Little Scarlet

by Walter Mosley

  “Come sit down,” the woman said. “My name is Dottie, Dottie Mathers. What’s yours?”

  “Ezekiel, Miss Mathers,” I said. “Ezekiel Rawlins.”

  The woman turned to me with awe on her face.

  “Named after the Bible,” I added so that she wouldn’t mistake me for an agent of the Lord.

  The room she ushered me into had flowers everywhere. In vases and stitched into the fabric on the couch and stuffed chairs. There was a floral pattern on the wallpaper and little knickknacks on the shelves, coffee table, and windowsills that had various flower motifs. Moving between the images of flowers were cats. White, black, calico, and blond cats rubbing and mewling and looking at me with sultry half-interest.

  “Have a seat, young man,” Dottie told me.

  There was a cat on the seat she offered me. He didn’t move until I was almost on top of him.

  I counted seven felines and I was sure there were twice that number in and around her house. But none of that bothered me. The cops had not come to the door. I was safely hidden among the flowers and cats in the company of a white woman who didn’t seem to care about anything else.

  “Tea?” she asked.

  “No ma’am. All I wanted to know was about Harold.”

  “What a shame,” she said. “You know he used to come here to my door when he couldn’t take it anymore. That was a long time ago. More than twenty-five years. I’m one of the only people left who remembers it and that’s why Jocelyn hasn’t talked to me in all that time.”

  “So Harold and his mother used to live at Jocelyn’s home?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly right,” Dottie said. “I think her name was Honey.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember her last name?”

  “Oh yes, I do,” Dottie said in a pixilated sort of way. “Honey May. I’ll never forget that, because she had two first names. I always thought that was peculiar.”

  “Honey May,” I said, committing the name to memory.

  “That’s right. She seemed like a nice girl but I think she must have had a problem with the bottle.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “She just left one day. Didn’t even take little Harold with her. Left him with Jocelyn.”

  She had taken a seat in the middle of the flowery red-and-blue-and-green sofa. Dottie had a long face that was meaty around the jowls. Her nose was hefty and her cheeks round. In that face I saw Jocelyn’s face. I had been distracted by the large ears but now that I remembered it I could see the features of the Ostenberg woman again.

  “Jocelyn kept the boy,” Dottie was saying. “I suppose it was very Christian of her but you know, everybody would have been better off if she would have found some nice colored people to take him in.”

  “Why do you say that, ma’am?”

  “Aren’t you polite, Ezekiel,” she said beaming at me. “It would have been better because Jocelyn was ashamed to have people know that she was raising a colored child. She wouldn’t even take him to school. From the time he was five years old she made him walk the nine blocks to Redman Elementary. She never took him to the park or allowed his friends into the house.”

  “What about her husband?” I asked.

  “That man she lives with is her second husband,” Dottie said. “He’s only been there for sixteen years. Jocelyn’s first husband left years before. Harold left Jocelyn’s home when he was twelve.”

  “Twelve years old?”

  “Oh yes. I know because he came here to me the day he left. He asked me if he could cut my lawn for fifty cents and I told him yes. After that I never saw him again. Jocelyn told her neighbors that his mother had come to get him. But I knew better. He wanted that fifty cents for a stake to run away from home. And who can blame him? His mother a drunk who abandoned him and the woman who raised him didn’t even hold his hand when they crossed the street.”

  By then I had forgotten the police.

  A cat jumped into my lap and started pressing her nose against my hand. I scratched behind her ears absently. I imagined a lonely black boy living out in a white world where even his mother treated him like dirt.

  “You like cats, Mr. Rawlins?” Dottie asked me.

  “Better than most people,” I replied.

  “Hallelujah to that,” she said.

  41

  Hello?” a man’s voice asked.

  “May I speak to Miss Ostenberg?” I said into the phone in a booth on Chandler Boulevard.

  It was near four in the afternoon and I was waiting for a ride.

  “Who is this?” the man asked me.

  “Harold,” I said, “Ostenberg.”

  There was a lull and then, “Yes?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Was Harold’s father passing too?” I asked. “Or was Harold just a throwback from your side of the family?”

  “Who is this?”

  “If you don’t want me to have a talk with your husband, you had better tell me how I can get to your son, Jocelyn.”

  “I’m going to hang up,” she warned.

  “No you won’t,” I said. “Because if you do I’ll send that policeman to your husband’s place of work. He’ll be asking about you and your lineage, Jocelyn. How deep will he have to dig to find out who your parents are?”

  “I don’t know where Harold is,” she said, answering two questions with one declaration.

  “I need to meet with you, Jocelyn. I need to talk about your son.”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “I’ll give you an address and you come to me. If you don’t I’ll huff and puff right in your husband’s ear.”

  “You can’t blackmail me, sir,” she said from a high saddle.

  “I could if I wanted to, ma’am,” I replied humbly. “But all I want is Harold. You give me that and I’ll let you be.”

  “And if I meet with you you’ll leave me and Simon alone?”

  “I don’t care about you, Jocelyn. I never heard of you before yesterday and I won’t be thinkin’ about you tomorrow. But this evening when you come to see me I need you to tell me where I can lay my hands on Harold.”

  “I told you I don’t know where he is.”

  “Have you had letters from him?”

  Silence.

  “Do you have any adult pictures of him?” I asked.

  Again no answer.

  “I need to know anything you got,” I said.

  “Hey, Easy,” Raymond Alexander said. He was rolling to the curb in a golden Continental. A brand-new car.

  I held up a hand while telling Jocelyn Ostenberg my office address.

  “I want to see you by seven, Jocelyn,” I said and then I hung up.

  “WHAT YOU DOIN’ out here, Easy?” Mouse asked me when we were on our way back to SouthCentral L.A.

  “Lookin’ for Harold.”

  “You think some Negro bum gonna be out with the white peoples?”

  “How are you, Ray?”

  I asked because he didn’t look good. He was wearing an old pair of dress trousers held up by suspenders and a white T-shirt that was none too clean. He still wore the handmade alligator shoes but had no socks on. Most people would have looked at him and thought he was trying to achieve some kind of rough fashion statement but I knew better. When Mouse’s dress got rough, so did he. Something was bothering him and there was an even chance that he’d settle this problem with a gun or knife.

  “I can’t find Benita,” he said.

  “No? I’ve seen her just about everywhere I been.”

  “I called her and she ain’t there,” Mouse said. “I asked her friends and they haven’t seen her since before you took her home. You know you got me worried about her with all your talk.”

  There was an accusatory tone to his words, as if it were my fault she was gone.

  “She mentioned that she might go see some family down in San Diego,” I said. “Why don’t you ask her mother if you could get their phone number?”

  “Yeah. All
right. You know her mother’s worried too.”

  FOR THE ENTIRE ride Mouse was sour and silent. That wouldn’t have been pleasant in any companion but with Raymond there was always the added threat of homicide. He was more killer than anything else and so had to be handled gently and with great respect. An angry Mouse was like a grenade with a loose pin, like a hungry lion breathing down your neck.

  When we neared my office I asked, “How’s business with you and that dude Hauser?”

  “Okay, I guess. Mothahfuckah kept houndin’ me ’cause I wouldn’t let up on my private shit, kept sayin’ that he wanted his fair share. I finally had to say that we could either fight or he could get up off’a me. He didn’t even wanna pay you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, Easy. You saved our butts, man. Shit, it wasn’t just the cops that night. You know them mothahfuckahs had the National Guard too. Even if we woulda killed them cops, they woulda had men with bazookas on us. As it was, we did three more runs and once the police even waved at us. Waved.”

  With that he reached into a pocket and came out with a thick brown envelope. He handed the packet to me saying, “We made ’leven thousand dollars that night.”

  The envelope contained a stack of hundred-dollar bills and an emerald ring wrapped in toilet paper.

  “Three thousand dollars and a little sumpin’ from my private stash.”

  I held the ring up to the light. The stone was very large, five or six carats at least.

  “High-roller pawnshop over on Avalon,” Mouse said. “I been thinkin’ about them for years. They didn’t think anybody could get into their safe but I knew a torch man.”

  By then we were in front of my office. I couldn’t turn down the lucre. Mouse was giving me the money partly because he was my friend and partly because he wanted me to be implicated in his criminal activity. Telling him no would have put us at odds.

  I told him to call me if he hadn’t found Benita by morning. Then I went up to the only place where I could be the man I wanted to be.

  I PUT THE money and the ring into the bottom drawer of my desk.

  At home in the garage I had a little box where I kept all the extra monies I had taken in. That was for Feather’s college and Jesus’ future, whatever that might turn out to be. But Mouse’s money was something else. I had to do something with it that would redeem his crimes. I thought about how to achieve that goal but without much success.

  After that I went to the window and looked out on the street. There were no National Guards to be seen, but six police cars cruised down my block in the time I stood there.

  On my street, the effects of the riots were still in evidence. Small knots of people moved around listlessly from corner to corner. The police would break them up whenever they began to congregate. I saw one man getting arrested for refusing to move on. The riots were kind of like my fight with the wrong Harold. There was no real winner. Fear on one side, defeat on the other.

  42

  I was reading Banjo when she came to the door. The knock was so soft that I couldn’t place it at first. It might have been a cat playing with a ball of yarn in the hallway.

  But it was Jocelyn Ostenberg. She was still wearing that gray dress and she’d added a brunette wig. There was enough powder on her face to bake bread and her lips looked like they were painted with red nail polish. Rather than trying to be a white woman, she seemed like she was attempting to pass as a member of a lost race of clowns.

  “Come in,” I said to the garish woman. “Come have a seat.”

  I returned to my chair after the older woman was seated. She was carrying a big tan bag. I wondered if she had a gun in that purse. It bothered me that the idea wasn’t very far-fetched at all.

  “What do you want from me, Mr. Rawlins?”

  “Your son owes me six hundred dollars,” I said. “He stopped me on the street, asking for a handout. I hired him to work on a wall I was building and he ran away with my power tools.”

  The pinched expression returned to the tiny woman’s face.

  “You brought the police to my house for a bunch of tools?”

  “Good tools,” I said. “Power tools. And anyway, it’s the principle, not the money.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “On the day he was workin’ he talked about his life some. He talked about his mother, Jocelyn, so when he stole my property I looked you up in the book.”

  It was a weak lie, very weak. But it was all I could manage.

  “What do you do here?” she asked me.

  “I do research,” I said. It was close enough to the truth that I would have probably passed a lie detector test.

  “So then why were you building a wall?”

  “Tell me where your son is or I will tell your husband that he’s married to a Negro woman who has a Negro son running around Watts committing crimes.”

  “That’s extortion,” she said. “I could take you to court over that.”

  “Where’s Harold?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “He said that he comes to your house now and then.”

  “Not for years,” she said. There were tears somewhere near.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “You’re not doing this over some old tools.”

  “I have your number right here, Miss Ostenberg. And I will call your house before you can get there.”

  “It’s not right for you to do this.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, lady. Either you give up Harold or you give up your white life.”

  “Do I look like a black woman to you?” she pleaded.

  “You look like Bozo’s grandmother,” I said. “But I don’t care. I would go out in the streets and stage a one-man riot to get to Harold. So either you tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell everybody else about you.”

  I could hardly believe how brutal I was toward that fragile, elderly woman. But I knew that Harold had given rise to all kinds of sorrow and the woman before me had given birth to him. She was responsible and I wouldn’t let up.

  “Why do you want him so bad?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Where is he?” I replied.

  “I don’t know. You’ve seen him. He lives in the streets and alleys. He doesn’t have a phone or an address. He’s a derelict. Only thirty-seven and he’s just a bum.”

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “I told you. He’s worthless.” Her lips curled into a feral snarl. “He’s nothing.”

  “Is that why he’s killing black women who get together with white men?”

  For me it was her eyes. They opened wide at the accusation I leveled, wide and brown and down-home. She had the colored curse in her veins. I was sure that she saw it in the mirror every morning before dousing herself with powders and lightening creams, before she put on her wig and gloves and hat.

  It wasn’t the first time I had met someone like her. And I didn’t hate her for hating herself. If everybody in the world despises and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself, your face and features, your parents, and even your child. It could all happen and you would never even know it. And then one hot summer’s night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why.

  “What women?” Jocelyn said.

  You. The word came into my mind but I didn’t say it. Maybe it wasn’t even true but I believed it. I believed that Harold Ostenberg had roamed around the streets looking for a place to put his rage. He found women who had betrayed him as his mother had. He killed them and stole their memories.

  “The woman across the street said that you made Harold walk to school alone even when he was little,” I said.

  “Lots of children go to school alone. I was busy keeping the house in order,” she said.
<
br />   “She also told me that Harold ran away when he was just twelve.”

  “He was a bad seed even then. You know, Mr. Rawlins, that some children are just born bad.”

  “Who was his father?” I asked.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said. “His father left when Harold was just a baby.”

  “Was he passing like you?”

  “I don’t have to put up with this.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “Either that or you want me to go to your new white husband with this story.”

  For a moment I believed that Jocelyn was going to walk out on me. She certainly wanted to. She certainly hated me.

  “Carl came from St. Louis,” she said, defeated. “We met when we were both working for Third Avenue Bank. He was a loan officer and I was a teller. They thought we were white and we didn’t set them straight. But we could tell about each other. It wasn’t so wrong. We just wanted to get ahead. We wanted to work together. We bought a house.”

  “Just a nice white couple from back East.”

  “You have no right to judge me.”

  “But black-skinned Harold did,” I said. “Somehow you and your light-skinned hubby made a mess in the nursery. Harold would be like a shit stain on your sheets.”

  “You don’t have to be crude,” she said.

  “I have never once murdered a black woman, Miss Ostenberg. I never once drove a child from my door.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “Carl left me. He just went to work one day and never came back. I had no friends or family. All I had was Harold and he just couldn’t act right.”

  “You mean he didn’t know why he had to pretend to be your maid’s child? He didn’t know why Honey May was pretending to be his mother?”

  “You know her name?” Jocelyn asked.

  “I’m looking for Harold,” I said. “I intend to find him with or without your help.”

  “I don’t know where he is, Mr. Rawlins. He left me when he was twelve. I haven’t seen him since.”