“I ’ont know,” he said. “Lately.”
“Did you know about this, Easy?”
“He told me this morning.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we have to talk about it.”
Jesus chose that moment to stand up and walk out of the kitchen. It was a rare show of anger on his part. I wanted to stop him, make him come back to the table and discuss his education. But I still felt feverish and giddy. I wanted to run from the room, too.
“Jesus,” Bonnie called. But he pretended not to hear.
“Juice, wait up,” little Feather screamed. She jumped out of her chair and ran for the door.
“Feather,” I said.
She stopped and turned around. She was full-faced but not chubby, with bushy blond hair, light skin, and Negro features. She was another man’s child but I was the only father that she had ever known.
“Um... ah...,” she stammered. “May I be excused?”
“Go on,” I said, and she was gone.
Frenchie ran after her. The screen door was already closed but he scratched at it until it bounced open, then ran to find his little-girl master.
When I looked over at Bonnie I found her gazing at me as if I were some Martian just dropped out of the Twilight Zone.
“What’s wrong with you, Easy?”
“He just sprung it on me this morning,” I explained. “And I know Juice. If you tell him no straight out, he won’t do any homework or he might even try to get in trouble so they have to expel him.”
“So you just let him throw his life away?”
“I have to talk to him, honey. I have to see what his problem is. Maybe we can work something out.”
I was no longer grinning, but there was a carefree tone in my words.
“It’s not just Jesus. You’re acting very strange this morning,” Bonnie said.
“Strange? When’s the last time I made you feel that good?”
“You never made me feel like that before,” she said. Her dark eyes were large and filled with concern. The shape of Bonnie Shay’s face contained the continent of Africa. Those eyes saw in me things that I could barely imagine.
“Well then, what you complainin’ about?”
She reached across the table, binding my arms with hers.
“What’s wrong?” The question gained a lot of weight the second time around.
“Nuthin’s wrong. I just decided to come back to bed and love my woman — that’s all.” I tried to pull away but she was too strong. “And I know how to deal with my own boy.”
“What did John want?”
“I don’t know. Really. He just said that he needed a favor and that I should come on down to his lots. It’s probably just a construction thing. I know a lot more about that kinda stuff than John does.”
“You told me that he’s hardly called you in the last year,” Bonnie said.
Her grip loosened slightly. I took the advantage to pull away. “So?”
“Isn’t that what you said you used to do?” she asked.
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Favors. Didn’t you say that you used to trade in favors? That before you had honest work, you used to help people when they couldn’t go to the authorities?”
“It ain’t nuthin’ like that here,” I said. “John’s an old friend, that’s all.”
“What are you doing making love to me three times this morning? Why are you just sitting there smiling while your son tells you that he’s dropping out of high school?”
I heard her questions but they didn’t mean anything to me. If I thought she’d’ve let me, I would have taken her back into the bedroom for number four.
“I guess the love kinda built up. You know, I been so tired at night.”
“You’ve been sad, Easy. Sad because of your friend. I don’t care that you need to grieve.”
That was too much. I stood up, hoping that the air would be cooler above my head. In the few months since Raymond’s death I had come closer to Bonnie than I ever had with a woman. She knew my dreams and property holdings, but I could not talk to her about my impotence — my failure to save Mouse’s life.
“It’s okay. Nuthin’s wrong. I was just a little confused when I woke up. It just kinda threw me off, that’s all.”
Bonnie stood up and caressed my face with her fingers, then shook her head slowly and shrugged. It was her way of saying that a fool was his own worst enemy.
“I’m going to be gone for three or four days,” she said. “Depending on the layovers and weather.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“I told you that I’d have to be gone for days at a time now and then,” she said sweetly.
Bonnie and I hadn’t been together long. She moved in with me only a week after Mouse had died, but already I found myself aimless and unsatisfied when she was away.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just don’t forget where home is.”
“Don’t you forget who loves you,” she said.
— 3 —
I drove my new used pontiac with all the windows down and a Chesterfield cigarette between my lips. Somewhere, way in the back of my mind, there was an alarm going off. It was like the uneasy feeling after a nightmare that you can’t remember. The worry had no picture, so it was more like a suspicion than fear. At the same time I was happy to be driving toward someone else’s troubles. The sensation of delight on top of anxiety made me smile. It was a grin that represented a whole lifetime of laughing at pain.
John’s lots were on an unpaved street that hadn’t been properly named yet. There was a sign where the street name should have been that read A229-B. John was building six homes, three on either side of the street. He was part of a syndicate put together by Jewelle MacDonald, the girlfriend of my real estate agent, Mofass.
Mofass had been dying from emphysema for the past few years. The doctors gave him three months to live about every six months or so. But Jewelle kept him going and made the few shanty houses he owned into nearly a real estate empire. Jewelle had put together six or seven colored businessmen to invest, along with a downtown real estate firm, in a couple of blocks under construction in Compton.
John was standing out in front of the first of his houses on the north side of the road. The straw hat, T-shirt, and blue jeans looked wrong on him. John was a night man, a bartender from the time he was sixteen in Texas. He was taller, stronger, and blacker than I, ugly enough to be beautiful and silent as a stone.
“Hey, John,” I said from the car window. My tires had kicked up a low-riding mist of red and yellow dust.
“Easy.”
I got out and nodded at him. That was all the greeting old friends like us needed.
“Nice-lookin’ frame, anyway,” I said waving at the unfinished wooden structure behind him.
“It sure is gonna be nice,” he said. “They all comin’ along good. Mercury an’ Chapman workin’ out just fine.”
John gestured and I saw the two men across the street. Chapman was hammering at a beam near the roof of one house while Mercury pushed a wheelbarrow full of debris. Both men were ex-burglars I’d helped out in my old life of doing favors. They used to make their living by tunneling into businesses the night before payday, when the safe was sure to be full of cash.
It was a good living, and they weren’t greedy — two jobs a year kept them in groceries. But one day they decided to hit a dockworkers’ payroll in Redondo Beach. That safe had too much money for the payroll, and within a week there were white men in cheap suits canvassing Watts, looking for the whereabouts of the two black burglars who specialized in payrolls.
When they realized their situation, Mercury came to me.
“How could you be stupid enough to knock over the dockworkers?” I asked him. Chapman had been so scared that he refused to leave his mother’s house.