Beyond the makeshift bleachers was a single window in the wall where ticket sales and group rates were negotiated.
A copper-colored man sat on the other side of the whitewashed plasterboard wall, gazing out through the aperture, considering something that had nothing to do with buses, winos, nervous women at the depot hours before their bus was to leave, or anything else that concerned his daily bread.
Evander and I walked up to the window. Looking at the man closely I had no inkling of his origins. He could have been anything from Choctaw to Mongolian, American Negro to Polish-with-a-tan.
“Hey,” I said.
“How can I help you, sir?” he said, surprising me with his courtesy.
“Where’s your lockers?”
“We don’t have lockers here. The bulk of our fares are onetimers, you know, and so if we provided that service mostly derelicts would use it to store their stuff.”
“That’s still money,” I suggested.
“The smell would drive our customers away.”
I wasn’t sure about the ticket clerk’s conclusions, but it was his bus station, not mine.
“Look here, man,” I said, taking on a verbal persona that wasn’t exactly me—or at least, it wasn’t before the accident. “You see this boy?”
The copper man turned his gaze on Evander.
“Five days ago he took LSD for the first time,” I continued.
This sparked interest in the dark, hooded eyes.
“He was supposed to pick up something for my sister, but he met this hippie chick just got to town and she put it on his tongue with hers. Three days later he comes in and we ask where’s the suitcase he was supposed to get and he says that he thinks he put it in a bus station locker where he met the hippie girl. He thinks! So now we been to every bus station downtown and there ain’t no locker fit his key.”
“Can I see it?” the shining, dreamy clerk asked.
I held the key out in my palm and he leaned over to get a good look at it. His posture suggested that he was peering over glasses but he wasn’t wearing any.
“That LSD must be some strong stuff,” he said to Evander.
Evander shrugged his big yellow shoulders.
“You were in the train station, son,” the clerk said. “The train, not the bus.”
“The train?” That was the real me looking at the kid who was so drugged out that his memory was more supposition than fact. I shook my head and then said to the clerk, “Thank you very much, sir. You’ve really helped.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“Yeah. You see those two ladies sittin’ on the bench?”
“Yes.”
“You see that skinny boy in the corner?”
I didn’t have to say any more.
The copper man nodded as he picked up the phone.
“I’ll call the police right now,” he said.
The train station was a step up in class. Big and grand, it was full of passengers of all types and ages. The main hall had dark red–cream-and-green tile floors that were mopped nightly. There were businessmen and first-class ladies, working-class couples, students, hippies, and every color under the sun. The wooden benches in the waiting area had backrests and were built-in and shiny.
The lockers were off to the side, and 33ab was in a secluded corner. A young white woman in a mauve dress suit was standing at a nearby midlevel square locker door putting in an alligator bag and taking out a red velvet satchel. When she was gone I had Evander stand in such a way as to block me from the casual glance. Only then did I use the key.…
The wadded bloody burlap sacks wrapped up in the graying white sheets contained more money than I had ever seen in one place. It was no wonder that Evander wanted to forget where he put it; that kind of money was likely to get a black man killed.
I closed the locker door and tapped Evander on the shoulder.
“You think you can remember where I parked the car?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“You sure now?”
“Yeah,” he said impatiently. “I ain’t trippin’ no more.”
“Here’s the car keys. The square one works on the trunk. Go get the laundry bag and come right back. And don’t kiss no hippie girls on the way.”
The aisle was wide enough for travelers to attend the light gray lockers from either side without bumping elbows. The floor in this area was plain concrete painted battleship green. I moved across and down from Evander’s locker and stood there trying not to look suspicious.
I would have succeeded if it wasn’t for the woman in mauve.
I suppose she saw in me what I saw in the white drug addict at the Proctor Street station. She brought with her a Negro station employee in a uniform that might have meant security. She pointed at me from the mouth of the aisle. The man squared his shoulders and walked my way. He was shorter than I, and slimmer. This didn’t give me much of an advantage, because the last thing I wanted was a fight.
“Excuse me,” he said, looking at my chin.
“What?” I didn’t want to seem too friendly, because your run-of-the-mill sneak thief usually puts on jocular airs to hide his intentions.
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean, what am I doin’? This is a public station, idn’t it?”
“You heard what I said, man.”
He was a lighter brown than I, but our skin tones were similar. His features could have been Ethiopian, with a slender nose and high cheekbones. He was pumping himself up because I promised to be an uphill climb.
“That white woman bring you over here?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came with my nephew,” I said, relenting with a lie. “We got to the locker and I remembered that I left my key in the car. My hip hasn’t been right since I fell three stories from my construction job, and so the one with the stronger legs went for the key. If you don’t believe me just ask the lady. She saw me with him. What am I gonna do? Come in here to steal her shit and then just stand around with my thumb up my ass?”
“No need to go cursin’ at me now,” the train station man said.
“No need to come ovah here actin’ like I’m a thief just ’cause some white lady told you I look like one. As a matter of fact … where can I make a complaint about this shit?”
“Don’t you go worryin’ about complainin’,” he said. “Just get your stuff and go.”
He walked back to the lady in mauve and slowly guided her away from that area of lockers.
All of this made me wonder what she had in those bags. But that was a mystery I was not signed on to solve.
A few minutes later Evander came back. I wasted no time shoveling the bloody sheet and its contents into the laundry bag.
Walking out of there, with all that money slung over my shoulder, I felt like every eye in the place was on me.
31
Evander and I drove down to 117th Street near Hooper to the Alcott Court Presidio Arms apartments. This was a little horseshoe of workingmen and workingwomen’s rental units that faced inward upon a swept-clean and barren concrete courtyard decorated only with a granite fountain, gone dry before World War II. The apartments were just large enough for one man or two younger women or a mother with an infant child. The separating walls were thick enough to dull the sounds of TVs and radios, domestic squabbles or cries of passion.
The Presidio Arms was a nice place before the riots. A white woman—I never knew her name—had owned it, and a black woman, Winifred Wolverton, managed the units. But after the conflagration they were bought by an ex-bootlegger from Galveston named Nan Mann. Nan was a freckle-faced bronze-colored woman who, when a permanent tenant moved out, would turn the unit into a day-rate room. Prostitutes, transients, and out-of-town musicians made up the majority of her day-raters, and so, in short order, the regular tenants found different accommodations.
The police didn’t bother Nan, because she paid on the first and fifteenth of every m
onth and maintained the peace with the help of an ex-GI named Luce who kept any and all disputes from going too far.
“The police have not had to come once to Presidio since I bought it,” Nan often bragged.
That’s why I brought Evander, and his loot, there; the police were the last people we needed to see.
The horseshoe was made up of twelve units, A through L. Nan lived in A and Luce in L. The rate was three dollars a night, and so it was usually pretty near capacity.
Evander, once missing and still yet to be delivered, and I showed up at the screen-door entrance to unit A a little before two in the afternoon.
I knocked and called, “Nan?”
After a minute or so the short and stooped onetime moonshiner shuffled into sight behind the haze of the doorway.
“Easy Rawlins,” she said in her deceptively high voice. “I heard you was dead.”
“Yeah. You got a room?”
“One room or two?” she asked, looking at Evander.
“One.”
That raised her eyebrows, but Nan was about money—not morals.
“Four fifty,” she said.
“Price went up fifty percent?”
“No. It’s just when it’s two men I charge more. The wear and tear, you know.”
There was all kinds of innuendo in Nan’s words, but I didn’t care. She could have charged me twenty dollars and I would have gladly paid.
“J open?” I asked. I wanted to be as far away from Nan’s prying eyes as I could be without sharing a wall with Luce; he was an angry Korean War veteran who thought the whole world owed him something.
“It is for you.”
I brought out a five-dollar bill and we walked down to the unit I requested. Nan handed me a copper key. I forked over the five but didn’t receive any change. Nan liked to be tipped for her services, especially when discretion was an unspoken element of the rental agreement.
There were two wooden chairs, a folding card table, and a queen-size bed set on box springs for furniture. A fat man would not have fit comfortably in the toilet, and the kitchen wasn’t much larger. The Presidio Arms was the only place I’d ever been that had one-burner gas stoves.
But the window had bars and a shade, the overhead lamp was fitted with two one-hundred-and-fifty-watt bulbs, and the front door was substantial, with a chain for extra security. That’s all we needed.
I split the money into two more or less equal piles and, sitting across the table from each other, Evander and I started counting.
Just shy of an hour later we came up with the sum of $214,461, more money than any recent graduate from L.A. High had ever held in his hands.
“This is one fuck of a lot of money, Evander.”
“Yes, sir, it is.” There was awe in his voice from the immensity of our calculations.
“It’s also a fuck of a lot of blood.” He had no answer to that, so I added, “Enough that if only one man shed it, he’s probably a dead man now.”
“I don’t want this money, and I don’t remember what happened.
Why can’t I just leave it with you and go on home?”
I just stared at him.
“What you lookin’ at?”
“You love your sisters, Evander?”
“Of course I do.”
“You want people like them drug dealers takin’ them out in the woods, or maybe you want them at your funeral when the men lookin’ for you catch up?”
“You don’t know they’re after me.”
“Not you, boy, this money—and maybe, just maybe, revenge for all this blood. I hope you don’t think two hundred thousand dollars is just forgotten.” I kept my voice to a whisper. Wisely Evander followed suit.
“When you woke up in that motel, was there a knife or a gun in there with you?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
I was glaring at him. He’d been high for days after taking the LSD. Maybe he’d overlooked the weapon or dropped it after committing the crime. Maybe he was lying.…
Under the indictment of my stare Evander clasped his hands and then yanked them apart. He stood up and went to the kitchen, then came back, sat down, and got right up again.
He went to the door and I said, “Where you think you goin’, boy?”
“I don’t know,” he said nervously.
“Come here and sit down.”
He obeyed, almost meekly.
He and I, as different as we were in age and temperament, had been reared in the same atmosphere: the ether of perpetual vulnerability and subsequent lifelong fear. Black people in America at that time, and all the way back to our first conveyance, the slave ship, had received common traits. For the so-called white man these attributes were merely hair texture, skin color, and other physical characteristics. But our true inheritance was the fear of being noticed, and worry about everything from rain collapsing the walls around us to a casual glance that might lead to lynching. We—almost every black man, woman, and child in America—inherited anxieties like others received red hair or blue eyes.
“I got to go out and figure what to do,” I said. “Here …” I handed him one of Mama Jo’s tar balls. “Eat this and rest. You’re gonna need your strength later on.”
“Where you goin’?”
“First I’m gonna put the money somewhere safe. Then I’m going to try and find out what happened to this Maurice guy.”
“Maybe I should go with you.”
“And I’d like to bring you,” I lied. “But you don’t remember what happened. As far as we know there might be a warrant out for you. That’s a lotta blood and a lotta money. Suppose you robbed a bank? We don’t know.”
I liked Evander because he was smart enough to make sense out of the abstractions of language. Many young people hear you say the pot is hot but they still have to touch it. Evander chewed on the tar ball.
Half an hour later he was sound asleep. I put the money back in the laundry bag and threw the sheet and burlap sack in the bathtub with hot water and soap flakes that some previous tenant had left behind.
Before long I was nosing my red Barracuda toward downtown, to a building on Wilshire where I hoped to get help from an old friend and a new one.
32
It was close to four thirty when I reached the first-floor entrance of the forty-four-floor office building that housed Proxy Nine. The architecture was very modern, with lots of steel and glass, white stone, and a high ceiling. This was the main office of the international French insurance company, and no expense had been spared.
Before being allowed through to the elevators you had to pass a minor inquisition at a counter behind which labored at least a dozen young clerks, receptionists, and other, less definable preprofessionals. That day a young man with almost alabaster white skin, coarse red hair, and pale blue eyes was my corporate magistrate.
“Yes?” he said.
The fact that he didn’t say sir reminded me that I was black and hadn’t worn a jacket and tie—all while toting a tan-and-black-striped laundry bag.
“Jackson Blue,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Jackson Blue. Tell him that it’s Mr. Rawlins calling on him.”
The young man was my height and gave the appearance of physical fitness gained from tennis or maybe golf. He hesitated and then asked, “Do you have an appointment?”
A pretty young woman with black hair and pale eyes looked up from a nearby table where she was typing on a state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriter.
“If I said no would you turn me away?” I asked, knowing that I was wasting my time.
“I can’t let you in without an appointment.”
“What if you called Mr. Blue and he said, ‘Sure, send him up’?”
The young man, nameless as far as I was concerned, raised his right hand and gestured somewhere behind me. I didn’t need to look to know what was coming. I might have taken a glance if I wanted to see how many,
but that was of no concern either.
The young woman was now talking on the phone. I wondered if she was calling for additional backup. I imagined that she and the redhead were lovers and her attentiveness was instinct for her man.
The feeling rising in my breast was at once familiar and alien, not unlike my identification with Evander’s fears. Along with anxiety and fear my people had inherited spite and rage for the centuries of oppression that we were reminded of almost every day of our lives. To experience the malice of generations in a moment is a taste so bitter that it could make an otherwise healthy man retch.
I saw this emotion in my imagined reflection in the young man’s blue eyes, but I didn’t feel a thing. I had died and there was nothing that anyone could do to match the experience of my semiresurrection.
“Yes, Mr. Graham?” a man asked.
There were two of him, tall and in gray uniforms, hatless but armed. Both of them were white men, though that didn’t matter; enough Negroes protected the property of men like the receptionist Graham.
“I was trying to explain to this gentleman,” the redhead said, “that you can’t go in without an appointment.”
“Okay, guy,” one of the two said.
“Pardon?” French is a lovely language. It was the black-haired young woman. “Monsieur Rawlins, non?”
“Oui,” I replied, and she smiled.
“Parlez-vous francais?”
“Pas vraiment, un peu.”
She smiled at my feeble attempt and said, “Monsieur Blue’s secretary, Crystal, non? She says that ’e is in the building but not in ’is office. She says to bring you up.”
“What are you saying?” the talking security guard asked.
This question was also on Graham’s face.
“If someone asks to see somebody you should call,” the young woman said to Graham. “It is not for us to question them like Nazis.”
This last word told a whole story. There was a generation of French men and women who understood, however briefly, what it was to be treated like a dog in your own home.
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