Little Scarlet

29

At sunup Bonnie and I went down to a breakfast stand facing the beach in Santa Monica. The sands were empty at six-fifteen. We talked about nothing for a while and then we turned up our cuffs and walked along the shore.

Bonnie was the first woman ever to make me feel guilty about being a man. I felt bad about my heart racing whenever I saw Juanda. Here I had a wonderful woman who knew the world from a whole different perspective. She read Latin and had traveled extensively in Eastern Africa and elsewhere. She was beautiful and trusting and she never questioned my crazy little office or the work I did in the divide between the police and black L.A.

She never demanded that I marry her, even though I knew that was what she wanted.

I decided not to call Juanda when we were walking along the sand.

I dropped Bonnie off at the house at ten-forty-five.

BY ELEVEN Dr. Dommer was telling me that Geneva had fallen into a coma.

“What happened?” I asked.

The weak man’s eyebrows twitched like big furry caterpillars being jolted with electricity. He shook his head and frowned.

“I don’t know. Maybe there was an underlying condition that was exacerbated by her shock,” he said. “We’ve taken blood and put her on an antibiotic IV. That’s all we can do for a while.”

He placed a hand on my shoulder for a moment and then walked off.

It came to me that Tina Monroe and I were Miss Landry’s closest friends and we didn’t really know her. Geneva Landry was just part of different jobs that each of us was doing.

I thought about going down to her room but I realized that there wasn’t time for that luxury.

It was my job to find Harold.

BILL’S SHELTER. The words were spray-painted in orange over the door to the gray building.

I was in my work clothes again. I had shoes on my feet that should have been thrown out and no socks at all. My beard hairs were coming in. More of them than I would have liked were showing up white. My eyes were bloodshot and the skin beneath my eyes hung down like budding turkey wattles. Lack of sleep and grooming made me perfect for Jackson Blue’s plan.

The door opened into a large room with a high ceiling. There was a table with enough space to seat a double dozen to the left and a desk faced by four couches set out like so many rows on the right.

There was an industrial-size rotating fan on a pole roaring from one corner. But it didn’t do much to relieve the heat.

There were chairs everywhere and men too—black men of every hue and age and state of disrepair. A group of four men were playing a very loud game of dominoes to the left of the desk while groups of two and three were talking here and there. One man was having a lively conversation with himself next to a boarded-up window. I counted fifteen in the room including me and the small snaky man sitting behind the walnut desk.

It smelled like fifteen men who were down on their luck. There were body odors of every type and other smells meant to mask or clean up after them.

The room was lit by eight or nine lamps and one set of neon lights hanging by ropes from the ceiling. This was because all of the windows were boarded over. Between the smells and despair, the darkness, and the shouting I felt myself being pressed as if the room were trying to eject me.

I gagged and winced at the melee before me. My disguise was finished by the time I reached the desk.

“Yeah, bub?” the little man sitting behind the desk asked.

“Somebody said I could stay here,” I said, not looking him in the eye.

“Who said?”

He was a small man with ocher skin, a Mississippi accent, and mainly Caucasian features—one of the thousands of racial blends brought into existence by the melting pot of the South.

“Man named Blue,” I answered.

“Blue what?”

“Jackson Blue.”

The man cocked his head way over to the left and squinted.

“Where’d you see him?”

“On Central. I used to know him down in Texas and he was dressed good so I axed ’im to help me out.”

“Did he?”

“He ’idn’t gimme nuthin’ but he told me ’bout here.”

“Where’s he livin’?” the snaky man asked.

At the same time I became aware of someone standing behind me. I turned around quickly and shouted, “Get on out away from me, muthahfuckah! Step back!”

There were two men who had approached me. One was fat and powerful, while the other was of a normal build. The heavy one wore a trench coat even though it was probably eighty-five degrees in that room. His friend was clad in a white T-shirt and jeans that were two sizes too large. Both men took a big step backward.

All discussion and play in the room stopped. That’s just what I wanted. I needed the men in that room to see me and make up their minds that I was just what I looked like: a crazy man down on his luck and ready to protect his boundaries.

“Hey!” the snaky man shouted. “You two know to keep away from the desk when I’m talkin’ to a prep.”

He was addressing the men I scared away.

“And you,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”

“Willy,” I said. “Willy Mofass.”

As I have gotten older I find that I use the names of dead friends to mask my secret passages. I do this partly because it is easy for me to remember their names and partly to keep them alive—at least in my mind.

“Well, Willy,” the man said. “You can have soup and bread for dinner and a place to stay for two bits.”

“I don’t have a nickel much less a quarter,” I said. “Blue said that this place was free.”

“Ain’t nuthin’ free, Brother Willy. No sir. You got to pay. But we could let you slide for a day or two. But you got to pay the kitty if you gonna stay here more’n that.”

“Where the fuck I’ma get twenty-fi’e cent a day. If I had that right now, I get me a bottle’a wine and climb in a cardboard box down near Metro High.”

I knew the layout of Los Angeles. I knew where the hobos went to sleep unmolested.

“Billy will help you get a job,” the little man said. “Remember though. No wine on the premises. No drugs or liquor or women neither. This here’s a Christian men’s shelter. It’s clean.”

As he said this a light brown roach darted across the desk. That bug was quick but the gatekeeper was quicker. He slammed that roach so hard that the only things left to identify it were two legs and a quivering wing.