A Little Yellow Dog

39

I called Raymond from a phone booth five blocks down from Philly Stetz’s hideaway.

“Could you come meet me up at Mofass’s place?” I asked the onetime gangster.

“What you askin’, Easy?”

“I just need some company, Ray. It’s tough men I’m dealin’ with, but it’s them makin’ money. I just need a friend to stand by me.”

“I ain’t totin’ no gun, Ease. I won’t do that. Not yet.”

“That’s good,” I said. “No need for trouble.”

We met at Mofass’s house and picked up Jackson. Mouse was driving a neighbor’s car that he’d borrowed.

“Good-bye,” Jackson said to Jewelle at the front door.

“Bye,” she said. “You gonna call?”

“Come on, Jackson,” I said.

“She sure is sweet,” Jackson was saying in the car.

“You got better things to think about, Jackson,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I reached over and opened the glove compartment in front of him. Inside was a wax-paper bag. We all knew what it held.

“We gonna sell it?” he asked.

“We ain’t gonna do a thing. All I need for you to do is to tell me where you got them bookie boxes hid.”

“What?”

“We cain’t cut you no slack without somethin’ to trade, Jackson. Those bookie boxes are worth your life.”

“They worth a lot more’n that.”

I don’t think he realized what he was saying.

Mouse, who was sitting in the backseat, put his hand on Jackson’s shoulder. “Let up on it, Blue. It’s time to move on.”

Mouse had a persuasive hand.

Jackson directed us to a Bekins storage warehouse on Pico where he had hidden his boxes. There were fourteen of them. Small black wooden cases, each one about double the size of a table humidor for cigars. Along with them he had a notebook full of the numbers of his clients.

“How do these things work, man?” Mouse asked Jackson. He had one of the boxes opened up across his lap, revealing a small transistor tape recorder and a large dry-cell battery.

“It’s just a circuit switch,” Jackson answered, a little distracted. “After it rings, the switch go off an’ the recorder go on. Then the one who call give their number and the bet.”

When Mouse smiled the blue jewel on his front tooth sparkled.

We all went back to my house to wait. Jackson didn’t want to go with us to meet Stetz, and we had an hour to kill.

“What the hell is this?” There was a dog turd in the middle of my neatly made bed.

I ran that dog all over the house. He scuttled under the couch and I yanked the thing away from the wall.

“He headed out t’the kitchen!” Mouse yelled out.

I ran right into the kitchen table and banged my thigh pretty bad. Jackson and Mouse tried to help me corner him but Pharaoh was too quick and they were mostly laughing anyway.

He finally took a bad turn into Feather’s room and I got him in a corner. He started yowling like Death had gotten hold of him — he wasn’t too far from wrong. The running had tired me and cut my anger a hair; if I had caught him a second sooner he would have had something to scream about. As it was I brought him out to the car and threw him into the trunk.

“Easy, you shouldn’t let that dog get under yo’ skin like that, man. He just a dumb dog,” Mouse said. “He don’t know what he doin’.”

I would have hit anyone but Mouse. I might have been angry but I hadn’t yet gone mad.

I cleaned up my bed and sulked on the couch. Jackson sat across from me, writing out his instructions on how to use the bookie boxes.

Mouse was squatting down next to the door — reading a book!

“You read?” I asked him.

“Li’l bit, brother. Li’l bit. EttaMae make me an’ LaMarque sit’own sometimes an’ go through his readin’ lessons. I picked up a little.”

“What’s that you readin’?”

Mouse showed me his gold-encrusted teeth and said, “Treasure Island.”

I could feel the world turning under my feet. At any minute I could have gone spinning off into space. My children were changing every day. The headlines spoke of every kind of tragedy. You couldn’t just live life anymore — that’s how it seemed to me; you had to take notes and study charts just to know how to take the same road to the same place you’d always gone. And even when you got there, it was no longer the same.

The morning edition of the paper was still on the front porch. It said that the Bird Man of Alcatraz was dead. The man who had become a scientist in his cell. He was a hero down among my people because he was one white man who understood the odds that we faced. The prison officials interviewed said that he was just a criminal and that the public, and the movies, were mistaken in thinking that he was a good man.

They had no idea of goodness or honesty. They had power and that’s what they thought was good.

I would have mourned the passing of Robert Stroud, but there was no time to grieve.

“All right, boys,” I said. “Let’s hit it.”

Mouse slammed the book shut and put it on the floor. He stood up and smiled at me like he had done so many times since we were children in the Houston slums.

Mouse stood up but Jackson stayed in his chair.

“Come on, Jackson,” I said. “You could wait for us in the car.”

“I cain’t, man. I cain’t go.”

I didn’t press him. I didn’t care. Jackson wasn’t going to be of any help. And I was happy that he played the coward; at least that way the world made a little sense.

“Mouse,” I called out.

“Yeah, Easy. I’m out here in the kitchen.”

I heard a drawer close shut and then Mouse appeared. He met my eye with a somber face. I shuddered but I wasn’t quite sure why.