His hands were swollen and he cried out when the rope was cut.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Friends of your mother, Evander,” I said. “Now get up, because we got to run.”
24
The young man had a thick build and was quite strong, though not from exercise. When I mentioned his mother he jumped to his feet and we began the long trek, the hazardous escape from his captors.
Coco ran in front of us, Evander staggered behind her, and I took up the rear, making sure that the man we were saving didn’t tumble to the creek bed or run into a tree. Every third or fourth step that Evander took was precarious. It was as if, during his time of captivity, he’d lost his sense of equilibrium. He’d veer off to the side, lower to his knees now and then, as if the chase was over and now we might stop for a catnap.
Coco paused whenever Evander did.
“Keep on going,” I said the last time she did this. “Just keep on running till you’re back at the car.” I threw her the keys and she caught them, just barely. “Unlock it and start it up. That way we’ll be ready to go when I get him there.”
The young woman, whom I hadn’t known six hours before, nodded and took off with our hope in her hands. I believed in her, but at the back of my mind I was well aware that I could have been wrong. What if she was so scared that she drove off before I could get Evander to the beach?
I shrugged at the possibility and pulled the boy up by his arm.
“Come on, Evander,” I said. “There’s bad men after us and I’d like not to have to kill them if possible.”
Pushing him forward I saw the burns on his shoulders and back. Those thick welts would leave scars like the bullwhips made on our slave ancestors. I forced myself to go on, not backward—toward liberation rather than retribution.
Evander cried out in pain as we passed through the sandstone corridor. The rough rock scraped against his wounds. I would have given him my shirt but I didn’t feel we had the time. The smugglers would realize soon enough that their prisoner was gone. They might very well come after us.
Evander fell flat on his face in the dry creek bed when the scent of salt air was strong. He tried to rise but failed. I could see that he was exhausted and defeated by our run, so I put his left arm around my shoulders and brought him to a standing position. His weight didn’t feel like anything. I didn’t know if it was Gator’s Blood or adrenaline, but I made the last three hundred feet dragging that bulky kid along like one of those sacks of cotton on a Mississippi sharecropper’s farm.
The red Barracuda was still there, with Coco sitting behind the wheel.
This was another moment in the development of a friendship that I would come to value over time.
She jumped out of the car to help me pile the nearly unconscious bare-chested boy into the backseat.
“Easy!” she cried as I was folding Evander’s legs up on the cushions.
I pulled my pistol for the first time and turned to study the coastal foliage from which we had come.
Four long-haired white men, two of them with pistols of their own, came out from the leaves. There was a great plume of white smoke in the sky behind them. The color of this plume told me that they had managed to extinguish the fire.
Redshirt pointed at us, making a guttural sound that had meaning without linguistic articulation. He wanted us dead and there was no argument that would dissuade him.
The man’s yowl seemed to go on beyond his breath. It came to me that a nearby siren had extended his promise and threat.
Redshirt heard the fire engine too. Or maybe it was the police.
“Get back behind the wheel,” I said to Coco.
She didn’t argue.
Redshirt pointed his pistol at me and the far-off wail got closer. He lowered the gun, wishing with his gaze that I was close enough for him to strike me. Then all four men faded back into the coastal trees—wild-eyed primitives retreating to their primordial home.
I went to the driver’s-side door.
“Get in the backseat with Evander,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
She hopped over the seat and I put the red Barracuda in gear.
“Is there another way out of here?”
“If you drive north along the beach about half a mile there’s a regular turnoff.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
“He’s got a fever, Easy,” Coco said two hours later, when we were on the Santa Monica Freeway headed east for L.A. proper.
We had passed six fire trucks headed north toward Caller’s Creek. I could only hope that Redshirt and his crew were caught, or at least that they didn’t recognize Coco sitting in the car.
“I don’t know where the money is!” the boy shouted. “I don’t know where the blood came from!”
He had been calling out now and then, delirious after the ordeal.
I stopped at a gas station that had a sign for ice. I got fifteen pounds and took a couple of extra plastic bags. These I gave to Coco to apply to Evander’s head and shoulders.
“We have to take him to a hospital,” she said.
“I got a better place in mind.”
Coco argued the whole way.
“This man is sick and wounded,” she said. “He’s been tied to a tree and beaten. He needs a doctor.”
“You already said that, girl. I’m just askin’ for you to help me bring him to this woman I know. If, after we get there, you think he needs a doctor, I will be happy to oblige.”
“But that could be too late.”
“Honey, I have carried wounded men across battlefields. I have been too late more than once. Evander is hurt but he’s not dyin’. Not yet.”
When we got to Mama Jo’s it was midafternoon.
Coco helped me carry Evander through the trees to Jo’s yellow door. We passed through, and when Coco laid eyes on Jo all the complaints stopped.
I put the boy on Jo’s visitor’s cot and without introduction she began to work on his wounds, burns, and bruises.
“Hand me that white pottery jug,” she said to Coco. “And gimme that glass jar … the square one. Okay now, take three white buds off’a that hangin’ bunch’a herbs on the far right and …”
Coco did everything Jo said without error or complaint. She didn’t ask questions; nor did she make any objection.
I sat back in my regular chair and the last iota of strength fled from my limbs. I could watch but that was all. My job, for the moment, was over. After a while my eyes started to close. I fought sleep, because I knew that it would lead either to death or nightmare—neither of which I was prepared for.
25
“Do you want some more soup?” Jo asked on the other side of closed eyelids.
“Yes, ma’am,” a young man replied.
“This is delicious,” a woman added.
“Thank you, Coco.”
“My real name is Helen Ray,” the woman I knew as Coco said.
“I like your nickname.” There was something odd in Jo’s voice, but I was too out of it to try to figure out what that something was.
My purpose in life right then was to open my eyes and sit up from wherever it was that I had been laid down. I was on my side and decided visual reconnaissance should be my first act.
Jo, Evander, and Helen “Coco” Ray were sitting at the medieval table, sharing a meal.
I wondered about that table. Maybe it had been constructed in some ancient Spanish canton in the twelfth or thirteenth century, moved from place to place until it found its way aboard a galleon bound for the New World. It had come to Louisiana and finally to Jo’s country fortress. Now that same table, so well built that it had outlasted its own history, was in a California home that conformed to its forgotten origins.
“Easy,” Jo said, and I focused, as well as I could, on her. “Evander, go help Easy up.”
The young man that I virtually carried through the coastal woods now pulled me up from a straw bundle on the floor.
The hou
se raven squalled and the armadillos wrestled in their corner. The lynx-cat was nowhere to be seen.
Jo served me oxtail stew over yellow rice, and for the first time since my revivification the food didn’t hurt my stomach.
“How are you, Easy?” Jo asked.
Upon hearing Jo’s tone, Coco looked at me as if for the first time.
“Like a bleeding, wounded shark among his brother sharks,” I said.
“You saved Evander here.”
“Those men had him tied to a tree,” I answered.
“Coco says that she wanted to run and call the cops, but you planned the whole escape in just one minute and didn’t even have to kill nobody.” There was pride in Jo’s voice.
“I thought there mighta been a guy out back of the camp. If there was I woulda killed him,” I promised.
“I know,” said Jo. “I know that you a man do what he have to.”
Now Evander was looking at me.
“Did my mother really send you?” he asked.
“Her, LaTonya, and Beatrix too.”
“Well, thank you,” said the young man that Mouse called Little Green. “I don’t know for sure, but I think those guys mighta killed me.” He was wearing a loose gray shirt that was three or four sizes too big even for his large frame.
“Is that shirt Domaque Junior’s?” I asked the air.
“Uh-huh,” Jo grunted.
“How is your son?”
“Him and that girl he was livin’ wit’ on the commune, Loretta, have moved up to north Alaska and got themselves a fishin’ boat.”
“Damn.”
“Do you need an assistant or something, Miss Jo?” Coco asked.
Jo turned to the beautiful white girl and stared. Raymond had told me that she had what was known as second sight that she used now and then when the truth was there but unspoken. I never believed any tales like that except when I was actually in Jo’s physical presence.
“You go on with Easy,” Jo said after a minute or two. “If you still interested after ten days’ time, call him and he will bring you here to me.”
“What time is it?” I asked Jo.
“I don’t have no clock,” she said. “Maybe nine, ten.”
“How long was I out?”
“A few hours,” she said. “You should get a better rest before you take any more’a that elixir.”
“Then it’s time to go, Evander,” I said, a little loudly for the small space. “You too, Coco Helen Ray.”
Now both youngsters were looking at me. Leaving that medieval cottage was the last thing on their minds.
“Easy’s right,” Jo said, adding her authority to mine. “You children got business to take care on.”
Evander had gone through the yellow door, and Coco was just about to follow when she turned and gave Jo a serious kiss on the lips. Their embrace ended when Jo gently shoved the girl on.
Then Jo kissed me lightly and said, “Watch that medicine, Easy. It will push you further along than you used to goin’.”
“That’s okay, Jo. I got a long way to go.”
She smiled and kissed me again.
The next thing I knew I was driving through Watts. There were still lots of boarded-up, burned-out buildings that indicated the businesses that had yet to return to the ’hood after the devastating riots. My community had suffered decimation as I had. It was trying to come back, but there was no promise that it would rise again either.
It was not yet ten p.m. when we reached Terry’s Hollywood mansion. Coco, Evander, and I had said fewer than a dozen words on the long drive. I was exhausted but not as depleted as I had been the day before. Evander was in a nightmare that he could not decipher. And Coco had met her first muse, a black witch-woman from a place most men had never even dreamed of.
Coco climbed out from the backseat, came around to the driver’s window, and kissed me on the lips.
“Maybe not all men are so bad,” she said.
“It took Jo sayin’ it to make you know it.”
“She’s an amazing woman.”
“It’s an amazing world out there if you give it half a chance.”
I watched Coco until she was in the front door and then I went around the driveway back to the street.
Three blocks away I started talking.
“A man named Raymond Alexander hired me to go to your mother and ask her if she wanted me to go looking for you.”
“That can’t be,” he said definitively.
“What? You don’t think your mother would send a stranger out looking for you?”
“I don’t think she’d talk to you if you came from Mr. Alexander.”
“Why not?”
“When I was a kid,” he said, “maybe ten or so, it was my birthday and I was playin’ in the front yard. This fancy man came up and gave me a toy pistol that made a sound like a ricochet. He patted my head and called me Little Green. I asked him who he was and he said Ray Alexander. And when I went back to the house Mama threw away my toy and then that night she called somebody on the phone and started cursin’ at him. I never heard my mother curse before or since.
“But the funny thing is that she gets these envelopes once a month with money in ’em. One time she threw one away and the return address had the name Alexander written on it.”
I pulled to the curb near La Cienega and Pico. It was a few minutes before eleven.
“Evander.”
“Yes, Mr. Rawlins?”
“I don’t know what it is between Raymond and your mother, but she did tell me about your call from the Strip, and she gave me this picture to help look for you.”
He took the graduation photo, looked at it, and then handed it back.
“I live about three blocks away from your house. I can either take you home the way you are or you can come to my house and get yourself a little more together to keep Timbale from distress. I mean, Jo has tended to your bruises and burns, but you need maybe a day for the swelling on your face to go down.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to your house.”
“Raymond might be there.”
“Good.”
26
The porch light was shining above my front door.
I wasn’t exactly surprised to see an ounce or so of what looked like partially dried blood on the top stair of the entrance to my house. There wasn’t enough to assume that someone had died, at least not then and there. The dollop had a bright red eye at the very center and had dried to black around the edges.
I was confounded when my key didn’t fit the lock. For a moment I wondered if, in my tired state, I had come to the wrong house. But then Martin Martins came to mind. He must have changed the locks as he promised to do. I reached up into the brass lanternlike light fixture above the door and found the right key. It was silver and quite long. I used the new key and pushed the door open, going in before Evander. On the first step into the house a man rushed out from the kitchen. He was a crazy-looking gray-brown Negro with dark topaz eyes and curly, not kinky hair. Only five-ten and a hundred and seventy tops, he had huge fists that rivaled those of Sonny Liston.
“Niggah …” he said, as if I had somehow insulted him. “What you doin’ in my house?”
The third man to call me nigger in less than twenty-four hours, but this was a black man and the term, though not friendly, wasn’t actually disparaging either.
“Your house?” Another squatter? Was that Raymond’s blood on the porch? Had the previous trespasser hired this guy to push me out?
“What is it, Mr. Rawlins?” Evander asked from behind me.
I didn’t need Gator’s Blood to push my mind into coming up with an immediate plan that included the intruder and my young guest.
The strategy was simple: I’d stammer something unintelligible and vaguely apologetic, back out of the door as if retreating, pushing Evander as I went. The angry man would follow me, feeling that he had the upper hand. While moving I’d pull out my pistol. He’d be halfway out the f
ront door when I shot him—first in the knee and then, if he reached for a weapon, somewhere in the head.
I wasn’t worried about the police. Even a black man could protect his home from intruders—if those intruders were also black.
“S-s-s-sorry,” I stuttered.
My back pressed Evander off the front steps.
“Where you think you goin’?” the home invader said in the same insulted tone.
“Mister!” another voice yelled from somewhere in the house.
Mouse came out from the hall that led to our bedrooms.
The gray-brown Negro hesitated.
“Ray?” I said, coming back into the house.
Mouse was wearing a loose-fitting royal blue shirt and red-brown silk pants. He had on black shoes that looked like shiny bullets. His expression was casual; he looked unconcerned about the violence about to blossom in front of him.
As I came in Evander followed. When Mouse saw the young man his expression changed. There was a new emotion in his gaze. A look I had never seen in my friend’s mien.
“You go on, Mister,” Raymond said to the madman. “This here’s Easy Rawlins. This his house.”
“He the one gonna pay me?” Mister said, every bit as angry and outraged as when he thought I was an intruder.
“Go on, man,” Raymond said. “I’ll drop by in the morning and settle up.”
“Why not right now?”
Mouse turned his head to look at his temporary henchman, and the aggression drained right out of the man named Mister’s bearing.
“I ain’t gonna tell you again,” Mouse said. “Go on now. I’ll give you your money tomorrow.”
Mister hesitated maybe two seconds, then ducked his head and brushed past me and Evander without another word.
“Some niggahs just don’t know how to act,” Mouse said as he closed the door behind the disgruntled Mister.
Ray parted the closed drapes and watched the nighttime street until we heard an engine turn over and a car drive off.
Ray then turned to Evander and said, “Boy, you look like you been through a meat grinder.”
“Why is there blood on my front porch, Ray?”
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