“Easy,” Chapman said, seeing me first.
“Ken, John.”
“What you want, Easy?” John’s tone was exasperated, as if he were Job in one more conflict with the Deity.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said.
“Alva’s in the hospital.”
“What’s happened?”
“Nerves. They got her under sedation, she so worried about Brawly and upset over Aldridge.”
“I’m sorry, John. I just tried to do what you asked me to do.” That got me a hard look. John’s fists clenched, his shoulders hunched. Chapman took a step backward. But John wasn’t going to hit me. He knew I was right.
“I came by to ask you men some questions,” I said.
“What?” Chapman asked.
“I’m lookin’ for Brawly. I think he might’a run to ground somewhere for the day and part of the night. You got any idea where he could be?”
“If I knew, I’d be there,” John said.
Chapman looked at the ground.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Brawly, Ease,” he said. “I’d tell you if I did.”
I had no idea if Chapman was lying to me or not. For all I knew, he and Mercury were in the heist together. They’d been partners for years, since they were children.
I had no idea what their childhood was like, so an image from my own early years crossed my mind. My mother was dead and my father was gone. My older half sister and half brother had been taken away to live with cousins on their mother’s side in El Paso. I had been passed on to a man named Skyles. He had been married to one of my mother’s sisters and owned a farm. He took me on to be his slave.
Skyles worked me from sunup to sundown and then fed me only the scraps from his nightly supper. After three weeks I decided to run away. I made up my mind on a Tuesday, but the train I had to jump didn’t go by till Thursday night. I stole a full sack of Skyles’s food and hid in an abandoned barn across the road from his house.
Those two nights I watched him through the loose boards yellin’ and smashin’ his own things — he was that mad that I stole from him and ran.
“Walk with me, John,” I said to my friend.
We went out to my car in the street.
“Lemme have the keys to your apartment,” I said.
“Why?”
“Don’t ask me, man. Just trust me.”
He hesitated for a moment and then produced a steel ring that held dozens of keys. He removed a brass Sergeant and handed it over.
I took the key to my car and drove it over to John’s.
I found the number in John’s little phone book in the top drawer of their bureau. I dialed it. He answered on the second ring.
“Hello?” The voice was breathy but brooding. I could almost see the taciturn young man’s face in the words.
“Rita there?” I asked in a voice that, I hoped, sounded nothing like mine.
“Wrong number,” he said, and then slammed down the phone.
I hadn’t been to Odell’s house in over a year. His wife, Maudria, had passed sixteen months earlier. I had gone to the funeral and then to their house to eat salami sandwiches and sit with Odell.
He was near seventy but didn’t look much older than he had twenty years before. He was just softer and a little shorter — his ears were larger, too.
“Easy,” he said through the brittle screen door. “How you doin’?”
“Fine.”
He studied me for a moment and then said, “Come on in.”
The house had become a mausoleum. The heavy brown drapes were drawn. The furniture was neat and for the most part unused. There was the smell of mothballs and scotch whiskey in the air.
He escorted me to a pitted maple table next to the sink in the kitchen. The unwashed windows allowed only a small amount of sunlight in, but it was enough. He poured me a glass of lemonade made from frozen concentrate and took out a bottle of scotch for himself.
“How you doin’?” I asked my oldest living friend.
“Oh, okay,” he said. “Not too much. Like Maudria used to say, no news is good news.”
“You goin’ out?” I asked. “Seein’ anybody?”
“No. Ain’t nobody to see. You know when you get to be my age everybody’s dyin’. Dyin’ or dead. If I walk out that door wearing jeans and with bus money in my pocket, it means I’m goin’ to the hospital to visit a friend. If I’m in a suit, it means a funeral.”
We talked like that for a while. Odell kept quoting his dead wife or talking about funerals and disease. I was sad to see my old friend so broken-down. I wondered about Brawly while we talked. If I saved the boy, would he end up like my friend? Sad and broken-down at the end of his life?
“Well, you didn’t come by to hear me complain,” Odell said. “What can I do for you, Easy?”
“I need a pair of your thin cotton huntin’ gloves and that rabbit gun,” I said.
“What for?”
“Somethin’ Mouse told me,” I said. “In a dream.”
He nodded as if my answer were perfectly reasonable.
I explained about John and Alva and the wayward Brawly Brown.
“Brawly’s big as a grizzly bear,” I was saying, “and at least as strong. There’s no way I can stop him or force him. I don’t believe that John and I together could hold him down. So I need you to do one more thing for me.”
Odell took one more shot of scotch while I sipped on my lemonade. After our drink he got my gloves and rifle. The gun was all broken down in a leather case. I gave him the phone number with a little speech I wanted him to recite at seven-thirty.
I parked out back in an alley behind the empty office building next to the used-car lot and across the street from John’s building. I jimmied open the back door and then forced my way into an office on the third floor. That was 6:35.
I opened the window and sat there in the twilight thinking that Mouse was advising me even after he was gone.
I thought about him and Etta, about their crazy life. There was no rancor or condemnation in my thoughts. We had all made it by sheer dumb luck. Any poor black child of the South who woke up in the morning was lucky if he lived to make it to bed that night. You were bound to be beaten, stabbed, and shot at least once or twice. The question wasn’t if you were going to get killed, it was, were you going to get killed on that particular day?
“Easy,” Mouse would say to me. “You know you just too sensitive. You think that you can keep somethin’ bad from happenin’ here or there. But that kinda power ain’t in your reach. It was all settled a long time ago. What happens with you — when you get borned, when you die, who you kill, who kills you — that was all writ down in your shoes and your blood. Shit. You be walkin’ down the road outside’a Pariah, hopin’ that New Orleans is just beyond that yonder stand of live oaks. But it ain’t. No, baby, you want it, you want it bad, but there’s just more swamp after them trees, and more swamp after that.”
My respect for Raymond was intense because he never worried about or second-guessed the world around him. He might have gotten tired now and then, but he never gave up. When I thought about that, I knew I had to go search out his grave.
At 7:15 I put my watch on the windowsill and opened Odell’s gun case. That .25-caliber rabbit gun was his pride and joy. I screwed in the barrel and fit the cherrywood stock into place. The best part of his rifle was its telescopic sight. Back when I first came to L.A., Odell would go out hunting and come back with enough rabbits to feed Maudria, him, and me — and two or three others besides.
I filled the magazine and pointed the muzzle through the window at the front door. I held that pose, glancing at the Gruen now and then. At 7:30 I knew that Odell was making the call.