Gray Dawn

9

The ride home was wonderful. I felt excitement in my heart, mind, and nether regions too. It was a feeling akin to how I felt about my first true love, Anger Lee, the stolen-goods-monger of the Fifth Ward. Back then, when I was fourteen and Anger seventeen, I was at peace with the world. For the longest time, many months, Anger treated me like a little brother. It wasn’t until I got stabbed trying to save her life that she promoted me to temporary boyfriend status. The time I had to wait for Anger’s love seemed to echo inside the space I’d have to occupy until I could be with Ida again.

Cosmo Longo came out of the little sentry hut that stood before the gate to the entrance of the mountaintop I called home. The Sicilian had a powerful build, with hair everywhere. He was probably the gentlest of the brothers. The kind of man you wanted as a babysitter for your child.

“Mr. Easy,” he greeted.

“Hey, Cos, how are ya?”

“You have a visitor,” he said instead of answering.

I looked toward the lighted door of the shedlike guard post. At that moment she emerged, as if waiting for me to turn that way.

“Amethystine,” I think I said. Maybe the name only reverberated in my mind. I had been wanting to see her every day since the day I told her that I’d never see her again.

“Hello, Ezekiel, can I come up?”

I knew what I should have said and what I wanted to say. But instead, I said, “Okay.”

The Sicilian caretaker unlocked the gate to the inner property, revealing a short pathway that led to the bottom of the mountain. He opened the sliding door of the fancy funicular car and then bunged us in.

When the machinery engaged and began to drag us up the mountainside, we kissed. It wasn’t me kissing her or her kissing me. We came together naturally, after two years of being apart. It was alchemy and gravity. What was to be without a doubt.

Walking along the pathway, which was blue in sunlight and gray at night, to my tower of a home, we stopped here and there to resume the kisses and touching, unbuttoning and caressing. When we got to the front door, disheveled and hot, I fumbled around, finally working the key in the lock. I pressed the door open and ushered her in before I remembered Prince Valiant, the 180-pound killer guard dog.

“Watch out!” I shouted, but it was too late.

Valiant leaped out of the darkness, knocking Amethystine to the floor. He’d jumped on top of her before I could react. But when I got to him, he was already licking her face as she was tousling the thick fur below his ears.

She was laughing and he was crying — he was that happy to see her, a woman he had last seen as a few-weeks-old puppy.

“Oh my God,” Amethystine exclaimed. “He’s wonderful.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said, pulling at his collar. “Every other time he’s ever met a stranger, he growls and bares his teeth.”

“He must smell you on my hand,” she said. “He knows what this is.”

She was the kind of woman who knew and didn’t mind the fantasies of men. We’d almost made it to my top-floor bedroom when she mounted me on the stairs.

“Feather’s not here, is she?” she whispered, rising from and descending onto my lap.

“She’s in — in France.”

It was as if I was caked with the filth and detritus of a lifetime, and now this woman came with a rough-bristled scrubber and hand rake to scour me clean and raw.

That night was spent throbbing with pleasure and pain too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a sleepless night that didn’t involve a case, or one of my kids getting sick.

“I want to devour you, Easy Rawlins,” she said maybe five minutes after sunrise. We were in my bed by then, taking a breather. “I been thinkin’ about this here every day, every day.”

She rose above me on her left elbow and looked down.

“I been dreamin’ about it, but whatever I imagined, I never thought it would be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like dogs at their meat after they’d been starvin’ a week.”

I had to kiss her, didn’t I?

Later that morning, we had breakfast in bed. I made lemon waffles with maple-cured bacon and a simple salad of butter lettuce dressed with vinaigrette. Somewhere in the middle of the meal I remembered Ida Lorris. I’d had a wonderful evening with that woman. She was friendly and intelligent, just bent enough that she wouldn’t run away screaming from the life I inhabited. I remembered her the way I thought of parts of my life that had happened long ago, far away.

“So, what’s your day like, Ezekiel?”

“I’m on a job.”

“What kinda job?

“Lookin’ for people probably don’t wanna be found, runnin’ into those don’t want me lookin’.”

“Wouldn’t you rather stay up here with me?”

“What I want and what I have to do are two different things.”

“Can’t you hire some young man to run the streets with a target on his back instead of yours?”

“That’s next year on the life plan. What about you?”

“What about me?” When she turned over on her stomach, the sheet rolled under her, showing off her fine flanks and two marks that told of healed violence. One scar was small and round, not unlike Vu Von Lihn’s eye. The other was long and centipede-like due to the many stitches that had to be used to hold it together.

The long gash I remembered from the few weeks we knew each other. The bullet wound, though, that was new.

“What you been doin’ since I seen you last?” I asked her. “Still workin’ for Jewelle?”

“No. It didn’t feel right working for your friend’s wife. I left there and started working for a man named Charles Clinic.”

“Now, that’s a name. What’s Mr. Clinic have you doin’?”

“Dr. Clinic,” she corrected. “He’s a physics professor at USC, pretty arrogant, really. I hired on to keep his house clean because his wife left him. He told me that he was doing very important work and that when he was in his study he didn’t want to be disturbed, even with cleaning noise. So, one day when he wasn’t behind a closed door, I asked him what he does in that study of his. He got all snide and said, ‘Particle physics.’ To which I said, ‘Oh, you mean quantum mechanics.’ His lips got all twisted. He said I coulda learnt that from some note he threw in the trash or sumpin’. I told him, no, I could read real books just as well as anybody else.”

I knew what she was saying was true. Amethystine could debate someone on the level of Jackson Blue about the meanings and values of mathematical theory.

“So, what did the good professor have to say to that?” I asked.

“He thought for a minute and then asked me what the maximum number of electrons in a quantum shell was. When I said two-N-squared, he almost shit himself.” Her grin was hard and self-assured. “He asked me more and more questions over the next few days. Sometimes we talked for hours. By the end of that week, he hired me to transcribe notes for a major paper he was slated to deliver at the end of last year.”

“So, your job is to clean out his toilets and write his physics papers?”

She smiled and said, “Not anymore. When I made up my mind to come see you, I quit.”

“Why?”

“I realized that I was just marking time, waiting for this.”

I was listening to what she said but I was thinking too, and when her story was over, my mind kept on going.

“What?” she called into my silence.

“You killed that man,” I said with deep conviction, referring to Harrison Fields, aka Sturdyman, who had murdered her ex-husband. She’d shot the old guy in his eye, leaving no clue but a whiff of perfume. I was the only one who knew the identity of the murderer, and so, because I didn’t turn her in, I felt complicit.

“You woulda done the same to somebody murdered one’a your loved ones,” she countered.

She’d said the same thing two years before, but for some reason, back then, I didn’t hear it as truth. But time had changed me. I remembered talking to my adopted son, Jesus, pronounced in the Spanish articulation, Hey Zeus. He told me that I needed a woman in my life.

Somewhere between assigning Ida a place in memory and accepting Amethystine’s hard truth, I stalled. In hindsight, I suppose it was good for me to be conflicted about love instead of the deadly danger that Mouse said awaited me with Lutisha James.

“Ezekiel?”

“Yeah.”

“What you thinkin’?”

“How’s Garnett and Pearl doin’?” I asked, coming up with a topic that had no weight. Garnett and Pearl were fraternal twins, her much younger siblings. She’d taken care of them since they were infants.

“They’re fine. I sent them up north to a co-ed academy. He’s gotten into painting, and she says that she wants to go into law.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“They’re both very smart. Most of the cost they get in financial aid.”

“They don’t mind being away from you?”

“I go up to see them on the weekend every two or three weeks. And they come home for the holidays and part of summer vacation.”

“That’s good. Those private schools can be hell on a sensitive child.” I knew this from my daughter’s prep school experience.

“You told me about Feather. What’s goin’ on with Jesus?”

“Him and Benita raisin’ my beautiful granddaughter and they’re makin’ pretty good money at deep-sea fishin’.”

“Really? I read somewhere that the mackerel were running less around Southern California.”

“Yeah, it’s been kinda dry. Jesus is a real fisherman, though. He goes down into open sea outside of Mexican waters.”

“I wanna see you,” she said out of nowhere.

“Me too.”

The smile those two words earned brought me all the way out of the funk I’d been in for the last two years. You could say that she saved my life right then and there.

I left Amethystine in my mountain home with her scars and my killer dog. I hadn’t broken it off with her due to any lack of trust. I did it because being with her was like being back in the Fifth Ward ghetto, back when the only laws were heaven and hell, black and white, good or evil.

The gates to the curved driveway of the Bel-Air address were open wide. I traveled up the long and curving cobblestone coachway and then parked at the curb before the heavy oaken double doors of the three-story manor. I disembarked the work Lincoln, walked up to the entrance, and was about to press the doorbell button when I noticed the right-side door was just a bit ajar.

I stood there for a full sixty seconds wondering what to do next. It was probably nothing. People up in that fancy neighborhood weren’t worried about a neighbor coming to see if their door was unlocked and what kind of money they kept in the underwear drawer. Nobody wanted to steal your cracked china or some pair of three-year-old size-eleven shoes.

It was probably okay to ring the bell but, then again, I was unarmed and by myself. I had kissed one woman and made love to another. My life was going well, quite well. Why should I put that good life on the line for a man who looked like a demon that had been misnamed Saint?

Because he paid you, that’s why, my secret voice advised. Because you’re in the business to do right by your people.

My people. Blacks and Mexicans, those who were too old or too young. I identified with immigrants and wage slaves, those who were confused and the ones who were too smart for their own good.

I pressed the button.

The deep reverberation of three gongs sounded through the heavy oak, emanating from the interior of the ridiculously large house. I rang four more times, just in case the people therein were late sleepers. Three minutes had passed. My left hand pushed the right-side door inward. That’s what it felt like, like my hand and not my mind decided, however unwisely, to enter the place.

The foyer was rendered in the shape of the long half of a twenty-foot oval, mimicking the lengthwise dissection of some ancient Roman gladiatorial arena. This hall was furnished with four padded chairs of blue and a stark, dark red love seat. Opposite the front door was a wide entranceway. This led to a room that went up all the three floors of that house, where a skylight, aided by well-placed mirrors, brought down a great deal of sunlight. This meant that the atrium was also a solarium, where dense plant life flourished. There were at least a hundred different varieties of flora. It was like a fancified jungle in there — rosebushes, dwarf palms, cherry and walnut miniatures, just to name a few. Two very colorful birds, not native to this continent, squawked and fluttered at the height of the room, flitting back and forth in the passion fruit vines. I remember thinking that they must’ve had a gardener working at least three days a week to keep everything watered, fertilized, pruned, and harvested.

From the sunroom I entered a sitting room that was just big enough to hold two reclining chairs and a single bookshelf. This room was heavily infused with pipe smoke. The next room was a very large kitchen that looked as if it had never been used — it was that clean.

“Anybody here?” I called. “Lutisha, Lutisha James?”

I passed through a few more rooms that didn’t have names in my architectural vocabulary. Then I finally got to a chamber that was occupied. The residents were corpses, three adults of differing ages. There was a barefoot young woman in her early thirties, clad in a T-shirt and jeans, an older man who looked to be in his eighties, and a younger man, maybe forty, who wore a burgundy housecoat that hung open. They were all white, dead, and had bled, copiously. There were marks of violence on their faces, and they had gunshot wounds to their chests. The old man had had two fingernails ripped out, telling me that this had been a straightforward torture scene.

There was no elderly white woman among them, nor some Black lady old enough to be the mother of Santangelo Burris. There was dried blood, the faint smell of gun smoke, and then there were a dozen or so flies. The ravenous little creatures’ buzzing sounded like applause. They were feasting and no doubt planting eggs.

This last revelation coincided with my decision to leave.

I strode down a long hallway, coming to a hexagonal room that would have most certainly been called the library. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves against all six walls, filled with books, mostly hardback and jacketed. All other things being equal, I would have taken a moment to investigate the literary tastes of the house.

But things were not equal, and I was more interested in an exit than in the printed word.

That’s when the ghost appeared.

A hideous scream broke the silence of the home. I turned to see a banshee running at me. It was all white, like a Klansman from hell, shrieking in a tone so high it would have been impossible for any living mortal to make. It was a vengeful spirit, intent upon rending my soul and dragging me to hell.

A second later, the spirit slammed into my side.

I felt the blow. There was no immediate pain, but I knew from the war that injuries didn’t start out with pain. That would come later. I screwed up my courage to face the demon. But then it was just a child wearing a very light blue nightgown that went down past her feet. She’d wrapped her arms around my waist, holding tight and hollering words that I couldn’t understand.

I put my hands down under her armpits and lifted her even though she struggled against me. When I hugged her close, her arms clamped down around my neck and she screamed and screamed.