Farewell, Amethystine

28

Jo walked me back to my car, parked behind the false screen of bamboo. There she kissed me again and said, “Can you gimme a ride?”

“How long before?” I asked as if in answer.

“His bones’ll be soup before we get where we goin’. And even if somebody come in now and turn the whole thing over, his remains would dissolve in the grass.”

We drove mainly on side streets from Compton, talking little and listening to a UCLA radio station whose nighttime jazz DJ was playing nothing but Ella. It was when she started in on Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” that Jo started talking again.

“You cain’t get away from death, Easy. I mean, not no more than you can hide from the sun. You cain’t control it. You cain’t ignore it. You cain’t say it ain’t true.”

“The sun?” I asked, truly confused.

“Even if you dug you a hole a mile deep and stayed down there the rest’a your days, the sun would still kill you by its, uh, its, what you call it? Its deprivation.”

We were coming up to the Bel-Air arch on Sunset. Three cars in front of us were waiting to turn in.

“So,” I said to continue our talk, “you’re sayin’ that Mr. Mirth lived under the same sun we do and that he lived by the same rules.”

A pink El Dorado at the front of the line made its turn.

“I’m sayin’ that when you meet a woman like this girl you talkin’ ’bout, there’s not a hole deep enough for you to hide in.”

Mama Jo was a part of my life. She didn’t mince words, would one day face death without a qualm, and had a heart that beat for everyone and everything she ever encountered.

It was now our time to turn. I executed the rotation well enough, but still an official-looking security automobile flashed its lights and blocked our entrance into the wealthiest part of the city.

“I guess that it was white people in those other three cars,” I said to my elder.

“Here you go, baby,” Jo said, handing me a shiny red business card.

I couldn’t read the name in the dim light, but that didn’t matter.

I rolled down my window as the two private security guards walked up to my side and Jo’s. They had their hands on the butts of their pistols and so my passenger and I weren’t making any fast moves.

The pudgy, pasty, and pimpled guard on my side was, at most, half my age.

“Driver’s license.”

I handed him the red business card. He used his flashlight to study it. Then he held up the card for his partner to see. That guard left Jo’s window and went back to their brown-and-gold vehicle.

“What’s your name?” I asked the glorified doorman standing at my car door.

“Jerry,” he murmured with a hint of deference. “Jerry Fram.”

The other guard, who was taller and better built, gestured at Jerry.

“You two can go on,” Jerry said.

“Why’d you stop us in the first place?” I just had to ask.

“We check out everyone who comes in this late.”

“There were three cars in front of us. You didn’t stop any of them.”

“We knew them.”

“You knew ’em? One of those motherfuckers was a taxi...”

“Easy,” Jo said. “Let’s go.”

I realized that the three swigs of Tranquility had loosened my tongue beyond the confines of common sense. So, I slowly depressed the gas pedal and moved us along.

The route up into the hills of Bel-Air was circuitous and, at times, steep. But Jo knew where we were going.

“What that card have to say?” I asked after half a dozen turns.

Ignoring the question, she said, “It’s that driveway up ahead. Turn in and go to the top.”

The mansion was big and broad, with four floors at its highest point. The front doors were ivory white and brightly lit by spotlights that I was sure had been turned on for Jo’s benefit.

She cracked her door and then said, “You comin’?”

Before we reached the front doors, they swung inward.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a white waif of a woman who looked sixteen but was more probably forty-six.

“Isabelle,” Jo said.

The woman-child ran into Jo’s arms and held on as if for life.

After the embrace had run its course Jo said, “Izzy, this is one of my oldest friends, Easy Rawlins.”

To my surprise Izzy gave me a hug with the same heartfelt passion she showed for Jo.

She was wearing an emerald-colored slip and fabric house shoes that looked as if they had seen many leagues of pacing.

“Come on in, you guys,” Izzy said. “You hungry?”

“Naw, honey.” Jo sighed. “Easy and me both tired, but I wanted to sleep up here and he give me a ride.”

The living room was nearly half the size of my whole four-story house. The ceiling was twenty-five feet high, and the rectangular floor was a good two thousand square feet. The center of the room was dominated by a squat table, six by six feet in dimension, most likely cut from a single stone of nephrite jade. It was gray and green with veins of tawny yellow here and there. This table was surrounded by couches of very different and unique styles. One was made from Chinese rosewood and upholstered with golden fabric. Another was made from rough-hewn timbers and had a seat much higher than its Asian cousin. I could explain the other two but that would only be repetitive in its rarity.

We each chose a divan and talked about many things, most of which I no longer remember.

The only thing that stayed with me was a conversation I had with our hostess.

“How’d you and Jo meet, Isabelle?”

“Call me Izzy.” Her smile was somehow both innocent and feral.

“How’d you and Jo meet?”

She paused, appreciating, I think, the fact that I managed not using her name again. Then she shot a glance at Jo, who nodded ever so slightly.

“My parents died when I was seven,” Izzy said in a voice that was both clear and rough. “It was in a plane crash in Venezuela. My dad owned oil wells down there. After that my aunt Gala and her husband, Bob, moved in. They were nice but I got so sad about Mama that I was sick a lot. Bob knew Jo because she helped him one time when he had this infection...”

Jo knew many people in the alternative medical community. If you had enough money, or tenacity, you might find a way to her door.

“...she moved into my room with me and stayed there for a long time,” Izzy continued. “After that I was better.”

“What did she do?” I asked even though Jo was sitting right there.

“She just sat there. Every time I woke up she was sitting in the chair next to my bed, not smiling or anything. Just sitting there.”

There’s a lot to learn from the creatures of the earth, Jo had whispered to me sometime during our two-day love affair. They know how to heal themselves without anything but their warm bodies and steady eyes.