Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  “You like?” he asked with a grin, holding up his cuffs and giving a wink.

  “Halloween?” I asked, gesturing at the suit.

  “You a regular Redd Foxx. No. This is a business suit. I’m a businessman.”

  “Hi, honey,” Bonnie said, coming out of the kitchen.

  “Daddy!” Feather yelled, careening between Bonnie and Jackson and slamming into my legs.

  Feather hugged my right thigh, Bonnie kissed my cheek, and Jackson got into it by giving me a handshake. It was one of the few moments at that time that stands out for me as peaceful and whole. There I was, a man surrounded by friendship and love.

  “Uncle Jackson says that there’s people in the South Pacific got two heads,” Feather said.

  “Maybe if they buy a head of lettuce at the store,” I told her.

  Feather giggled and then laughed until she fell to the floor.

  Bonnie picked her up and I kissed her.

  “What you doin’ here, Jackson?” I asked.

  “Anybody ever need help, they come to Easy Rawlins,” he said.

  Maybe I should have turned him away. I already had two or three full-time jobs to accomplish in the next week or so. Jackson wasn’t deserving of special consideration because he was so undependable. But no one I ever knew had a mind like his. And I was going to need some special thinking if I was going to go out after Harold the woman killer.

  “What’s up, Jackson?”

  Bonnie whirled Feather around and whisked her back into the kitchen.

  Jackson sat in the love seat and I pulled up a two-rung step stool that Bonnie had bought so that she could get up on the high shelves.

  “It’s Jewelle,” he said. He adjusted his glasses as he spoke.

  “Since when you been wearin’ glasses, Blue?”

  “You like ’em? I just got ’em last week. Bought ’em up in Beverly Hills—on Rodeo Drive.”

  “Near-sighted?” I asked.

  Jackson grinned. “No, brother. My eyesight’s twenty-ten. You a small man like me, need an edge with all these violent peoples runnin’ up and down the street.”

  He handed me the glasses and I tried them on. It was like looking through the windshield of my car—no change at all. I handed them back.

  “I don’t get it. Glasses make you look like an egghead. What’s the angle?”

  Jackson smiled again.

  “You know I been studyin’ the binary language of machines,” he said.

  Computers had been Jackson’s passion for some time. He had been holed up in a small apartment managed by his lover, Jewelle MacDonald, for well over a year reading about how those thinking machines worked.

  I said all of this by nodding.

  “Well,” he said, “a while ago I decided to see if I could get me a job at a bank or some insurance company workin’ on their computers. I know the IBM languages called BAL and COBOL and FORTRAN. I know all the loops and peripheries and the JCL too.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about but it still gave me an inner glee to know that a ghetto-bred black man like Jackson could know all the rich white businessmen’s secrets.

  “So what’s that got to do with your glasses?” I asked.

  “I been goin’ out on job interviews for the last five weeks,” he said. “At first I was wearin’ my light blue suit but I could see that that wasn’t the way a businessman’s supposed to be dressed. I got me some Brooks Brothers then but still I couldn’t get a job. Finally I realized that I had to do somethin’ about bein’ black.”

  We both chuckled. If anyone was a black man it was Jackson. His skin, his accent, the way he laughed at a joke.

  “It came to me,” he went on, “that even though I’m little the white people were still scared’a me. So I had to make it so I didn’t seem scary.”

  “Damn,” I said in deep appreciation for his uncharacteristically subtle solution. “So you put on those glasses with the ugly frames so the people at the bank would think that you’re a Poindexter.”

  “Tried ’em out this afternoon,” he said. “And three people said I’m as good as hired.”

  “Damn, Jackson. Damn. You’re good.”

  It was rare that I complimented Blue. He grinned to show his appreciation.

  “That’s the favor I need,” he said.

  “I thought it was Jewelle needed help?”

  “She does—in a way.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the scam, Jackson?”

  “No scam, man. I swear.”

  “No? Then let’s hear it.”

  “You know about that big shoppin’ center they puttin’ up over near Slauson?” he asked.

  “The one on Figueroa?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about it?”

  “The name on the papers is the Bigelow Corporation,” he said. “But you know almost every dime comes from JJ. She bankrolled the project thinkin’ we was gonna be rich.”

  It made sense that the young Jewelle and Jackson had gotten together. He was a technical and philosophical whiz, while she had a knack with real estate and finance that put me to shame. And Jewelle didn’t mind caring for a man older than her by decades. She had been with my real estate agent, Mofass. He was quite a few years past sixty when he died. And Jewelle wasn’t put off by a man who lived a rough life either. Mofass had died in a murder-suicide protecting Jewelle from her homicidal auntie.

  “. . . so,” Jackson was saying, “I need to work until JJ get on her feet. You know she gonna have to sell almost everything she own to keep the wolf from the door. That house up in the canyon and every apartment buildin’ she got. She says she’s gonna come live with me down in Santa Monica.”

  “You like that?”

  “She been payin’ my bills for a long time, Easy. Don’t matter what I like.”

  It takes a woman to make a man. That’s what my cousin Rames used to say. I never knew what he really meant until that moment.

  “So what is it you need from me, Jackson?”

  “You remember that answerin’ machine I hooked up for that numbers thing?”

  “You mean when those white gangsters were tryin’ to kill you?” I asked. “You mean the reason you livin’ in Santa Monica today? So they don’t find you and shoot you in the back’a your head?”

  “Yeah,” he said, giving me the evil eye. “I wanna put that machine on your office phone.”

  “Why?”

  “I gave your number for a reference. I said that your number was for the office of Tyler Office Machines. I said that I fixed your cash registers and time clocks.”

  And there it was again. Jackson couldn’t fly straight down if you threw him off a cliff. He could have gotten a job as a filing clerk or a secretary and worked his way up to the computer room. But that wasn’t how he operated. Get in quick, burn down everything, and then run like hell—that was Jackson’s way.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

  I even smiled.

  Jackson didn’t like it. He was ready to give me some long sob story about how we both owed so much to Jewelle and how he was finally trying to settle down and use his mind. He wasn’t used to me saying yes without an argument.

  “What’s up, Easy?” he asked cautiously.

  “Let’s wait till after dinner,” I said. “Then we can go down and put in your machine and maybe you could do a little something for me.”

  27

  Bonnie and Feather had made short ribs roasted in a spicy Jamaican sauce. They also served rice with some red beans mixed in and collard greens cooked with kale, onions, and salt pork. There were corn muffins to soak up the juices and for dessert we had Feather’s favorite: strawberry Jell-O made with a cup of melted ice cream folded in.

  Like most naturally thin men Jackson had a good appetite. He took thirds on everything and would have kept on eating if I hadn’t pulled him out of his chair.

  I kissed my weepy daughter good-bye and asked Bonnie to tell Jesus if he called that I exp
ected to see him by the next day.

  “OKAY, EASY, WHAT kinda trouble you in?” Jackson said when we were less than a block from my house.

  I could have tortured him but with Harold on the streets I didn’t have the leisure to act coy. I told him the whole story starting from the time I helped Musa Tanous prove that he hadn’t killed the beautiful teenager Jackie Jay.

  “And the cops didn’t believe you up until this new woman got killed?” was Jackson’s response.

  “It’s only one cop believe me now,” I said. “It’s just the three of us if you wanna help.”

  “Me? What can I do, Easy?”

  “Talk to me, Jackson. Talk to me. You one’a the only men I know can talk about the streets with me. I mean Mouse knows the street but he only knows one way.”

  “That sounds like what you would want with a man like this here Harold,” Jackson said. “Mouse would do what’s right in a situation like that.”

  “I got to find the man first.”

  Jackson nodded and sat back in his seat. Then he scratched his left ear with a baby finger and I knew he was applying his mind to my problem.

  I was so upset about Harold and the riots and the sweet sugar talk of Juanda that there wasn’t much room in my head for logical thought. I wanted to use Jackson as a kind of a jump start.

  We got to my office and installed his answering gizmo. It was a big box that he wired directly to the jack. If the phone rang, it picked up after the third ring and gave out a prerecorded message.

  Jackson wrote a little speech for me to give and I did it without any Texas or Louisiana in my voice. After that Jackson put his feet up on the edge of a small trash can and grabbed the back of his neck with both hands.

  “What you think about these riots, Easy?” he asked, beating me to the punch.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither. Me neither. I just cain’t see how people gonna get out in the street and waste that much energy when all you gonna get is some scratched-up shit don’t even match the carpet on yo’ floors.”

  “It was more than that, man,” I said. “It’s hot and they been sittin’ on our necks forever.”

  “I don’t see nobody sittin’ on our necks, Easy.” Jackson looked around, indicating that it was just him and me in the room.

  “No? Did they ever send a letter to your mama’s farm askin’ you to go to college and say that they’d be happy to pay for your courses?”

  “’Course not.”

  “Did your teachers tell you that you were the smartest kid in school and you need to go to college?”

  “Are you crazy, Easy?”

  “They don’t do it out at Sojourner Truth but maybe two times in a year. And you know that’s wrong.”

  “And me throwin’ rocks gonna change that?”

  “Maybe not for you.”

  “Definitely not,” Jackson said. “Especially if I get arrested or killed.”

  I could still smell the smoke from the streets in my office.

  “I need to find this man Harold,” I said. “You got any ideas?”

  “I’m not gonna get my hands dirty, Easy. I’ma take this here job as a computer man and I ain’t never gonna be in these streets again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You just point me in the right direction and pull the trigger. That’s all you got to do.”

  I could feel my language turning toward my southern roots. Jackson brought out the country in me.

  “There’s a flop house over on Manchester near Avalon. You know it?”

  “Gray bungalow,” I said, “with boarded-up windows.”

  “That’s the place. White guy run it. Man named Bill. I think he was a preacher or a priest or sumpin’ but he got the call and put that place in. He wanna help people when they down. You know I been there a few times myself. Before I got it together and started —”

  “Livin’ off of Jewelle,” I said, cutting off whatever story he’d invented to make it seem like he was making it on his own.

  “Why you wanna fuck wit’ me, Easy? Fuck wit’ me and then ask me for my advice.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Bill’s a good guy. He likes Negroes and he knows about that foot on the neck thing you talkin’ ’bout. I mean, he’s part of the problem but he mean well.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean —‘part of the problem’?”

  “It’s like when the doctor I used to have would give me a penicillin injection and every two weeks later I’d come down sick again,” he said. “Finally after about a year I went to the medical library at UCLA and looked up about those antibiotics. I realized that he never gave me enough. That way he had me comin’ back for more. You know that doctor wasn’t no better than a pusher. The only difference with Bill is that he don’t have enough medicine to pass around. One bowl of soup and a sandwich and a cot—that’s all he can give ya. And you know, Easy, when you only give enough medicine to keep the disease down, it gets stronger down there and come back with a vengeance.”

  “So you think Father Bill there would know about Harold?” I asked.

  “Yes sir. I sure do. Every brother been down on his luck been to Brother Bill’s mission at one time or other. Everybody.”

  “So what should I do?”

  Jackson smiled and hunched his shoulders.

  “I ain’t gonna get my hands dirty, Easy,” he said. “But that don’t mean you have to come out clean.”

  ON THE RIDE back to my house we talked about the internally rhyming irony of the phrases “space shots” and “race riots.” Using that as his argument Jackson postulated that there was some sort of mathematical and poetic necessity that brings about a balance in scientific, economic, and social extremes.

  “You can’t have a rich man if you don’t have a poor one, Easy,” he said. “You can’t have a clean floor unless you got somewhere to put the dirt.”

  “What you gonna do if you get that job, Jackson?”

  “Work.”

  “I mean really.”

  “I’m a changed man, Easy,” the man who most resembled a black coyote said. “No more shit, brother. I’ma make a nest for Jewelle and feather it with hard-earned cash.”

  I rubbed my bristly chin and wondered. Maybe the world had changed in the fires of the riots. Maybe I had to let go of the order of things that I had always known.

  It made me feel unsure and hopeful like a man weak from hunger who stumbles upon an empty store filled with delicacies. How much could I eat before they came to take me away?

  28

  Jackson left me on the sidewalk in front of my house. He climbed into a yellow pickup truck. I was sure that there was some story around him driving that truck but I didn’t ask. It was very late and he wanted to get home and tell Jewelle about his new job.

  BONNIE WAS NAKED on top of the covers. She moved her head and gasped when I came into the room but I could tell that she was still asleep.

  “Mama?” she cried.

  I whispered, “It’s okay.”

  “Papa?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  I sat down on the bed next to her and put my palm against her forehead.

  I sat there looking at her body. Bonnie had a curvaceous but lean body with a great mound of pubic hair and powerful thighs that had been made strong by walking thousands of miles through her Guyanese childhood.

  “I love them,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Both of them.”

  She could have been talking about the children or her parents, who she thought had come into the room. But my suspicious imagination jumped to another conclusion.

  “Easy and Joguye?”

  “I want to go fishin’,” she complained.

  “Who?” I asked again.

  “We can ride the big fish and go down to the seas and under the coral.”

  “Who?”

  “What?” she asked, still asleep. “What did you say?” she asked, and I knew she was awake.
r />   “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I said.

  “What did you ask me, Easy?” She sat up without covering herself.

  “You were talking in your sleep.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Something about fishing and coral at the bottom of the sea.”

  Bonnie smiled.

  “About my home,” she said. “Papa used to take me fishing but he stopped when I started to become a woman.”

  “Why wouldn’t he take you then?”

  “Because he didn’t want to make me into a boy, that’s what he said.”

  I wanted to ask her if Joguye Cham had taken her fishing when they spent their holiday on Madagascar. But my courage fled when she was awake.

  I stood up and took two steps toward the door.

  “Are you coming to bed?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Late. You get back to sleep.”

  I went out into the little living room. A few moments later Bonnie followed wearing her robe. I knew that Jesus must have been home because she only put on that garment to hide from his eager teenage eyes.

  “You want some tea?” she asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  WE SAT AT the small table in the living room drinking tea, using the lemons from our own tree for spice.

  I told her about Harold and Suggs and the women who were murdered but no one knew that there was a connection between them.

  She asked me to come to bed but I told her to go on, that I wasn’t tired.

  “But you have to sleep,” she said.

  “All I have to do is die and pay taxes,” I replied.

  After that we talked about all kinds of things. About how Jesus seemed to be becoming a man without all of the teenage rock and roll nonsense that was going on in every other house on the block. We talked about liquored plantains and fruitcakes and how she used to swim naked in the ocean.

  “I would swim out so far that I could hardly see the shore,” she said. “I’d do that in the summer when it was hot and only very far out did the water turn cool.”

  “Swimmin’ instead’a riotin’,” I said.

  “I suppose we were freer then,” she agreed. “I mean inside of us. We were colonized but still our home belonged to us.”