Also by Walter Mosley
FICTION
Gone Fishin’
Devil in a Blue Dress
A Red Death
White Butterfly
Black Betty
A Little Yellow Dog
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
Walkin’ the Dog
Fearless Jones
Blue Light
RL’s Dream
Futureland
NONFICTION
Workin’ on the Chain Gang
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Walter Mosley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-7434-5161-9
ATRIA BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
“Smoke” first published in the 2002 Washington Square Press edition of Gone Fishin’.
“Crimson Stain” first published in the 2002 Washington Square Press edition of Devil in a Blue Dress.
“Silver Lining” first published in the 2002 Washington Square Press edition of A Red Death.
“Lavender” first published in the 2002 Washington Square Press edition of White Butterfly.
“Gator Green” first published in the 2002 Washington Square Press edition of Black Betty.
“Gray-Eyed Death” first published in the 2002 Washington Square Press edition of A Little Yellow Dog.
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For Walter Bernstein
Contents
Smoke
Crimson Stain
Silver Lining
Lavender
Gator Green
Gray-Eyed Death
Amber Gate
Smoke
EASY,” SHE SAID, and then the phone rang. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the phone rang, and then Bonnie called my name.
Bright sun shone in the window, and the skies were clear as far as I could see. There was a beautiful woman of the Caribbean lying next to me. From the living room, early morning cartoons were squeaking softly while Feather giggled as quietly as she could. Somewhere below the blue skies, Jesus was hammering away, building a single mast sail that he intended to navigate toward some deep unknown dream.
It was one of the most perfect mornings of my life. I had a steady job, a nice house with a garden in the backyard, and a loving family.
But I was nowhere near happy.
The phone rang again.
“Easy,” Bonnie said.
“I hear it.”
“Daddy, phone,” Feather yelled from her TV post.
Her dog, Frenchie, growled in anger just to hear her say something to me.
Jesus stopped his hammering.
The phone rang again.
“Honey,” Bonnie insisted.
I almost said something sharp, but instead I grabbed the receiver off the night table.
“Yeah?”
“Ezekiel?”
Ezekiel is my given name but I never use it. So when that deep voice came out of the phone, I stalled a moment, wondering if it was asking for someone else.
“Ezekiel?” the voice said again.
“Who is this?”
“I’m lookin’ for Raymond,” the near-bass voice said.
“Mouse is dead.”
I sat up, pulling the blankets from Bonnie’s side of the bed. She didn’t reach for the sheets to cover her naked body. I liked that. I might have even smiled.
“Oh no,” the voice assured me. “He ain’t dead.”
“What?”
“No.” The voice was almost an echo. There was a click and I knew that the connection had been broken.
“Easy?” Bonnie said.
I put the phone back into its cradle.
“Easy, who was it?”
Bonnie pressed her warm body against my back. The memory of Raymond’s death brought about the slight nausea of guilt. Add that to the heat of the woman I loved and I had to pull away. I went to the window.
Down in the backyard I saw the frame of Jesus’s small boat on orange crates and sawhorses in the middle of the lawn.
“It was…a woman I think. Deep voice.”
“What did she want?”
“Mouse.”
“Oh. She didn’t know he was dead,” Bonnie said in that way she had of making everything okay with just a few words.
“She said he was alive.”
“What?”
“I don’t think she knew. It was more like she was certain that he couldn’t be dead.”
“That’s just the way people think about him,” Bonnie said.
“No. It was something else.”
“What do you mean?”
I went back to the bed and took Bonnie’s hands in mine. “Do you have to leave today?” I asked her.
“Sorry.”
Jesus’s hammer started its monotonous beat again.
Feather turned up the volume on Crusader Rabbit now that she knew we were awake.
“I know you got to go,” I said. “But…”
“What?”
“I dreamt about my father last night.”
She reached out and touched my cheek with her palm. Bonnie had work-woman hands, not callused, but hard from a long life of doing for herself and others.
“What did he say?” she asked me.
That was her superstitious streak. She believed that the dead could speak through dreams.
“He didn’t say a thing,” I said. “Just sat there in a chair on a raft in the water. I called out to him four or five times before he looked up. But just then the current started pullin’ the raft downstream. I think he saw me but before he could say anything he was too far away.”
Bonnie took my head in her arms and held on tight. I didn’t try to pull away.
WE SAT DOWN TO BREAKFAST at nine o’clock, two hours after I was supposed to be at work. Jesus had taken Feather to school. After that he was going to work four hours as a box boy at Tolucca Market on Robertson. In the late afternoon he’d come back home and read to me from Treasure Island. That was our deaclass="underline" he’d read out loud to me for forty-five minutes and then discuss what he had read for three quarters of an hour more. He did that every day, and I agreed to let him drop out of high school.
Jesus wasn’t interested in a public school education, and there was nothing I could do to light a fire under him. He was smart about things he cared for. He knew everything about grocery stores because of his job. He worked there and did gardening around our neighborhood to afford his boat dreams. He liked carpentry and running. He loved to cook and explore the beaches up and down the coast around L.A.
“What are you thinking about?” Bonnie asked.
We were holding hands under the table like schoolchildren going steady.
“Juice,” I said. “He’s doin’ pretty good.”
“Then why do you look so sad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s that phone call.”
Bonnie leaned closer and squeezed my hand. “I’m going to be gone longer than usual,” she said.
“How long?”
“Maybe three or four weeks. Air France is having a special junket around western Africa with black political leaders and some European corporate heads. They need a French-speaking black stewardess who can also speak English. They’ll need me on call for special flights.”