I smiled and she at least tried to.
“You know what I’m sayin’, don’t you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Mouse is like a thundershower at the end of a hot day. If lightning don’t strike you the rain will cool you down. It brings you back to life.”
Benita smiled and took a very deep breath.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s Raymond.”
“But a storm like that just passes by, Benny. And when it’s gone it’s gone. I mean even if it hits you again it won’t stay around.”
Benita was staring into my face. Her intensity brought back the beauty I knew.
“But I love him, Easy. He come into my life and I never even knew you could feel like that for anybody else. When he walk out to go to the store I ache till he’s back again. When he say my name in conversation I feel somethin’ so strong I get dizzy.”
What could I say to that? She was in love—or something. And whatever that was, it would be wrong to take it away.
“You got any relatives outta town?” I asked.
“A cousin in San Diego.”
“Maybe after a while you should go visit her. Maybe the sea will do you some good.”
Ronette came up to the table then.
“Easy,” she said, setting down my coffee, and to Benny, “Girl, you need to go to the bathroom and fix your face.”
Ronette was solidly built and the color of tarnished bronze. She had straightened hair that swirled at the top of her head like a squat tornado that had been turned upside down.
“I’m lookin’ for a Harold,” I said to Ronette.
“Funny, it look like you lookin’ for a Helen.”
Benita was touching her face to see if she should follow Ronette’s suggestion.
“His last name,” I said, ignoring her joke, “could be Lakely or Ostenberg or Bryant.” I decided to leave out Brown and Smith. I concentrated on the less common names, hoping my man would be one of them.
“Excuse me,” Benita said.
She got up and went toward the bathroom.
“Sounds like white men,” Ronette said.
“It ain’t a woman and it ain’t a white man,” I replied. “Have you heard their names?”
“No, Easy. I don’t know no Harolds at all. Not no black ones.”
“You know we all have white men’s names,” I said.
“Say what?”
“Our names. None of them come from Africa.”
“That’s why you always frownin’, Easy,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Studyin’ somethin’ till it don’t even look like what it is no more. That’s what makes you so sad.”
I couldn’t deny it. She was right.
Ronette saw my silence as a victory. She snorted and smiled and strode off to her bar. I watched her. She had a good figure for a woman in her mid-forties. She liked being watched by men, and women too. She just didn’t want their opinions.
When Benita got back to the table she looked like another woman. There was a store-bought sexiness about her, from the false eyelashes to the fire-engine-red nails.
She sat down and started in as if she had never heard of Raymond or had a broken heart. She asked me about my job at Sojourner Truth and my kids. I found out all about her grandfather who was descended from chiefs of the Seminole tribe out of Florida. She talked until the sky began to lighten.
When I said that I had to leave she asked for a ride.
When we got to her door on San Pedro she asked me inside. I could tell that she was fragile and for some reason I felt responsible for Raymond’s romantic misdemeanor.
Once inside she made me another coffee. She wanted a kiss for her troubles but I suggested that she might want to bathe first.
I ran the tub for her, making it especially warm.
She came in wearing a pink robe. Before I could leave the bathroom she let the garment drop to the floor. I saw why Mouse once wanted her and then I closed the door.
BENITA HAD A very small place. It was just two rooms and a hot plate. And the rooms were small. The telephone sat on a small triangular table that had three legs. Underneath it sat a phone book.
The Smiths alone took up seven pages. The Browns only had a page and a column.
Lakely and Ostenberg had five listings apiece and Bryant was little more than a third of a column of names.
I studied the book, jotting down numbers until the sun was bright. Then I peeked into the bathroom.
Benita was sound asleep in the tub, snoring and dreaming of real love.
33
I left Benita’s before she woke up. That way she could feel kindly toward me without having to face her drunken failure at seducing her lover’s best friend.
I needed to talk to Detective Suggs but in the light of morning and with a few hours’ sleep from Bill’s Shelter, I knew that I shouldn’t go waltzing into the Seventy-seventh after the argument of the day before. So I went to a phone booth on Hooper and called like any other ordinary citizen.
“Seventy-seventh Precinct Police Station,” the male operator said.
“Detective Suggs.”
“Who is this?”
“Ezekiel Rawlins.”
“And what is the call pertaining to?”
“He called me,” I said to avoid further bad blood with the department. “So I wouldn’t know.”
The operator hesitated but then he connected the pin in the switchboard.
The phone only rang once.
“Suggs.”
“I need to speak with you, Detective.”
“You got something?”
“Enough to talk about.”
“Bring it in,” he said.
“No. Let’s meet. At my office. I’ll be there by nine.” I hung up after that. I couldn’t help it. The letter in my pocket gave me true power for the first time ever in my life. I didn’t have to answer to Suggs but I wanted even more. I wanted him to answer to me.
I STOPPED BY Steinman’s Shoe Repair before going up to my office. The doorway was boarded over and a sign that read CLOSED DUE TO DAMAGES had been nailed from the center plank. I made up my mind to call Theodore soon, to find out what he needed. It came to me then that my side job of trading favors had become more geographic than it was racial. I felt responsible for Theodore because he lived in my adopted neighborhood, not because of the color of his skin.
My office was a comfort to see. The plain table desk and bookshelves were filled with hardbacks I’d purchased from Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. He’d introduced me to the depth as well as the breadth of American Negro literature. I had always known that we had a literature but Paris showed me dozens of novels and nonfiction books that I had never known existed.
I started reading a copy of Banjo by Claude McKay that I’d bought from Paris a few weeks before. It was a beautiful edition, orange with black silhouettes of jazz musicians and women and swimmers on the wharf in Marseilles. It was a rare find at that time: a book about people of many colors getting together on foreign shores. The dialect McKay wrote in was a little too country for my sensibilities but I recognized the words and their inflections. On the title page, just below the title, there was a little phrase, A Story Without a Plot. I think that’s what I liked best about the book. After all, isn’t that the way most of the people I knew lived? We went from day to day with no real direction or endpoint. We just lived through the day, praying for another. Even in the best of times that was the best you could hope for.
The knock on the door was soft, almost feminine, but I knew it was Suggs.
“Come on in.”
He wore a black suit. You know it has to be bad when you can see the wrinkles in black cloth. His white shirt seemed askew even with the red tie, and today he wore a hat. A green one with a yellow feather in the band.
“You didn’t have to get dressed up for me,” I said.