Little Scarlet

44

It was nearly ten at night. No domino players would be out that late. I drove back to my office and called home.

“Hello,” Feather said.

“What are you doing up so late, girl?” I asked the daughter of my heart.

“Daddy!” she shouted. “It’s you.”

“Sure it is, baby girl. Did you think I ran away?”

“I was scared that you were hurt down in the riot places.”

“No, baby. I’ve just been workin’ at my office. You know sometimes grown-ups have to work day and night.”

“But why can’t you come home, Daddy? I miss you.”

“I’ll be home when you wake up in the morning, baby. I promise.”

“You promise?”

“Cross my heart,” I said. “Is Bonnie there?”

“Uh-huh. Here.”

“Where are you, Easy?” Bonnie asked.

“At the office. What’s wrong?”

“A woman named Ginny Wright called at about eight. She said that Benita Flag had been looking around for sleeping pills. She tried to call Raymond but he wasn’t home. She said that you might want to know that.”

I took a deep breath. The world was feeling too big for me to handle. I wanted to go home and see my family. I wanted to sleep for a week. And when I got up I wanted to go to my job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School, mopping up spilled milk and checking to see that there was no litter in the schoolyard.

“I was gonna come right home, baby,” I said. “But I better look into this. Benita is one’a Raymond’s friends and she’s been under a lotta pressure lately.”

“That’s okay, Easy,” Bonnie cooed. “Jesus is here and he’s going to wait until you get back before he goes out on his boat again.”

WHEN NOBODY ANSWERED I knocked the door in. If I was wrong about Benita I could always put it back on its hinges. Living poor and black had done many things for me. It had made me a plumber and a carpenter, an electrician and a mason. I could put in windows, take a car engine apart, pave a highway, or run a steam engine. Being poor made more out of many men than any Harvard or army could imagine.

Benita Flag was on her bed with white foam coming from her mouth. She didn’t respond to shaking or slaps or cold water in her face.

I could have called an ambulance but poverty had taught me a lesson about that too. I had her at Mercy in less than twelve minutes. They pumped her stomach and shot medicine in her veins. A doctor named Palmer told me that she was so close to death that he didn’t know if they had done enough.

“You did the right thing,” he told me.

“What good is doin’ the right thing if women are dyin’ whichever way I look?” I said.

I think the doctor was put off or worried by my words. But he patted my shoulder and showed me to a chair.

What else did I have to do? It was only one in the morning. I had many hours before I would set up watch at the domino tables at Will Rogers Park. Why not sit in a chair at the hospital, waiting to see if yet another woman had died?

THE EMERGENCY ROOM at any hospital in the middle of the night is mainly made up of the consequences of love. Men and women and children with fearful parents. The men and women had gotten into fights over passionate jealousies and the children were there because their parents had nowhere to turn.

I watched a small boy with a purple bruise on his head drifting off to sleep but before he could go there his mother would shake him, saying, “You might have a concussion, honey. You got to stay up.”

Two men who had stabbed each other over a woman started fighting in the waiting room and the police had to be called to separate them.

With all that blood and worry I still fell asleep.

I WAS A simple seaman on a great gray battleship going off to war far from America’s shores. It was my job to keep the hull bright and shiny and clean. I had thick rope riggings and a platform made from a single plank of oak. All I did day and night was scrub and swab the steel hull from top to bottom, from sunup to sundown. Once I’d cleaned the whole hull it was already dirty at the place where I started. So I’d begin again with no complaint or attempt to shirk my duty.

But after a long while and many, many revolutions of scrubbing I began to wonder why the boat had to be so clean when all it was made for was war. Why shine and glisten on the deep blue sea when it would only come to blood and the deaths of mothers’ sons? The sea would still run red, the skies would still resound with cannon. Then the shining hull would be a disgrace and my work would be scorned throughout history.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

It was a nurse.

“Yeah?”

“Miss Flag is awake now,” the middle-aged, gray-headed white woman said.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Sixteen after six.”

SHE LOOKED AWFUL in that hospital bed. There were two other beds in the room. Each one had curtains to separate them but they weren’t drawn. In one bed was an elderly woman who kept babbling to herself. In the other lay one of the men who had been fighting in the waiting room. His color looked bad. There was a nozzle strapped to his nose, feeding him oxygen, I supposed, and three different intravenous drip sacks putting medicine into his arms. If he had a mother I prayed she didn’t see him like that.

“Easy,” Benita whispered. “Are you the one saved me?”

“I brought you here,” I said. “How you doin’, Benny?”

“I feel like a fool,” she said. “Please don’t tell nobody what happened.”

“Are you okay now?”

“Oh yeah. Can you imagine it? Taking them pills, tryin’ to kill myself over Raymond?”

“What made you do it?” I asked.

I pulled up a heavy chair with a metal frame.

“Have a seat,” the elderly patient said to the air.

“I don’t know, Easy. It just hurt so bad that I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again. It was like I was in a dream, you know? I didn’t really think about dyin’, just goin’ to sleep. And then when I came to and the doctor asked me if I tried to kill myself I said no. And I meant it too. But I can see where everything been leadin’ to this. Everybody said that I was takin’ this thing with Raymond too hard but I told ’em that they didn’t understand. But I guess they did, huh?”

She was drifting a little bit but her words were clear and the burden of love had been lifted from her brow.

“It hurts when somebody you love is gone,” I said. “Imagine how your mama would feel if you turned up dead on the floor with foam comin’ outta your mouth.”

“Yeah.” She was looking up at me with wonderment in her eyes. “You saved my life, Easy Rawlins.”

“So what you gonna do with it now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can come stay at my house a few days if you want,” I said. “We don’t have an extra room but there’s a couch you can sleep on. And my girlfriend will make sure you eat right and have somebody to talk to.”

Benita smiled and her face seemed to fill with health.