Farewell, Amethystine

26

We’d made it through Pomona, past Ontario, and were half the way to Fontana when Fearless started his line of inquiry again.

Seemingly out of nowhere he said, “I get it that Raymond Alexander is crazy. And I know what it’s like when you with a woman and somebody try and get in the way. I could even understand it why a man might get mad that a woman lay down with him to save another man that she truly love.”

“That’s a lotta understandin’, Fearless. But what are you tryin’ to say?”

“Same thing. Wonderin’ why you hit Benny in the head when you didn’t have to.”

“Why that matter so much to you?”

“Because I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that that’s the same reason we drivin’ up to the country.”

“Why you say that?”

“Com’on, Ease, you ain’t got to be no genius to see trouble starin’ you in the face. You ain’t nevah even took me up to your house before and now I’m a invited guest. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the invite, but I can tell you gettin’ ready for some kinda war and I just like to know the sides.”

Again, I was using Fearless. This time it wasn’t even a conscious plan. I knew that he saw and felt things that I did not. I knew that he was more than just a strong arm and a man I could trust. What I didn’t know was that he was about to reveal my heart to me.

“I met a girl,” I said, “a woman.”

“She got sumpin’ to do with the cop?”

“Not a goddamn thing. At least not on the face of it.”

“Then what?”

I told Fearless about Amethystine Stoller, her missing (now dead) ex-husband, and how I wanted, more than anything, to set her free.

“So, you knew from the beginnin’ that you needed the cop — Suggs?”

“Naw. I was just tryin’ to take a shortcut with him and then I found out that he was in trouble too. I could see that if I got him through whatever problem he was havin’, he might could help Amethystine if she needed it.”

“Hm,” the war hero grunted.

I let that pass.

Myra had given us pretty good directions and so we made our way past the snow line, up into the San Bernardino National Forest. It wasn’t yet evening, but the sun had gone down by the time we passed the ski resort. After that we drove along the shore of Big Bear Lake until reaching the village they call Big Bear City.

A few people stared at us as we drove down the main street, past isolated restaurants, souvenir shops, and stands.

After that we were making our way up a barely paved road, onto a mountain that seemed to hunch over the lake. The cabin we were looking for was certainly isolated.

Every hundred feet or so there was a light pole giving some notion of the dividing line between the forest and the road. Even though it had been plowed, the zigzagging path was slippery. Once or twice, it felt as if I was going to lose control.

Then Fearless called out, “Over there, Easy.”

I don’t know how he saw the weak electric light and the slanting flash of synthetic blue wall through clumps of dark-green pine needles. There was no car parked there and no other sign of life. But we pulled to the side and made our way up a long and uneven trail of disintegrating wooden steps.

Fearless and I had a slippery time negotiating that climb. Our shoes weren’t made for walking on snow and ice. Our socks didn’t do much to keep our feet warm either.

There were thirty-nine steps up the steep incline and I couldn’t help but think of the movie, the book, and Alfred Hitchcock. The porch, which was just a jagged line of four-by-four pine timbers, tilted this way and that, emulating a drunkard’s attempt to toe the line.

By the time we got to the front door we were both out of breath. I knocked, wondering if maybe I was on some hopeless campaign that would end in failure. Then the door came open, framing the pathetic figure of the fifth-most-important cop in the LAPD.

His hair was askew, and the buttons of his red-and-black woolen lumberjack shirt were fastened out of sequence. His facial hair had been growing but had not filled in, and would not soon do so. The whites of his eyes were red and their violet centers unfocused. Rye whiskey scented the atmosphere around him.

There were other, bodily, fragrances too.

“Easy?” His voice was hoarse, as if it hadn’t been used for some time. “What the fuck you doin’ here?”

At that moment Fearless began to shiver.

“What do you think, Mel?”

He stared at me, leaned forward, almost toppled, but then righted himself using the doorjamb. He looked up and it was as if he was now seeing me for the first time, again.

“Easy?”

“Hey, man,” Fearless said. “Can we get in outta this here cold?”

“Oh,” the muddled cop said. “What you doin’ here?”

I walked past him into the rude but spacious one-room cabin. Fearless was no more than a step behind me. The walls, floor, and roof were rough-hewn and unpainted. There was a large loft above the cooking area that had its inner wall open to the room. The huge fireplace was dead and cold, so Fearless began to work with the logs scattered before it.

“Fireplace don’t work,” Mel managed to say. “Smoke comes right back down.”

Fearless grabbed an adze that was leaning against the side of the hearth and started poking at the inner walls of the chimney.

“Come on, Mel,” I said, taking him by the arm.

“Where?”

“Shit, shower, and shave. Hot coffee, clean clothes, and hard talk.”

Sometimes men need each other’s help. In an ideal world we want to be strong and independent. We’d rather die than ask for a handout, rather go hungry than go on the dole. On top of all that, fighting was second nature to the men of my generation. And the best fights were the ones we knew we couldn’t win.

What you say to me? Pee Wee demands of the behemoth.

But after the fracas, when the colossus has laid Pee Wee low, his buddies take the defeated hero home and patch him up. That’s what Fearless and I were there for. Melvin Suggs had put his entire demesne on the line to protect the woman he loved. Heroism like that takes it all out of a man. Women go through pain like that every month — more often, sometimes. In many ways that has been women’s lot in history. But... that said, they need us to be heroes now and then too. They need us to at least try to get it right. And when we try, usually failing, we need our brothers to be there.

I led Mel to his toilet, sat outside on a three-legged stool through his toil, threw him into an ice-cold shower, and shaved him myself. While I did these things Fearless literally disappeared up the chimney, picking and chipping the black and brown creosote from the smokestack walls.

“How you doin’ up there, Fearless?” I called into the funnel at one point.

“Least my blood is runnin’.”

While Fearless was clearing a passage in the flue, Mel and I swept the debris away from the area surrounding the hearth. Before we were done Fearless had reduced eight squat logs to kindling.

While the war hero worked on starting a fire, I heated canned chili over a butane grill. This I poured over Fritos and grated cheese while I made coffee and Fearless washed off the soot. Mel watched us, unable to do much more.

When the hearth was filled with flame, Mel roused himself to clean off the dining table by pushing all the papers, tin dishes, and other detritus to the floor. I served the food on paper plates, took Mel’s bottle of rye from his hand, and seated myself between my friends.

We ate and grunted, talked about the fight that Emile Griffith had waged against José Nápoles, and how beautiful the mountain was.

We’d made it all the way through a third cup of coffee when Mel asked, “How the fuck you two find me?”

I explained in detail each of the steps and missteps that had brought me and Fearless to Commander Suggs’s decomposing front porch.

After that he told us pretty much the same story Mary had reported.

“I thought it was gonna be easy,” Melvin said.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I let the guy think I was setting him free when really I got my sergeant to temporarily misplace the evidence. That way I could pull him in anytime I wanted to.”

“So, what happened?”

“Laks.”

“Yeah, I heard he put out a warrant on you.”

“Where you hear that?”

“From Mary.”

“You talked to her?”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“She told me she was leaving town.”

“I’on’t know what to tell ya, man. I called her tryin’ to find out what happened to you. She came out to see me on the mountain, asking me to get in touch with this dude Tommy Jester.”

“Where is she now?” he asked, cutting me off. It was obvious that Mel was more worried about her than himself.

“I got one’a my people to put her in a place nobody could find.”

I don’t think anyone had ever stared at me harder than Mel did right then. He studied me like a hunted man looking for the flaws in his pursuers.

Finally, he said, “She’s safe?”

“The queen of England in her royal bed.”

He gazed at me a moment more and then let his head fall, no longer able to find the strength.

“There’s no warrant out on me,” he said to the tabletop.

“That’s not good,” Fearless Jones intoned. “If a cop is after you, then you’re safer with a warrant.”

Mel raised his head to regard me.

“Anybody follow you?”

“I sincerely doubt it. Most of the road we traveled was empty, ahead and behind.”

“You tell anybody where you were going?”

“Myra gave us directions. I don’t think she’d tell.”

“Where’d you meet?” he asked.

That question turned my head toward the front door.

“My office, huh?” Mel added.

“You really think he’d bug you? You?”

The only electrical outlet in the cabin was a double plug connected to a space heater set down next to Mel’s reading chair. Apart from one standing electric light, the rest of the lamps were kerosene.

Fearless went around turning them all down low.

For some reason the darkness increased the feeling of silence. We hunkered down in that quietude, listening for the trouble that Mel’s semi-sobriety had just brought to light.

“I should go out there,” Fearless hissed after a few minutes.

“We all should,” Mel added.

“No.” My heart was beating fast. And there was a feeling in my chest that I hadn’t experienced since 1944. “When he wanna be, Fearless is the shadow that a shadow casts.”

At that moment, maybe even before I finished saying those words, I saw something like an afterimage in the window over the table where we’d eaten. By the time I’d registered the wraithlike passing it was gone and I was shooting, not at the window but at the thin pine wall just below. I had six bullets and shot five.

Fearless belly-crawled to the front door and then said, “When I say ‘now,’ throw somethin’ through the glass.”

Mel picked up a coffee mug and nodded, looking somewhat like a bulldog.

“NOW!”

The pane shattered, Fearless lunged through the front door, and two more shots were fired. Then, once again, there was silence.

I was back in the final days of World War II. My buddy, my comrade, had just risked and maybe lost his life doing his duty, as so many of us had done in that great conflagration. My heart was a young man’s heart. My fear went all the way back to a time before machines or even written language.

There were a few rustling sounds and then, “It’s okay,” Fearless called out. “He dead.”

Mel shone a flashlight on the body. Then he turned the corpse over.

“Bradley Mirth,” he said.

It was a big white man in military-like fatigues. His face was broad, with one eye open. He’d received at least six wounds.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Used to be LAPD back in the days of Parker and his Night Riders. The ones who enforced laws that were never written down.”

“He was with my people in the war,” Fearless said. “They say he was as good as me but that he took a few more chances.”

“Then why didn’t you recognize him?” I pointed out.

“Just knew the name. The major run the unit made sure we never crossed paths. You know, what they call philosophical differences.”

“You think anybody gonna come up here and check out the shots?” I asked Mel.

“Hard to say. There’re shots at night out here pretty often.”

“All we got to do is pull out that ratty old couch to cover the bullet holes and the blood,” Fearless opined. “If anybody aks, you tell ’em you saw a bear out the window and shot at it ’cause you were drunk. You guys do that, and I’ll get rid’a Mr. Mirth here.”

“No.” That was me.

“No what?” Fearless challenged.

“Help me wrap him up in a carpet or somethin’. I’ll get rid’a the body while you make the place look decent.”

We argued some.

Mel was unused to witnessing a crime and not reporting it. He certainly didn’t want to cover it up. He felt that innocence was its own reward. But I was able to persuade him that a body, one of an ex-cop, would lose him his influence and probably make Mary into a fugitive.

Fearless was of the opinion that he was best qualified to dismember and discard a corpse. All things being equal, he was probably right. But all things weren’t.

“Help me load him in the trunk,” I told my friends, “and I’ll take him down the hill. After cleaning up here, Fearless, you go with Mel in his car and put him up in that hotel you showed me.”

“What if any’a his friends are out there?” Mel asked, quite reasonably.

“Mirth was a loner,” Fearless said. “I’ve heard it that even his mama couldn’t stand him.”

Melvin had no carpeting in his rustic pied-à-terre. He did have four woolen blankets and about twenty-five feet of thick hemp rope. Fearless and I wrapped and trussed up the bloody corpse. Carrying two hundred pounds’ worth of deadweight was a lot, even for three men. By the time we got him into the trunk of my car, my hands and feet were numb, and I was shivering.

“Where’s your car, Mel?”

“Up the path a little.”

“Okay. If I’m lucky I’ll see you in the morning.”