“Pain has a memory of its own,” I said, thinking of Joguye Cham, the African prince, and Nola Payne.
“What do you mean, honey?” Bonnie asked.
“If I was to hit you right now,” I said. “Haul off with my fist and crack you upside your head it would be on your mind for the rest of your life.”
I balled my fist as I spoke. Bonnie leaned down and kissed the big knuckle, then licked it.
“Every day,” I continued, “you’d wonder why I did it and when I might do it again. You’d wonder if you’d done something wrong. You’d hate me but you’d be angry at yourself too.”
“Why would I be angry at myself if you attacked me?”
“If you hit me back, you’d worry that it wasn’t enough or maybe too much. You’d worry that maybe I had a reason to hit you and you just didn’t know what it was. If you didn’t hit me back, you’d feel like a coward or a fool. The pain of that one blow would worm around in your gut and change everything you did from that moment on.”
Bonnie had had her own share of pain in life, I knew that. I didn’t want to bring it up but I felt compelled to explain myself.
“But even if something happens to me,” she said, feeling the hurt as she spoke, “does that make anything I do right? Shouldn’t we decide at some time to let it go and move on?”
“You can’t ever leave something like that behind. You go to sleep with it and you wake up with it too.” I was looking her in the eye then. She wanted to turn away but would not.
“But it’s worse than that,” I said. “For most people the pain they experience is just inside them. I hit you in the head but that’s you and me. You could leave, find another man. You could go to work and none of the other women got a big knot on their heads. But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting for you. And so when you see some man stopped by the cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Because you been there before. And everybody around you has been there before. And it’s hot, and you’re broke, and people have been doin’ this to you because of your skin for more years than your mother’s mother can remember.”
There were tears in my voice if not in my eyes and Bonnie was crying too. She put her hands on my forearms letting her heat sink into my skin. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.
“THE POLICE CAME to see me down at the office today,” I said.
We were both undressing for bed.
“What did they want?”
“They want to hire me.”
“No. Why?”
I told her everything from Theodore Steinman’s story to Nola Payne to the cops stopping me and the watchmaker asking for my business.
“Are you going back down there?” she asked when I was through.
“What else can I do? Nobody else can do it.”
“It might be dangerous. You have children.”
I leaned over and kissed her right nipple. She made a sound that told me that she hadn’t realized how much her nipple missed that kiss.
We didn’t talk any more about the LAPD or Nola Payne. Our only words were sweet promises about a world made up of two.
9
I was up before five. After donning my day’s costume I shook Bonnie out of bed. She wrapped herself in a housecoat without complaint. She didn’t even stop to make a cup of coffee, just staggered out to her pink Rambler and turned over the engine.
Neither Feather nor Jesus would be up before seven. By then Bonnie would be back in her bed.
On the ride to my office Bonnie and I said very little. She was slow to wake up the first day after coming back from Europe. But she wouldn’t let me take a taxi.
The sun was rising but not risen. The streets were fairly empty until we crossed Florence. After that we came across the occasional army Jeep. Two trucks full of armed soldiers sped past us at one point. There were groups of soldiers on a few major corners. But the main thing we saw was the wreckage left by the riots.
Bonnie gasped and sighed with every new ruin we passed.
On Avalon and Central and Hooper the burned buildings outnumbered the ones still intact. There was at least one torched car hunkered down at the curb on almost every block. Debris was strewn along the sidewalks and streets. Smoke still rose here and there from the wreckage. Furtive shadows could be seen sifting through the debris, searching for anything of value that had been overlooked.
City buses were running and the police made their presence felt. They were still riding four to a car, some wearing riot helmets or holding shotguns upright in their laps. They were still jumpy from days and nights when the Negro population rose up and fought back.
Bonnie let me off in front of my building. She kissed me and told me to be careful and then she kissed me again.
“Call if you’re going to be late, honey,” she said. “You know Feather will be worried.”
I kissed her and then walked off to my car.
TRINI’S CREOLE CAFé on 105th and Central was just an open-air coffee stand with a fancy name. All Trini had were a counter and six stools under a dirty yellow awning.
“You opened the minute they called the curfew off, huh, Trini?” I said to the open-air restaurateur.
“I been open every day, Mr. Rawlins,” Trini replied.
“With all this riotin’ and snipin’ goin’ on?” I asked.
“Dollar don’t make itself, brother.”
He had straight black hair from his Mexican father and the chocolate brown face and flat nose of his mother, who worked in the kitchen.
“Didn’t they give you any trouble?” I asked after enjoying the first real laugh I’d had in a week.
“Most of your serious riotin’ was done at nighttime. I’m mainly a breakfast place. I had looters, rioters, even cops and soldiers buyin’ coffee and jelly doughnuts.”
“Cops and looters at the same counter?”
“Oh yeah. You know the cops come six and eight at a time, and so it wasn’t too much to worry about. But mostly it was just neighborhood peoples comin’ out for to see what had been burnt down and tryin’ to feel a little normal.”
“Weren’t you supposed to be closed?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. They come by and told me to shut down a time or two but what was they gonna do, book me with the bombs goin’ off around their heads?”
I laughed again. Trini was about my age. He held himself like an elder, though. Wisdom was his crutch. He never worried about anything because he could explain it all away with a few sage words.
“So I guess you know all the dirt, huh?” I asked.
“So much I got to wash my hands every ten minutes.”
I smiled. “Lemme have another one’a those lemon-filled doughnuts, will ya?”
The sun was up and the streets were halfway normal. While Trini got my doughnut, I turned over a question in my mind.
The stock-and-trade of wise men was to educate. That meant they always had to feel they knew something you didn’t know. So when asking a question of a wise man it was always best to ask it in the wrong way.
Trini brought my doughnut on a thick tan plate.
“You hear about some white dude got dragged outta his car and killed down on Grape Street?” I asked when he set the plate down.
“You ain’t got that one quite right, Easy,” he replied.
“No? Why not?”
“There was a boy drivin’ ’round lookin’ at the play when a couple’a the brothers saw him and drug him out for a dustin’.”