Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 28 —

Jasper Xavier Bodan lived on the third floor of a rooming house on Hoover. He was at the end of a long hall lit by a single bulb.

There was a strip of light showing at the foot of his door.

“Who is it?” he asked after Tina knocked.

“Tina,” she said. “And the man who pulled me out of the storefront the other night. Easy Rawlins.”

The door opened inward. The room beyond seemed to be empty. I followed Tina with my hands visible at waist level. Xavier was standing behind the door with an extremely small pistol in his hand.

He pushed the door shut and glowered at us.

“Why you bring him here?” he asked Tina.

“He already knew your address,” she said. “He invited me to come with him.”

“Why you talk to him in the first place?”

“He found my address, and Miss Latour said that he was good at helpin’ black folks out when they’re in trouble,” Tina said. She was another young woman pleading for her black man to listen to reason. “I brought him because he says that he wants to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” he said to me. “I should have let Conrad shoot you the other night.”

When he held the pistol up in my face, it didn’t seem so small anymore. The proximity of the muzzle affected my lungs. I could breathe in just fine, but my exhaling ability seemed to be paralyzed.

“Put that gun down, Xavier,” Tina said. “He came here to talk to you.”

“I don’t need to talk.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. Forcing the air out of my lungs was one of the most difficult physical tasks I’d ever performed. I was dying for a cigarette. “There’s things you don’t know. Things that will put all of this in a different light.”

“Listen to him, baby,” Tina said. She moved next to the skinny kid. When she put her hand on his gun arm, I flinched, afraid that he might clench up and shoot me by mistake.

When Xavier let his pistol down to his side, my whole body relaxed. I realized that I had to use the bathroom but decided that it wasn’t a good time to ask where the facilities were.

“Can I sit?” I asked.

“Over there.” He pointed to a solitary wooden chair.

I sat down and reached for my pocket, remembering again that I’d thrown my cigarettes away.

“You got a cigarette?”

Tina reached into her purse and came out with a filter-tipped smoke.

“What you got to tell me?” Xavier said as Tina lit a match for me.

I inhaled deeply and my throat and lungs felt a strange cold burning all the way down. For a second I was afraid that I’d been poisoned but then I realized that it was a mentholated cigarette.

“The cops,” I said, choking on the strange smoke.

“What about ’em?”

“They came to me and asked me to spy on you,” I said.

“Why they want to put a spy on me?” Xavier asked.

I shrugged.

“Then why come tell me about it?” Xavier asked.

“You the one thinks the cops killed Strong,” I said.

“He says that Brawly’s father is dead, too,” Tina added.

“Aldridge? Why’d anybody wanna kill Aldridge?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. “But I got even a better one for you.”

“What’s that?”

“I went down to the cops and told them that I was willing to help them, to share information—”

“You what?” When Xavier’s gun came up again I was less afraid, but not foolish.

“Hold on, man,” I said. “I already told you that I’m tryin’ to help Brawly. When the cops came to me and started talkin’ ’bout the Urban Party, I wanted to find out what they had on him.”

“That’s what you say.” Xavier kept the gun leveled at my chest. “But I don’t know you. You might be planning to turn me over.”

“He already knew your address, baby,” Tina said. “I told you that. He didn’t need to come here to get you arrested.”

“Then maybe it’s something else.”

There was sweat on Xavier’s upper lip. He was no more than twenty-two years old but he was standing up pretty well under the pressure of the situation. I glanced around the place while he considered my possible duplicities. You could have called it a compartment rather than an apartment. The most outstanding feature was a small window looking out on a club’s red neon sign — merrian’s. There was an aqua-colored vinyl couch that I’m sure he slept on and a table with stacks of books and papers on it.

“There is a special squad assigned to you,” I said. “D Squad they call it. It’s headed up by a man named Lakeland. He’s from the army, but they tapped him to watch you.”

It was too much for him to come back at me with doubts or challenges.

“Oh no,” Tina said, looking at her man.

“We don’t know if what he’s sayin’ is true,” Xavier said.

I was proud of him for trying to stay on top of the growing problem.

“But Henry said that they were trying to kill us,” Tina reasoned.

If I were planning to overpower them, that would have been the moment. Xavier turned his eyes on Tina. Maybe it was because she called Strong by his first name. Maybe it was his anger that she wanted to believe what I was saying.

“They didn’t kill Henry,” I said.

“Now how the hell you gonna know that?” he said.

“Because I was there, in their office, when they found out about it. They were surprised. For cops, they were even upset.”

“Where’s their office?” Xavier asked.

“I got to urinate,” I replied.

Tina giggled. She was close to hysteria.

“What?” Xavier asked me.

“I got to go, man.”

“No,” Xavier said. There was power in his voice and even the trace of an evil smile on his sweaty lip. He moved closer to me and said, “You sit here till I get the answers I want.”

That was too much.

I slapped his gun hand with my left and socked him at half strength with my right. I grabbed his wrist, twisted, and pulled the gun away from his loosened fingers.

“Stop!” Tina shouted.

I turned toward her with my hands in the air.

“I’m just goin’ to the toilet,” I said. “Fuck a niggah keep me from my bodily functions. Where is it?”

Tina’s eyes darted at a door that stood perpendicular to the window. I went into it and relieved myself without closing the door behind me.

When I came out Tina had propped Xavier up to a sitting position on the floor, but he was still too stunned to rise.

“I’m sorry I had to hit you, man,” I said. “But you don’t treat somebody like that. You don’t push a gun in his face when he ain’t done nuthin’ to you.”

Tina was too scared to talk and Xavier was still seeing double, wondering which image of me was the one talking to him.

“Can I take another cigarette?” I asked Tina.

She nodded and I picked up her purse from where she’d dropped it on the floor.

“Gimme one, too, will ya?” she asked.

I lit two at once and handed her one.

Xavier groaned and put his hand to his head.

“You didn’t have to hit him,” Tina said.

“No. Instead I could have peed in my pants. But let me tell you, it take a badder motherfuckah than your boy here to make me do that.”

“What do you want?” Xavier managed to get out before he grimaced in pain.

“I been tellin’ you the whole time, man,” I said. “I been asked by Brawly’s mother to make sure he was okay. If he isn’t in too deep, I’m gonna try and rectify the situation. The only thing I care about the First Men is that Brawly is a part member.”

“I don’t know where Brawly is,” Xavier said.

He held out his arm and Tina helped him to his feet. I doubt if he weighed more than she did.

“I know that. I know that. But maybe you could help me anyway.”

“What?” Xavier wasn’t afraid even though I had his pistol and proved my superior strength.

I really liked the kid.

“First,” I said. “What are you guys doin’ with them guns?”

“What guns?”

“The guns at Brawly’s girlfriend’s place. Guns like this one here.” I took out the 45-caliber pistol I’d taken from underneath BobbiAnne’s bed.

Both kids were impressed by the size and heft of the gun.

“You got that from Clarissa’s place?” Xavier asked me.

“No, from BobbiAnne’s.”

“Who’s BobbiAnne?”

I went through the same talk with Xavier that I’d had with Tina. Both of them claimed that they didn’t know of any white girl that Brawly ran with.

“We don’t make people do anything, but it’s frowned upon when one of the Party takes a white woman over one of our black sisters,” Xavier said. “We wouldn’t say he couldn’t be with her but we would damn sure know if he was.”

“And what about Henry Strong?” I asked.

Tina stiffened and Xavier asked, “What about him?”

“How long has he been down here?” I asked. “The other night it sounded like he was just down from Oakland to give a talk to your organization. But from what I’ve heard since then, it seems like he’s been here for a few weeks at least.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody murdered him,” I said. “They murdered him not five blocks away from where Brawly worked up until a few weeks ago. That ties in Brawly, so I’d like to know how.”

“Mr. Strong is connected with various political organizations in the Bay Area,” Xavier said. “He’d been watchin’ us for a while and wanted to bring some money down our way. You see, they had some supporters in Berkeley that liked what we were doing. The special thing we wanted to do was to start a school for kids from the first grade to the eighth. We were going to buy the old Kleggman Bakery on Alameda but we needed more money.”

“And Henry was going to get you that?”

“He’s been coming down for the past few months, havin’ meetings with some of the officers of the First Men,” Xavier said.

“Then why would he ever know Brawly?” I asked.

“Brawly said that he knew builders and contractors that were black,” Tina offered. “When he first came to us and he heard that we wanted to make the bakery into a school, he started talking to us about his mother’s boyfriend and the project he had down Compton.”

“He said that John could help with your school?”

“At first he was just bragging,” Tina said. “You know, how he was a contractor and he could get together a good black crew. We didn’t listen until he said that there was a woman, a black woman who helped finance his mother’s friend’s project. When Henry heard about that, he began talking to Brawly.”

“You don’t say,” I mused.

“How did you find out where we lived?” Xavier asked.

“Lakeland,” I said. “He got your picture, your history, your numbers, and all the gold fillin’s in your teeth noted down on paper in a file cabinet.”

The lovers clasped hands.

“Tell me about this school,” I said. “From everything I’ve heard and read so far, I thought you guys were trying to bring down the system, not educate children.”

“That’s just your fear talking,” Xavier, the flyweight, said. “If you really listened, if you really read our manifesto, you’d know that the school is our first priority. We want to start a school, a publishing house, a community center, and a lunch program for our children and our elderly.”

Tina’s eyes were fastened on her skinny boyfriend’s profile. I wondered at her — in love with two powerful men. She was at the center of everything she loved and held dear.

After a while she got into the conversation. She said that black women had to learn to love their own beauty and their men.

“We can’t let them dictate how we live and love and learn,” she said. “That’s our responsibility and if we don’t take the reins, we’ll never be truly free.”

I wondered who she included with them. Was I one of the ones holding back the black race?