A Red Death

18

I came home to loud hammering. There were three men on my porch. Two of them were doing the carpentry. Boards had already been laced over the windows; there were bright yellow ribbons of paper across them. Right then the men were driving nails into fresh timbers across my front door.

“What the fuck you think it is you doin’ here!” I shouted.

All of the men were white and wore dark suits. When they turned around I recognized only one of them, but that was enough.

Agent Lawrence said, “We’re sealing the house against the threat of you liquidating property that may rightfully belong to the federal government.”

“What?”

Instead of talking Lawrence tore off a sheet of paper that had been tacked to the wall. He handed me the federal marshal’s warrant. It said that my property was temporarily confiscated by the federal marshal until such time that my tax responsibility had been determined; I made that much out. Two judges had signed the document; also the tax agent involved, Reginald Arnold Lawrence.

I ripped the warrant in half and pushed my way past the tax man. I went up to the closest marshal and said, “Brother, I don’t know what you’d do if a man threatened to take your house, but I’ve been told by the FBI that I don’t have to worry ’bout this until I done some work for them.”

The marshal was short. He had blue eyes and thinning sandy hair that lay down and stuck to his scalp because of the sweat he’d built up driving nails into my walls.

“I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Rawlins. All I know is that I got this warrant to execute.”

“But this is my house, man! All my clothes are in there. My shoes, my address book, I don’t have anything.”

The two officers looked at each other. I could see that they sympathized with me. Nobody likes to kick a man out of his home. Nobody decent, that is.

“Come on, Aster,” Agent Lawrence said. “I have to get home.”

“He’s got a right to hear something,” Aster complained. “I mean, here we are locking up his house and he doesn’t have anything but what’s on his back.”

“This is the law, mister,” Lawrence said. “All we have is the law, that’s why I’m here. I’m doing my job. And that’s what I want from you.”

Lawrence gave the men a hard stare and they turned back to their hammers.

I watched them for a minute. And while I did my breath came up short. Something started shaking in my chest.

“You cain’t do this, man.” I said it because I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t talk.

Lawrence ignored me, though. He took the two halves of the warrant and tacked them back up against the wall.

“I said, you cain’t do this, man!”

The tone of my own voice in my ears reminded me of Poinsettia; her crying to Mofass that she needed another chance.

The marshals were almost done with their job, so I put my hand on Lawrence’s shoulder.

He didn’t bother with the hand. He drove his fist into my temple and followed with an uppercut that I managed to avoid. The adrenaline was already pumping, so I hit him somewhere in the chest and then in the side of his head. When he doubled over I pushed him down the stairs.

I was just ready to go after him when I remembered the two men behind me. I was about to turn but then they grabbed me by both arms.

As they dragged me down the stairway Lawrence cried, “He hit me! He assaulted me!” He said that over and over. He didn’t sound outraged, though. It was more like he was glad that I had assaulted him.

The marshals wrestled me to the fence and forced me to my knees before handcuffing me to one of the metal posts. I was struggling and fighting, and maybe screaming a little. There may have been tears in my eyes and my voice as I warned those men to stay away from my house.

A small crowd of my neighbors gathered at the front gate. A few men even entered and approached the white peacekeepers.

The marshal who had talked to me approached the men. He had a calmness about him and was holding up his identification. As I watched him I felt a blow to the side of my head. When I looked around I saw the other marshal holding Agent Lawrence back.

“Stop it!” the black-haired, Mediterranean-looking man ordered.

“… we’re just doing our job,” Marshal Aster was saying to the men. He was backing them up. No guns were drawn. “Everybody go on home. Mr. Rawlins will explain himself after we’re gone…”

“I want him arrested for attacking a federal agent!” Lawrence shrieked. His lips stuck straight out and he shook as if he were freezing.

“Next time I’ll kill your ass!” I shouted from my knees.

The black-haired marshal dragged Lawrence out to the gate and the other man came to my side.

“You cain’t do this to me, man!” I said to him. “I ain’t gonna lose my house, my clothes…”

“Shut up, man!” he ordered. He must have been an officer somewhere, because the tone of his voice demanded obedience.

He knelt there beside me and reached for the cuffs.

“We’re going off duty after this, Mr. Rawlins. If you break the seal we’ll have to come by tomorrow and arrest you, if you’re still here, that is.”

He took off the cuffs and I jumped to my feet. I advanced on the two men at the gate with Aster at my heel.

“What’s goin’ on, Easy?” Melford Thomas, my across-the-street neighbor, asked.

“I want you to arrest him,” Lawrence said again.

“Why?” Aster asked. “All I saw was you fall on your ass.”

“I won’t take this!” Lawrence said, spitting over all of us.

Aster wiped his face. “We’re going home now. You want to come with us you better get in the car, or else you can stay here and arrest him yourself.”

Lawrence looked as if he might try it. But when he saw all of my angry-looking black neighbors he backed down.

“Don’t break that seal, Rawlins,” he said. “That’s an official barrier.”

And then they were off in their car.

I had the planks pulled off my door before they turned the corner.

Craxton was working late that night. Maybe he worked late every night, sitting up in some vast office plotting strategies against the enemies of America. I didn’t need to worry about communists, though-the police were enough for me.

“What’s that?” he laughed. “He had the federal marshal out there?”

“I don’t find it too funny. He kicked me upside the head.”

“Sorry, Easy. It’s just that you’ve got to admire a man who wants to do the job right.”

“What about me? I’m supposed to work for you and I don’t even have a place to sleep or clothes to wear.”

“I’ll make some calls. You just climb into your bed, Easy, and get ready to work tomorrow. Agent Lawrence will not bother you again.”

“Okay. Just as long you keep that man away from my house.

I don’t want him in here again.”

“You got it. I thought Lawrence had more sense than that. My request for your help was informal. I didn’t want to have to step on him. But I’ll do that now.”

I was satisfied with that much. There was a moment when we were both quiet.

Finally I asked, “So you still want me to look into this Wenzler thing?”

“Certainly do, Easy. You’re my ace in the hole.”

“Well then, I was thinkin’…”

“Yes?”

“About this, um, Andre Lavender guy.”

“What about him?”

“Well, I asked a couple’a guys I still know down there about him. They said that he got in trouble with the law down there and disappeared.”

“What kind of trouble was that?”

I was pretty sure that he already knew the answer, so I said, “I don’t know.”

“Well, Easy, I don’t know about any trouble he had. I know that he’s working with Wenzler and we’d like to talk to him. If you get a line we’d sure appreciate it. As a matter of fact, if you could lead us to Lavender we might not need you anymore at all.”

It was a tempting offer. Andre didn’t mean anything to me. But he was innocent of anything but being a fool and Craxton wasn’t promising me anything anyway. So I said, “Nobody seems to know where he’s gone to, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

I paced the rooms of my tiny house all night. I walked and cursed and loaded all my pistols. When the sun came up I sat out on the front porch, waiting for marshals.

They didn’t come, though. That was better all the way ’round.