A Red Death (21 page)

“What com’unists?”

“Uh, that feels good,” I said. “The Jew I been workin’ for, communist.”

“What they gotta do wit’ Towne?”

She sat up a little.

I said, “Put your hand back, Etta, put it back.”

She grinned at me and settled back against my chest.

“That’s why the government got me outta jail. They want the Jew,” I said, clearheaded again.

“So? Let them do it. You ain’t gotta go out an’ do they job.”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I sat back and smiled because so much pleasure could come after pain.

“Mofass is gone,” I said after a while.

“Gone where?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Outta his house?”

“Uh-huh. He left some kinda half-assed note at the office. Said his mother was sick down in New Orleans and he was going to care for her. He let his room go too. That’s some strange shit.”

“Ain’t nuthin’ wrong wit’ that.”

“I guess. But I cain’t see Mofass runnin’ out without a word.”

“People change when it comes t’ family.”

“But that’s just it, Mofass never even liked his momma.”

“You just cain’t tell, Easy, blood is strong.”

I knew she was right about that. I loved my father more than life even though he abandoned me when I was eight years old.

“But you know it is funny,” Etta said.

“What?”

“You know that boy tried to beat up on you after church?”

“Willie Sacks?”

“Uh-huh. His momma, Paulette, come by here today.”

“Why’s that?”

“I asked her ’cause I wanted her to know how Willie had come after you. I told her but she already knew it. She said Willie had gone bad after he met Poinsettia.”

“Bad how?”

“She had’im runnin’ after her an’ spendin’ all his money. Willie used t’take his money home. He ain’t got no father an’ Paulette relied on him t’pay the rent.”

“Boys grow up, Etta. LaMarque do the same thing when some girl get him to feelin’ like this.” I touched her hand.

“But you know Willie never made enough an’ Mofass was payin’ fo’ that girl too.”

“What?”

“Mofass been payin’ her rent the last year. Poinsettia told Willie ’bout it. She said how sometimes she had to go out with him but that they never did any more than kiss.”

“No lie?” I never thought Mofass chased the ladies.

“But she also said how Mofass had her go out with other men sometimes.”

“You mean like he was her pimp?”

“I don’t know, Easy. I just know what Paulette said. Now you know she heard it from her son an’ he got it from Poinsettia. Willie broke up with her when he found out. At least that’s what Paulette thought. But after her accident she started callin’ again. Maybe Mofass did somethin’ to that girl.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can’t see it. What could she have on him to make him wanna do that?”

“You’ll find out.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I just know it, that’s all. You’re a smart man, and you care too.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

She tossed back the blankets so that I could see her handiwork. She watched it too.

“I want some more, baby.” She said it loudly and bold as if she were announcing to an audience.

I knew she didn’t but I asked, “You do?”

“Yeah.” It was almost a growl in my ear.

“Where?”

And she guided me. And I turned into a rutting pig again, trying to rut myself to safety.

I
WOKE UP WITH A START. There was a sound somewhere in the apartment. I worried that Mouse was in the other room with his revolver but at the same moment I looked at EttaMae. I looked at her feeling how spent I was and I realized that I wanted her more than just for sex. That was new to me. Usually sex was the first and last thing with me, but I wanted her with the same ardor when I was all used up.

I snaked out of bed and slithered into my pants. There was no light from outside or from the other room. I eased the door open and saw him sitting in the living room. He was swinging his head back and forth and kicking the heels of his feet against the couch.

“LaMarque!”

“Hi, Unca Easy,” he said, looking around me to the room I came from.

“What you doin’ up?”

“You sleep wit’ my momma?”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I could only hope that he would never repeat it to Mouse. I would have liked to ask him to keep it quiet, but it was a sin, I thought, to make a child lie.

“Oh.”

“Why you up?” I asked again.

“Dreams.”

“What kinda dreams?”

“ ’Bout a big ole monster wit’ a hunert eyes.”

“Yeah? He chase you?”

“Uh-uh. He ax me if I wanna ride an’ then he take me flyin’ so high an’ then he start fallin’ like we gonna crash.”

LaMarque’s eyes opened wide with fear as he spoke.

“Then,” he went on, “he stop jus’ fo’ we crash an’ he laugh. An’ I ax ’im t’ let me go but he jus’ keep on flyin’ high an’ scarin’ me.”

I sat next to him and let him crawl into my lap. He was panting at first.

I waited until he’d calmed down and then I asked, “Do you like it when your daddy takes you to Zelda’s?”

“Uh-uh, it’s smelly there.”

“Smell like what?”

“Dookey an’ vomick.” He stuck out his tongue.

“You tell your momma ’bout what it smells like there?”

“Uh-uh, I never telled. I’s ascared ta.”

“How come?”

“I’ont know.”

“You think that they might fight if you told?”

“Uh-huh, yeah.”

He’d grabbed a fistful of the fabric of my pants and wrung it.

“You know if you told your daddy that you didn’t wanna go there no more he wouldn’t take you.”

“Yeah he would. He like to be gamblin’ an’ gettin’ pussy.”

When LaMarque said the last word he ducked down as if I might hit him.

“No, honey,” I said and I patted his head. “Your daddy wanna see you more than them folks. He wants to play ball wit’ you, an’ watch TV too.”

He didn’t say anything to that, so we just sat for a while. He was wringing my pants hard enough to pinch me.

“Your daddy gonna come visit you an’ Etta in a coupla days,” I said after a long while.

“When?”

“Prob’ly day after tomorrow, I bet.”

“He gonna bring me a present?”

“I bet he does.”

“Are you gonna be in my momma’s bed?”

I laughed and hugged him to my chest.

“No,” I said. “I got work to do.”

We sat there and watched the sun come up. Then we both fell asleep. I dreamed about Poinsettia again. The flesh was coming off her. She was deteriorating in my dreams from one night to the next; soon she’d just be bones.

I awoke maybe half an hour after we’d gone to sleep. LaMarque was snoring. I carried him to his room and then I looked in on Etta. She was in the same position, one powerful hand thrown up next to her beautiful, satin-brown face. I still wanted her the way I had for so many years, but for the first time in my life I considered marriage.

I left a note in the kitchen telling Etta that Mouse would be by to visit his son in a couple of days. I told her that everything was fine. I signed it, “I love you.”

— 27 —

F
ROM ETTAMAE’S I WENT OVER to Mercedes Bark’s house on Bell Street. Bell was a short block of large houses with brick fences and elaborate flower gardens. During Christmas everyone on Bell put out thousands of colored lights around their trees and bushes and along the frames of their houses. People lined up in their cars to see that street for three weeks either side of Christmas Day. It was just that kind of a neighborhood. Everybody worked together to make it nice.

It was all good and well but there was a down side to the Bell Street crowd; they were snobs. They thought that their people and their block were too good for most of the rest of the Watts community. They frowned on a certain class of people buying houses on their street and they had a tendency to exclude other people from their barbecues and whatnot. They even encouraged their children to shun other kids they might have met at school or at the playground, because it was the Bell Street opinion that most of the black kids around there were too coarse and unsophisticated.

Mercedes had a three-story house in the middle of the block. The walls were painted white and the trim was a deep forest green. There were chairs and sofas set out along the porch and a bright green lawn surrounded by white and purple dahlias, white sweetheart roses, and dwarf lemon trees.

Mercedes’s husband, Chapman, had been a dentist and could afford the upkeep on so large a domicile. But when he died the widow was quick to realize that his life insurance wasn’t enough to maintain the family in the way they had lived before. So she took the money and turned the upper floors into a boardinghouse. She could accommodate as many as twelve tenants at one time.

The neighborhood association took Mercedes to court. They complained that their beautiful street would be ruined by the kind of riffraff that had to live in a single room for weekly rent. But the county court didn’t agree and Mrs. Bark started her rooming house.

Mofass was her first and most long-lasting tenant. He didn’t need a kitchen because he took his meals at the Fetters Real Estate Office. And he certainly didn’t want to be bothered with leaky roofs and shaggy lawns after doing that kind of work all day.

I got to the Bell Street Boardinghouse at about nine-thirty that morning. I knew that Mrs. Bark was sitting in a stuffed chair just inside the front door but I couldn’t see her. She was hidden in the shadow of a stairwell and by the screen door, but she still had a good view of whoever came to visit.

I waited patiently, ringing the bell even though I knew damn well that she could see me. I carried a tan rucksack in which I had two quart bottles of Rainier Ale.

“Who is that?” Mrs. Bark asked after the fourth ring.

“Easy Rawlins, ma’am. On some business for Mofass.”

“You too late, Easy Rawlins. Mofass done moved out already.”

“I know that, ma’am, that’s why I’m here. Mofass called me from down south and said that I should get some papers that he left in his room by mistake.”

I wasn’t taking much of a chance. If Mofass had moved out all of a sudden he might have left something that would give me an idea about his relationship with Poinsettia. If he’d moved out clean I would have just been caught in a white lie by one of the snobs of Bell Street.

“What?” she cried. The audacity of Mofass forced Mercedes Bark to her feet, which was no easy task. She waddled her great body to the door and then rested by leaning her upper arm against the jamb. Mercedes wasn’t tall, and if you only looked at her bespectacled face you would never have guessed how large she was. Even her shoulders were small, you might have called them slender. But from there on down Mercedes Bark was a titan. Her breasts and buttocks were tremendous. She took up the entire lower half of the doorway.

“He got some nerve,” she said. “Sendin’ you here when he left me a room fulla mess and now I cain’t even rent the place until I hire somebody to clean it out.”

“But that’s just it, ma’am. Mofass told me that he was sorry but that his mother got sick so fast that he didn’t have time to think things out. He don’t wanna move outta this place. He told me to pay you the sixty dollars for his next month’s rent.”

I had the money in my hand. Mrs. Bark turned from a snapping wolf to a loon, crooning her sorrows for Mofass’s poor mother and complimenting a son’s deep love.

She got the key, after taking my money, and even came out of her apartment to point me on the way. Mofass’s room was far from being a mess. It was neat as a pin and as orderly as a pharaoh’s tomb. In the center drawer of his desk were his pencils, pens, pads of paper, and ink pads. In the right-hand drawers were all of the receipts of his bills for his entire life. He still kept ticket stubs for movies he’d seen in New Orleans twenty years before. In the lower left drawer he kept folders detailing his daily business. One folder was for expenses, another for expenditures, and like that.

He also had a drawer full of cigars. I knew something was wrong when I saw them. For Mofass to leave fifty good cigars he must have been really shaken.

I searched the rest of the place without finding very much. Nothing under the bed or between the mattresses or even in his clothes. No loose boards or envelopes taped under the drawers.

Finally I sat down at his desk again and put my hand flat on top of it. Really it wasn’t flat because there was a blotter there. I lifted it but there was nothing underneath so I let it fall back. And it made a little sound: flap flap. Not a single flap but two, as if there were two blotter sheets.

Mofass had slit his blotter in two and then taped it back together so he could keep things in there secret without calling any attention to them. But the tape had worn thin and the pages had separated.