Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 3 —

I drove my new used pontiac with all the windows down and a Chesterfield cigarette between my lips. Somewhere, way in the back of my mind, there was an alarm going off. It was like the uneasy feeling after a nightmare that you can’t remember. The worry had no picture, so it was more like a suspicion than fear. At the same time I was happy to be driving toward someone else’s troubles. The sensation of delight on top of anxiety made me smile. It was a grin that represented a whole lifetime of laughing at pain.

John’s lots were on an unpaved street that hadn’t been properly named yet. There was a sign where the street name should have been that read A229-B. John was building six homes, three on either side of the street. He was part of a syndicate put together by Jewelle MacDonald, the girlfriend of my real estate agent, Mofass.

Mofass had been dying from emphysema for the past few years. The doctors gave him three months to live about every six months or so. But Jewelle kept him going and made the few shanty houses he owned into nearly a real estate empire. Jewelle had put together six or seven colored businessmen to invest, along with a downtown real estate firm, in a couple of blocks under construction in Compton.

John was standing out in front of the first of his houses on the north side of the road. The straw hat, T-shirt, and blue jeans looked wrong on him. John was a night man, a bartender from the time he was sixteen in Texas. He was taller, stronger, and blacker than I, ugly enough to be beautiful and silent as a stone.

“Hey, John,” I said from the car window. My tires had kicked up a low-riding mist of red and yellow dust.

“Easy.”

I got out and nodded at him. That was all the greeting old friends like us needed.

“Nice-lookin’ frame, anyway,” I said waving at the unfinished wooden structure behind him.

“It sure is gonna be nice,” he said. “They all comin’ along good. Mercury an’ Chapman workin’ out just fine.”

John gestured and I saw the two men across the street. Chapman was hammering at a beam near the roof of one house while Mercury pushed a wheelbarrow full of debris. Both men were ex-burglars I’d helped out in my old life of doing favors. They used to make their living by tunneling into businesses the night before payday, when the safe was sure to be full of cash.

It was a good living, and they weren’t greedy — two jobs a year kept them in groceries. But one day they decided to hit a dockworkers’ payroll in Redondo Beach. That safe had too much money for the payroll, and within a week there were white men in cheap suits canvassing Watts, looking for the whereabouts of the two black burglars who specialized in payrolls.

When they realized their situation, Mercury came to me.

“How could you be stupid enough to knock over the dockworkers?” I asked him. Chapman had been so scared that he refused to leave his mother’s house.

“How we gonna know that they was mob men, Mr. Rawlins?”

“By the way they shoot you in back’a your head,” I said.

Mercury moaned and I felt for him. Even if he had been a white man, there would have been little hope for his survival.

When I called the shop steward at the dockworkers’ union, he laughed at me. That is, until I told him that I was coming down there with Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. Even the criminals in the white community had heard about Mouse.

I wore denim overalls the night of the meeting. Mercury’s and Chapman’s clothes were so nondescript that I can’t even remember the colors. But Mouse wore a butter-cream gabardine suit. He was a killing man, then and always, but back then Mouse didn’t question himself, didn’t wonder at all.

“They made a mistake, Bob,” Mouse said to the man who had introduced himself as Mr. Robert. He wore a long coat and hat and stood over Mouse, who, already a smallish man, was seated.

“That’s not enough —,” Mr. Robert began in his guttural, East Coast snarl.

Before he could finish, Mouse leapt to his feet, pulled out his long-nosed 41-caliber pistol, and shot the hat right off of Robert’s head. The two men who stood behind him gestured toward their guns but changed their minds when they looked down the barrel of Mouse’s smoking piece.

Mr. Robert was on the floor, feeling for blood under his toupee.

“So like I was sayin’, Bob,” Mouse continued. “They made a mistake. They didn’t know that you was who you is. They didn’t know that. Did you, boys?”

“No, sir!” Mercury shouted like a buck private at roll call. He was a bulky man with cheeks so fat that they made his head resemble a shiny black pear.

“Uh-uh,” Chapman, the lighter-skinned, smaller, and smarter of the two, grunted.

“So...” Mouse smiled.

The shop steward and the three thugs, all of them white men, had their eyes on him. You could see that they wanted to kill him. Each one was thinking that they probably had the upper hand in numbers of guns. And each one knew that the first one to move would die.

I was biting my tongue because I hadn’t expected a fight. I brought Raymond around for weight, not for violence. Why would those men get angry if we wanted to return their money? Along with the insurance from the legal payroll, they’d make a nice profit on the deal.

“All me an’ my friends need to know is what the finder’s fee is,” Mouse said.

“You must be crazy, nigger,” Robert said.

Mouse pulled the hammer back on his pistol as he asked, “What did you say?”

The thug was looking up into Mouse’s steel-gray eyes. He saw something there.

“Ten percent,” he uttered.

Mouse smiled.

We walked out of the beachside warehouse with $3,500 in our pockets. Mouse gave five hundred each to Mercury and Chapman and split the remainder with me.

The burglars gave up their life of crime that very day. I’d never seen anything like it. Usually a thief stays a thief; either that or he becomes a jailbird. But those men set down roots and started a new life. They married two sisters, Blesta and Jolie Ridgeway, and went to work in construction.

When I heard that John was building, I got them together. Jewelle had set up a traveling crew of workers who went from one site to another among her various investors. But each work site needed a couple of permanent employees to do detail work and prepare for the larger jobs.

“... and every house gonna be different, too,” John was saying. “Brick, aluminum-sided, wood and plaster. One-, two-, and three-bedroom.”

“You hate it, don’t you, John?”

An old hardness came into the ex-bartender’s face, a look that somehow seemed happy.

“Yeah, Easy. Here I am, out in the sun every day. Damn. You know I’m black enough as it is.”

“Then why you doin’ it, man? You think you gonna get rich?”

“Alva Torres,” he said.

I didn’t know John’s girlfriend all that well. She didn’t approve of his old friends, so he stopped seeing most of them. He talked to me on the phone every once in a while, but we rarely saw each other.

Alva was tall and spare, her beauty was pure, flawless, and hard — the kind of beauty torn from the pain and ecstasy of what it was to be a Negro in this country.

Alva didn’t like me but I accepted that because I once saw John grin when someone just mentioned her name.

“She wants me out of the nightlife and I cain’t say no,” John said meekly.

“So what you want from me?” I asked.

“Why’ont you take a ride with me over to our place? We can talk better over there.”

“Hey, Mr. Rawlins,” Mercury Hall called. He was coming across the graded dirt road, slapping his hands together like two chalky blackboard erasers.

“Mercury.” I shook his hand and smiled. “I see you still playin’ honest citizen.”

“Oh yeah,” he proclaimed. “Got to.”

“Mr. Rawlins!” Kenneth Chapman shouted. He was an ochre-colored man, very thin with the broad features of our race. His smile was the biggest thing I had ever seen in a human mouth.

“Hey, Chapman. Don’t you go shortchangin’ them nails now.”

His laugh was immense.

“Come on, Easy,” John said.

It was from the tone of his voice that I knew whatever John had to ask was going to require sweat.