Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 8 —

“Come on, Tina! Quick!” Conrad, the matinee idol, shouted.

He was seated in the driver’s seat of a lime green ’62 Cadillac. Next to him was Xavier, and in the backseat Henry Strong crouched down against the window. There was screaming coming from behind us, the sounds of scuffling and the occasional heavy thud and grunt.

I pressed Tina toward the automobile.

Conrad yelled, “Not you!”

“He took me out of there,” Tina hissed.

I just kept on pushing until I was in the backseat. Conrad took off down the alley in spite of his unwanted passenger. He sideswiped two wooden fences and knocked over a whole family of garbage cans. I could tell by his driving that Conrad would never make the grade on the military side of the revolution; I hoped that Xavier and Strong saw that, too.

Conrad took side streets. He made so many turns, it seemed to me that we were going in circles. But at some point he pulled out onto Central. We cruised that boulevard toward Florence.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

The younger people were in a funk. Maybe it was their first taste of what the world thought of their idealism, their truth.

Strong was just scared. His eyes were still wide with fear, and his fists were clenched on the hem of Tina’s dress. She didn’t seem to mind. She laid three fingers on the big knuckle of his right hand. There was a great deal of tenderness in the gesture.

I stayed quiet because there was nothing I could learn from hearing my words. A police raid meant nothing to me. I’d been in whorehouses, speakeasies, barber shops, and alley craps games when the police came down. Sometimes I got away and sometimes I lied about my name. There was nothing spectacular about being rousted for being black.

After a while Conrad pulled over to the curb. He fumbled around in the front of his pants for a moment and then turned around, leveling a pistol at my head.

“Hey, Con, what’s wrong wit’ you?” Xavier cried.

“Conrad!” Tina added.

“Who are you, man?” Conrad demanded.

I gazed into his eyes, wondering why I felt no fear. For a moment I thought that I had gone crazy, that Mouse’s death had robbed me of my own survival instinct. But then I thought that it was probably the adrenaline from the escape that kept me unafraid.

“Easy,” I said.

“Say what?”

“Easy. Easy Rawlins.”

“Put the gun down, Conrad,” Strong demanded in a commanding baritone.

“We don’t know who he is. Maybe he’s the one called the pigs on us.”

“They didn’t need him, Conrad,” Tina said. “We were right there in our own place.”

“Yeah, man,” Xavier complained. “Talk sense.”

“Put the gun down,” Strong said again.

Conrad finally did as he was told. It made no difference to me. By then I was thinking about Jesus wanting to drop out of school. Suddenly I felt that I understood my son’s desire. Life was too short and too sweet to be spent in the company of fools.

“Well, Mr. Rawlins?” Strong asked.

“I was lookin’ for Brawly Brown. His mother wanted to make sure that he wasn’t in trouble.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Conrad wouldn’t have been happy with anything I said.

“It means that she’s a mother and she’s worried over her son. For all she knows, he’s with a gang. So I told her that I’d find him and ask him to give her a call.”

Sometimes the truth is just as good as a lie.

“You’re not welcome among us, Mr. Rawlins,” Strong said at last. “There’s no time for Good Samaritans and mother’s tears while the police brutalize our souls and break our bodies.”

“That’s okay with me, man. You know, I don’t want my body broken, neither. But could you take me back to Hambones? My ride is out in front’a there.” I didn’t lie but I talked in a way that hid the nature of my mind.

“No,” Conrad said. “Get out here and find your own way back.”

Xavier and Tina wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“I think I must agree,” Strong said.

“Okay. All right then.” I opened the door and got out. As soon as I was on the curb the lime Caddy took off.

There I was, at least three miles from my car, but I wasn’t unhappy. I walked four blocks to a small diner and called the Ajax Cab Company. They sent a red and white car straight off to pick me up. A friendly driver named Arnold Beard from North Carolina took me to my car.

He didn’t ask me why I was out and so far away from my car, and I felt no need to explain.

I was at my house by eight-thirty. The volume on the TV was turned up high; I could hear it from the front porch. I knew what I would find when I got inside. Feather would be sitting almost on top of our console TV while Jesus slept behind her, sprawled out on the couch.

Frenchie, the little yellow dog, growled at me from under the TV set. I was so happy to be home that even that foul mutt’s snarling felt like a welcome.

“Shhh, Daddy. Juice sleepin’.” She wore her pale blue pajamas with decals of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans pasted all over them.

“Hey there, cowgirl.”

“Shhh,” she said, and then she giggled as I picked her up.

“Are you baby-sitting for Juice?”

“Uh-huh.”

Feather put her soft arms around my neck and laid her head just below my chin. She always fell asleep in my arms at night when I came home late. She would try her best to stay awake until I got there, but the moment I picked her up she was on her way to dreamland.

By the time I had her under the covers she was in a deep sleep.

I left Jesus on the couch. It was hard to wake him up, and it had been years since I could carry him to bed. After all, he was almost seventeen years old. He’d wake up at some point and look in to check on Feather and then me before going to bed.

I put away the dishes that Jesus and Feather had washed and left in the rack to dry. Then I went to my bedroom. Frenchie followed me, snarling and crouching as if he were about to pounce. But he was no larger than a big rat. He knew that he couldn’t do the kind of damage he wanted.

I stripped off my T-shirt and looked at him in the doorway.

“What you want?”

Confusion replaced hatred for a moment and then he snarled again. I threw my T-shirt on his head, causing him to yelp and run from the room.

It gave me a kind of perverse pleasure to know that there was someone close to me who was always planning my demise. Frenchie hated me, that much was sure. He blamed me for the death of his mistress, and forgiveness was not a part of his nature. Every time I saw him he reminded me that there’s always somebody out to get you, that you better keep your guard up because there’s no such a thing as safe.

I went to bed feeling lonely. That’s what Bonnie had brought into my life — loneliness. Before her, my company was the best company. I loved my kids but they were children; they were going to grow up and go away, and I felt that I could let them. But now my bed felt as though it were missing something when Bonnie was gone. When she was off on her flights to Europe and Africa, I never got a satisfying sleep. And when she was home, even though I was miserable over the death of Raymond, I found an island in my dreams that was the closest thing to home that I had ever known.

No one had ever really been there for me before. I never talked to my first wife. Back then I thought that a man was supposed to be strong and silent; he was supposed to make her safe and warm while paying the bills and siring children.

But Bonnie changed all that. She was on my wavelength. And she was an independent thinker. She could take an action for herself without anybody else’s approval. I knew that because she’d once killed a man who attacked her and then went on with her life. Sometimes I’d wake up at night and look at her, knowing that she had crossed the same line I had. But I was never afraid. I felt like some ancient nomad who could depend on his woman to fight at his side, tooth and nail, against the wild.

That night had me wide-eyed but it wasn’t just missing Bonnie. Neither was my insomnia due to the police raid or the pistol in my face. All that was just a small part of the obstacle course that had been my life. I was an orphan at eight years old in the Deep South. I had fought, and won, against men when I didn’t even have hair in my armpits.

No, neither the Urban Revolutionary Party nor their cop enemies bothered me. But dead men were different.

In the cool darkness of my room I wondered about the dead man and Alva’s plea to find her son. It would have been easy enough for me to go to John and tell him that murder was more than I had signed up for. I didn’t even have to tell him, because it was bound to get around about the death in Alva’s cousin’s home. John would know that I couldn’t get involved with that kind of trouble. He knew what trying to make a normal life meant.

I decided to call him and say that I’d gone to the First Men, that I saw Brawly and he looked fine. He would have heard about the murder by then. He’d understand.

I breathed a deep sigh, relieved that my insanity was only a twelve-hour bug. But when I dozed off I found myself in the middle of a very real dream. I walked into a room where Mouse was seated at a small round table. He was wearing a dark suit and a short-brimmed hat. I remained on my feet and told him the story of my day. He was looking down while I spoke, listening to my words with gravity. When I finished he looked up with his gray eyes glittering. He shrugged as if to say, Hey, man, what’s to worry?

I felt that giddiness in my gut again. I woke up in the middle of the night realizing that I was trying to stifle a laugh.