toward him.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said to the young master of the crash-pad mansion.
“I was up in San Francisco for three weeks. I just got back day before yesterday. You want to go down to the beach today?”
“Yeah.”
I must have made a sound or moved in some way. Ruby looked at me with the slightest hint of guilt on her face.
“Easy’s looking for the son of a friend’a his that I did acid with the other night.”
“You mean Evander?”
“How did you know that?”
“You brought him here, didn’t you?” Terry asked.
“Yeah, we came over to get my makeup kit after we dropped that acid. But you were up north.”
“He came by right after I got back. He was looking for you. He was scared and kinda nervous. He said he didn’t remember what had happened and wanted to ask you something. I didn’t talk to him much. I was going to the movies when he got here.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“He started talkin’ to Coco. I haven’t seen him since then.”
“What about Coco?”
“She almost always sleeps on the third-floor roof outside the White Rabbit room.”
21
Terry told me that it would be easy to find the White Rabbit room, and I, in my addled state, recast the words: Easy would find the White Rabbit room. It didn’t make sense, what I thought I heard, but Terry was right.
The first door I came to on the manor’s middle floor was black with a crude image of a bunny painted with white slashes for its body and bright red for its disconcerting eyes.
There were five or six beds lined up side by side against the wall of the large room. At least nine naked and nearly naked bodies sprawled on and across the mattresses. A young woman wearing big square-framed glasses was reading a hardback book that had a bright blue cover. As I moved past her, headed for the window in the far wall, she looked up, dug in her nose with a finger, and then went back to her book.
I wanted to ask her what she was reading but managed to squelch that question. Then I wondered what time it was, but said to myself, It’s right now, man. Now move on.
I climbed through the window thinking about Alice through the looking glass.
Outside the big bedroom was a triangular red gravel-and-tarpaper roof—maybe sixteen feet at its widest point. There was a ten-inch-high ledge along the outer edge. Behind me, above the window, was the domed structure of the upper floors. The outside roof on which I stood was cut out of floors three, four, and five. I had never seen a house like that. It must have, I thought, been built up slowly over time. Maybe it started out as a normal two-story home and had been added on to until it became this patchwork novelty.
I shook my head to clear out the errant thoughts and concentrated on the sleeping bag that was up against the ledge at the outer edge of the roof. Next to the occupied bedroll was a thick pile of heavy rope.
The color of the synthetic fabric that covered the sleeping bag was drab green. The only life visible was a thatch of brown hair that was so full and healthy that in other circumstances I might have thought it was an animal pelt—maybe even with a live creature under it.
I hesitated then. Coco, whoever that was, didn’t know me, and even though we were outside this was still a bedroom of sorts. The morning air was fresh with just a slight chill to it. I squatted to sit down, but the pain in my ankle betrayed me and I fell with a thump.
The vibration roused the head of hair. It turned and rose up on both elbows.
Coco was most definitely a young woman. A very beautiful young woman with eyes to match her hair and skin that had absorbed a lot of sun. She sat up. This alone wouldn’t have meant much, but she was naked, and it was hard for me, in that frame of mind, not to allow myself to get distracted by her well-formed charms.
“Who the hell are you?” Coco asked.
I put up my hands in surrender and said, “No disrespect, lady. Ruby and Terry downstairs told me that a woman named Coco was up here and that she might know where I could find Evander Noon.”
Words could be either glue or acid, an old man named Tyner once told me. I was fourteen and staying on his three-acre farm ten miles outside of Houston. I helped him with the chickens and gardening and he let me sleep in the basement, where it remained cool on the hot summer nights. Words are the finest invention that human beings have ever made. They build bridges and burn ’em down. Glue or acid, that’s what the words you say will be. But you got to be careful. Sometimes you might have both parts at the same time. You got to watch out, because some words will at first pull somebody close and then turn him against you in time.
“You’re looking at my tits,” the beauty said. It was hardly an indictment, more like an argument against my claim.
“Um …”
She brought a pink T-shirt out from the sleeping bag and pulled it on.
“I’m not turning in nobody to the cops,” she said. The words came naturally, but her elocution told me that this dialect was a learned language. I wondered where she was from.
“Well?” she asked when I didn’t respond.
“I’m not a cop.” I took the picture of Evander out and handed it to her. “Evander’s mother, Timbale, gave me this
and told me that he had gone missing. She’s scared sick. I know that Evander loves his mother and would at least want her to know that he was okay.”
Coco winced at me. There was something in what I said that resonated with her. But she didn’t know me, and I wasn’t dressed, coiffed like, or the right age of the people she trusted. Then again, I was black and Evander was too.
The young woman—I figured her to be around twenty-two—seemed to come to some decision. She stood up from the sleeping bag, unconcerned with the fact that she was nude from the waist down.
In another frame of mind I would have looked away from what my Christian brothers and sisters would have called her shame. But she wasn’t ashamed and neither was I. I had driven my Pontiac off of a cliff and crash-landed in a new world where women like Coco lived according to a whole new set of laws and beliefs.
So I watched while she rooted around for a pair of black sweatpants shoved down into the sleeping bag. I lit a cigarette as she pulled them up and drew the waist string tight. It wasn’t like the shower with Antigone or when I had sex in my sleep with Ruby; I wasn’t aroused. I was just a witness to the new world, like a failed Magellan or Columbus that had been shipwrecked and beached among an unfamiliar people. My job was to take on the local customs or get thrown back into the sea.
“Why do you sleep out here on the roof?” I asked as she went about the task of gathering her other possessions.
“I don’t like most men,” she said as if in answer.
“So it’s just that you want to be alone?”
“Not only.” She took a pair of red sandals, three books, a wallet, a plastic semiopaque golden box, and a see-through blue plastic pouch that had everything from bandages to Q-tips to loose change in it. These things, except for the sandals, she put in a purple velvet bag that was her purse. “I like being outside up here. Even when it rains sometimes I put up a tent.”
I smiled.
“What?” she said in challenge.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s funny to think of pitching a tent right outside the window.”
“You think it’s stupid.”
“Only if you get wet.”
Coco went about rolling up her sleeping bag and binding it.
After waiting a bit I asked, “Do you have disdain for all men?”
I think it was the use of the word disdain that raised her head. She pondered a moment and said, “No. I just don’t waste time with them unless they’re cool.”
She threw the bundle into the corner that cut deepest into the dome of the upper floors and then started pulling on her footwear. She did this standing up. I was impressed by her steadiness.
“Was Evander cool?”
“He was all freaked out,” she said. “Ruby had given him some acid and he had a bad trip that lasted for days. He came here a couple of days ago asking everybody where Ruby was. He was asking if we knew some guy but didn’t know his name. He said that he met him at Lula’s cathouse and that he wore all green. I didn’t know who he was talking about.
“Evander was going around asking everybody his question and crying a little, and this asshole named Yancy got mad and picked a fight with him. Yancy slapped Evander like people do in the movies to stop them from being so scared, but everybody knows that you can’t pull somebody out of a flashback by hitting them. Evander pushed Yancy and Yancy pulled out a knife …”
I wondered if Yancy had that knife on him when we tussled. Terry might have saved my life.
“… so,” Coco continued, “I got between them and told Yancy to fuck off. A couple of other people crashing said he should take a time-out and he split. After Yancy left, me and this girl named Vixie tried to calm Evander down.”
“Did he tell you where he’d been or where he was going?”
“You hungry?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. Then I made the mistake of standing up.
The first pain was in my right ankle—I expected that—but then there was a stitch that felt like a tear running up my left side, and my neck refused to straighten out.
I must have grunted from the pain, because Coco asked, “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Just a cramp.”
“We could go get a good breakfast at a place I know for three bucks each,” she said.
“Sounds good to me. I only want coffee anyway.”
“You got the money?”
“If you got the time.”
Coco smiled at the phrase, went to the pile of rope, and heaved it off the roof. I went to see why she’d done that and saw that the rope had unfurled into a ladder like the ones they use on big sailing ships. It was hooked to two metal bolts that were sunk into the ledge.
“You want me to go first?” she asked.
“We can’t just use the window?”
“I like to stay outside as much as possible.”
“After you,” I said, bobbing my head lightly.
22
I waited until Coco had made it down to the lawn before clambering over the side.
It was a foolish thing for me to scramble down that shaky ladder. With each step the ladder’s swing became more pronounced, the bodily pains increased, and my sense of balance flailed from side to side. But this was all of a piece, because everything I was doing right then was foolish; just the fact that I was out in the world rather than at home in the bosom of my family seemed like a fatal gaffe.
Chuckling at my own reckless nature made the netting wobble more, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Watch it!” Coco called. She steadied the rope and I took the last half dozen rungs with hardly a misstep.
On the lawn I was exhilarated, like a child who had successfully taken his first ride on the slide under his own power.
“You almost fell,” Coco said.
“Almost being the operant word.”
Once again my use of language gave her pause.
Since she was just standing there, looking at me, I asked, “Where’s the breakfast place?”
“Down on Pico. You got a car?”
“Ten or eleven blocks from here.”
Sunset was almost empty at that time of day. As much as I’d enjoyed the throngs of the night before, I was grateful for the silence that accompanied the early morning. Coco and I had made it to San Vicente before we started talking again.
“So what was Evander so freaked out about?” I asked.
“He kept saying that he forgot almost everything over the last few days, but then there was something about blood and money that he didn’t understand. He wanted to ask Ruby what had happened, but neither me nor Vixie knew where she was. Vix said that Ruby was bound to come back, but that Evander should get his head together first. So she told him that maybe they should go up to Caller’s Creek, up above Malibu, to let the trip wear off. You know, Ruby and your friend’s son did this acid that people call STP. It lasts a lot longer.”
“What’s this Vixie like?” I asked.
“I don’t really know her. She crashes at Terry’s sometimes. I mean, Terry’s cool, but he likes to have sex, and the girls know it and so sometimes they come up and ball him and he lets them hang around for a few days or whatever.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you friends with Terry like that?”
“No. Of course not. I like that roof ’cause I can sleep out there alone. I’m almost like part of the family at Terry’s.”
“Ruby too?”
“She could be, but Ruby’s all over the place. She sells her flowers and goes off any way the wind blows. I like her.”
“Here,” I said. “Let me make a stop at this phone booth.”
It was a free-standing booth on the corner. I closeted myself inside and dropped the dime.
“Hello?” Feather answered after quite some time.
“Hey, girl. You sleep okay?”
“Uh-huh. Where are you, Daddy?”
“Up in Hollywood, near there. I think I might be
going down to the beach looking for that guy Uncle Ray wanted me to find.”
“He said that he was going to be staying at our Genesee house the next few days.”
“Ray did?”
“Uh-huh. When are you coming home?”
“Pretty soon. Um, tell me something, Feather.”
“What?”
“Did you know an older girl who used to go to Burnside named Beatrix Noon?”
“Yes. She was one of the nice girls. I taught her a nursery rhyme in French. What about her?”
“Did you ever meet her mother or her brother?”
“She has a little sister named LaTonya. She’s still at Burnside. And … and her brother—I don’t remember his name—he would meet her after school sometimes and walk her home. He worked at this supermarket that made their own buttermilk doughnuts. Beatrix gave me half of one one time. Why?”
“It’s Beatrix’s brother, Evander, that I’m looking for.”
“How come?”
“He went off and his mother’s worried.”
“I hope you find him then. He was really nice to me. He said that he wanted to go to the University of California at Berkeley.”
“He didn’t seem strange or anything?”
“Nuh-uh. He was just serious like.”
“Is Jesus there?”
“He’s asleep. You wanna talk to him?”
“No. But tell him that I’d like it if he and Benita stay with you until I’m back.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, baby, I gotta go. Have fun at summer school.”
“Okay.”
Coco and I walked on. My gait, I noticed, was oddly light. It was as if I was sneaking down the street, avoiding being noticed by some greater power that preyed on flesh like mine. I wasn’t exactly weak, but the gas tank, once again, was near empty.
When we reached the Barracuda I went right to the trunk, took out one of Mama Jo’s bottles, and drained it in one gulp. The heat was there almost immediately, but it would be a while before the fire ignited.
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