Mouse stared at my wall, seeing that long-ago scene there. Pharaoh leapt up into his lap. Mouse’s eyes blinked slowly and I felt the fumes of his whiskey swimming around my head.
“I wanted to finish wit’ Agnes but she’s all scared that he’s hurt. But you know when he was laid up in bed she come on down an’ finished our li’l job. Hm. An’ you know sumpin’, Easy?”
“No, Raymond. What?”
“I don’t feel a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing. I mean, I know it’s wrong but I don’t care. I don’t feel good about it neither. It just happened. I just did what I did. That’s all. Ain’t no more to it. I coulda killed the motherfuckah. If I had a gun in reach I probably would have. Just like with William. But you know it’s just water off my back.” He paused for a second. I remember thinking, half dreaming, that it was more likely blood than water that he shook off so casually.
“You met William down in Pariah, right, Ease?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He was sumpin’, right? Make that guitar sing like it was a bird. A gottdamned bird.”
“It ain’t your fault, Raymond,” I said.
“What?” His voice was so light that it could have been a child asking.
“It’s not your fault. You wouldn’ta been up there wit’ Agnes if she didn’t ask you. And Cecil still married her after all that. William knew the company he kept. Shit. He died livin’ more than most men ever even dream about.”
Mouse heard my voice but the words didn’t seem to register. He frowned when I mentioned William.
“I got to thinkin’ ’bout Agnes up in the manual arts building; got to thinkin’ that it was the same shit that put William down in his grave,” Mouse said.
“How come you thinkin’ ’bout that?”
“That policeman come up to me on the third flo’a the manual arts buildin’. I was doin’ the windahs an’ he come up an’ ask if I wasn’t Alexander.”
“What he want?”
“He said that he knew who I was, that they were aware’a me down at the station. Then he look at me like I’ma fall apart right there. But you know, man, I ain’t scared’a him. He couldn’t take a damn thing from me. But then he showed me a Polaroid picture of that man they found. He asked me if I knew him.”
“Did you?”
“Not that I told him, I didn’t. But you know that picture stayed in my mind. It was in my mind all night. I kept on seein’ him an’ then all the other people I seen dead, daddy Reese, that sheriff in Texas… William…” Mouse trailed off for a few seconds. Pharaoh stood at attention in his lap, his jaundiced ears perked up. “You ever think that William looked like me?”
“I’ont know. You light-complected an’ light-eyed. He wasn’t all that light.”
“My momma was part Indian, part Negro, an’ then there was some white in there too. I don’t know what exactly but I could be a mix of her and William.”
It was strange that Momma Jo came to my mind a second time that night. I hadn’t thought about her in years. She had as much as told me that William was Raymond’s father. That’s why he came around from Jenkins every now and then when Mouse was growing up.
“I can’t see that,” I lied. “If he was your father why wouldn’t he have said so?”
“Maybe ’cause he had a problem wit’ my momma. Maybe… I don’t know.”
“What you sayin’, Raymond?”
“That maybe I killed my own blood.” There was a dangerous look in Mouse’s eye. A look that said someone had done him wrong.
When Mouse reached for his bottle, Pharaoh cringed down between his knees.
I took one deep breath, then another. I felt sleep coming on but I was afraid to let go. Raymond was nodding too.
“I come here to ask you what you think, Easy. You good about feelin’s and all.”
“You wanna know what I think?”
“Yeah.”
We were both battling the sandman.
“I think you should wait for a while. Wait and see. Right now it’s just too soon. You don’t have no kinda handle on it. You an’ Etta an’ LaMarque just startin’ out again. I think one day real soon you’ll wake up and be happy with your family and so these things you thinkin’ will be far off like. Far off.” The words seemed to call to me.
“You mean like I’ll get a sign tell me which way to go?” Mouse asked.
My eyes were closed. I was drifting on the way to a dream. “Yeah,” I remember saying. “Like a sign.”
10
Feather was squealing on the floor next to the couch. She squirmed on her back with Pharaoh switching his rat tail back and forth across her stomach like a windshield wiper. Mouse was coming awake on the chair across from me.
“Hi, Dad,” Jesus said from the dining table. And then to Feather, “Come on, little sister. Breakfast.”
“No,” she said playfully.
But she got up.
Mouse groaned and leaned forward. “Easy, you goin’ in?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess.” All the problems from the day before were quickly settling back into my mind.
“Mind if I sleep in your bed awhile?”
“Go on.”
He got up and staggered toward the hallway.
Before he was gone I called after him, “Raymond.”
“Yeah?”
“You told Sanchez that you didn’t know that man, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But did you know’im?”
“I seen’im. Up at the school.”
“Beginnin’ of the semester?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. He was wit’ Mr. Langdon down in the wood shop.”
“What they do there?”
“I’ont know, man. Wasn’t none’a my business.”
He went off toward the toilet. While he was there I got clean clothes out of my bedroom closet. When Mouse sacked out I took a shower and shaved. It was almost eight o’clock by the time I was finished. It would be the first time that I’d ever been late for work.
Pharaoh had to stay with us for at least one more day. I wouldn’t have been able to bear my daughter’s tears that morning. I left the house with them romping around the living room, having the time of their lives.
I went to the external lot of the lower campus first. Her car wasn’t there. I looked into C2. A tall white man, a substitute teacher, was guiding the students through their algebra.
I drove around to the main campus then, wondering how much longer I’d be able to hold on to my job.
The oleander bushes along the front of the old school were decorated with white flags. T-shirts, handkerchiefs, corners torn from old sheets. They were hung from branches and spread out over the grass.
Glue sniffers’ rags. Boys, and some girls, crawled behind the bushes in the middle of the night with airplane model glue. They emptied the metal tubes into cloth and breathed deeply, almost eating the poison. Afterwards they staggered out into the streets, grinning like idiots. A few months of glue and half their brains were eaten away.
Every morning Mr. Burns came out and collected the rags for the trash. It was all we could do.
I came into the main hall of the administration building. Students were moving around, heading toward their first-period classes.
“Mr. Langdon,” I called down the crowded corridor. “Mr. Langdon.”
Casper Langdon turned around quickly, as if my voice had grabbed his shoulder and yanked. A teenager bounced off of his great paunch and went crashing into a bank of lockers.
Langdon ignored the boy and called, a little too loudly, “Mr. Rawlins?”
He was a man who was used to people running away, not calling out to him.