Another woman entered the room. She wore a man’s white dress shirt and nothing else. All the buttons except the bottom one were undone. Her lush figure peeked out with each step. She was maybe eighteen and certain that any man who saw her would pay for her time.
When she sneered at me, I understood her pride.
“Inez,” Moms said. “You know where Etheline got to?”
A man came stumbling out from the doorway behind Inez. He was fat, in overalls and a white T-shirt. “Bye, Inez,” he said as he went around the sofas, toward the door.
“Bye,” she said. But she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on me.
“Well?” Moms asked.
“What?” Inez’s sneer turned into a frown at Moms’s insistence.
“Do you know where Etheline has got to?”
“Uh-uh. She just left. You know that. Didn’t say nuthin’ to nobody.” Inez kept her gaze on me.
“Well,” Moms said. “That’s all, Easy. If Inez don’t know where she is, then nobody do.”
“You wanna come on back to my room?” Inez asked, sneering again.
She undid the one button and lifted the tails of the shirt so I could see what she was offering. For a moment I forgot about Etheline and Mouse and why I was there. Inez was the color of pure chocolate. But if chocolate looked like her I’d have weighed a ton. She was young, as I said, and untouched by gravity or other earthly concerns.
“How much?” I asked.
“Thirty dollars up front,” Moms said, no longer pitying or even friendly.
I handed the money over and followed the woman-child down a short hallway.
“You got thirty minutes, Easy,” Moms called at my back.
At the end of the hallway we came to a right turn that became another, longer passage. Inez stopped at the fourth door down.
Her room was done up in reds and oranges. It smelled of cigarette smoke, sex, lubricant, and vanilla incense. Inez let her shirt drop to the floor and sneered at me.
I closed the door.
“You shy?” she asked.
I scanned the room. There were no closets. The bed was just a big mattress on box springs. There was no frame that someone could hide under.
“How do you want me?” Inez asked.
“On a desert island for the rest of my life,” I said.
There was a bench at the foot of her bed. It was covered with an orange and cream Indian cloth that had elephants parading around the edges. I took a seat and gestured for Inez to sit on the bed. She mistook my meaning and got down on her knees before me.
“No-no, baby. On the bed, sit on the bed.” I lifted her by the elbows and gently guided her to sit.
“How you gonna fuck me like that?”
“I need to find Etheline.”
“I already told you. She left. She didn’t say where she was goin’.”
“What did she say before she left?”
“What do you mean?” Inez was getting a little nervous. She covered her breasts under crossed arms.
“Did she have any friends? Was there some neighborhood she lived in before she came here?”
“You family to her?”
“She might know something about a friend’a mine. I want to ask her about him.”
“You paid thirty dollars to hear about where she lived before here?”
“I’ll give you twenty more if I like what I hear.”
I hadn’t noticed how large her eyes were until then. When she put her arms down I saw that her nipples had become erect. They were long and pointed upwards. This also reminded me of my long-ago visit to Pariah.
“I don’t know,” Inez said. “She had a regular customer name of Cedric. And, and she went to…yeah, she went to The Winter Baptist Church. Yeah.” Inez smiled, sure that she had earned her twenty dollars.
“What was Cedric’s last name?”
The girl put one hand to her chin and the other to her ear. She pumped the heel of her left foot on the floor.
“Don’t tell me now,” she said. “I know it. We’d be sittin’ on the purple couch after dinnertime, waitin’ for the men. Shawna would be playin’ solitaire and then, and when Cedric came Etheline always smiled like she really meant it. She always saw him first and said, ‘Hi, Cedric,’ and Moms would say, ‘Good evenin’, Mr. Boughman.’ Moms always calls a man in a suit mister. That’s just the way she is.” Inez grinned at her own good memory. She had a space between her front teeth. I might have fallen in love right then if another woman didn’t hold my heart.
“What kinda suit?” I asked.
“All different kinds.”
“Black man?”
“We don’t cater to white here at Piney’s,” Inez said.
I stood up and took out my wallet, giving Inez four five-dollar bills. “You supposed to walk me out?” I asked.
“You don’t want me?”
“Don’t get me wrong, honey,” I said. “I don’t even remember the last time I’ve seen a girl lovely as you. You might be the prettiest girl ever. But I got a woman. She’s away right now but I feel like she’s right here with me. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Inez whispered. “I know.”
* * *
IT WAS STILL EARLY when I left Piney’s, about noon. I drove up toward Watts thinking that I should have been at work instead of in the company of naked women. Whorehouses and prostitutes belonged in my past. I had a job and a family to worry about. And as much as I missed him, Mouse, Raymond Alexander, was dead.
But just his name mentioned on the phone ten days earlier had thrown me out of my domestic orbit. He was on my mind every morning. He was in my dreams. Jackson Blue had told me that Etheline talked about a man who might have resembled Mouse. I kept from seeking her out for seven days, but that morning I couldn’t hold back.
Maybe if Bonnie wasn’t off being a stewardess in Africa and Europe, things would have been different. If she were home, I’d be too, home with my Mexican son and my mixed-race daughter. Home with my Caribbean common-law wife. Either at home or at work, making sure the custodians at Sojourner Truth Junior High School were picking up the vast lower yard and clearing away the mess that children make.
But there was no one to stop me. Bonnie was gone, little Feather was at Carthay Circle Elementary, and Jesus had left early in the morning to study the designs of sailboats at Santa Monica pier.
I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.
WINTER BAPTIST CHURCH was just a holy-roller storefront when I came to Los Angeles in 1946. Medgar Winters was minister, deacon, treasurer, and pianist all rolled into one. He preached a fiery gospel that filled his small house of worship with black women from the Deep South. These women were drawn to the good reverend because he spoke in terms of country wisdom, not like a city slicker.
By 1956 Medgar had bought up the whole block around 98th and Hooper. He’d moved his congregation to the old market on the corner and turned the storefront into a Baptist elementary school.
In 1962 he bought the old Parmeter’s department store across the street and made that his church. Parmeter’s space seated over a thousand people, but every Sunday it was standing-room-only because Medgar was still a fireball, and black women were still migrating from the South.
That February, 1964, Medgar was sixty-one and still going strong. He might have been the richest black man in Los Angeles, but he still wore homemade suits and shined his own shoes every morning. The old market had become the school, and the storefront was now the church business office.
I got to the business office a few minutes shy of one o’clock.
The woman sitting behind the long desk at the back of the room was over sixty. She wore glasses with white frames and a green blouse with a pink sweater draped over her shoulders. Six of eight fingers had gold rings on them and, when she opened her mouth, you could see that three of her teeth were edged in gold. She was buxom but otherwise slender. She seemed unhappy to see me, but maybe that was her reaction to anyone coming in the door.