“Where you from, Brown?”
“Illinois originally,” he said. “But they tell me I was born in Mississippi.”
“Jackson?”
“Greenwood.”
“Delta boy.”
“I got the blues in my spit,” he agreed.
“How long you been in L.A.?”
“Two years. Most’a that time I lived down at Redondo Beach, workin’ on this mackerel fishin’ boat they got down there.”
“How come you left?”
“When I realized that I was gettin’ seasick on dry land, I knew it was time to leave fishin’ behind.” He had a nice, friendly laugh. “So I moved here to Miss Moore’s just a few days ago and got a job cleanin’ tuxedos and silk dresses.”
Charlotta had returned from the store and was sitting next to Brenda Frail. They were working on a quilt together.
Deciding to play with Brown turned out to be a mistake because of my pride. We traded wins back and forth for two hours, until the late news came on.
Good evening, this is Bob Benning with KTLA news. The police were summoned to a grisly scene late this afternoon at the Bernard Arms Residence Hotel on Fountain. The body of Lance Wexler was found by police, who had been trying to get in touch with Mr. Wexler for the past three days. There was no sign of a break-in. Just two days ago Wexler’s sister was found dead in Griffith Park. She was also the victim of foul play. When asked about a connection between the two crimes, Captain Howard North told reporters that the police were looking into every detail of both homicides. . . . Maestro Wexler, oil distributor and real estate developer, offered a reward of ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his children’s killers. . . .
My heart was thundering by the end of the report. I wondered if the randy porter Warren had put together the delivery Negro at the back door and the death of his tenant. I worried that I might have left a fingerprint or maybe my wallet fell out on the toilet floor. I actually reached for my billfold to make sure that I still had it.
As bad as I felt, I was still able to beat Brown. That gave me hope. Maybe fear gave me clarity.
“Another game?” Brown asked.
“You good, man,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
Brown stuck his tongue in his cheek and smiled. The grin stopped at his mouth, his eyes bearing no relation to mirth. That’s how it was for so many displaced southern, and even midwestern, Negroes in those days. Coming to California, they had to dig out from under nearly a century of white oppression. Everybody, black and white, was a potential enemy. People that had been mired so deeply in poverty that that’s all they could ever expect. And so when faced with hope, many became distant and watchful. Even when relaxing, people like Brown were on guard, ready for any threat.
“MR. HENDRICKS,” CHARLOTTA CALLED AT MY BACK.
I was halfway down the hall, headed for my room. You know I had to be shaken by that news report to have forgotten her in the sitting room.
“Hey.”
“Did you forget our drink?”
“No, baby,” I said. “I just didn’t want to give people the wrong idea. I mean, what would it look like if I just walked up to you and said let’s go upstairs?”
Charlotta was slightly taller than I and a few pounds heavier. She pressed me up against the wall and kissed me, hard. She knew how to kiss. The worry was still in my head but all the details fell away. When she stepped back to see my reaction, she had a smile on her face. I took a stutter step to keep on my feet.
“I like bein’ treated like a lady,” she said.
We kissed down the hall and up the wide stairway. It took me three minutes to unlock the door because Charlotta had worked her hand down the front of my pants. When she found what she was searching for her eyes opened wide.
“Is that real?” she asked me.
“Does it feel real?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it is.”
There are only three things that I’ve ever had pride in: my intelligence, my bookstore, and my sexual endowment.
Charlotta and I barely made it to the bed. Once there, we hardly let go of each other.
Somewhere in the middle of our passion I realized how much I needed the release. It wasn’t lovemaking, but that was all right. I needed to be pushed around in a situation where I could push back. She didn’t need to love me but just what I was doing—how hard and how long.
“Again,” she whispered for the third time.
“You got to gimme a couple’a minutes, girl,” I said. “Just a couple.”
Charlotta smiled at me. She held both physical love and victory in her mien. It was a battle I didn’t mind losing.
I got up and lit two cigarettes, placing one of them between her lips. Then I lay down, putting my head on her thigh. We smoked for a while in the afterglow of our passion.
“You used to come up here when Kit had this room, huh?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.
“What you mean by that?” She flexed the hard muscle of her leg.
“Nuthin’ really,” I said. “I mean, it’s just that when I opened that door and looked at you, I thought that whoever it was you were comin’ to see was a lucky man.”
“Oh.” Charlotta’s leg relaxed. “You don’t have to be jealous, Paris.”
“Wha, what did you call me?”
“That’s what your driver’s license says your name is.”
I had only gone to the toilet once since we’d been together. I couldn’t have been out of the room for more than a few minutes.
“Yeah, well, you know, honey. Sometimes a man needs to be a little on the sly. I know I told Miss Moore I was marrying somebody, but really I’m tryin’ to get away from some guys wanna do me harm.”
“I knew it,” Charlotta said.
“How you gonna know all that?” I asked just to put her a little on the defensive.
“I didn’t know about no men or nuthin’, but I could tell by the way you loved me that you wasn’t engaged.”
“How?”
“A man gettin’ married don’t have it stored up like you do, baby. I done had men just got outta jail less hungry than you.”
“Where you think Kit went?” I asked. She probably thought that I was changing the topic because of being embarrassed by the way she had mastered me sexually.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He told me that he might be gone one night. He promised to take me to the show by Friday, but he never came back. You like the movies, Paris?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, Thad.” She kissed me.
“What did he do for a living?”
“Who?”
“The man who lived here.”
“Why you wanna know?”
“It’s just this feelin’ I got ever since comin’ up in here,” I said, and then I shivered.
“What kinda feelin’?”
“Somethin’ bad,” I said. “I get like that sometimes. Once, when my uncle Victor was up in Jackson, Mississippi, I woke up in a sweat callin’ out his name, and then a week later we found out that he had been killed that very night in a juke joint around there.”
I figured that either Charlotta would think I was crazy or her superstitious side would come out—either way she’d stop being suspicious about my questions.
“You know I got a bad feelin’ about Kit too,” she said. “Before he left he told me that he was about to make a whole lotta money. So much that we could go to the show seven nights a week. He said that he was gonna buy a proper farm and hire people to do all the work for him.”
“He was gonna make money on a farm?” I asked.
“No, stupid. He was gonna buy the farm with all the money he made.”
“What money?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But you better be sure that no poor niggah livin’ in a roomin’ house gonna make money like that the honest way.”