Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 45 —

Jesus read to me from Moby-Dick and Feather bragged on her good math test. Bonnie served me reheated lamb shank in a cognac gravy, and I started on chores that I’d ignored for days.

No one called. There was going to be a robbery in the morning, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Before I went to bed I called Primo. “Hey, Easy. How you doing?”

“How’s the girl?” I asked.

“Still a little dizzy,” he replied. “Flower been giving her a special tea that makes her sleep.”

“You can stop that in the morning,” I said.

“Easy?” Bonnie asked, lying there next to me. I was staring at the ceiling, wondering if I’d get a wink.

“Yeah?”

“Did you finish with that business about Alva’s son?”

“Yeah. Finished.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Not no more he ain’t.”

“John is really lucky to have a friend like you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky as a prize pig after the county fair.”

I heard it on the radio at ten-thirty. Three black men and one white woman had gotten into a shootout with the city police and county sheriffs in Compton. The unidentified men were attempting to rob a payroll delivery for the Manelli Construction Company. They tried to run the armored car off the road, but little did they know that the authorities had been tipped off and the car was filled with armed officers. The would-be robbers had all died while still in their vehicle. The officers had opened fire when it became obvious that they were threatened by the sideswiping car.

I remembered the plans tacked to the wall in the thieves’ temporary hideout. They hadn’t planned to ram the payroll car. They were going to overpower the guards on their way to the office.

At work that afternoon I sat down to an Underwood typewriter and composed a letter to Teaford Lorne, captain of a special anticrime unit. In my unsigned letter I told him about Lakeland and Knorr and the extra-special police unit set up to take down the Urban Revolutionary Party. I sent copies of that letter to the regional office of the NAACP, the Los Angeles Examiner, and the mayor’s office.

I never read about it in the newspaper, but three weeks after I sent those letters I drove by Lakeland’s onetime headquarters. The building was up for lease. Maybe they had planned to close up shop after the killing of Mercury and his gang. Maybe I should have done more to bring their crime to the public eye, but I couldn’t think of a thing that wouldn’t have put my own family in danger.

Two months later I took my little brood over to John’s new house in Compton. He had invited us for a late-afternoon Sunday supper. Everybody on John’s side of the table was convalescing. He had wrenched his back from falling off the roof of the very house we were eating in. He had been putting up the last touch, the television antenna, when he lost his balance and fell.

Alva was just two weeks out of the mental ward in the hospital. When we’d gotten to the house she was still in her bathrobe, with her hair going all over the place. Bonnie and Feather took her into the bedroom and when they came out she was dressed and brushed and made up. The only wear you could see was in her pained gaze.

Brawly still had a limp from where he’d been shot in the thigh and buttock. John had rushed him to the hospital and stayed with him for two days.

“How’s L.A.C.C.?” I asked the boy.

“Good,” he said. “They got me finishin’ my high school courses. I’ma start college history classes next semester.”

It was a simple meal, made by Sam Houston and delivered by Clarissa, who couldn’t stay because she was due to work for her cousin that afternoon. Chicken and dumplings with a cranberry-orange relish and country salad.

Jesus told John all about his boat and his plans to travel up and down the Pacific Coast. He said that he was going to live off the ocean, eating fish and seaweed the way his friend Taki Takahashi’s father said they did when their grandparents first came to America. It was more than he had ever told me.

“The minister says that prayer erodes the grip of sin in the world,” Alva said at one point. She’d been reading her Bible every day while John and Chapman finished off his lot.

After dinner John and I went outside for a smoke. For a long time we just stared out at the sky. He was leaning against the front wall because of the injury and I was sitting on the stair.

“Nice house,” I said after a few minutes of silence.

“Yep.”

“You say you still workin’ with Chapman?” I asked.

John looked at me then. “Yeah. Why?”

“Oh. I don’t know. I mean with Mercury all messed up in that robbery attempt...I don’t know...I thought you might wanna let him loose.”

“He didn’t have nuthin’ to do with it.”

“He tell you that?”

“Brawly told me,” John said.

“Oh.” It was the first time John had hinted that he knew anything about Brawly’s dealings with Mercury and the crew.

“He was in on it,” John continued. “Alva was right about them people he was runnin’ with.”

“I guess the man who shot him that day saved his life.”

“They could’a killed him,” John said. “As it is, he’s gonna limp for the rest of his life. Doctor said that that bullet in his buttock came within half a inch from his main nerve.”

“Better lame than dead,” I said.

A harsh note escaped John’s lips. Someone who didn’t know him might have mistaken it for a cry of derision, but I recognized coarse humor in his tone.

“What about Isolda?” I asked.

“What about her?”

“Brawly still in touch?”

“He said she left L.A. The police were lookin’ to talk to her about Aldridge, and she asked him for bus money for down South.”

John pushed himself into a standing position and lurched up past me. He stopped at the door.

“You a good friend, Easy Rawlins,” he said. “But if I had my druthers, I’d never have to call on you again.”

He went into the house and I stayed outside, smoking in the desert twilight.