Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 5 —

Not ten words passed between John and me on the ride back to the site. He was naturally a quiet man, but this silence was sullen and heavy. There was something else on his mind. But whatever it was, he wasn’t sharing it with me.

When I was driving off I could hear him shouting orders at the ex-burglars.

The fever was still burning in me. For the first time I thought that I might have had some kind of flu. I went down three blocks of dirt road to the first paved street. There I pulled over to the curb to catch my breath. The February air was chilly and the sky was still blue. I was like a child, so excited that it was hard to concentrate on anything but sensations.

I knew that I had to calm down. I had to think. John called on me because he knew that I had been among desperate men my whole life. I could see when the blow was coming. But I couldn’t see anything if I didn’t relax.

I lit up a cigarette and took a deep draw. The smoke coiling around my dashboard brought on the cool resolve of the snake it resembled.

The pamphlet was mimeographed on newsprint, folded and stapled by hand. The Urban Revolutionary Party was a cultural group, it said, that sought the restitution and recognition of the builders of our world — African men and women. They didn’t believe in slave laws, that is to say, any laws imposed on black men by whites, just as they didn’t accept forced military service or white political leadership. They rejected the white man’s notion of history, even the history of Europe. But mostly they seemed perturbed about taxes as they applied to social needs and services; the distribution of wealth, the blurred purple words explained, as it applies to our labor, and the dreams that we hardly dare to imagine, is woefully inadequate.

I’d read similar ideas before. I had read a lot in my time. Most of it white man’s fictions and his histories, too. I was a sucker for history.

A car drove up and parked while I was remembering what I’d read about the plebes of ancient Rome. Two car doors slammed one after the other, but I was busy wondering whether that ancient oppressed people had some kind of pamphlets, or was it all word of mouth?

But when I heard “Step out of the car,” I was dragged back to the present.

The policemen had flanked my Pontiac. One of them had his hand on his holster and the other actually had his pistol drawn. My hands rose quickly like the wings of a flightless bird when frightened by a sudden sound.

“No problem, Officers,” I said.

“Use your left hand to open the door,” the closer cop commanded. He was young — they both were, pale boys with guns among men who had been living on a diet of pamphlets and poverty.

I did what I was told, then stepped out of the car cautiously and slow. My hands stayed at shoulder level.

The difference between the cops was that one was a dark brunet and the other was black-haired. They were both about my height, just over six feet. The black-haired one looked into my open door as the other one tried to spin me around and push me up against the car. I say tried because even though I had reached my forty-fourth year, I was still sturdy.

But I turned anyway and put my hands on the roof. He holstered his gun and moved up close behind me, sliding his hands in my front pockets. After feeling around my thighs for a moment, he slapped my back pockets. I felt like a woman being groped. It wasn’t pleasant. But the worst thing about it was his breath. It was so rank that I became nauseous. I tried to breathe through my mouth but even then I could taste the disease blowing out of his lungs.

When he stepped back I almost thanked him.

“Open the trunk,” he said.

“Why?”

“What?”

“Listen, man.” The fever had gripped me again. “I was just sittin’ there, readin’ my paper. I’m parked legally. Why you wanna roust me?”

His reply was to pull out his billy club.

A voice in my head said, “Kill ’im,” and I went cold inside.

“The key is in the ignition,” I explained.

The brown-haired cop slid in and took the key. It was awkward for him because he had his club out, too.

They made me watch while they opened up the trunk. All they found was a flat spare tire that I had been meaning to fix and a tool-box full of tools.

The black-haired cop slammed the trunk shut.

Then his partner said, “There’s been some theft and vandalism around the construction out here. We’re just keeping an eye on things.”

I made a mental note to ask Jewelle what was really going on.

When i got to Isolda Moore’s house, I parked way down the block because of those cops. I was upset with myself for not paying attention. If I was going to be in the streets again, I had to be better prepared than that.

Alva’s cousin lived on Harcourt Avenue, near Rimpau. It was one of those working-class L.A. fantasy homes. Powder blue, small and rounded. There was hardly a straight line to the place. The eaves of the roof were cut in the form of waves. Even the window frames were irregular and absent of straight lines. The front door was surrounded by a waist-high turret of white stucco.

As I pushed the whitewashed gate open I wondered if Isolda would be as beautiful as her cousin. Maybe Brawly would be sitting at her kitchen table, eating ribs and blowing off steam about some argument that he’d had with Alva or John.

Instead, I came upon a corpse that was half in and half out of the doorway.

He was a big man, especially around the middle. Black, he wore blue work pants and a blue work shirt that had been pulled almost off of his back. His head was crushed from behind and there were deep bloody marks in his back also made by the bludgeon.

He resembled the carcass of a beached sea lion left by the tide.

There were dozens of columns of tiny black ants making their way to and from the body. Given enough time, they might have consumed it.

The day’s mail was sticking out from under his gut.

The company of the dead doesn’t bother me much, not after the front lines of World War II. I’d seen death in all colors and sexes, in all sizes and states of decomposition. That’s why I could step over that spilled life into Isolda’s powder-blue oceanic home.

The fight and flight were evident in upturned furniture and bloody hand- and footprints on the walls and floor. It was a spare house with pine floors and not much furniture. The walls were white and the furniture mostly an ugly violet hue. The stuffed chair and couch were on their sides. In the sunny kitchen a cabinet had been ripped from the wall, and all the china and glass had shattered on the floor. There was a dollop of blood frozen in a spilling motion from the drain board into the sink.

I traced the fight from its beginning in the kitchen, through to the living room, and from there back to the front door, where the fat man had lost his race with Death.

In the corner of the little front patio I saw the weapon. It was a meat-tenderizing mallet. A stainless-steel hammer with a head made of a four-inch cube that had jagged teeth to mash up tough flesh. The mallet was slick with dark gore.

I went back in the house, into a woman’s bedroom. Here the color scheme was white and pink. The neatly made bed was covered with a satin coverlet and piled with small quilted pillows at the head. The room seemed so innocent that, compared with the bedlam in the other parts of the house, it took on a sinister air.

There were four pictures taped to Isolda’s bureau mirror. One was of a burly man — maybe the corpse, I couldn’t be sure without turning him over. The next two were of Brawly somewhere in his teens and also as a grown-up. The last photo was of a good-looking woman in her late thirties wearing a bathing suit and laughing at Brawly, who was rubbing water out of his eyes. That picture had been taken near the Santa Monica Pier.

In one drawer I found a red and black envelope of photographs. Most of the pictures were of the woman modeling in a two-piece bathing suit. She looked rather inviting. The odd thing was that the pictures were taken inside, in a room that I hadn’t seen in her house. In one photo she was lying on a bed with her legs splayed and her back arched. She was beaming a smile that could have made a new sire out of an eighty-year-old man.

While I was staring at those photographs a car door somewhere slammed. At first it was just a faraway sound, meaningless to me. Then, for some reason, I thought of the black-and-white photographs I had once seen in a book about ancient Rome. I wondered what could have made me think about the Colosseum. Then the cops came back into my mind. I ran to the front and peeked out from behind the violet drapes.

The sight of the four policemen deflated me for a second. The fact that two squad cars had been dispatched meant that someone had seen the body and called it in. I had that helpless give-it-up emotion that comes on me sometimes.

But it passed quickly.

Running was a fool’s enterprise, but I took it up with vigor. I pocketed the pictures and ran to the door at the back of the kitchen. I used my shirttail as a glove to turn the knob. As I left out of there I heard a man’s voice call, “Watch it, Drake. Man down.”

I ducked low in the bare backyard and headed for the fence. Over that hurdle I made it to the next street through the back neighbor’s driveway. Most people, men and women, in that neighborhood spent the day at work, so I wasn’t too worried about being seen. I dropped the photographs into a trash can, set out for the weekly pickup, just in case I was stopped by the cops.

The only trouble I had left was walking to my car without being noticed. In any other city that would have been easy. But not in L.A.

I went the long way around and turned up two blocks on Henry. By the time I got to Isolda’s block there were four police cars parked out front. An approaching patrol car drove past me. They slowed down to watch. I turned and glanced at them and kept on walking.

I guess the lure of real action pulled them away. A dead man in a doorway was still news back then.

I got the key in the ignition slot on the fourth try and drove well within the speed limit past the powder blue dream. The police in their dark uniforms reminded me of the ants that were swarming over the corpse at their feet.