The tall man cocked his head and grinned at me just as if he was saying, Got ya.
Sam Houston always made me angry. It was the way he took everything he heard, saw, or read and made it seem that he was the expert. If you came up to him and said that you put up a new cinder-block wall, he’d start lecturing you on the way to build a foundation and the type of drainoff that you’d need. He hadn’t lifted a finger, but now he’s going to tell you what it was you did wrong.
And far too often he was right.
Sam was tall, as I said, but added to that, he had an extremely long neck. His skin had the texture of medium-brown leather with gray highlights and his eyes were great googly things that rolled around dramatically no matter what he was saying or, less often, listening to.
“I’m tellin’ ya, Easy. All you got to do is read that newspaper and the whole world falls right into place.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“You own a car?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What year?”
“’Fifty-eight Pontiac,” I said.
“So if you push it over fifty, it’s rattlin’, right?”
How did he know that?
“Now,” Sam went on, “Craig Breedlove broke five hundred miles per hour in his car, on the Salt Flats. You doin’ the shimmy at fifty while he’s solid-state at five hundred. That’s where you are. The white man got cars fifty years in the future and you ain’t hardly out the Dark Ages.”
I nodded. I could have asked what kind of car he was driving. I could have asked how fast he could go. I could have broken his long neck. But instead, I nodded and got the first of the two things I wanted at Hambones.
Sam turned around and said, “Clarissa! Bring Easy some’a them braised short ribs!”
“Okay,” said a taciturn young woman wearing pink shorts and a pink blouse. She had a green ribbon holding back her straightened hair.
“So, Easy,” Sam said. “What you doin’ here?”
Sam didn’t let many people eat at his counter. You went back there and ordered for sit-down or take-home. But he didn’t want you loitering around and obstructing his view. Most men who tried to start a conversation with Sam were told, “Sit your ass down, man. I ain’t got time to fool with you. This here’s a business.”
The fact that he could stare and shout down most of his clientele was saying quite a lot. Because the men that patronized Hambones were not to be pushed.
Before answering Sam’s question, I looked out along the walls. There were three men and four women. Each of the men had a girlfriend, and one of those girlfriends had brought a friend along. That extra woman had on a red dress that must’ve fit her when she was a size or so smaller. I think that it probably looked better, however, straining against her womanly form. She was looking at me and I felt that fever again. Her gaze didn’t move me, though. I wasn’t looking for any more love than Bonnie Shay could deliver.
I didn’t know any of the men but I could feel their violence. Hard men in dark suits and white shirts with dirty collars and small cigarette holes down the breast. Felons, murderers, and sneak thiefs, too. I never understood why Sam surrounded himself with so much danger.
“Oh, nuthin’,” I said, answering Sam’s question.
“Uh-uh, Easy. You got to do better’n that now. I ain’t seen you in two years. Odell done told me that you got a job workin’ at the Board of Education, that you moved to West L.A. and bought a house. You got to need somethin’ if you gonna cross all’a them lines to come here to me.”
“Here you go,” the pink-clad girl said, placing a heaping plate of short ribs in front of me.
“What’s wrong wit’ you, girl?” Sam asked angrily.
“What?” Clarissa complained.
“Go get him some greens an’ corn. He ain’t no animal just gonna tear at the meat. He needs him a balanced meal.” Sam shook his head in disappointment and his waitress pouted.
“You want collard or turnip greens, Easy?” Sam asked me.
“Collard.”
“Yeah, man, me too. You know them turnip greens is bitter.” He sang the last word to accent his distaste. Sam Houston was a Texan all the way down to his socks.
“You know a young man name’a Brawly Brown?” I asked when Clarissa had slouched her way back to get my vegetables.
Sam pulled out a bottle of Tabasco sauce from under the counter. I opened it and doused my dark meat and gravy.
“Bad boy Brawly Brown,” Sam said, and sighed. “Mm, mm, mm. Now that boy is trouble an’ he don’t even know it.”
“You know him, then?”
“Oh yeah. Brawly got a chip on his shoulder, ants in his pants, eyes twice as big as his stomach, and a heart just drippin’ right off his sleeve. If it could be too much, then that there’s Brawly.”
“So he’s like a big kid?” I asked in a deferential tone.
“He’s just too much, that’s all, Easy. One day he come in here sayin’ he’s gonna sign up in the army an’ be a paratrooper over in Asia somewhere. Gonna make him some good money and then go to college on the GI Bill. Next week he wandered the wrong way down the street, now he’s a revolutionary. He wanna tell me that I’m just a slave workin’ for my white master. Can you imagine? Boy look like a butterball come in here, eat my food, and insult me.”
Clarissa brought up a big plate full of greens with bits of salt pork in them. The collards gave off a sharp vegetable odor laced with a hint of vinegar.
“No, I don’t get it, Sam. This here is the best damn food I’ve eaten in many a day. Many a day.”
I wasn’t lying, either. When you get soul food right, it feeds the spirit. And my spirit was flying with those greens and ribs.
“Okay, Easy. You done et for free and I answered your questions. Now what you here for?”
“Brawly’s mom wants to see him. She called on me and I come here to you.” I saw no reason or profit in lying to Sam.
“So you know about the First Men?” he asked.
I nodded because my mouth was busy chewing.
“I don’t have much patience for all this vigilante communist bullshit,” Sam said. “If they come in here after me, I got a shotgun blow ’em all away.”
“Why’d they come after you, Sam? I thought it was white people they couldn’t stand.”
“They like all the other ignorant people down here, Ease. They hate colored more’n they hate white. They see a black cop or school principal, they say that that man’s a traitor to the race and deserves to die. They come around askin’ for donations, an’ some people out here is scared enough to cough it up. But you know they only askin’ black people.”
“Protection?” I was surprised.
“Not really. I told ’em no an’ they just grumbled. But you know they on the edge of organized crime, they on the edge.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“One or two of ’em come in here,” Sam said. “Sometimes with Brawly and sometimes not. I can tell by the way they lean close and whisper that they plannin’ things. Not lunches for chirren like they say. No. They got plans that go by the dark’a night.”
“I see,” I said.
I had enough of food and talk for a while. I wanted to think about it all, and Sam wasn’t the kind of man to let you stand there quietly.
“Thank you, Mr. Houston,” I said, straightening up. I saw Clarissa in the back, past Sam. She was looking at me.
“They got meetins every evenin’ ’bout six,” Sam said.
“Say what?”
“The First Men. They give talks just about every night.”
“Uh-huh.” I gave Clarissa a glance and she looked down, pretending to be doing something. “Thanks for your help, man.”
— 7 —
I decided to go down to the First Men’s storefront and see what it was that they were about. Sam had his point of view and I was sure that he had told me the truth as far as he saw it; but truth, as my uncle Roger used to say, is just one man’s explanation for what he thinks he understands.