Farewell, Amethystine

11

John’s unlicensed bar was still on Central Avenue, but it had moved location down to 103rd Street. It was now housed on the attic floor of a defunct furniture warehouse.

When I asked John why he moved, he told me that his new girlfriend, Millicent Roram, didn’t want to sleep in the same bedroom that her predecessor had occupied.

John usually had an apartment attached to his business.

“Cuts down on the commute,” he’d say.

Millicent was a Black woman from Wisconsin who felt oppressed by any temperature above eighty degrees. Because he loved her, John, for the first time, had air-conditioning installed in his bar. This made his place one of the most popular nightspots in the whole Watts community.

I got there not long before 2:00. The establishment was one very large room with twenty tables and a bar long enough to seat forty patrons.

The place had no more than a dozen customers at that time of day. Most of them were seated or standing at the bar. Millicent Roram was serving when I sidled up.

“Easy Rawlins,” she said in greeting.

“Millie.”

She was almost as tall as six-foot-two John, and her body was powerful. She was the color of a cantaloupe rind and seemed, somehow, like a stone statue that had achieved mobility.

“What’s a workin’ man like you doin’ in a bar when the sun is still out?” she asked.

“Having a business meeting, of course.”

She reached across the mahogany bar and pushed against my chest.

We liked each other because we both loved John.

“Easy Rawlins,” said the oldest living voice in my mind.

“Ray,” I replied while turning.

There he stood, flanked by two Asian women. To his right stood Lynne Hua. Hong Kong — born and more beautiful than almost any other American actress, Lynne had a smile that was a smirk, and her posture backed up this pride.

To Raymond’s left stood Vu Von Lihn. A whole other kind of woman, Asian, and Lynn. She was from Vietnam, an undercover Vietcong when she was still there. Now she was in America, saying that she’d gotten tired of the war. Maybe that was true. But it was a certainty that she and Mouse were made for each other.

Vu, as I called her, had been in the vicinity of a bomb blast that wreaked a lightning-strike scar down the right side of her face. The eye on that side was white and blind. She was her own unique person. Just being in her presence brought out a feeling that was hard to explain. It was a mixture of fear and dignity, of history and the vanity of a doomed warrior.

“Wanna take the girls and get us a table, Ease?” Mouse requested. “I’ll get the drinks.”

I walked with the ladies to a table set against a far wall. I pulled out chairs and complimented them, truthfully.

By the time we’d gotten through the niceties, Raymond was with us, carrying a tray with our various preferences.

“How’s the novel readin’ goin’, Ray?” I asked.

“I done read three novel fictions in the last six months, more or less.”

“More or less months or books?”

Mouse grinned. He had a small black pearl embedded in an upper incisor. A vain man, he had style enough for two.

“Three books doesn’t sound like much,” Lynne Hua, the ex, commented.

Mouse turned toward her and smiled. Lynne was a big reader and she’d known Raymond since a time when no one would have been surprised if he’d never read even one single book.

“Jackson Blue told me that you can’t read a book just one time, not no good book, not a book that means somethin’,” Ray said, relishing the surprise on his old girlfriend’s face.

“I know you read Papillon,” I said. “What are the other two?”

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Godfather.”

For Raymond, three books meant three heists. In the early days of his high-level robbery career, he’d spend his downtime in public houses accompanied by b-girls who were drawn to his outlaw ways. In recent years he spent more time alone. But his kind of insanity didn’t do well with self-reflection, so he started reading as a kind of balm for his turbulent mind.

Vu Von Lihn had been a mechanic in Saigon. She was plying that trade when I met her. Soon after that she met Mouse.

“You still workin’ at the fancy car garage?” I asked the lady.

“No,” she said with that raspy, jagged-edged voice of hers. “I started my own garage in Korea Town.”

I asked her about the old job only to be polite, but I already knew about her business. She hired women mechanics who did the work almost at cost. Down below the regular garage there was a chop shop where the same lady mechanics toiled for profit.

“How about you, Lynne?” I asked.

“I have my own show,” she said into my eyes.

“You do? What’s it called?”

“China Girl.”

“Why haven’t I heard about that?”

“We shoot in Hong Kong. It airs over there and in Canada.”

“Your own show. Damn. That’s big,” I said. “Damn. You gonna move to one of them places?”

“I don’t know. You could get lost out there, thinking you found something.”

“That’s the truth,” the other Lihn agreed.

“What about you, Easy?” Lynne Hua asked. “What are you up to?”

She was focused on me. For some reason this degree of attention made me want to open up.

“It’s not what I’m doing, really. It’s how I feel, how the world feels.”

“What’s that mean?”

I remember lowering my head to think for a minute and then looking up to meet her gaze.

“It’s like every day is the same old war and all that changes is in me. I wake up on my mountaintop, water the plants, scratch the dogs behind their ears. I talk to my little girl, who is more of a woman than I am a man. Cops half my age stop me because they say I look suspicious. And all I do is rake leaves that keep fallin’ and go to funerals in my mind.”

If I didn’t think about them, these words made sense to me.

“But you’re making a world for your children and your people,” Vu said.

“You know, Vu, I was in World War II back in the day.” I found that it was easy looking her in the face if I concentrated on the scar. It was beautiful in its own way. Notched, blind, and indelible — the kind of mark that defined a life lived.

“Back then Black soldiers didn’t have to fight,” I went on. “The white side of our armies didn’t wanna see us with guns blazin’. There was only a few of us signed up for battle.”

The Vietcong didn’t say anything, but her eyes asked a question.

“I don’t know why I needed to fight. I wouldn’t do it again for love or money. But... it’s not me I’m talkin’ about. Most of the young Black men that enlisted, maybe a hundred that I knew, all but four made it back home to the Fifth Ward. But two out of every three we knew back home was gone. Helpin’ my people is like tryin’ to sweep up sand at the seashore.”

Even Mouse winced at that freehand statistic. “Damn, Easy,” he proclaimed. “You never told me ’bout that.”

Vu was nodding, contrasting, I believed, her war times with mine.

“Raymond said you wanted to talk to me, Easy,” Lynne said.

“Yeah. I need to find somebody and I thought you might be able to help.”

“Why don’t you give me a ride home and we could talk on the way.”

We four talked a while longer. Ray had some good stories about the old days between Houston and Pariah, Texas. People died in the wake of his bejeweled laughter. That was how people who lived in wartime entertained themselves and taught the true lessons of history.

“I better be goin’, Ray, Vu,” I said at last.

“Don’t get lost out there, brother,” Ray advised, and then he laughed.

Lynne’s apartment was on Sixth Street, half the way between downtown and West Los Angeles. Hers was a turquoise structure with a wide stairway just inside the front doors. Her place was on the fifth floor, which was also the top stage of that prewar building.

The living room windows were floor to ceiling, allowing in the fading glow of daylight. I stood there at the glass, looking out over the smaller buildings and the streets. Cars outnumbered pedestrians at least seven to one. You wouldn’t know by looking that we were a nation waging war on Vu Von Lihn’s people. You wouldn’t know the hatred and antipathy harbored between the races, religions, classes, and sexes.

They didn’t know. Most people, at least most whites, thought that everything was fine. Children made more money than their parents did, peace had been retained by the war I’d fought in, and freedom was available to everybody who deserved it — as long as they spoke English while praising Jesus and the almighty dollar.

Lynne got into the space between me and the window. She pulled my button-up sweater down past the shoulders and then started working on the shirt.

“What are you doing?” I chuckled nervously.

“Taking off your shirt.”

“Ummmm?”

“I’m not going to fuck you with your shirt on.”

Exhilaration and dread. That was the life I’d led. The two constants.

She reached down at the front of my trousers and hummed, “Mmmm. You want this. I could tell at John’s you did.”

My life had never been boring. Where most Americans were afraid of getting fired or their sports team losing to some rival, I was out there with my life on the line whether I wanted it to be or not.

After working the zipper, she whispered, “Look at it, Easy. How hard it is, how beautiful.”

“Um... could we get outta the window?”

Grinning, she pushed me back until I fell on her deep red sofa.

I was a fifty-year-old fool, scared to death of this beautiful woman.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“You need someone to help you prove that you are alive,” she philosophized as she climbed on top of me.

She was right. Most people came alive only at the moment their deaths were a certainty. Cancer or prison. Maybe careening off the side of a cliff.

I grabbed at the back of her dress, searching for the zipper.

“No, Easy,” she murmured. “Pick me up. Carry me to the bed.”

Smoke.

I awoke with a start. For a moment I thought there was a fire burning and Anger Lee in the bed next to me. Then I realized it was Lynne Hua, smoking a cigarette, watching.

“You got another one’a those?” I asked.

“I thought you stopped.”

“On regular days I only have one in the morning.”

“And what kinda day is this?”

I didn’t have an answer so I inhaled deeply while staring into her dark eyes.

She smiled and handed me her cigarette.

Between shared inhalations she kissed me and wriggled around until she was installed on my lap.

“Would you come live with me in Hong Kong, Easy? They speak English there and you wouldn’t have to work or anything.”

“You don’t even know me, girl.”

Biting my ear she said, “I know everything I need to.”

“Like what?”

“You command respect, you have good manners, and you look good in bed.”

“That’s all you need?”

“From you. I just want a man to be good-looking and on my side.”

“What about smart and brave and true?”

“That stuff is overrated. You’re a man and I’m a woman. That’s all we’d need.”

There was no place like LA. It was a town and a people with a future and no past. Lynne Hua couldn’t have been a star in Hong Kong if she hadn’t come through LA first.

“I got a daughter, Lynne. She needs me right where I am.”

She got up off me and went out of the bedroom. Not long after she returned with a red lacquered platter bearing an iron pot of jasmine tea, two simple jade cups, and a few sugar cookies.

We toasted with the two impossibly thin nephrite cups.

“So, what is it you want from me, Easy?”

“I’m looking for a guy named Tommy Jester. I don’t know if that’s real or a stage name.”

“It’s both,” she said.

“You know him?”

“It’s a small town for TV bit actors. He was born Rayford Jennings but changed it legally when he started getting work in commercials.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“I could find out easy enough. TJ has always wanted me to work for him.”

“Doing what?”

“Things that a good girl doesn’t talk about.”

“So when can you get his information?”

“After we climb back under the covers.”

“We were just there.”

“That was for you. A warm, loving body through the night is for me.”