Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  “I wish I could have seen you way out there,” I said. “I wish I was a fisherman and you got hung up in my net. That’s a fish story right there.”

  Bonnie kissed me and then turned so that she could lean against my chest.

  I held her, thinking about the southern oceans surrounding her as I did with my arms.

  29

  At sunup Bonnie and I went down to a breakfast stand facing the beach in Santa Monica. The sands were empty at six-fifteen. We talked about nothing for a while and then we turned up our cuffs and walked along the shore.

  Bonnie was the first woman ever to make me feel guilty about being a man. I felt bad about my heart racing whenever I saw Juanda. Here I had a wonderful woman who knew the world from a whole different perspective. She read Latin and had traveled extensively in Eastern Africa and elsewhere. She was beautiful and trusting and she never questioned my crazy little office or the work I did in the divide between the police and black L.A.

  She never demanded that I marry her, even though I knew that was what she wanted.

  I decided not to call Juanda when we were walking along the sand.

  I dropped Bonnie off at the house at ten-forty-five.

  BY ELEVEN Dr. Dommer was telling me that Geneva had fallen into a coma.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  The weak man’s eyebrows twitched like big furry caterpillars being jolted with electricity. He shook his head and frowned.

  “I don’t know. Maybe there was an underlying condition that was exacerbated by her shock,” he said. “We’ve taken blood and put her on an antibiotic IV. That’s all we can do for a while.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder for a moment and then walked off.

  It came to me that Tina Monroe and I were Miss Landry’s closest friends and we didn’t really know her. Geneva Landry was just part of different jobs that each of us was doing.

  I thought about going down to her room but I realized that there wasn’t time for that luxury.

  It was my job to find Harold.

  BILL’S SHELTER. The words were spray-painted in orange over the door to the gray building.

  I was in my work clothes again. I had shoes on my feet that should have been thrown out and no socks at all. My beard hairs were coming in. More of them than I would have liked were showing up white. My eyes were bloodshot and the skin beneath my eyes hung down like budding turkey wattles. Lack of sleep and grooming made me perfect for Jackson Blue’s plan.

  The door opened into a large room with a high ceiling. There was a table with enough space to seat a double dozen to the left and a desk faced by four couches set out like so many rows on the right.

  There was an industrial-size rotating fan on a pole roaring from one corner. But it didn’t do much to relieve the heat.

  There were chairs everywhere and men too—black men of every hue and age and state of disrepair. A group of four men were playing a very loud game of dominoes to the left of the desk while groups of two and three were talking here and there. One man was having a lively conversation with himself next to a boarded-up window. I counted fifteen in the room including me and the small snaky man sitting behind the walnut desk.

  It smelled like fifteen men who were down on their luck. There were body odors of every type and other smells meant to mask or clean up after them.

  The room was lit by eight or nine lamps and one set of neon lights hanging by ropes from the ceiling. This was because all of the windows were boarded over. Between the smells and despair, the darkness, and the shouting I felt myself being pressed as if the room were trying to eject me.

  I gagged and winced at the melee before me. My disguise was finished by the time I reached the desk.

  “Yeah, bub?” the little man sitting behind the desk asked.

  “Somebody said I could stay here,” I said, not looking him in the eye.

  “Who said?”

  He was a small man with ocher skin, a Mississippi accent, and mainly Caucasian features—one of the thousands of racial blends brought into existence by the melting pot of the South.

  “Man named Blue,” I answered.

  “Blue what?”

  “Jackson Blue.”

  The man cocked his head way over to the left and squinted.

  “Where’d you see him?”

  “On Central. I used to know him down in Texas and he was dressed good so I axed ’im to help me out.”

  “Did he?”

  “He ’idn’t gimme nuthin’ but he told me ’bout here.”

  “Where’s he livin’?” the snaky man asked.

  At the same time I became aware of someone standing behind me. I turned around quickly and shouted, “Get on out away from me, muthahfuckah! Step back!”

  There were two men who had approached me. One was fat and powerful, while the other was of a normal build. The heavy one wore a trench coat even though it was probably eighty-five degrees in that room. His friend was clad in a white T-shirt and jeans that were two sizes too large. Both men took a big step backward.

  All discussion and play in the room stopped. That’s just what I wanted. I needed the men in that room to see me and make up their minds that I was just what I looked like: a crazy man down on his luck and ready to protect his boundaries.

  “Hey!” the snaky man shouted. “You two know to keep away from the desk when I’m talkin’ to a prep.”

  He was addressing the men I scared away.

  “And you,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”

  “Willy,” I said. “Willy Mofass.”

  As I have gotten older I find that I use the names of dead friends to mask my secret passages. I do this partly because it is easy for me to remember their names and partly to keep them alive—at least in my mind.

  “Well, Willy,” the man said. “You can have soup and bread for dinner and a place to stay for two bits.”

  “I don’t have a nickel much less a quarter,” I said. “Blue said that this place was free.”

  “Ain’t nuthin’ free, Brother Willy. No sir. You got to pay. But we could let you slide for a day or two. But you got to pay the kitty if you gonna stay here more’n that.”

  “Where the fuck I’ma get twenty-fi’e cent a day. If I had that right now, I get me a bottle’a wine and climb in a cardboard box down near Metro High.”

  I knew the layout of Los Angeles. I knew where the hobos went to sleep unmolested.

  “Billy will help you get a job,” the little man said. “Remember though. No wine on the premises. No drugs or liquor or women neither. This here’s a Christian men’s shelter. It’s clean.”

  As he said this a light brown roach darted across the desk. That bug was quick but the gatekeeper was quicker. He slammed that roach so hard that the only things left to identify it were two legs and a quivering wing.

  30

  I camped out at the far end of the sofa furthest away from the desk. The snaky man, Lewis was his name, was a little too interested in the whereabouts of Jackson for me. So I sat there and read the papers.

  Gemini 5 was ready to take off. The Russians offered hope for a peace treaty in Vietnam. But mainly the news was about the riots and race relations across the nation.

  The news was all the more fuel for Gerald Jordan’s fears. A Catholic priest and a seminary student had been gunned down by local lawmen in Hayneville, Alabama. It seems that they had been trying to integrate a country store. Lyndon Baines Johnson declared that the rioters in the streets of L.A. were no better than Klan riders. Two more people died, so the official death toll in the riots had risen to thirty-five. In a statement Martin Luther King made before leaving L.A. he said that he couldn’t find the kind of creative and sensitive leadership among our elected officials to solve the problems that caused the riots.

  Even Martin Luther King had given up on a nonviolent solution.

  “Hey, man,” someone said.

  I looked up to see a tall young man with bright eyes and a nice smile except for o
ne broken and brown tooth.

  “Hey,” I replied.

  He sat on my couch, about three hand spans distant, looked me up and down and asked, “Where you from?”

  “Galveston.” It was true pretty much. I had come from a lot of places. Baton Rouge, New Iberia, New Orleans, Houston, Galveston, and many other towns. I had been to Africa, Italy, France, and Germany during the war. And someone had shot at me at least once in every location.

  “You know a man name of Tiny?” the young man asked me.

  “I know a whole slew’a Tinys: A man, another man, a woman, and one don’t know what he is.”

  The young man smiled again.

  “You read?” he asked.

  I nodded and folded the newspaper across my lap.

  “I wanna read,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “What you mean ‘why’? You read, don’t you, niggah?” Just that fast the pleasant young man was ready to fight.

  “All I did was ask you why, man,” I said. “You know, people always got a reason t’do somethin’ and I collect reasons.”

  “Collect ’em?”

  “Yeah. Somebody tell me they go to church I ask ’em why. I wanna know if they go there because they love the Lord or because they afraid’a hell. Somebody tell me that they like America I ask ’em why. You know, I once knew a woman loved a man so hard that she’d do anything for him. But he beat her just about every Saturday night. When I asked her why she said, ‘’Cause he give me flowers every Sunday—just about.’”

  By the time I was through with my explanation the young man’s anger was gone.

  “You crazy, niggah,” he said.

  “You know a old boy name of Harold?” I asked then. “Short guy, kinda wide. His hands is kinda fat like.”

  The young man shook his head. “Naw. You got two dollars?”

  “I got half a pack of Lucky Strikes. You want one?”

  We smoked for a while and two other men came up to us. They looked like brothers with their coal-colored skin and bloodshot eyes. They both had long hair that was matted and infused with dust.

  “Mickey,” one of the men said to me.

  “Terry,” the other said.

  We shook hands and I supplied them with cigarettes. We all smoked and talked about the streets. I lied. They lied. We all laughed. And slowly I began to get used to the heat and electric light, the smells and despair.

  AT ABOUT SIX, three black men—one old, one young, and one in between—all dressed in clean white pants and white T-shirts, came out with bent-up pewter bowls that they placed around the large table. They also put out steel-ware cutlery and blue and green plastic tumblers. The residents had just started to rise and move toward the table when a door behind Lewis’s desk opened and a big white man came out.

  He was very fat. So much so that his eyes were almost shut from the flesh pressing from all sides. After taking in his girth I realized that the man was also tall. Taller than I am and I’m six one, at least I was when I got drafted. They tell me that you shrink with the years of worry we go through.

  That fat man didn’t look like he ever worried about anything.

  “Hey, Bill!” Lewis shouted.

  Ten or twelve of the residents echoed the snake’s greeting.

  Bill smiled. He wore a green jacket and black trousers. His shoes reminded me of catcher’s gloves and he carried a cane whose tip never touched the ground.

  His hands were enormous with fingers that might have been babies’ limbs. His dense brown hair only covered the sides of his head and his crown rose from the thicket like a battlement or a moon.

  I was fascinated by this massive Caucasian the way some white children in Germany were amazed by me and my black skin.

  Maybe he felt my gaze. He turned his head toward me and strode toward my couch. I rose to meet him—half out of respect and half from fear.

  “Bill,” he said introducing himself.

  “Willy,” I said, but I was so impressed I almost said Easy.

  “Short for William?” he asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Me too. We have the same name, you and me.”

  I thought that there wasn’t anyone in the world who could do for a name what he could. He could have been Emperor Bill, Conqueror Bill, Bill the Magnificent.

  Even though he turned out to be important to my investigation, Bill’s effect on me had to do with something else. He had all of the charisma of Mouse in a package that was appropriate for such grandeur. A giant who dominated all that he saw, was aware of everything in his world. I was sure that Lewis’s greeting was normal fare in Bill’s life. He would command respect without asking for or even desiring it. I had only been in his presence for a minute or two and I’d already forgotten that he was a white man.

  “Down on your luck, Willy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess there’s a lotta others got it worse. I’d like a place to sleep, though.”

  “Done,” he said. “Come, sit with me.”

  I followed the big man to a seat at the table and sat on his left side. Lewis took the chair to his right and then the rest of the men took their seats. The men in white brought out a large tureen and went from man to man, ladling out a stew of potatoes with beef, lamb, and chicken. They also put down cheese sandwiches as they went.

  The food was good. Very good. I ate heartily, realizing that I hadn’t eaten much or slept at all since Detective Suggs had drafted me into service for the LAPD.

  “Where you from, Willy?” Bill asked.

  “Galveston,” I remembered. “From down around the docks.”

  “Never been there,” he said. “What do you think of this place?”

  “L.A.?”

  “No. The shelter.”

  “We sure could use it,” I said. “You know, it was better bein’ poor down south. At least there you could go back to the country and find a barn to sleep in, catch some fish, sumpin’. Here they would just as soon see you starve.”

  “Amen,” Bill said, and it didn’t seem forced. “How long have you been in town?”

  “I been in and around L.A. for years,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t seem to catch hold of enough money to make a go of it. But I ain’t give up yet.”

  Bill turned his attention to his other guests after that. He talked to everybody, even the man who talked only to himself.

  That man was named Roderick, and when Bill asked him how he was, Roderick said, “Somebody wants to know how you doin’, Rod.” And then he answered, “I’m doin’ pretty good, they keep them doctors off and don’t let ’em put them needles in my eyes.”

  That made me think about Geneva and Geneva reminded me of Nola Payne. Before you know it Harold was on my mind.

  The dinner went on for about forty-five minutes or so. I didn’t want to be too obvious about Harold because someone there might warn him off. So I just ate and marveled at Bill the Shelter King.

  31

  I was walking through a full meat locker, wearing only a T-shirt and cotton pants. It was freezing in there. The carcasses were black women hanging from hooks. I recognized all of them but couldn’t put a name to anyone. Women I had known from Texas to California as lovers and co-workers, neighbors and friends. They were naked and hard, beyond hope for any heaven or afterlife. They were hung in rows that went on forever and it came to me that I might be in hell. There wasn’t much light but I could see. And as long as I kept on walking, I thought, I wouldn’t freeze.

  Then I came across Nola Payne. Her reddish hair was plastered down over her eyes. I stopped even though I knew I ran the risk of freezing. I almost brushed the hair from her face but then I understood that if I touched any one of the dead women He would know I was there.

  I turned around and saw Bonnie and Juanda side by side on hooks. They were both cramped and uncomfortable looking as if they had been frozen in quarters too small for them to spread out in. I felt crystalline tears form in my eyes and I reached out . .
.

  The moment I touched Bonnie a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It spun me around and there was Bill, King of the Underworld.

  “Don’t mess with my dinner, Easy,” he proclaimed.

  I shouted and sprang up out of the cot where I had fallen asleep. My heart felt as if it had grown two sizes too large for my chest. And the despair I felt was beyond anything I had ever imagined except when I was a child and my mother died while I slept.

  The room smelled of sixteen men down on their luck. There were snores and farts and sighs and darkness. I knew where I was but for a moment I couldn’t remember how I got there.

  Slowly it came to me.

  After dinner I talked with Lewis for a while. He asked me about Jackson Blue from every angle he could think of. How long had I known him? What kind of gig was he into? Where was he going? And even how was he dressed?

  I realized that the men that had been after Jackson must have put out a bounty on the Coal Coyote’s hide.

  I tried to mask it well enough. I said that I saw him now and again in Compton, that he was involved with a counterfeiter that printed down in L.A. but distributed his product in Frisco and Vegas. But that was all hearsay, I added. I also said that Jackson was wearing the outlandish styles of Carnaby Street, elevator shoes and bell-bottoms, ruffled shirts and a feather in his hat.

  After that I retreated to the dormitory cot, where I pretended to sleep for a few minutes.

  When I awoke it was very late.

  I rose up from my cot and moved through the maze of sleeping men toward a strip of light that betrayed the door.

  “Do you see that man, Rod?”

  “Uh-huh, yeah I do.”

  “I wonder where he’s goin’?”

  “It ain’t none’a your business, mister. Keep your eyes to yourself.”

  I smiled at Roderick’s conversation with himself. He wasn’t crazy, just obvious and out loud. I would have had the same thoughts if I had seen someone walk by my bunk in that dark and hopeless room.

  THE DOOR BEHIND Lewis’s desk was unlocked and the light switch was on the left. The filing cabinet stood against yet another boarded-up window. It was locked but that didn’t matter. I had lifted a steel spoon from the dinner table and the bolt gave with very little pressure.