Little Green (13 page)

I shook my head to clear out the errant thoughts and concentrated on the sleeping bag that was up against the ledge at the outer edge of the roof. Next to the occupied bedroll was a thick pile of heavy rope.

The color of the synthetic fabric that covered the sleeping bag was drab green. The only life visible was a thatch of brown hair that was so full and healthy that in other circumstances I might have thought it was an animal pelt—maybe even with a live creature under it.

I hesitated then. Coco, whoever that was, didn’t know me, and even though we were outside this was still a bedroom of sorts. The morning air was fresh with just a slight chill to it. I squatted to sit down, but the pain in my ankle betrayed me and I fell with a thump.

The vibration roused the head of hair. It turned and rose up on both elbows.

Coco was most definitely a young woman. A very beautiful young woman with eyes to match her hair and skin that had absorbed a lot of sun. She sat up. This alone wouldn’t have meant much, but she was naked, and it was hard for me, in that frame of mind, not to allow myself to get distracted by her well-formed charms.

“Who the hell are you?” Coco asked.

I put up my hands in surrender and said, “No disrespect, lady. Ruby and Terry downstairs told me that a woman named Coco was up here and that she might know where I could find Evander Noon.”

Words could be either glue or acid
, an old man named Tyner once told me. I was fourteen and staying on his three-acre farm ten miles outside of Houston. I helped him with the chickens and gardening and he let me sleep in the basement, where it remained cool on the hot summer nights.
Words are the finest invention that human beings have ever made. They build bridges and burn ’em down. Glue or acid, that’s what the words you say will be. But you got to be careful. Sometimes you might have both parts at the same time. You got to watch out,
because some words will at first pull somebody close and then turn him against you in time
.

“You’re looking at my tits,” the beauty said. It was hardly an indictment, more like an argument against my claim.

“Um …”

She brought a pink T-shirt out from the sleeping bag and pulled it on.

“I’m not turning in nobody to the cops,” she said. The words came naturally, but her elocution told me that this dialect was a learned language. I wondered where she was from.

“Well?” she asked when I didn’t respond.

“I’m not a cop.” I took the picture of Evander out and handed it to her. “Evander’s mother, Timbale, gave me this and told me that he had gone missing. She’s scared sick. I know that Evander loves his mother and would at least want her to know that he was okay.”

Coco winced at me. There was something in what I said that resonated with her. But she didn’t know me, and I wasn’t dressed, coiffed like, or the right age of the people she trusted. Then again, I was black and Evander was too.

The young woman—I figured her to be around twenty-two—seemed to come to some decision. She stood up from the sleeping bag, unconcerned with the fact that she was nude from the waist down.

In another frame of mind I would have looked away from what my Christian brothers and sisters would have called her shame. But she wasn’t ashamed and neither was I. I had driven my Pontiac off of a cliff and crash-landed in a new world where women like Coco lived according to a whole new set of laws and beliefs.

So I watched while she rooted around for a pair of black sweatpants shoved down into the sleeping bag. I lit a cigarette as she pulled them up and drew the waist string tight. It wasn’t like the shower with Antigone or when I had sex in my sleep with Ruby; I wasn’t aroused. I was just a witness to the new world, like a failed Magellan or Columbus that had been shipwrecked and beached among an
unfamiliar people. My job was to take on the local customs or get thrown back into the sea.

“Why do you sleep out here on the roof?” I asked as she went about the task of gathering her other possessions.

“I don’t like most men,” she said as if in answer.

“So it’s just that you want to be alone?”

“Not only.” She took a pair of red sandals, three books, a wallet, a plastic semiopaque golden box, and a see-through blue plastic pouch that had everything from bandages to Q-tips to loose change in it. These things, except for the sandals, she put in a purple velvet bag that was her purse. “I like being outside up here. Even when it rains sometimes I put up a tent.”

I smiled.

“What?” she said in challenge.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s funny to think of pitching a tent right outside the window.”

“You think it’s stupid.”

“Only if you get wet.”

Coco went about rolling up her sleeping bag and binding it.

After waiting a bit I asked, “Do you have disdain for all men?”

I think it was the use of the word
disdain
that raised her head. She pondered a moment and said, “No. I just don’t waste time with them unless they’re cool.”

She threw the bundle into the corner that cut deepest into the dome of the upper floors and then started pulling on her footwear. She did this standing up. I was impressed by her steadiness.

“Was Evander cool?”

“He was all freaked out,” she said. “Ruby had given him some acid and he had a bad trip that lasted for days. He came here a couple of days ago asking everybody where Ruby was. He was asking if we knew some guy but didn’t know his name. He said that he met him at Lula’s cathouse and that he wore all green. I didn’t know who he was talking about.

“Evander was going around asking everybody his question and
crying a little, and this asshole named Yancy got mad and picked a fight with him. Yancy slapped Evander like people do in the movies to stop them from being so scared, but everybody knows that you can’t pull somebody out of a flashback by hitting them. Evander pushed Yancy and Yancy pulled out a knife …”

I wondered if Yancy had that knife on him when we tussled. Terry might have saved my life.

“… so,” Coco continued, “I got between them and told Yancy to fuck off. A couple of other people crashing said he should take a time-out and he split. After Yancy left, me and this girl named Vixie tried to calm Evander down.”

“Did he tell you where he’d been or where he was going?”

“You hungry?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. Then I made the mistake of standing up.

The first pain was in my right ankle—I expected that—but then there was a stitch that felt like a tear running up my left side, and my neck refused to straighten out.

I must have grunted from the pain, because Coco asked, “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Just a cramp.”

“We could go get a good breakfast at a place I know for three bucks each,” she said.

“Sounds good to me. I only want coffee anyway.”

“You got the money?”

“If you got the time.”

Coco smiled at the phrase, went to the pile of rope, and heaved it off the roof. I went to see why she’d done that and saw that the rope had unfurled into a ladder like the ones they use on big sailing ships. It was hooked to two metal bolts that were sunk into the ledge.

“You want me to go first?” she asked.

“We can’t just use the window?”

“I like to stay outside as much as possible.”

“After you,” I said, bobbing my head lightly.

I waited until Coco had made it down to the lawn before clambering over the side.

It was a foolish thing for me to scramble down that shaky ladder. With each step the ladder’s swing became more pronounced, the bodily pains increased, and my sense of balance flailed from side to side. But this was all of a piece, because everything I was doing right then was foolish; just the fact that I was out in the world rather than at home in the bosom of my family seemed like a fatal gaffe.

Chuckling at my own reckless nature made the netting wobble more, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Watch it!” Coco called. She steadied the rope and I took the last half dozen rungs with hardly a misstep.

On the lawn I was exhilarated, like a child who had successfully taken his first ride on the slide under his own power.

“You almost fell,” Coco said.

“
Almost
being the operant word.”

Once again my use of language gave her pause.

Since she was just standing there, looking at me, I asked, “Where’s the breakfast place?”

“Down on Pico. You got a car?”

“Ten or eleven blocks from here.”

Sunset was almost empty at that time of day. As much as I’d enjoyed the throngs of the night before, I was grateful for the silence that
accompanied the early morning. Coco and I had made it to San Vicente before we started talking again.

“So what was Evander so freaked out about?” I asked.

“He kept saying that he forgot almost everything over the last few days, but then there was something about blood and money that he didn’t understand. He wanted to ask Ruby what had happened, but neither me nor Vixie knew where she was. Vix said that Ruby was bound to come back, but that Evander should get his head together first. So she told him that maybe they should go up to Caller’s Creek, up above Malibu, to let the trip wear off. You know, Ruby and your friend’s son did this acid that people call STP. It lasts a lot longer.”

“What’s this Vixie like?” I asked.

“I don’t really know her. She crashes at Terry’s sometimes. I mean, Terry’s cool, but he likes to have sex, and the girls know it and so sometimes they come up and ball him and he lets them hang around for a few days or whatever.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you friends with Terry like that?”

“No. Of course not. I like that roof ’cause I can sleep out there alone. I’m almost like part of the family at Terry’s.”

“Ruby too?”

“She could be, but Ruby’s all over the place. She sells her flowers and goes off any way the wind blows. I like her.”

“Here,” I said. “Let me make a stop at this phone booth.”

It was a free-standing booth on the corner. I closeted myself inside and dropped the dime.

“Hello?” Feather answered after quite some time.

“Hey, girl. You sleep okay?”

“Uh-huh. Where are you, Daddy?”

“Up in Hollywood, near there. I think I might be going down to the beach looking for that guy Uncle Ray wanted me to find.”

“He said that he was going to be staying at our Genesee house the next few days.”

“Ray did?”

“Uh-huh. When are you coming home?”

“Pretty soon. Um, tell me something, Feather.”

“What?”

“Did you know an older girl who used to go to Burnside named Beatrix Noon?”

“Yes. She was one of the nice girls. I taught her a nursery rhyme in French. What about her?”

“Did you ever meet her mother or her brother?”

“She has a little sister named LaTonya. She’s still at Burnside. And … and her brother—I don’t remember his name—he would meet her after school sometimes and walk her home. He worked at this supermarket that made their own buttermilk doughnuts. Beatrix gave me half of one one time. Why?”

“It’s Beatrix’s brother, Evander, that I’m looking for.”

“How come?”

“He went off and his mother’s worried.”

“I hope you find him then. He was really nice to me. He said that he wanted to go to the University of California at Berkeley.”

“He didn’t seem strange or anything?”

“Nuh-uh. He was just serious like.”

“Is Jesus there?”

“He’s asleep. You wanna talk to him?”

“No. But tell him that I’d like it if he and Benita stay with you until I’m back.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, baby, I gotta go. Have fun at summer school.”

“Okay.”

Coco and I walked on. My gait, I noticed, was oddly light. It was as if I was sneaking down the street, avoiding being noticed by some greater power that preyed on flesh like mine. I wasn’t exactly weak, but the gas tank, once again, was near empty.

When we reached the Barracuda I went right to the trunk, took out one of Mama Jo’s bottles, and drained it in one gulp. The heat was there almost immediately, but it would be a while before the fire ignited.

“What’s that?” Coco asked.

“For all I know it’s voodoo,” I said. “I don’t even believe in it, but it still has faith in me.”

Coco’s beautiful face broke out into a resplendent smile.

When we were in the car, driving south toward Pico, she said, “You’re a very unusual man, Easy.”

“In what way?”

“How you talk, this crazy low-rider car—the way you almost fell coming down that ladder. It’s kind of like you’re coming from four different directions at once.”

I laughed heartily in reply. This humor rose from the anticipation of the minor resurrection Jo’s medicine would have on my body, and the recognition of the actual definition of a black man’s life from that white girl’s lips.

Not long after that we came to Pete and Petra’s Diner, a little bit west of Sepulveda on Pico. It was a ramshackle barnlike building with a huge blacktop parking lot for a yard. There were lots of cars parked there in the early morning. This was a weekday workingman and workingwoman’s joint. A place where three dollars would keep you stoked until it was time for the brown-bag lunch in the backseat.

The morning restaurant was vast and crowded. With not much natural light there were fluorescent fixtures hung in random fashion above the diners. There must have been sixty people eating their eggs and bacon, pancakes and ham. Most of them were white, but there were some blacks and Asians, even a Mexican here and there.

A man in a light blue suit brought Coco and me to a booth made
for two at a rare small window. He left us with menus and muttered something that I didn’t catch. The Gator’s Blood was gaining strength, and I was distracted by the internal physical changes caused by the elixir.

“What can I get you?” a middle-aged and portly waitress with bottle-black hair and cornflower blue eyes asked us.

I gestured at Coco and she said, “Coffee, hot chocolate, pecan pancakes, a side of bacon, and a side of ham.”