Devil in a Blue Dress

Chapter 28

I was on a great battleship in the middle of the largest firefight in the history of war. The cannons were red hot and the crew and I were loading those shells. Airplanes strafed the deck with machine-gun fire that stung my arms and chest but I kept on hefting shells to the man in front of me. It was dusk or early dawn and I was exhilarated by the power of war.

Then Mouse came up to me and pulled me from the line. He said, “Easy! We gotta get outta here, man. Ain’t no reason t’die in no white man’s war!”

“But I’m fighting for freedom!” I yelled back.

“They ain’t gonna let you go, Easy. You win this one and they have you back on the plantation ’fore Labor Day.”

I believed him in an instant but before I could run a bomb rocked the ship and we started to sink. I was pitched from the deck into the cold cold sea. Water came into my mouth and nose and I tried to scream but I was underwater. Drowning.

When i came awake I was dripping from the bucket of water that Primo had dumped on me. Water was in my eyes and down my windpipe.

“What happened, amigo? You have a fight with your friends?”

“What friends?” I asked suspiciously. For all I knew at that minute it was Primo who suckered me.

“Joppy and the white man in the white suit.”

“White man?” Primo helped me to a sitting position. I was on the ground right outside the door of our little house. My head started clearing.

“Yeah. You okay, Easy?”

“What about the white man? When did he and Joppy get here?”

“About two, three hours ago.”

“Two, three hours?”

“Yeah. Joppy asked me where you were and when I told him he drove the car back around the house. Then they took off about a little bit after that.”

“The girl with ’em?”

“I don’t see no girl.”

I pulled myself up and went through the house, Primo at my heels.

No girl.

I went out back and looked around but she wasn’t there either. Primo came up behind me. “You guys have a fight?”

“Not much’a one. Can I use your phone, man?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s right inside.”

I called Dupree’s sister but she said that he and Mouse had left in the early morning. Without Mouse I didn’t know what to do. So I went out to my car and drove toward Watts.

The night was fully black with no moon and thick clouds that hid the stars. Every block or so there’d be a streetlamp overhead, shining in darkness, illuminating nothing.

“Get out of it, Easy!”

I didn’t say anything.

“You gotta find that girl, man. You gotta make this shit right.”

“Fuck you!”

“Uh-uh, Easy. That don’t make you brave. Brave is findin’ that white man an’ yo’ friend. Brave is not lettin’ them pull this shit on you.”

“So what can I do?”

“You got that gun, don’t ya? You think them men’s gonna beat bullets?”

“They armed too, both of ’em.”

“All you gotta do is make sure they don’t see ya comin’. Just like in the war, man. Make believe you is the night.”

“But how I even find’em t’sneak up on? What you want me t’do? Look in the phone book?”

“You know where Joppy live, right? Les go look. An’ if he ain’t there you know they gotta be with Albright.”

Joppy’s house was dark and his bar was padlocked from the outside. The night watchman on duty at Albright’s building, a fat, florid-faced man, said that Albright had moved out.

So I made up my mind to call information for every town north of Santa Monica. I got lucky and found DeWitt Albright on my first try. He lived on Route 9, in the Malibu Hills.