Little Scarlet

37

I don’t know how my driving was doing but there were a few blaring horns along the way. I had probably gone a mile or so when I realized I had no idea where I was headed. The wrong Harold had put the hurt to me, as the young people used to say around that time. I was reeling in my seat, driving my car like it was a boat.

I had to laugh, even through all that pain. So many young men go out on the street looking to get into a fight. They talk about how they beat some fool who cursed or insulted them. But all they needed was one fight with a man like the wrong Harold and all of their heroic notions of street fighting would go out the window. I didn’t beat that big ugly man. All I did was keep him from stomping me to death. I saved my life but I’d have pains and bruises to remind me of my folly for more than a month. No. There was nothing glorious about getting tossed around like a rag doll and hit so hard that you could taste it.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t use a phone or go ask questions. There was a big knot over my right eye, and my lower lip was swollen too. I drove to Compton, to Tucker Street. That was a dead end with a stand of avocado trees where the road should have continued. I pulled off the road and parked between two dark-leaf trees. I opened the door and she was standing there. Tall and black-skinned, handsome with glints of beauty left over from a glorious youth, Mama Jo was like an African myth come to life in the New World, where no one could believe in her unless they felt her magic.

“I wondered when you was gonna get here,” she said in a deep voice that was not wholly masculine or feminine.

“It’s a wonder I made it at all,” I said.

I opened the door and reached out to her. She pulled me by the arms until I was standing. Then she supported me, helping me to navigate through the trees until we got to her cabin.

Mama Jo always lived in hidden places. She raised armadillos and ate delicacies like alligator and shark meat. She made medicines and potions for poor superstitious black people and if you wanted she would read your fortune.

I never wanted her to tell me my future but she said she wouldn’t even if I asked her.

“You not the kind’a man should know what lies ahead,” she’d tell me. “It won’t make a difference and you got too much to do to be slowed up thinkin’ about it.”

She half carried me into her one-room home and laid me out on a mattress on the floor. By that time Jo was over sixty. But she still had the spark that made me make love to her when I wasn’t yet out of my teens. Sometimes I still wonder about what might have been if I had stayed out there with her as she asked me to do.

I watched her sitting at her long oak table mixing powders in a wooden bowl.

“Jo,” I said.

“Rest, baby,” she said, shushing me.

It was a hot day but Jo’s place was cool, covered as it was by the shade of a dozen trees. And it was also partially submerged in the soil. The floor was at least six feet below ground level.

It was dark in there too. Candles and lanterns lit the cavernlike space. A shelf over her table contained various animal skulls. One of these was a human, her first lover and the father of her son, both named Domaque.

Jo was a woman of great power and knowledge: a witch by anyone’s definition at any time in the history of mankind.

She took a dirty green bottle and poured a greenish liquid from it into the wooden bowl. She lifted my head for me to drink and I did. Whatever it was she was giving me I knew that it would be good. I knew it because she had saved my life once and on another occasion she literally brought Mouse back from the dead.

Things got a little hazy after I drank the brew, which managed to be both slimy and chalky. I remember her putting poultices on my head and mouth. I thought I saw a great black feathered bird spreading his wings on a branch behind her.

“Easy Rawlins!” I heard her deformed son announce as was his wont whenever he saw me.

I was looking at the roof and slowly it disappeared. Above me were ten thousand stars on a backdrop of black. The air in my nostrils was crisp and cold and I was the only person in the wide world, safe at last from the pain of hatred and the pain of love.

The events of the past two weeks—the riots, the death of Nola Payne, the pursuit of Harold the woman killer, and the memories that Juanda kindled in me all came together and spun me out like a bird clipped by a stone. I was spinning through the sky, seeing pieces of everything—out of control.

Then I crashed. For a moment the aching from my fight was excruciating, then I felt nothing, and then I knew nothing.

“YOU CAN GET up now, baby,” Jo said.

“Hi, Easy,” her hunchbacked son cried.

“Hey, Dom. How you doin’?”

“Hey, Ease,” Mouse said. I couldn’t see him from where I lay but it was him.

A large black bird cried and flared its wings.

“You got a crow as a pet?” I asked Jo as I sat up on the floor mat.

“Raven,” she said. “This here’s a raven. Talks an’ everything. He keeps me company.”

“Who did this to you, Easy?” Mouse asked.

He was standing to the side. Just looking at him made me smile.

Mouse was wearing a greenish gray two-piece suit with a black shirt and a tie made up of every shade of yellow that you could imagine. His shoes were fashioned from alligator skin.

“Poor Howard make you those shoes?”

“Oh yeah. You know Howard got his cousins bringin’ up gator hide from bayou country. He sellin’ ’em for four hunnert dollars a pair.”

Howard was a dark-skinned Cajun acquaintance of ours from Louisiana. He lived in the wilds around L.A. because he was a fugitive from Louisiana justice. He had killed a white man, so running was the only choice he had.

“You gonna answer my question?” Mouse asked.

“It was just a misunderstandin’, Ray. Nuthin’ to get upset about.”

“How you feelin’, darlin’?” Jo asked me.

She’d always had a soft spot for me. I could still hear it in her tone.

“Good,” I said. “Great. I don’t hardly hurt at all.” I was a country boy again, even in the way I spoke.

She handed me a mirror and I saw that all of the swelling on my face had gone. Her teas and poultices rivaled the medicines most doctors prescribed.

“You got to take it easy, baby,” she said. “You know a man’s body don’t bounce back too fast after he pass forty.”

“You wanna go fishin’, Easy?” Domaque shouted.

I turned to Jo’s powerful and lopsided son. He was big and misshapen in almost every part of his body. Something was wrong with his nasal passages, so his mouth hung open showing crooked teeth and red gums. His arms and legs were all different lengths and his mind, though extremely intelligent, held on to all of the innocence of childhood. The first time you saw Dom he’d scare you silly but if you knew him you would feel that you’d met one of the finest human beings on this earth.

“No, Dom. I got to do some huntin’ first. But you know, my boy Jesus has built him a sailboat.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. It floats and goes where he tells it to. I bet he’d take us out for some fishin’.”

The glee on that child-man’s face gave me one of my first feelings of true happiness since the riots began.

“I got to go,” I said.

I rose to my feet. I was fully dressed except that Jo had taken off my socks and shoes.

While I tied my laces she said, “Here, drink this, Easy.” She proffered a cloudy quartz bottle.

“What is it?”

“It’s what you need, baby. You gonna take that body back into the street, you better have a little get-up-n-go.”

I drank the liquid down in one swallow. There wasn’t any alcohol in it but it certainly had a kick.

“After six hours get yourself into bed, honey,” she said.

“Don’t forget about Jesus,” Dom said.

“I’ll ride with ya, Easy,” Mouse informed me. “When Jo called about you, LaMarque drove me over. He needed the car to impress some girl.”

As we walked out from between Jo’s trees her elixir hit me. I felt like I could go out and run a ten-mile race.