Farewell, Amethystine

23

We went to Tommy’s on Beverly and ordered four chili burgers, two chili-cheese fries, and a few cans of Cel-Ray soda. I sat eating at one of the picnic benches the twenty-four-hour burger stand provided for customers. Fearless borrowed a few coins and went to a pay phone to make him a call.

He returned after fifteen minutes or so.

“Long call,” I commented.

“Bonita.”

“Your girl?”

“Oh yeah. You know, Easy, if I had come to her house she would’a cursed me out and th’owed my clothes in the mud. She might’a even tried to stab me.”

“Because you was in jail?”

“Not exactly.”

“What exactly?”

“She missed me,” he said on a shrug. “You know when you in love and your friend is gone, some people get all crazy.”

I thought then that Fearless, in spite of his less-than-stellar intelligence, would make a great psychotherapist. He understood feelings the way a boxer knew when a blow was coming from behind.

“You a good man, Fearless Jones.”

“That and a dime, Easy, that and a dime.”

For the next hour or so I let him regale me about his adventures in World War II.

“...I come on this one house outside Munich where this group’a Allied soldiers had trapped six or so women,” he was saying. “They had ’em in rooms and was usin’ ’em — you know.”

I did know.

Fearless tightened up and glowered at his food.

“I had to kill two of ’em before they give up their crime. I would’a killed ’em all if I had to.”

That was the way it was among Black people back then. We killed and were killed, fought and lost a thousand battles before a life was done. I didn’t ask Fearless the race of those soldiers. That didn’t matter. It wasn’t about race. In his perfect heart there was only right and wrong.

“Fearless!” a woman from somewhere screamed. “Where are you!”

“Uh-oh,” Mr. Jones uttered. Then he called out, “Ovah here, B.”

She appeared out of the darkness like some ancient Scandinavian goddess with black skin come down to count the dead. Her dress was silver. Her handbag, red as blood, and her hair was dyed blond. Bonita Williams was twenty-eight going on a century, fine as any woman could want to be, and filled with a passion that wanted either to make or take a life that night.

She strutted up to our picnic table with her fists clenched and her eyes at odds with each other.

“Excuse me, Easy,” she commanded.

I would have moved away if Fearless hadn’t spoken up.

“Uh-uh, no,” he said. “I’m sittin’ here talkin’ wit’ my friend and you got no right to send him away.”

“I need to talk to you,” Bonita told Fearless.

“Oh yeah? For the last three months I needed some talk. I needed a woman to bring me chocolate or make my bail. I needed a friend when all I could count was enemies.”

“I couldn’t,” she said and stalled. “I couldn’t bear to see my beautiful man in that place.”

“Lucky for me there was another woman could.”

“What woman?”

“Missy,” he said in as blasé a tone as I ever heard from him.

“My... my mother?”

“You better believe it. She told you to come see me, and then, when you said no, she come herself. Now, take your red bag and your silver ass home and I might call ya when me an’ Easy finish our business.”

Bonita didn’t know what to do. She wanted him to pay for her pain but now saw that he was willing to let her go. She stared at him with killer eyes, and then, all at once, she turned and stormed off.

Fearless and I sat quietly a moment, two.

“I suppose we should be gettin’ back to King Pong,” I suggested.

By the time we got back, the indoor sports parlor was closed. I knocked and Fearless peered through the tinted window into the shadow-shrouded room.

“Easy Rawlins,” a man called from the corner of the building.

Down the dark block, thirty yards or so away, stood “Hard Hand” Bernard Kirby. Jawbreaker, Skull-Buster, Bone-Bruiser Kirby.

He walked up to us with all the pride and confidence of a world champion. We were nothing to him, little people sitting in the nosebleed seats.

“BK,” I said when he got to us.

“You’re Fearless Jones, right?” he asked my friend.

Fearless nodded demurely.

Kirby turned to me then. “What you want, Easy Rawlins? Drake said that it was sumpin’ ’bout some typewriters and Mouse. But I know Mouse don’t sell hardware and you work for the cops.”

“I work for myself and my clients.”

Hands clenched, Kirby took an aggressive step in my direction.

“An’ those clients got a truckload of typewriters?” He could have broken my jaw with either fist.

I gave a weak shrug and said, “I wanted to keep my real question a secret, so that’s what I told Drake.”

“Tell me why the fuck I don’t kick the shit outta you and your boyfriend right here and now.”

“Thousand dollars.”

The boxer’s shoulders did something that made him seem much less aggressive. I gleaned for only a moment the kind of topography that boxers must witness in the ring. Just that one movement told a complex tale.

“For what?” Kirby asked, almost politely.

“You have a movie clip concerning Terrence Laks...” I began.

Those docile shoulders turned into a pair of Sherman tanks within the span of a fruit fly’s heartbeat. But, faster than that, Fearless hit the boxer three times: in the head, in the head, and in the head. This wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds, because Kirby’s head was moving at a downward arc from the first blow.

Once he was on the ground and unconscious, Fearless turned to me and asked, “You saw that, right?”

“I saw it but that was just about all.”

“You should go get the car, Ease.”

I did as he asked.

“We both gettin’ old, Easy,” Fearless said from the back seat as we drove out toward the woods beyond Griffith Park.

He was sitting next to the slumped-over form of Bernard Kirby and I was driving with a purpose but no particular destination in mind. I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble over Kirby. Even if the cops stopped us, he would never turn us over. At that time almost all Black men, and women, over a certain age knew that anything having to do with the law ended badly for everyone involved. So, when a cop asked a man of my hue, “What happened?” he was, most often, met with glacial silence.

“What you mean old, Mr. Jones?”

“You should’a at least pulled back from Benny, and in my younger days I should’a put him down with one punch.”

“There’s a turnoff up ahead, man. Looks like some trees beyond that.”

I parked and got out to make sure that we weren’t in somebody’s front yard. Once I was certain that we were alone, Fearless pulled the groggy BK out and leaned him up against the hood of the car. The fresh air along with a few hard slaps brought him to awareness.

What he saw was Fearless Jones and me.

I had the gun Lihn had lent me and was ready to use it on one of his extremities. Bernard was a boxer by trade, and he would, more likely than not, feel that he could fight his way out of any predicament. That conviction was usually negated by bullets.

“What the fuck you niggahs want?” he challenged.

“We want to give you some money and in the process save your life,” I said with as much equanimity as an armed man can muster.

“Save my life how?”

I had his attention out there in the darkness, among the crickets and the cooling air.

“Tommy Jester reach out to you lately?” I asked.

“What if he did?”

“Tommy’s dead. Shot down in the alley around the corner from his apartment.”

The boxer glanced down at my gun hand.

“We didn’t do it, brother,” I said. “I asked him the same question I’m gonna ask you. But instead of lookin’ after himself, he called the man in question.”

“The what?”

“He called Terry Laks.”

Kirby was no genius, but he was pretty good at one plus one.

“So, so you think he was tryin’ to get a better deal from the cop?”

“Nobody else in the game.”

“And they know about me?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re still breathing.”

That took a few mental steps, but he made it there.

“What if I did the same thing that Tommy did?” Kirby conjectured.

“First of all,” I opined, “you’d end up in the same street. Second, you won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are going to give the film to us.”

“Or what?”

“Or I put you in the ground and plant bamboo on your ass,” Fearless Jones replied.

I had to forgive my friend his anger. He’d just spent three months in the Los Angeles County Jail — a place worse than war.

Kirby could fight when he thought he had the chance to win. Fearless Jones fought when there was no chance whatsoever. He was a Black soldier who went behind Nazi lines when Germany was still winning the war. He was a killer.

“Well then,” Kirby said with a pleading tone, “why don’t you cut me in on it?”

“This is not some kinda blackmail thing,” I said. “The thousand dollars comin’ outta my own pocket.”

“How’m I gonna believe that?”

I raised the muzzle of my pistol to his knee level with every intention of shooting. But outpacing that fruit fly’s heart once more, Kirby said, “All right, all right.”