Little Scarlet

40

Suggs opened the driver’s side door but I just stood there on the patch of grass at the curb.

“You getting in?” he asked me.

“No.” I chewed on the word, drawing it out.

“You gonna walk over that hill?”

“They got buses out around here, Detective. I wanna stretch my legs, think a bit.”

“You’re not about to find a Negro hobo around here, Rawlins. But you might find trouble.”

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t you see where you are?”

“Los Angeles,” I said. “That’s the city I live in, the city where I work and pay taxes.”

Suggs shook his head, dropped into the driver’s seat, and took off. I liked him more all the time.

I STARTED AT the far end of the opposite side of the block. Nobody was home at the first house. The lady at the second home looked out between the blinds of a side window at me but never came to the door. There were another few homes where the people were not at home or didn’t answer. Finally one door came open. The man standing there was thick around the middle but slender in the shoulders and neck. He wore white pants and a green shirt and so resembled a leek or some other bulb plant.

“What do you want?” he asked, none too friendly.

“I’m looking for my wife’s second cousin Harold,” I said easily.

“None’a your people livin’ around here,” he said.

He had green eyes and a pale face.

“He used to use an address around here,” I explained, “and my wife was worried about him —”

“Didn’t you hear me?” the study in green and white asked.

“So you don’t know a black Harold?” I replied.

“I told you —,” he said.

I didn’t hear the rest because I turned away from him. While I walked down the concrete path toward the sidewalk he shouted at my back.

“You better get out of here, mister. We don’t want you or your relatives causing problems here. You aren’t welcome here.”

On my way to the house next door, I counted the three times he used the word “here.” I quickened my pace because it was a toss-up whether his next move would be to get his gun or call the police.

The next three places turned me away too. And then I came to a pink house edged in red toward the other end of the block. A tallish and older white woman in a banana-colored housecoat came to the door. She looked at me with no apparent fear. Maybe she had no radio or TV and no paperboy either. Maybe no one told her that Los Angeles had just been through a small-scale civil war or maybe she didn’t care.

“Yes?”

“Hello, ma’am,” I said. “I’m looking for a man, a Negro named Harold. I think he used to live on this block.”

“That boy from the Ostenberg home,” she said.

“You mean Jocelyn Ostenberg across the street?” I asked.

“Yes sir. That’s the one. And it was a shame too.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see a police cruiser turn onto the far end of the block.

“May I come in, ma’am?” I asked.

“Oh yes. Please do,” she said.

She moved away from the door and I took a long step into her home, hoping that the cops hadn’t seen me.

The house smelled of cat piss and air freshener but that didn’t bother me. If the police didn’t come to the door within two minutes I was home free. I still had Jordan’s letter in my pocket but after my arrest at the gas station I didn’t know if it still held any official power.

“Come sit down,” the woman said. “My name is Dottie, Dottie Mathers. What’s yours?”

“Ezekiel, Miss Mathers,” I said. “Ezekiel Rawlins.”

The woman turned to me with awe on her face.

“Named after the Bible,” I added so that she wouldn’t mistake me for an agent of the Lord.

The room she ushered me into had flowers everywhere. In vases and stitched into the fabric on the couch and stuffed chairs. There was a floral pattern on the wallpaper and little knickknacks on the shelves, coffee table, and windowsills that had various flower motifs. Moving between the images of flowers were cats. White, black, calico, and blond cats rubbing and mewling and looking at me with sultry half-interest.

“Have a seat, young man,” Dottie told me.

There was a cat on the seat she offered me. He didn’t move until I was almost on top of him.

I counted seven felines and I was sure there were twice that number in and around her house. But none of that bothered me. The cops had not come to the door. I was safely hidden among the flowers and cats in the company of a white woman who didn’t seem to care about anything else.

“Tea?” she asked.

“No ma’am. All I wanted to know was about Harold.”

“What a shame,” she said. “You know he used to come here to my door when he couldn’t take it anymore. That was a long time ago. More than twenty-five years. I’m one of the only people left who remembers it and that’s why Jocelyn hasn’t talked to me in all that time.”

“So Harold and his mother used to live at Jocelyn’s home?” I asked.

“That’s exactly right,” Dottie said. “I think her name was Honey.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember her last name?”

“Oh yes, I do,” Dottie said in a pixilated sort of way. “Honey May. I’ll never forget that, because she had two first names. I always thought that was peculiar.”

“Honey May,” I said, committing the name to memory.

“That’s right. She seemed like a nice girl but I think she must have had a problem with the bottle.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“She just left one day. Didn’t even take little Harold with her. Left him with Jocelyn.”

She had taken a seat in the middle of the flowery red-and-blue-and-green sofa. Dottie had a long face that was meaty around the jowls. Her nose was hefty and her cheeks round. In that face I saw Jocelyn’s face. I had been distracted by the large ears but now that I remembered it I could see the features of the Ostenberg woman again.

“Jocelyn kept the boy,” Dottie was saying. “I suppose it was very Christian of her but you know, everybody would have been better off if she would have found some nice colored people to take him in.”

“Why do you say that, ma’am?”

“Aren’t you polite, Ezekiel,” she said beaming at me. “It would have been better because Jocelyn was ashamed to have people know that she was raising a colored child. She wouldn’t even take him to school. From the time he was five years old she made him walk the nine blocks to Redman Elementary. She never took him to the park or allowed his friends into the house.”

“What about her husband?” I asked.

“That man she lives with is her second husband,” Dottie said. “He’s only been there for sixteen years. Jocelyn’s first husband left years before. Harold left Jocelyn’s home when he was twelve.”

“Twelve years old?”

“Oh yes. I know because he came here to me the day he left. He asked me if he could cut my lawn for fifty cents and I told him yes. After that I never saw him again. Jocelyn told her neighbors that his mother had come to get him. But I knew better. He wanted that fifty cents for a stake to run away from home. And who can blame him? His mother a drunk who abandoned him and the woman who raised him didn’t even hold his hand when they crossed the street.”

By then I had forgotten the police.

A cat jumped into my lap and started pressing her nose against my hand. I scratched behind her ears absently. I imagined a lonely black boy living out in a white world where even his mother treated him like dirt.

“You like cats, Mr. Rawlins?” Dottie asked me.

“Better than most people,” I replied.

“Hallelujah to that,” she said.