Little Scarlet

47

It was a little after five by the time Jewelle parked across the street from the hospital. She had put on a pink dress and dark makeup. I remembered when she was just sixteen, in jeans and in love with my property manager, the grumpy Mofass. Now he was gone and she was a woman.

“I brought you some food and a gun, Easy,” she said as I dropped as delicately as I could into the passenger’s seat.

I took the paper bag sitting between us and found a .45 pistol, a ham sandwich, and a silver thermos filled with hot black coffee.

“Where to?” Jewelle asked me.

I gave her Jocelyn Ostenberg’s address and we took off.

I ate the sandwich even though my stomach didn’t want it. The coffee was strong, the way black people made it down South. The gun was loaded and the safety was off. I’m right-handed, so the wound wouldn’t deter me from killing Harold.

“Who shot you, Easy?” the petite Jewelle asked me.

“A man I’m after. A man who kills black women for loving white men. He pulled the trigger but his mother loaded the gun.”

“Uh,” she grunted disparagingly. “You’d think that people would have enough trouble makin’ the rent without all this shootin’ and burnin’ and killin’ everybody.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you know there’s always somebody with some reason to be mad. I can’t hardly throw stones. I mean look at me. Here I am all shot up and bruised and still I’m out here with a gun.”

“But you different, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You the only one I know tryin’ to do right by people.”

“Jackson said that he’s getting’ that job to help you out, JJ. That sounds like he’s tryin’ to do right.”

“Yeah. He loves me. I know he does. But you know straight as he tryin’ t’be, he still a pretzel in his heart. It tickles me to see him in that suit with those cute glasses don’t do nuthin’.”

“You love him?”

“Yeah. I love ’im but he ain’t you, Mr. Rawlins. No sir. You are the real thing. That’s why I got up outta my bed, because it ain’t too often that Easy Rawlins calls on somebody for help.”

I drifted in my seat for a while then. I was angry at myself for inviting Jocelyn Ostenberg to my office, for giving her a way to come at me. But in that car, with the rising sun making silhouettes of the eastern mountains, beside a woman I’d seen grow up from a child, I felt at ease. I was at home in my own life in spite of everything. Maybe that was the drugs or maybe even shock but I remember feeling safe and comfortable on the drive toward the Ostenberg home.

“Jackson said that you lost everything in the riots,” I said after a long time.

“Naw,” Jewelle said easily. “It’s just tied up my resources. The property’s still there and there’s sure enough rent to pay the taxes. I got to be creative but the money’ll flow back in.”

WE PARKED A block away from the Ostenberg house. I didn’t want Jocelyn seeing me out there waiting and I didn’t need a close-up view to know if Harold came in or if she went out.

It was still very early when we got there, not yet six. Jewelle put her head down on my lap and fell asleep. She’d always felt comfortable with me, as if I had some kind of secret power to keep away danger. There she was with her brilliant business mind thinking that I was the one who could protect her.

I wasn’t tired but all the drugs and trauma to my system made me drift in and out of various states of mind. I thought about Juanda and Howard and Jackson and Mouse. I thought about the riots and Gerald Jordan and Melvin Suggs all at the same time. Between all the chemicals and thoughts and wounds I seemed to be able to break up my thoughts and let them blend together.

For most of my life I’d only been able to think about one thing at a time unless I was in danger and had to have eyes in the back of my head. But that morning, when I should have been concentrating on Harold and only Harold, I was putting all the pieces into place all at once.

Jewelle took my hand in her sleep and rolled her head. I looked down on her lovely profile. She was smiling, thinking about Jackson most probably while holding my hand and feeling my warmth.

I realized then that I had almost died in my hallway. I had come within inches and moments of my own death and hadn’t stopped even to acknowledge my luck.

I could see Juanda in Jewelle’s profile and I knew that we would never be lovers. That made me smile. I could see that Suggs hated Jordan as much as I did and that Harold felt the same pain that drove his mother. Mouse and Harold were in the same place in my mind. And Benita and Nola, and Honey and Geneva were right behind them. Black women at the mercy of black men who couldn’t help what they’d become.

My heart was racing trying to keep up with all the overlays in my head. I wanted a cigarette but Jewelle was holding my hand.

A light-colored ’sixty Cadillac drove up to Jocelyn’s driveway and pulled in. A man got out and walked up to the door. He fiddled around and then went in. It wasn’t Harold. I stayed where I was, wondering what I should do.

A few minutes later the sirens began to howl. At first there was only one and it was pretty far off. It wasn’t a fire engine siren; either police or ambulance then. And then there was another, and another. They were coming closer with every moment.

“Get up, baby,” I said to Jewelle.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know but you should be awake.”

The ambulance wailed up to the front of the Ostenberg home. Two attendants rushed out carrying the gurney. The man from the Cadillac ran out to meet them. Even at the distance I could tell that he was all broken up. His hands kept moving. The ambulance men had to push him aside.

“What is it, Easy?” Jewelle asked.

“I don’t know. But you better get out of here. I’ll get out and you go home.”

“I’m not leavin’ you here. You come on with me.”

Four police cars came up all at once. Cops rolled out of the cars and into the house. People were coming out of their houses on the next block. The sun was coming up as if even the sky was awakened by the racket.

As the minutes went by, the ambulance attendants didn’t reappear. That meant there was either a false alarm or a death.

“It’s him!” someone shouted in a maniacal tone. “It’s him! It’s him!”

I looked out and saw, not fifteen feet from Jewelle’s Citroën, the flabby man with the green eyes who had called the police on me the last time I was on Jocelyn’s block. He was shouting and jumping in his housecoat and slippers. When our eyes met he shrieked and ran straight for the cops.

“You got a key for the glove compartment?” I asked Jewelle.

“What’s wrong with him?” she said, referring to the screaming man.

“Take it off of the key chain and gimme it,” I said.

I took the forty-five out of the bag and Jewelle handed me the key. I threw the gun into the glove compartment, locked it, and then swallowed the little brass key just as if I were in some spy movie about to be arrested for attempting to go over the Berlin Wall.

“What’s wrong with that man, Easy? Was he talking about us?”

“The cops are going to grab us, JJ. Let’s get out of the car and cross our hands in front of us.”

Jewelle was a fast study. She got out with me and we waited for the cops that were hurrying out of the Ostenberg house.

Even though we were waiting peacefully we were both grabbed and thrown to the ground. The officers used rough language, calling us niggers and asking questions without waiting for or expecting replies. We were cuffed and yanked to our feet, dragged down the street and thrown through the Ostenberg front doorway.

As we were pulled into the house more policemen arrived. All that pushing and shoving opened the wounds on my leg and arm.

“This one’s bleeding,” one cop said.

But I wasn’t paying attention to their overreactions or the stinging pain I felt. I was looking around the Ostenberg living room.

It was all white.

The carpets and walls, the sofa and even the coffee table were stark white. Even a painting on the wall was a big white house in snow with white children laughing in the window. I wondered if the rest of the house was the same. A policeman grabbed my bandaged arm and a drop of my blood fell onto the thick white rug.

A white man in a brown suit was ushered into the room by two cops. He was an old man and miserable beyond his years. One cop whispered something into his ear and he looked up at me and Jewelle. Then he shook his head and collapsed into their arms. They led him to a white stuffed chair.

He rolled out from the seat and onto the carpet, crying.

I watched him as if he were a distant constellation. I didn’t care about Jocelyn’s husband any more than some far-off celestial event that occurred before humanity had blighted the earth. He was just a bystander who didn’t see the car coming at him. He wasn’t important.