Six Easy Pieces

Silver Lining

MRS. MASTERS, I’d like you to meet Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins,” Kathy Langer said. “He’s our senior head custodian.”

I had just entered the secretary’s office. Masters was standing there next to Kathy’s desk.

“Nice to meet you,” I said to the new principal of Sojourner Truth Junior High School. “I hope you’re going to like it here at Truth.”

“Oh, yes,” Ada Masters replied. “I already love it. It’s a beautiful school. And it’s so good to meet you at last, Mr. Rawlins. Are you feeling better?”

I had missed a few days of work looking for the photograph of a man I might have known. It turned out to be the picture of a stranger. I had squandered my sick days and made a bad impression on the new boss. The worst thing about it was, I didn’t give a damn.

“Okay now,” I said. “One’a those seventy-two hour viruses. Woke up this morning and it was gone.”

Mrs. Masters’s pale blue eyes concentrated on me. She was at the midway point between fifty and sixty, petite and well dressed. The gray suit she wore was elegant, made from cashmere. The light gray blouse showing at the V of her jacket had the high sheen of silk. Her sapphire ring was real and her glasses were lined with nacre cut from a single shell. For all that expense her clothes weren’t showy; a careless eye might miss the finer touches and think that Masters was dressed according to a city employee’s salary.

The secretary, Kathy Langer, was an interesting contrast to her new boss. She was young, pert, and ready to make babies. Her coarse, nut-brown hair was almost shiny, her clothes came from the May Company bargain table or maybe JCPenny’s. A vegetarian could have eaten her blunt-toed brown shoes with a clear conscience. Her face wasn’t pretty but it was hungry, a thing most working-class men like. And she had a habit of lifting her chin to bare her throat, at least when I was in the room with her.

There I was, a big black man, in the room with two white women who would never meet traveling in their own social circles. It seemed odd to me and I wanted to say something about it. But I didn’t think that either one of them would understand or appreciate my views.

“Will you take a walk with me, Mr. Rawlins?” Mrs. Masters asked.

“Easy,” I said. “That’s the name I go by.”

I saw Kathy mouth the name. When she saw me regarding her she smiled and moved her shoulder like a lounging cat getting comfortable in a new corner.

“I’d like you to walk me around the lower campus,” Principal Masters said.

WE VISITED SEVERAL CLASSROOMS. The teachers looked wary until they saw Mrs. Masters smile at them and wave. She wasn’t like the previous principal, Hiram Newgate, who only dropped in to see what infractions he might find.

We also spent a while in the garden: the biology and agrarian science department of the school. Out there the students grew radishes and studied elementary anatomy.

Finally we came to the custodians’ bungalow. The rest of my crew was out working by then so we had the room to ourselves. It was a big rectangular space with a large table down the center of it. Along the walls were shelves crowded with cartons of paper towels, toilet tissue, and boxes filled with bottles of ammonia, window cleaner, and bleach. There were five-gallon cans of wax piled in one corner and an entire wall of pegboard hung with dozens of sets of keys next to the door. The table was strewn with newspapers, overflowing ashtrays, empty paper coffee cups, and plates with half-eaten cakes on them.

“Nice place,” Mrs. Masters said. “The kind of place where the job gets done.”

“Sorry about the mess. But, you know, if I want ’em to keep the school clean I can’t complain about this room until Friday after lunch.”

“I understand,” she said. “May I have a seat?”

“Please do.” I was thinking that Newgate never asked permission for anything. He’d stand up if you didn’t offer a seat and nurse a grudge against you from then on.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“No thank you. I am very happy that you’re back, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know the faculty and the students talk a lot about you.”

“They do?”

“Yes. It seems that they’ve come to rely on you for many problems that have nothing to do with the maintenance of the plant. Many of the women teachers, some men too, say that they depend on you for discipline when some of the more aggressive students have problems.”

Ada Masters had a mild way about her. She was small and unthreatening. In that manner she had gotten more out of her new charges than harsh-mouthed Newgate ever could.

It was true that students and teachers alike came to me when there was a problem. I was a black man in charge at a black school. No boy student was big enough to challenge me and the parents trusted me more than they did the white teachers. I was well read too. I’d perused every textbook in the school and often found myself instructing the kids on how to do their homework and even how to use the library.

I never neglected my own work, at least not until the past few weeks. It was coming up on the first-year anniversary of the death of my friend, Raymond Alexander. I felt responsible for Raymond’s death. He had been trying to steer clear of trouble but he helped me out one last time and got a bullet in the chest. His wife, EttaMae Harris, carried him out of the hospital just before they were about to declare him dead. I’d been looking for him, for his grave if that’s where he was, but Etta had disappeared and there were only whispered rumors that Ray hadn’t actually died but had gone back to Texas or up to the Bay Area or down in Mexico.

Lately I had been spending afternoons roaming around the city looking for clues about EttaMae or Raymond, who most people knew as Mouse.

I thought that the new principal had walked me around to gently let it drop that I shouldn’t miss any more days, but then I realized that she was going to stop me from working outside of the job description for the supervising senior head custodian.

“I wanted to thank you,” she said.

I girded myself thinking that this was the soft caress before the slaughtering knife.

“…for taking such good care of the school.”

“Say what?” I said.

“You have been the spine of Sojourner Truth,” Mrs. Masters said.

“I have?”

“You know you have. There are paintings of you in the art class, letters from thankful parents on file in the main office. The only negative notices are the job evaluation reports from Principal Newgate. He thought that you were insolent and insubordinate. I suppose that if he had been a better principal some future artist might have drawn him.”

“Oh they did,” I assured her. “There were quite a few portraits of Principal Newgate that I’ve had to wash off of the children’s rest room walls. If he had found them I would have probably got a transfer letter in there too.”

Mrs. Masters’s laugh was hushed but hardy. She covered her mouth and leaned forward in her chair. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“Easy?” It was a man’s voice.

At the door stood Jackson Blue, himself a living doorway into another dimension of my life.

Mrs. Masters straightened up and wiped the tear from her face.

“You have work to do, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “Come up to the office tomorrow morning and we’ll talk about what you think I need to pay attention to here at Truth, as you call it.”

She got to her feet and walked to the door. Jackson stepped out of the way and they both made graceful little bows with their heads. When she walked out Jackson closed the door behind her.

“What the hell are you doing here, Jackson? This is my job.”

“You walked in on me just a few weeks ago, brother,” Jackson replied. “At least I didn’t knock at the door and yell out that I was the cops.”

He was right. I had pulled that tasteless joke on him.

“So what do you want, man? You know that woman you just chased outta here is my new boss.”

Jackson snaked into the chair that Masters had vacated. He clasped his hands together and started rocking to and fro. He was a short man with small bones. His face was slender, sharp, and very dark. He wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and gray rubber-soled shoes with no socks.

“Well?” I asked.

“It ain’t good, man.”

“Listen,” I said. “If I can’t cover it with a mop and a buck-et’a soapy water you don’t even need to tell me. My street days are over.”

“Jewelle MacDonald.”

Jackson stared at me with certainty. He knew he had me hooked.

“What about JJ?”

“You remember when you brought me over her house last year, when I was in trouble with them gangsters?”

“Yeah? What about it?”

Jackson’s shrug was as damning as a signed confession.

“You and her?” I asked.

Just before Mouse had been shot I brought Jackson to my real estate agent’s home in Laurel Canyon. His name was Mofass. Mofass lived with what we called an almost-in-law, Jewelle MacDonald. She was barely more than a third of his age but she loved him and ran his business since emphysema slowed him down.

Jackson had been in trouble because he was competing with the mob for the numbers game in Watts. He had information I needed so we traded favors: a foolproof hideout for some names and addresses.

“After it was all over,” Jackson said, “I went back up there. She told me that Equity Realty had a relationship with another company that manages that apartment I got on Ozone.”

“And then she brought you some groceries?” I asked.

“She was just lettin’ stuff off, you know. Then we started talkin’. She told me that she was brought up a Catholic in Texas. You know, fish on Fridays an’ like that. I told her that the whole philosophical structure of the Catholic Church was based on Aristotle hundreds of years before Christ was even born. You know I said it just to fuck with her head. She just told me that I was crazy but the next time I saw her she must have been to the library or something, because she knew about Plato and Socrates and them, and she wanted me to explain what I had said.”

I sighed. Jackson was winding up into a story. Most other times I would have cut him off but I let him go on because I didn’t really want him to get to the point. I was in no hurry to go into the world where men got shot down in the street for doing their friends a favor.

“So,” Jackson continued, “I read her the riot act on Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. You know, you’n me talked about all that stuff ten years ago, more.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “So what?”

“I figured out up at her house that she liked talkin’ about books and shit. But I didn’t know that it got her hot. I never met a black woman who got hot over a man’s book knowledge.”

I wanted to tell him that he didn’t know my girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, but I thought better of it.

“So what, Jackson? Mofass can’t hardly leave the house. I guess if JJ wants a boyfriend, it’s okay.”

“It’s not that, man,” Jackson said. “I mean Jewelle made it plain from the start that she ain’t never gonna leave Mofass. She wants to be with me. She lets me stay in that apartment and helps me out if I need it. But I cain’t call her up at the house or stay with her the whole night because she got to get back up there to the canyon and take care’a him.”

“So you’re kinda like a married man’s girlfriend on the side,” I said, cracking a smile in spite of my trepidations.

“Laugh if you want to, man. But once I figure out the binary language of machines I’ll be inside them computers and you’ll be out in the cold.”

“What’s the problem, Jackson?”

“Clovis.”

Another name, another universe of danger.

“What about her?”

“Really it ain’t her. Or maybe it is,” Jackson speculated.

“What, Jackson? What you tryin’ t’say?”

“Misty Stubbs.”

“Who’s that?”

“She’s Jewelle’s half-sister on her dead daddy’s side.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Jewelle’s been writin’ to Misty down in Texas all these years since she been up here. She been askin’ Misty to come up but the girl got married when she was fifteen and had to stay with her husband. You know, like it should be. Anyway, I guess her and the husband started not gettin’ along a while back and Misty finally decided to come out here. We went down to Greyhound and everything but she didn’t show up.”

“But she said she was comin’?”

“Give us the schedule and everything.”

“Did JJ call her house in Dallas?”

“How could she do that, man? Misty was leavin’ her husband.”

“Maybe Misty changed her mind.”

“They closer than full sisters is, Easy. Misty wouldn’t do somethin’ like that and not say.”

“Well what do you want from me?” I said. “Girl got on a bus or she didn’t. Maybe her husband stopped her. Maybe she got pulled off somewhere on the road. Either way it’s the kinda story you tell to the cops.”

“But I didn’t say about Clovis yet,” Jackson said.

“Okay. Okay. Hit me.”

“Clovis come over to the real estate office three days ago. She waltzed right up to Jewelle’s desk like they never had no problems. You know Jewelle ain’t scared’a Clovis and them no more ’cause she got Jackie and Lorenzo workin’ for her. Those boys always go around armed.”

I knew Jackie and Lorenzo. They were okay. But Clovis MacDonald, Jewelle’s aunt, was deadlier than three men and almost as smart as her niece.

“Clovis was all smilin’ and pleasant,” Jackson continued. “So Jewelle knew that somethin’ was wrong. She axed Clovis why she was there and Clovis said that Jewelle done stoled Mofass’s real estate company from her and she wanted a piece of the business back.”

Clovis was wrong to have blamed Jewelle. It was really Mofass and I who pushed Clovis out of the business. But the real problem with her memory was that she had taken the business from Mofass in the first place. When Clovis was just a waitress, at a nameless diner we used to frequent, she seduced Mofass and then imprisoned him in her house. Jewelle helped him escape and then she took over the real estate office and turned it into a major concern. At one time I thought that I could be in the property business, but once I saw how good Jewelle was I realized that I would always be a little fish.

“What did Jewelle say?”

“She axed Clovis to leave. Clovis just smiled and put up her hands. But before she left she said, ‘I bet you Misty would be happy if you signed me back into the business. I bet you that she’d come hug and kiss you if you did the right thing.’”

I could imagine the chill in that evil woman’s smile. Mouse had once asked me if I wanted Clovis dead. He didn’t like hurting women but he made allowances now and then. I told him no, but deep in my heart I knew that it would have been the safe move to make.

“What you think about that, Easy?”

“What do you mean what do I think? I don’t think anything.”

“Come on, man. Clovis knew that Misty came down here. Somehow she fount out and grabbed her.”

“You don’t know that, Jackson. It could have been just some innocent comment. That’s all.”

Jackson Blue stood up from his seat with such force that the chair he was in flew five feet backward and crashed to the floor.

“Fuck you, man!” he shouted. “You know better’n that shit!”

I was amazed. I had never seen, nor ever expected to see, Jackson show anger or rage. He was a coward down into his bones and always fled from confrontation.

“What’s wrong with you, Jackson?”

“She’s up in that house with Mofass now. She cain’t eat or sleep or do her job. I axed her to come to you but she wouldn’t. She’s afraid that you might go against Clovis and get her friend killed. But you know tomorrow afternoon she’s gonna go down to Equity and sign half of the business over to Clovis. That’s what’s wrong.”

It was wrong, there was no question about that. And there was no question about what I should do. JJ was a friend of mine. Equity Realty managed my three small apartment buildings in and around Watts. And Clovis was the closest thing I ever had to a true enemy.

“How can she do that, Jackson? Mofass owns the business.”

“She got the power of attorney ever since Mofass been sick. She the one wit’ the final say.”

I looked over at my pegboard of keys. They reminded me of the homemade Christmas ornaments we had when I was a child.

“You know I have to talk to her, Jackson.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s gonna be mad that you came to me.”

“I know she will, brother. But what can I do? Clovis be like a cancer once she get in there.”

I took a deep breath and wondered if a vengeful supreme deity actually existed. Or maybe it was Hindu karma that had caught me by the tail. Something was pulling me back into the street.

I DROVE UP TO MOFASS’S HOME. It was at the end of an unpaved path two turns off of Laurel Canyon Road. From the driveway of their hidden home you could see the Los Angeles basin. Ragged brown smoke clung to the atmosphere like some kind of evil spirit dancing the dance of the damned.

Jewelle opened the door. She wore a cranberry-colored dress with wide skirts and a tapered waist. The neckline was straight across and low cut. If it wasn’t for that frown she would have been captivating.

When I met JJ she was still a child. She was hopeful, filled with life and energy that made you want to laugh and do things for her happiness. Now, though sad, she had the figure and presence to make a man want to change his life for her. That’s what Jackson Blue had done. He had gone against everything that came naturally to him in order to bring me to that door.

“What you doin’ here, Easy Rawlins?”

“You know why I’m here, girl. ’Cause you need help.”

“I don’t need your kind of help,” she said.

She swung the door in my face. It would have slammed if I hadn’t put my foot across the threshold.

Jewelle possessed a powerful spirit. She had stood up to Clovis while still in her teens, saving Mofass from that evil woman’s clutches. She had borne the weight of her half-sister’s disappearance up until the moment that door would not close; then she fell up against me and cried. I walked her outside toward the sheer cliff that was the marker of their backyard. I held her as we walked because she would have fallen if I hadn’t. She was wailing by the time we reached the overhang.

“Tell me about it, baby,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be here, Easy. You shouldn’t.”

“I ain’t gonna do nuthin’ unless you say to, JJ. But you know you got to talk this out.”

“They’ll kill her.”

“Not if it means that Clovis don’t get Equity. She’d set loose Satan in the kingdom of heaven if she could just make a dollar and not pay the tax.”

It was true and JJ knew it. The woman-child smiled bitterly and pushed away from me.

“I’d give her every dollar I got to keep Misty safe,” JJ said.

“Has she told you that she has her?”

“No. Not in so many words. She says that Misty would be happy, that she’d come over and make me a toast if I did the right thing by the MacDonald clan.”

“Could she have heard that Misty was supposed to come down here? I mean if she knew that she was supposed to come and didn’t, then she could feed you a story and there’d be no way you could find out the truth.”

“She had Mr. Sunshine,” JJ said with trembling lips.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s a rag doll, a lion with jade-green eyes. Misty had that thing since before she could even talk. She always kept him with her.”

“And Clovis give this doll to you?”

“No. She sent it in the mail. I got it two days ago.”

“Any letter?”

“No. Just the doll in a cardboard box.”

“You got the box?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s go see it.”

MOFASS AND JEWELLE had a big house. The entrance was like a dais that stood high over a gigantic living room. The back wall of this room was all glass looking out onto the vista of L.A. There was a table and four high-back chairs next to this window. JJ left me in one of these while she went to look for the doll.

I sat back and crossed my legs, appreciating the view in late afternoon. JJ was a real estate whiz kid. She bought and sold buildings around the county and turned a larger profit every year. She was able to lease that house, in a neighborhood most black people didn’t even know existed, because she was a valuable asset to the white men she dealt with.

“Mr. Rawlins,” a faint but deep voice called.

I turned my head slowly, not wanting to witness the demolition of one of my oldest L.A. friends. Mofass stood there leaning on two thick walking canes, one for each hand. He wore a heavy maroon-colored robe and had leather slippers on his ashen-black feet. He was breathing hard and looked like an old oil tanker that had been shipwrecked and washed up on land. He leaned to the side, sighed, and groaned. His breath was like the wind whistling through the rusted-out hull of the wrecked ship he resembled. His yellowy eyes were fog lamps in the deep night of his face.

“Hey, William,” I hailed. “You up and around, huh?”

“Not too much longer. Uh-uh, no.”

“You been sayin’ that fo’ years, man. But I still see you every Christmas.”

“It’s the tent,” he said.

“Oxygen tent?”

“Yeah. JJ got it hooked up over my bed. I gotta gas mask and’a oxygen tank too but I don’t use that too much. An hour under the tent and I can be almost normal for fifteen minutes. Then I got to get back there ‘fore I run outta air an’ cain’t walk no more.”

The hulking wreck lowered himself in the chair opposite me.

“Where JJ?” he asked suspiciously.

“She went to get something to show me,” I said.

Mofass leaned forward in his chair and made a motion that he wanted me to do the same.

“I think she gotta boyfriend, Mr. Rawlins,” he whispered.

“Why you say that?”

“She got this pretty young thing named Rosa come up and take care’a me sometimes when she go out. She says she goin’ to do business. But I smell her perfume and see them high heels. You know JJ was runnin’ around in tennis shoes before Rosa.”

“She was a child before, William. She growin’ up and wants to dress more like a woman, that’s all.”

“Sometimes she out late at night, Mr. Rawlins.” There were tears in the old man’s eyes. “Late. She don’t think I know. She thinks I’m asleep, but I ain’t. I get up and wander around lookin’ for her an’ sometimes I cain’t find her.”

“You ask her where she been?”

“She says that she just run out to pick somethin’ up in Hollywood or that she just took a drive, but I know better. You know I got a long-barrel twenty-two pistol right under my pillow. When I get a good breath I’ma go out an’ find the motherfucker. Kill him too.”

“Uncle Willy,” JJ called from across the football field of a living room. “What you doin’ up?”

Mofass just stared at his girlfriend. He didn’t have enough breath to make himself heard that far away.

She came up to us carrying a small walnut tray with two sodas on it. There was a cardboard box under her arm.

“I brought you a drink,” she said to Mofass. “But you weren’t in your room.”

“Cain’t I come out and see my friend?” he complained.

“Sure you can,” she replied.

She put down the drinks on the table and began fussing with Mofass’s robe. You could see the love those two had for each other. They behaved like people who had been together for decades. Jewelle was barely in her twenties but she had an old soul.

After she had him squared away she handed me the box. “Here it is, Mr. Rawlins.”

“What’s that?” Mofass asked.

“Piece’a mail come for me at Equity,” I said. “Somebody didn’t know my address and then JJ opened it by mistake.”

“That’s why you should be listed,” my old property manager chided. His voice was still deep and raspy but it was also feeble, like the distant rumble of a thunderstorm that has almost passed from earshot.

I took out the bear and the paper it was wrapped in. It was just a tattered old doll made of cotton, sewn with hemp, and given green eyes made from glass. It smelled a little like buttermilk. The newspaper the doll was wrapped in was the Dallas Gazette, dated two weeks before. The postmark on the box was L.A. three days earlier.

“What is that stuff?” Mofass asked.

“Just a joke, Mo,” I said. “Old friend’a mine tellin’ me that she’s in town.”

“Don’t…seem…too…funny….” Mofass gasped between each breath. He reached out with his right hand and JJ was there to catch it. She helped him to his feet. I tried to lend a hand but she pushed me off.

“I’ll take care of him,” she told me.

She put herself under his arm like a human crutch. They made their way across the immense living room and then passed through a door.

While they were gone I considered the box and its contents. I knew a cop who might have been interested but it was slim evidence and there would be no action before the next day when Clovis wanted to close the deal.

I had a pretty clear notion of what to do next but I couldn’t begin until JJ returned. So I sat in the window, drinking my cola.

No complex ideas or deep emotions came to me; just the image of an orphaned child, at the age of eight, on his own and moving fast. He traveled from Louisiana to Houston, and from there to North Africa, Italy, Paris, and finally the Battle of the Bulge. I’d encountered death and destruction from the very start. I came to L.A. to get away from it but death clung to me—–he was my oldest friend, my only constant star. I thought about my years trading in favors on the streets of L.A. I’ll do for you if you do for me, was my motto and creed.

Sitting there in that window, looking out over a city that had no idea I was there, made me feel powerful in a funny way. At the Board of Education they told you the kind of broom you needed and the amount of time it would take you to sweep up a classroom or hallway. They took out taxes and retirement funds from your paycheck and told you what days you could take off and how often you could be sick. Everything was preplanned and managed. The paperback rule book was three-hundred-and-forty-seven pages long.

I yearned to be sitting where I was sitting, to be my own man. Loving freedom and loving danger are one and the same thing for most black men. Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we’re feeling liberation we know that there’s somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.

That’s why I always loved Mouse. He was crazy and a killer and trouble in any circumstances. But he never accepted our slave heritage. He never bowed his head in front of an enemy. “Kill me if you can,” he said more than once. “But if you cain’t you better know how to run.”

“Easy,” JJ said.

I hadn’t noticed her return in my reverie.

“How is he?”

“Sleepin’. You know he can’t be out of that tent more than ten minutes at a time.”

“She’s in L.A.,” I said handing her the doll.

“You think that ’cause’a the postmark?”

“Uh-huh. Yes I do.”

“What should I do, Easy?”

“What time you supposed to get together with them tomorrow?”

“Noon.”

“Call ’em up. Tell ’em you can’t do it before five. Tell ’em Mofass has to get a shot or somethin’.”

“Why?”

“To buy me time. I wanna look at Clovis, see what’s happenin’ at that house of theirs. Do you have a picture of Misty around?”

JJ reached into a fold of her cranberry dress and came out with a faded photograph. The sepia tones revealed a tomboy, with a space between her front teeth, smiling so wide that you wondered if she had ever known sorrow.

I must have grinned when I saw the photo.

“She’s the closest person to me in the world,” JJ said. It was both a vow and a threat.

Clovis shared a big four-story house with her brothers and sisters on Peters Lane, up in Baldwin Hills. They lived there with various other husbands and wives, and some children.

I parked down the street in a run-down old Ford sedan that I borrowed from my mechanic friend, Primo. I got there at four-thirty in the afternoon.

The MacDonald clan was a filthy lot. They parked their cars on the lawn and kept a ratty old sofa out on the front porch. The paint was peeling off the walls. But even though they lived like sharecroppers I knew they had money in the bank. While Clovis had Mofass under her power she’d siphoned off enough money to buy property under her own name.

At six, the brothers, Fitts and Clavell MacDonald, came out of the house with two dark-skinned women, laughing loudly, probably half drunk already, they climbed into a new Buick and drove off.

As the evening wore on I saw most of the whole ugly tribe. Grover, Tyrone, Renee, Clovis and her husband Duke. There were other men, women, and children who seemed to live there. But there was no one who matched up with Misty’s photograph.

I DROVE HOME AT EIGHT O’CLOCK.

Feather had refused to go to bed until I was there. Jesus sat up with her watching some show that was mostly canned laughter.

“Daddy!” my little girl shouted when I came in.

I guess Jesus was worried too. He kissed me, which is something the seventeen-year-old hadn’t done in two years. I put Feather to bed and talked with Jesus about his boat for a while.

“I want to go camping with some friends next weekend,” he told me.

“Where?”

“Around Santa Cruz.”

“Who you goin’ with?”

“A girl and some of her friends.”

“Who’s that?”

“Marlene.”

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Eighteen.”

“You can get in trouble behind that shit, boy.”

Again he was silent. Jesus never argued with me. When he disagreed or got angry he just clammed up.

“White girl?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Friends too?”

He nodded.

I stared at my adopted son. He was my child more than blood might have been. For many years he was mute. He had been molested as an infant and young child, sold to men for sex. I took him out of that. For a while I had him living with Primo because I thought that a Mexican child needed a Mexican family. But Jesus wanted to be with me and somehow it just felt right.

I wanted to protect him but telling him no or which way to go would never work. Jesus had a mind of his own and all I could do was make suggestions.

“Be careful,” I said, feeling as helpless as I feared he might be.

Jesus smiled and hugged me.

AT ELEVEN-THIRTY I was still up, reading Anthem by Ayn Rand in the living room. The little yellow dog had taken up his post at the hallway, guarding Feather’s sleeping place from the grim ogre–—me. As time had gone by I had begun to appreciate the dog. He came to me, the last living testament of a woman who had been murdered. He hated me because he blamed me for his mistress’s death. Now his love was for Feather and he took her protection as his purpose in life. I had grown to respect him for his devotion to my daughter and so our regular standoffs at the door to her room made me smile every evening at bedtime.

The phone rang. I picked it up before it was through the first bell.

“Hello.”

“Easy?” she said in a brittle voice.

“Hey, baby. How are you?”

“A little tired,” Bonnie Shay said. “I just woke up. They’ve been running us ragged.”

“Where are you?”

“In Paris. For the last ten days we’ve been in West Africa so I couldn’t call.”

“The ambassadors and princes been askin’ for your number?” I said in a joking voice.

“No. What do those men care about a stewardess?” she said. But there was fraction of a second of delay in her voice.

“Easy?” she asked in the static of long distance.

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, baby,” I said. “I just miss you. I need you here with me.”

“Can you hear me smiling?” she asked, and I felt ashamed of my suspicious heart.

“Loud as daybreak,” I said.

“How are Feather and Jesus?”

“He’s planning some kind of camping trip and she’s gettin’ bolder every minute.”

“Tell them I love them.”

“Sure will.”

“I love you too, Mr. Rawlins.”

“And I love you.”

There was another pause. We were too old to profess love back and forth, over and over, and too young to just hang up.

Finally Bonnie said, “I should go.”

“I’ll hang up first,” I suggested.

“Okay.”

I LEFT THE HOUSE at four the next morning. The streets were empty and dark. I made good time to the MacDonald residence. The lights were off and four cars were parked on the lawn. I lit up the first of ten Chesterfield cigarettes I allotted for myself per day. I sat back in the smoky haze thinking about how much I loved being a silent watcher.

The dark street looked like a stage after the play is long over and the actors and the audience have gone home. I was thinking about Jesus growing up, and Bonnie so many thousands of miles away. About Mouse being gone from my life, like my dead mother and my father who, in fleeing a lynch mob, also abandoned me.

I imagined my father running into the darkness, his own dark skin blending with the night. A calm came over me as he disappeared because I knew they would never catch him. I knew that he was alive and breathing—–somewhere.

“HEY, MISTER!” the old lady shouted. I started awake. The sun was just coming up. Two cars were already gone from the MacDonald lawn. The woman’s face on the other side of the glass was pocked and haggard, deep molasses brown and relenting to the pull of gravity.

“What?” I said.

She motioned for me to roll down the window.

I did what she wanted and asked, “What do you want?”

“You watchin’ them?” she asked, pointing toward the MacDonald residence.

When you wake up suddenly from a deep sleep, as I just had, part of your mind is still in dreams. And in dreams time is almost meaningless. There are times I’ve dozed off for just a minute and had dreams that covered an hour or more of activity. That’s how it was for me at that moment. I saw the woman, read the lines on her face, deciphered the obvious anger in her tone, and decided that she wasn’t mad at me but at those filthy, uncouth MacDonalds. She was also, I surmised in a fraction of a second, a first-degree busybody who had more information on the kidnappers than the police could gather in seven years.

“Yes I am,” I replied.

“What they do to you?”

“Stoled my car,” I said in good old Fifth Ward lingo.

“Bastids,” she spat. “Make the whole neighborhood a pigsty. Noisy and vulgar, I hate ’em.”

“The man who stoled my ride was with this girl,” I said, showing the angry old woman my photograph of Misty.

“I seen her. Yeah. She was wit’ some guest’a theirs. A man drove a old red truck. It had Texas plates on it.”

“That’s the guy took my car. He asked me could he borrow it. Left me a suitcase to hold. All it had was some underwear and that picture of the girl drove off with him.”

“You wanna use my phone to call the cops?” the woman asked.

“I sure do. But first I wanna wait here and make sure he’s in there. ’Cause if I call and he ain’t there, that old bitch Clovis’ll just say they never heard of him.”

“You got her ticket, brother,” the old woman agreed. “I’m right over there in the white-and-green house. You need somethin’ you just come over to me.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “Just as soon as that man show up. He come here much?”

“Almost every day. In the mornin’ too. You probably don’t have long to wait.”

With that the old lady left for her home. I was sure that she’d be watching but that was all right. If I fell asleep again she’d rouse me to the mysterious Texan’s arrival.

HE GOT THERE AT ABOUT EIGHT. The truck was an interesting combination of dull red paint and brown rust, like lichen rolling over a scarlet stone. The black man at the wheel was large with muscle, about thirty. He wore overalls and a T-shirt. I wondered if there was a straw hat on the seat next to him. He drove right up on the lawn and ran to the front door. Antoinette, the prettiest MacDonald next to JJ, ran out to meet him. Antoinette was a healthy girl. Even under her loose one-piece dress you could see her large upstanding breasts. They hugged and kissed, and kissed again. Clovis came out then, talking in a loud voice, though not loud enough for me to make out the words.

Antoinette stood back, seemingly afraid of what was being said. The big Texan was nodding at every word, listening hard. When she was finished he asked something and Clovis yelled something back. The Texan jumped into his truck and took off. I waited a second and followed him.

Clovis and Antoinette didn’t seem to notice me.

THE TEXAN LED ME on a long drive through L.A. He took side streets, always headed south. We went down into Compton. We were still in L.A. county, but the houses became sparse and the street was barely covered by asphalt. I had dropped almost two blocks behind the Texas truck because there was hardly any traffic. When I saw the red pickup turn right up ahead, I increased my speed to make sure I didn’t lose him.

I turned the corner just in time to see the truck park in the driveway of a small blue house. I went all the way to the end of the block, turned the corner, and pulled to the curb.

My heart was racing but not from fear. I was excited by my proximity to the solution of JJ’s dilemma.

Sitting in the car I wondered how to get past the cowboy’s defenses. I needed a distraction.

My first thought was to set the house on fire. There had recently been a fire at Truth. Everyone always runs out to the curb when threatened by flame and smoke. But maybe, if Misty was a hostage in the house—tied up and gagged—maybe the kidnapper would leave her in there rather than be implicated in the capital crime of kidnapping.

Two women in pink and blue dresses were making their way down the street. The one in blue carried a small white cardboard box about the size of a workman’s lunch pail. This box had cardboard handles that folded out from the top.

I thought about the police. Looking back on it now I realize that I should have called the cops. I could have said that I saw a woman, bound hand and foot, carried into the house. But I was never happy about dealing with the city’s armed thugs. Even though the cowboy was probably guilty I couldn’t call the law in on him until I was sure.

The ladies were handing two long rectangular bars to a woman standing at the front of the house nearest me. When they came back to the sidewalk I was waiting for them.

“Excuse me, ladies,” I said.

The taller one was in the pink dress suit. It was Sunday attire; all that was missing was a hat. She was tall and dark-skinned. There was a gold wedding ring on her finger so I supposed that someone had once found her beautiful. I suspected that that was a long time ago. She had a frown that would give children nightmares.

“What do you want?” she demanded. It was as if she recognized me as the no-good black sheep of the family and wasn’t about to let me get an inch too close.

“Are those church chocolates?”

“Oh yes,” said the shorter woman wearing the powder-blue dress. She was dark too. But she was sweet all the way through. “A big grin and big butt on a black woman and you know I be a happy man,” my uncle Stanley used to profess. He would have been happy seeing what I saw.

“With almonds?” I asked the friendlier church lady.

“Yes,” she said.

“You know I love church candy.”

“This ain’t no tea party, young man,” the lady in pink said. “We’re selling these chocolates.”

“Hester,” the lady in blue complained. “There’s no need to be rude.”

“I have a house to take care of, Minne Roland,” Hester replied. “So now, mister, if you would please move—”

“I would like to buy all of your candies, ladies,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “How many have you got left?”

“Almost twenty,” Blue Minne replied.

The bars sold for thirty-five cents a piece. I gave them seven dollars and they thanked me. Hester made a grimace that I was sure was meant to be a smile.

I walked off toward the cowboy’s house laden with chocolates and high hopes.

THE FRONT DOOR hadn’t been used much recently. There were spider webs at the corners and leaves sticking out from underneath the welcome mat. There were stains on the peeling white door left from the last rainstorm three months ago.

I pressed the doorbell. There was no sound from inside.

I knocked on the door.

There came the sound of footsteps. But not the heavy-booted feet of the black cowboy I’d been following. The door whined and cracked as it opened. The short honey-brown woman had a wide smile and smaller eyes than JJ’s photograph indicated.

“Hey y’all,” she said, greeting me with all the friendliness of the country.

“Hi,” I said, widening my eyes in surprise.

Misty took my stare as a compliment; it might have been if it were not for my astonishment at her carefree attitude.

“You sellin’ candy?” she asked.

“You bet,” I said. “Milk chocolate and almonds for twenty-five cents a bar.”

“Misty, who you talkin’ too?” The man’s voice was hard and serious.

The cowboy appeared in the disheveled room behind the young Texan miss. His skin was rough and brown with the strong aura of drab green emanating from underneath. His eyes were brown too but just barely. This cowboy’s ancestors could have well included a rattlesnake or two.

“Anthony Lender,” I said, remembering the name of a white private I once went to war with. “Sellin’ chocolate.”

“What you wanna knock on this door for?” he asked me.

“To sell a pretty young lady somethin’ sweet,” I said.

Misty smiled at me and the snake pushed her aside.

“It don’t look like no one live in here,” he said. “Why you wanna come up here?”

“I saw you drive up when I was across the street goin’ door to door,” I said, stalling for time. “I’m sellin’ chocolate to build the house for our minister. It’s really good chocolate and cheap…”

While I spoke I reached into the box as if I were going to show him just how good my candies were. But instead of chocolate I whipped out my .38 caliber pistol and hit him in the center of his forehead. As the cowboy fell backward I hit him again on the side of the jaw. He fell heavily and I knew that he was no longer conscious. I pulled the door closed behind me and presented the muzzle of my gun to the once smiling face of Misty.

“This gun can shout a lot louder than you,” I said. “So I suggest you keep it down and do what I say.”

Misty was not only pretty, she was smart. She nodded and glanced at her boyfriend.

“You got some sheets somewhere?” I asked her.

“In the bedroom.”

“Show me.”

She led me through a doorway into a room so small it would not have been large enough to contain a vain woman’s wardrobe. There was a single bed and sheets strewn around it.

“Take that sheet and bring it back out front,” I commanded.

She did as I said.

“Now tear it into five long strips,” I said handing her my pocket knife.

“We ain’t got no money, mister,” she said as she worked.

“But you will soon enough won’t you, Misty?”

She stopped cutting for a second.

When she was through with the sheets I used the strips to hogtie the cowboy and gag him. When I was through I had Misty sit down on the floor in front of me.

“You gonna rape me?” she asked.

“No.”

“What you want wit’ me an’ Crawford? And how come you know my name?”

“How much they payin’?”

“Who?”

“Clovis and them,” I said, falling into the rhythm of the Texan dialect.

Misty was good. She looked like and talked like a hick off the back of a watermelon truck, but she knew how to feint and lie.

“I don’t know no Clovis,” she said, her voice a fraction softer than it had been before.

“You made the right choice comin’ to L.A., girl,” I said. “But wrong in goin’ in against your half-sister. I know you know Clovis. Clovis is your family too. So now you tell me what’s happenin’ or I’ma make sure you spend your pretty years in jail for extortion.”

“I didn’t do nuthin’,” she said. “I just been livin’ in this shitty house.”

“I bet you Clovis owns the deed on this house.”

“What if she do?”

“Put that together with Clovis forcing JJ to sign over half her business to her and you got prison stamped all over it.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“Come with me,” I said. And we left the tethered cowboy dreaming of money that he would never collect.

“DID YOU PLAN IT from the beginning?” I asked her on the long drive back to Laurel Canyon.

“What?”

“Did you plan to steal your sister’s business when you were writin’ her from down Texas?”

“No. I didn’t even know she had nuthin’ when I was down there. She’d just write and say how she lived with this old man Mofass and how they loved each other. She said that he was too sick to work but she loved him anyway so I thought that they was poor.”

“So when did you get in with the plan?”

“I left Crawford a note tellin’ him that I was comin’ up here. He called Clovis an’ told her. He wanted her to talk me into comin’ back.”

“Yeah?” I prodded.

“She told him to get up here and then they all met me at the bus stop in San Diego.”

“How they know when you gonna get there?”

“They’s on’y one bus a day to L.A. from Dallas.”

“But why would you let them turn you against your sister?”

“I told you already.”

“Told me what?”

“She lied makin’ me think that her an’ her boyfriend was poor. She never sent me no money or tried to help me get on my feet. An’ she stole Clovis’s money in the first place.”

“So you wanted to steal it back from her?”

At that question Misty went silent.

For the rest of the ride she stared out of the window.

“WHERE WE GOIN’?” she asked when we turned off onto JJ’s road.

“Where you think?”

“You said to the police.”

“I figured I’d skip the constabulary and go straight to the judge,” I said.

When we got to Mofass’s door, I expected to have to pull JJ off of Misty. But there were no fireworks, no waterworks either. JJ grinned when she saw her missing sister. The smile faded when I told her what was what. JJ didn’t ask why and Misty offered no excuse.

“Well I guess that’s it,” JJ said when I was through explaining.

* * *

I TOOK MISTY back down to Compton and dropped her off about six blocks from her hogtied cowboy.

On the way home I thought about JJ. She must have been brokenhearted over her sister’s betrayal. Money, I thought, is a harsh master in poor people’s lives. It warps us and makes us so hungry that we turn feral and evil. If Misty and JJ had stayed back home in their poor shacks, they would have been friends for fifty years baking pies and raising children side by side.

JESUS HAD BOUGHT a sleeping bag with money he’d saved from work. We sat up late into the night talking about my experiences camping out in France and Germany with the small troop I belonged to.

“Did you kill a lotta Germans?” the bright-eyed boy asked.

“Yes I did.”

“Did you hate ’em?”

“I thought I did–—at first. But after a while I began to realize that the German soldiers and the white American soldiers felt the same about me. I used my rifle a little less after that.”

“How come?”

“Because I didn’t really know who it was I wanted to shoot.”

“So you didn’t kill any more?”

“I didn’t kill except if I absolutely had to.”

I showed Jesus how to camp so that nobody could see you. I cautioned him to stay low when he heard something in the bushes.

“Be careful out there, son,” I said to him. “You know I love you more than anything.”

* * *

THE PHONE RANG at two thirty-five.

“Yes,” I said, expecting it to be Bonnie.

“Easy,” she cried. “Easy, come quick. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

I filled an empty mayonnaise jar with water and then drove the car I’d borrowed from Primo toward the canyons. At the base of the hills I got out and made mud from the dirt at the side of the road. I smeared the mud on Primo’s license plates.

THE DOOR TO THE HOUSE was open. The large living room was strewn with bodies and blood. Clovis was thrown back on the couch so that she was hanging over the backrest. Fitts and Clavell were lying one in front of the other. It seemed as if they had been running at someone but were cut down—–first Clavell and then his brother–—in the middle of their rush.

Mofass was leaning up against the wall that the brothers had rushed. The .22 caliber pistol was in his hand. JJ was kneeling next to him, trying to pull him up by the arm.

“Damn criminals,” Mofass said. I could barely hear him.

“Get up, Uncle Willy,” JJ pleaded. “Get up.”

“Take her outta here, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. His eyes were so blurry and yellow that they seemed to be melting right out of his head.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Ain’t no time for questions. Take her outta here.”

When I tried to pull JJ to her feet she clutched Mofass’s arm. Her grip was brittle though and I manged to pull her away.

“Get his oxygen tank,” I told her.

While she ran into the other room I interrogated my real estate manager.

“What happened?”

“They wanted to steal my property,” he said. “They wanted to hurt my girl. Fuck that. Fuck that.”

“We got to get you outta here, William,” I said.

“No, Mr. Rawlins. I got to stay here an’ cover up for the cops. They cain’t know JJ was in on this.”

I didn’t know for a fact what he meant. But I had my suspicions.

JJ returned with the oxygen tank and mask. When she held the mask to Mofass’s nose and mouth he sighed. He smiled at his child lover and then shook his head for us to go.

I dragged JJ to the car.

“We can’t leave him,” she said as we were driving away.

“We have to call the police, JJ.”

“No. He killed them.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I called Clovis after you left. I told her that I decided against lettin’ her in the business. She said sumpin’ but I just hung up. Then, about two hours ago, they all came over with the contracts for me and Uncle Willy to sign. I told ’em no an’ Uncle Willy pretended that he was ’sleep.”

“Then what.”

“Fitts started twistin’ my arm like he used to when I was a kid. I guess I screamed and he slapped me. I fell down and heard this sound like a cap gun. I thought maybe it was my nose bone or sumpin’ but then Clovis made this squeakin’ sound. I looked up and seen her holdin’ her chest and then the crackin’ sound happened again and she fell back on the couch. Uncle Willy was standin’ at the do’ with his pistol in his hand. Fitts and Clavell run at him but Uncle Willy cut ’em down. He used one hand to hold himself up on the wall and the other to shoot.”

“We got to get outta here,” I said.

“Not without him,” JJ said.

“He got his oxygen mask,” I reasoned. “When the cops come they’ll call it self-defense. But if you’re here you might get in trouble.”

I CALLED THE POLICE from a phone booth, telling them that I had heard shots from Mofass’s home. Then I took JJ down near Jackson Blue’s apartment on Ozone Street in Venice.

I parked down the street and called him from a booth.

“JJ’s in trouble,” I said to the sleepy con man. “If you got a woman in there with you send her away. Take JJ in and make her feel comfortable. If the police ask, you tell ’em she was with you for the night.”

“Ain’t no woman up in here, Easy. Send her on.”

I watched as JJ walked down the block to Jackson’s house and then I went home to bed—if not to sleep.

THE MORNING EXAMINER had the triple murder and suicide on the front page. The police, tipped off by an anonymous call, went to the secluded Laurel Canyon home where they found the four corpses. Mofass had given his life for Jewelle.

She returned home that morning and told the police that she’d left early to see her boyfriend. She also informed them that Clovis had been pressing to get back into business with them. The contracts Clovis wanted them to sign seemed to prove the story.

My name was not mentioned. And I have no idea where Misty and Crawford went. Jewelle stayed in her home. Jackson didn’t move in but they still see each other.

I went back to work the next day wondering how long it would be before my past showed up and put me into an early grave.