I had forgotten the incident. I had misjudged Ace. What else had I lost or missed?
“So I’m gonna tell you something, Mr. Rawlins,” Ace said. “You know I don’t talk to the cops much. I mean, they’re okay for traffic and like that but if you start testifying the police will find some reason to turn it around on you.”
I had never heard him say as much in the whole time he’d worked for me.
“I won’t tell the cops, but I’ll tell you just in case it means something to ya.”
“What’s that, Ace?”
“That man who was killed in the garden. He had a key to the fence. I seen’im go into the garden four or five weeks ago. It was that week I was opening up early for you. You know I came in a whole two hours early because I was so nervous that I’d get something wrong. I didn’t dare do the boiler without going through all the steps of bleeding it out first. Anyway, that’s when I saw him.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“If something happened I would have, but I didn’t know. I didn’t want to get into any trouble if nothing was wrong.”
All the times I distrusted Ace, all the times I saw his respect as guile — now all I saw was a kindred spirit; a man trod on by his history, his poverty. A man who knew that the people in power wouldn’t notice his broken bones, or if they did, they would blame him for his own misery.
I put out my hand and said, “Thanks, man.”
33
Grace Phillips lived on Pinewood Terrace down below Adams. When John was helping her to look for a place I told him about a woman I knew, Mrs. Grant, who’d been looking for a long-term tenant. Grace took the little cottage huddled behind Mrs. Grant’s house. You had to walk through the driveway to get there.
“Easy Rawlins, is that you?” The voice came from behind the opaque sheen of her front-door screen.
“Hello, Mrs. Grant,” I said, squinting at the doorway.
“She givin’ a party back there?” the screen door asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I just come by to shout at her.”
“You might have to raise your voice pretty high,” Clara Grant said. She pushed the screen door open with the rubber tip of her cane. The light on her face revealed why she hid behind that door. She’d been laid low by stroke. Her pear-shaped, walnut-brown face was cut in two by the broken vessel. Half made of warm brown wax that was flowing down from the skull; half left to wonder why she couldn’t do what she used to do.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“She always got a pack’a yowlin’ dogs back there yappin’ an’ carryin’ on.”
“Somebody back there now?” I asked.
She made a gesture that would pass as a nod. “I don’t exactly know who but I heard footsteps a while ago. You know I nap when the sun come in.”
“Okay now, Mrs. Grant. See ya later.”
At another time I would have offered to come by and see after her now and then. But my working life kept me away from the everyday country kind of living that I had known in Texas and Louisiana. It bothered me that I couldn’t be of more help, but I had chosen my path — and I followed it down to Grace Phillips.
The door to the cottage was open. There was a baby crying somewhere in another room. I rapped lightly on the doorjamb.
“Anybody home?” I called.
A woman’s scream was cut short, punctuated by a blow.
I rushed into the house through a room of cheap imported wicker furniture. I heard another wail and went through the door, into a bedroom that was almost all bed.
She was on the floor, arms around his knees and begging, “Please, I got a cough,” pretending to hack a little. Bertrand Stowe was holding a medicine bottle high over his head; his sternest face looking down upon her.
In the middle of the jumbled-up bed was a naked brown baby, howling and waving both hands and feet.
Stowe caught me out of the corner of his eye and turned, fearful of who I might be. At that moment Grace yelled and leapt at the bottle in Stowe’s hand.
“Stop it!” he shouted. He unleashed a clubbing slap that knocked her down on the bed, almost on top of the child.
He raised his hand but I moved in and pushed him down. He rose up to fight me but I pushed him down again. When Grace went to go after the bottle in his hand I grabbed her around the waist and yelled, over her screams, “Pour it down the drain! Pour it down the drain!”
It took him a moment but then he knew what I was saying. He went into the small bathroom that was next to the bedroom and poured the green fluid into the commode.
“Nooooooo,” Grace cried, just like the dying witch in The Wizard of Oz.
She fell to the floor, weeping. Bertrand slumped down beside her.
I picked up the baby. He was a powerful boychild with strong legs and arms. He struck me again and again with his fists and feet. I rubbed the top of his head and made deep sounds in the pit of my throat; all the time aware of my supervisor and his junkie girlfriend.
The baby needed a quiet moment, so did the adults. Bert and Grace stayed on the floor, dumb and drained.
After a while the baby stopped his crying and gave me the kind of stunned look that babies get when they receive pleasure from an unfamiliar source. I sat down on the bed, putting him across my lap, and rubbed his back. After a while his eyes stuttered shut.
I laid him in the center of the bed and we three adults then went into the other room.
Grace moaned, “My baby, my baby.”
Stowe and I sat down on a dilapidated wicker couch and Grace lay crying at our feet. Her eyes were bloodshot and watery. Her skin had taken on a blue hue. Her chapped lips were blood-flecked from Stowe’s slaps. And her mouth never stopped moving, though very few intelligible words came out.
“What’s happenin’ here, Bert?” I asked my boss.
“She wanted to quit, Easy. She wanted it. I thought that she had quit months ago but then I found out that, that she had been getting it from a friend but now that was cut off. I came over to help her quit.”
Grace raised up and said, “Please, Easy. Tell’im t’lemme go. Please. Please.”
“You shouldn’t hit her,” I said as if she wasn’t there.
“I had to stop her.”
“You should just hold her back. You should just hold her an’ tell’er that you’re tryin’ t’help. Hittin’ ain’t gonna help a thing.”
“I know,” he said. “I just, I just…”
Grace’s moan turned from general despair to a kind of painful retching. She crawled, then staggered to her feet and made it to a door behind the couch. We could hear her vomiting into the kitchen sink and then the sound of the tap running.
Bertrand got up. “I better go see about her,” he said.
The baby started whimpering after a while. Grace cried along with him from the other room. That was as close as she could come to being a mother right then.
We undressed grace. I could tell that Bertrand was still crazy for her because he kept trying to shield her breasts and pubic hair from my sight. I wanted to tell him that he could have all of that junkie — I didn’t want any.
She didn’t actually fall asleep but closed her eyes lying there next to her blood child. In that darkness she writhed with the pains of withdrawal.