A Red Death

9

I left Adolf’s and drove straight to John’s bar. I wanted a good-tasting drink in the bar of my own choosing.

That was about nine o’clock, so lots of people were there. Odell was at his regular seat, near the wall. Pierre Kind was with him. Bonita Smith danced slowly in the middle of the floor with Brad Winston in her arms. The bar was lined with men and women, and John worked hard meeting their demands. “Good Night, Irene,” the original version by Leadbelly, played on the jukebox, and a haze of cigarette smoke dimmed the room.

I saw Mouse sitting at a table with Dupree Bouchard and Jackson Blue; as unlikely a trio as I could imagine.

Jackson had on jeans and a dark blue button-down shirt. He also wore a baby-blue jacket with matching pointy-toed shoes. Jackson’s skin was so black that it glinted blue when in the full sun. He was a small man, smaller than Mouse even, and as cowardly as they come. He was a petty thief and a lackey to the various numbers runners and gangsters. He would have been what we called trash back then, but that wasn’t all there was to Jackson Blue. He was the closest I ever came to knowing a genius. Jackson could read and write as well as anybody I knew, including the professors at Los Angeles City College. He’d tell you all kinds of things about history and science and things that happened in places elsewhere in the world. At first I didn’t believe the things he’d tell me, but then I bought an old encyclopedia set from him. No matter how I tested him, Jackson knew every fact in those books. From then on I just took it on faith that everything else he said was true too.

But Jackson didn’t just read and remember, he could also tell what people were thinking and what they were likely to do, by just talking to them. Jackson would walk into a room and come out the other side knowing everybody’s secrets from just watching their eyes or hearing them talk about the weather.

He was a valuable asset to a man like me; even more so because Jackson never used his ability except to rat back and forth between factions of the criminal element. Give Jackson five dollars and he’d sell out his best friend. And you never had to worry about Jackson lying to you, because he was so cowardly and because he had great pride in the fact that he was right about whatever he said.

Dupree dwarfed his companions. He was a head taller than I and built to split stones. He was wide and burly with close-cropped hair and a great propensity for laughter. Right when I walked in he let go a terrific gust of guffaws. Mouse had probably been telling one of his grim tales.

Dupree wore drab green overalls with CHAMPION sewn into the back in dull red thread. We both worked at the airplane manufacturer for some years, before the untimely death of his girlfriend, Coretta James, and my entree into the world of real estate and favors.

But for all their showy qualities, Dupree and Jackson were dim lights compared with Mouse.

He wore a cream double-breasted suit with a felt brown derby and brown, round-toed shoes. His white shirt looked to be satin. His teeth were all aglitter with gold edgings, silver caps, and one lustrous blue jewel. He didn’t wear rings or bracelets, because they got in the way of weapons handling. Mouse’s color was a dusky pecan and his eyes were light gray. He was smiling and talking. People from other tables leaned away from their drinks to hear what he had to say.

“Yeah, man,” Mouse drawled. “He waits till the bitch an’ me was in the bed, not gettin’ ready mind ya, but in the fuckin’ bed. Then he jump out an’ say, ‘Ah-hah.’”

Mouse opened his eyes wide just the way the jealous lover must’ve done it. Everybody was laughing.

Jackson asked, “What you do then?” in a way that let you know he felt he might need that trick one day.

“Shit!” Mouse spat. “I kicked off the blankets an’ jumped up t’ face the mothahfuckah. I say, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ That boy was rowdy, but you know he took out a moment t’ look down at my big hard dick. ’Cause you know I got sumpin’ give any man pause.”

Mouse was a master storyteller. He had every man there wondering about his thing just like that jealous lover was supposed to have done.

“Then I go upside the dude’s head wit’ a lamp from the night table. Heavy clay job, man, it was so thick that it didn’t even break. Shit. That boy hit the flo’ hard.”

“I bet you got yo’ ass outta there in a hurry,” Jackson laughed. You could tell that Jackson had his hand on his own business under the table; that’s how some men maintain their security.

“Run? Hell no! Man, I was really ready t’ fuck then. I pulled that bitch down in the bed an’ got me some pussy like most men on’y dream of. Run? Shit.”

Mouse sat back and drank his beer. The men around were all laughing. Most people there were from Texas originally, but many of them didn’t know Mouse. They laughed because they loved a well-told lie. And Raymond didn’t mind, because he liked to make people laugh. But I wasn’t laughing. Neither was John behind his bar, or Odell over on his side.

Mouse never lied. That wasn’t his way. I mean, he’d lie to you if it was business of some sort, but sitting around a bar Mouse told true stories.

What I wondered was how hard he hit that man.

“Easy.” Mouse smiled at me out past the edge of his audience.

My heart thrilled and quailed at the same time. Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.

“Raymond,” I said. I moved past the others to sit at the small table. “How ya doin’, Jackson, Dupree?”

They both said my name and touched my hand.

“You heard I was here?” Mouse asked me.

“Yeah,” I answered. “I wondered why you didn’t come by t’see me.”

Mouse and I were talking to each other. It was like no one else was in the room. Dupree was calling John to get more drinks and Jackson turned away, telling a story to somebody at another table.

“I been out at Dupree’s house. I’m out there stayin’ wit’ him.”

“You coulda come t’ my house, Ray. I got room, you know that.”

“Yeah, yeah. Coulda done, but…” He paused and smiled at me. “But I don’t like t’ be surprised, Easy. It’s like that dude come bustin’ in the bedroom. You see, if I had seen my old lady fuckin’ somebody in my own bed, well, they both need the undertaker by then.”

I felt the weight of that. 38 through my jacket and on my right thigh. But my arms felt weak and I remembered how awful it was for my great-uncle Halley when he got so old that he couldn’t even feed himself.

“Ain’t none of us gotta worry ’bout gettin’ old, Mouse,” I said.

He laughed and slapped my thigh. It was a good laugh. Happy.

“But,” I went on, “that ain’t no reason fo’ you to go to Dupree when I got room right in my own house.”

“You seen Etta?”

I wanted to, but I couldn’t lie in his face.

“She come yesterday, stayed the night, and moved to a place t’day. Her an’ LaMarque.”

When I said LaMarque’s name Mouse jerked his head up. He looked me in the eye for a moment, and what I saw there scared me.

Most violent and desperate men have a kind of haunted look in their eyes. But never Mouse. He could smile in your face and shoot you dead. He didn’t feel guilt or remorse. He was different from most men. What he did, he did because of a set of rules that only applied to him. He loved some people; his mother, dead by then, Etta and LaMarque, and me too. He loved us in the strange way that he felt everything.

So I was unsettled when I saw the remorse and bitterness in Mouse’s gaze. A man who is already insane was frightening enough, but when he goes crazy…

“Where she go?”

“She asked me not to tell ya, Raymond. She said t’tell her how she could call you an’ she’d do it-when she was ready.”

Mouse just stared at me. His eyes were clear again. He might have killed me then. Who knows? Maybe if it all happened at a different time I would have acted differently. But I didn’t know how to give in to my fear. In two days I had prepared to lose all my property and my freedom, I had settled on becoming a murderer, and I had become a flunky for the FBI. I decided to let fate hold my cards.

“You ain’t gonna tell me where she is?”

“She upset, Raymond. If you don’t let her do it her way she gonna blow up at you, an’ me too.”

Mouse watched me like a little boy might watch a butterfly. John hovered behind him while he put down short glasses filled with various amber liquors and ice.

“Easy got yo’ number, Dupree?” Mouse asked at last.

“Ain’t ya, Ease?” Dupree asked me.

“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

Mouse laughed. “Well then, that’s business. Let’s have some drinks.”

Dupree got drunk and told stories after a while. Wholesome stories about foolish men at Champion Aircraft. The kind of stories that workmen tell. How somebody lost count when assembling a jet engine and how that engine blew the roof off of the construction bungalow. And when the boss asked what happened the perpetrator just opened his eyes and said something like “Somebody musta lit a match.”

At one point I asked Dupree, “You seen Andre Lavender ’round there lately?”

“Uh-uh, man. He got the politics bug pretty bad there for a while. Union. But then he just disappeared one day.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah, man. Gone. I think he stole sumpin’, ’cause they had all kindsa cops there. But no one know what happened.”

“Didn’t his li’l girlfriend…” I snapped my fingers trying to remember.

“Juanita,” Dupree said, frowning.

“Yeah. Juanita. Didn’t she know where he was?”

“Nope. She come around the plant lookin’ fo’im the next day, but nobody could help. But you know I did hear that Andre blew town with Winthrop Hughes’s ole lady.”

“You mean Shaker’s girl?”

“Uh-huh. They say Andre took her, his bank book, an’ his car.”

“No shit?” I let it drop there. Andre could wait for a while.

When Dupree passed out (which is what he did whenever he drank) we carried him out to the car. We piled him in the back and Jackson jumped into the passenger’s seat. Before Mouse pulled in behind the wheel he leaned very close to my face and said, “If you see’er, you tell’er that I give it a couple’a days. You tell’er that I won’t be denied. I will not be denied.” Then he grabbed my shirt with thin fingers that were hard as nails. “An’ if you get in my way, Easy, or if you take her side, I kill you too.”

As I watched them drive away I breathed a quiet sigh of relief that Etta had moved out of my house. I figured that EttaMae could handle Mouse, especially if she wasn’t with me.