“Is Alva mad at you for sleeping with her husband or her son?” I asked then.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’m askin’ you.”
“I ain’t told her about either one,” Isolda said.
“Did you know Henry Strong?” I asked.
“Never heard of him.”
“Hm.”
“What?”
“Nuthin’,” I said. “It’s just that somebody’s been lyin’ to me.”
“Who?”
“Maybe Kenneth Chapman.”
For the first time she stumbled. It was no more than turning her head away from me, looking off for something easy to fall from her tongue. She turned back, but still she wavered.
“What’d he say?” she asked at last.
“That you and him and a man named Anton Breland had drinks with Strong and Aldridge.” I was lying to force her to admit some kind of connection between the murdered men.
“I don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”
“But you know Chapman?”
“Once when I went to pick up Brawly for lunch, he introduced me to him and a stocky man named Mercury. They worked with Brawly. But I ain’t never been out with them. And I don’t know no Henry Strong.”
“I see. Yeah. Uh-huh.” I was just making noise while Isolda floundered in my suspicions. She was telling me the truth about not going out with Chapman while lying about Strong, I was sure of that. But I needed more.
“What did this Chapman say?” she asked.
“Just that you had been with them. And when I asked him about Aldridge he told me that Brawly and Aldridge got along just fine, even after that fight you said they had.”
“They did have that fight,” Isolda protested. “I ain’t lyin’.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I’m sure that it’s Chapman lied to me. Sure of it. You know him and Mercury was burglars a long time ago. I thought they give it up, but you never know with crooks.”
Isolda let her bathrobe fall open so that I could see her left breast. She was thirty-five if she was a day, but gravity hadn’t touched her yet. It was the breast of a twenty-year-old. Any male from six weeks to ninety years old would have had trouble resisting. If I hadn’t had Bonnie in my life, I might have crossed the line — for just a kiss. But instead I took out a Chesterfield and sat back, out of range of her charm.
She acted as if the robe had fallen open by mistake and covered up.
I inhaled deeply, feeling of two minds about the benefits and detriments of smoking. On one hand, tobacco robbed me of my wind, but on the other, it gave me something to do while the devil was tempting me.
I stood up.
“Time to go,” I said lamely.
“Where?” she asked, rising and coming toward me.
“To talk to Chapman again, I guess.”
“What about his partner?” Isolda asked. “Mercury.”
“He left town,” I said. “Probably the smartest one of the bunch.”
— 39 —
Jackson Blue was in his bathrobe, too.
I shook my head when he came to the door.
“What’s wrong with you, Easy?” he asked.
“Don’t nobody work?” I said. “I mean, am I the only one who thinks he got to get up in the morning and at least put on a pair of pants?”
Jackson grinned. White teeth against black skin has always had a soothing effect on me. It made me happy.
Jackson led me down the stairs into his house.
“I’m workin’,” he said as he went. “Been readin’ about a guy named Isaac Newton. You ever hear about him?”
“Of course I have,” I said. “Every schoolkid knows about Newton’s apple.”
“Did you know that he invented calculus?”
“No,” I said, not particularly interested.
I took my seat at his table and he took to the one-piece school desk. He stretched out in the chair like a cat or an arrogant adolescent.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, at the same time this dude name’a Leibniz came up with the same calculations, but Newton invented it, too. Newton was a mothahfuckah.”
“How long ago did he live?” I asked.
“Died in 1727,” Jackson said. “A rich man, too.”
“So he did his work,” I said. “You just sittin’ ’round here in your drawers.”
“But, Easy,” Jackson said with that grin. “I’m learnin’. I know things. I know things ninety-nine percent’a your white people don’t know.”
“I know about gravity, Jackson. Maybe I didn’t know about calculus, but what good is it knowin’ that, anyway?”
“It’s not just that, Easy. It’s not knowin’ one thing. It’s under-standin’ the man. If you understand him, then you got somethin’ to think about in your own world.”
He had me then. Just like Sam Houston talking about newspaper articles, Jackson made claims that made me want to stop and understand.
“Okay, man,” I said, looking at my wristwatch. “Two minutes to hear what you mean.”
I expected Jackson to smile again, but instead he put on his serious face.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Newton was a religious man, what they called a Arianist...”
“A what?”
“It don’t matter, except that it meant that he was a heretic in England, but he didn’t let nobody know. He was a alchemist, too. Tryin’ to turn lead to gold and like that. He lived through the plague years. And at the end of his life he was the president of the science club and the head of the national mint.”
“All that?”
Jackson nodded almost solemnly. “As the head of the mint he was in charge of executions. And all them things he discovered — he kept ’em to himself for years before he let the world know.”
“So what, Jackson?”
“So what? This is black history we talkin’ here, Easy.”
“So now you sayin’ Newton was a black man?”
“No, brother. I’m sayin’ that all they teach in schools is how a apple done falled on Isaac’s head and that’s it. They don’t teach you about how he believed in magic or how he was in his heart against the Church of England. They don’t want you to know that you can sit in your room and discover things all by yourself that nobody else knows. I’m down here collectin’ knowledge while some other Negro is outside someplace swingin’ a hammer. That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“Swingin’ a hammer is more than you do,” I said out of reflex. I didn’t really believe it. Jackson Blue’s rendition of Isaac Newton reminded me of me, a man living in shadows in almost every part of his life. A man who keeps secrets and harbors passions that could get him killed if he let them out into the world.
“You a fool if you believe that, Easy.”
“And you just a fool, Jackson,” I said.
“How you see that?”
“This man you talkin’ about kept his secrets — for a while. But then he let the world know — that’s the only reason you know it today. When are you gonna let the world know?”
“One day I might surprise ya, Easy. Uh-huh.”
“Well,” I said, “until that day comes, I need you to do somethin’ for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Before I get into that, why don’t you answer my question?”
“What question?”
“How come you in your house in your underwear in the afternoon? I mean, who pays the rent?”
“Somebody who thinks that my studies are something important, that’s who.”
I could tell that he wasn’t going to reveal his golden goose. And it really wasn’t any of my business, so I went back to the reason I had come.
“I need you to apply for a job, Jackson,” I said.
“A job? I don’t know what the fuck’s got into you, brother. But I done worked more in my forty-two years than most white men twice my age. An’ I’m a lazy mothahfuckah.”