“It ain’t like I killed somebody. It ain’t right if they don’t even give me a chance t’pay.”
“On’y right is what you get away wit’, Mr. Rawlins. And if they find out about some money, and they think you didn’t declare it …” Mofass shook his head slowly.
The girl returned with two giant white plates. Each one had a fat, open-ended burrito and a pile of chili and yellow rice on it. The puffy burritos had stringy dark red meat coming out of the ends so that they looked like oozing dead grubs. The chili had yellowish-green avocado pieces floating in the grease, along with chunks of pork flesh.
One hundred guitars played from the jukebox. I put my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging.
“What can I do?” I asked. “You think I need a lawyer?”
“Less people know ’bout it the better.” Mofass leaned forward, then whispered, “I don’t know how you got the money to pay for those buildin’s, Mr. Rawlins, and I don’t think nobody should know. What you gotta do is find some family, somebody close.”
“What for?” I was also leaning across the table. The smell of the food made me sick.
“This here letter,” Mofass said, tapping the envelope.
“Don’t say, fo’a fact, that he got no proof. He just investigatin’, lookin’. You sign it over t’ some family, and backdate the papers, and then go to him, prove that it ain’t yours. Say that they was tryin’ t’hide what they had from the rest of the family.”
“How I back—whatever?”
“I know a notary public do it—for some bills.”
“So what if I had a sister or somethin’? Ain’t the government gonna check her out? ’Cause you know ev’rybody I know is poor.”
Mofass took a suck off his cigar with one hand and then shoveled in a mouthful of chili with the other.
“Yeah,” he warbled. “You need somebody got sumpin’ already. Somebody the tax man gonna believe could buy it.”
I was quiet for a while then. Every good thing I’d gotten was gone with just a letter. I had hoped that Mofass would tell me that it was alright, that I’d get a small fine and they’d let me slide. But I knew better.
Five years before, a rich white man had somebody hire me to find a woman he knew. I found her, but she wasn’t exactly what she seemed to be, and a lot of people died. I had a friend, Mouse, help me out though, and we came away from it with ten thousand dollars apiece. The money was stolen, but nobody was looking for it and I had convinced myself that I was safe.
I had forgotten that a poor man is never safe.
When I first got the money I’d watched my friend Mouse murder a man. He shot him twice. It was a poor man who could almost taste that stolen loot. It got him killed and now it was going to put me in jail.
“What you gonna do, Mr. Rawlins?” Mofass asked at last.
“Die.”
“What’s that you say?”
“On’y thing I know, I’ma die.”
“What about this here letter?”
“What you think, Mofass? What should I do?”
He sucked down some more smoke and mopped the rest of his chili with a tortilla.
“I don’t know, Mr. Rawlins. These people here don’t have nothin’, far as I can see. And you got me t’lie for ya. But ya know if they come after my books I gotta give ’em up.”
“So what you sayin’?”
“Go on in there and lie, Mr. Rawlins. Tell ’em you don’t own nuthin’. Tell ’em that you a workin’ man and that somebody must have it out for you to lie and say you got that property. Tell ’em that and then see what they gotta say. They don’t know your bank or your banker.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ma have to feel it out,” I said after a while.
Mofass was thinking something as he looked at me. He was probably wondering if the next landlord would use him.
— 3 —
IT WASN’T FAR TO MY HOUSE. Mofass offered to drive, but I liked to use my legs, especially when I had thinking to do.
I went down Central. The sidewalks were pretty empty at midday, because most people were hard at work. Of course, the streets of L.A. were usually deserted; Los Angeles has always been a car-driving city, most people won’t even walk to the corner store.
I had solitude but I soon realized that there was nothing for me to consider. When Uncle Sam wanted me to put my life on the line, fighting the Germans, I did it. And I knew that I’d go to prison if he told me to do that. In the forties and fifties we obeyed the law, as far as poor people could, because the law kept us safe from the enemy. Back then we thought we knew who the enemy was. He was a white man with a foreign accent and a hatred for freedom. In the war it was Hitler and his Nazis; after that it was Comrade Stalin and the communists; later on, Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese took on an honorary white status. All of them bad men with evil designs on the free world.
My somber mood lifted when I came to 116th Street. I had a small house, but that made for a large front lawn. In recent years I had taken to gardening. I had daylilies and wild roses against the fence, and strawberries and potatoes in large rectangular plots at the center of the yard. There was a trellis that enclosed my porch, and I always had flowering vines growing there. The year before I had planted wild passion fruit.
But what I loved the most was my avocado tree. It was forty feet high with leaves so thick and dark that it was always cool under its shade. I had a white cast-iron bench set next to the trunk. When things got really hard, I’d sit down there to watch the birds chase insects through the grass.
When I came up to the fence I had almost forgotten the tax man. He didn’t know about me. How could he? He was just grabbing at empty air.
Then I saw the boy.
He was doing a crazy dance in my potato patch. He held both hands in the air, with his head thrown back, and cackled deep down in his throat. Every now and then he’d stamp his feet, like little pistons, and reach both hands down into the soil, coming out with long tan roots that had the nubs of future potatoes dangling from them.
When I pushed open the gate it creaked and he swung around to look at me. His eyes got big and he swiveled his head to one side and the other, looking for an escape route. When he saw that there was no escape he put on a smile and held the potato roots out at me. Then he laughed.
It was a ploy I had used when I was small.
I wanted to be stern with him, but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t keep from smiling.
“What you doin’, boy?”
“Playin’,” he said in a thick Texas drawl.
“That’s my potatas you stampin’ on. Know that?”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. He was a small, very dark boy with a big head and tiny ears. I figured him for five years old.
“Whose potatas you think you got in your hands?”
“My momma’s.”
“Yo’ momma?”
“Um-huh. This my momma’s house.”
“Since when?” I asked.
The question was too much for him. He scrunched his eyes and hunched his boy shoulders. “It just is, thas all.”
“How long you been here kickin’ up my garden?” I looked around to see daylilies and rose petals strewn across the yard. There wasn’t a red strawberry in the patch.
“We just come.” He gave me a large grin and reached out to me. I picked him up without thinking about it. “Momma losted her key so I had to go in da windah an’ open up the door.”
“What?”
Before I could put him down I heard a woman humming. The timbre of her voice sent a thrill through me even though I didn’t recognize it yet. Then she came around from the side of the house. A sepia-colored woman—large, but shapely, wearing a plain blue cotton dress and a white apron. She carried a flat-bottomed basket that I recognized from my closet, its braided handle looped into the crook of her right arm. There were kumquats and pomegranates from my fruit trees and strawberries from the yard on a white handkerchief that covered the bottom of the basket. She was
a beautiful, full-faced woman with serious eyes and a mouth, I knew, that was always ready to laugh. The biceps of her right arm bulged, because EttaMae Harris was a powerful woman who, in her younger years, had done hand laundry nine hours a day, six days a week. She could knock a man into next Tuesday, or she could hold you so tight that you felt like a child again, in your mother’s loving embrace.
“Etta,” I said, almost to myself.
The boy tittered like a little maniac. He squirmed around in my arms and worked his way down to the ground.
“Easy Rawlins.” Her smile came into me, and I smiled back.
“What … I mean,” I stammered. The boy was running around his mother as fast as he could. “I mean, why are you here?”
“We come t’ see you, Easy. Ain’t that right, LaMarque?”
“Uh-huh,” the boy said. He didn’t even look up from his run.
“Stop that racin’ now.” Etta reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. She spun him around, and he looked up at me and smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
“We met already.” I motioned my head toward the lawn.
When Etta saw the damage LaMarque had done her eyes got big and my heart beat a litter faster.
“LaMarque!”
The boy lowered his head and shrugged.
“Huh?” he asked.
“What you do to this yard?”
“Nuthin’.”
“Nuthin’?” You call this mess nuthin’?”
She reached out to grab him, but LaMarque let himself fall to the ground, hugging his knees.
“I’s just gard’nin’ in the yard,” he whimpered. “Thas all.”
“Gard’nin’?” Etta’s dark face darkened even more, and the flesh around her eyes creased into a devil’s gaze. I don’t know how LaMarque reacted to that stare, but I was so worried that I couldn’t find my breath.
She balled her fists so that her upper arms got even larger; a tremor went through her neck and shoulders.
But then, suddenly, her eyes softened, she even laughed.
Etta has the kind of laugh that makes other people happy.
“Gard’nin’?” she said again. “Looks like you a reg’lar gard’nin’ tornado.”
I laughed along with her. LaMarque didn’t exactly know why we were so cheery but he grinned too and rolled around on the ground.
“Get up from there now, boy, and go get washed.”
“Yes, Momma.” LaMarque knew how to be a good boy after he had been bad. He ran toward the house, but before he got past Etta she grabbed him by one arm, hefted him into the air, and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. He was grinning and wiping the kiss from his face as he turned to run for the door.
Then Etta held her arms out and I walked into her embrace as if I had never heard of her husband, my best friend, Mouse.
I buried my face in her neck and breathed in her natural, flat scent; like the smell of fresh-ground flour. I put my arms around EttaMae Harris and relaxed for the first time since I had last held her—fifteen years before.
“Easy,” she whispered, and I didn’t know if I was holding her too tight or if she was calling my name.
I knew that embrace was the same thing as holding a loaded gun to my head, because Raymond Alexander, known to his friends as Mouse, was a killer. If he saw any man holding his wife like that he wouldn’t even have blinked before killing him. But I couldn’t let her go. The chance to hold her one more time was worth the risk.
“Easy,” she said again, and I realized that I was pressing against her with my hips, making it more than obvious how I felt. I wanted to let go but it was like early morning, when you first wake up and just can’t let go of sleep yet.
“Let’s go inside, honey,” she said, putting her cheek to mine. “He wants his food.”
The smells of Southern cooking filled the house. Etta had made white rice and pinto beans with fatback. She’d picked lemons from the neighbor’s bush for lemonade. There was a mayonnaise jar in the center of the table with pink and red roses in it. That was the first time that there were ever cut flowers in my house.
The house wasn’t very big. The room we were in was a living room and dining room in one. The living-room side was just big enough for a couch, a stuffed chair, and a walnut cabinet with a television in it. From there was a large doorless entryway that led to the dinette. The kitchen was in the back. It was a short alley with a counter and a stove. The bedroom was small too. It was a house big enough for one man; and it held me just fine.
“Get up from there, LaMarque,” Etta said. “The man always sit at the head of the table.”
“But …” LaMarque began to say, and then he thought better of it.
He ate three plates of beans and counted to one hundred and sixty-eight for me—twice. When he finished Etta sent him outside.
“Don’t be doin’ no more gard’nin’, though,” she warned him.
“’Kay.”
* * *
WE SAT ACROSS THE TABLE from each other. I looked into her eyes and thought about poetry and my father.
I was swinging from a tree on the tire of a Model A Ford. My father came up to me and said, “Ezekiel, you learn to read an’ ain’t nuthin’ you cain’t do.”
I laughed, because I loved it when my father talked to me. He left that night and I never knew if he had abandoned me or was killed on his way home.
Now I was half the way through Shakespeare’s sonnets in my third English course at LACC. The love that poetry espoused and my love for EttaMae and my father knotted in my chest so that I could hardly even breathe. And EttaMae wasn’t something slight like a sonnet; behind her eyes was an epic, the whole history of me and mine.
Then I remembered, again, that she belonged to another man; a murderer.
“It’s good to see you, Easy.”
“Yeah.”
She leaned forward with her elbows on the table, placed her chin in the palm of her hand, and said, “Ezekiel Rawlins.”
That was my real name. Only my best friends used it.
“What are you doing here, Etta? Where’s Mouse?”
“You know we broke up years ago, honey.”
“I heard you took him back.”
“Just a tryout. I wanted to see if he could be a good husband and a father. But he couldn’t, so I threw him out again.”
The last moments of Joppy Shag’s life flashed through my mind. He was lashed to an oaken chair, sweat and blood streamed from his bald head. When Mouse shot him in the groin he barked and strained like a wild animal. Then Mouse calmly pointed the gun at Joppy’s head….
“I didn’t know,” I said. “But why are you up here?”
Instead of answering me Etta got up and started clearing the table. I moved to help her, but she shoved me back into the chair, saying, “You just get in the way, Easy. Sit down and drink your lemonade.”
I waited a minute and then followed her out to the kitchen.
“Men sure is a mess.” She was shaking her head at the dirty dishes I had piled on the counter and in the sink. “How can you live like this?”
“You come all the way from Texas to show me how to wash dishes?”
And then I was holding her again. It was as if we had taken up where we’d left off in the yard. Etta put her hand against the bare back of my neck, I started running two fingers up and down either side of her spine.
I had spent years dreaming of kissing Etta again. Sometimes I’d be in bed with another woman and, in my sleep, I’d think it was Etta; the kisses would be like food, so satisfying that I’d wake up, only to realize that it was just a dream.
When Etta kissed me in the kitchen I woke up in another way. I staggered back from her mumbling, “I cain’t take too much more of this.”
“I’m sorry, Easy. I know I shouldn’t, but me and LaMarque been in a bus for two days—all the way from Houston. I been thinkin’ ’bout you all that time and I guess I got a little worked up.”
“Why’d you c
ome?” I felt like I was pleading.
“Mouse done gone crazy.”
“What you mean, crazy?”
“Outta his mind,” Etta continued. “Just gone.”
“Etta,” I said as calmly as I could. The desire to hold her had subsided for the moment. “Tell me what he did.”
“Come out to the house at two in the mo’nin’ just about ev’ry other night. Drunk as he could be and wavin’ that long-barreled pistol of his. Stand out in the middle’a the street yellin’ ’bout how he bought my house and how he burn it down before he let us treat him like we did.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, Easy. Mouse is crazy.”
That had always been true. When we were younger men Mouse carried a gun and a knife. He killed men who crossed him and others who stood in the way of him making some coin. Mouse murdered his own stepfather, Daddy Reese, but he rarely turned on friends, and I never expected him to go against EttaMae.
“So you sayin’ he run you outta Texas?”
“Run?” Etta was surprised. “I ain’t runnin’ from that little rat-faced man, or no other one’a God’s creatures.”
“Then why come here?”
“How it gonna look to LaMarque when he grow up if I done killed his father? ’Cause you know I had him in my sight every night he was out there in the street.”
I remembered that Etta had a .22-caliber rifle and a .38 for her purse.
“After he done that for ovah a month I made up my mind to kill ’im. But the night I was gonna do it LaMarque woke up an’ come in the room. I was waitin’ for Raymond to come out. LaMarque asked me what I was doin’ with that rifle, and you know I ain’t never lied to that boy, Easy. He asked me what I was fixin’ t’ do with that rifle and I told him that I was gonna pack it and we was goin’ to California.”
Etta reached out and took both of my hands in hers. She said, “And that was the first thing I said, Easy. I didn’t think about goin’ to my mother or my sister down in Galveston. I thought’a you. I thought about how sweet you was before Raymond and me got married. So I come to you.”
A Red Death Page 2