Maybe it was Archie who called in blaming me for a thief.
“Mr. Newgate,” I said, interrupting whatever it was that he was saying, “you’re the boss of the school. You call the shots. I mean, if you see a problem you come to me and I’m supposed to take care of it. If I don’t perform to your expectations, then you call the area office to complain — that’s what it says in the rule book. That’s how it works.”
“It would be better if you tried to work with me, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. “I came to this school to straighten things out.”
“Oh? I thought it was because Mrs. Jimenez had a stroke and the three people higher than you on the eligible list didn’t want the job.” I had been a fool with Mrs. Turner and I kept it up with Mr. Newgate.
“Will you let me have Archie?”
“No,” I said.
“I want you to reconsider, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Mr. Muldoon works for me. Any jobs you need done will come through me. Me or Mr. Burns.” It felt good to be standing up for myself. Too good. It’s amazing how ten minutes with a woman can turn you silly.
“This isn’t over,” Newgate said.
“I have to go.”
I left the principal to make my rounds of the plant.
The school, like Los Angeles, was a hodgepodge of this and that, old and new. It was once a series of brick buildings at the top of a hill named after President Polk and populated with Irish, Italian, and Jewish kids — all of them working-class or poor. There had been a large empty plot of land down the hill that the school used for a garden. When the population changed, and grew, most of the plot had been paved over. The garden shrank but it was still the size of half a city block. Bungalows were moved in to accommodate the larger student body and the school was renamed. Sojourner Truth; evangelist, suffragette, abolitionist, and — by her own account — a woman who spoke personally with God. By that time the neighborhood was primarily black but there were Mexicans and Asians too. That was still back in the days when all dark people were the same color.
It would have been a fertile ground for a teacher like Miss Truth. But she was dead and her name meant no more to the students, teachers, or parents than did that of President Polk.
My day went on at a natural pace.
A toilet exploded with the help of a quarter stick of dynamite; probably the doing of Brad Parkerhouse, our resident bad boy. Jorge and Simona disappeared for a while but by the time I got to search for them Jorge pretended that he’d been looking for me to ask if we needed to restock the outside johns with toilet paper. There was a pigeon infestation along the gutters of the older buildings and I had to direct the exterminators where it was safe to lay their bait.
Every now and then Idabell crossed my mind. I wondered who might have blamed me for stealing from the school. But mostly I went about my job like half a million other working men and women in the L.A. basin.
There’s a routine wherever you find people; even in a condemned man’s cell. I missed lunch but made it back to the main office by one-thirty to make sure that my people had finished their midday break and were off at work.
EttaMae was the only one there.
“Hi, Easy,” she said.
“You not mad anymore, Etta?”
“I wasn’t mad in the first place. Maybe disgusted. Maybe I was worried about you jeopardizin’ your job. But I wasn’t mad.”
“Okay. What you doin’ still here?”
“It’s Raymond. I got to go get him.”
I could live to a hundred and still the mention of that name would send a chill down my spine.
“He sick?”
“Naw. The other car broke down an’ he cain’t get in here.”
“He stuck out there at the house?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. You mind if I go get him?”
“Yeah, I mind. You go back to work, Etta. I’ll go an’ get Mouse.”
Etta smiled. “You always did look after Raymond,” she said.
4
It felt good to be headed down toward Compton. EttaMae lived there with her son, LaMarque, and, sometimes, with his father — Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.
They were together again in the early sixties. Mouse had a change of heart there for a while and wanted to be a family man, a married man.
The change came about late in ’61. Sweet William Dokes had moved to L.A. from Jenkins, Texas. Sweet William was a barber and a guitar player, somewhere in his sixties. He was a dapper man who had taught Mouse everything about good dress and conduct with the ladies.
Mouse took his own slant on what William had to say and left broken hearts, broken heads, and more dead bodies than anyone knew throughout Texas and southern California.
Mouse was an old-time gangster. A tough who could work with you or go it alone. He wasn’t afraid of prison or death, and that made him the kind of man that people left alone. Even the police didn’t come after Raymond unless they were sure they had something on him.
The first man he killed was his stepfather, daddyReese Corn. Some years later he killed his stepbrother, Navrochet, in a back-alley duel.
Over the years many of my friends have asked me how I could be close with a man like Mouse. A man who was a cold-blooded killer.
I never tried to explain. How could I? In the hard life of the streets you needed somebody like Mouse at your back. I didn’t have a mother or father, or close family or church. All I had was my friends. And among them Mouse packed the largest caliber and the hardest of rock-hard wills.
When Sweet William came to town he and Mouse took to the streets together. They plied the pool halls and whore-houses; they gambled and drank deep. William always had his blues guitar with him and because of that they were welcome in almost every door.
People commented on how much they resembled each other. Both had slight builds and long-fingered hands. You would have sworn that they were related and not just good friends.
Raymond treated William like a father and a friend. They lived together and shared the same women. For six months William and Mouse were joined at the hip. And wherever they showed up there was a party going on.
I hadn’t seen much of them because I was sick for a while and then I went to work at the school. Mouse and William didn’t wake up until the afternoon; by the time they were out on the town I was already in my bed.
So I was a little surprised one day when I got home to find Raymond with my adopted children, Jesus and Feather. Mouse sat solemnly in my favorite sofa chair while Feather offered him a glass of green Kool-Aid. Jesus was sitting at the dining table doing his homework. He was a freshman in high school and, even though he could talk by then, Jesus was still a very quiet boy.
“Raymond, what you doin’ here?” I asked.
“Let’s take a ride, Easy,” he said. He stood up, ignoring the glass that five-year-old Feather proffered. Like all females she was in love with him.
“Okay,” I said. I could see that he meant business.
“Don’t you want your Kool-Aid, Uncle Raymond?” Feather asked.
I knelt down and kissed my little girl’s light brown face. “Put it in the icebox till he comes back, baby,” I said. “We got to talk about something right now.”
We went out to my Pontiac and we drove off. I took a southeastern route because, like I said, that was the 1960s and black men couldn’t take a leisurely drive in white Los Angeles without having the cops wanting to know what was going on.
“It’s all ’cause’a my dick, Easy,” Mouse said.
It worried me to hear his words because they indicated that Mouse had been thinking — he was always his deadliest when circumstances forced him to use his mind.