Little Green (10 page)

“Who are you, Straight?” an auburn-haired skinny guy asked.

I didn’t understand the word, so I took out a pack of Luckies and shook some butts out for him to choose from—he took all four.

“My name’s Easy,” I said. “I’m from down around Fairfax and Pico and I’m looking for the son of one of my friends.”

“Who’s that?” the pretty girl asked as she took one of the cigarettes from the young man.

I took out Evander’s picture and showed her. She gave the photo a milky frown and shook her head.

Two of her other friends also shook their heads. But this one raven-haired young man, who was a head taller than the rest, said, “I don’t squeal to the pig.”

“You think I’m a cop, man?” I asked, Gator’s Blood rousing in my system like its namesake on an unsuspecting doe. “How many times you been busted, beat up, or betrayed by a black man? When’s the last time you saw a brother on TV tellin’ you that hippies are communists?”

I suppose I was a little more aggressive than I intended, because the tall young man blanched behind his black beard and mustache. He backed away and I had to concentrate not to advance on him.

The power of Jo’s medicine had made itself evident. It released some kind of demon force in my heart and soul. I actually wanted to beat that boy just because that’s what he expected.

“Excuse me,” a small voice said.

The quartet I’d been talking to was moving away, and I was consciously hanging back. I turned and saw this smallish brunette girl, maybe twenty, maybe not. She was wearing a white dress and blue
socks in red Keds tennis shoes. She had on pink lipstick and violet eye shadow.

There were as many kinds of hippies on Sunset as there were definitions of snow in native Alaska.

“Yes?” I said.

“I heard what they said to you,” she told me. “Some people just don’t get it that it’s a class, race, and culture war all rolled up into one. They don’t know that they’re guilty of the same thing the Man is if they judge you by how you look.”

She certainly got my attention. Her patter was intelligent but peculiar to that street, those people, and an era that had seemingly popped up out of the ground, or maybe out of the radio.

“Have you seen this guy?” I asked, showing her Evander’s photo.

Immediately a light of recognition showed on the young half hippie’s face. This illumination was immediately followed by another, less identifiable reaction. She looked up at me and said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I mean, um, I think he’s this guy we been callin’ Evy. He gets high in this little alley up above Sunset.”

“Is he there right now?”

“He’s been there all week.”

“I’d really like to see him,” I said. “I have a message from his mother. Will you show me where he is?”

“Okay.”

The white girl in white led me down three blocks of Sunset. There we moved shoulder to shoulder with unwashed humanity from every state and city in the country. It was a profound experience for a black man like me to walk along with so many white people and them not having any kind of revulsion, fear, or disgust. That night, on Sunset Boulevard, the playing field was even, but that hardly mattered, because there was no competition.

If I didn’t have a life somewhere else I might have stayed right there for a good long time—until I got the rancid taste of my own particular history off my tongue and out from my nose.

“This way,” the girl in white said.

She led me up a side street and then turned at the block. Walking a few houses over, we came to a lane that led down to an alley behind a block of Sunset businesses.

“Over there,” she said, pointing at the back door of some building.

At that very moment something hard hit me on the back of the head. The blow hurt but did not debilitate me. I understood then that Mama Jo’s medicine had somehow strengthened my awareness and speeded up my reaction time.

While allowing my body to lurch forward I realized that the girl had set me up to be mugged. Why not? There had to be criminal hippies along with those involved in flower power. I let my left knee go all the way to the ground and then genuflected beyond that. Above my head a man grunted and the slight breeze of a heavy object passed overhead. My right hand reached under my jacket, behind my back, and grasped the .22 I’d brought from the secret chamber in my closet. I fell on my left side and looked up to see two scruffy men with longish, but not hippie-long, hair. They wore black leather jackets, angry beards, and had, respectively, red and blue bandannas tied around their throats.

Time was moving at a normal rate, but I felt like three different men watching various sections of the action as it unfolded.

“Stomp ’im, Jess!” one of the beards ejaculated.

I saw the girl in white behind me while the two men were rushing up from my feet. One of the guys raised his metal-rimmed boot, intending, no doubt, to bring the heel down on my forehead. But I shot right through the leather toward the toe and he screamed so high that I actually wondered if he was descended from swine.

“He shot me! He’s got a gun!” the wounded mugger yelled.

His friend caught him around the waist and they hurried away at a surprising speed. The girl tried to join them, but I caught her by the ankle and she went down.

“Jess! Tony! Help!” she cried, but her friends knew that they couldn’t do anything against a man that could and would shoot.

The girl shouted, “Let me go!” and I slapped her.

I didn’t feel bad about hitting a woman in those circumstances. After all, she had just set me up to get mugged and beaten. Also, I didn’t hit her very hard, just enough sting to get her attention and to keep the police from coming.

“Shut up. I’m not gonna hurt you, girl.”

Her wild eyes were a sight in themselves. I could see in them a great deal of suffering and pain that lived inside her like a parasite that had been in her gut since childhood.

“Then let me go,” she said at a half shout.

“I’ll do you one better,” I said. “I’ll let you go and give you twenty dollars if you tell me where I can find this Evy. That really is his nickname and you couldn’t know that unless you met him.”

Money means freedom; that was what people in the white America thought then. Citizens like me knew that whatever you had could be taken away in an instant. We knew that value was first and foremost defined by the hand that offered it. Those on the receiving end were one-legged tightrope walkers.

But for the white girl in the white dress and blue socks, money would open a door that she could pass through; at least, that was what she believed.

“He was talking to a girl named Ruby down by the Blues Hut near Fairfax,” she said.

“Where can I find Ruby?”

“She’s always down there this time of night. She sells flowers that she steals from people’s gardens in Beverly Hills.”

I still had the pistol in my hand. I had a carry permit granted me by one of the assistant chiefs of police who hated my guts but also needed my help from time to time.

I put the gun back under my jacket and took a twenty from my front pocket.

Before handing the money to the girl I said, “You know there’s a whole lotta men would kill you for what you tried to do to me.”

She stared into my eyes, looking for that death blow.

I handed her the bill and let go of her arm. She ran so fast that it was comical.

I laughed and started walking.

I had made it all the way to the mouth of the little lane before my next trial.

A flashlight winked and then shone in my face. I winced but remained otherwise still.

“Stop right there,” a man’s voice said. “Let’s see some ID.”

I didn’t move.

The policemen phased into sight from the darkness and the partial blindness imparted by the flashlight. Both men had pistols in their hands.

“I said,” the man said, “show me some ID.”

“I will certainly do that, Officer,” I replied in a jaunty voice. “But I just wanted to tell you that my wallet is in my back pocket.”

“Move slowly,” the other man said.

I was thinking that I had a good chance of killing those two men. It was merely supposition, but a frightening thought still and all. I took out my driver’s license and private investigator’s ticket and handed them to the second man.

“Look at this, Leon,” the cop said after shining his light on my proofs.

“Private dick?” Leon said incredulously.

I thought about nodding but didn’t.

Leon moved closer to get a better look at me.

“This is you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I never met a colored private dick before.”

“We’re a rare breed.”

“What are you doing up here?”

“May I take something out of my inside breast pocket?”

“What?”

“The picture of the young man I’m looking for.”

“Okay,” he said, leveling the pistol at my chest.

I showed him and his partner Evander’s picture and told them pretty much the truth about my intentions.

“So what are you doin’ up here?” the cop who was not Leon asked.

“I met a girl down on Sunset who said that Evander would sleep behind a Dumpster in the alley back there. I came up to look but instead I see these biker guys fighting.”

“Did one of them fire a gun?” Leon wanted to know.

“No gun that I saw, but they made one helluva racket pushing and fighting around those big Dumpster cans. I called out, thinking that maybe one of them was Evander, but when they ran I saw it wasn’t him.”

The officer-not-Leon handed me my identification and said, “You have to be careful up around here, Mr. Rawlins. A lot of these kids hate the establishment and they sometimes rob men and women dressed like you.”

“I’m beginning to see that. You know, I believe that if those guys weren’t fighting each other they might have attacked me.”

The police left soon after that, looking for bikers that had been fighting in the dark.

I made my way back to Sunset. Somewhere along the way I’d dropped the carton of Lucky Strikes, but I still had Evander’s photograph.

Walking down streets so dense with humanity you don’t really move in a straight line or very fast. All you have is a general forward motion shoved around by couples, corpulence, and unexpected pirouettes of ecstasy. Hiking eastward toward Fairfax felt like a fragrant dance in itself, all the bodies and faces, odors and sounds.

“Hey, man, that’s a groove,” a patchouli-scented white face said.

“Three dollars a lid, I swear,” a marijuana-eyed black hippie announced.

After a while I felt like I was part of a flood, not a singular man at all. It reminded me of outlying Negro towns in Louisiana and Mississippi on Saturday nights, when the workers all hung around the juke joints drinking homemade liquor and dancing. Back then we laughed and cried because we were down under the thumb of racism so strong that there was no escape.

These hippies felt under the gun too. They were ostracized because of their clothes and habits, outraged by the war in Vietnam—but unlike my people in the old days, these young men and women believed that they could change the world that tried to hold them down. They believed that they were part of a revolution.

You could feel the hope coming off of them in waves.

After six or seven blocks I believed it too.

On the southeast corner of Fairfax and Sunset sat a slender white girl on an upside-down red plastic bucket. She wore a tie-dyed yellow-and-violet dress that hugged her figure and went all the way down to her ankles. Her face was long and would become homely as she aged, but that year she had a particular beauty brought out by the mostly peaceful mutiny of people in the street.

As I approached she looked up and smiled. Her eyes were amber. Her hair was long and brown. At her bare feet sat a white plastic
bucket with roses, dahlias, small sunflowers, poppies, and maybe half a dozen other flowers arranged at random.

“How much?” I asked.

“Whatever you can give,” she said.

“What if I don’t have anything?”

“Then that’s what you can give.”

“But aren’t you here to make money?”

“I’ll get enough for some bread and honey whether you pay me or not.” Her eyes went a little out of focus. “One time a guy gave me some French bread and strawberry jam and only took one little snapdragon.”

“Are you Ruby?”

“Yes.”

I held out a hand and she rose to shake it.

“What’s your name?”

“Easy.”

“Wow.”

She was standing very close to me. I could smell rose attar and human sweat. People were moving around us, but there was an aura of stillness in the little patch of sidewalk that we occupied.

“Do I know you, Easy?”

I took out the graduation picture and showed it to her.

“Evander,” she said.

“He hasn’t been home in four or five days and his mother wants to make sure he’s okay.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to go home,” she suggested.

“I just need to see him breathing, that’s all.”

Ruby considered me for a moment, came to a decision, and said, “Come on.”

“What about your flowers?”

“Somebody’ll take them.”

She took me by the hand and we waded into the throng. For a brief moment there I felt alive and that something great awaited me.

Holding hands with a stranger, walking down the boulevard, I was unmoored and somewhat grateful for the warm night and its surprises.

Ruby’s gaze was restless. Moving her head from left to right and back again she was looking for something that had yet to be defined. Her smile was alive and anticipatory.

She let go of my palm to grasp my index and middle fingers.

“I met him when I was selling flowers, the way I met you,” she nearly shouted. “He said that he wanted to go to a disco.”

Her head bobbed so close to mine that I could feel the breath of her words on my cheek. This sensation was all the more intimate because we were in the middle of a moving mob.

“Evander?” I asked.

“We dropped some orange-speckled barrel and went out to get something to eat.”