A Red Death

by Mosley, Walter

  “Yeah.”

  He led me through a maze of long dining tables and through an open doorway in the back. This led to a closed door. I could smell the smoke even before we went in.

  There I found a roomful of black men. All of them smoking and sitting in various positions of ease.

  It was a smallish room with a threadbare light green carpet and a few folding tables that the men used to hold their ashtrays. There were checkerboards and dominoes out but nobody was playing. There was a sour smell under the smoky odor. The smell of men’s breath.

  Odell rose to meet me.

  “Easy,” he said. “I want you to meet Wilson and Grant.”

  We nodded at each other.

  “Pleased t’meetcha,” I said.

  Dupree was there and some other men I knew.

  “Melvin and the minister be down in a few minutes. They upstairs right now,” he said. “And this here is Chaim, Chaim Wenzler.”

  The white man had been sitting on the other side of Dupree, so I hadn’t seen him. He was short and hunched over in a serious conversation with a man I didn’t know.

  But when he heard his name he straightened up and looked at me.

  “This is Easy Rawlins, Chaim. He’s got some free time in the week an’ wants t’ help out.”

  “Wonderful,” Chaim said in a strong voice. He stood up to shake my hand. “I need the help, Mr. Rawlins. Thank you.”

  “Easy. Call me Easy.”

  “We are doing work in the neighborhood,” he said. He indicated a chair for me and sat himself. We’d gone right to work. I liked him even though I didn’t want to.

  “Food for old people, some driving maybe. I don’t drive and it’s hard to get a ride when you need it. Sometimes my daughter drives me, but she works, we all work.” He winked on that. “And sometimes we need to take messages about meetings here at the church and some other places.”

  “What kinda meetin’s?”

  He hunched his thick shoulders. “Meetings about work. We do lots of work, Mr. Rawlins.”

  I smiled. “Well, what kind of work you want from me?”

  He gave me the once-over then and I took him in. Chaim was short and powerful. His head was bald and I would have put his age at about fifty-five. His eyes were gray, about the same color as Mouse’s eyes, but they looked different in Chaim. Chaim’s eyes were piercing and intelligent but they were also generous, rather than cruel. Generosity was a feeling that Mouse only had after someone he didn’t like had died.

  You could see something else in Chaim’s eyes. I didn’t know what it was at the time but I could see that there was a deep pain in that man. Something that made me sad.

  “We need to get clothes,” he said at last.

  “Say what?”

  “Old clothes for the old people. I get people to donate them and then we have a sale.”

  He leaned toward me in a confidential manner and said, “You know we have to sell it to them because they don’t like to be given wit’out paying.”

  “What you do with the money?”

  “A little lunch wit’ the sale and it’s gone.” He slapped his hands together indicating breaking even.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. But there must’ve been a question in my voice.

  “You have something to ask, maybe?” He smiled into my eyes.

  “Naw, not really … it’s just that …”

  “Yes?”

  There were people around us but they weren’t listening.

  “Well, it’s like this,” I said. “I cain’t see why somebody ain’t even from down there wanna do all this an’ they ain’t even bein’ paid.”

  “You are right, of course,” he said. “A man works for money or family or,” he shrugged, “some men work for God.”

  “That what move you? You a religious man?”

  “No.” He shook his head grimly. “No, I’m not a religious man, not anymore.”

  “So here you don’t even believe in God but you gonna do charity for the church?”

  I was pushing him and wishing I wasn’t. But something bothered me about Chaim Wenzler and I wanted to find out what it was.

  He smiled again. “I believe, Mr. Rawlins. Even more—I know. God turned his back on me.” The way he looked at me reminded me of something, or someone. “He turned his back on all the Jews. He set the demons on us. I believe, Mr. Rawlins. There could not be such evil as I have seen wit’out a God.”

  “I guess I could see that.”

  “And that’s why I’m here,” Wenzler said. “Because Negroes in America have the same life as the Jew in Poland. Ridiculed, segregated. We were hung and burned for just being alive.”

  It was then that I remembered Hollis Long.

  Hollis was a friend of my father. They used to get together every Saturday afternoon on the front porch. Being the only two black men in the parish that could read, they would smoke pipes and discuss all the newspaper articles that they had read in the past week.

  Hollis was a big man. I remember him laughing and bringing me presents of fruit or hard candy. I’d sit on the floor between the two men and listen to them talk about events in New Orleans, Houston, and other Southern capitals. Sometimes they’d talk about Northern cities or even foreign lands like China or France.

  Then one weekday I came home from school to find my mother standing over the wood stove crying. My father stood next to her with his arm around her shoulders. Hollis Long was sitting at the table drinking straight whiskey from a clay jug. The look in his eye, the same look that Chaim Wenzler had when he was talking about God, told of something terrible.

  No one spoke to me, so I ran out of the house down to the sugarcane field that bordered our land.

  That night Hollis slept at our house. He stayed there for two weeks before going away to Florida for good. And every night I could hear him moaning and crying. Sometimes I’d be wrenched out of sleep because Hollis would get up from his bed hollering and smashing the walls with his fists.

  After the first night my mother told me that there was a fire while Hollis was gone lumbering with my father. His wife and sons and mother all perished in the flames.

  “When I had given up everything,” Chaim said, “men came and saved me. They helped me to take vengeance. And now it is my turn to help.”

  All I could do was nod. When God abandoned Hollis Long there was no one to save him.

  “We must help each other, Easy. Because there are men out there who would steal the meat from your bones.”

  I thought about agents Lawrence and Craxton and I looked away.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “We will work together.”

  I said, “All right.”

  “You got time tomorrow?” he asked, and then he touched the back of my hand the way John had when he was concerned for me.

  “Maybe not tomorrow, but in a couple’a days.”

  And it was done. Chaim and I were partners working for the poor and elderly. Of course, I was trying to hang him too.

  Towne and Melvin came in with a beautiful young woman. Her black skin and bright white dress were a shocking contrast. Tall and shapely, she had straightened brown hair that was shot through with golden strands. Her lips were bright orange and her big brown eyes were on Towne. It was the passion of her gaze that made her beautiful. You could see that she held nothing back.

  The minister said a few words to Parker, and then he turned to whisper something to the girl. The way he put his palm against her side I knew they were lovers. It wasn’t much but it was very familiar. When I looked away from them I saw Melvin staring hard at me.

  They left almost immediately. I could see that this disturbed the men. They expected the minister to represent their church at the meeting. But he had other fish to fry. I did too.

  Odell asked me, “You stayin’, Ease?”

  I said, “No, man, I got some calls t’ make.”

  When I turned to go he grabbed me by the arm. That was the only time he’d ever do
ne anything like that. He said, “Don’t be messin’ wit’ us now, Ease. Get what you want from that man, but don’t hurt the church.”

  I smiled as reassuringly as I could and said, “Don’t worry, Odell, all I need is some information. That’s all. You won’t even notice I was here.”

  THE PHONE RANG ONLY ONCE before he answered.

  “Craxton.”

  “I met ’im.”

  “Good. What did he say?”

  “Nuthin’ really. He wants me to get clothes for old people.”

  “Don’t fall for it, Mr. Rawlins. He’s only helping those people for his own ends.”

  Just like I am, I thought. “So what next?”

  “String him along for a few weeks, see if he brings you to the others. Milk him for information. Try to sound like you’re unhappy with white people and America, he eats that stuff up. Maybe find out if he knows where Andre Lavender is.”

  I made sounds like I’d do what he wanted and then I asked, “Mr. Craxton?”

  “Yes?”

  “I got a call from Agent Lawrence the other day.”

  “About what?”

  “He wanted to know what am I going to do about my taxes.”

  “He did?” Craxton laughed. “You have to hand it to him, the man is loyal to his work.”

  “His loyalty be my jail term.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Rawlins. J. Edgar Hoover pulls every string in Washington. If he says you’re all right, then you are.”

  Mr. Hoover hadn’t said a thing to me, but I didn’t mention it.

  “What was Wenzler doing at the church?” Craxton asked.

  “Helpin’ with the N double-A C P meeting.”

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  I could almost hear him nodding.

  “You thought what?”

  “NAACP. That’s one of them. One of the so-called civil rights organizations that are full of Reds and people who will one day be Reds.”

  I thought that he was crazy and then I thought, I’m working for him, so what does that make me?

  — 15 —

  CHAIM WENZLER WAS A STRANGE ONE. But he called up memories in me and I found myself hoping that he wasn’t the bad guy Agent Craxton claimed. I figured that as long as Craxton didn’t know where to find Andre, that’s what I should concentrate on. I suspected that the FBI man wasn’t telling me the whole story about what had happened at Champion. And it didn’t make sense that he would go to all the trouble springing me from the IRS just to see what might be happening with some union organizer. I needed more information and Andre was my best bet, but getting to him was a crooked road.

  Craxton was smart to get a man like me, because the FBI couldn’t really mount an investigation in the ghetto. The colored population at that time wasn’t readily willing to tell a white man anything resembling the truth; and the FBI was made up exclusively of white men.

  I also had the added advantage of knowing Andre and the company he kept.

  Andre had gotten a little girl, Juanita Barnes, pregnant and Juanita had a baby boy. I knew that she was living in a little place off Florence and that she wasn’t working. Andre was proud of his son and so I figured he went off with Linda because she flattered his manhood, such as it was, and because he could get a few dollars away from her to send for his son. Not to mention whatever trouble he had gotten into with Champion Aircraft and Chaim Wenzler.

  Winthrop Hughes, Linda’s husband, knew most of that too, but he wouldn’t get one word out of Juanita.

  It was the kind of job I liked.

  I dropped by Juanita’s filthy one-room efficiency apartment the next morning with some patch-up work. Juanita liked to think she was good with needle and thread. She told everybody that she earned her board and keep by sewing, but I didn’t believe that lie.

  Anyway, I went over there with some torn clothes and asked her could she fix them up.

  “You might as well throw this stuff out, Easy,” she said, holding the crotch up to the window. You could see the birds congregating on the telephone line through the holes in those pants. “They ain’t hardly worth the work,” she said.

  “You mean you don’t need t’work?”

  “Naw, it ain’t like that.”

  “Look like it t’me. Here I bring you my work pants and you cain’t even be bothered with it.”

  She cowered a little under my gaze. “I just sayin’ that you could maybe buy sumpin’ better fo’almost much as you gonna pay me.”

  “Why’ont you let me say how the money goes,” I said. I was standing over her. She had little Andre Jr. in her arms.

  Andre Jr. was about fourteen months old. He was walking by then and showing some individuality. His mother was a small, hard-looking girl, about the color of a cougar. She was eighteen with small eyes and skinny legs. But even though she was ugly, Juanita had the dazed look of love in her eyes. The look that many women have with their firstborn.

  I took Andre Jr. from her and cuddled him to my chest.

  “I’ll look after the baby while you fix my clothes,” I said. I tried to sound like a father and she played the obedient child. When I think on it now I realize that I must’ve been almost twice her age.

  Little Andre and I had a good time. I let him walk on me and sleep on me, I even heated his bottle, letting Juanita check it to see that I wasn’t going to scald her baby’s tongue. She gave me a few shy smiles while I sat in her padded chair and she sat on the kitchen counter, working at my rags. But what really got her to glow was when I changed his diapers. I laid him out on the counter next to her and played with him so he didn’t even cry.

  I showed her that I knew how you could put Vaseline on a baby to keep him from chafing. While I was rubbing the stuff on Andre’s buttocks Juanita uncrossed her legs, licked her sliver lips, and asked, “You hungry, Easy?” and before I could answer, “ ’Cause I’m starved.”

  I couldn’t see where I was doing anything wrong.

  Juanita didn’t have any close family, so she was alone with Andre Jr. most of the time. And everybody knows how a gabbling baby will drive the strongest will to distraction after a while. All I did was keep her company when she needed a man around.

  I got steaks, cornbread mix, and greens from the Safeway and made dinner, because Juanita couldn’t really cook. After dinner she put Andre Jr. in a cardboard box on a table next to the couch, which she proceeded to unfold into a bed.

  Then Juanita took the bottle of Vaseline and showed me some things she knew how to do. She might have been eighteen, and unacquainted with many ways of the world, but Juanita was full of love. Powerful love. And she had the ability to call forth the love in me.

  She pushed me down in that bed and wrapped her arms around me and told me all the things she had dreamed since Andre Sr. had left.

  In the middle of the night the baby cried and Juanita tended to him. Then she whispered something to me and before long I was on my knees begging and praying to her like she was a temple and a priestess rolled up into one.

  AT FOUR IN THE MORNING I woke again. I didn’t even know where I was. Every tender spot on my body was sore and when I looked at that little girl I felt a kind of awe that verged on fear.

  The shades were torn. Light from the granite-columned streetlamp shone on Andre Jr. in his cardboard cradle. I could see his tiny lips pushing in and out.

  I looked around the rest of the house. Even in the dark it felt dirty. Juanita never really cleaned the floors or walls. There was dirt in that house that had been there before her; it would be there after she had gone.

  When I saw the drawers in the kitchen counter I remembered what I was doing there.

  In the very bottom drawer, under a few rolls of wrapping paper, was a stack of envelopes held together with a wide rubber band. The postmark, which was all but impossible to make out in the dim light, was from Riverside, and Juanita’s name and address were written in a junior high school scrawl. But it was the return address that interested me. I tore off the upper
left corner of one letter, shoved it back into the middle of the stack, and pushed the drawer closed.

  “What you want, Easy?”

  “Tryin’ t’get some water but I didn’t wanna turn on the light and wake ya,” I said, straightening up quickly.

  “You lookin’ on the floor fo’some water?”

  “I kicked my damn toe!” I tried to sound angry so that she’d let it go.

  “Glasses in the cabinet right over your head, honey, get me some too.”

  When I climbed back into bed Juanita reached for the jar of Vaseline again.

  “I’m a little tired, baby,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, Easy, I’ma get you up.”

  A few hours later sunlight came in through the shade.

  Juanita was sitting up against the head of the couch with a knowing look in her eye. She had the baby, suckling on his bottle, in her arms.

  “How long Andre’s father been gone?” I asked.

  “Too long,” she said.

  I lit a cigarette and handed it to her.

  “You hear from him at all?”

  “Uh-uh. He just gone, thas all.” Then she smiled at me.

  “Don’t worry, honey, he ain’t gonna come in here. He ain’t even in L.A.”

  “I thought you didn’t even know where he was?”

  “I heard he was gone.”

  “From who?”

  “I just heard it, thas all.”

  Her mouth formed a little thin-lipped pout.

  I took her foot and rubbed it until she smiled again. Then I asked, “You think you might want him back?”

  She said no. But she didn’t say it right away. She looked at her baby first and she made like she wanted to pull her foot away from my hand.

  I got up and put on my pants.

  “Where you goin’?” asked Juanita.

  “I gotta meet Mofass at one’a his places at eight,” I said.

  I WENT HOME and napped for a few hours, then I drove out to Riverside.

  Riverside was mainly rural then. No sidewalks or street signs to speak of. I had to go to three gas stations before I found out how to get to Andre’s address.