Her face was wet. The look in her eyes would have been called insane at any other time.
“Easy?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh. Uh, I want to ask you.”
“Wha’?”
“Do you believe me?”
I did. I really did and I told her so.
“I’d never lie to you,” she said. “I mean…” She laughed a little. “I mean I would lie but I’m not. I need you.”
Those three words shot a tremor through me.
“Hold it, Easy,” she said, feeling my mood. “Wait a second. I didn’t do anything wrong. I want you to believe that.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Really?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. Neither of us said anything for the next while. I fell out from the chair and we wrestled across the floor more like snakes than humans, or birds.
In the dream there was an orange-hot sunset at the horizon of a dense German forest. I was a dogface again, separated from my troop and deep behind enemy lines.
The forest was beautiful and rich with the scents of things living. I wanted to take off my uniform and get down on my belly. I wanted to grow fur and scurry off between the thick branches that bristled at the road.
There were men coming up through the woods. They moved cautiously and abreast. I could see snatches of them but they were mainly hidden by the foliage, and I was nearly blinded by that orange sun.
Were they GIs like me? Or Nazi soldiers? My heart thumped in my throat and I tried one last time to become a beast and run.
A rifle swung up and aimed at me. Was it a GI who saw a bear or a German shooting down an American invader? Maybe it was just a white man shooting at shadows.
Whatever it was, I jumped, gasping my last breath.
“Easy, what is it?” Idabell was lying next to me, her hot skin against my back.
The lamp in the living room had an orange shade.
My pants were down around my ankles and my shirt and jacket were pulled up to my chest. I was in a strange house in the middle of the night sleeping next to a woman who might have been a murderer.
My nightmares were no more threatening than my waking life.
“Nothin’s wrong,” I said. “I got your dog out in the car.”
She jumped up with a wide grin on her face.
“I was so happy to see you that I forgot. Where is he?”
“Out in the car,” I said again. I was sitting there pulling up my shorts and pants. Then I stood trying to straighten out my clothes.
“Can we go see him?” she begged.
Pharaoh leapt high into the air on our walk back to the house — splashing in the puddles and putting paw marks on Idabell’s skirt. Inside he licked her face and wagged his whole backside along with his tail while Idabell cooed and giggled and scratched.
After a long reunion I pointed out that it was nearing two o’clock in the morning.
“I have a bus ticket for five.” She yawned deeply and smiled at me. When she reached out to stroke my face Pharaoh growled.
“Oh shush,” she said. “You silly dog you.”
“You wanna ride to the bus station?”
“Yes. I just need to drop something off.”
“What’s that?”
“Just a note to my friend Bonnie,” she said sleepily.
“Is that Bonnie Shay?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get my number from her?”
“She called me here after you came by. We’ve had our differences but Bonnie’s still my friend.”
“So you just wanna drop this note off and then go to the bus station?”
“Yes.” She had very white teeth. “When I get somewhere I’ll write you. Maybe you could come visit — after a while.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” I was as sincere as a boxer putting up his guard. “Well, let’s go.”
“I just have to bring a couple of things,” she said.
She ran somewhere in the house and came back with a child’s croquet set that consisted of two wooden mallets and six large wooden balls held together in a wire frame that had a handle at the top. She also had a carrying case for Pharaoh. It was a little doghouse with a screened door and a handle at the top.
I took the child’s game and dog cage, she took Pharaoh and held the umbrella over all of us out to the car. The croquet set was very light. I remember thinking that it must have been made from balsa wood.
Maybe Idabell thought my head was made from the same material.
She might have thought it, but she was wrong.
18
All this ain’t over no dog,” I said.
We were driving south and west toward B. Shay’s apartment house. Pharaoh was so excited to be with Idabell that he was leaping around the car and barking. I had to stop the car and make her put him in his cage.
“All what, Easy?” she asked.
“Your husband, your brother-in-law.”
“I don’t know what happened,” she said, rising a little from her dozing posture. “For about three weeks Holland was really upset. He was mad and said terrible things to me. You know I’m from a good family, I’m not used to men using language the way he did. And then he was mad at Pharaoh. It’s true. I left because he wanted to kill my little baby.”
“What was he mad about?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was something with a business deal he had with Roman.”
“What kind of business were they in?”
“Roman was a gambler. He didn’t have a real job. He did business ventures now and then but mainly he gambled. He played in Gardena and Reno and Vegas.”
“And what about Holland?” I asked.
“I loved him,” she said. “I mean he was kind and sweet. We’d go out to a movie and then walk back to his house speaking to each other in French. My parents are Guianese but I learned French in school because I came here so young. Holly came when he was a child too but he learned French at home. Sometimes we’d talk all night long. He loved it that I was a teacher. He was proud of me. He’d take me everywhere and say to everybody that I was an educator and that I worked among black children to educate them.”
A police car moved up alongside of us as we went. The cop in the passenger’s seat shone a powerful flashlight on me and then on Idabell. He turned to his partner, they said a few words, and the car turned off onto the next cross street.
“He sounds nice,” I said. “What did he do for a living?”
“He managed paper routes in Hollywood.”
“What?”
“He used to get up early in the morning and go down to his paper shack on Olympic and prepare the paper boys for their bicycle routes. He had six boys doing morning routes, seven in the afternoon, and three who did street sales. He did the whole Sunday route on his own with two helpers.”
“Used to? He give it up?”
“Then Roman came,” Idabell said. “Holly quit after he saw how flashy Roman was with his deals and his gambling.”
“Holland get into that line’a work?”
“He didn’t know what he wanted to do. One day he was going to trade the T-bird in for a Cadillac and go into the limousine business; the next day he was going to be a musician. Roman killed Holland.”
“He did?”
“I don’t know if he actually did it, but when Roman came to town Holly went crazy. He would have done anything to outdo his brother.”
“That’s how come they were dressed like each other?”
“It was only since Roman came,” the schoolteacher said again. “Roman always wore snakeskin shoes and one of three tweed coats, or a black jacket. After Holly saw how he lived he bought the same things, he even spent four hundred dollars on shoes. I told him that he shouldn’t try to copy his brother. But he just told me that the same clothes looked better on him. They were identical twins but Holly was always saying that he was taller and more handsome.”