Little Scarlet (21 page)

“I need to talk to Harold. Could you get me to him?” I asked. I wanted Harold on my own. I wanted to mess him up before giving him to the cops. I wanted to kick him when he was down.

“I could tell him that I had some wine and that he should meet me in the alley over on that side of the mission,” the little man suggested.

He pointed and I took out a five-dollar bill. I folded the note and then tore it in half along the crease.

“Here’s half’a what it’s worth to me,” I said. “Bring Harold over there and I’ll give you the rest.”

The creepy little man took the scrap of money and scuttled away, his heels slapping against yellow rubber. As he slipped into the front door of the mission I moved toward the entrance of the alley on the left side of the building.

I lit up a cigarette and stared at the city from that particular point of view.

Los Angeles ghettos were different from any other poor black neighborhood I had ever seen. The avenues and boulevards were wide and well paved. Even the poorest streets had houses with lawns and running water to keep the grass green. There were palm trees on almost every block and the residential sidewalks were lined with private cars. Every house had electricity to see by and natural gas to cook with. There were televisions, radios, washing machines, and dryers in houses up and down the street.

Poverty took on a new class in L.A. Anyone looking in from the outside might think that this was a vibrant economic community. But the people there were still penned in, excluded, underrepresented in everything from Congress to the movie screens, from country clubs to colleges.

But there was something else different. The riots were beginning to wear off. Life was becoming what was to become normal after all of the stores had been burned down. People were going to work. The police and National Guard were less present.

The black revolutionary scattershot aimed at overthrowing the oppression of white America was over, or at least it seemed to be. People were talking and laughing on street corners. White businessmen, at least a few, were returning to their stores.

“Hey you!” someone called.

I turned and saw the scrawny man who had promised to bring Harold. He was far down in the alley next to a big green Dumpster.

I walked toward him, unafraid. I was sure that he’d have cooked up some lie about how he tried to find Harold but could not. He knew that the good Mr. Brown would be back later, though, and if I’d just give him the other half of that five-spot he’d be happy to arrange a meeting.

I had been in the street longer than I’d lived in any house. I knew how it worked. There was a natural order to the way things happened. I didn’t mind playing along.

But as I approached my informant he was casting glances to his left into a recess between buildings. My pace slowed slightly. The crafty little man might have seen me as a mark, someone who could be mugged. The smart thing to do would have been to turn around. But I was too angry for that. Bums didn’t roll citizens, I told myself. They begged maybe or cajoled but they didn’t mug everyday people.

When I was three steps from the little man someone walked out from the crevice. It was a big man. Not as big as Bill but large enough to put me into a lighter-weight class.

“You lookin’ for me, mothahfuckah?” the big black man asked.

What could I say?

He stepped forward reaching for me.

I stepped backward. Not quite fast enough.

His fingertips felt like steel rods scraping against my chest. I gave up running and leaned forward putting all of my weight into a blow to his jaw.

I’m a big man and strong too. The man I hit felt it. He even backed up half a step. He shook his head. I was hoping that was the beginning of a downward slump but then he grabbed me again. I went aloft, something I hadn’t experienced in many a year. The next thing I knew I was flying back down into the crevice that the angry man had come from. I might have flown all the way to the foothills if it weren’t for the brick wall in my path.

Most of the pain was in my lungs but there was plenty left over for my neck, head, and spine. I hit the ground and slumped to the side, which was a good thing because it caused the big man’s foot to miss my head by at least an inch.

I got to my feet. How I did it I will never know. I stood up straight just in time to get a backhand that lifted me higher still. I hit the wall again and instinctively ducked. The instinct was right. He missed my head but got in a body blow. I fell to my knees and put my hands out in front of me. When he tried to kick me, like I knew he would, I grabbed his ankle and stood straight up, pressing my hands high and pushing out so that King Kong would take a spill.

The little man who had brought me there was jumping up and down, yapping about something. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The pain was so strong in my body that no other sensation could get a toehold.

The big man was on his back, then risen up on one elbow, then staggering to his feet. All this time I was panting in short hacking breaths against the wall, wanting to run but unable to call forth the strength.

“Kill him, Harold,” the little man shouted.

I was happy that I could make out his words. But that wasn’t my Harold. It was just a big ugly Harold who was made out of pig iron and cast in a bathtub.

Harold swung his fist and hit me in the shoulder. I sprang forth as if leaping from a diving board. My hands were at my sides and the top of my head aimed for the big man’s nose.

I felt the collision in my sinuses, fell to the side, and hit the ground. When I looked up I saw Harold looming above me. There was blood gushing from his nose and a mean look on his face. I scrambled to my knees and crawled. I knew I couldn’t escape him but I had to try. I had to find the right Harold and do to him what this Harold had done to me.

I made it about five feet and then turned to see the progress he’d made.

The big man looked at me and wavered. Finally he fell flat on his back, knocking up a plume of dust. The little man was still shouting. I couldn’t understand him again.

I got to my feet and staggered away. I made it to my car and slumped down on the hood. The metal was hot from the unrelenting sunlight. No one came to save me from frying out there. After a while I began to sweat profusely. Somehow that gave me the strength to get to my feet, unlock the door, and turn over the engine.

I drove away from there wondering if I was driving on the right side of the road and if the wrong Harold had done enough damage to take my life.

I don’t know how my driving was doing but there were a few blaring horns along the way. I had probably gone a mile or so when I realized I had no idea where I was headed. The wrong Harold had put the hurt to me, as the young people used to say around that time. I was reeling in my seat, driving my car like it was a boat.

I had to laugh, even through all that pain. So many young men go out on the street looking to get into a fight. They talk about how they beat some fool who cursed or insulted them. But all they needed was one fight with a man like the wrong Harold and all of their heroic notions of street fighting would go out the window. I didn’t beat that big ugly man. All I did was keep him from stomping me to death. I saved my life but I’d have pains and bruises to remind me of my folly for more than a month. No. There was nothing glorious about getting tossed around like a rag doll and hit so hard that you could taste it.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t use a phone or go ask questions. There was a big knot over my right eye, and my lower lip was swollen too. I drove to Compton, to Tucker Street. That was a dead end with a stand of avocado trees where the road should have continued. I pulled off the road and parked between two dark-leaf trees. I opened the door and she was standing there. Tall and black-skinned, handsome with glints of beauty left over from a glorious youth, Mama Jo was like an African myth come to life in the New World, where no one could believe in her unless they felt her magic.

“I wondered when you was gonna get here,” she said in a deep voice that was not wholly masculine or feminine.

“It’s a wonder I made it at all,” I said.

I opened the door and reached out to her. She pulled me by the arms until I was standing. Then she supported me, helping me to navigate through the trees until we got to her cabin.

Mama Jo always lived in hidden places. She raised armadillos and ate delicacies like alligator and shark meat. She made medicines and potions for poor superstitious black people and if you wanted she would read your fortune.

I never wanted her to tell me my future but she said she wouldn’t even if I asked her.

“You not the kind’a man should know what lies ahead,” she’d tell me. “It won’t make a difference and you got too much to do to be slowed up thinkin’ about it.”

She half carried me into her one-room home and laid me out on a mattress on the floor. By that time Jo was over sixty. But she still had the spark that made me make love to her when I wasn’t yet out of my teens. Sometimes I still wonder about what might have been if I had stayed out there with her as she asked me to do.

I watched her sitting at her long oak table mixing powders in a wooden bowl.

“Jo,” I said.

“Rest, baby,” she said, shushing me.

It was a hot day but Jo’s place was cool, covered as it was by the shade of a dozen trees. And it was also partially submerged in the soil. The floor was at least six feet below ground level.

It was dark in there too. Candles and lanterns lit the cavernlike space. A shelf over her table contained various animal skulls. One of these was a human, her first lover and the father of her son, both named Domaque.

Jo was a woman of great power and knowledge: a witch by anyone’s definition at any time in the history of mankind.

She took a dirty green bottle and poured a greenish liquid from it into the wooden bowl. She lifted my head for me to drink and I did. Whatever it was she was giving me I knew that it would be good. I knew it because she had saved my life once and on another occasion she literally brought Mouse back from the dead.

Things got a little hazy after I drank the brew, which managed to be both slimy and chalky. I remember her putting poultices on my head and mouth. I thought I saw a great black feathered bird spreading his wings on a branch behind her.

“Easy Rawlins!” I heard her deformed son announce as was his wont whenever he saw me.

I was looking at the roof and slowly it disappeared. Above me were ten thousand stars on a backdrop of black. The air in my nostrils was crisp and cold and I was the only person in the wide world, safe at last from the pain of hatred and the pain of love.

The events of the past two weeks — the riots, the death of Nola Payne, the pursuit of Harold the woman killer, and the memories that Juanda kindled in me all came together and spun me out like a bird clipped by a stone. I was spinning through the sky, seeing pieces of everything — out of control.

Then I crashed. For a moment the aching from my fight was excruciating, then I felt nothing, and then I knew nothing.

“YOU CAN GET
up now, baby,” Jo said.

“Hi, Easy,” her hunchbacked son cried.

“Hey, Dom. How you doin’?”

“Hey, Ease,” Mouse said. I couldn’t see him from where I lay but it was him.

A large black bird cried and flared its wings.

“You got a crow as a pet?” I asked Jo as I sat up on the floor mat.

“Raven,” she said. “This here’s a raven. Talks an’ everything. He keeps me company.”

“Who did this to you, Easy?” Mouse asked.

He was standing to the side. Just looking at him made me smile.

Mouse was wearing a greenish gray two-piece suit with a black shirt and a tie made up of every shade of yellow that you could imagine. His shoes were fashioned from alligator skin.

“Poor Howard make you those shoes?”

“Oh yeah. You know Howard got his cousins bringin’ up gator hide from bayou country. He sellin’ ’em for four hunnert dollars a pair.”

Howard was a dark-skinned Cajun acquaintance of ours from Louisiana. He lived in the wilds around L.A. because he was a fugitive from Louisiana justice. He had killed a white man, so running was the only choice he had.

“You gonna answer my question?” Mouse asked.

“It was just a misunderstandin’, Ray. Nuthin’ to get upset about.”

“How you feelin’, darlin’?” Jo asked me.

She’d always had a soft spot for me. I could still hear it in her tone.

“Good,” I said. “Great. I don’t hardly hurt at all.” I was a country boy again, even in the way I spoke.

She handed me a mirror and I saw that all of the swelling on my face had gone. Her teas and poultices rivaled the medicines most doctors prescribed.

“You got to take it easy, baby,” she said. “You know a man’s body don’t bounce back too fast after he pass forty.”

“You wanna go fishin’, Easy?” Domaque shouted.

I turned to Jo’s powerful and lopsided son. He was big and misshapen in almost every part of his body. Something was wrong with his nasal passages, so his mouth hung open showing crooked teeth and red gums. His arms and legs were all different lengths and his mind, though extremely intelligent, held on to all of the innocence of childhood. The first time you saw Dom he’d scare you silly but if you knew him you would feel that you’d met one of the finest human beings on this earth.

“No, Dom. I got to do some huntin’ first. But you know, my boy Jesus has built him a sailboat.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. It floats and goes where he tells it to. I bet he’d take us out for some fishin’.”

The glee on that child-man’s face gave me one of my first feelings of true happiness since the riots began.

“I got to go,” I said.

I rose to my feet. I was fully dressed except that Jo had taken off my socks and shoes.

While I tied my laces she said, “Here, drink this, Easy.” She proffered a cloudy quartz bottle.

“What is it?”

“It’s what you need, baby. You gonna take that body back into the street, you better have a little get-up-n-go.”