“He said that those rifles would take the first shots in the revolution.” She began to weep.
I believe that as she spoke to me, the full meaning of Brawly’s words hit home. Sometimes you have to hear yourself saying something out loud before you understand it.
“Did he say what they planned to do?”
She shook her head.
“Did he tell you what he did with those guns after they took them out from BobbiAnne’s place?”
Again, no.
“How did BobbiAnne and Conrad get together?” I asked, thinking that a change of tempo might get me closer to what I didn’t know.
“Conrad got in trouble with some men who he had been gambling with,” Clarissa said. “They was gonna bust him up and so Brawly called his high school girlfriend and asked her to put him up. You were right; her parents both died last year. Him of a heart attack and then she just faded away.”
“And after that is when BobbiAnne moved down to L.A.?”
“Yeah,” Clarissa said. “She moved down to be near Conrad.”
“And do you think that she was a part of this special group that Strong started?”
“No,” Clarissa said. “They didn’t have no white people in the First Men. White people couldn’t come in the door, that was the rule.”
The image of those policemen breaking through the windows went through my mind.
“Where’s Brawly?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You got any idea? Any at all?”
“No, sir.”
“What about Isolda?” I asked.
“Who?” Sam chirped.
I ignored him, staring at Clarissa’s downcast face.
“What about her?” she asked.
“Why do you hate her?”
“Because’a what she did to Brawly.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not for me to say.”
“If you want me to try and help him, you better believe you better tell me somethin’.”
Clarissa looked at me with real spite in her eyes. I could see that she was going to tell me something, and somehow she believed that I would be hurt by it.
“She took him in when him and his father fought, and then she tried to make him into her husband,” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Brawly,” she said, sneering. “She’d walk around the house with no clothes on and come into his bed with him at night. She’d get him all hot and make him love her.”
I sat back in my chair.
“What you say?” Sam asked.
“She had sex with him until finally he stole a radio out of a store so that the county would take him away,” Clarissa said.
“She had sex with him.” Sam repeated the words as if they were some intricate puzzle.
“Do you know where Brawly is now?” I asked again.
And again Clarissa shook her head.
“Is he going to call?”
“Not until Sunday,” she said.
“That’ll be too late,” I muttered.
“What you say, Easy?” Sam asked.
I took a deep breath and stood up. “You gonna stay up here?” I asked Clarissa.
It was the first time she thought that she might leave the house where Brawly had hidden her.
“Yeah,” she said, darting a glance at Sam.
“Come on back down with us, baby,” Sam said. “You can stay with me and Margaret. You be safe there.”
“Two people dead already,” I reminded her. “And none of us know who’s doin’ it.”
The ride back to L.A. was almost completely silent. Clarissa sat in the back.
When we got in range of L.A.’s radio waves we listened to KGFJ, the soul station. James Brown and Otis Redding serenaded our bruised minds. Once Sam asked me if I ever heard from EttaMae — Mouse’s wife, the mother of his son, LaMarque, and one of my best friends.
“No,” I said. “She’s gone.”
He didn’t follow up the question and I didn’t offer any explanations of my guilt.
“Wait up a minute, Easy,” Sam said to me.
I was parked in front of his house off of Denker at about eight. He walked Clarissa into the house and I laid back and shut my eyes. A pattern was beginning to appear in my mind. It wasn’t a pretty picture, nor was it very clear. I still didn’t know where Brawly fit, or if I could save him.
I had a clear path of investigation, though. I knew what I was after and I knew who and what might be after me.
Sam came out and climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“You think you could drop me off back at the restaurant?” he asked.
“Sure.”
I didn’t do anything, though. I didn’t start the car or move very much at all.
“So we gonna go?” Sam asked.
I lit a Chesterfield.
“This ain’t bar talk, Sam.”
“What ain’t?”
“Not one thing you heard today,” I said. “Not that Riverside house or Brawly Brown or the mention of army rifles. Loose lips ’bout any’a that shit get the man who said it dead.”
Sam brought his hand to his long throat, trying to hide his fear with a contemplative pose.
“Get his cousin killed,” I continued, “and be a threat to my own peace’a mind.”
I turned to him with whatever it was my face looked like when I was deadly serious. “This shit can get you killed.”
“I ain’t sayin’ a word, man,” Sam said.
I stared at him until he looked away.
Sam never tried to get under my skin again after that day. When I’d come into Hambones he’d be friendly, but there was no more sharp-edged banter or superiority on his part. I missed our old arguments but, on the other hand, I appreciated his fear.
— 37 —
By the time I got home the children had eaten and gone to bed. Bonnie was curled up on the sofa, reading a French novel in tight pants and a blue velvet shirt that was buttoned only halfway up the front.
When I walked in she came to me and kissed me. She didn’t ask why I was late or where I had been. She knew. She didn’t need me to apologize for being me. I felt, at that moment, that Bonnie had known me for my whole life.
Dinner was waiting on the stove. Baked chicken and rice under a peach gravy with brussels sprouts on the side. We ate and talked about her travels in Africa and Europe with Air France. She was a black stewardess working in three languages in a country I once considered living in because it seemed so much better than America.
“It’s better in some ways,” Bonnie once said when I suggested that we live together in Paris. “But it’s not without prejudice.”
“Do they hang colored people in the countryside?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But that’s because in France they aren’t afraid of blacks, just certain that we are from a lesser culture. We are interesting, but in the end just primitives. At least here in America the white people I’ve met are afraid of Negroes.”
“And that’s better?” I asked.
“I believe so,” she said. It was a turn of a phrase that she’d learned along the way. Bonnie picked up things from the way people spoke and then used them in her own manner. “If you’re afraid of someone, then in some way you are forced to think of them as equals. It is not a child but a man you face.”
She was a deep soul and I was lucky for the time I had to spend with her.
That night we didn’t make love but just held each other. I listened to her breathing until it turned deep and I knew she was asleep. I drifted on behind her, murder just a distant thunder in my mind.
I had twenty-seven sick days accrued at that time and a pretty good union, so I called in sick the next morning and drove off to see John at his construction site.
He had on white overalls and old alligator shoes, one of which had worn through over the little toe. He wore a tool belt and a wristwatch with a thick gold band, and he was hammering away at a nail in an awkward, one-handed fashion.