“How we gonna know that they was mob men, Mr. Rawlins?”
“By the way they shoot you in back’a your head,” I said.
Mercury moaned and I felt for him. Even if he had been a white man, there would have been little hope for his survival.
When I called the shop steward at the dockworkers’ union, he laughed at me. That is, until I told him that I was coming down there with Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. Even the criminals in the white community had heard about Mouse.
I wore denim overalls the night of the meeting. Mercury’s and Chapman’s clothes were so nondescript that I can’t even remember the colors. But Mouse wore a butter-cream gabardine suit. He was a killing man, then and always, but back then Mouse didn’t question himself, didn’t wonder at all.
“They made a mistake, Bob,” Mouse said to the man who had introduced himself as Mr. Robert. He wore a long coat and hat and stood over Mouse, who, already a smallish man, was seated.
“That’s not enough —,” Mr. Robert began in his guttural, East Coast snarl.
Before he could finish, Mouse leapt to his feet, pulled out his long-nosed 41-caliber pistol, and shot the hat right off of Robert’s head. The two men who stood behind him gestured toward their guns but changed their minds when they looked down the barrel of Mouse’s smoking piece.
Mr. Robert was on the floor, feeling for blood under his toupee.
“So like I was sayin’, Bob,” Mouse continued. “They made a mistake. They didn’t know that you was who you is. They didn’t know that. Did you, boys?”
“No, sir!” Mercury shouted like a buck private at roll call. He was a bulky man with cheeks so fat that they made his head resemble a shiny black pear.
“Uh-uh,” Chapman, the lighter-skinned, smaller, and smarter of the two, grunted.
“So...” Mouse smiled.
The shop steward and the three thugs, all of them white men, had their eyes on him. You could see that they wanted to kill him. Each one was thinking that they probably had the upper hand in numbers of guns. And each one knew that the first one to move would die.
I was biting my tongue because I hadn’t expected a fight. I brought Raymond around for weight, not for violence. Why would those men get angry if we wanted to return their money? Along with the insurance from the legal payroll, they’d make a nice profit on the deal.
“All me an’ my friends need to know is what the finder’s fee is,” Mouse said.
“You must be crazy, nigger,” Robert said.
Mouse pulled the hammer back on his pistol as he asked, “What did you say?”
The thug was looking up into Mouse’s steel-gray eyes. He saw something there.
“Ten percent,” he uttered.
Mouse smiled.
We walked out of the beachside warehouse with $3,500 in our pockets. Mouse gave five hundred each to Mercury and Chapman and split the remainder with me.
The burglars gave up their life of crime that very day. I’d never seen anything like it. Usually a thief stays a thief; either that or he becomes a jailbird. But those men set down roots and started a new life. They married two sisters, Blesta and Jolie Ridgeway, and went to work in construction.
When I heard that John was building, I got them together. Jewelle had set up a traveling crew of workers who went from one site to another among her various investors. But each work site needed a couple of permanent employees to do detail work and prepare for the larger jobs.
“... and every house gonna be different, too,” John was saying. “Brick, aluminum-sided, wood and plaster. One-, two-, and three-bedroom.”
“You hate it, don’t you, John?”
An old hardness came into the ex-bartender’s face, a look that somehow seemed happy.
“Yeah, Easy. Here I am, out in the sun every day. Damn. You know I’m black enough as it is.”
“Then why you doin’ it, man? You think you gonna get rich?”
“Alva Torres,” he said.
I didn’t know John’s girlfriend all that well. She didn’t approve of his old friends, so he stopped seeing most of them. He talked to me on the phone every once in a while, but we rarely saw each other.
Alva was tall and spare, her beauty was pure, flawless, and hard — the kind of beauty torn from the pain and ecstasy of what it was to be a Negro in this country.
Alva didn’t like me but I accepted that because I once saw John grin when someone just mentioned her name.
“She wants me out of the nightlife and I cain’t say no,” John said meekly.
“So what you want from me?” I asked.
“Why’ont you take a ride with me over to our place? We can talk better over there.”
“Hey, Mr. Rawlins,” Mercury Hall called. He was coming across the graded dirt road, slapping his hands together like two chalky blackboard erasers.
“Mercury.” I shook his hand and smiled. “I see you still playin’ honest citizen.”
“Oh yeah,” he proclaimed. “Got to.”
“Mr. Rawlins!” Kenneth Chapman shouted. He was an ochre-colored man, very thin with the broad features of our race. His smile was the biggest thing I had ever seen in a human mouth.
“Hey, Chapman. Don’t you go shortchangin’ them nails now.”
His laugh was immense.
“Come on, Easy,” John said.
It was from the tone of his voice that I knew whatever John had to ask was going to require sweat.
— 4 —
John and Alva were living in a box-shaped apartment building near Santa Barbara and Crenshaw. The outside walls were slathered with white stucco that had glitter sprinkled in it. There were bullet holes here and there, but that wasn’t unusual. That part of L.A. was full of Texans. Most Texans carry guns. And if you carry a gun, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.
The stairway and halls were all external, making the apartment building resemble a cheap motel. John and I made it up to the third floor. While he was fishing around for his keys, I looked out across the street. Three floors was high in L.A. in 1964. I could see all the way to downtown: a small cluster of granite buildings that looked like a thousand movie backdrops I’d seen.
Across the way was a newly built and empty office building next to a used-car lot. Even that made me smile. I have a soft spot for used cars. They’re like old friends or family members you love even though they always give you trouble.
“Right in here, Easy.” John had worked his key in the lock and pulled the hollow wooden door open. He gestured for me to walk in and I did.
The room was the size of a ship’s cabin, hardly wider than it was high. The furniture was cheap bamboo supporting fake blue leather, and the walls, though they had the sheen of being painted, were no color to speak of.
I sat down on a hammock-like footrest and regarded the bartender-turned-builder.
He walked into what I thought was a closet and said, “What you drinkin’?”
It was the question I’d heard most often from John. My most common reply had been whiskey, but my drinking days were over by then.
I got up to see what kind of bar John had carved out of a closet. But what I found was a kitchen in miniature. A tiny two-burner stove on top of a refrigerator no larger than a picnic cooler. The sink had no drain board or shelves.
“They call this a kitchen?” I asked.
“We had to sell the house an’ put our stuff in storage,” he said, as if that somehow answered my question. “To pay for the labor and some’a the legal expense for the buildins.”
“Damn.” I was amazed by the crowded little cooking closet.
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins.” I didn’t have to turn to know her voice.
“Alva.”
I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Alva Torres. She was a good woman, as far as I ever knew. She just didn’t approve of my old life. What some might have called an economy of trading favors she saw as criminal activity.