The events of the past two weeks—the riots, the death of Nola Payne, the pursuit of Harold the woman killer, and the memories that Juanda kindled in me all came together and spun me out like a bird clipped by a stone. I was spinning through the sky, seeing pieces of everything—out of control.
Then I crashed. For a moment the aching from my fight was excruciating, then I felt nothing, and then I knew nothing.
“YOU CAN GET up now, baby,” Jo said.
“Hi, Easy,” her hunchbacked son cried.
“Hey, Dom. How you doin’?”
“Hey, Ease,” Mouse said. I couldn’t see him from where I lay but it was him.
A large black bird cried and flared its wings.
“You got a crow as a pet?” I asked Jo as I sat up on the floor mat.
“Raven,” she said. “This here’s a raven. Talks an’ everything. He keeps me company.”
“Who did this to you, Easy?” Mouse asked.
He was standing to the side. Just looking at him made me smile.
Mouse was wearing a greenish gray two-piece suit with a black shirt and a tie made up of every shade of yellow that you could imagine. His shoes were fashioned from alligator skin.
“Poor Howard make you those shoes?”
“Oh yeah. You know Howard got his cousins bringin’ up gator hide from bayou country. He sellin’ ’em for four hunnert dollars a pair.”
Howard was a dark-skinned Cajun acquaintance of ours from Louisiana. He lived in the wilds around L.A. because he was a fugitive from Louisiana justice. He had killed a white man, so running was the only choice he had.
“You gonna answer my question?” Mouse asked.
“It was just a misunderstandin’, Ray. Nuthin’ to get upset about.”
“How you feelin’, darlin’?” Jo asked me.
She’d always had a soft spot for me. I could still hear it in her tone.
“Good,” I said. “Great. I don’t hardly hurt at all.” I was a country boy again, even in the way I spoke.
She handed me a mirror and I saw that all of the swelling on my face had gone. Her teas and poultices rivaled the medicines most doctors prescribed.
“You got to take it easy, baby,” she said. “You know a man’s body don’t bounce back too fast after he pass forty.”
“You wanna go fishin’, Easy?” Domaque shouted.
I turned to Jo’s powerful and lopsided son. He was big and misshapen in almost every part of his body. Something was wrong with his nasal passages, so his mouth hung open showing crooked teeth and red gums. His arms and legs were all different lengths and his mind, though extremely intelligent, held on to all of the innocence of childhood. The first time you saw Dom he’d scare you silly but if you knew him you would feel that you’d met one of the finest human beings on this earth.
“No, Dom. I got to do some huntin’ first. But you know, my boy Jesus has built him a sailboat.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. It floats and goes where he tells it to. I bet he’d take us out for some fishin’.”
The glee on that child-man’s face gave me one of my first feelings of true happiness since the riots began.
“I got to go,” I said.
I rose to my feet. I was fully dressed except that Jo had taken off my socks and shoes.
While I tied my laces she said, “Here, drink this, Easy.” She proffered a cloudy quartz bottle.
“What is it?”
“It’s what you need, baby. You gonna take that body back into the street, you better have a little get-up-n-go.”
I drank the liquid down in one swallow. There wasn’t any alcohol in it but it certainly had a kick.
“After six hours get yourself into bed, honey,” she said.
“Don’t forget about Jesus,” Dom said.
“I’ll ride with ya, Easy,” Mouse informed me. “When Jo called about you, LaMarque drove me over. He needed the car to impress some girl.”
As we walked out from between Jo’s trees her elixir hit me. I felt like I could go out and run a ten-mile race.
38
You talked to Benita?” Raymond asked me after I’d driven about six blocks.
I don’t know what it was that Jo had given me but I could feel the blood pumping in my veins. I was wide awake and ready for anything—even the implied threat in Raymond’s tone.
“Yeah,” I said confidently. “Yes I did.”
“What for?”
“I was just goin’ around lookin’ for my boy—Harold. I run into her at Stud’s.”
“What she say?”
“That she loves you, that she misses you, that you broke her heart.”
“Then what?”
I pulled the car to the curb, came to a halt, and yanked on the parking brake.
“I took her home,” I said. “Then I read the phone book while she fell asleep in the bathtub. After that I left. You wanna make somethin’ outta that?”
Ray’s gray eyes seemed to flash as he looked at me.
He was a small man. That’s where most men who went up against him made their biggest mistake. They thought that a small man had to cave in to a bigger one. They didn’t know that Mouse was strong as a man twice his size. But that’s not what made him dangerous. Mouse was fast and he was a killer. He killed without a second thought or a moment’s remorse. He was a soldier who had been at war his entire life.
“What’s wrong with you, Easy? You crazy or sumpin’?”
“You wouldn’t understand, Ray. What’s been goin’ on the last few days don’t mean nuthin’ but business to you. But this shit has fucked me up. I’m lookin’ for this killer and the streets I’m walkin’ down today ain’t what they were last week. I’m your friend, Ray. But you know that girl has let herself go all the way down to the ground over you. She could die.”
“Die? What she gonna die from, man? It’s not poison.”
I was breathing hard. I knew that my friend could see it. I hoped he knew that I wasn’t a threat to him.
“Black women, Ray. You know how they are. Tough as you ever wanna be. Go up against a whole gang to protect her man. Ready to walk away if you do her wrong the next day. But you know about her heart. You know when you talk that sweet shit, she gonna believe every word even if she knows it ain’t true. And when you leave her alone it eats at her like acid.
“I went home with her because she needed someone to look after her. I ain’t interested in your girl. I just don’t want her to feel like she’s all alone.”
While I spoke Ray didn’t say a word. He just stared with those killer eyes. For all I knew he was waiting for me to finish so he could say I had my last words.
But instead of killing me he scratched his nose.
“You know they’s hardly anybody talk to me like that, Ease. I once killed a man fightin’ over a woman and you know that woman was his wife. But you right. Just ’cause I tell ’er about Etta don’t mean I don’t snake up in there an’ confuse her mind. Yeah.”
He turned around and faced forward. We sat there for a while and then I turned over the engine.
I let Raymond off at his house. He got out of the car and walked away without another word.
I drove off thinking that I would never take another one of Mama Jo’s potions without asking her how it was going to affect me.
IT WAS NIGHTTIME and I hadn’t spoken to Bonnie in quite a while. I was running low on gas too. So I pulled into an A-Plus gas station on Normandie and waited for the attendant. It was a white guy in a tan jumpsuit with “A+” printed over his breast pocket. He was back on the job and the end of the riots wasn’t three days old.
“What can I get you, mister?” he said.
“Two dollars,” I said.
“Right away.”
He attached the nozzle to my car and the pump started ringing. I got out and stretched my legs. I took a deep breath that went all the way to my toes. There was a phone booth at the corner of the lot. I took a few steps toward it, when three squad cars ran up on the curb and surrounded me.