Farewell, Amethystine

25

We had come to a stop on the moonlit dirt path, deep in the Santa Monica Mountains.

“Where the fuck you got me, Easy Rawlins?”

We climbed out of my nondescript automobile and approached the tiny cabin.

As we moved toward the little domicile, a light snapped on and the rough-hewn sentry emerged. That night he was wearing clothes made from thick wool and hard canvas.

“Cosmo,” I said.

“Mr. Easy,” he replied.

“This is my friend — Fearless.”

The Sicilian looked Fearless up and down, nodded slightly, and then said, “With a name like that you must have to prove yourself every day.”

Nodding modestly, Fearless replied, “That’s a Black man’s load on these shores.”

Cosmo grinned, showing us a smile missing at least four teeth.

“Gaetano up on the hill?” I asked the gatekeeper.

“Matteo. He went up after bringing Feather home.”

I touched Fearless on the shoulder and pointed at a hillside down the way from my mountain.

“One man to guard the gate and one to open fire if he need it.”

“What is this place?” my friend asked again.

“Paradise,” I said as Cosmo Longo opened the double-deep chain-link gate.

He walked us the fifteen steps to the funicular.

Before Cosmo pulled shut the sliding door I asked, “Who’s up there?”

“Jesus, Benita, Feather, the baby, and dogs.”

“Full house, huh?”

Cosmo grinned and locked us in.

“What is this, Easy?” Fearless asked again.

“My home.”

The car began its grinding ascent up the mountain. Fearless grabbed on to the door and I felt a little spark of pride that I made the much-decorated war hero a wee bit nervous.

We walked past the circular concrete landing of Brighthope Canyon and then down the long blue-brick path past the other five mansions there.

We made it maybe halfway across the broad single-room first floor with its high walls and the natural stream flowing through. At that point my friend stopped and gaped.

“This is your house?”

“Yeah.”

“How much it cost?”

“I got it free from the woman owns the mountain.”

“She just give it to you?”

“Ninety-nine year lease.”

“For real?”

“I signed the contract almost two years ago. Paid her with a two-dollar bill. One dollar for me and the other for Feather.”

“And what that cost?”

“Every now and then she ask me for a favor, but most the time she just likes to watch Feather practice in the pool.”

Shaking his head my friend said, “You the luckiest niggah I ever met in my life.”

“Mouse once said that to me,” I chortled. “I told him that I had plenty of bad things in my day. He said, ‘I didn’t say you had good luck, just luck, and a whole lot of it.’”

Fearless laughed heartily.

“Dad,” came a voice from the curved stairway that spiraled its way up the round-walled four-story house.

“Juice,” I said to the son of my heart.

He bounded down the stairs wearing white overalls with long sleeves and about a dozen pockets.

“Hi, Mr. Jones,” the young man greeted before hugging me.

“Jesus,” Fearless greeted. “What you doin’ up this time’a night?”

“Going over plans to start a fishin’ business.”

“Easy, don’t you have no lazy kids? You know, that sit around all day wonderin’ when they was gonna be football stars.”

His joke brought up a question in my mind.

“How many kids you got, Fearless?”

He grimaced and rubbed the fingers of his left hand across his brow.

“Ohhhh, maybe fifteen if nobody lied. But, for that matter, maybe twenty if they did.”

Many women wanted Fearless to be the father of their kids, but few of these wanted him as a husband. He was not a man open to domestication. If he met a mendicant with a problem, he’d bring that soul home. If he lost his temper, war wouldn’t be far behind. He might lose his house, his car, his bank account, at a moment’s notice, and that was not marriage material.

“You guys want some coffee?” Jesus offered.

“Tea for me,” Fearless said.

Upstairs, on the second-floor kitchen level, the three of us sat at the high table-ledge surrounding the cooking area of the kitchen. Below our stools sat the yellow and brown dogs that belonged to my sleeping daughter.

“You know sumpin’, Easy?” Fearless said. “I’m’a get you a real dog, a guard dog.”

“I already got two.”

“These here are nice toys for chirren,” he said, “but a man like you, a man your age, needs a serious mutt. I’ll take care of it.”

“Whatever you say, Fearless. Juice?”

“Yeah, Dad. Get our guest some blankets and show him the sleeping couch downstairs.”

“Okay.”

The scent of coffee aroused me, along with the sun through my upper-floor window.

I stumbled down the stairs to the third floor, where the children stayed. But they weren’t there. Jesus had made his and Benita’s bed. Even Feather’s blankets were tucked in.

They were gathered on the kitchen level, sitting around the raised table-bar. Fearless had made his specialty, buckwheat cakes and bacon. The kids and dogs were all excited. Fearless was the kind of family friend that everybody loved.

“Mr. Rawlins,” my friend of many years greeted. “I don’t think I ever remember you sleepin’ this late.”

“Like you said, Fearless, gettin’ old.”

Fearless regaled the assembly with PG-rated tales of his adventures in various wars and military actions. There were bridges blown off their moorings and ammunition stores ignited by fire. He told these tales because, as a listener, you were far enough away not to have to think about blown-apart and burnt bodies.

“Do you ever want to go back to war?” my adolescent daughter asked, her eyes aglimmer.

Fearless looked into Feather’s eager face and a shadow seemed to come between them.

“Naw, baby girl, naw. I mean if your daddy or maybe Paris had trouble, I might motivate myself to do this or that, but war don’t give a damn about the butcher or the baker. If you just a ordinary citizen in war today, they more likely to kill you than they are a real soldier.”

That was a fitting end to an otherwise joyous morning.

“So, guys,” I called while Benita and Jesus washed the dishes and Feather played patty-cake with Essie on one of the high chairs.

“What, Dad?” Jesus asked.

“What if we had Fearless stay up here a while?”

Feather and Juice got serious looks on their young faces.

“Something that bad?” they asked in unison.

“Not if he’s here,” I said with equal gravity.

Essie started crying.

“But, but Erculi and his sons already guard the mountain,” Feather said.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but they’re here for everybody and they work for Sadie. Fearless is our friend.”

The mood lightened again. Essie laughed again. In that pleasant space Fearless and I made our way back down the mountainside and into my car.

Our first stop was a gentlemen’s clothing store on Flower downtown. Fearless’s clothes were at Bonita’s house, but neither of us wanted to encounter her brooding anger. That would have taken too much time.

On top of that, where we were going, Fearless needed some winter clothes, and so did I.

Etienne’s Compleat Man had everything. Men from around Los Angeles went there to cover their nakedness in style.

Fearless got two pairs of trousers, three shirts, one sports jacket, and a pair of leather shoes. We both got overcoats, winter hats, and heavy gloves in preparation for an expedition.

The tailor had to adjust Fearless’s buys and so we didn’t get to Police Central until midafternoon.

Following our usual route, we made it to the front desk and asked the officer sitting there if we might be announced to Melvin Suggs’s office.

“Commander Suggs is not in today,” the blocky and pale senior sergeant informed us. He had a huge, bright-pink discoloration over his left eye and another one on his right cheek.

“We’re here to meet with his assistant, Myra Lawless,” I countered.

“Meet with her about what?”

“That is a private matter.”

“How am I to know that?” he challenged softly.

“By calling her and saying that Mr. Rawlins and Mr. Jones are here for our meeting.”

It’s always pleasing when logic trumps simple tribal hatred.

We negotiated a mostly unused hallway to its far end, scaled six flights of stairs, and then came to a door, which opened onto another door, upon which we knocked.

A short but not small gray-haired woman answered. She gave me a pleasant enough glance, but when she got a load of Fearless she broke out into a grin.

“Mr. Jones,” she exclaimed, “and Mr. Rawlins,” she added for the sake of civility. “Come in. Come in.”

Myra poured us coffee from a pot she kept on a pine file cabinet behind the desk.

“Coffee-Mate?” she offered.

“I like the stuff from the real cow,” Fearless said, “not no powder come from a test tube.”

I think Myra would have laughed if my friend had recited the ABCs.

“I’ll take some,” I said, knowing the bitterness of the ancient percolator’s urn.

She poured our coffee. I took the creamer cylinder and shook yellowy-white powder into my cup.

We made small talk for a while. Fearless knew Myra’s pets by name, species, and disposition. That little powwow went on for maybe five minutes.

“How you doin’, Myra?” I asked, getting down to business.

“It’s been hard, Mr. Rawlins. Melvin is gone and I have no idea when he’s gonna be back. I don’t even know where he is or why he left. Just that all his messages have to be sent to Captain McCourt.”

The coffee was hot. It singed the tip of my tongue.

“But you must have some idea,” I suggested. “I mean, nobody in the world knows Mel better than you.”

“No, not really.” She looked down at the desktop feeling a sadness that only friendship can conjure. “But I don’t have any idea of where he might have gone.”

“Well,” I said, “then will you let me ask a couple of questions?”

“Questions about what?”

“Mel. He’s my friend and his girl, Mary, is worried.”

“Mary,” Myra spat. “That bitch is the cause of all his problems. You can bet on that.”

“Be that as it may. He loves her and she him, in her own way.”

Myra settled a bit and then looked into my eyes.

“What do you have to ask?”

“Mary says that there was an overcoat missing from Mel’s closet. When I heard that I remembered, before he ever knew her, he used to go to a cabin somewhere up in the snow.”

At first Myra looked at me with suspicion that might have turned to violence in some.

Then she turned to Fearless and asked, “Can I trust you to protect him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I was taught from an early age that you had to respect people and be straightforward in your dealings with them. This was true even for white people — as far as you could trust them not to lynch you from a poplar tree.

“All human beings have souls and so deserve respect.” That’s what my old-man mentor Sorry told me when I was no more than eleven and scratching for my daily crumb. Because of my deep respect for that ancient elder, I tried in my dealings to be good and fair without, as much as possible, manipulating folks.

I have tried, over the many years during and since my hardscrabble orphanhood, to be honest, truthful, and fair. But, living these long hard years of American freedom, I have had to learn that most people exist in a complex maze of manipulation.

Fearless, for instance.

He was a child of nature who knew things that he was not aware of. Women, children, creatures large and small, were drawn to him. For many he was a touchstone, an almost magical being who transcended the mortal flaws and foibles that limited most members of the human race.

He didn’t know all that. Fearless thought that he was an everyday sort of guy. He foraged, fucked, fought, and freely shared whatever he had, and expected these qualities in others. Anyone who strayed from these norms Fearless saw as a deviant, though I doubt if he would have ever used that word. Because he was, probably still is, so guileless, people like Myra Lawless could see that he was a kind of human shelter, someone, even something, that could be relied on as constant in the everyday chaos of human relations.

That sounds beautiful. Mother Nature’s son and a woman who could see him for what he is.

It would have been the perfect honest relationship... if not for me. Myra could trust Fearless but not me. My job was to find Melvin, help him if I could, but also use him to untangle a woman whom I didn’t know at all from a crime that might be the end of me.

So, Fearless promised Myra that she could trust him. He believed this. She believed in him and so said, “It’s a cabin up outside of Big Bear City. Maybe five miles up into the mountains from there, on a road called Myer’s Peak.”