“And Clovis give this doll to you?”
“No. She sent it in the mail. I got it two days ago.”
“Any letter?”
“No. Just the doll in a cardboard box.”
“You got the box?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s go see it.”
MOFASS AND JEWELLE had a big house. The entrance was like a dais that stood high over a gigantic living room. The back wall of this room was all glass looking out onto the vista of L.A. There was a table and four high-back chairs next to this window. JJ left me in one of these while she went to look for the doll.
I sat back and crossed my legs, appreciating the view in late afternoon. JJ was a real estate whiz kid. She bought and sold buildings around the county and turned a larger profit every year. She was able to lease that house, in a neighborhood most black people didn’t even know existed, because she was a valuable asset to the white men she dealt with.
“Mr. Rawlins,” a faint but deep voice called.
I turned my head slowly, not wanting to witness the demolition of one of my oldest L.A. friends. Mofass stood there leaning on two thick walking canes, one for each hand. He wore a heavy maroon-colored robe and had leather slippers on his ashen-black feet. He was breathing hard and looked like an old oil tanker that had been shipwrecked and washed up on land. He leaned to the side, sighed, and groaned. His breath was like the wind whistling through the rusted-out hull of the wrecked ship he resembled. His yellowy eyes were fog lamps in the deep night of his face.
“Hey, William,” I hailed. “You up and around, huh?”
“Not too much longer. Uh-uh, no.”
“You been sayin’ that fo’ years, man. But I still see you every Christmas.”
“It’s the tent,” he said.
“Oxygen tent?”
“Yeah. JJ got it hooked up over my bed. I gotta gas mask and’a oxygen tank too but I don’t use that too much. An hour under the tent and I can be almost normal for fifteen minutes. Then I got to get back there ‘fore I run outta air an’ cain’t walk no more.”
The hulking wreck lowered himself in the chair opposite me.
“Where JJ?” he asked suspiciously.
“She went to get something to show me,” I said.
Mofass leaned forward in his chair and made a motion that he wanted me to do the same.
“I think she gotta boyfriend, Mr. Rawlins,” he whispered.
“Why you say that?”
“She got this pretty young thing named Rosa come up and take care’a me sometimes when she go out. She says she goin’ to do business. But I smell her perfume and see them high heels. You know JJ was runnin’ around in tennis shoes before Rosa.”
“She was a child before, William. She growin’ up and wants to dress more like a woman, that’s all.”
“Sometimes she out late at night, Mr. Rawlins.” There were tears in the old man’s eyes. “Late. She don’t think I know. She thinks I’m asleep, but I ain’t. I get up and wander around lookin’ for her an’ sometimes I cain’t find her.”
“You ask her where she been?”
“She says that she just run out to pick somethin’ up in Hollywood or that she just took a drive, but I know better. You know I got a long-barrel twenty-two pistol right under my pillow. When I get a good breath I’ma go out an’ find the motherfucker. Kill him too.”
“Uncle Willy,” JJ called from across the football field of a living room. “What you doin’ up?”
Mofass just stared at his girlfriend. He didn’t have enough breath to make himself heard that far away.
She came up to us carrying a small walnut tray with two sodas on it. There was a cardboard box under her arm.
“I brought you a drink,” she said to Mofass. “But you weren’t in your room.”
“Cain’t I come out and see my friend?” he complained.
“Sure you can,” she replied.
She put down the drinks on the table and began fussing with Mofass’s robe. You could see the love those two had for each other. They behaved like people who had been together for decades. Jewelle was barely in her twenties but she had an old soul.
After she had him squared away she handed me the box. “Here it is, Mr. Rawlins.”
“What’s that?” Mofass asked.
“Piece’a mail come for me at Equity,” I said. “Somebody didn’t know my address and then JJ opened it by mistake.”
“That’s why you should be listed,” my old property manager chided. His voice was still deep and raspy but it was also feeble, like the distant rumble of a thunderstorm that has almost passed from earshot.
I took out the bear and the paper it was wrapped in. It was just a tattered old doll made of cotton, sewn with hemp, and given green eyes made from glass. It smelled a little like buttermilk. The newspaper the doll was wrapped in was the Dallas Gazette, dated two weeks before. The postmark on the box was L.A. three days earlier.
“What is that stuff?” Mofass asked.
“Just a joke, Mo,” I said. “Old friend’a mine tellin’ me that she’s in town.”
“Don’t…seem…too…funny….” Mofass gasped between each breath. He reached out with his right hand and JJ was there to catch it. She helped him to his feet. I tried to lend a hand but she pushed me off.
“I’ll take care of him,” she told me.
She put herself under his arm like a human crutch. They made their way across the immense living room and then passed through a door.
While they were gone I considered the box and its contents. I knew a cop who might have been interested but it was slim evidence and there would be no action before the next day when Clovis wanted to close the deal.
I had a pretty clear notion of what to do next but I couldn’t begin until JJ returned. So I sat in the window, drinking my cola.
No complex ideas or deep emotions came to me; just the image of an orphaned child, at the age of eight, on his own and moving fast. He traveled from Louisiana to Houston, and from there to North Africa, Italy, Paris, and finally the Battle of the Bulge. I’d encountered death and destruction from the very start. I came to L.A. to get away from it but death clung to me—–he was my oldest friend, my only constant star. I thought about my years trading in favors on the streets of L.A. I’ll do for you if you do for me, was my motto and creed.
Sitting there in that window, looking out over a city that had no idea I was there, made me feel powerful in a funny way. At the Board of Education they told you the kind of broom you needed and the amount of time it would take you to sweep up a classroom or hallway. They took out taxes and retirement funds from your paycheck and told you what days you could take off and how often you could be sick. Everything was preplanned and managed. The paperback rule book was three-hundred-and-forty-seven pages long.
I yearned to be sitting where I was sitting, to be my own man. Loving freedom and loving danger are one and the same thing for most black men. Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we’re feeling liberation we know that there’s somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.
That’s why I always loved Mouse. He was crazy and a killer and trouble in any circumstances. But he never accepted our slave heritage. He never bowed his head in front of an enemy. “Kill me if you can,” he said more than once. “But if you cain’t you better know how to run.”
“Easy,” JJ said.
I hadn’t noticed her return in my reverie.
“How is he?”
“Sleepin’. You know he can’t be out of that tent more than ten minutes at a time.”
“She’s in L.A.,” I said handing her the doll.
“You think that ’cause’a the postmark?”
“Uh-huh. Yes I do.”
“What should I do, Easy?”
“What time you supposed to get together with them tomorrow?”
“Noon.”
“Call ’em up. Tell ’em you can’t do it before five. Tell ’em Mofass has to get a shot or somethin’.”