“Did you two eat?”
“Uh-huh. I made meat loaf sandwiches and chicken soup.” Jesus had a lot of Indian blood in him; he was slight and dark-haired. He was also Hamilton High School’s best long-distance man in track; he might have been the best in the city at that time.
“You put tomatoes and lettuce in the sandwiches?” I was trying to teach them to eat their vegetables.
“Uh-huh.”
“You wanna tell me about that money up in your closet?”
“What?” He looked up from his notepaper.
“Don’t mess with me now, Juice. I saw it. Now tell me where it came from.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
That was the first time I didn’t hit him.
“Listen, I’m upset. I’ve had a really hard day. You got hundreds of dollars in your closet and I got to know if you’re going to jail or not. So tell me where it came from or I might get mad.” I said that all in a calm voice but anyone with half an ear could have heard the violence underneath.
“It’s ours.”
“And where did we get money like that?”
“You know,” Jesus said. I almost smiled because it was so rare to hear the boy flustered. “I saved it.”
“Where’d you get it from?” I asked.
It was during the boy’s long silence that I didn’t hit him for the second time.
“Well?”
“I got it from you,” Jesus said simply.
“From me?”
I realized that the palms of my hands had gotten hot because suddenly they cooled.
Jesus squinted at me, looking like a sailor trying to peer through a high wind. He nodded.
“You stole from me?”
He didn’t have an answer.
“Juice, I’m talking to you. This ain’t nuthin’ like takin’ twenty-five cents from my change drawer.”
“I took it,” he said. “I took it …”
“Where? Where’d you take it from?” I was thinking about the cash box that I kept hidden under a sloppy pile of bricks at the back of the garage. The garage was locked, and there was a lot of brick. No burglar would find it, but a healthy inquisitive boy might.
“I took it from the grocery money,” Jesus said.
“Don’t lie to me now, boy. I don’t give you that kinda money for groceries.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’re you talkin’ ’bout?” I took a violent step toward the table. Jesus was up and around the other side with all the speed and graceful awkwardness of a young deer.
“If you give me ten dollars for stuff and if I save some coupons and stuff, then I took the money I saved and put it in my money box.”
“That’s some shit, boy.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I did too take it out of the shopping money.”
“If you did that, then where’d all these big bills come from? You didn’t get any twenty-dollar bills in change from Safeway.”
“But if I saved up enough change and dollars then I’d use them and keep the big bills.” Jesus was almost pleading. I knew that every word was true.
“You been stealin’ from me for years?” The rage in my chest was beyond any anger I could have felt at my son. It was Principal Newgate, Idabell Turner, and Sergeant Sanchez that made me rage. I knew it but I just couldn’t help myself.
“You know, Jesus,” I said, “the only reason I don’t kick the shit outta you is ’cause I want to. We gonna talk about this later, but in the meantime I don’t want you spendin’ one goddam dime’a that money. Do you understand me?”
He started to say something but then nodded instead.
“Go on then.” I wanted to talk more to him but I was just too angry.
BY TWO A.M. I’d gone through every scrap of paper in Holland Gasteau’s fat wallet. I supposed that the man was Holland Gasteau because his driver’s license said so. I also figured that there was something wrong with him. He had over seven hundred dollars in his pocket. An everyday workingman only carried around what he needed for a day or two—all the rest of an honest man’s money was out paying bills or stacked in the bank for a rainy day. So Mr. Gasteau was either a fool, trying to be a big man on the street flashing his money roll, or he was a crook. Seeing the condition I found him in I figured that he was both.
But he was a workingman too.
There were fourteen check stubs from the Los Angeles Examiner shoved in his wallet. He’d received seventy-four dollars and nineteen cents a week up until mid-April of that year. There were six or seven racing tickets—two-dollar bets.
But the most interesting thing in his wallet was a note, a letter actually, scratched in peacock blue in the smallest print that I have ever seen. It was written on a sheet of paper that was half the size of a standard typewriting leaf.
Idabell you know that I love you and that I need you too. It’s only me and you in this world and I would never NEVER hurt you unless it was the best for both of us. I only took your peepee dog because that was the only way to make you do what’s going to make us rich and happy and you won’t have to work anymore unless you want it and people won’t believe that they can walk on me because they know that they got more money in their pockets while I’m down at the paper shack on my knees on the dirt floor.
I’m too classy for all that Idabell. You know I am. I know you’re out there right now taking a chance but that can’t be helped. Only you could do it and so I had to make the decision for what was the best for the both of us. Don’t worry. If you get in trouble I will take the blame. If you do it all fine then you could have Peepee and a house that’s paid for and a man you could be proud of. But because you know you got to trust me and then everything will work out fine.
I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ALL OF IT. I wasn’t even sure what it was. A note to himself? A letter he intended to send? He was very careful not to say what it was that Idabell was doing. But he couldn’t hide how nutty and childish he was. His note reminded me of a twelve-year-old pretending with adult words and ideas. Not a mature child like Jesus but some kind of crazy unloved boy who pulled the tails off lizards and threw rocks at girls he liked.
There were scraps of papers with notes and numbers written on them but nothing that made any sense. When I’d finished I took the wallet and buried it under the pile of bricks in the garage.
The whole time I had the feeling that someone close by was searching for me. It was my imagination I knew, but it took that kind of fancy for poor men to survive where I’d come up. My imagination was urging me to hurry up and finish the game before I lost it all.
I wasn’t afraid, exactly. I rarely got frightened unless I was faced with immediate danger. But there was anxiety rooting around in my gut. It’s the kind of feeling I’m sure birds get when it’s time for them to fly south.
Whatever it was, worry or instinct, I wasn’t sleepy. I was so tired that it was hard for me to rise up out of my chair, but my mind was running like a hound that just caught the scent of blood.
I couldn’t sleep, so I sat down to read the papers.
Maybe it was just my mood but the news seemed especially bad. Volcanoes erupting in Alaska. A military coup in Iraq. Thirty people dead in a retirement-home fire in Atlantic City. The only thing I learned worthwhile was that it was supposed to rain the next day.
I was wondering where I’d put my umbrella when I saw something moving from the corner of my eye. Over near the hallway door Pharaoh was hunkered down with his snout pushing forward. He was giving me the evil eye.
“An’ you know when a animal hate ya,” Momma Jo, Mouse’s swampland voodoo godmother, once told me. “You need a counterspell a’cause that mean the whole world have turnt against ya.”
It was a memory from so long before that it seemed like I had made it up. But real or fancy, those words struck me. It was late and a good time to take Pharaoh from my house. I couldn’t have killed him. But I could take him out somewhere and let him go. At least he’d have some chance to sur
vive on the streets. I’d survived when I was just a boy.
I moved to rise from my chair. Pharaoh growled and took half a step back. I halted, preparing for my lunge.
My big toe was digging into the carpet and I was ready to leap when the doorbell rang.
The doorbell at three A.M. had only meant one thing in my L.A. experience—the police. Pharaoh and I both looked at the door and then at each other. Then he started yelping for his life. I don’t think he actually knew that there was a cop out there, but he smelled the fear on me.
There was no help for it. No hand in front of my face was going to save me from Sanchez. The Horns could take care of the kids while I was in jail. Maybe my old friend Primo or Etta could take them after that.
The bell rang two times more before I had the heart to answer. By that time Pharaoh was howling.
I opened the door and he walked in, right past me, and sat down in the sofa chair. He sat heavily like a man at the end of an especially hard job.
“Mouse!”
“You got a drink, Easy?”
“Naw, man. I gave it up. You know that.” I was so relieved that I didn’t complain. All I felt was a sense of relief that was laced with exhaustion.
“That’s all right,” he sighed. “That’s all right. You know I got my spot right here.” He took a flat bottle of scotch from his back pocket.
As he tilted the liquor to his lips I had the strange feeling that it was me knocking back a drink.
Pharaoh crawled up beside him and nuzzled his hand for a caress. Mouse scratched him behind the ear. I sat down opposite them realizing that I had been up for almost twenty-four hours.
After a while I said, “Raymond, it’s after three.”
He turned his stony gray eyes at me.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You know, Easy,” he began, “I done some terrible things.”
The silence that followed his declaration was such that we could have been on a stage or in a courtroom, the performance just begun.
“You remember Agnes Varel?” he asked. “An’ her boyfriend, what was his name?”
“You mean back in Houston?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” He took another sip. The smell of alcohol caught in the back of my throat and made me cough.
“Cecil,” I said. “Her boyfriend was Cecil.”
“Mmm.” He nodded, not really remembering. “Etta was down Galveston an’ he was at work. Agnes told me to come on upstairs. You know I hardly got on my shoes ’fore I was there. I got inta that stuff.” For a moment the old Mouse rose out of the sad man. “She was walkin’ on the moon, an’, baby, I was right up there wit’er. I mean that woman had five hands, two mouths, an’ on top’a that she could fly. You know we go at it for a while an’ then lay back an’ she be lookin’ at me like a wildcat be lookin’ up a tree. An’ then we was prowlin’ again.
“We been goin’ at it for half the night when her boyfriend walk in. He all mad an’ yellin’ high like a girl. I jump up offa Agnes hard as a motherfuckin’ rock. I say, ‘What?’ An’ ’fore he could do anything I grabbed a bottle an’ th’ew it upside his head.”
Mouse stared at my wall, seeing that long-ago scene there. Pharaoh leapt up into his lap. Mouse’s eyes blinked slowly and I felt the fumes of his whiskey swimming around my head.
“I wanted to finish wit’ Agnes but she’s all scared that he’s hurt. But you know when he was laid up in bed she come on down an’ finished our li’l job. Hm. An’ you know sumpin’, Easy?”
“No, Raymond. What?”
“I don’t feel a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing. I mean, I know it’s wrong but I don’t care. I don’t feel good about it neither. It just happened. I just did what I did. That’s all. Ain’t no more to it. I coulda killed the motherfuckah. If I had a gun in reach I probably would have. Just like with William. But you know it’s just water off my back.” He paused for a second. I remember thinking, half dreaming, that it was more likely blood than water that he shook off so casually.
“You met William down in Pariah, right, Ease?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He was sumpin’, right? Make that guitar sing like it was a bird. A gottdamned bird.”
“It ain’t your fault, Raymond,” I said.
“What?” His voice was so light that it could have been a child asking.
“It’s not your fault. You wouldn’ta been up there wit’ Agnes if she didn’t ask you. And Cecil still married her after all that. William knew the company he kept. Shit. He died livin’ more than most men ever even dream about.”
Mouse heard my voice but the words didn’t seem to register. He frowned when I mentioned William.
“I got to thinkin’ ’bout Agnes up in the manual arts building; got to thinkin’ that it was the same shit that put William down in his grave,” Mouse said.
“How come you thinkin’ ’bout that?”
“That policeman come up to me on the third flo’a the manual arts buildin’. I was doin’ the windahs an’ he come up an’ ask if I wasn’t Alexander.”
“What he want?”
“He said that he knew who I was, that they were aware’a me down at the station. Then he look at me like I’ma fall apart right there. But you know, man, I ain’t scared’a him. He couldn’t take a damn thing from me. But then he showed me a Polaroid picture of that man they found. He asked me if I knew him.”
“Did you?”
“Not that I told him, I didn’t. But you know that picture stayed in my mind. It was in my mind all night. I kept on seein’ him an’ then all the other people I seen dead, daddy Reese, that sheriff in Texas … William …” Mouse trailed off for a few seconds. Pharaoh stood at attention in his lap, his jaundiced ears perked up. “You ever think that William looked like me?”
“I’ont know. You light-complected an’ light-eyed. He wasn’t all that light.”
“My momma was part Indian, part Negro, an’ then there was some white in there too. I don’t know what exactly but I could be a mix of her and William.”
It was strange that Momma Jo came to my mind a second time that night. I hadn’t thought about her in years. She had as much as told me that William was Raymond’s father. That’s why he came around from Jenkins every now and then when Mouse was growing up.
“I can’t see that,” I lied. “If he was your father why wouldn’t he have said so?”
“Maybe ’cause he had a problem wit’ my momma. Maybe … I don’t know.”
“What you sayin’, Raymond?”
“That maybe I killed my own blood.” There was a dangerous look in Mouse’s eye. A look that said someone had done him wrong.
When Mouse reached for his bottle, Pharaoh cringed down between his knees.
I took one deep breath, then another. I felt sleep coming on but I was afraid to let go. Raymond was nodding too.
“I come here to ask you what you think, Easy. You good about feelin’s and all.”
“You wanna know what I think?”
“Yeah.”
We were both battling the sandman.
“I think you should wait for a while. Wait and see. Right now it’s just too soon. You don’t have no kinda handle on it. You an’ Etta an’ LaMarque just startin’ out again. I think one day real soon you’ll wake up and be happy with your family and so these things you thinkin’ will be far off like. Far off.” The words seemed to call to me.
“You mean like I’ll get a sign tell me which way to go?” Mouse asked.
My eyes were closed. I was drifting on the way to a dream. “Yeah,” I remember saying. “Like a sign.”
CHAPTER 10
FEATHER WAS SQUEALING on the floor next to the couch. She squirmed on her back with Pharaoh switching his rat tail back and forth across her stomach like a windshield wiper. Mouse was coming awake on the chair across from me.
“Hi, Dad,” Jesus said from the dining table. And then to Feather, “Come on, little sister. Breakfast.”
; “No,” she said playfully.
But she got up.
Mouse groaned and leaned forward. “Easy, you goin’ in?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess.” All the problems from the day before were quickly settling back into my mind.
“Mind if I sleep in your bed awhile?”
“Go on.”
He got up and staggered toward the hallway.
Before he was gone I called after him, “Raymond.”
“Yeah?”
“You told Sanchez that you didn’t know that man, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But did you know’im?”
“I seen’im. Up at the school.”
“Beginnin’ of the semester?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. He was wit’ Mr. Langdon down in the wood shop.”
“What they do there?”
“I’ont know, man. Wasn’t none’a my business.”
He went off toward the toilet. While he was there I got clean clothes out of my bedroom closet. When Mouse sacked out I took a shower and shaved. It was almost eight o’clock by the time I was finished. It would be the first time that I’d ever been late for work.
Pharaoh had to stay with us for at least one more day. I wouldn’t have been able to bear my daughter’s tears that morning. I left the house with them romping around the living room, having the time of their lives.
I went to the external lot of the lower campus first. Her car wasn’t there. I looked into C2. A tall white man, a substitute teacher, was guiding the students through their algebra.
I drove around to the main campus then, wondering how much longer I’d be able to hold on to my job.
THE OLEANDER BUSHES along the front of the old school were decorated with white flags. T-shirts, handkerchiefs, corners torn from old sheets. They were hung from branches and spread out over the grass.
Glue sniffers’ rags. Boys, and some girls, crawled behind the bushes in the middle of the night with airplane model glue. They emptied the metal tubes into cloth and breathed deeply, almost eating the poison. Afterwards they staggered out into the streets, grinning like idiots. A few months of glue and half their brains were eaten away.
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