“Jeffrey come back with these two fat dudes this evenin’. I figured he might. You need somethin’ to drink, Evander?”
“No, I-I mean, no, thank you.”
“Have a seat, boy,” Ray said.
The boy sat on the sofa and Mouse perched next to him.
I took the chair and said, “The blood on my porch?”
“I figure you was helpin’ me, and so I aksed Mister to come play some penny-ante blackjack while we waited to see if Jeffrey needed some more explainin’.
“First Martin Martins come by to put up bars and new locks on the doors and windows. He had a helper and they did the job in under three hours. You know, I like Martin. The way his mind works is a mystery to me.
“Then later on Jeffrey come up with these two fat dudes. I stabbed one’a them in the leg and Mister used his big fists on the other guy. They lit out. Pretty sure they ain’t comin’ back.”
Raymond shrugged and gave me his innocent look.
“How you doin’, Li’l Green?” he asked Evander.
“I’m okay. I’m all right.” Just then the boy flinched and jerked his head to see what might be happening in the corner.
“You want a beer?” Mouse asked.
“Okay.”
Ray got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with three bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“So what happened to your face?” Raymond asked Evander.
“He was tied to a tree by a gang of dope-smugglin’ hippies and they were torturing him,” I said.
Raymond stood up and I held out a hand.
“Sit down, Ray. This isn’t any simple thing here.”
“No?”
“Evander,” I said.
“Yeah?” He was still glancing into the empty corner as if some threat were crouching there.
“Why did those men have you tied to that tree?”
“They wanted the money.”
“What money?”
Mouse sat down again.
“The money that was in the bed next to me at the Flamingo Motel on Hollywood Boulevard when I woke up.”
“Was there anybody else there?”
“No. But there was a lotta blood and I wasn’t hurt yet.”
“And where’s the money now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you leave it in the motel?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t remember too much after that acid trip.”
“Acid?” Mouse said. “Why the fuck you wanna fool around with that shit?”
“I met this girl named Ruby. She just put it on my tongue … with hers. And I swallowed it. After that I only remember things here and there. I was in this place and there was a naked woman on a couch smiling at me. And then there was this guy dressed all in green.”
“Maurice?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said in revelation. “That was his name. Me and him drove off in his convertible Cadillac and we went … we went … to do something. At least, I think that was with him.”
“And then you woke up in a motel with money,” I said.
“Pretty much.”
“How much money?”
“A whole helluva lot. I mean, it was hundred-dollar bills and fifties and everything. It was a whole lot.”
“And you don’t remember anything else?”
“There was a fight and people were yellin’ and I think somebody got shot … maybe more than one person did.”
I looked over at Raymond. He was taking the ad hoc deposition very seriously.
“Are you my father?” Evander asked Mouse.
“No. I am not your father.”
“Do you know who my father is?”
“Yes. I do know. Hasn’t your mother ever told you about your old man?”
“She says that she didn’t even know his name.”
“Is that so? Hm. I don’t mean to say nuthin’ bad about your mother, boy, but she knows his name. She might wanna forget, but she knows his name.”
“Who is he?”
That question was a signal for thoughtful silence.
Then: “A son deserves to know who his father is,” Raymond said in his most serious voice. “It don’t matter who he was or what he’d done. A son deserves to know and make up his own mind what to do and who to be.
“But it’s a mother’s job to give her boy that information.”
“LaTonya and Beatrix got different fathers but they know both’a them,” Evander said, regressing into childhood as he spoke. “Louis Champagne ain’t no good. That’s LaTonya’s father. Bigger Lewis and Mama just don’t get along, but he still loves Beatrix. He comes over and takes her out for ice cream on her birthday.”
“I hear ya, boy,” Mouse said. “I hear ya. I’ll tell you what—I want you to go to your mother and tell her that I said, that Raymond Alexander said if she doesn’t tell you who your real father is then I will. You got to give her the chance to do the right thing, but if she don’t I will.”
Evander, in spite of the bad shape he was in, looked hopeful. All he had to do was follow the bread crumbs and he would arrive at a place that maybe he should never, ever go.
27
“We got right now to worry about before we have the luxury of revisiting the past,” I said.
Evander turned to me, but Mouse was still studying him.
“The first thing we need to know is why those men had you tied to that tree,” I continued.
Evander’s round face scrunched up, giving him the appearance of a much older man—the man he’d grow to be if he was lucky. He shook his head three or four times, throwing off one remembrance after another.
“I … I … I met a girl name of Vixie,” he said. “It was after I took the acid. I think it was after I woke up in the motel. Yeah, that’s it. I went to this house where I thought Ruby lived at because I didn’t remember where the naked lady was and I wanted Ruby to tell me where I could find Maurice … but … but … but I couldn’t even remember his name.”
Evander stopped there, feeling that he’d answered the question.
“And what happened with you and Vixie?” I asked, seeking substantiation of Coco’s story.
“I was still kinda trippin’, but I knew I had to do somethin’. I asked that girl Coco—”
“What girl Coco?” Raymond asked, showing that he was paying attention.
“She was at the house.”
“What house?”
“I don’t remember. I just went there … you know, like it was in my head, but it didn’t have a street or number or anything.”
“Vixie was there with Coco?” I asked to push the story along.
“She was there. I don’t think Coco liked her much. But this little dude slapped me and Coco told him to go on. That’s when Vixie sat down with us. She told me she knew a place where I could get my head together. She and I hitchhiked up north on the ocean road until we got to this green stick and then we walked a really long time until there was this commune with these guys livin’ outta tents and sleepin’ bags. Vixie told ’em I had a bad trip and could I stay out there a few days. They said yeah and made chili and beans from a can and poured it over tortilla chips. When I ate it, it sounded like a waterfall in my head.”
While Evander was remembering the crashing waters, I was making a checklist that told me at least Coco had been telling the truth.
“Then this guy handed me a joint,” Evander said, as if the conversation going on in his head broke the surface of that water like a shark’s fin. “I never smoked before, but I just took it and inhaled like I’d seen people do with cigarettes. Vixie showed me how to hold the smoke in, and all of a sudden I was trippin’ hard again.
“After that I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember having your hands tied behind that tree?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember when that happened?”
After a moment of serious thought he said, “No.”
“Did they hit y
ou?”
“This one guy they called Haskell took a burning stick and laid it on my shoulder.”
“Easy,” Mouse said, “tell me where these motherfuckers is at.”
“Did Haskell ask you anything when he burned you?” I asked, ignoring Mouse.
“ ‘Where is the money? Where is the money?’ ” He was mimicking the men that tormented him.
“Did Vixie tell them about the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you tell them?”
“Maybe. Maybe I did.…” Evander’s eyes latched onto a tableau outside the confines of my small TV room. “It was like I was trippin’ again and I was doin’ all the same things I done before.…”
Raymond was about to ask something else, but I put a hand on his shoulder and shook my head.
“I woke up to blood and money,” Evander continued. “I washed off as much of the blood as I could. The money was in these burlap sacks that were covered with blood too. It felt like I shoulda known where the money come from, but it’s like when you forget somebody you know’s name. So I wrapped the sacks of money in a sheet and took it down to the … to the … to the bus station and put it in a locker. Yeah, that’s what I did. I remember that it took me a long time, because I kept seein’ things like snakes and lynchers. I took a lotta buses.”
“Is that what you told those men?”
“I don’t remember, but Haskell kept hittin’ me and askin’ me what was the locker number and where was the key. And then …”
“Then what?” I said. It was more a suggestion than a question.
“It was cold,” Evander said with a shiver in his voice. “I was tied to the tree and there was six devils on my back prickin’ me with their pitchforks. I counted ’em. It was like my eyes floated up behind my back like Dr. Strange does in the comic books. And then Vixie come up and say that they was gonna kill me if I told where the money was. I told her I didn’t remember. And she said that even if I do I shouldn’t say.
“She told me that I should tell her where the key was, but I couldn’t say even if I wanted to, because every time they had hit me or burnt me the memory just went deeper. It was the acid. It made my mind like a deep dark hole.
“Vixie left that night. Haskell thought I told her sumpin’ but I didn’t. He hit me and I still didn’t. Then he hit me again and I was a black crow in a blue sky bein’ attacked by blackbirds protectin’ their nests.”
“Where’s the key, Evander?” I asked.
The kid turned to me, his face like a fallow field in the late fall under the first frost of the season to come.
I cut my eyes to see what was up with Raymond. He usually got very excited when the question of money came up. But that night on the comfortable sofa, on the other side of the door from a blood-spattered porch, Raymond seemed more interested in the boy than the story being told.
“What happened after you put the money in the bus depot locker?” I asked.
“I went to the house to find Ruby.”
“In the morning?”
“Uh-uh, I don’t think so.”
“What time did you wake up in the motel?”
“Mornin’ time.”
“So what did you do between the bus depot and the house where Ruby was supposed to be at?”
The thaw was slow and ponderous. He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. He looked up at Raymond. I thought he might ask again if Ray was his father, but he seemed to go through that discussion in his head—silently.
“I went to see Esther,” Evander said, surprised and delighted by the memory.
“Esther who?”
“Corey. Esther Corey.”
“Angeline Corey’s daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“How you know her?” Mouse asked.
“We went to L.A. High together. We sat three seats apart at the graduation.”
“You went to her house …” I primed.
“And she kissed me … on the lips.”
I heard Mouse sigh. I knew exactly what he was thinking.
Angeline Brown had been married to a man named Charles Corey. Charles was a straight-up fence who moved stolen merchandise at a low profit margin but also at a prodigious rate. He had outlets from Redondo Beach to Beverly Hills.
His business was so good, as a matter of fact, that a fellow named Cool Louie, a white guy from the gambling mob downtown, decided to take Charles out and assume the business.
Louie managed the hit but he couldn’t run the business, because he didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that could maintain the low profit margin.
In the meanwhile Angeline took up with a man named Ashton Burnet. Burnet killed Louie and his three top lieutenants, thus returning the business to Angeline.
But Angeline, being smarter than Louie, her dead husband, or Ashton, turned the business into a request company. People came to her when they needed some commodity or other and she would assign the job to any of dozens of freelance operatives. Everybody worked for Angeline, be they white, black, or Spanish-speaking. There were even a few Koreans in her stable.
Combining Angeline’s fearlessness and smarts with Ashton’s violent tendencies, you had one serious, very formidable threat.
“Did you give Esther the key?” I asked Evander.
“Yes, sir. I sure did. I told her about the blood and money and she wasn’t bothered at all. She washed my face and kissed my mouth. She said that she always liked me. And you know, that felt good.”
28
I had more questions, lots of them, but it was late and Evander’s mind stopped at the oasis of Esther Corey. He couldn’t remember anything else, and that was fine—for the moment.
Mouse said, “I gotta get outta here, Easy.”
“Evander’s gonna stay with me tonight,” I replied, “until we get him presentable enough that his mother doesn’t lose her mind.”
“Okay, then.” Mouse rose to his feet. “You take care’a yourself, Li’l Green.”
“I’ma call you after I told Mama what you said,” the boy replied.
“That’s fine. Just ask Easy. He always knows how to get in touch with me.”
“I’ll walk you to the car, Ray,” I said.
Mouse’s pink Cadillac was in my driveway. It was after midnight and the stronger stars were glistening in the sky.
“How much for findin’ the boy?” he asked.
“Nuthin’.”
He smiled and opened the driver’s-side door. For some reason this reminded me of him as Death in my waking dream.
“Well, let me say thanks then.” He held out a hand and I grasped it.
“You the only real friend I evah had, Easy.”
“Don’t I know it.”
After Ray drove off I backed the Barracuda all the way up into the driveway so that no one would see me take two bottles from the rude crate of Mama Jo’s medicines into the side door to my house. I don’t know why I felt so secretive about Jo’s elixir; I guess it was because she never really cared if her ingredients were legal or not.
When I returned to the front room Evander was standing with his back to the northwest corner, looking up at the ceiling.
“What you doin’, son?” I asked.
“Um, uh … I got a little jumpy and had to get to my feet. You know … the acid makes it like things are movin’ around the edges. I think it might be a rat or sumpin’, so I get up. And then there’s voices and sounds sometimes too.”
I took the boy by the elbow and led him to the chair.
“Sit down,” I said.
“What?”
“Sit down.”
When we were both seated I handed him one of Mama Jo’s tar balls.
“Eat this,” I said.
It was the size of a large jawbreaker, but Evander put the whole thing in his mouth. He chewed at it a minute or so before saying in a garbled voice, “This taste like it comes from Mama Jo.”
I got him to his feet and led him down the hallway to my
bedroom. On the way I pointed out the bathroom.
By the time he stepped out of Domaque’s oversize old shoes he was drifting.
“I’m sleepy,” he said from a seated position at the side of my bed. “That tar ball will put away all the dreams and nightmares,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me.
Evander slumped down on the bedspread.
Looking at him lying there, I felt exhaustion rest a heavy arm on me like a Santa Ana wind descending on Southern California.
I literally staggered back to the couch in the front room and then collapsed on the cushions as Evander had done on my bed.
I think I went to sleep, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.
With my skull wedged against the armrest, it came to me that I had died and was resurrected by a smiling devil dispatched on a witch’s errand from her hut in the woods. Sunset Boulevard and Caller’s Creek were all part of a limbo that I was passing through on my way—maybe to life or possibly some eternity that was beyond any value system I could apply. The sofa was like a piece of turf where I was forced by fatigue to rest before continuing the unlikely journey.
I was asleep or maybe just half the way to that blissful state. I wasn’t sure, because I heard breathing as if it came from someone next to me, but I knew that I was the only person in the room. It’s possible that sleep for me in that brief period was death, and the manifestation of life—my breath—kept rousing me like Lynne Hua had done when I emerged from the semicoma.
The knocking came after many, many breaths. In my sleep state I was trying to justify the hard sound with the repetitive and slow susurration of respiration. But the rapping, like a foreign language, insisted that it was something different, something indecipherable that still needed to be heeded.
When I opened my eyes the room was dark except for a weak glow that came from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I remembered leaving the forty-watt hall light on so that Evander could find his way if he awoke in the night.
The knocking sounded again, rousing me to a higher state of consciousness. It felt like every time I woke up I was a different man. Instead of the one man I had been when I drove off that cliff I was now a series of men, each being born out of the husk of the last.
Knocking.
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