Charcoal Joe

by Walter Mosley

  And there was a letter.

  Dear Seymour,

  I know that you’re very busy with college and that physics paper you want to get published. You’re a man now and men have to work hard to make it in this world. But you don’t live that far from here and I miss you dearly. You are the son of my heart and the most important person in my life.

  I’m writing to tell you that soon I’ll be leaving Los Angeles. I’m going to South America where I can get a house for little money and live off my savings. I won’t be moving for a while yet but I want to see you many times before I leave.

  I’ve only stayed in America so long because of you, because I wanted to be sure that you had everything that I never did.

  I love you,

  Mama Jasmine

  Seymour had already mentioned Jasmine’s leaving the country, but he didn’t say South America. I might have thought more about it but just then the only door burst open.

  I recognized the two big white men in their dark clothes. I had last seen them through the hedgerow in my backyard in the wee hours of the morning.

  I lamented my decision not to pop the trunk while scanning the desktop for another weapon. There wasn’t even a letter opener. Maybe there was something on the kitchen shelf but that was one step too far away. Seymour didn’t have a baseball bat or even a baseball. The only defense at hand was piles and piles of paper.

  I grabbed a great stack of handwritten notes and threw them at the intruders. The momentary flurry of wispy paper gave me time to pick up the straight-back pine chair from behind me. I threw it in the general direction of the men and then vaulted over the desk using my left hand as the spring and my left hip as the slide. I landed more or less steady and moved forward with no thought in my mind except the annihilation of my enemies.

  I did pretty good hitting the bald one with a left hook and his nearly bald partner with a right cross. The second man had taken the brunt of the flying chair so I turned to the first, bringing up a knee intent on hitting him anywhere between the groin and the nose.

  I don’t remember if my knee connected because of the sharp blow to the back of my head. The pain brought to my mind the odor of a ripe cheese. The autopilot that had driven me through the worst slums in Houston, Texas, and all the way through World War II made me pivot and hit the man who’d used a sap on the back of my skull. He fell back a step and a half. I remember thinking that if he went all the way down to the floor I had a chance at survival.

  But he didn’t fall and his friend, who had somehow come up beside me, laid a haymaker fist against the left side of my jaw.

  28

  Coming awake was a revelation; an event equal to sitting on my Big Mama’s lap while hearing the minister say, “And God said, ‘Let there be light, and the light was good.’ ”

  I was hurting, bound hand and foot, bleeding, and a little dizzy. Even though I was lying on my side on the floor, I had the feeling that I might fall.

  But none of that mattered. I was alive when I should have been dead. I had expected to give up the ghost and I was still breathing, still able to feel pain. This afforded me a shred of hope.

  My hands were tied at the tailbone and my ankles were bound so tightly that it felt like I had but one leg. There was no electric light on in the room but the window let in ample sun. The floor was carpeted with thin green material and there was one wood chair that I could see. Not only did my head and jaw ache but there were pains in my hip and right side. I imagined that I’d earned these extra bruises with the chair I’d thrown.

  I was a little queasy but not actually nauseous. I would have liked to urinate but I could put that on hold.

  They must have staked out the house, I thought, the two bald men. They were waiting for Seymour. When I came along, one of them made a call. That gave me the time to search the house. The boss, whoever he was, told them to grab me. That meant they were going to press me to give up the college student. And that was the small window through which I might escape.

  —

  The door to the small room came open and three men’s trousered legs walked in. The door closed.

  “Get him up,” a voice barked.

  Unceremoniously I was lifted and thrown in the chair. Once upright I could see that the two bald men had been joined by the third home invader. He had been the boss in my backyard and he held the same position in this small, sparsely furnished cell. I wasn’t so worried about my captors because I was trying not to throw up. My thoughts of escape were orbiting the sharp pains in my head and side.

  “Look at me,” the leader ordered.

  I obeyed as well as I could. The boss was the smallest of the three. He had brown hair and a boxy face with evenly spaced features. His mustache was uncalled for. His breath stank.

  “Where’s Seymour Brathwaite?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was looking for him when your friends showed up.”

  He hit me with a backhanded slap. A blow like that would have probably made Seymour cower and cry. But after a life like mine it was a simple declaration. I had to concentrate on not smiling at my torturer.

  “Where’s Brathwaite?”

  “I told you I don’t know,” I said to the floor with an emphasis I did not feel. “I was at his place looking for him.”

  “Look at me,” the leader commanded.

  Gazing upward, I saw him and the bald men at his sides.

  “If you don’t know, that’s too bad because you broke Arnold here’s finger with that chair and he will surely kill you if you don’t have what we want.”

  It’s an odd feeling to be bound hand and foot and yet involved in a dance. I had to believe that the three men were going to kill me anyway. The question was when. I couldn’t just blurt out my answers; they wouldn’t have trusted that. But the guy the short boss indicated did have a finger on his right hand trussed up like it might have been broken.

  If I pushed them too far they might kill me before I got the chance to craft my survival.

  “What’s your name, man?” I asked the boss.

  He hesitated and then said, “Gregory.”

  “Listen, Greg, I told you the truth. I was hired by Charcoal Joe to get Seymour outta hock. I turned him over to a guy Joe pointed me at and he took him somewhere I don’t know.”

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “They told me to call him Mary Donovan.”

  “It’s a woman?”

  “That’s what I thought but when he showed up I saw it was a man.” I opened my eyes wide, making an insincere plea for sympathy.

  “That’s not enough, Mr. Rawlins,” Gregory said. “Not nearly enough.”

  “I made a call to the guy,” I offered. “I remember the number.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look, man,” I said. “All I got between me and Arnold here is that number. You know I cain’t go to the police over this. You guys are safe from me. And you already kicked my ass. I’ll give you what you need but you got to let me loose.”

  “Can’t do that, blood,” Gregory said with manufactured sympathy. “At least not until I have Seymour.”

  “But once you got him you don’t need me.”

  “I won’t need to kill you either. I could tell Arnold to kick your ass a little more and then you could walk home from here. I might even give you bus fare.”

  For a moment I assumed the role in which I was cast. I felt that maybe if I really gave Gregory what he wanted I could walk away with my life.

  “All right,” I said. “All right. But you can’t call. I got to.”

  “Why?”

  “I already done business with Mary. He don’t know you.”

  “If he wants to save your life he’ll do what I say.”

  “Mary work for Charcoal Joe,” I explained. “He don’t know me from a hole in the ground.”

  “What’s the number?” Gregory insisted.

  “I’ll give it to you,” I said. “But if you call it and he hears your voi
ce that’ll mean your last chance to get at Seymour is gone and my d-death.”

  The stutter was not part of my plan.

  Gregory studied me then. He’d come into the room the man in charge but our interchange had the unexpected result of making me an active element in the equation. The information I had made me a part of the action; even an unwanted partner.

  “Untie him,” Gregory said to the thug-not-Arnold.

  —

  My feet were fine but my hands prickled and felt swollen like a bunch of sausages. For a full minute I couldn’t even bend my fingers.

  They led me from the small cell to a bright living room with eight windows covered by gossamer yellow curtains. Sunlight blossomed at these windows but no one from the street could see inside.

  “Make the call,” Gregory commanded.

  “Two-one-three area code?”

  “Make the call.”

  Even though my fingers felt like logs I was able to dial the seven digits. On the first ring Gregory picked up a second receiver and Arnold pointed his pistol at my forehead.

  The phone rang six times before he answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Mary Donovan,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m calling Mary about that job we did.”

  There was a brief pause that felt like a year and then he said, “What about it?”

  “I talked to Joe,” I said. Gregory was jotting something on the front page of a newspaper. “He needs me to see Seymour.”

  “No one told me about that.”

  “I’m telling you now,” I said, trying to put some authority in my voice.

  Gregory handed me the newspaper. Scrawled over the headline was a Culver City address on Red Maple Lane.

  “So you want me to take you to see him?” the voice on the phone asked.

  “I need you to bring him to me.”

  “Why not just talk to him on the phone?”

  “He needs to talk to him face-to-face.”

  “Why not—”

  “Listen, man, whatever your name is, Joe wants me to see Seymour. You got to bring him to me now.” I gave him the address.

  “That’s in Culver City.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “I don’t like the way this sounds. What’s up?”

  “Nuthin’s up, man. I just need you to bring Seymour out here to me.”

  There was another long pause. Arnold pushed the gun forward so that the muzzle was touching the center of my forehead.

  The last time I felt so hopeless I was in an automobile plummeting off the side of a Malibu cliff.

  “All right,” the phone voice said. “He’s sleeping. I’ll wake him up and we’ll come on out.”

  “ ’Bout a hour?” I asked.

  “Or less.”

  “Mary” hung up the phone and Arnold put his gun down.

  If I was Mouse I would have grabbed that gun and killed those men or died trying. Fearless Jones would have won the fight in Seymour’s apartment. But I was a man of strategy wishing it was me on a backwoods journey with Bonnie while the king’s corpse lay in state.

  “Should we kill him now?” Arnold asked Gregory.

  The short boss-man considered the question.

  “When we have the kid,” he said at last. “First we got to be sure we have him.”

  I chuckled a bit at the relief I felt for the one-hour reprieve the thugs had allowed me.

  “What are you laughin’ at?” the thug-not-Arnold asked.

  “Just thankful for the few breaths I got left, brother.”

  The bald bruiser frowned. I believed that he was in agreement about the brevity and the value of life.

  29

  I was tied up again. This time my legs and arms were lashed to the chair, which had been dragged in from the smaller room. Gagged with a washcloth shoved in my mouth, held in place by black electrical tape wrapped around my head; the only useful powers I had left were sight and hearing.

  The man with the broken finger, Arnold, pulled an armless chair to my side and sat astride it, backward.

  “Don’t worry, son,” Arnold said. “After we get your friend I’m going to shoot you right here.” He touched my right temple with the tip of a single finger. “It’ll be fast, like turnin’ out a light.”

  Knowing the time, place, and method of your death is a deeply existential moment. It was too immediate, too absolute for me to actually feel fear. Instead I concentrated on my instincts for survival.

  I closed my eyes.

  “You prayin’?” Arnold asked.

  I couldn’t reply.

  “Mayhew!” the man named Gregory barked.

  “What?” Arnold complained.

  “Let that man alone.”

  Arnold Mayhew grumbled and got up, leaving me to contemplate his boss’s words. Let that man alone. I was helpless and under a death sentence. There was almost no chance for me to survive. But what struck me, what caught my attention, was the fact that the boss had called me a man. I tried to remember if at any time I had been called a nigger by Gregory or his cohorts. Arnold had called me “son” but that didn’t feel racial.

  A virtual mute quadriplegic, I had nevertheless transcended racism because they were going to kill me for the danger I posed, not the color of my skin.

  Some victories are so hard-won that they might not be worth the exertion.

  —

  I wanted more time and I wanted it to be all over. I worried about Feather hearing I had died. I wondered if Mouse would find out who’d shot me and deal with them in the near future.

  The man-not-Arnold pulled the drapes over the windows, cut a small hole in one of them next to the door, and took upon himself the job of sentry. All three of the men had pistols in their hands. That’s how I realized that Gregory was left-handed.

  During the first half hour they spoke very little but as the time came for “Mary” to bring Seymour, the talk dried up completely.

  I was nervous but not scared. I’d been near death many times over the years but rarely did the Reaper move so slowly. It was almost like I had a disease that was killing me. I could still see the world moving on as I stayed behind—dying by inches.

  There came a sound. It was the softest of thuds.

  Arnold heard it too. He turned his head toward the back of the bungalow….

  “Somebody’s coming up the path,” not-Arnold said. “He’s black but too old to be our guy.”

  “Alone?” Gregory asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I smiled underneath the tape-gag because Gregory was now as worried as I.

  He looked at me and then down at his gun hand.

  I actually felt the sweat sprouting from my brow.

  “Drop your weapons!” a man shouted.

  Six cops had somehow entered the space. They were armed with rifles and shotguns, clad in bulletproof gear and Plexiglas-visored helmets.

  Gregory, the only man who might have shot me, dropped the pistol and fell to his knees on the floor, placing his hands behind his head.

  Arnold, moving by reflex instead of intelligence, turned his gun at the voice and was cut down by a dozen or more shots.

  The only mistake not-Arnold made was not dropping his gun fast enough and staying on his feet. He was shot twice and fell to the floor hollering in pain.

  The front door was broken in and another six cops in military gear entered. The last of these was Melvin Suggs. Melvin Suggs who lived not six blocks away with his grifter girlfriend, sometimes known as Mary Donovan.

  —

  When I opened my eyes (though I didn’t remember closing them) I was no longer trussed up or gagged. I was lying on my back in a hospital bed feeling no pain. I took in a deep breath and felt an ever-so-slight ache in my left side.

  Looking around the white room I noted the late-day sunlight in the window and the empty bed next to me. When I turned my attention toward the door, a white man in a dark suit saw me and went away.

 
I thought about sitting up but decided against it. When I closed my eyes it felt like just a few seconds passed, but it might have been more.

  “You are a fucking lucky bastard,” Melvin Suggs said.

  I opened my eyes again and winced at him.

  “What happened?”

  “You fainted.”

  “I what?”

  “Fainted…like a young girl in the hot sun.” He was grinning and I was alive.

  “That was a close call, Melvin.”

  “You can say that again. I know butchers can’t cut that close to the bone.”

  “I’m in a hospital?”

  “Brotman,” he said, nodding sagely. “You were pretty banged up and unconscious too. They wrapped your ribs. Doctor says they probably aren’t broken. But he gave you a shot for the pain. What happened?”

  “I was lookin’ for something for Seymour and the two big guys attacked me. I tried to fight, lost, and then the little one, Gregory…”

  “Chalmers,” Suggs added.

  “Him. He told me that if I didn’t produce Seymour that he’d ventilate my skull. So I made up a story about a man code-named Mary and hoped that you’d get the idea.”

  “Chalmers works for a man named Eugene ‘the Cinch’ Stapleton,” Melvin said. “You ever heard of him?”

  “No.” It wasn’t such a big lie. “Who is he?”

  “Troubleshooter for the eastern mobs. He settles disputes and tells who to do what. He’s big-time, Easy. Much too much for a guy like you.”

  “Aw, come on, Mel, the Constitution says that every man bleeds the same.”

  It was nice to wring another grin out of that ugly mug.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” the special assistant to the chief of police asked.

  “Like I told you, I’m working for Seymour Brathwaite’s foster mother, trying to get her son out from under a murder charge. A murder we both know he didn’t do.”

  “What’s she paying you?”