Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 6 —

From the moment I heard John’s voice I had expected trouble. I was looking for it. But the dead man had sobered me somewhat. I didn’t want to get that far into somebody else’s grief. I didn’t want to be used, either. But I doubted that John and Alva would have lied to me — not about murder, anyway.

I decided not to call them until I had at least seen Brawly. If I were to tell Alva that I had come upon a dead man instead of her son, there’s no telling where her imagination might have taken her. I would go to the headquarters of the Urban Revolutionary Party, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young man.

But first came food. I hadn’t eaten since Juice’s pancakes, and fear always stoked my appetite.

Hambones was a soul food diner on Hooper, not far from the First Men’s storefront address. I hadn’t been there for a while because it catered to a rough clientele and I had spent the past few years (with one major slip) trying to deny that I ever traveled in those crowds.

Sam Houston, proud black son of Texas, owned the place. It was one long room with tables running down the length of the walls and a kitchen in the back. If you wanted to eat at the Hambone, you had to sit next to your honey and look at the man across the way.

Sam was standing at his waist-high counter at the back of the place. Behind him was the kitchen full of his family members, their spouses, and friends.

“Sam,” I hailed as I walked toward him.

“I knew they was gonna take it, Easy,” he bellowed. Sam’s speaking voice would have been a shout for a normal man.

“Take what?”

“The Star of India,” he said in a smug and satisfied tone. “Right outta the Museum of Natch’l History up there in New York City. I knew it.”

I had come to his countertop by then. His loud pronouncement irritated me.

“You knew what?”

“I knew that they had to steal sumpin’ like that. You cain’t have no million-dollar jewel lyin’ around for just any old motherfucker t’be lookin’ at. I read it right here in the Examiner.” Sam gestured at a rumpled pile of papers lying next to him on the counter.

“What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, Sam?” I hadn’t seen the man in at least two years, but the first words out of his mouth had already made me mad. “All the shit in the news and you gonna be worried ’bout some goddamned piece’a glass?”

“It’s the money, man. Got to go wit’ the money. I feel for them civil rights workers, but they dead. And them white men kilt ’em? They gonna see a white judge for tea and they mamas for dinner that night.”

“How the hell you figure that?”

“I know what I know, Easy. I know what I know.”

“Man, you don’t know shit.”

The tall man cocked his head and grinned at me just as if he was saying, Got ya.

Sam Houston always made me angry. It was the way he took everything he heard, saw, or read and made it seem that he was the expert. If you came up to him and said that you put up a new cinder-block wall, he’d start lecturing you on the way to build a foundation and the type of drainoff that you’d need. He hadn’t lifted a finger, but now he’s going to tell you what it was you did wrong.

And far too often he was right.

Sam was tall, as I said, but added to that, he had an extremely long neck. His skin had the texture of medium-brown leather with gray highlights and his eyes were great googly things that rolled around dramatically no matter what he was saying or, less often, listening to.

“I’m tellin’ ya, Easy. All you got to do is read that newspaper and the whole world falls right into place.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“You own a car?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What year?”

“’Fifty-eight Pontiac,” I said.

“So if you push it over fifty, it’s rattlin’, right?”

How did he know that?

“Now,” Sam went on, “Craig Breedlove broke five hundred miles per hour in his car, on the Salt Flats. You doin’ the shimmy at fifty while he’s solid-state at five hundred. That’s where you are. The white man got cars fifty years in the future and you ain’t hardly out the Dark Ages.”

I nodded. I could have asked what kind of car he was driving. I could have asked how fast he could go. I could have broken his long neck. But instead, I nodded and got the first of the two things I wanted at Hambones.

Sam turned around and said, “Clarissa! Bring Easy some’a them braised short ribs!”

“Okay,” said a taciturn young woman wearing pink shorts and a pink blouse. She had a green ribbon holding back her straightened hair.

“So, Easy,” Sam said. “What you doin’ here?”

Sam didn’t let many people eat at his counter. You went back there and ordered for sit-down or take-home. But he didn’t want you loitering around and obstructing his view. Most men who tried to start a conversation with Sam were told, “Sit your ass down, man. I ain’t got time to fool with you. This here’s a business.”

The fact that he could stare and shout down most of his clientele was saying quite a lot. Because the men that patronized Hambones were not to be pushed.

Before answering Sam’s question, I looked out along the walls. There were three men and four women. Each of the men had a girlfriend, and one of those girlfriends had brought a friend along. That extra woman had on a red dress that must’ve fit her when she was a size or so smaller. I think that it probably looked better, however, straining against her womanly form. She was looking at me and I felt that fever again. Her gaze didn’t move me, though. I wasn’t looking for any more love than Bonnie Shay could deliver.

I didn’t know any of the men but I could feel their violence. Hard men in dark suits and white shirts with dirty collars and small cigarette holes down the breast. Felons, murderers, and sneak thiefs, too. I never understood why Sam surrounded himself with so much danger.

“Oh, nuthin’,” I said, answering Sam’s question.

“Uh-uh, Easy. You got to do better’n that now. I ain’t seen you in two years. Odell done told me that you got a job workin’ at the Board of Education, that you moved to West L.A. and bought a house. You got to need somethin’ if you gonna cross all’a them lines to come here to me.”

“Here you go,” the pink-clad girl said, placing a heaping plate of short ribs in front of me.

“What’s wrong wit’ you, girl?” Sam asked angrily.

“What?” Clarissa complained.

“Go get him some greens an’ corn. He ain’t no animal just gonna tear at the meat. He needs him a balanced meal.” Sam shook his head in disappointment and his waitress pouted.

“You want collard or turnip greens, Easy?” Sam asked me.

“Collard.”

“Yeah, man, me too. You know them turnip greens is bitter.” He sang the last word to accent his distaste. Sam Houston was a Texan all the way down to his socks.

“You know a young man name’a Brawly Brown?” I asked when Clarissa had slouched her way back to get my vegetables.

Sam pulled out a bottle of Tabasco sauce from under the counter. I opened it and doused my dark meat and gravy.

“Bad boy Brawly Brown,” Sam said, and sighed. “Mm, mm, mm. Now that boy is trouble an’ he don’t even know it.”

“You know him, then?”

“Oh yeah. Brawly got a chip on his shoulder, ants in his pants, eyes twice as big as his stomach, and a heart just drippin’ right off his sleeve. If it could be too much, then that there’s Brawly.”

“So he’s like a big kid?” I asked in a deferential tone.

“He’s just too much, that’s all, Easy. One day he come in here sayin’ he’s gonna sign up in the army an’ be a paratrooper over in Asia somewhere. Gonna make him some good money and then go to college on the GI Bill. Next week he wandered the wrong way down the street, now he’s a revolutionary. He wanna tell me that I’m just a slave workin’ for my white master. Can you imagine? Boy look like a butterball come in here, eat my food, and insult me.”

Clarissa brought up a big plate full of greens with bits of salt pork in them. The collards gave off a sharp vegetable odor laced with a hint of vinegar.

“No, I don’t get it, Sam. This here is the best damn food I’ve eaten in many a day. Many a day.”

I wasn’t lying, either. When you get soul food right, it feeds the spirit. And my spirit was flying with those greens and ribs.

“Okay, Easy. You done et for free and I answered your questions. Now what you here for?”

“Brawly’s mom wants to see him. She called on me and I come here to you.” I saw no reason or profit in lying to Sam.

“So you know about the First Men?” he asked.

I nodded because my mouth was busy chewing.

“I don’t have much patience for all this vigilante communist bullshit,” Sam said. “If they come in here after me, I got a shotgun blow ’em all away.”

“Why’d they come after you, Sam? I thought it was white people they couldn’t stand.”

“They like all the other ignorant people down here, Ease. They hate colored more’n they hate white. They see a black cop or school principal, they say that that man’s a traitor to the race and deserves to die. They come around askin’ for donations, an’ some people out here is scared enough to cough it up. But you know they only askin’ black people.”

“Protection?” I was surprised.

“Not really. I told ’em no an’ they just grumbled. But you know they on the edge of organized crime, they on the edge.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“One or two of ’em come in here,” Sam said. “Sometimes with Brawly and sometimes not. I can tell by the way they lean close and whisper that they plannin’ things. Not lunches for chirren like they say. No. They got plans that go by the dark’a night.”

“I see,” I said.

I had enough of food and talk for a while. I wanted to think about it all, and Sam wasn’t the kind of man to let you stand there quietly.

“Thank you, Mr. Houston,” I said, straightening up. I saw Clarissa in the back, past Sam. She was looking at me.

“They got meetins every evenin’ ’bout six,” Sam said.

“Say what?”

“The First Men. They give talks just about every night.”

“Uh-huh.” I gave Clarissa a glance and she looked down, pretending to be doing something. “Thanks for your help, man.”