I smiled at the concussion or the existential reaction of a mind that had given up to death only to find that it was a feint. I sat up and the soft rapping came again. I pulled the pistol from my jacket pocket and took the two steps to the door.
After flipping the light switch on the wall I yanked the door wide with my left hand while halfway lifting the pistol in my right. I was ready for anything—almost. It could have been Jeffrey, a red-shirted hippie, or even my mother come to ask when was I going to give up the mortal coil and come to spend eternity with her. It could have been anyone or anything.
Anything or anyone but Bonnie Shay decked out in her Air France flight attendant uniform.
“What happened to your suit?” she asked.
Putting the gun back in my pocket I said, “I went on a hike in the woods to find a lost boy.”
“Did you find him?” Her smile lit up the question.
I fell in love all over again, even with one foot planted solidly in another world.
“He’s asleep in my bed.”
“That’s good.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost three.” Her Guyanese lilt thrilled me.
“Why are you here?”
“It’s cold out here, Ezekiel.”
“Yeah, yeah, right, come on in.”
We went into the kitchen, where I brewed English breakfast. I was happy that Jeffrey hadn’t used my honey, because Bonnie had to have honey in her tea. She liked to have a lemon wedge too, but that wasn’t essential. She needed honey and I had it right there.
We settled across from each other at the dinette table. We hadn’t spoken hardly at all since she’d come in.
I wanted to say something, many things, but looking at her was overwhelming. I still loved her, and that love was the same as it had been, but in the interim I had changed. Seeing Bonnie I knew that she was lost to me: like the old country to an émigré; like a dead parent buried in another state decades ago in a grave I never visited, in an abandoned graveyard that I wouldn’t be able to find.
“Feather called me when your car was found in the ocean,” Bonnie said. “I was at the Bel-Air house when Raymond called to say that he’d found you alive. That was eighteen hours later. Not even a day, but my feelings settled and set. I realized when I thought you were dead that you were my man. You saved my life and you forgave me later on.”
“Too late,” I said, repeating the last words I remembered her saying to me before I went to drive off the side of a mountain.
“No,” Bonnie said, “not too late. You brought Jesus and Feather into my life, and when you lost your mind over me and Joguye I should have understood. I should have called you and asked you to forgive me. I should have known that a real man can’t stand by and watch his woman … his woman being loved by another man.”
“I should have asked you to come back,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“And now I’ve died and everything that was fell away like snakeskin.”
“Before Raymond called I told Joguye that it was over, that I would not marry him.”
“What did he say?” I asked, wondering why I cared.
“He didn’t understand. He is royalty and rich, a part of a world that no black American or Caribbean could ever really understand or imagine. But I told him that you were my man, dead or alive.”
We finished our tea and repaired to the sleeping couch of the front room. I was sitting side by side with the woman I loved as much as I had my Big Mama, who died of pneumonia when I was too young to fully understand death. I was there but still mostly silent.
“Easy.”
“I was in a semicoma,” I said to the floor. “That’s what they told me. Part of me feels like I still am. It’s just Jo’s chemistry experiments keepin’ me goin’.”
“Feather says that you’re on a case.”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“It was finding the boy in the back room. But now it might be something else.”
She put a hand on my knee. I liked Bonnie’s long brown fingers and her sensibly trimmed nails.
“When it’s over call me,” she said. “We can go out for dinner and talk.”
“Like a date?”
Instead of answering she leaned over and kissed me. The force of that contact made me lean back. Bonnie followed, kissing me all the way down. When I was prone again I started counting osculations: One, two, three, and I was asleep again. This time it was a deep rest with no breaths or knocking or questions about the road between here and there.
29
There was sunlight blooming at the periphery of my closed eyes. It wasn’t shining directly into the shuttered living room but glowing out from the kitchen, from the unshaded window there.
I took in a deep breath that seemed to fill my entire body. Exhaling, I sat up. I was weak but no longer dizzy. Instead of dithering I got right up and opened the drapes.
The sun almost bowled me over. It was so bright that I had to get back to the couch. Sitting there, garnering my strength, breath was like a playful carp swimming in and out of my body, strengthening me with each visit, bringing the light in small parcels that my living carcass could absorb.
After a while, I have no idea how long, I got up and went down the short bedroom hallway.
First I looked in on Evander. He was half under the blankets, having thrown two of the three pillows on the floor. He had taken off the borrowed shirt in the night. Sleep had him in its dark fist like some kind of precious possession clutched to a dead pharaoh’s chest.
Taking a fresh pair of boxers from an underwear drawer that hadn’t been raided, I headed for the bathroom.
I took off my clothes while urinating, dropping everything on the floor. It didn’t matter; the suit was ruined.
There was a soap dish screwed into the sea green tile wall next to the bathtub shower. In it was a bright red bar of soap—one of the many little mementos left by Jeffrey the squatter. It smelled like cinnamon and had an oily feel, but I turned on the shower and used the soap: Waste not, want not.
When the water hit me I remembered Antigone standing outside the stall while I showered, a lifetime ago. Antigone, and the erection she summoned, reminded me of Bonnie. She had actually been in my house, kissed me to sleep as my mother used to do when I was too young to worry about losing love.
After the shower I went to the bedroom again. When I raised the window shade Evander groaned and winced behind closed eyes.
“Time to get up,” I said, taking a square-cut blue shirt and black slacks from my closet.
It came to me that Jeffrey must have been expecting my return. All of his clothes, and most of the rest of his belongings, were in a battered leather suitcase on the floor. He knew that somebody would come one day to kick him out, and he wanted to be ready to jump. He would have cleared that hurdle if it wasn’t for Mouse.
I dressed in the kitchen, something I’d never done before. While pulling up my pants I heard Evander’s heavy footfalls take him to the toilet. The door slammed but that didn’t bother me. Blood and money, torture and imprisonment stalked that boy—and he wasn’t half the way home yet.
When I heard the water of the bathtub shower being turned on I was reminded of something. I went to the small room that the side door opened on and looked in the hamper. Therein was a striped cloth laundry bag that I might have need for before the day was done.
Downing my third bottle of Mama Jo’s elixir I sat and waited patiently: a wounded soldier left at the side of the road by an advancing army that could not afford to be held back by invalids.
When the heat was flowing toward my feet and hands, Evander stumped in and sat across from me. He looked better for the night’s rest. The swelling on his face and head had gone down, and his eyes were neither frightened nor pained.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Like I got a hollow leg for a stomach.”
“Your mama used to say that?”
“One
’a her boyfriends … Sebastian Shore.”
I thought about asking if Timbale had had a lot of boyfriends, but even with the lack of inhibition caused by the medicine, I had the civility to curb my curiosity.
“We could go to a place I know,” I said instead. “I need to get out and stretch my legs.”
“I should go home and get some clothes,” he replied. “This shirt like to fall off me, and if I don’t curl my toes I’d walk right outta these shoes.”
“Domaque is just about the biggest, strongest man I ever met,” I said on the heels of grunted laughter. “He could pick up a big man and hold him over his head. I’ve seen him do it.”
“So all this room is for muscle?”
“Damn right.”
“You know some strange people, Mr. Rawlins.”
“First we’ll go eat,” I said. “And then we’ll head out to a store to buy you some clothes.”
“Why can’t I go home?”
“Blood, money, dope smugglers,” I said, listing them on the index, middle, and ring fingers of my right hand. “Take your pick.”
“That’s over.”
“Did anybody you been with get a look at your wallet in the last week?” I asked him.
“I don’t have a driver’s license,” he said. “And I don’t carry my library card with me, ’cause I lose it sometimes.”
“Did you ever say your last name?”
“Maybe, but Mama ain’t been listed since somebody used her name to buy furniture on credit.”
“Did you ever mention where you lived?”
You could tell by Evander’s frown that he was an intelligent young man. He didn’t like what I was saying, but he understood.
“Maybe I did,” he said. “I don’t remember. You think they might come after me?”
“I think they’ll be lookin’.”
“So what then?”
“First breakfast, then clothes, and finally we’ll go talk to Esther—and Angeline.”
There was a pancake house up on Fairfax just above Wilshire in those days. We put away some stacks and bacon and then we made it down to the Midtown Shopping Center, a mile or so past La Brea on Pico.
After spending an inordinate amount of time studying different garments, Evander finally decided on a bright yellow shirt with orange stitching along the seams, dark red pants, and buff brown, round-toed shoes. He donned these clothes and discarded what he wore in the store. The salesman just took the tags and I paid in cash.
In the car, on the way back to my neighborhood, I was curious.
“Does your mother usually buy your clothes for you, Evander?”
“Not since I was sixteen.”
“And have you always bought loud colors like bright cars crashing at high speed?”
“No.”
“Then why now?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess it’s the acid. I can’t even, like, see soft colors.”
“Uh-huh.”
We drove for a while in silence and then I had another question. For this one I pulled to the curb a few blocks from the Corey residence.
“You know I’m trying to help you, right, son?”
“I guess so.”
“You don’t know me and you’ve been through some strange shit, but I need you to tell me something before we go to see this girl and her mother.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you know what Esther’s mother and stepfather do for a living?”
“Not exactly, but I know that they’re, like, crooks—criminals.”
“Then you can understand that when you start talking about blood and maybe-stolen money, Angeline and Ashton don’t seem like a coincidence.” I was looking hard at the boy but he didn’t wilt.
“They don’t have nuthin’ to do with it. I didn’t go over to see Esther until after and I told her what happened but she wouldn’t tell.”
“L.A. High has a pretty big graduating class,” I said. “How come you two are such good friends?”
“Because’a Mr. Alexander,” he said without hesitation.
“How could he have anything to do with it? You don’t hardly know Ray.”
“But evah since he give me that toy gun and I found that envelope, I thought he might be my father. I thought he was my father and I heard people talkin’ about him, about how he was a crook like Esther’s mother and them. I asked her if she knew him and what it was like havin’ a mother or a father like that. We used to talk about it on the bleachers sometimes.”
“That’s when she became your girlfriend?”
“No,” he said somberly. “She never told me how she felt till I came ovah her house aftah takin’ that acid.”
Like kismet gone slumming, I thought.
Angeline and Ashton lived in a converted duplex on the sixteen hundred block of Elsmere Drive. I knew the address—everybody that had anything to do with the life did. We parked in front of the duplex, went through the waist-high iron gateway of the burnt-sienna stucco building, and ascended the spiral stairs to the second floor. Angeline had walled up the first floor entrances to her home, some kind of security precaution that wasn’t quite logical.
She was waiting for us at the entryway, outside the front door.
Angeline was a Negro woman by the American standards of blood and pedigree, but she wasn’t what you would call black. Her skin was the color of dull steel with a hint of red just under the surface. Her salt-and-walnut hair was sparse and soft. And she hadn’t achieved five feet in height even at the acme of her youth. Angeline was thin, with small, hard hands and big knuckles. Her lips sneered naturally and there was no sympathy in her watery brown eyes.
“Easy Rawlins,” she said in mild surprise. “I heard you was dead.”
“Yeah. You know Evander here, right, Angeline?”
“Mr. Noon.” She said the words with absolutely no greeting in her tone.
“Ma’am.”
“ ’Scuse me, Mama,” a female voice said, and then a young woman—Esther Corey, I assumed—went around her tiny tyrant of a mother to stand next to Evander on the enclosed second-floor deck.
Esther was ocher in color and her face was round like a perfect autumn moon. Her short dress hugged her like the motive leaf of some man-eating plant. She wasn’t fat but what the old folks used to call big-boned, with large, upstanding breasts and thighs that looked like they were made for a piano mover’s trade.
“I think Evander left something with Esther,” I offered the elder Corey.
“Ain’t nuthin’ on this property belong to nobody except the people that live here.”
From the corner of my eye I could see Esther taking Evander’s hand. They made a good couple; she was an inch taller and he a bit broader.
“You know I don’t hold anything against you, Angeline,” I said. “I’ve never been on the wrong end of a deal with you, your late husband, or Ashton. But I was hired by Mouse to help Evander. And you know I would surely hate to get between you and him.”
“I’m not afraid’a Raymond Alexander,” she said. “I ain’t runnin’ from no mortal man or woman.”
“Common sense doesn’t take fear, Ms. Corey.”
“Let me make myself clear,” she said. “I will kill you and this boy too if you go against me, Easy.”
“Brutus killed Caesar,” I said, a preacher on his movable pulpit, “and look what happened to him.”
It would have been different if Ashton was there. If he was at the house I would have accepted her decree and used the telephone to complete our business. But I wasn’t worried about him, because if Ashton was there he would have met us at the door.
Angeline glowered at me and her natural snarl turned feral.
“Esther,” she said.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Do you have anything belongs to this young man?”
“He aksed me to hold a key for him.”
“Then give him his key back.”
“I already did,” the brave and buxom child s
aid. “It was his in the first place. All I was doin’ was hangin’ on to it.”
When Angeline turned her savage gaze upon Esther, I worried that I might have to stop her from killing her own child. But the snarl turned, miraculously, into a smile!
“You mean you just handed it to him right under my nose?”
“Yes, Mama. It’s his and he’s mine.”
Still smiling, Angeline shook her head, turned her back on us, and returned to the depths of her side-street fortress. A moment later Esther gave Evander a deep soul kiss and then went after her mother, closing the door behind.
That boy had some strong luck. Not good or bad, just strong. Like inheriting a battleship at the beginning of a war or earning a winner-take-all chance to fight Muhammad Ali by lottery.
30
There were three downtown bus stations large enough to contain lockers: Greyhound, Trailways, and the Proctor Street bus depot, which was on Grand. The number on the eye of the key read 33ab. The Greyhound station didn’t have that numbering system; neither did Trailways. The Proctor Street bus depot, which served independent group travel concerns and general leasing, was our last stop.
The depot was a dilapidated, barnlike building with wood floors that were neither sealed nor waxed; if they ever got swept it was no more than once every other week. The eleven ten-foot-long splintery wooden benches, provided for waiting passengers, were set too close for comfort.
Two large, middle-aged black women were sitting side by side on the far end of the frontmost backless pew. They had six or seven suitcases piled in front of them. Both women held their purses to their breasts like newborns that needed protection from a dangerous world.
In the far corner of the dowdy room stood a young white guy wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. I say white because that’s what I’m supposed to call the sallow-skinned, pock-faced, rail-thin predator. He was staring at those women with hunger for those purses. He reasoned, as I did, that someone clutching anything the way they did their handbags had to be hiding treasure inside.
On the back bench sat an ancient human being clad all in faded rags who was leaning sideways, maybe asleep. This person could have been either a man or a woman. The race was also a thing of speculation, but the napper’s place in the world was definite: He or she had been descending for decades and was very near toppling over.
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