I watched a small boy with a purple bruise on his head drifting off to sleep but before he could go there his mother would shake him, saying, “You might have a concussion, honey. You got to stay up.”
Two men who had stabbed each other over a woman started fighting in the waiting room and the police had to be called to separate them.
With all that blood and worry I still fell asleep.
I WAS A simple seaman on a great gray battleship going off to war far from America’s shores. It was my job to keep the hull bright and shiny and clean. I had thick rope riggings and a platform made from a single plank of oak. All I did day and night was scrub and swab the steel hull from top to bottom, from sunup to sundown. Once I’d cleaned the whole hull it was already dirty at the place where I started. So I’d begin again with no complaint or attempt to shirk my duty.
But after a long while and many, many revolutions of scrubbing I began to wonder why the boat had to be so clean when all it was made for was war. Why shine and glisten on the deep blue sea when it would only come to blood and the deaths of mothers’ sons? The sea would still run red, the skies would still resound with cannon. Then the shining hull would be a disgrace and my work would be scorned throughout history.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
It was a nurse.
“Yeah?”
“Miss Flag is awake now,” the middle-aged, gray-headed white woman said.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Sixteen after six.”
SHE LOOKED AWFUL in that hospital bed. There were two other beds in the room. Each one had curtains to separate them but they weren’t drawn. In one bed was an elderly woman who kept babbling to herself. In the other lay one of the men who had been fighting in the waiting room. His color looked bad. There was a nozzle strapped to his nose, feeding him oxygen, I supposed, and three different intravenous drip sacks putting medicine into his arms. If he had a mother I prayed she didn’t see him like that.
“Easy,” Benita whispered. “Are you the one saved me?”
“I brought you here,” I said. “How you doin’, Benny?”
“I feel like a fool,” she said. “Please don’t tell nobody what happened.”
“Are you okay now?”
“Oh yeah. Can you imagine it? Taking them pills, tryin’ to kill myself over Raymond?”
“What made you do it?” I asked.
I pulled up a heavy chair with a metal frame.
“Have a seat,” the elderly patient said to the air.
“I don’t know, Easy. It just hurt so bad that I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again. It was like I was in a dream, you know? I didn’t really think about dyin’, just goin’ to sleep. And then when I came to and the doctor asked me if I tried to kill myself I said no. And I meant it too. But I can see where everything been leadin’ to this. Everybody said that I was takin’ this thing with Raymond too hard but I told ’em that they didn’t understand. But I guess they did, huh?”
She was drifting a little bit but her words were clear and the burden of love had been lifted from her brow.
“It hurts when somebody you love is gone,” I said. “Imagine how your mama would feel if you turned up dead on the floor with foam comin’ outta your mouth.”
“Yeah.” She was looking up at me with wonderment in her eyes. “You saved my life, Easy Rawlins.”
“So what you gonna do with it now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can come stay at my house a few days if you want,” I said. “We don’t have an extra room but there’s a couch you can sleep on. And my girlfriend will make sure you eat right and have somebody to talk to.”
Benita smiled and her face seemed to fill with health.
45
I called Bonnie and told her about the attempted suicide. I asked if we could put Benita up for a while.
“Doesn’t she have a mother?” Bonnie asked.
“I promised.”
“Okay,” Bonnie replied. “But she better understand that I don’t want any monkey business under my roof.”
I had breakfast at a diner on Success Avenue, soft-boiled eggs over toast. That’s what my mother fed me when I was sick. I also had tea with honey and only one cigarette. I ate and read the paper.
The riots were nearly over. There was only one article on the front page that referred to them and that was an argument between Chief Parker and Governor Brown. Brown thought that Parker hurt race relations in L.A., and Parker didn’t believe that his police department was guilty of brutality. Other than that, the space shot showed promise and might last eight days, the job prospect in the nation was the best since 1957, and the Vietcong had ambushed some South Vietnamese regulars.
There were no stories about Negro women being murdered by a deranged black man whose mother thought that she was white.
After I was finished I went down to the park benches where men gathered to play dominoes.
The tension from the riots was lifting around the city. People were on their way to work and mothers let their children come to the playground at the park. A few men gathered to play dominoes on the tables. None of them was Harold. I sat down on a slender bench under a tree and watched. I may have fallen asleep a few times because my watch said eleven and it hardly felt like nine-thirty to me. For a while I thought about asking the domino men if they knew Harold but then I decided against it. Someone might warn my quarry and then I would have driven him away.
“SEVENTY-SEVENTH PRECINCT.” A woman’s voice this time.
“Detective Suggs, please.”
“Hold a moment.”
The phone rang.
“Detective Suggs.”
“I’ve got a picture of him,” I said. “I borrowed it from a woman that wants it back.”
“I’ll come over to pick it up,” he said.
“Don’t bother. I’ll meet you at the dinette down the street from the station. I’m just callin’ to tell you that and that I know where he hangs out a lot.”
“Where?”
“Northeast part of Will Rogers Park. Where the men play dominoes.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it, Detective?”
“Ten minutes?” he replied.
“You got it.”
I GOT THERE in less than ten minutes but Suggs was already at the counter, drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug. There was a gutted jelly-filled doughnut on a plate in front of him and two cigarettes in his ashtray.
“Got a light?” I asked him as I sat.
He set fire to my cigarette and I handed him the photograph I got from Honey May.
“So this is Harold the Horror,” the cop said. “Just looks like some loser.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised you brought me this,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I figured you would go after this clown yourself. I was ready to cover you if he showed up dead after havin’ fallen on a bullet or some shit like that.”
I laughed then. My head bowed in mirth and I had to hold on so as not to fall off of my stool. It wasn’t the joke but the notion that a white cop would let me do my business without interference or condescension tickled me. It was as if I’d died and gone to another man’s heaven. This man whose soul I inhabited had been white, and his heaven was filled with ordinary things that were like magic to me.
“No,” I said. “I know too much about Harold to kill him like that. People been messin’ with him his whole life. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to arrest him and I want them to send him to the gas chamber too. But I don’t have to do it. No sir. Not me.”
I felt the weight of Melvin Suggs’s hand on my shoulder. Another friendly gesture.
The police detective stood up and threw a dollar bill on the counter.
“Have some eggs, Rawlins,” he said. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks. I will.”
I had two more soft-boiled eggs and white toast with strawberry jam. You could buy a lot with a buck back then.
I walked back to my building.
Before going upstairs I stopped by Steinman’s Shoe Repair. The closed sign was still up but it was tacked on the door that had been wired back into place. I pushed it open and saw Sylvie, Theodore’s wife, muse, and best friend. She was a quarter of a head taller than him with the features of a Teutonic goddess. She was slender and I doubted if even her husband knew what her voice sounded like. Mostly she gestured, now and again she whispered, but Sylvie would never raise her voice. I don’t know how old she was but she had the kind of beauty that would not fade. Violet eyes and platinum hair, long thin hands and skin akin to the perfect milk that men like Plato dreamed of.
She smiled when she saw me.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said from somewhere behind her.
“Hi, guys,” I said. “I saw that the door was open and I just dropped in to make sure things were okay.”
Sylvie’s smile took on a trace of sadness.
“I’m probably going to close up here, Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said. “It’s too much. My insurance agent says that my policy doesn’t cover riots and the city refuses to help.”
“What about the federal government?” I asked.
He shook his head and Sylvie laid an ethereal hand upon the nape of his neck. The love between them always surprised me. It was like a fairy tale that you one day realized was true.
“You need help moving?” I asked.
It was Theodore’s turn to smile.
“You know,” I continued, “there’s a corner store not far from my house that might be a good place to open a shoe repair shop. It’s been vacant a couple’a months. Maybe I could introduce you to the owner.”
Sylvie took two steps and kissed me. Her lips formed the words “thank you,” and she might have made some sound.
We set up a day for the move and a time to talk with the owner at the empty corner store near my house. It was once a clothes store near Stanley and Pico. It was a space and he was a cobbler and people wore shoes everywhere in the world.
Theodore took the leather saddle from the ruined table and pushed it on me.
“Take this, Mr. Rawlins—Easy,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything, Theodore,” I said. “This is yours.”
“But you are helping us,” he argued. “You are always trying to help. This is just a, what you call it, a token for our friendship.”
I didn’t want to take it but Theodore held it out and Sylvie kept smiling. Finally I nodded in defeat and took the ancient riding gear.