Charcoal Joe (4 page)

My first instinct was to keep walking, pretending that I had not heard my name called in Bonnie's sweet, powerful voice; failing that, I stopped but didn't turn.

“Easy.”

She touched my shoulder and I pushed down the desire to slap her.

“What?” I said, still with my back turned.

“Let's go somewhere and talk.”

“What about your cripple up there?” I said, finally turning.

There was shock and pain in her face but that's not what caught my eye. She was wearing the snug-fitting yellow dress that always got me excited. The hem only made it to the middle of her dark brown thighs. Her figure was right out there in the bright afternoon, but that wasn't what affected me either.

There was a whole story behind that dress. Bonnie always wore it as a prelude to our lovemaking…and she was coming to meet me. She was coming to make love to me one last time before creating a life with the has-been prince. Her loyalties and her heart were split.

“My cousin Gerard is coming over,” she said.

“Where do you wanna go?”

“There's a new teahouse up on Melrose.”

Henrietta's Tea House was a quasi-hippie joint that was decked out like a large living room. Bonnie and I sat side by side on a stunted green sofa. She ordered white tea and I coffee—black.

We'd spoken to the russet-haired waitress but not to each other—not yet. Our drinks came with scones and clotted cream, blueberry jam, and sweet butter.

“You married him,” I said at last.

“To get him out of the country—yes.”

“That's all?”

“At first.” The second word stuck a little in her throat.

“And now?” The coffee was very hot, it burned my tongue.

“His swagger is all gone,” she said. “All that's left is a revolutionary and a king who is willing to fight for his people. He's become the man he was supposed to be.”

“And what about me?” I asked, regretting the words even before I spoke them.

“You were a grown man at eight years old,” she said, “fully grown and living on your own.”

“Do you like the scones?” the coarse-haired waitress asked. She was no more than seventeen; beautiful with a goofy grin.

“I always have them,” Bonnie said kindly.

“Tamara makes them,” she said. “She's my sister. I'm Barbara.”

Barbara wanted to engage us in conversation but we had no room. I turned to Bonnie, and Barbara walked away.

“I know things haven't been right since the first time you got together with Joguye,” I said.

“You don't need me, Easy.”

“I was going to ask you to marry me today.”

“Cham's manhood is gone,” she said as if in rebuttal. “He needs someone beside him. He gives meaning to my life.”

“What about my life? What about Feather?”

She put a hand on my knee but I pushed it off.

“I can't blame you,” she said.

I twisted my lips in the way I used to when I was a little boy missing my mother after she died.

“You won't,” Bonnie said then, “you won't hurt yourself, will you?”

This question ignited rage in my chest and shoulders. How dare she pretend to care about my well-being when I had the ring in my pocket and the words in my throat?

“Why the yellow dress?” I said.

Bonnie winced and looked away toward the picture-window front of the teahouse. Rays of sunlight coming in through the glass struck her left hand and right elbow. She sighed and tried to turn to meet my gaze—but failed.

I waited, wanting to touch her but knowing I shouldn't.

“We're going to have to run away,” she said, giving me no more than a sidelong glance. Then she turned full-face. “And I wanted to have, to take your baby with us.”

That lesson was deeper than the understanding of metaphor. Bonnie taught me something about humanity right then. Here I'd been living movie plots and novel scenarios while there were men and women like Joguye and Bonnie in the world, digging their hands into the mud and making life: everyday pedestrian Christs—both frail and omnipotent.

I opened my mouth but there were too many words to say; they jammed together, wanting to be heard and to make sense at the same time.

“You don't have to say anything,” Bonnie uttered. She took a sip of tea and nodded at the cup.

Everything seemed so meaningful, so painful and yet still so right.

It was at that moment that the transition came for me. I was like a little child accepting that morning had come and sleep was over.

“Mama Jo got people all over the world,” I said.

The crinkling around Bonnie's nose and eyes asked me,
What are you talking about?

“When Jesus wanted to go fishing up in Alaska she knew an Inuit shaman that took him, Benita, and their baby in. She knows witches and alchemists, lay philosophers and healers from everywhere in the world. I have no idea how she connects with them. But the people she knows ain't in no phone book or public register. They don't pay taxes, answer the census, or even have driver's licenses in their own names. They won't be found unless they want to be.”

“I don't understand what you're saying,” Bonnie told me.

“If I ask her to help you and your, your husband, she'll send you to a place that neither the FBI nor all the tribes of Africa could find.”

It was Bonnie's turn to be amazed. She expected brutal words or even blows; she was ready for violent sex in retribution for what her man took from me—but she wasn't prepared for me to offer help. I hadn't expected it myself.

“I'm gonna be on a job starting tomorrow,” I said, when my ex-girlfriend was speechless. “But I'll get word to her and she can get word to you.”

“And what about the other thing?” she asked.

“You should have Joguye's child.”

“That can't happen,” she said with all the finality of a death notice.

There were words to say, a motel room somewhere to hire; there was all the love I felt for that woman and the genetic directive to procreate, but I said, “I can't do that, baby.”

“Why?”

“Because I got to let you go…completely. And if I knew I might have a child out there somewhere worryin', a child hounded by assassins…well, I just wouldn't be able to sleep right.”

Bonnie bent forward to kiss me but I leaned away.

She nodded her acceptance.

I stood up, leaving ten dollars for Barbara.

“Hello,” said Jackson Blue's wife, Jewelle MacDonald, answering her own phone.

“Hey, girl.” I was standing at a phone booth on Fairfax just north of Olympic.

“Easy.” Jewelle had a soft spot for me. She said that it was because she liked intelligent black men, but I think she knew that I'd cross hell and high water for any friend.

“Bonnie married the prince and now there's all kinds'a people after them,” I said, deciding to explain myself in broad declaratives. “I need either you or Jackson to hide them until I get a more permanent answer.”

“Um…sure.”

“Can you send a car to pick them up at Bonnie's place?”

“Okay, but how are you?”

“I don't wanna talk about it, Jewelle. What's done is done. What I need now is for you to do what you can.”

“Jackson's out on Jean's yacht but I can get the company limo.”

“Thanks.”

“We should get together, Easy.”

“Also, can you take Feather for the night?”

“I'll pick her up myself.”

“How's the baby?” I asked, just to show that I wasn't completely devastated.

“Olivia is fine,” Jewelle said. There was some hesitation in her voice. She probably didn't know that I knew she'd had a revenge affair after Jackson had a fling with another woman. The problem was that the baby might not have been Jackson's. I knew the whole story but kept it secret so as to spare her unnecessary pain.

Feather was my next call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, honey.”

Silence and then, “Did she tell you?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Are you okay, Daddy?”

“I am.”

“You not gonna drink?”

“I am not. But I do need to be alone for a bit. Jewelle's gonna take you for the night. She'll get you to school tomorrow.”

Adolescent girls don't like being shuttled around haphazardly. They want to be heard and in control of their environment. That's how I knew the degree to which Feather was worried about me; because instead of arguing she said, “Yes, Daddy.”

Those two words told me how much pain I was going to feel.

“I'll call you later on,” I said.

“Daddy?”

“What?”

“Should I take Frenchie with me?”

“Yeah, yeah. Jackson likes the dog and I might have my hands full.”

It's a long way from West L.A. to Watts.

It's the same city but a darkness descends as you progress eastward. You pass from white dreams into black and brown realities. There were many miles to cover but distance was the least of it. It was another world, where I was going.

In West Los Angeles, when people looked at their TVs they saw themselves and what they wanted to be: James Arness and Lorne Green, Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. They had their own jokes and music and interpretations of right and wrong in the world. People in Watts saw the same shows but not their faces, their dreams, the hard facts of their lives. In Watts, people spoke the same language in different dialects and at separate schools. For darker-skinned citizens
employment
was synonymous with
toil
. The police were often the enemy, as the motorcycle cop had been for me out in Studio City.

I parked close to the curb at 114th Street and Central Avenue. There a black door was wedged between Bob's Hardware and Center Five & Dime (both looted, scorched, and then boarded up after the riots three years before). There was no sign or promise on that tar-colored door. If you didn't know what lay on the other side, you just walked on by.

It was nineteen paces up the first tier of stairs while twenty-three steps made up the second. There, at the top of the three-story structure, was another door jacketed in green metal.

I knocked and a slat in the wall slid open next to my head. Yellowy eyes anchored in dark flesh glared at me, and then the green door opened wide.

Seated on a tall brown stool was Elias Shaw—three hundred and then some pounds of muscle, hard fat, and bad intentions. His skin was only a shade lighter than mine and the crowbar in his hand was in lieu of the .45 in his back pocket. He wore overalls and a long-sleeved yellow shirt (to match, I imagined, the “whites” of his eyes).

“Easy Rawlins,” he said aloud, as a vassal to royalty might announce an arrival at the king's ball.

The room was large and bright because the sun was still out and the roof was mostly skylight. There were maybe twenty-five patrons in the illegal saloon. Chuck Berry was wailing from the jukebox and John was standing behind the bar. His darkness, strength, and proportions were mythic. He was both ugly and attractive, tight-lipped with eyes that told you everything you needed to know.

I walked up to where he was drying a glass mug and took a seat there before him, again reminding me of some kind of audience with royalty.

“What's wrong with you?” he asked after just a glance.

“I'm here, ain't I?”

There was both evil and forgiveness in John's grin. He took a bottle with no label from under the mahogany bar and poured a long drink into a slender glass that he then set before me. I looked at the glass a moment and then swiveled around to take in the environs of the only kind of black business that throve in Watts in those days.

The patrons of the Black Door Bar were mostly around my age, and all black. Chesa Tambor, a Louisiana Creole, was sitting at a small blue table with Fisk Ryan. Fisk had only recently come out of prison for murdering Chesa's lover (and Fisk's best friend) Bob Stods. Fisk did six years and I was told by various acquaintances that Chesa and he had reached a rapprochement while he served his time. After all, she'd had the clandestine affair with Bob; so in a way she was the source if not the cause of his death
and
Fisk's imprisonment.

Soul Benton had the three youngest women in the room sitting around his table. I didn't know the girls' names but I could know any or all of them for twenty dollars a head—so to speak.

Mike Twine and Hugh Short were at the pool table. They were both sharks, and John had laid down the law that they could play but could not bet on the premises.

“Hey, Easy,” Louise Lash said.

She was maybe forty with a face that would be beautiful twenty years after her death. Her skin was black and flawless. Even when she wasn't talking her mouth seemed to be saying something elusive.

“Lou.”

“I hear you all rich nowadays.”

“I'm workin'.”

“That's rich.”

“How's Jackman?”

“Moved back to Texas,” she said with something like a sneer on those sculpted lips. “Not before he got me pregnant—twice.”

Our eyes met. Louise had always liked me. Ten years before, we'd spent three days in a cinder-block house five miles north of Ensenada.

“You know Jewelle MacDonald?” I asked my onetime paramour.

“Yeah.”

“She could give you a job cleaning out apartments rented by the week to traveling businessmen.”

“I need to feed my kids tonight.”

Truth between men and women, after all the make-believe was over, was something that had to be recognized.

I handed her a twenty-dollar bill and John came up from his side of the bar.

“All right, Lou,” he said. “You got what you need so either spend it or move on.”

“You want me to make you some dinner, Easy?” she asked, ignoring the master of the house.

“Not tonight, baby. Like I said…I'm workin'.”

The handsome and beautiful woman pushed one shoulder in my direction and then shoved off toward the door.

“You a soft touch, Easy,” John chided.

“Not much joy in a rock, John.”

“You right about that. You gonna drink that liquor?”

“Don't know yet.”

“When you gonna find out?”

There was a small man, the color of tarnished gold or buffed bronze, sitting at a table about fifteen feet from the bar. He was older, maybe in his sixties, and nursing a beer the way my old friend Odell used to—before he died.

“My girlfriend ran off and married an African king,” I said.

“Damn.”

“That ain't all, man. The king crossed the white men that really own his country and they got the other kings out there trying to hunt him down.”

“That sounds like a problem solve itself,” John observed.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but like you said…I'm a soft touch.”

“So why ain't that glass empty then?”

The rheumy eyes of the old man watching us seemed to be asking the same question.

“I can say it,” I said to John, “but I don't feel it.”

“You mean you not mad?”

“No. But worse than that, I don't feel anything at all. I mean when I saw him and she told me I was angry but you know even then it felt more like reflex than I was gonna be like Fisk there an' kill somebody. I even told her that I'd help them get away.”

John's smile was better than his grin. In its glow you felt understood.

“You and me a lot alike, Easy.”

“How you see that?” I asked, realizing that I was slipping into the dialect of my upbringing like a tired man putting on his favorite pair of worn house shoes.

“Somebody does somethin' wrong or gets wrong done to 'em then you go out and find out who did what and what happened where. You fix the problem after the damage been done. Me, I'm what you call a crime prevention specialist. Men and women come to me when they just about to blow. They think they comin' in for one drink, just enough fortitude to go out and kill the no-good mothahfuckah wronged 'em. But then I give 'em another drink and we start talkin' about old times and better days ahead. Between the liquor and the talkin' you get some medicine and more times than not the crime don't happen.”

“That's the glass you put in front'a me?” I asked.

John nodded.

“But what if I don't drink it?”

“That's okay. It's right here and you are too. The liquor will guide you. You got to make a choice. Now maybe in your case you already did but now you got to accept it. So either you drink or you don't…the answer's the same.”

A man I didn't recognize walked up to the bar three stools away. John moved over to greet him and I took out my one cigarette of the day. I'd been carrying around a pack of Lucky Strikes for ten days so it was half gone. I lit the tobacco stick and took in a deep breath.

The wonderful thing about one cigarette a day is that whenever you lit up it was always the first and therefore the best smoke of the day. I loved Bonnie but I'd been smoking since I was ten years old; that tar and nicotine brought back a whole lifetime of laughter and tears.

“Excuse me, mister,” someone said.

It was the old gold- or bronze-colored man that had been watching from the distance. I was sure that he was going to ask me for a cigarette.

“You gonna drink that liquor?” he asked.

“No, brother. Help yourself.”

He hopped up on the stool next to me and put away the special bootlegged brew that John kept for his favorite customers.

“You Easy Rawlins, right?” my new friend asked.

“What's your name?”

“Hollis. Hollis Pressman from southern Illinois. I used to be a porter but now I play the horses on Tuesdays and Thursdays and take the bus out to the beach Mondays and Wednesdays.”

“What about Fridays?”

“If I win at the horses I go ask Soul Benton for a girl and I give John two bits. If I lose John give me the beer I paid for when I was flush.”

I laughed out loud, realizing that John was right; that whiskey was my medicine even if somebody else drank it.