“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 there?”
“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 runs 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.”
“Etta,” I said. “What you call me for?”
“Mrs. Merchant have four chirren,” she said. “The youngest one is thirteen and the oldest is twenty-two.”
I was about to say something else to urge her along. I didn’t want there to be too much silence or space in the room. Silence would allow me to think about what I had just learned — that my best friend since I was a teenager was dead, dead because of me. For the past year I had hoped that he was alive, that somehow EttaMae had nursed him where the hospital could not. But now my hopes were crushed. And if I couldn’t keep talking, I feared that I would fall into despair.
But I didn’t push Etta because I heard a catch at the back of her throat. And EttaMae Harris was not a woman to show that kind of weakness. Something was very wrong, and she needed me to make it right. I grabbed on to that possibility and took her hand.
A tear rolled down her face.
“It was hard for me to call on you, Easy. You know I blame you for what happened to Raymond.”
“I know.”
“But I got to get past that,” she said. “It’s not just your fault. Raymond always lived a hard life an’ he did a lotta wrong. He made up his own mind to go with you into that alley. So it’s not just that I need your help that I’m here. I been thinkin’ for some time that I should talk to you.”
I increased the pressure of my grip. EttaMae had a working woman’s hands, hard and strong. My clenching fingers might have hurt some office worker, man or woman, but it was merely an embrace for her.
“Mrs. Merchant’s second-to-oldest is a girl named Sinestra. She’s twenty and wild. She been a pain to her mama and daddy too. Kicked out of school an’ messin’ around with boys when she was a child. Runnin’ from one bad egg to another now that she’s a woman.”
“She too old for you to look after, Etta,” I said.
“I don’t care about that little bitch. She’s one’a them women that ambush men one after the other. Her daddy think that they doin’ to her, but he don’t see that Sinestra the rottenest apple in the barrel.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Sinestra done run away.”
“She’s twenty,” I said. “That means she can walk away without havin’ to run.”
“Not if her daddy’s one of the richest men in the state,” Etta assured me. “Not if she done run off with a black boy don’t have the sense to come in outta the rain.”
“Who’s that?”
“Willis Longtree. Hobo child from up around Seattle. He showed up one day with a crew to do some work for the Merchants. You know the foreman of their ranch would go down near the railroad yards in Oxnard whenever he needed to pick up some day labor. They got hobos ride the rails and Mexicans between harvests all around down there. Mr. Woodson—”
“Who?” I asked.
“Mr. Woodson, the foreman,” she said. “He brought about a dozen men down to the lower field around four months ago. They was buildin’ a foundation for a greenhouse Mr. Merchant wanted. He grows exotic plants and the like. He’s a real expert on plants.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So was my cousin Smith. He could grow anything given the right amount’a light and rainfall.”
“Mr. Merchant don’t have to rely on nature.”
“That’s why they build greenhouses instead’a churches,” I said.
“Are you gonna let me talk?”
“Sure, Etta. Go on.”
“All that Willis boy owned was a guitar and a mouth harp on a harness. Whenever they took a break, he entertained the men playin’ old-time tunes. Minstrel, blues, even some Dixieland. I went down there one day after young Lionel Merchant, the thirteen-year-old. The music was so fine that I stayed all through lunch.”
“I bet Sinestra loved his barrelhousin’,” I said.
“Yes, she did. Everybody did. It took the crew four days to dig the foundation. After that Mr. Merchant himself offered Willis a job. He made him the assistant groundskeeper and had him playin’ music for his guests when he gave parties.”
“Mighty ungrateful of that boy to think he deserved the boss’s daughter,” I said.
“It’s not funny, Easy. Mr. Merchant got a whole security force work for him. They use it to keep the Mexicans in line on the farms. He told the top man, Abel Snow, that he’d pay ten thousand dollars to solve the problem.”
“And he sees the problem as what?”
Etta held up her point finger. “One is Sinestra bein’ gone from home, and two,” Etta held up the next finger, “is Willis Longtree breathing the same air as him.”
“Oh.”
“Is that all you got to say? Oh?”
“No,” I replied. “I could also say, what’s it to you? Boys run away with girls every day. Daddies get mad when they do. Sometimes somebody ends up dead. Most of the time she comes home cryin’ and it’s all over. That’s the way it was in Fifth Ward when we were kids. I remember more than one time that Mouse got jealous’a you. Usually we got the poor fool outta sight before Ray’s .41 could thunder.”
“Grow up, Easy Rawlins. We ain’t in Houston no more, and this ain’t no joke I’m tellin’ you.” There was that catch in her throat again.
“What’s wrong, Etta?”
“Willis ain’t no more than nineteen. He thinks he’s a man but he barely older than LaMarque. And Abel Snow is death in a blue suit.”
“You like the boy, huh?”
“He’d come around the kitchen in the afternoon and play for me, tellin’ me all the great things he was gonna do. If you just closed your eyes and listened to him, you might believe it’d all come true.”
“Like what?”
“All kindsa things. One minute he was gonna be in a singin’ band and then he talked about bein’ in the movies. He said that he looked like Sidney Poitier and maybe he could play his son in some film. He wanted to be a star. And then Sinestra got her hooks in him. She couldn’t help it. It was just kinda like her nature. Girl like that see a man-child beautiful as Willis and she cain’t think straight. She just wanna make him crazy, make him run like a dog with her scent in his nose. I saw it happen, Easy. I tried to talk sense to him.”