I turned my head away and took a deep draft.
Jo sat beside me on the bench. Her breath wafted across my forearms, and I regretted having come.
Jo might have been a witch; I didn’t know. She was certainly a botanist and a physician and possessed of deep insight into human nature, my nature.
Ever since asking Bonnie to leave, I had avoided Jo. I knew that she saw right through the pain brought on by my own stupidity.
“Have you seen her?” Jo asked.
“No. She called, though. She’s marrying that prince of hers.”
“The man you drove her to.”
“Yeah . . . right.”
Jo was looking at me while I stared at the hard yellow earth she walked upon. Her feet were bare and the flames from the fireplace threw odd-colored waves of light around the room.
“You know you got to go to her, baby,” Jo said after many long minutes of silence.
“Yeah,” I said again. “I know.”
“Man cain’t be a man without a woman and chirren to love him,” she said. “You got to take her up or let her go.”
A loud screech tore through the room. I leaped to my feet, and Blackie, Jo’s pet raven, spread his wings in alarm. The ebony bird had been so still in his dark corner I hadn’t noticed him.
My heart was beating fast, and I was tired, very tired.
“Do you ever make love potions, Jo?” I asked the witch.
“You don’t need a love charm, Easy. You got more love than you know how to handle now.”
I slumped down on the bench, placing my elbows on my knees. Jo put her hand to the back of my neck the way she had when we made love so long ago.
“It’s like wakin’ up in a shallow grave, baby,” she whispered. “There’s dirt in your mouth, and you so cold that you cain’t even feel it. You wanna go back to sleep, but you know that can only bring death.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“What you doin’, child.”
I laughed. “What I’m doin’ is runnin’ full throttle without sense or worry,” I said.
“You always know what’s right, Easy,” she said softly. “Always. If you runnin’, then there’s a reason for it, even if you don’t know what that reason is.”
A sweet, frightening shock went through my mind like a live wire cut loose from its stem. Suddenly I had my bearings. I knew where I was — and I wasn’t at all happy to be there.
“I’m lookin’ for Ray, Jo,” I said, no longer sad or heartbroken or unsure.
“You two always lookin’ for each other,” she said sagely. “I don’t know where he’s at right now. He come by a couple’a weeks ago sayin’ that he was gonna be gone awhile — on business.”
We both knew what that meant: Somewhere some bank or armored car or payroll was going to be robbed, or maybe there was a soul destined to die.
“If he gets in touch with you, call me,” I said, standing up and feeling strong.
Jo rose with me and kissed me gently on the lips. This made me smile, grin even.
“You mostly see the truth,” she said. “But sometimes you like a man stranded on a island, lookin’ across a wide stretch’a ocean at a faraway shore.”
25
I could see the truth, all right. It was like swimming in a peaceful lake and suddenly seeing the beady eyes of a crocodile bearing down upon me.
I didn’t speed on the ride back to my house because I didn’t want to be stopped by the police and therefore lose time. Going to see Mama Jo was always a revelation. That’s why people shied away from her. Who wants to see the truth? Not the condemned man, the dying woman, the child who will be orphaned.
I decided somewhere in a corner of my mind to let go of Bonnie and move on. I would not go to the wedding. I would not grieve for my loss. The world did not revolve around me or my pain.
I went through a whole list of decisions that I had put on hold for the past year, mainly so that I wouldn’t think about what might have happened while I was wallowing around like a pig in its sty.
Sammy Sansoam, otherwise known as Captain Clarence Miles, knew my name and office address. And even though I was unlisted, it wouldn’t take much time for him to find my house. If he suspected for any reason that I was a friend of Christmas Black, then he might come for me. Jesus would die protecting Easter, so might Feather and Benita.
Fighting the men that killed Faith’s husband was like fighting organized crime or the FBI. They had limitless resources and were ruthless.
I pulled to the curb and jumped out of the car with my pistol in my hand. I ran to the front door, and burst in.
Jesus’s body looked like fresh kill spread out on the couch, with the fingers of one hand grazing the floor and the other hand over his forehead. His eyes were closed and in shadow.
“Juice!”
The dead boy opened his eyes and sat up with a quizzical look on his face.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” he asked.
Feather came running in with Easter and Benita right behind her. My heart thudded against its cage and the room shimmied. I lurched over to the couch and sat as Jesus moved his legs. I would have fallen otherwise.
Sitting there, I tried to control my breathing but could not. My heart was going so fast that I believed I was going to die right then. If there had been whiskey in the house, I would have drunk it. If there had been opium in the house, I would have swallowed it.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Feather asked.
She sat down beside me and wrapped her arms around my head while Easter sat on Jesus’s lap and put her hands on my thigh.
My heart thundered through all of that. My ears were hot, and I wanted to kill Clarence Miles.
All men are fools. The words came into my head, but I could not remember where I had heard them. The source did not matter, because the content was true. All men were fools and me most of all.
My children could have died while I was out acting like a child.
I stood up. Jesus did too, taking hold of my right arm. I put the gun in my pocket and said, “Pack up everything you need for a trip.”
“Where are we going?” Feather asked.
“Away for a while. There’s some bad men out there and they might come here.”
“But why?” Benita asked.
Jesus took his common-law wife by the hand and led her into the back room. Feather needed no direction. She packed her things in a small blue suitcase and put Frenchie in a bag made for the transportation of small dogs. Easter started to gather her things with military precision.
I took in a deep breath. I was a fool, but I was lucky too. Just that thought made me laugh. I lit a cigarette while Benita and Jesus argued and the girls packed. Fifteen minutes later, we were all crowded in the car, headed west.
WE ARRIVED AT A DOORWAY half a block from the Pacific Ocean on a street named Ozone. I knocked and rang and knocked again. Jewelle came to the door, wearing a yellow dress that perfectly accented her dark brown skin. As the years had passed, the plain-Jane girl had been supplanted by a subtly beautiful maiden. She had been the lover of my property manager Mofass until he died heroically and now she was with Jackson Blue, who was both the smartest and the most cowardly man I knew.
“Easy,” Jewelle said, looking at the brood that surrounded me. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I need help, baby. I need it bad.”
Jewelle smiled, and I remembered that she loved me in a way that she felt for no other man. She wasn’t sexually attracted to me, but she felt a connection like a daughter feels for her dad.
“Come on in.”
The doorway led to a long set of stairs that went down two floors to the apartment below. The ceilings were twenty feet at least, and the walls sported bookshelves from top to bottom.
Jackson Blue had read every book on those shelves at least twice. He kept only books that he intended to read again, and again. Jewelle had been working her way through Jackson’s library, having long discussions with him about the meanings and ramifications of the texts. Jackson was the first man she met who proved that he was smarter than she, and she loved him for it.