“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“No thank you. I am very happy that you’re back, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “You know the faculty and the students talk a lot about you.”
“They do?”
“Yes. It seems that they’ve come to rely on you for many problems that have nothing to do with the maintenance of the plant. Many of the women teachers, some men too, say that they depend on you for discipline when some of the more aggressive students have problems.”
Ada Masters had a mild way about her. She was small and unthreatening. In that manner she had gotten more out of her new charges than harsh-mouthed Newgate ever could.
It was true that students and teachers alike came to me when there was a problem. I was a black man in charge at a black school. No boy student was big enough to challenge me and the parents trusted me more than they did the white teachers. I was well read too. I’d perused every textbook in the school and often found myself instructing the kids on how to do their homework and even how to use the library.
I never neglected my own work, at least not until the past few weeks. It was coming up on the first-year anniversary of the death of my friend, Raymond Alexander. I felt responsible for Raymond’s death. He had been trying to steer clear of trouble but he helped me out one last time and got a bullet in the chest. His wife, EttaMae Harris, carried him out of the hospital just before they were about to declare him dead. I’d been looking for him, for his grave if that’s where he was, but Etta had disappeared and there were only whispered rumors that Ray hadn’t actually died but had gone back to Texas or up to the Bay Area or down in Mexico.
Lately I had been spending afternoons roaming around the city looking for clues about EttaMae or Raymond, who most people knew as Mouse.
I thought that the new principal had walked me around to gently let it drop that I shouldn’t miss any more days, but then I realized that she was going to stop me from working outside of the job description for the supervising senior head custodian.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said.
I girded myself thinking that this was the soft caress before the slaughtering knife.
“…for taking such good care of the school.”
“Say what?” I said.
“You have been the spine of Sojourner Truth,” Mrs. Masters said.
“I have?”
“You know you have. There are paintings of you in the art class, letters from thankful parents on file in the main office. The only negative notices are the job evaluation reports from Principal Newgate. He thought that you were insolent and insubordinate. I suppose that if he had been a better principal some future artist might have drawn him.”
“Oh they did,” I assured her. “There were quite a few portraits of Principal Newgate that I’ve had to wash off of the children’s rest room walls. If he had found them I would have probably got a transfer letter in there too.”
Mrs. Masters’s laugh was hushed but hardy. She covered her mouth and leaned forward in her chair. A tear rolled down her cheek.
“Easy?” It was a man’s voice.
At the door stood Jackson Blue, himself a living doorway into another dimension of my life.
Mrs. Masters straightened up and wiped the tear from her face.
“You have work to do, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “Come up to the office tomorrow morning and we’ll talk about what you think I need to pay attention to here at Truth, as you call it.”
She got to her feet and walked to the door. Jackson stepped out of the way and they both made graceful little bows with their heads. When she walked out Jackson closed the door behind her.
“What the hell are you doing here, Jackson? This is my job.”
“You walked in on me just a few weeks ago, brother,” Jackson replied. “At least I didn’t knock at the door and yell out that I was the cops.”
He was right. I had pulled that tasteless joke on him.
“So what do you want, man? You know that woman you just chased outta here is my new boss.”
Jackson snaked into the chair that Masters had vacated. He clasped his hands together and started rocking to and fro. He was a short man with small bones. His face was slender, sharp, and very dark. He wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and gray rubber-soled shoes with no socks.
“Well?” I asked.
“It ain’t good, man.”
“Listen,” I said. “If I can’t cover it with a mop and a buck-et’a soapy water you don’t even need to tell me. My street days are over.”
“Jewelle MacDonald.”
Jackson stared at me with certainty. He knew he had me hooked.
“What about JJ?”
“You remember when you brought me over her house last year, when I was in trouble with them gangsters?”
“Yeah? What about it?”
Jackson’s shrug was as damning as a signed confession.
“You and her?” I asked.
Just before Mouse had been shot I brought Jackson to my real estate agent’s home in Laurel Canyon. His name was Mofass. Mofass lived with what we called an almost-in-law, Jewelle MacDonald. She was barely more than a third of his age but she loved him and ran his business since emphysema slowed him down.
Jackson had been in trouble because he was competing with the mob for the numbers game in Watts. He had information I needed so we traded favors: a foolproof hideout for some names and addresses.
“After it was all over,” Jackson said, “I went back up there. She told me that Equity Realty had a relationship with another company that manages that apartment I got on Ozone.”
“And then she brought you some groceries?” I asked.
“She was just lettin’ stuff off, you know. Then we started talkin’. She told me that she was brought up a Catholic in Texas. You know, fish on Fridays an’ like that. I told her that the whole philosophical structure of the Catholic Church was based on Aristotle hundreds of years before Christ was even born. You know I said it just to fuck with her head. She just told me that I was crazy but the next time I saw her she must have been to the library or something, because she knew about Plato and Socrates and them, and she wanted me to explain what I had said.”
I sighed. Jackson was winding up into a story. Most other times I would have cut him off but I let him go on because I didn’t really want him to get to the point. I was in no hurry to go into the world where men got shot down in the street for doing their friends a favor.
“So,” Jackson continued, “I read her the riot act on Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. You know, you’n me talked about all that stuff ten years ago, more.”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “So what?”
“I figured out up at her house that she liked talkin’ about books and shit. But I didn’t know that it got her hot. I never met a black woman who got hot over a man’s book knowledge.”
I wanted to tell him that he didn’t know my girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, but I thought better of it.
“So what, Jackson? Mofass can’t hardly leave the house. I guess if JJ wants a boyfriend, it’s okay.”
“It’s not that, man,” Jackson said. “I mean Jewelle made it plain from the start that she ain’t never gonna leave Mofass. She wants to be with me. She lets me stay in that apartment and helps me out if I need it. But I cain’t call her up at the house or stay with her the whole night because she got to get back up there to the canyon and take care’a him.”
“So you’re kinda like a married man’s girlfriend on the side,” I said, cracking a smile in spite of my trepidations.
“Laugh if you want to, man. But once I figure out the binary language of machines I’ll be inside them computers and you’ll be out in the cold.”
“What’s the problem, Jackson?”
“Clovis.”
Another name, another universe of danger.
“What about her?”