A Little Yellow Dog

4

It felt good to be headed down toward Compton. EttaMae lived there with her son, LaMarque, and, sometimes, with his father — Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.

They were together again in the early sixties. Mouse had a change of heart there for a while and wanted to be a family man, a married man.

The change came about late in ’61. Sweet William Dokes had moved to L.A. from Jenkins, Texas. Sweet William was a barber and a guitar player, somewhere in his sixties. He was a dapper man who had taught Mouse everything about good dress and conduct with the ladies.

Mouse took his own slant on what William had to say and left broken hearts, broken heads, and more dead bodies than anyone knew throughout Texas and southern California.

Mouse was an old-time gangster. A tough who could work with you or go it alone. He wasn’t afraid of prison or death, and that made him the kind of man that people left alone. Even the police didn’t come after Raymond unless they were sure they had something on him.

The first man he killed was his stepfather, daddyReese Corn. Some years later he killed his stepbrother, Navrochet, in a back-alley duel.

Over the years many of my friends have asked me how I could be close with a man like Mouse. A man who was a cold-blooded killer.

I never tried to explain. How could I? In the hard life of the streets you needed somebody like Mouse at your back. I didn’t have a mother or father, or close family or church. All I had was my friends. And among them Mouse packed the largest caliber and the hardest of rock-hard wills.

When Sweet William came to town he and Mouse took to the streets together. They plied the pool halls and whore-houses; they gambled and drank deep. William always had his blues guitar with him and because of that they were welcome in almost every door.

People commented on how much they resembled each other. Both had slight builds and long-fingered hands. You would have sworn that they were related and not just good friends.

Raymond treated William like a father and a friend. They lived together and shared the same women. For six months William and Mouse were joined at the hip. And wherever they showed up there was a party going on.

I hadn’t seen much of them because I was sick for a while and then I went to work at the school. Mouse and William didn’t wake up until the afternoon; by the time they were out on the town I was already in my bed.

So I was a little surprised one day when I got home to find Raymond with my adopted children, Jesus and Feather. Mouse sat solemnly in my favorite sofa chair while Feather offered him a glass of green Kool-Aid. Jesus was sitting at the dining table doing his homework. He was a freshman in high school and, even though he could talk by then, Jesus was still a very quiet boy.

“Raymond, what you doin’ here?” I asked.

“Let’s take a ride, Easy,” he said. He stood up, ignoring the glass that five-year-old Feather proffered. Like all females she was in love with him.

“Okay,” I said. I could see that he meant business.

“Don’t you want your Kool-Aid, Uncle Raymond?” Feather asked.

I knelt down and kissed my little girl’s light brown face. “Put it in the icebox till he comes back, baby,” I said. “We got to talk about something right now.”

We went out to my Pontiac and we drove off. I took a southeastern route because, like I said, that was the 1960s and black men couldn’t take a leisurely drive in white Los Angeles without having the cops wanting to know what was going on.

“It’s all ’cause’a my dick, Easy,” Mouse said.

It worried me to hear his words because they indicated that Mouse had been thinking — he was always his deadliest when circumstances forced him to use his mind.

“What’s that, Raymond?”

“You know I got me a big dick,” Mouse answered. “That’s a fact. I don’t know what the girls think about it but you know I like it just fine.”

I was impatient but with Raymond you had to let the story unwind. He couldn’t be rushed, so I concentrated on the white line.

“I mean, sometime it might be saggin’ a little but I could always get the mothahfuckah hard.” He slapped his steely finger against the dashboard. “You know Tisha?”

“Lawrence?”

“Naw, Burnett. Live over in the Russell projects.”

“I don’t think so.”

“She work for John, waitress over there. Sour-faced bitch, but she fine, an’ she know it too.”

“What about her?”

“I’ont know, Easy. I’ont know what happened. We was drinkin’ red wine. Maybe that’s it. But my dick was hangin’ down just like a goddam water hose. An’ you know Tisha didn’t like that at all. She say I’m a faggot and a punk. She said to get outta her house ’cause she need a man who could get hard for her.”

“An’ what you do?” I asked. I asked because he was my friend — but I really didn’t want to know.

“I went down to my house and started drinkin’. I was mad. Mad at my own goddam dick. When I got up it was early in the mornin’, ’bout four. I don’t know what got into me, Easy. I started talkin’ to myself like I was crazy. Talkin’ ’bout Tisha. And the more I talk the madder I get. Before you know it I’m out in my car headed for the projects.”

We were driving down Hauser. It was a sunny day, I remember. But the shadows seemed darker than usual. The people, out in front of their houses, looked grim.

“I pult up in front’a the projects; I was gonna get that bitch out the bed. You cain’t talk to me like that an’ get away wit’ it. Shit. For all I knew she got on the phone after I was gone an’ told ev’rybody.” Mouse stopped and stared angrily out at the street.

When we pulled up to a red light I turned and asked, “What did you do?”

“William was comin’ outta the courtyard when I drove up. He was walkin’ across the street to his car but when he see me he smile an’ grab on his thing. ‘Hey, Raymond,’ he say. ‘You sure right, man. That Tisha’s like satin.’ Like satin.”

The car behind us honked and I looked up to see that the light was green. I drove across the street and parked at the curb. I couldn’t stand the tension of driving and listening to that story at the same time.

“I didn’t mean to hit him,” Raymond said. “You know that woman didn’t mean a damn thing t’me. When William hit the ground I knew I was wrong. I was gonna say I was sorry. I was gonna buy him a drink — but he went for his gun, Easy. I swear he did.”

No more had to be said. I knew that Sweet William Dokes’s corpse was laid out on a slab somewhere.

“Cops picked me up at the house an’ took me down to jail this mornin’, but they didn’t give a fuck. They knew we’d been runnin’ together. One of ’em hit me a couple’a times an’ when I didn’t break down they let me go.”

Raymond was crying. Not blubbering or shaking, but there were real tears in his eyes. I had never seen him even sad over anything he’d done. Seeing him cry brought tears uncontrollably to my own eyes.

I didn’t know what to say.

Maybe just sitting there is what changed him. Maybe being in my company, coming from my house, he got the idea to go straight.

We sat there at the curb until sunset. The skies turned a black-tinged orange. We sat silently. I was thinking that my new life as a workingman was a good idea.

As it turned out Mouse was thinking the same thing.

When the streetlamps came on I drove us back to my house. Mouse didn’t come in. He got in his car and drove out to EttaMae, his ex-wife and soon-to-be-wife-again.

Etta called me the next day. She wanted jobs for both her and Raymond at the Board of Education. It was easy to get her in. She was a hard worker and had a clean work record.

The only job Raymond had ever held was making license plates at the state prison at Chino while doing five years for manslaughter.

But I was good at making things happen. I got Raymond a job as janitor under my supervision. And, so far, he did it just fine.

Southeast L.A. was palm trees and poverty; neat little lawns tended by the descendants of ex-slaves and massacred Indians. It was beautiful and wild; a place that was almost a nation, populated by lost peoples that were never talked about in the newspapers or seen on the TV. You might have read about freedom marchers; you might have heard about a botched liquor store robbery (if a white man was injured) — but you never heard about Tommy Jones growing the biggest roses in the world or how Fiona Roberts saved her neighbor by facing off three armed men with only the spirit of her God to guide her.

Etta lived in a small house that was by itself on a large lot. She had fruit trees and a large garden. There was a tan Ford parked on the lawn.

Raymond Alexander, wearing a soft gray work shirt and matching pants, was looking under the hood. He didn’t get down in it but merely looked from a safe distance. Mouse might have changed but he wasn’t ever going to get dirty if he didn’t have to.

“Mouse,” I said from my open window.

“I think it’s the generator, man. Battery spark just fine,” he said, not even looking in my direction.

“Jump in,” I told him. “I’ll take you to work.”

We took the long way back. I stopped by my Magnolia Street apartment building, and a smaller place I owned on Denker. I was still in the real estate business in a small way. But I no longer dreamed of making a fortune on speculation.

We didn’t even get out of the car. I just wanted to see the places.

Raymond sat next to me, quiet and thoughtful. He drew his right knee up to his chin and smoked a Chesterfield. He reminded me of a man sitting in a solitary cell. There was nothing to complain about because there was no one who could hear him.

“You ever go to church, Easy?” Mouse asked when we were about a mile from Sojourner Truth.

“I been in one or two, even on a Sunday sometimes, but I don’t think you could say that I ever properly went to church, not since I’ve been a man.”

“Oh. Uh-huh.”

“You thinkin’a goin’ to church, Ray?”

“I don’t know.”

That was a long talk for us at the time.