Six Easy Pieces

Gray-Eyed Death

ACAR DOOR SLAMMED on the street somewhere but it didn’t mean anything to me. I was at home drinking lemonade from the fruit of my own trees on a Saturday in L.A. Nobody was after me. My slate was clean. Bonnie had gone out with her friend Shirley, Jesus was taking sailing lessons near Redondo Beach, and Feather had gone down the street to her little boyfriend’s house, a shy red-headed child named Henry Hopkins.

Just four weeks before I would have spent my solitary time wondering if I should ask Bonnie to be my bride. But she had spent a weekend on the island of Madagascar with a man named Jogaye Cham. He was the son of an African prince born in Senegal while I was raised a poor black orphan.

Bonnie swore that the time they spent together was platonic but that didn’t mean much to me. A man who expected to be a king, who was working to liberate and empower a whole continent, wanted Bonnie by his side.

How could I compete with that?

How could she wake up next to me year after year, getting older while I made sure the toilets at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were disinfected? How could she be satisfied with a janitor when a man who wanted to change the world was calling her name?

Sharp footsteps on concrete followed the slamming door.

Bonnie had made my life work perfectly for a while. She never worried about my late-night meetings or when I went out for clues to the final fate of my old friend Mouse. I knew he was dead but I needed to hear it from the woman who saw him die. EttaMae admitted that she buried him in a nameless grave.

The footsteps ended at my door. They were the footsteps of a small man. I expected Jackson Blue to appear. Maybe he wanted my advice about his crazy love affair with Jewelle now that Mofass was dead. Or maybe he had some scheme he wanted to run past me. Either way it would be better than moping around, wishing that my woman wasn’t born to be a queen.

The knocking was soft and unhurried. Whoever it was, he, or she, was in no rush.

When I pulled the door open I was looking too high, above the man’s head. And then I saw him.

He pushed me aside and went past saying, “If it wasn’t for ugly, Easy, I woulda never even seen you again.”

“Raymond?” I could feel the tears wanting to come from my eyes. I was dizzy too. Torn between the two sensations I couldn’t go either way.

“You know I been drivin’ up an’ down Pico for the last hour and a half tryin’ to figure out if I should come here or not,” Mouse was saying.

He wore dark gray slacks and an ochre-colored jacket. His shirt was charcoal and there was gold edging on three of his teeth. On his baby finger he wore a thick gold ring sporting an onyx face studded with eight or nine diamond chips. His shoes were leather, honed to a high shine.

He wore no hat. Kennedy killed hats by going bareheaded to his inauguration, any haberdasher will tell you that. And if Mouse was a slave to anything it was fashion.

“Where the hell you been, Ray?”

He grinned. He laughed.

That was one of the few times I ever hugged a man. I actually lifted him off the floor.

“All right now, Easy. Okay. It’s okay, brother. I missed you too, baby. Yeah.”

Mouse was still laughing. It wasn’t a guffaw or even a roll. It was a calculated chuckle that only debutantes and killers had mastered.

“Where the hell you been?” I asked again.

“You got somethin’ to drink around here, Ease?” he replied. “I know you don’t drink but I thought maybe your woman did.”

Bonnie kept a bottle of brandy on the top shelf in the kitchen, behind the mixing bowls. I poured Mouse three fingers and refreshed my lemonade. Then he got comfortable on my recliner and I sat on the loveseat Bonnie brought from her home when she moved into mine.

“Well?” I asked after his first sip.

“Well what?”

“What happened?”

“You saw me get hit, didn’t you? You saw me sprawled out there at Death’s door. Shit. I was almost dead, Easy. Almost. Everything looked different. Slow and like black-and-white TV through red sunglasses. I heard Etta cryin’. I heard the nurse tellin’ her I was dyin’. I believed her. As far as I was concerned I was already dead.”

Mouse stared at the kitchen window through the door, his gray eyes amazed with the memory of his own demise.

“Where did Etta take you?”

“Mama Jo’s,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, partly.”

“You were too hurt to be taken all the way down to Texas,” I said. “Your heart wasn’t even beating.”

“Jo moved up around Santa Barbara six years ago,” Mouse said. “Etta knew about it but she never told no one. Domaque had got himself in trouble down Harrisville and she helped ’em move here.”

“She called me.”

“Etta?” Mouse asked.

“No. Jo. Couple’a months ago. She called and asked if I knew where you were. It was that same deep voice. Yeah. I couldn’t place it at the time. She healed you?”

“Yeah, baby. You know Jo’s a witch.” I remembered Mouse saying the same words when we were only nineteen. He’d taken me to her cabin in the woods outside of Pariah, Texas. Jo was twenty years older than we were. She was tall and jet black, crazy and full of need.

She seduced me and then saved my life when I came down with a fever.

“She used powders and ointments,” Mouse continued. “Stayed up all night by my side, every night for six weeks. She sat next to me almost the whole time. Etta and LaMarque was in the corner worryin’ and Domaque did all the work. You know, Easy, I believe that her standin’ sentry was why Death couldn’t pull me off. When my heart got weak she held foul-smellin’ shit up under my nose. And then one mornin’ I was awake. Everything looked normal. My chest hurt but that was fine. I was walkin’ in seven days’ time. I woulda been fuckin’ but Etta was mad at me for gettin’ myself shot.”

He sipped while he talked. After each swallow he hissed in satisfaction. As the moments ticked by I got used to seeing him. That was easy because Mouse had never really been dead for me. I took him with me everywhere I went. He was my barometer for evil, my advisor when no good man would have known what to say. Raymond was proof that a black man could live by his own rules in America when everybody else denied it. Why couldn’t he crawl up out of the grave and return to life whenever he felt like it?

“Damn,” I said. “Damn.”

Mouse grinned again. I refilled his glass.

“Good to see you, Easy.”

“I looked everywhere for you, Ray. I asked just about everybody here and down in Texas. I asked EttaMae but she said you were dead.”

“She told me about that. You know I was mad at her for not gettin’ me to help that musician boy.” Mouse held up his glass in a toast to his wife. “But she’s a good woman. She didn’t want me hangin’ ’round you ’cause she said that she thought that you’d get me in trouble.”

“Me?” I said. “Me get you in trouble?”

Mouse chuckled again. “I know what you mean, Ease, but Etta got a point too. You know you always on the edge’a sump’n’. Always at the wrong door. I did get shot followin’ you down that alley.”

Mouse winked at me then. We were both in our mid-forties but he didn’t look thirty. His smile was as innocent as Eve’s come-on in the Garden of Eden.

“I’m sorry,” I said. A tear did escape my eye. “I really am.”

Mouse ignored the emotion I showed. “Anyway,” he said. “She don’t know that a man cain’t be worried ’bout every Tom, Dick, and Harry wanna do him some harm. There’s always somebody out to get ya. Always. You cain’t hide from it. Shit. At least we friends, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We sure are.”

Mouse focused those cloud-colored eyes on me. “Domaque’s in trouble again.”

“What about?”

“Ugly,” the dapper killer said. “Ugly brought him into this world and ugly gonna take him out.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong with him? Don’t you remember?”

Domaque was Mama Jo’s son. He had the soul of an artist, the strength of a mule, and the looks of a fairy-tale ogre. His nasal passages didn’t work right and so his drooling mouth was always open. One eye was larger than the other and between his arms and legs no two of them were the same length. He had a curve in his spine that made him hunchbacked and, though he was very intelligent, he had the emotional makeup of a twelve-year-old.

“I mean, what trouble is he in?”

“They say he robbed a armored car on its way to the Bank of America in Santa Barbara.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you?”

That made Mouse laugh. But it wasn’t his debutante titter. It was a snort that was meant to be a warning. I had seen dogs run away from him when he’d made that sound.

He’d only been alive for ten minutes and I was already under threat.

“So what did happen?” I asked.

“Some white girl been hangin’ ’round, that’s what Jo says. She met Dom down at this cove where he went fishin’ and started sweet-talkin’ him. One day she disappears and the next thing they know the cops come up to Jo and Dom’s house.”

“They get him?”

“Naw. Jo got a false floor with a hole for Dom to hide under. She told them cops that Dom was down in Texas, that he’d been there for two weeks. They didn’t believe her. But they couldn’t find Dom neither.”

“Where is he now?”

“Compton. With Etta.”

“Etta’s here?”

“Yeah. After you two killed that white man she decided to come back. You gonna help me with Domaque, Easy? You know you owe me after all the shit I gone through.”

There it was, the offer of redemption. I could pay Mouse back for the guilt I’d taken on. I just nodded. What else could I do?

“YEAH, EASE,” Mouse opined as we drove south toward Compton. “You ain’t got no reason to feel guilty. The way I see it it helped me gettin’ shot and all.”

“Helped you how?”

“Well, you know I was so upset back then, wonderin’ if all the violence I lived through was wrong. But when Jo patched me up she said that I’m just a part of a big ole puzzle, a piece. I fit in where I go and I do what I do. She said that and it stuck with me. Now I’m just fine with who I am.”

Etta’s new house wasn’t as nice as the servants’ quarters of the mansion she lived in, in the mountains above Santa Barbara. It was a small wooden cottage on a street of wooden cottages—all of them painted white. The only protection her little home had from harm was a wire fence that was twelve feet long and three-and-a-half feet high.

Mouse opened the gate and we scaled the three granite steps to the door. Before he could get his key into the lock it came open.

“Hey, Ray!” Domaque shouted. “Easy Rawlins!”

He was almost exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him, in the summer of 1939. Barrel-chested and lopsided, drooling and full of glee.

“I saw you comin’!”

“You don’t have to shout and spray like that, Dom,” Mouse said. “Damn.”

I offered my hand to Dom and he almost crushed it.

“Good to see you, Dom,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Wanna go fishin’ like we did back in Pariah?” he asked.

The outing came back to me with all the pain of those miserable days. I was coming down with a virus that nearly finished me. Mouse took Dom and me fishing with a pistol instead of a pole. He stunned the fish by shooting the water with a flat-nosed soft-lead bullet, shoveling them into a bag before they could regain their senses and escape. Raymond also killed three dogs and their master, his own stepfather. After that he married Etta and I joined the army for the comparative safety of World War Two.

“No time for relaxation, Dom,” Mouse said. “Easy got to get you outta trouble before Jo loses her mind.”

A pitiful emotion spread over Dom’s already damaged face.

The front door led into a makeshift dining room. There was a dark wood table just inside the door, surrounded by six chairs.

I grabbed a seat and turned it backward.

“Who was this girl you’d been seeing, Domaque?” I asked. I wanted to get down to business quickly.

“You ever learn how to read books, Easy?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

When I’d met Dom and his mother I knew how to make out what words I needed to pick through instructions or read a love letter from a girl. But when I saw him read hard books out loud I got jealous because I realized that he could go further than I could in the world of his mind. It struck me that it was because of Dom that I learned to read.

“Her name is Merry,” Dom said. “E-R-R-Y Merry not A-RY the way it is usually. She was just on the beach one day while I was fishin’. You know you cain’t shoot the water in the sea for fish, Raymond. It’s too big.”

“Dynamite prob’ly work though,” Mouse replied.

“Tell me about Merry,” I said.

“She was real pretty, Easy. Real pretty and nice. She didn’t care I was ugly and humpbacked. She liked to laugh. For a few days she’d come around and talk to me. She even kissed me on the cheek and let me hold her hand.” A sigh shuddered through Domaque’s diaphragm. He was more upset about the girl than the police intent on sending him to prison. “But then she had me go to a supermarket-like place on the coast highway one day. She said that the guy who ran the place always tried to make her kiss him and she hated him. But she owed him some money and said for me to take it there.”

“Did the armored car come while you were there?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. It did. You know how much I like trucks and other big cars. I looked at it and they told me to get away.”

“Did Merry tell you that you could see the money car if you went down to pay her debt?”

“Sure did. But they didn’t have no record of her owin’ money and they told me to get away from there.”

“And the next thing you know the car is robbed?”

“Not till the next week,” Dom said, shaking his head. “It was a week later that we found that bag in the bushes.”

I glanced at Raymond. He just hunched his shoulders and looked away.

“What bag?”

“Jo fount a bag in the bushes outside our house,” Dom said.

“Was that after the cops came?”

“Uh-uh. She got the sight, you know. She felt somethin’ and started nosin’ around. That’s when she made me hide in the space. She knew the cops would be there.”

Before I could ask what was in the bag Raymond pulled it out from a closet next to the table.

It was a Wells-Fargo bag that had three stacks of a hundred twenty-dollar bills and a short .38 with a rough black handle the shape of a lightbulb. I didn’t touch the money or the gun.

It was a beautiful frame: the girl with the fake name that nobody ever saw; the witnesses at the country market and evidence poorly hidden in the bushes.

“But what about the guards?” I asked out loud. “I mean there’s no mask in the world that could hide Dom.”

“Dead,” Mouse said. “Both of ’em shot in the head. And I bet you ten to two that it was this here .38 done it.”

“Damn.”

“She prob’ly had partners,” Mouse said. “I mean Dom says she wasn’t big or tough or nuthin’.”

“Yeah,” Dom put in. “She was prob’ly tricked by some guy wanted to fool me too. I don’t wanna get her in trouble for that.”

“You see why I called on you, Easy,” Mouse said. “If I knew who they were it would be a piece’a cake. But I got to find ’em before I could convince ’em to let up on my cousin here.”

I had to laugh then. It was really funny. Maybe I wasn’t an African prince but I had my own domain. I wasn’t a sovereign maybe and I didn’t wear a crown or signet ring. But I too spent my time working for my people.

“What the hell you laughin’ about, Easy?” Mouse complained.

“It’s good to see you, Ray. It really is.”

THE FRONT DOOR OPENED and a tall and lanky youth came in tripping over his own big feet.

“LaMarque!” Dom shouted.

The boy, who was at least six foot three, winced.

“Is that you, LaMarque?” I asked.

“Hi, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Boy, you’ve grown a foot.”

“Yes sir.”

His skin had grown darker in just the few months since I’d last seen him, and he had brooding eyes. His shoulders slumped and his head hung down. He was Jesus’s age, seventeen, and prey to all of the sour emotions of an adolescent.

“Say a proper hello to Easy and your uncle,” Mouse ordered his son.

“He’s not my uncle,” LaMarque replied.

“What you say?” Mouse asked.

I stood up and stuck my hand out. “It’s great seeing you, son.”

After a moment’s hesitation LaMarque took my hand.

“Ray,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk. This is some serious business and it should just be us three involved.”

“You gonna say hello to your uncle?” Mouse asked his son.

“Hello, Uncle Dom.”

Dom grinned and waved with his long arm.

The level of drama around Mouse was always higher than it was anywhere else in the world. A week in Raymond’s company would age a normal man a year or more.

He smiled at LaMarque and said, “Okay, Easy. I got a place we could go.”

“What you want me to tell mama?” LaMarque asked his father.

“That I went out. That you don’t know where I went or who I was wit’.”

The brooding boy nodded and turned away toward the kitchen.

WE CAME TO A SMALL HOUSE with a brick façade off of Denker. Mouse had the key and so we went in the front door. The door opened onto a good-sized living room. There was a picture of a shapely black woman and a bespectacled black man on the coffee table. The table was flanked by two sofas. Dom and I sat on one couch and Raymond took the other.

“Whose house is this?” I asked.

“Pamela Hendricks and her husband Bobby.”

“They friends of yours?”

“She is. I don’t think he likes me too well.”

“Where are they?” I was wondering what Mouse thought I meant when I asked for privacy.

“He took her up to Frisco for a vacation. They gonna be gone another ten days.”

“And they gave you keys to their house?”

“She did. He prob’ly don’t know about it. But even if he did—what’s he gonna do?”

“So nobody’s gonna come around?”

“No sir.” Mouse grinned.

I shook my head. Mouse still lived in the fever of our youth. At that degree he should have died long before he was shot down in that alley.

“Did Merry have a last name, Dom?”

“Not that I know.”

“Did she tell you anything about herself, anything? About her parents, her school, where she’s from—”

“She said she was from Pasadena,” Domaque blurted out. “She said that when she moved out from her parents she moved to, to…” the damaged man pressed his powerful fingers against his dark brow. “…Culver City. Uh-huh, Culver City.”

“Think hard, Dom,” I said. “Did she ever say anything about her last name or her parents’ last name?”

“I think,” he said. “I think that it had the sound ‘Bick’ in it somewhere.”

“Bickman? Becker? Buck somethin’?”

“Uh-uh. No. Not like that. I don’t know, Easy.”

“She have any scars or marks? What color was her hair?”

“Light, light blond. Almost white. But brown eyes though. Most’a your blond-haired peoples got blue eyes but not Merry. And she had a little nose and her canine teef was sharp. She bit me one time and laughed.”

Mouse sighed and stood up. “I’ma go in the other room,” he said. “Stretch out a minute.”

He walked out. I knew he was bored by all of my questions. The only questions Mouse had patience for could be answered by “yes” or “no,” either that or with a number.

“How tall?” I asked Domaque when Raymond was gone.

“Five-five,” he said, and then he ducked his head and grinned. “She showed me her butt,” he whispered.

“What?”

“She showed me her butt. One day we was playin’ around down by the sand at Horth’s Cove. She’d pushed me and then run before I could push her back. I got kinda hard an’ she point at my pants and laughed. Then she pulled down her jeans and said was that what I wanted. I told her yeah and she said to go down to the market and wait for her in two days. And I did but then the people who owned the place made me go away.”

“That was the day of the robbery?”

“Yeah,” Dom said. There was a glimmer of suspicion in his eye but it faded quickly.

Raymond had left the Wells-Fargo bag on the sofa. I opened it and took out the gun. It was a peculiar design. The barrel was silver or at least silver-plated. It had ornate designs etched all over—wandering vines with small dog heads instead of flowers. The butt was made from ebony wood capped with hammered gold. The cylinder was extra-large with eight chambers. Four bullets had been discharged.

I used my shirttail to wipe my fingerprints off and then put the gun back and checked out the bag. It was double-ply canvas, tough and coarse. On the very bottom it was lined with a leather strip. Along the seam of the strip was a dark stain: blood of the corpses whose dead fingers pointed at one of the only people that Raymond loved.

Dom and Ray were raised together in the now defunct town of Pariah, Texas. They ran together because they were both outcast from the other poor children. Dom because of his birth defects and Raymond because he had always been crazy.

“Did Merry ever say that she had a boyfriend?” I asked Domaque.

He pouted and turned to the side, away from me.

“Did she?” I asked.

“That was all over. She said it was.”

“I’m sure it was,” I said, and he turned a quarter of the way back. “But maybe if I could locate him he might know something about her that could help me find out what happened.”

“Like what?”

“Like her last name.”

This didn’t seem so bad to Dom. A name wasn’t like looking at the comely girl’s butt.

“His name was Dean,” he said. “That’s what she told me. But he wasn’t nice to her and I was and that’s why she liked to come see me at Horth’s Cove.”

“Was there anything else about him?” I asked. “A last name or maybe what he looked like.”

“He was strong but not as strong as I was. And he had stringy black hair that got in her eyes when he made her have sex with him.”

I asked a hundred questions but didn’t learn much else.

Finally I asked, “How did Merry come across you in the first place?”

“I go down to the cove all the time to fish. You know I love fishin’, Easy.”

“Anybody else know that you went down there?”

“Jo.”

“Other than Jo.”

“There’s Axel.”

“Who’s that?”

“Axel Myermann. He’s a guy live up in the hill over Santa Maria. Axel come down and fish wit’ me now and then.”

“Jo ever meet Axel?”

“Yeah. Onceit.”

“Did she like him?”

“Not too much. She said that he had twisted eyes.”

* * *

RAYMOND WAS ASLEEP. I reached for his shoulder but before I could touch him he grabbed my wrist. For a small man Raymond was very strong.

“You finished, Easy?”

“If your friends won’t be back for a few days I think you should leave Dom here,” I said. “You wouldn’t want the police showin’ up at Etta’s place and findin’ a suspected murderer.”

“Where we goin’ next?” Mouse asked with a smile.

“I’m gonna strike out solo for a while. You know, quiet like.”

“Okay, Ease. Do what you got to. But remember—I will do anything and kill anyone to keep Jo from comin’ to grief.”

Those words rattled around my mind for weeks after it was all over.

I SPENT THAT NIGHT with Bonnie and my brood. Feather had been reading her first book with no pictures while Jesus put the finishing touches on the hull of his single-sail schooner. Bonnie was reading a French-African journal published in Mali. I made pigtails and black-eyed peas with white rice. There was pumpkin pie in the refrigerator for dessert.

We ate and talked loudly, laughing and making fun. At least the ladies and I did. Jesus was almost always silent. But he had a good time. He loved the family I had cobbled together around him. He’d have done anything for Feather and the way he looked at Bonnie sometimes made me feel like putting my arm around her waist.

They spoke together in Spanish sometimes. Bonnie knew five languages.

She would reach out and touch my arm now and again, somehow sensing that I was giving her up in my heart, that I felt unequal to her black prince. We made love passionately every night. I think she was trying to hold on to me. For my part every moment was precious because I knew that one day soon she would leave me for her throne.

“Ray came by today.”

“What?” all three of them said.

“He’s alive. Etta lied. Our old friend Mama Jo nursed him back to health.”

“No,” Bonnie said. “You’re joking.”

“No ma’am. He walked right up to the front door and knocked.”

“What did he want?” Jesus asked.

There was feeling behind my adopted son’s question. He knew Ray almost as well as I did.

“Nuthin’ much,” I said, but I doubted if either Jesus or Bonnie believed me.

“ARE YOU IN TROUBLE, EASY?” Bonnie asked after we had made love.

“No. Why?”

“It was the way you mentioned Raymond. It was as if you were hiding something by being so simple.”

I turned toward her under the covers. The clock over her shoulder said 11:30.

“He’s got a friend in trouble and I’m the best one to figure it out.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not anymore. I’m just a snoop like. Just askin’ a few questions here and there.”

“Just don’t stick your neck out,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you.”

“Without me you’d be a queen.”

She kissed my lips and said, “Why would I want to settle for second best?”

I DROVE UP TO SANTA MARIA and looked Axel Myermann up in a phone booth at an Esso gas station. He lived at number five Elmonte Crook.

“What’s a crook?” I asked the station attendant.

“Say what?” He was over sixty but his thick hair was still mostly blond.

“I mean like a street,” I said. “It says here Elmonte Crook.”

“Oh,” the man said. He had the name DELL stitched on his breast pocket. “You mean Elmontey. Some rich old family bought up the land around there and started usin’ different names for streets. Lane and Circle and Way weren’t good enough for ’em so they started with that stuff like Crook and ‘Y’ and ‘U.’ If you got money you could do what you want. Now me, I can’t even get the town to come over and fill in a pothole. I been callin’ every Monday for three years almost. Every Monday and that hole gets bigger every time it rains.”

“Down where I used to live,” I said, “the city once left a dead dog in the street for over two weeks. It was one of those big dogs. Some guys and me tried to put it out for the trash collectors but they just left it moldering in the can.”

“Damn Democrats,” Dell said. “Damn Republicans.”

I didn’t have anything to add so we stood there a moment. I pulled out my wallet to pay for the three dollars’ worth of gas that he’d pumped. I handed him a five.

When he was giving me my change I asked, “How do I get up to this crook?”

“Follah Stockton all the way up the mountain till you get to Reynard. Turn there and stay on it till you get to a dirt road with no sign. Take that for a little less than a mile and you’ll see Elmontey. All the mailboxes are there together at the foot of the road.”

THE LOOSE DIRECTIONS worked perfectly. Twenty-three minutes after leaving the Esso station I was at the foot of Elmonte Crook. Number five did indeed belong to Axel Myermann. It was country out around there, dusty shrub country. There were no farms or even big trees. Just dirty green leaves, rocky terrain and blue sky.

Elmonte Crook was a hilly path that was well named. I passed two unlikely driveways before coming to a dark lane that had a small sign that read MYERMANN’S. The path was too steep for my car so I pulled off the road as far as I could and hiked my way down. I got as far as a small brook when I saw the house. Really it was just a cabin. Painted dull red and roofed in green, it had only one window that I could see and one step, even though the doorway was a good two feet above the ground.

The door was unlocked and Axel was not quite dead.

“Help me,” the elder man said.

He was sitting in a chair and holding his chest where blood was still escaping. He was small with a wiry build. Through his sparse beard you could see that he had a weak jaw. He wore a jeans jacket and denim pants too. His T-shirt had been white before the bleeding started. His shoes were brown with eyes but no laces.

“They shot me,” the man said.

“Dean and Merry?” I asked.

He nodded and winced.

“You Axel?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Who’re you?”

“Friend of Domaque.”

“I’m sorry ’bout him. It was just the money was all. The money they said we could get. I shouldn’ta done it. Shouldn’ta.”

Axel coughed and dribbled blood down into his beard.

“You better save your breath,” I said.

“Help me.”

“You got a phone?”

“They pult it outta the wall.”

“Why’d they shoot you?” I asked.

“So to keep the money and be sure I didn’t tell.”

“You told them about Domaque?”

“I’m sorry about that. I really am.”

I looked around for something to use to stop Axel’s bleeding. His home was just one big room, messy, unadorned, and pretty bare. There was a white-enameled wood stove in one corner and a bed in another. Next to the bed was a pile of clothing that he probably chose from now and then when he needed to change. I took out two long-sleeved shirts and shredded them to make a bandage that I could tie around his chest.

“What are you doin’ here, Mister?” Axel asked while I worked on his wound.

It wasn’t bleeding much. The hole, below his right nipple, was even and pretty small.

“Tryin’ to find Merry and Dean. They framed Dom and Dom’s my friend.”

“They’re in L.A.,” the old man said. “Spendin’ my money and laughin’ at us fools.”

“Where exactly?”

“He’s a surfer. Likes the water. So they’re down near the ocean somewhere, that’s for sure.”

“Did they live around here?”

“In a trailer on Bibi Wyler Road. Bibi Wyler Road,” he said again. Then he coughed up a great deal of blood and died.

I WENT BACK DOWN to the Esso station and called the cops, then I got a map and made my way to Bibi Wyler Road.

There was only one trailer on the three-block street. It was abandoned. There were clothes strewn around but no mail or written material of any kind. In one pants pocket I found an empty billfold with a photograph folded into the “secret compartment.” It was of a blond girl with a sharp smile standing arm in arm with a brutish-looking man whose black hair went down to the collar of his shirt.

I considered asking the neighbors about the occupants of the trailer but then I decided that the fewer people who saw me the better. After all, there had already been three murders in Santa Maria and the only suspect was a black man.

I GOT HOME in the late afternoon and played with my children. Bonnie watched me from the back door. I think she was worried but she didn’t say anything.

That night I dreamed about fishing in the ocean with Domaque and Raymond. We were in Jesus’s boat far out on the ocean. Mouse was catching one fish after the other, reeling them in to Domaque’s squeals of delight. I had my line in the water with bait on the hook but no fish nibbled or bit.

“Don’t worry, Easy,” Mouse said to me. “As long as you got friends you can eat.”

Those words soothed me and I clambered down into the bottom of the boat and slept on a rocking sea of deep silence.

* * *

“GOOD MORNING, MR. RAWLINS,” Ada Masters greeted. It was the next day and we were in the main hall of Sojourner Truth junior high school.

It was 5:30 A.M.

“Good morning to you too but you know you shouldn’t come to the school so early, Mrs. Masters,” I said. “It’s not safe for a woman alone.”

I was one of the few people who could tell it like it was to our new principal. She liked me. I liked her too.

“I’m not worried, Mr. Rawlins. And this is my school. I like to walk around and see what it looks like before children come in. How are you?”

Somehow Mrs. Masters knew that I had been in a funk. Her pale blue eyes saw past my façades. The suit she was wearing cost more than most other women’s wardrobes but you had to know something about clothes to tell that. We were perfect partners for the maintenance and care of the body and spirit of Truth.

“Doin’ pretty good,” I said. “Pretty good. If I don’t fall off, the horse I’m on might make me a winner.”

AFTER THE CUSTODIANS had left the maintenance office for their daily rounds, I pulled out the telephone and phone book. I made calls from eight o’clock until almost eleven. It was the thirty-second call that paid off.

“Why yes, Mr. Auburn,” Herschel Godfried said. “There was an eight-chambered thirty-eight caliber pistol and it did have a bulblike handle. It was a Lux-Tiger design from about 1895, an English design. The only one I know of in southern California is owned by Grant West in Pomona.”

Mr. West had sold the pistol in question to Harold Stout, a businessman who lived in Beverly Hills.

I left work at 1:45 and made it to Stout’s address by nine to two.

It was a large house on Doheny, only about two-and-a-half miles from my home.

He might have lived within walking distance from me but Stout was rich. I could tell by the pink marble that made up his walls and the manicured lawn surrounded by dozens of different varieties of rosebushes. I could tell by the imported stained-glass windows and the ugly Rolls-Royce parked in the driveway. The front door was heavy oak, at least ten feet high and five wide.

The small woman who answered the door wore cotton pants the color of a rotten lemon and a pink-and-white polka-dot shirt. Her hair was strawlike in both color and texture. She looked like she belonged in a trailer park drinking lemonade laced with straight alcohol.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Jay Auburn looking for Harold Stout.” If she had heard me over the phone she would have thought it was a white man speaking.

“Harry’s very sick,” she said. “He can’t talk.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Same thing’s wrong with all men,” the white woman said in a husky voice. “Thinkin’ about a woman’s butt and then wonderin’ why they got shit for brains.”

I laughed hard, not so much at her joke but at the shock of hearing such language from a white woman in those sedate surroundings.

“My name’s Alice,” the woman said. “You wanna come in, Jay?”

“Can’t think of anything better,” I said.

* * *

THE ENTRANCE HALL had yellow stone floors lit by slender three-story windows, which also threw light on the curving, cream-colored staircase leading to the higher floors. To the left was a dining room with a table set for fifteen, and a maroon carpet. To the right was a sunken living room with yellow sofas, chairs, and carpeting.

Alice led me into the living room.

She offered me scotch but I demurred. She poured herself a shot. It wasn’t the first one she’d had that afternoon. She asked if I had a cigarette. I gave her a Chesterfield and lit it. She steadied my hand with her fingers. Her hands were large and powerful, callused and misshapen by a life of hard work or hard time.

“I knew a girl got lynched just for touchin’ a nigger,” she said after her first lungful of smoke. “Selena was her name. The boy was Richard Kylie. You know, they had known each other since they were babies. They wanted each other all the more since it was a crime. She told me about their first kiss. Said it was so sweet it was like drinkin’ water from Jesus’ own hand. Said that all he had to do was kiss her neck and she’d shout out for the Lord.”

“I wish you would keep from saying the word ‘nigger,’” I said. “It hampers conversation.”

“It bothers you?” She sounded surprised. “It’s just a word back where I come from. I’m a cracker, you’re a nigger, Pablo’s a beaner, and Chin’s a chink. But okay. I don’t have to use the word, though.”

I nodded, thanking her for the restraint.

“Richard fucked Selena every day for six weeks,” Alice said, continuing with her story. “Every time she told me about it she was more upset. At first she was just playin’. It was taboo and sweet to her evil side. But sometimes her and Richard would steal away for a whole day. She’d say she was in school and he pretended to be lookin’ for a job down Minorville. You know, Jay, when a man make a woman feel like she turn inside-out, she cain’t help but be in love with him—nigger or not. Oh, excuse me.”

I took a breath. Alice was missing an upper front tooth but other than that she started looking good. Forty maybe. She had a tight body in her button-up cotton blouse and her yellow pants. I was almost glad for the insults; they meant that I would never let my guard down for the sex-crazed southern woman.

“I need to know something about Mr. Stout’s gun collection,” I said.

“Shoot,” she said, and then she laughed, realizing the pun.

“Did he have a Lux-Tiger?”

“A what?”

“It’s an English pistol,” I said. “A thirty-eight. Holds eight cartridges and has a handle looks like a rubber squeeze pump.”

“Oh yeah,” Alice said. “You know, Jay, you could fuck me right here on this couch and Harry wouldn’t even hear it.”

“What if he came downstairs to go to the toilet?”

“He don’t go nowhere without me helpin’ him.”

“I see. Well, maybe in a little while. You see, I need to know about that pistol first.”

“What for?”

“It showed up at a friend’s house and I was wondering if it was stolen.”

“It sure was,” Alice declared. She had a wide mouth and healthy teeth except for the missing one. That made me think that someone had socked her, at least once.

“What happened to it?”

“That girl took it. That whore.” She winked at me even though her words were angry.

“Who was that?”

“Doreen Fitz. Little whore drove Harry out of his mind. She had a boyfriend come up here and beat the shit outta Harry. That’s partly why he’s laid up now. They took all kinds of stuff from him. Rings and money and that old pistol. Harry loved that gun. He liked that it was so fat but hardly had no kick.”

“Are you Harry’s wife?” I asked.

“No. Just his cousin from Arkansas. Just his cousin come to make her fortune by pickin’ his bones. You could share some of it with me if you want.”

“You’re stealing from him?”

“Have you ever seen a sharecropper’s farm, Jay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I thought about all of the poor black and white people I’d seen straining over hard dirt, going deeper into debt with each passing season. I saw all that pain in her callused hands.

“You wanna go up and see Harry?” she asked.

IT WAS A BRIGHT BEDROOM with a picture window that allowed strong sun to beat down upon the occupant. He was a tall man but slender as a child. Even though he was under the sheet you could see the outline of his skeleton. His eyes were intelligent and the only part of him that moved. When he saw me a worried look crossed those eyes.

“Hey, Harry,” Alice said. “I brought a nigger up to look at ya. I fucked him on your couch. He nearly broke me in two.”

“Mr. Stout, my name is Jay Auburn. I’m looking for the people who stole your Lux-Tiger. Alice is just joking with you. She has some sense of humor.”

Stout was looking deeply into my eyes, pleading with me.

“Did Doreen Fitz take your pistol?”

With a supreme effort Harry Stout nodded.

“She had a boyfriend named Dean?”

Again he made his head move.

“Do you think that they might still be around?”

He didn’t nod that time but it might have been because he was exhausted.

Alice took a drag on her cigarette and coughed.

I went to the window and pulled the drapes closed.

“Hey,” Alice complained. “He needs a little color.”

“Keep the drapes closed and take care of him like you’re supposed to,” I said. “Do that or your free ride’ll be over.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I’m a cop,” I said. “Looking into a murder right now but I’m calling social services the minute I get back to the precinct.”

“You can’t come in here without telling me you’re a cop. That’s against the law.”

“Sue me,” I said. “Tomorrow morning a social services agent, Saul Lynx, will be here. You better either be taking care of this man or be on your way.”

THERE WAS ONLY ONE D. Fitz in the phone book. The number had been disconnected. But I went over to the house anyway. The address was on South Robertson, the left half of a two-family home composed of salmon stucco.

There was a concave entranceway with the doors to both apartments facing each other. I knocked on the D. Fitz number I got from the phone book.

An old woman came to the door.

“Oh,” she said instead of a greeting.

“Miss Fitz?”

“Who?” she asked instead of replying.

“I’m looking for a Doreen Fitz.”

“No,” she said. “Not me.”

“She moved out,” a man’s voice said from behind me.

I turned to see a tall and elderly white man. He had kind eyes and stooped a bit but still he had the posture of a soldier. His smile was mild. It wasn’t joyous or even happy. The expression was more relief than anything else. Remembering him in the narrow doorway he seemed like he was in a coffin, made up for death.

The door behind me slammed.

“You know Doreen?” I asked.

“Why, yes I do. I tried to help her out when I could.”

“World War One?” I asked him.

“Yes sir,” he replied.

MR. PALMER—that was the veteran’s name—invited me in for coffee. He led me through a living room that was twice the size of a dressing room at the May Company department store, through a transitional space that was so small that it could have no name or purpose, and into a small kitchen that was connected to a screened-in porch.

The porch had two redwood chairs and looked into the boughs of a tall magnolia. It was cool out there and I relaxed.

“…wasn’t a bad girl really,” he was saying about Doreen.

We had been out there for an hour or more. Every once in a while the little white woman from the other apartment would come out onto her little porch to see if I was still there.

Palmer told me about the war and the trenches, about the mustard gas and wild dogs that fed on soldiers who had fallen alone. He had three children, two dead wives, and had come out to California after the war because the war had taken too many friends from his small Iowa town.

I told him about my leaving the South for pretty much the same reasons, except that most of my friends had died in Houston rather than on the battlefield.

It was a nice talk. He was the perfect host; a lonely old man who didn’t worry about race or wildness in girls. I guided him into a discussion about Doreen, telling him that I had a friend who knew her in Santa Maria and who worried that she might have been in trouble because of a guy named Dean.

“It was that Dean who got to her,” Palmer agreed. “He was handsome and drove a motorcycle. Girls like that. They think they want a wild man until they drop their first kid. Then it’s fuddy-duddies like you’n me they want, Mr. Auburn.”

I liked being called a fuddy-duddy.

“My friend wanted me to drop by and see if Doreen had moved back here,” I said.

“No,” Mr. Palmer said. “She never came back. But I send her mail on to an address down in Venice. I think it’s Dean’s brother. Here, I’ll get it for you.”

The veteran weighed no more than a hundred and ten pounds but he had to use all of his strength and a lot of leverage to get up and out of his chair. While he was gone the old lady next door spied on me from her kitchen window.

I felt that I deserved her distrust. There I was lying to the friendly old man. If it wasn’t for Domaque and my blood debt to Mouse I would have left then.

“It’s a place down in Venice,” Palmer said when he returned. “I drove her down there once before the state took my license. They say I can’t see well enough. Anyway, it’s a small place not far from the water. But his brother isn’t a friendly fellow. I wouldn’t go there alone if I were you, Mr. Auburn. If you know what I mean.”

It was his only reference to race. Even then he might have meant I’d have trouble because of my fuddy-duddy status.

I had an extra cup of coffee and swapped a few war stories. He walked me to the door as evening came on.

“Come back and see me again sometime, Jay,” Mr. Palmer said as I left. “It’s nice to talk to somebody smart now and then.”

I DROVE DOWN TO THE ADDRESS Mr. Palmer gave me. It was on a small street a mile or so south of Pico. The house was smaller than the gaping garage, and the lawn was covered with rusting cars and motorcycle parts. I saw three men and one white-blond girl sitting on a bench, drinking whiskey from a quart bottle. One of the men and the girl had been in the photograph I took from the Santa Maria trailer.

The men were a rough-looking lot. They had long greasy hair that came down past where their collars would have been if they wore proper shirts. But they wore T-shirts and leather jackets, dirty jeans and heavy boots.

I drove by quickly and then headed back toward Compton.

I MULLED OVER THE PROBLEM of Dean’s brother’s place all the way. Mr. Palmer was probably right about me walking up there alone. Even in a gesture of friendship those men would have probably shown me the door—with a tire iron. And I didn’t want Doreen or Dean to know I was looking into them, not until I had a plan.

I needed backup but there was only one man I knew who could take that ride. And it scared me to death even to consider his help.

* * *

ETTA ANSWERED THE DOOR when I got there. Her eyes turned to stone when she saw me through the screen.

“How did you find us?” she asked in a whisper.

“Why’d you lie to me, Etta?” I replied.

“Who is it?” Mouse called from somewhere in the house.

“Nobody,” Etta said.

“It’s me,” I said, raising my voice.

“Come on in, Easy,” Mouse said.

Etta stared death at me a moment more and then stepped aside.

Raymond was sitting at the dining table playing solitaire, dressed in a soft gray shirt and dark gray pants. These colors made his gray eyes spark like fire.

Etta moved to a corner and stared at me like Feather’s little yellow dog does sometimes.

“Don’t be gettin’ all mad, Etta,” Mouse said. “I told Easy I was here. You know we gonna need him if we want Dom to get out from under that police investigation.”

Etta turned on her heel and strode from the room. We could hear her slamming pots and pans around in the kitchen.

“What you know, Easy?” Mouse asked.

“Too much,” I said.

“It’s them books, brother. Readin’ ain’t all that good, you know. It softens up your brain.”

“We can’t kill ’em, Ray.”

His teeth were smiling but he was staring gray-eyed death.

“Really, man,” I said. “If you kill ’em then Dom will go down for the murder.”

“Okay, baby. I got ya. No killin’ ’cause it’s for Dom. Okay.”

“I need an out-of-town car,” I said. “That and the money bag.”

“We could keep the money, though,” Mouse said. “Right?”

“Most of it. Hopefully they got more money at the house.”

“What house?”

“Down in Venice.”

Mouse grinned again. “You’re good, Easy. Damn good.”

WE PICKED UP A CAR from a friend of Raymond’s. It was a purple Chrysler, from San Diego we were told. We headed out for Venice at about nine-fifteen. On the way we decided that Mouse should approach the family, to make sure that Dean and Doreen were there. I tried to think of something better. Putting Mouse in the face of the enemy more often than not ended up in a war. But I made him promise that he’d keep his gun in his belt loop and his knife in his pocket. That didn’t mean much, though. Mouse had killed people with his hands, feet, and once with his teeth.

I waited down the block while he approached them with the promise of good weed that he could procure. He was gone over an hour and a half.

I sat in the car worried that the men got suspicious and overpowered my friend. If he died this time there’d be no solace for me. I was just about ready to take the eight-chambered .38 and rush the houseful of long-haired white men.

But then Mouse strolled up.

He was singing a song. “Feelin’ Good.”

Once next to me again I could see that he was pretty high.

“Damn, Easy. If them boys wasn’t all up against Dom I’d like ’em pretty good. You know I offered ’em my weed but they had golden hash. Damn. Wow. That shit twist up your mind.”

“Dean and Doreen there?” I asked.

“Sure is. Both of ’em. But they headed out to Canada tomorrow morning. Leavin’ the country—‘just in case,’ they said.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Bright and early.”

“Shit.”

“What we gonna do, brother?” Mouse asked.

He was grinning, looking at his face in the rearview mirror.

“Wait here.” I took out the Wells-Fargo bag and made it down the street.

I went into a driveway two houses down from the house of the motorcyclists and jumped over three fences. This brought me to a stand of fruitless banana trees that separated Dean’s brother’s house from his neighbors. There was loud rock and roll music playing from the open back door.

I took a deep breath and made my way across the cement patio and to an open window. Inside the window a balding man with a beard was kissing Doreen. It was a long, slow kiss. They were lying on a mattress on the floor, pressed up into a corner. The bald man put a hand up under her dress and she made a grunting sound that surprised me.

Then Dean came in.

“What the fuck,” he said.

Doreen jumped up immediately. She was a little slow on her feet, though.

The balding man was laughing.

“Just a little kiss, Dean. That’s all, man. You don’t mind if your brother gets a little kiss from his future sister-in-law.”

“Get the fuck in our room, Dorrie,” Dean said.

“Oh come on, baby,” she said. “It wasn’t nuthin’.”

I felt something brush against my ankle. When I looked down I expected to see a cat but instead it was a rat standing on its back legs, baring uneven yellow fangs.

I know I made some kind of sound but luckily Dean and his brother’s cursing drowned it out.

They argued for a minute or more and then took it out of the room with Doreen trailing after.

I tossed the money bag into a corner and then ran for all I was worth.

Mouse was listening to the radio when I got there. He was lost in the soul of Otis Redding and I couldn’t stop from breathing like a spent dog.

“WE COULD JUST CALL THE POLICE,” I was saying. We were still parked down the block.

“Ain’t LAPD’s case,” Mouse argued. “They ain’t gonna come runnin’ on a phone call. And even if they do come they’ll stop at the front door and that’ll be that. No, Easy. My way is the only way and you know it.”

I finally agreed. Mouse was crazy and unread but he was smart in spite of that.

I DROVE DOWN THE STREET going about thirty. Mouse, who was sitting in the backseat, lowered his window. When we got in front of the bikers’ house, he opened fire with his cannon-like .41. He shot all six chambers and reloaded with amazing precision while I made a U-turn at the end of the block. He opened fire again on our return route. On our third pass a man was standing out in front of the house holding a rifle or maybe a shotgun.

“Don’t kill him, Raymond!” I shouted as my friend opened fire.

The rifleman fired too, blowing out the rear window.

“I hit him!” Mouse declared. “In the leg, Easy. In the leg.”

The next time we went down the block the man was crawling toward the house. Gunfire flared from the windows and our stolen Chrysler was hit with a few slugs.

I threw a bundle of money onto the lawn.

Mouse was laughing.

“One more time,” he said.

“No,” I told him. “If that don’t do it then nuthin’ will.”

I DROVE SEVENTEEN blocks north to the nearly vacant parking lot of a Safeway supermarket. We left the wounded Chrysler there and went on foot to my car, which was four blocks farther on.

Then we came to the hard part.

I drove back down to Venice, to the street where we had played cowboys and Indians. The police were there arresting the occupants of the house. I saw them put Doreen into the back of a squad car.

“…THERE WAS A VIOLENT shootout in Venice last night,” the radio announcer was saying at 5:15 the next morning. I was on my way to work. “When the police arrived at the scene they discovered a bundle of cash in a Wells-Fargo wrapper. Inside the house police found a number of unregistered handguns and more evidence from the armored car robbery that occurred in Santa Maria last week. Arrested were Anthony Gleason, who was wounded in the shootout, Mickey Lannerman, Doreen Fitz, and Arnold Wilson. A fifth suspect, Dean Lannerman, is believed to have fled the scene on foot. Police sources have informed us that the escaped Lannerman and Miss Fitz are now prime suspects in the armored car robbery. Lannerman is considered armed and dangerous…”

The announcer went on to explain that the weapon that might have been used in the robbery-murder was also found at the scene. There was also some speculation that Lannerman and Fitz might have had something to do with the murder of an associate of theirs, a man named Myermann.

I made a U-turn in the middle of Central Avenue headed for Santa Barbara.

I stopped to call EttaMae’s number. Luckily she answered.

“What you want, Easy?”

“I need Mama Jo’s number.”

“She ain’t got no phone.”

“Then I need her address.”

“Why?”

“I think somethin’ me and Raymond did might come back on her. I need to get there fast, Etta.”

“You want me to get Raymond up? He knows the way.”

“I got a map. I’ll find my own way.”

She hesitated and then gave me what I needed.

I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway part of the way, then followed the map to a dirt road that led up into a forest of pine.

Walking down toward the house I was brought back to an earlier time, a time in the swamplands of eastern Texas. The trees, the smell of soil, insects buzzing around my head, even the fever I’d felt in the primeval wood returned.

The two-story house was rustic. Made from wood and stone, brick and plaster. There were large patches of chicken wire and tarpaper where the more costly materials had crumbled and failed.

The front door was ajar.

I picked up a stone and pushed the door open.

The room I entered was just like the one I had seen twenty-five years before. Shelves along the walls were filled with bottles and jars containing powders, leaves, twigs, and crystals. There was the same rough-hewn table and chairs. There was even a fireplace with the same skulls—five or six armadillos and one human, Domaque Sr.

“Easy,” she whispered from behind a drawn curtain.

I jumped nearly across the room.

“What’s wrong?” the curtains opened and Jo walked out.

She didn’t look a day older, except maybe around the eyes. Black skin and dark hair with some silver showing here and there. She stood erect, an inch taller than I. She was wearing a coral-colored robe drawn tight around her shoulders.

“We gotta get outta here, Jo,” I said.

“Sit down, honey,” she said. “Let me make you some tea calm your nerves.”

“We got to go,” I said again.

“Why?” She smiled. Her teeth were the color of aged ivory. They were big and somehow frightening.

“The man who robbed that armored car and blamed it on Dom was found by the police,” I said. “But he got away. We framed him with the same bag he tried to frame Dom with. He might be comin’ here.”

“Oh?” she said. “Then go on and sit, baby. I done thrown the bones on that one and the girl. They ain’t gonna mess around me. Go on—sit.”

I did as she said.

She made a pot of tea from her leaves and twigs. She served mine in a wooden mug.

The table was clear except for a worn black velvet bag.

“That’s my chicken bones,” she said. “That’s how I divine the future.”

From the first sip I was a little light-headed.

“Really?” I said.

“Uh-huh. You want me to read your future?”

“No thanks.” I took a second sip and settled back into the chair. I was still thinking about Dean Lannerman but for some reason I wasn’t concerned.

“I know what you mean, honey,” Jo said. “Men like you is better off not knowin’. Otherwise you might second-guess what you doin’ and get all worried when they ain’t nuthin’ you could do.”

“Yeah,” I said. I grinned too.

“Old Domaque was like that,” she said waving her hand at the skull covered in dried skin on the mantel. “He died for love of me and my father. He refused to fight and died thinkin’ that if he killed my father he would have broke my heart.”

“He must have been a great man,” someone speculated. That someone was probably me.

“Drink up, baby,” Jo said.

I did so. The world around me got sparkly and soft. Jo’s deep voice droned on. Some kind of music was playing. It was music that I had listened to years before on scratchy phonographs down in Texas when I was a child. I don’t know if the music came out of my memories or if Jo was playing something on an old player.

“You never did nuthin’ wrong to Raymond, baby,” she was saying. “And you saved Dom for me. Don’t you ever worry about what you do, Easy. You are the kinda man who stands up for who he is. You come here because you know what’s right. You might not always make it in time but you always on the way. That’s all we can ask for, darling child.”

I fell asleep to the deep crooning tones of Mama Jo’s speech. I felt as if I were being lifted up by a hundred black hands, that I was being carried up the side of a mountain while a thousand women sang. There were drums and trumpets playing. And I was walking down the center of Central Avenue with ten thousand people behind me. We were all walking together toward some unknown destiny.

I came to a door that had my name on it. Then I took a deep breath and trundled off into a deep sleep.

WHEN I WOKE UP I knew it was night. I was in bed and dressed only in my pants. There were voices coming from beyond the curtains. I came out feeling deeply refreshed. Dom and Mouse were sitting with Jo at the country table, eating from tin plates.

“You sleep good, baby?” Jo asked me.

Just that little bit of concern made me want to cry.

“What happened to Dean?” I asked.

“Dead,” Mouse said.

“Dead,” echoed Dom.

“How?”

“They had a roadblock waitin’ for him down on the highway. They knew him around here and spotted him on the road.”

“He was comin’ for Jo,” I said.

“But he was ordained to die on the asphalt,” Jo said.

I wondered if her chicken bones had been so specific but I didn’t ask.

“Wanna go fishin’, Easy?” Dom asked.

“In the mornin’?”

“Now,” he cried. “The grunion’s runnin’.”

I STOPPED AT a phone booth and called Bonnie. She seemed to understand, which surprised me because I was still in the haze of Jo’s potion.

“I dreamed I had a door,” I said into the receiver.

“It was telling you something,” Bonnie said. “Something that you need to know.”

* * *

AFTER THAT RAYMOND AND DOM and I ran up and down the beach with our aluminum pails scooping up the spawning fish and laughing out loud. We were like children in the dark of the ocean. No one knew we were there. No one cared about us and that was just fine by me.