“I just popped into your head after all these years?”
“Well.” Etta smiled and looked down at our tangled fingers. “Corinth Lye helped some.”
“Corinth?” She was a friend from Houston. If I happened to run into her at Targets Bar I’d buy a bottle of gin and we’d put it away; sit there all night and drink like men. I’d told her many deep feelings and secrets in the early hours. It wasn’t the first time that I was betrayed by alcohol.
“Yeah,” Etta said. “I wrote her about Mouse when it all started. She wrote me about how much you still cared for me. She said I should come up here, away from all that.”
“Then why ain’t you wit’ her?”
“I wus s’posed t’, honey. But you know I got t’ thinkin’ ’bout you on that ride, an’ I tole LaMarque all about you till we decided that we was gonna come straight here.”
“You did?”
“Mmm-hm,” Etta hummed, nodding her head. “An’ you know I was glad we did.” Etta’s grin was shameless.
She smiled at me and the years fell away.
The one night I had spent with Etta, the best night of my life, she woke up the next morning talking about Mouse. She told me how wonderful he was and how lucky I was to have him for a friend.
LAMARQUE HAD NEVER SEEN a television. He watched everything that came on, even the news. Some poor soul was in the spotlight that night. His name was Charles Winters. He was discovered stealing classified documents at his government job. The reporter said that Winters could get four ninety-nine-year sentences if he was found guilty.
“What’s a comanisk, Unca Easy?”
“What, you think that just ’cause this is my TV that I should know everything it says?”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded. LaMarque was a treasure.
“There’s all kindsa communists, LaMarque.”
“That one there,” he said, pointing at the television. But the picture of Mr. Winters was gone. Instead there was a picture of Ike in the middle of a golf swing.
“That kind is a man who thinks he can make things better by tearin’ down what we got here in America and buildin’ up like what they got in Russia.”
LaMarque opened his eyes and his mouth as far as he could. “You mean they wanna tear down Momma house and Momma TV up here in America?”
“The kinda world he wants, nobody owns anything. It’s like this here TV would be for everybody.”
“Uh-uh!”
LaMarque jumped up, balling his little fists.
“LaMarque!” Etta shouted. “What’s got into you?”
“Comanisk gonna take our TV!”
“Time for you to go t’bed, boy.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“I say yes,” Etta said softly. She cocked her head to the side and tilted a little on the couch. LaMarque lowered his head and moved to turn off the set.
“Tell Unca Easy g’night.”
“G’night, Unca Easy,” LaMarque whispered. He climbed on the couch to kiss me, then he crawled into Etta’s lap. She carried him into my bedroom.
We’d decided after the meal that they’d take my bed and I’d take the couch.
— 4 —
I WAS RESTING ON THE COUCH at about midnight, watching a bull’s-eye pattern on the TV screen. I was smoking Pall Malls, drinking vodka with grapefruit soda, and wondering if Mouse could kill me even if I was in a federal jail. In my imagination, he could.
“Easy?” she called from the bedroom door.
“Yeah, Etta?”
Etta wore a satiny gown. Coral. She sat down in the chair to my right.
“You sleepin’, baby?” she asked.
“Uh-uh, no. Just thinkin’.”
“Thinkin’ what?”
“ ’Bout when I went down to see you in Galveston. You know, when you an’ Mouse was just engaged.”
She smiled at me, and I had to make myself stay where I was.
“You remember that night?” I asked.
“Sure do. That was nice.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “You see, that’s what’s wrong, Etta.”
“I don’t follah.” Even her frown made me want to kiss her.
“That was the best night of my life. When I woke up in the morning I was truly surprised, because I knew I had to die, good as that felt.”
“Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that, Easy.”
“Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with it until you tell me that ‘it was nice’ stuff. You know what you said to me when you got up?”
“That was fifteen years ago, baby. How’m I s’posed to ’member that?”
“I remember.”
Etta looked sad. She looked like she’d lost something she cared for. I wanted to stop, to go hold her, but I couldn’t. I’d been waiting all those years to tell her how I felt.
I said, “You told me that Mouse was the finest man you ever knew. You said that I was truly lucky to have a man like that for a friend.”
“Baby, that was so long ago.”
“Not fo’ me. Not fo’ me.” When I sat up I realized that I had an erection. I crossed my legs so that Etta wouldn’t see it pressing against my loose pants. “I remember like it was only this mo’nin’. When we got up you started tellin’ me how lucky I was to have a man like Mouse fo’a friend. You told me how great he was. I loved you; I still do. An’ all you could think of was him. You know I had plenty’a women tell me that they love me when we get up in the mo’nin’. But it only made me sick ’cause they wasn’t you sayin’ it. Every time I hear them I hear you talkin’ ’bout Mouse.”
Etta shook her head sadly. “That ain’t me, Easy. I loved you, I did, as a friend. An’ I think you’s a beautiful man too. I mean, yeah, I shouldn’ta had you over like that. But you came t’me, honey. I was mad ’cause Raymond was out ho’in just a couple a days after I said I’d marry him. I used you t’try an’ hurt him, but you knew what I was doin’. You knew it, Easy. You knew what I was givin’ you was his. That’s why you liked it so much.
“But that was a long time ago, an’ you should be over it by this time. But, you know, it’s just that some men be wantin’ sumpin’ from women; sumpin’ like a woman shouldn’t have no mind of her own. It’s like when LaMarque want me t’tell’im that he’s the strongest man in the world if I let him carry my pocketbook. I tell’im what he wants t’hear ’cause he just a baby. But you’s a man, Easy. If I lied t’you it would be a insult.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “I knew it then. I never said nuthin’, but now here you are again. An’ here I am wit’ my nose open.
“You know somebody saw you get on that bus, Etta. Somebody told somebody else that they heard you went to California. And Mouse could be outside that door at this very minute. Or maybe he be here tomorrah. He’s comin’, though, you could bet on that. An’ if he finds you been in my bed we gonna have it out.” I didn’t add that I knew Mouse well enough to be afraid. I didn’t need to.
“Raymond don’t care ’bout if I got boyfriends, Easy. He don’t care ’bout that.”
“Maybe not. But if Mouse think I done taken his wife an’ child fo’ my own he see red. And now here you are talkin’ ’bout him bein’ crazy—how I know what he might do?”
Etta didn’t say anything to that.
Mouse was a small, rodent-featured man who believed in himself without question. He only cared about what was his. He’d go against a man bigger than I was with no fear because he knew that nobody was better than him. He might have been right.
“And here I am again,” I said. “Tryin’ to keep offa you when I got so many problems I shouldn’t even think about it.”
Etta leaned forward in the chair, resting her elbows on her knees, revealing the dark cleft of her breasts. “So what you wanna do, Easy?”
“I …”
“Yeah?” she asked after I stalled.
“I know a man named Mofass.”
“Who’s he?”
“He manages some units up here and I work fo’im.”
When Etta shifted, her gown slid and tremors went down my back.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“I think I could get him to find a place for you and LaMarque. You know, some place fo’ you t’live. Without no rent, I mean.” I was talking but I didn’t want to say it: I wanted her for myself.
Etta sat up and her gown rose over her breasts. Her nipples were hard dimes against the slick material.
“So that’s it? I come all this way an’ now you gonna put us out.” She stuck her lower lip out and shrugged, ever so slightly. “LaMarque an’ me be ready by noon.”
“You don’t have t’rush, Etta …”
“No, no,” she said, rising and waving her hand at me. “We gotta settle in someplace, and the sooner the better. You know chirren need a home.”
“I’ll give you money, Etta. I got lotsa money.”
“I’ll pay you back soon as I find work.”
We looked at each other awhile after that.
Etta was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known. I’d wanted her more than life itself, once. And the fact that I had let that go was worse than the fear of the penitentiary.
“’Night, Easy,” she whispered.
I made to get up, to kiss her good night, but she held her hand against me.
“Don’t kiss me, honey,” she said. “ ’Cause you know I been thinkin’ ’bout you long as you been thinkin’ ’bout me.”
Then she went off to bed.
I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t worry or think about taxes either.
— 5 —
THE GOVERNMENT BUILDING was on Sixth Street, downtown. It was small, four stories, and built from red brick. It almost looked friendly from the outside, not like the government at all.
But once you got past the front door all the friendliness was gone. A woman sat at the information desk. Her blond hair was pulled back so tight that it pained my scalp just to look at her. She wore a gray businesslike jacket and dark horn-rimmed glasses. She squinted at me, wincing as if her skull might have actually hurt.
“May I assist you, sir?” she asked.
“Lawrence,” I said. “Agent Lawrence.”
“FBI?”
“Naw. Revenue.”
“IRS?”
“I guess that’s what you call it. Spells taxes no matter what way you say it.”
As government workers went she was polite, but she wasn’t going to smile for my joke.
“Go down to the end of this hall.” She pointed it out for me. “And take the elevator to the third floor. The receptionist there will assist you.”
“Thanks,” I said, but she had turned back to something important on her desk. I peeked over the little ledge and saw the magazine, The Saturday Evening Post.
Agent Lawrence’s office was just down the hall from the reception desk on the third floor, but when the woman called him he told her that I had to wait.
“He’s going over your case,” the fat brunette told me.
I sat down in the most uncomfortable straight-back chair ever made. The lower back of the chair stuck out farther than the top so I had the feeling that I was hunched over as I sat there watching the big woman rub pink lotion into her hands. She frowned at her hands, and then she frowned again when she saw me staring through her glistening fingers.
I wondered if she would have been performing her toilet like that in front of a white taxpayer.
“Rawlins?” a military-like voice inquired.
I looked up.
There I saw a tall white man in a crayon-blue suit. He was of a good build with big hands that hung loosely at his sides. He had brown hair, and small brown eyes and was clean-shaven, though there would always be a blue shadow on his jaw. But for all his neat appearance Agent Lawrence seemed to be somehow unkempt, disheveled. I took him in for a few seconds. His bushy eyebrows and the dark circles under his eyes made him seem pitiful and maybe even a little inept.
It was my habit to size up people quickly. I liked to think I had an advantage on them if I had an insight into their private lives. In the tax man’s case I figured that there was probably something wrong at home. Maybe his wife was fooling around, or one of his kids had been sick the night before.
I dropped my speculations after a few moments, though. I had never met a government man who admitted to having a private life.
“Agent Lawrence?” I asked.
“Follow me,” he said with a gawky nod. He turned around, avoiding eye contact, and went down the hall. Agent Lawrence might have been a whiz at tax calculations but he couldn’t walk worth a damn; he listed from side to side as he went.
His office was a small affair. A green metal desk with a matching filing cabinet. There was a big window, though, and the same morning sun that came into the Magnolia Street apartments flowed across his desk.
There was a bookcase with no books or papers in it. There was nothing on his desk except a half-used packet of Sen-Sen. I had the feeling that if I rapped my knuckles on his cabinet it would resound hollow as a drum.
He took his place behind the desk and I sat before him. My chair was of the same uncomfortable make as the one in the hall.
Taped to a wall, far to my left, was a crumpled piece of paper on which was scrawled I LOVE YOU DADDY in bold red letters that took up the whole page. It was as if the child were screaming love, testifying to it. There was a photograph in a pewter frame standing on his windowsill. A small red-haired woman with big frightened eyes and a young boy, who looked to be the same age as LaMarque, both cowered under the large and smiling figure of the man before me.
“Nice-lookin’ fam’ly,” I said.
“Um, yes, thank you,” he mumbled. “I assume that you received my letter and so you know why I wanted to meet with you. I couldn’t find your home address in our files, and so I had to hope that the address we found in the phone book was yours.”
I was never listed in a phone book from that year on.
“The only address we had for you,” Lawrence continued, “was the address of a Fetters Real Estate Office.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I been in that same house for eight years now.”
“Be that as it may, I’d like you to write your current address and phone number on this card. Also any business number if I need to get in touch with you during the day.”
He produced a three-by-five lined card from a drawer and handed it to me. I took it and put it down on the desk. He didn’t say anything at first, just stared until finally he asked, “Do you need a pencil?”
“Um, yeah, I guess. I don’t carry one around with me.”
He took a short, eraserless pencil from the drawer, handed it to me, and waited until I had written the information he wanted. He read it over two or three times and then returned the pencil and card to the drawer.
I didn’t want to start the conversation. I had taken the position of an innocent man, and that’s the hardest role to play in the presence of an agent of the government. It’s even harder if you really are innocent. Police and government officials always have contempt for innocence; they are, in some way, offended by an innocent man.
But I was guilty, so I just sat there counting the toes of my right foot as I pressed them, one by one, into the sole of my shoe. It took great concentration for the middle toes.
I had reached sixty-four before he said, “You’ve got a big problem, son.”
The way he called me son instead of my name returned me to southern Texas in the days before World War Two; days when the slightest error in words could hold dire consequences for a black man.
But I smiled as confidently as I could. “It must be some mistake, Mr. Lawrence. I read your note and I don’t own nuthin’, ’cept fo’ that li’l house I done had since ’forty-six.”
“No, that’s not right. I have it, from reliable sources, that you purchased apartment buildings on Sixty-fourth Place, McKinley Drive, and Magnolia Street in the last five years. They were all auctioned by the city for back taxes.”
“What sources you talkin’ ’bout?”
“Where the government gets its information is none of your concern,” he said. “At least not until this case goes to court.”
“Court? You mean like a trial?”
“Tax evasion is a felony,” he said, and then he hesitated.
“Do you understand the severity of a felony charge?”
“Yeah, but I ain’t done nuthin’ like that. I’m just a maintenance man for Mofass.”
“Who?”
“Mofass, he’s the guy I work for.”
“How do you spell that?”
I made up something, and he pulled out the card with my information on it and jotted it down.
“Did you bring the documents I asked for in the letter?” he asked.
He could see I didn’t have anything.
“No, sir,” I said. “I thought that it was all a mistake and that you didn’t have to be bothered with it.”
“I’m going to need all your financial information for the past five years. A record of all your income, all of it.”
“Well,” I said, smiling and hating myself for smiling, “that might take a few days. You know I got some shoe boxes in the closet, and then again, some of it might be in the garage if it goes all that far back. Five years is a long time.”
“Some people make an awful lot of noise about equality and freedom, but when it comes to paying their debt they sing a different song.”
“I ain’t singin’ nuthin’, man,” I said. I would have said more but he cut me off.
“Let’s get this straight, Rawlins. I’m just a government agent. My job is to find out tax fraud if it exists. I don’t have any feeling about you. I’ve asked you here because I have reason to believe that you cheated the government. If I’m right you’re going to trial. It’s not personal. I’m just doing my job.”
There was nothing for me to say.
He looked at his watch and said, “I have a lot of business to see to today and tomorrow. You’ve served in the army, haven’t you, son?”
A Red Death Page 3