Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 42 —

The house that Christina Montes rented from Jaguar Realty was in the center of the block of a very residential street. There was no nearby nook where a spy could hide and survey them.

There was an alley at the end of the block. I backed in there, partially hidden by a stand of miniature evergreens that the last house had put in to hide the alley from view. I watched the white and blue two-story house and smoked cigarettes.

I’d been at my post for over an hour when Conrad cruised up in his Cadillac. Brawly was with him and so was BobbiAnne. Another man got out of the car, but I didn’t recognize him.

I tried to imagine what was going on inside. Not the mischief they were planning, but the surroundings they were planning it in. There was no indication on the rental receipt that the house was furnished. So they must be in a big empty room, sitting on the floor, surrounded by food containers and bottles. Maybe the guns were stacked in a corner. Their plan was probably tacked up on the wall so they could all see it while they drilled the operation, whatever that was, over and over.

Because the rooms were empty, their voices would make a slight echo, lending to the fervor of their convictions. There was no phone or television but there was probably a radio. Would they be listening to music? I doubted it. The dial was probably turned to a news-oriented station. They were worried about being found out and also wondering where Tina was. Did they know that she was going to bring me to them the same way that Strong brought me to the construction site in Compton? Was she involved with the killing of Strong? No. There was love for him in her voice. She loved both the older and younger leaders.

“What you doin’ here, man?” a voice said from behind.

I wasn’t worried. If it was one of the revolutionaries, I would have already been either dead or unconscious.

The man who spoke was short and wore matching ochre pants and shirt. He had a protruding belly and small hands with stubby fingers. Only his voice held any kind of threat.

“Hey,” I said, sticking out my hand. “I’m Troy. This your house?”

“Yes, it is,” the little man replied. He took my hand out of reflex but let it go before I could complete the perfunctory shake.

“You must be wonderin’ what I’m doin’ out here,” I said.

“Yes,” the little man said.

“It’s ’cause’a my girl — Royetta.”

“I don’t know any Royetta.”

“She’s my girl,” I said again. “At least that’s what she tells me. But I heard from Lucas that she been seein’ a man on this block. Yeah, every day, Lucas said, she drive down to this block to see some man. He didn’t have the address, so I decided to come down and use these here nice trees of yours so that she didn’t see me or my car when she come down to meet her sidetrack.”

It felt good to be lying again. It was as if I disappeared behind a cloud of black ink like the squid or cuttlefish.

The man I spoke to was muddy brown with many folds in his face. His head widened as it went toward his neck; with the folds, his head and face resembled a brown candle slowly melting down toward his shoulders.

“I don’t want no trouble,” the man told me. “This here is my property.”

The alley was a public throughway and not his property, but I didn’t say that.

“I don’t want no trouble, either,” I said. “But you see, Royetta got a sister named Cindy, and me and Cindy been messin’ around ourselves. Now if I can prove to Royetta that I know about her man, then when I leave her and take up with Cindy she cain’t get all that mad.”

“Can’t you just get your friend that...that—”

“Lucas,” I said. “Lucas.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a gold-colored Ford Galaxy drive past. I turned to my right to see where the car was headed.

“Can’t Lucas just say that he saw her with this man and that’ll be it?” the little man was saying.

But I was watching as Mercury Hall climbed out of his car and walked up to the revolutionaries’ house.

“No,” I said, returning to my fiction. “Lucas don’t wanna get in between us where he’s got to be there in the skin. No. I got to see for myself.”

“Well,” the little man said. “I don’t want you here.”

“I tell you what,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Foreman.”

“I’ll tell you what, Foreman” — I reached into my pocket and came out with a twenty-dollar bill — “I’ll give this here double saw-buck for the right to stand around in this public alley and look for my girlfriend to pass.”

If he had turned me down, I would have driven down to the other end of the block, but Henry Strong’s money was good. Foreman grabbed the twenty-dollar bill and shoved it in his pocket.

“How much longer you gonna be out here?” he asked.

“Two hours, tops,” I said.

We talked a moment or two more and he retreated with his reward.

I was there for more than three hours when the tribe finally showed their faces again. Mercury took BobbiAnne in his Ford while Conrad climbed in the Cadillac with Brawly and the man I did not recognize. They drove right past me and off toward Central.

With them gone, I should have called John. I should have called the cops. I should have gone home and started Jesus’s lessons and made it to bed early so the next morning I could get to work on time.

Instead, I walked straight to the hideout. I walked down the driveway and into the backyard. The back side of the home had a large porch that was walled in and had its own door. This door was unlocked. The porch contained a washing machine and dryer, modern luxuries down in the ghetto. There was a radio playing loud, too loud, so the sound of me forcing the lock might not have been heard if there had been anybody home to hear it.

The back entrance of the home was a slender hallway that was also the kitchen, small stove on one side, sink on the other.

I’d been right about the circumstances of the revolutionaries. The big living room was empty, except for white food cartons and paper plates used for ashtrays. There was a piece of blue-lined note-book paper tacked to the wall. Drawn in pencil was a square that stood for a building with a truck approaching and a car parked across the street from the door. Here and there X’s were in position to overpower the guards.

It was a frightening document mainly because it looked like the notations of a grade-schooler playing cops and robbers on paper.

There were army duffel bags in the entranceway closet. There were toothbrushes and towels in the bathroom. And a stack of smut magazines hidden under the sink.

One of the canvas bags belonged to Brawly. He had a pair of black and white tennis shoes and a pocketknife along with two shirts, a copy of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and a small spiral-bound notebook. Just flipping through those pages told me more about Brawly than anyone else seemed to know.

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a diary, but every once in a while there was a journal-like entry with a date at the top of the page. The first such entry, which appeared on the third page of the two-hundred-sheet notebook, was dated January 19, 1958 — more than six years earlier.

He wrote about BobbiAnne and how he could see her only at school because he had to return to Sunrise House, the halfway home, by four p.m. He also wrote, I miss Aunt Isolda but I know it’s better if I don’t see her. She only gets mad when I tell her how I feel...

The first thirty pages were in very dark blue ink from the same thick ballpoint pen. The next forty pages or so were in black. After that, he went back to blue pen. I was amazed that the young man could hold on to that one small notebook, each page covered with his tiny scrawl.

Along with his sporadic journal entries he had made small drawings of buildings, notes on school assignments, lists of resolutions on how to be a better man (a few of those were on how to be friends with Isolda), and sometimes there were simple reminders of where to go, what to buy, and what to say.

Less than six months earlier he had penned an entry separated halfway down the page. The top half was a list of requirements for service in the paratroopers. He had an ideal weight, number of pushups he should be able to do, and the reading level expected of new recruits. The bottom half seemed to be a comparison between superheroes. On the left side he’d listed Superman, Plastic Man, and Batman. On the right he had Thor, Mister Fantastic, and Spider-Man.

Three months later he was writing about the black revolution in America. Henry Strong had been giving him private instruction, telling him that his strength and intelligence had put a heavy weight of responsibility on his shoulders.

“It’s up to us young men,” Brawly wrote. “To lead the rest to freedom. We must be strong and willing to die for what’s right.”

A little later on he had received orders to “make contact with friends who could aid in the procurement of revolutionary funds and the maintenance of emergency refuge.”

Brawly came from a very different generation than mine. He was intelligent and ambitious, where I had been crafty and happy if I made it through the day. I never questioned the white man’s authority — that was a given.

But what really separated us was a need for love and his trust in people. He believed that there was a place for him and his in the world. I knew, from reading his words, that the only way to truly save him was to shatter this belief.

In one of the bedrooms there was a canvas cot with sheets and a pillow strewn across it. I imagined Conrad and BobbiAnne slipping away now and then to have sex on that cot. For some reason it reminded me of Isolda and her bedroom pictures. It was in that moment that I realized where those photographs had been taken.

I slipped out of the back door and walked across the street to my car.