“You know, Jesus,” I said, “the only reason I don’t kick the shit outta you is ’cause I want to. We gonna talk about this later, but in the meantime I don’t want you spendin’ one goddam dime’a that money. Do you understand me?”
He started to say something but then nodded instead.
“Go on then.” I wanted to talk more to him but I was just too angry.
By two a.m. I’d gone through every scrap of paper in Holland Gasteau’s fat wallet. I supposed that the man was Holland Gasteau because his driver’s license said so. I also figured that there was something wrong with him. He had over seven hundred dollars in his pocket. An everyday workingman only carried around what he needed for a day or two — all the rest of an honest man’s money was out paying bills or stacked in the bank for a rainy day. So Mr. Gasteau was either a fool, trying to be a big man on the street flashing his money roll, or he was a crook. Seeing the condition I found him in I figured that he was both.
But he was a workingman too.
There were fourteen check stubs from the Los Angeles Examiner shoved in his wallet. He’d received seventy-four dollars and nineteen cents a week up until mid-April of that year. There were six or seven racing tickets — two-dollar bets.
But the most interesting thing in his wallet was a note, a letter actually, scratched in peacock blue in the smallest print that I have ever seen. It was written on a sheet of paper that was half the size of a standard typewriting leaf.
Idabell you know that I love you and that I need you too. It’s only me and you in this world and I would never NEVER hurt you unless it was the best for both of us. I only took your peepee dog because that was the only way to make you do what’s going to make us rich and happy and you won’t have to work anymore unless you want it and people won’t believe that they can walk on me because they know that they got more money in their pockets while I’m down at the paper shack on my knees on the dirt floor.
I’m too classy for all that Idabell. You know I am. I know you’re out there right now taking a chance but that can’t be helped. Only you could do it and so I had to make the decision for what was the best for the both of us. Don’t worry. If you get in trouble I will take the blame. If you do it all fine then you could have Peepee and a house that’s paid for and a man you could be proud of. But because you know you got to trust me and then everything will work out fine.
I didn’t understand all of it. I wasn’t even sure what it was. A note to himself? A letter he intended to send? He was very careful not to say what it was that Idabell was doing. But he couldn’t hide how nutty and childish he was. His note reminded me of a twelve-year-old pretending with adult words and ideas. Not a mature child like Jesus but some kind of crazy unloved boy who pulled the tails off lizards and threw rocks at girls he liked.
There were scraps of papers with notes and numbers written on them but nothing that made any sense. When I’d finished I took the wallet and buried it under the pile of bricks in the garage.
The whole time I had the feeling that someone close by was searching for me. It was my imagination I knew, but it took that kind of fancy for poor men to survive where I’d come up. My imagination was urging me to hurry up and finish the game before I lost it all.
I wasn’t afraid, exactly. I rarely got frightened unless I was faced with immediate danger. But there was anxiety rooting around in my gut. It’s the kind of feeling I’m sure birds get when it’s time for them to fly south.
Whatever it was, worry or instinct, I wasn’t sleepy. I was so tired that it was hard for me to rise up out of my chair, but my mind was running like a hound that just caught the scent of blood.
I couldn’t sleep, so I sat down to read the papers.
Maybe it was just my mood but the news seemed especially bad. Volcanoes erupting in Alaska. A military coup in Iraq. Thirty people dead in a retirement-home fire in Atlantic City. The only thing I learned worthwhile was that it was supposed to rain the next day.
I was wondering where I’d put my umbrella when I saw something moving from the corner of my eye. Over near the hallway door Pharaoh was hunkered down with his snout pushing forward. He was giving me the evil eye.
“An’ you know when a animal hate ya,” Momma Jo, Mouse’s swampland voodoo godmother, once told me. “You need a counterspell a’cause that mean the whole world have turnt against ya.”
It was a memory from so long before that it seemed like I had made it up. But real or fancy, those words struck me. It was late and a good time to take Pharaoh from my house. I couldn’t have killed him. But I could take him out somewhere and let him go. At least he’d have some chance to survive on the streets. I’d survived when I was just a boy.
I moved to rise from my chair. Pharaoh growled and took half a step back. I halted, preparing for my lunge.
My big toe was digging into the carpet and I was ready to leap when the doorbell rang.
The doorbell at three A.M. had only meant one thing in my L.A. experience — the police. Pharaoh and I both looked at the door and then at each other. Then he started yelping for his life. I don’t think he actually knew that there was a cop out there, but he smelled the fear on me.
There was no help for it. No hand in front of my face was going to save me from Sanchez. The Horns could take care of the kids while I was in jail. Maybe my old friend Primo or Etta could take them after that.
The bell rang two times more before I had the heart to answer. By that time Pharaoh was howling.
I opened the door and he walked in, right past me, and sat down in the sofa chair. He sat heavily like a man at the end of an especially hard job.
“Mouse!”
“You got a drink, Easy?”
“Naw, man. I gave it up. You know that.” I was so relieved that I didn’t complain. All I felt was a sense of relief that was laced with exhaustion.
“That’s all right,” he sighed. “That’s all right. You know I got my spot right here.” He took a flat bottle of scotch from his back pocket.
As he tilted the liquor to his lips I had the strange feeling that it was me knocking back a drink.
Pharaoh crawled up beside him and nuzzled his hand for a caress. Mouse scratched him behind the ear. I sat down opposite them realizing that I had been up for almost twenty-four hours.
After a while I said, “Raymond, it’s after three.”
He turned his stony gray eyes at me.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You know, Easy,” he began, “I done some terrible things.”
The silence that followed his declaration was such that we could have been on a stage or in a courtroom, the performance just begun.
“You remember Agnes Varel?” he asked. “An’ her boyfriend, what was his name?”
“You mean back in Houston?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” He took another sip. The smell of alcohol caught in the back of my throat and made me cough.
“Cecil,” I said. “Her boyfriend was Cecil.”
“Mmm.” He nodded, not really remembering. “Etta was down Galveston an’ he was at work. Agnes told me to come on upstairs. You know I hardly got on my shoes ’fore I was there. I got inta that stuff.” For a moment the old Mouse rose out of the sad man. “She was walkin’ on the moon, an’, baby, I was right up there wit’er. I mean that woman had five hands, two mouths, an’ on top’a that she could fly. You know we go at it for a while an’ then lay back an’ she be lookin’ at me like a wildcat be lookin’ up a tree. An’ then we was prowlin’ again.
“We been goin’ at it for half the night when her boyfriend walk in. He all mad an’ yellin’ high like a girl. I jump up offa Agnes hard as a motherfuckin’ rock. I say, ‘What?’ An’ ’fore he could do anything I grabbed a bottle an’ th’ew it upside his head.”