Little Scarlet

9

I was up before five. After donning my day’s costume I shook Bonnie out of bed. She wrapped herself in a housecoat without complaint. She didn’t even stop to make a cup of coffee, just staggered out to her pink Rambler and turned over the engine.

Neither Feather nor Jesus would be up before seven. By then Bonnie would be back in her bed.

On the ride to my office Bonnie and I said very little. She was slow to wake up the first day after coming back from Europe. But she wouldn’t let me take a taxi.

The sun was rising but not risen. The streets were fairly empty until we crossed Florence. After that we came across the occasional army Jeep. Two trucks full of armed soldiers sped past us at one point. There were groups of soldiers on a few major corners. But the main thing we saw was the wreckage left by the riots.

Bonnie gasped and sighed with every new ruin we passed.

On Avalon and Central and Hooper the burned buildings outnumbered the ones still intact. There was at least one torched car hunkered down at the curb on almost every block. Debris was strewn along the sidewalks and streets. Smoke still rose here and there from the wreckage. Furtive shadows could be seen sifting through the debris, searching for anything of value that had been overlooked.

City buses were running and the police made their presence felt. They were still riding four to a car, some wearing riot helmets or holding shotguns upright in their laps. They were still jumpy from days and nights when the Negro population rose up and fought back.

Bonnie let me off in front of my building. She kissed me and told me to be careful and then she kissed me again.

“Call if you’re going to be late, honey,” she said. “You know Feather will be worried.”

I kissed her and then walked off to my car.

TRINI’S CREOLE CAFé on 105th and Central was just an open-air coffee stand with a fancy name. All Trini had were a counter and six stools under a dirty yellow awning.

“You opened the minute they called the curfew off, huh, Trini?” I said to the open-air restaurateur.

“I been open every day, Mr. Rawlins,” Trini replied.

“With all this riotin’ and snipin’ goin’ on?” I asked.

“Dollar don’t make itself, brother.”

He had straight black hair from his Mexican father and the chocolate brown face and flat nose of his mother, who worked in the kitchen.

“Didn’t they give you any trouble?” I asked after enjoying the first real laugh I’d had in a week.

“Most of your serious riotin’ was done at nighttime. I’m mainly a breakfast place. I had looters, rioters, even cops and soldiers buyin’ coffee and jelly doughnuts.”

“Cops and looters at the same counter?”

“Oh yeah. You know the cops come six and eight at a time, and so it wasn’t too much to worry about. But mostly it was just neighborhood peoples comin’ out for to see what had been burnt down and tryin’ to feel a little normal.”

“Weren’t you supposed to be closed?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. They come by and told me to shut down a time or two but what was they gonna do, book me with the bombs goin’ off around their heads?”

I laughed again. Trini was about my age. He held himself like an elder, though. Wisdom was his crutch. He never worried about anything because he could explain it all away with a few sage words.

“So I guess you know all the dirt, huh?” I asked.

“So much I got to wash my hands every ten minutes.”

I smiled. “Lemme have another one’a those lemon-filled doughnuts, will ya?”

The sun was up and the streets were halfway normal. While Trini got my doughnut, I turned over a question in my mind.

The stock-and-trade of wise men was to educate. That meant they always had to feel they knew something you didn’t know. So when asking a question of a wise man it was always best to ask it in the wrong way.

Trini brought my doughnut on a thick tan plate.

“You hear about some white dude got dragged outta his car and killed down on Grape Street?” I asked when he set the plate down.

“You ain’t got that one quite right, Easy,” he replied.

“No? Why not?”

“There was a boy drivin’ ’round lookin’ at the play when a couple’a the brothers saw him and drug him out for a dustin’.”

“They didn’t kill him?”

“Nope. Just a citizen that some’a our boys beat on. They say he run off so quick that nobody could catch him. Nobody said nuthin’ about no body.”

“I ain’t read about that at all.”

“That’s street talk, brother. You know what it’s like.”

“So you sayin’ a white boy come down here in his car and gets dragged out and beaten and the papers don’t even cover it?” I shook my head as if to say that that just couldn’t be true.

“Oh yeah, Easy. Yes sir. Bobby Grant told me himself and he live right around the corner from there.”

I sucked the lemon custard out of its pastry pocket. I liked Trini’s mother’s lemon filling because she didn’t add so much sugar that the lemon lost its tang.

“You got some cigarettes back there, Trini?”

“What’s your brand this week?” he asked.

“I’m gonna need a man’s cigarette down around here,” I said. “How about Chesterfields or Pall Malls.”

“I only got Lucky Strike in the filterless, Easy.”

“Gimme one’a them then . . . no, no. Gimme two packs.”

I COULD HAVE asked Trini for Bobby Grant’s address or phone number—if I wanted everybody who came into his shop for the next three days to know about it. The reason so many people braved the violent streets to come to Trini’s café was that they knew all the information of the neighborhood filtered through him. Anything he heard he repeated. And Trini had a piercing voice, so he could be talking to a man at one end of the counter and you heard every word six stools away.

Bobby Grant wasn’t in the phone book but that was no surprise. Back in 1965 a good half of your poor people didn’t have phones. They used one in the hall or maybe a relative’s line across the street.

WHEN RAYMOND “MOUSE” Alexander first moved to L.A., he gave Information his name to go along with my number. I still remember the look he gave me when I told him that I had his listing removed.

Mouse was a serious man who had killing in his blood. Telling him no was as dangerous a task as moving nitroglycerine in a truck with no shock absorbers.

“What you say, Easy?” the little gray-eyed killer asked. I remember that he was wearing an outrageous orange suit and a brown porkpie hat.

“It’s either that or you gonna have to shoot me,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Ray,” I said, “you got women callin’ me on the line day and night. ‘Where’s Raymond? Do you know how I can find Mouse? What’s your name, honey? You sound nice.’ I know you don’t like nobody messin’ with your women but it’s a little confusin’ when they wake you out of a deep sleep and there you are all alone in the bed.”

The evil stare turned into a grin and a shrug.

“Easy, you a fool, you know that?”

“Not me, Raymond. Not me.”

I PARKED THREE blocks from Nola Payne’s address and walked the rest of the way to her block. There was a group of men, and a few women, standing around on the corner of Grape and 114th. These were working people who got paid a dollar fifteen an hour, when there was a job to be had. But most of their potential employers had gone up in flames over the past five days.

In order to fit in with that working-class crowd I was wearing faded blue jeans and a T-shirt with a few small tears and paint stains on it. My brown leather shoes were cracked and stained too.

The men were for the most part loud and blustering, laughing about their adventures and the exploits of their friends.

“Cops chased Marlon Jones up into the White Front Department Store on Central,” one man was saying when I got there. “They run him up against the back of the store and told him to lay down or die. But you know he out on parole and so he jumped up on a shelf, climbed to the top and popped right out the window before they could catch a bead on his ass.”

The crowd broke out into loud laughter. His audience didn’t ask why the storyteller wasn’t arrested instead of Marlon Jones. They didn’t want proof. All they asked for was a good laugh in the face of the hard times coming up the line.

“Lonnie Beakman is dead,” an older man said. “Shot him in the back while he was runnin’ down Avalon.”

That sobered the group.

A skinny young man wearing overalls and no shirt said, “Lonnie? He was engaged to my cousin a while last year.”

“How is she takin’ it?” a young woman asked.

“I’ont know,” the youth replied. “She broke it off with him after she found him down the hall with her sister three weeks ago.”

No one laughed at the story but that opened up the floor for a new line of talk.

“Meany got about a thousand pint cans of forty-weight oil,” somebody said. “He sellin ’em for five cents a can.”

“Motherfucker,” a squat dark man said. “Motherfuckers killed Lonnie B and all Meany thinkin’ about is nickels. It ain’t funny, you know. It ain’t funny at all. Cops come down here and murder us and we track through the blood to make a pocket full’a change.”

On cue a police cruiser turned the corner.

As the cops drove past us one lowered his window and said, “No congregating on the street. Move along.”

Almost as if it were choreographed, every one of the dozen people standing there started moving in a different direction. We each made it about a dozen feet or so, just far enough for the cops to have driven out of sight. Then we drifted back to the corner.

“Who are you?” the angry man asked me when I sidled up against the lamppost.

The police had broken the friendly mood, so I was seen for what I was—a stranger and possible threat.

“Easy Rawlins,” I said.

“What you doin’ sneakin’ around the sidelines?”

“Just hangin’ around, brother. I’m lookin’ for somebody and I was waitin’ for a break in the conversation.”

The man wasn’t really squat, that was an illusion caused by his unusually broad shoulders. He was nearly six feet. Less than two inches shorter than me. Other than his shoulders his most noticeable features were his big hands and yellow teeth, which he showed without smiling—like a feral dog or a wolf.

“I ain’t never seen you before.”

I could see that we were going down the road to war and I wondered how to make a truce without fighting first.

“That’s Easy Rawlins,” a woman in a blue-checkered dress said. She looked like a well-stacked pile of black pears held in place by a farmer’s tablecloth.

“I never heard’a no Easy Rawlins live around here,” the skinny youth said.

“That’s Raymond Alexander’s best friend, Newell,” the woman said to the angry, broad-shouldered man. “Him and Ray been friends since Texas. Ain’t that right, mister?”

I nodded.

“Yeah,” another woman said. “I seen him wit’ Mouse, down at EttaMae Harris’s place. They was havin’ a barbecue.”

Newell raised his chin a bit then. Everybody knew about Mouse. He was one of the most dangerous men in L.A. No one but a fool would jump on his friend.

“Newell? That your name?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m just lookin’ for a guy I heard live around here. A guy name of Bobby Grant.”

“What you want wit’ Bobby?” Newell asked. He was just as afraid of Raymond as everybody else but Ray wasn’t there and Newell didn’t want to be seen as a coward.

“A woman I met, a Miss Landry, wanted me to ask him a question.”

“You know Geneva?” the woman in blue asked.

“Met her.”

“How do I know that?” Newell asked angrily. “You could just be a lyin’ motherfucker out here.”

“Why he wanna lie about Bobby and Geneva, Newell?” the older man asked reasonably. “You know Bobby live two doors away from her niece.”

“All I know is that the motherfucker could be lyin’,” Newell countered.

“Why the hell I wanna lie to some fool standin’ on the corner?” I said.

That was the only choice I had. Either we were going to fight or we weren’t. If we went at it either he was going to win or I was. That was the way it was on the street corners in Watts in 1965—riot or no riot.

“He live in that gray buildin’ across the street, Mr. Rawlins,” the third woman said quickly, trying to head off the conflict.

I cut my eye to catch a glance at her. Then I turned my head. The young woman wore a one-piece dress made from a stretchy fabric. It was composed of horizontal yellow and white lines that hugged her figure like a second skin. My heart had been beating fast in preparation for a possible fight with Newell but the anger turned to excitement when I saw her.

Her eyes watched mine and she flashed an appreciative smile.

“On the fourth floor,” she said.

“You live there too?” I asked. I didn’t mean to. I had no intention of following her to her door. But the question popped out of my mouth of its own accord.

“No,” she said. “I live next door in the blue buildin’.”

“What’s your name?”

“Juanda with ‘j-u’ instead of a ‘w.’”

“That’s a nice name.”

“Watch it now!” the older man cried.

I could see Newell moving from the corner of my eye. He might have blindsided me if it weren’t for the warning and the readiness of my blood.

I took a step backward, causing the broad-shouldered Newell to miss and step out of balance. Then I stepped forward with a nearly perfect uppercut to his midsection. I followed that up with three more blows, not to inflict added pain but to make sure Newell was put out of the fight.

He went down and two of his friends rushed to his side. My unexpected blows knocked the wind out of him and it was time for me to go.

In my youth that would have been the moment for me to say something insulting about Newell’s manhood but I was past that kind of behavior. I just turned and walked across the street, hoping that I could finish my business with Bobby Grant before Newell asked for a rematch.

I turned when I got to the opposite curb to make sure that no one was coming after me. Everyone had their attention on their fallen friend. Everyone except Juanda. Her eyes were on me.