Little Scarlet

27

Bonnie and Feather had made short ribs roasted in a spicy Jamaican sauce. They also served rice with some red beans mixed in and collard greens cooked with kale, onions, and salt pork. There were corn muffins to soak up the juices and for dessert we had Feather’s favorite: strawberry Jell-O made with a cup of melted ice cream folded in.

Like most naturally thin men Jackson had a good appetite. He took thirds on everything and would have kept on eating if I hadn’t pulled him out of his chair.

I kissed my weepy daughter good-bye and asked Bonnie to tell Jesus if he called that I expected to see him by the next day.

“OKAY, EASY, WHAT kinda trouble you in?” Jackson said when we were less than a block from my house.

I could have tortured him but with Harold on the streets I didn’t have the leisure to act coy. I told him the whole story starting from the time I helped Musa Tanous prove that he hadn’t killed the beautiful teenager Jackie Jay.

“And the cops didn’t believe you up until this new woman got killed?” was Jackson’s response.

“It’s only one cop believe me now,” I said. “It’s just the three of us if you wanna help.”

“Me? What can I do, Easy?”

“Talk to me, Jackson. Talk to me. You one’a the only men I know can talk about the streets with me. I mean Mouse knows the street but he only knows one way.”

“That sounds like what you would want with a man like this here Harold,” Jackson said. “Mouse would do what’s right in a situation like that.”

“I got to find the man first.”

Jackson nodded and sat back in his seat. Then he scratched his left ear with a baby finger and I knew he was applying his mind to my problem.

I was so upset about Harold and the riots and the sweet sugar talk of Juanda that there wasn’t much room in my head for logical thought. I wanted to use Jackson as a kind of a jump start.

We got to my office and installed his answering gizmo. It was a big box that he wired directly to the jack. If the phone rang, it picked up after the third ring and gave out a prerecorded message.

Jackson wrote a little speech for me to give and I did it without any Texas or Louisiana in my voice. After that Jackson put his feet up on the edge of a small trash can and grabbed the back of his neck with both hands.

“What you think about these riots, Easy?” he asked, beating me to the punch.

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. Me neither. I just cain’t see how people gonna get out in the street and waste that much energy when all you gonna get is some scratched-up shit don’t even match the carpet on yo’ floors.”

“It was more than that, man,” I said. “It’s hot and they been sittin’ on our necks forever.”

“I don’t see nobody sittin’ on our necks, Easy.” Jackson looked around, indicating that it was just him and me in the room.

“No? Did they ever send a letter to your mama’s farm askin’ you to go to college and say that they’d be happy to pay for your courses?”

“’Course not.”

“Did your teachers tell you that you were the smartest kid in school and you need to go to college?”

“Are you crazy, Easy?”

“They don’t do it out at Sojourner Truth but maybe two times in a year. And you know that’s wrong.”

“And me throwin’ rocks gonna change that?”

“Maybe not for you.”

“Definitely not,” Jackson said. “Especially if I get arrested or killed.”

I could still smell the smoke from the streets in my office.

“I need to find this man Harold,” I said. “You got any ideas?”

“I’m not gonna get my hands dirty, Easy. I’ma take this here job as a computer man and I ain’t never gonna be in these streets again.”

“Okay,” I said. “You just point me in the right direction and pull the trigger. That’s all you got to do.”

I could feel my language turning toward my southern roots. Jackson brought out the country in me.

“There’s a flop house over on Manchester near Avalon. You know it?”

“Gray bungalow,” I said, “with boarded-up windows.”

“That’s the place. White guy run it. Man named Bill. I think he was a preacher or a priest or sumpin’ but he got the call and put that place in. He wanna help people when they down. You know I been there a few times myself. Before I got it together and started —”

“Livin’ off of Jewelle,” I said, cutting off whatever story he’d invented to make it seem like he was making it on his own.

“Why you wanna fuck wit’ me, Easy? Fuck wit’ me and then ask me for my advice.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Go on.”

“Bill’s a good guy. He likes Negroes and he knows about that foot on the neck thing you talkin’ ’bout. I mean, he’s part of the problem but he mean well.”

“What’s that supposed to mean —‘part of the problem’?”

“It’s like when the doctor I used to have would give me a penicillin injection and every two weeks later I’d come down sick again,” he said. “Finally after about a year I went to the medical library at UCLA and looked up about those antibiotics. I realized that he never gave me enough. That way he had me comin’ back for more. You know that doctor wasn’t no better than a pusher. The only difference with Bill is that he don’t have enough medicine to pass around. One bowl of soup and a sandwich and a cot—that’s all he can give ya. And you know, Easy, when you only give enough medicine to keep the disease down, it gets stronger down there and come back with a vengeance.”

“So you think Father Bill there would know about Harold?” I asked.

“Yes sir. I sure do. Every brother been down on his luck been to Brother Bill’s mission at one time or other. Everybody.”

“So what should I do?”

Jackson smiled and hunched his shoulders.

“I ain’t gonna get my hands dirty, Easy,” he said. “But that don’t mean you have to come out clean.”

ON THE RIDE back to my house we talked about the internally rhyming irony of the phrases “space shots” and “race riots.” Using that as his argument Jackson postulated that there was some sort of mathematical and poetic necessity that brings about a balance in scientific, economic, and social extremes.

“You can’t have a rich man if you don’t have a poor one, Easy,” he said. “You can’t have a clean floor unless you got somewhere to put the dirt.”

“What you gonna do if you get that job, Jackson?”

“Work.”

“I mean really.”

“I’m a changed man, Easy,” the man who most resembled a black coyote said. “No more shit, brother. I’ma make a nest for Jewelle and feather it with hard-earned cash.”

I rubbed my bristly chin and wondered. Maybe the world had changed in the fires of the riots. Maybe I had to let go of the order of things that I had always known.

It made me feel unsure and hopeful like a man weak from hunger who stumbles upon an empty store filled with delicacies. How much could I eat before they came to take me away?