I wanted to drag her out of the shower by her hair, naked and wet, into the living room. I wanted to make her tell me everything that I had imagined her and her royal boyfriend doing on a deserted beach eight thousand miles away.
The bouquet had been sent to her care of the Air France office. Her boyfriend expected them to hold it there. But some fool sent it on, special delivery.
I decided to go into the bathroom and ask her if she expected me to lie down like a dog and take her abuse. My hands were fists. My heart was a pounding hammer. I stood up recklessly and knocked the glass ashtray from the arm of the chair. It shattered. It probably made a loud crashing sound but I didn’t notice. My anger was louder than anything short of a forty-five.
“Easy,” she called from the shower. “What was that?”
I took a step toward the bathroom and the phone rang.
“Can you get that, honey?” she called.
Honey.
“Hello?”
“Easy, is that you?”
I recognized the voice but could not place it for my rage.
“Who is this?”
“It’s EttaMae,” she said.
I sat down again. Actually, I fell into the chair so hard that it tilted over on its side. The end table toppled taking the lamp with it. More broken glass.
“What?”
“I called Sojourner Truth,” she was saying, “and they said you had called in sick.”
“Etta, it’s really you?”
Bonnie came rushing out of the bathroom.
“What happened?” she cried.
Seeing her naked body, thinking of another man caressing it, holding onto the phone and hearing a woman that I had been searching for for months—–I was almost speechless.
“I need a minute, baby,” I said to both women at once.
“Hold on a minute,” I said to Etta while waving Bonnie back to her shower. “Hold on.”
Bonnie stared for a moment. She seemed about to say something and then retreated to the bathroom.
I sat there on the floor with the phone in my lap. If I had a gun in my hand I would have gone outside and killed the yellow dog.
The receiver was making noise so I brought it to my head.
“…Easy, what’s goin’ on over there?”
“Etta?”
“Yes?”
“Where have you been?”
“There’s no time for that now, Easy. I got to talk to you.”
“Where are you?”
She gave me an address on the Pacific Coast Highway, at Malibu Beach.
I hung up and went to the bedroom. Three minutes later I was dressed and ready to go.
“Who was that?” Bonnie called from the bathroom.
I went out of the front door without answering because all I had in my lungs was a scream.
I DON’T REMEMBER THE DRIVE from West L.A., where I lived, to the beach. I don’t remember thinking about Bonnie’s betrayal or my crime against my best friend. My mind kind of shorted out and all I could do for a while there was drive and smoke.
There wasn’t another building within fifty yards of the house, but it looked as if it belonged nestled between cozy neighboring homes. The wire fence had been decorated with clam and mussel shells. The wooden railing around the porch had dozens of different colored wine bottles across the top. The house had been built on ground below street level so that it would have been possible to hop on the roof from the curb. It was a small dwelling, designed for one or maybe one and a half.
I opened the gate and descended the concrete stairs. She met me at the door. Sepia-skinned and big-boned, she had always been my standard for beauty. EttaMae Harris had been my friend and my lover in turns. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year because I was the man who had gotten her husband shot.
“You look wild, Easy,” was the first thing she said.
“What?”
“Your hair’s all lumpy and you ain’t shaved. What’s wrong?”
“Where’s LaMarque?”
“He’s with my people up in Ventura.”
“What people?” I asked. My heart skipped and for an instant Bonnie Shay was completely out of my mind.
“Just a cousin’a mines. She got a little place out in the country around there.”
“Where’s Mouse?”
Etta peered at me as if from some great height. She was a witch woman, a Delphic seer, and Walter Cronkite on the seven o’clock news all rolled into one.
“Dead,” she said. “You know he is.”
“But the doctor,” I said, almost pleading. “The doctor hadn’t made the pronouncement.”
“Doctor don’t decide when a man dies.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“Where?”
“I buried him out in the country. Put him in the ground with my own two hands.”
It was certainly possible. EttaMae was the kind of black woman who made it so hard for the rest. She was powerful of arm and iron willed. She had thrown a full-grown man over her shoulder and carried him from the hospital after knocking out a big white orderly with a metal tray.
“Can I go to the grave?”
“Maybe one day, baby,” she said kindly. “Not soon, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because the hurt is too fresh. That’s why I ain’t called you in so long.”
“You mad at me?”
“Mad at everything. You, Raymond. I’m even mad at LaMarque.”
“He’s just a child, Etta. He ain’t responsible.”
“The child now will become the man,” she preached. “And when he do you can bet he will be just as bad if not worse than what went before.”
“Raymond’s dead?” I asked again.
“The only thing more I could wish would be if he would be gone from our minds.” Etta looked up over my head and into the sky as if her sermon of man-hating had become a prayer for deliverance from our stupidity.
And we were stupid, there was no arguing about that. How else could I explain being ambushed in an alley when I should have been at home lamenting the assassination of our president? How could I ever tell Mouse’s son that he got killed trying to help me out with a little problem I had with gangsters and thugs?
“Come on in, Easy,” she said.
THE LIVING ROOM was decorated like a sea captain’s cabin in a Walt Disney film. A hammock in the corner with fish nets full of glass-ball floats beside it. The floor was sealed with clear coating so that it looked rough and finished at the same time. The windows were round portals and the chandelier was made from a ship’s wheel.
“Sit down, Easy.”
I sat on a bench that could have easily been an oarsman’s seat. Etta lowered herself onto a blue couch that had gilded clamshells for feet.
“How have you been?” she asked me.
“No no, baby,” I said. “It’s you who called me outta my house after more than eleven months of me searchin’ high and low. Why am I here?”
“I just wondered if you were sick,” she said. “They said at work that—”
“Talk to me, Etta. Talk to me or let me go. ’Cause you know as much as I want to see you and try to make it up to you, I will walk my ass right outta here if you don’t tell me why you called after all this time.”
Her face got hard and, I imagined, there were some rough words on the tip of her tongue. But Etta held back and took a deep breath.
“This ain’t my house,” she said.
“I could see that.”
“It belongs to the Merchant family.”
“Pierre Merchant?” I asked. “The millionaire from up north?”
“Lymon,” Etta said, shaking her head, “his cousin run the strawberry business north’a L.A. I work for his wife. She has me take care’a the house and her kids.”
“Okay. And so she let you stay here when you come down to town. So what?”
“No. She don’t know I’m here. This is a place that Mr. Merchant has for some’a his clients and business partners when they come in town.”