Little Green (14 page)

“Toast?” the jolly woman asked, and I smiled.

“No, thanks.”

“What can I get for you, Bright Eyes?” the waitress asked me.

Her name tag read HARA.

“Well, Hara …” I began, but then I noticed a man sitting at a booth with five other men, staring at me—or at least he was looking in my direction. “Well, Hara, I already had something to eat, so if you just bring me a coffee I’ll be doing fine.”

“Regular?”

“Black.” Back in those days regular meant with cream and sugar.

Hara left me with the notion of being called Bright Eyes. The medicine was coming up to the surface—I could feel it and the waitress could see it; the curious white guy in the dark blue work shirt maybe could sense it from his table of friends.

“So tell me about yourself, Coco,” I said, sitting back and letting the world flow around me.

“Why?”

“Why? Because we’re sitting here on a beautiful clear morning with food on the way and nobody after us. Because you’re a young white woman and I’m a middle-aged black man, and a waitress just took our order without even a second look.”

I was beginning to experience Coco’s smiles as little gifts.

“I was born in Dearborn,” she said.

“Near Detroit?”

“You been there?”

“No. But I read about the Detroit riots.”

“We lived in a big house,” she continued, “and went to church. I was gonna go to college back east and then one day the police came and arrested my father.”

“For what?” I looked up and saw the white workman staring me in the eye.

“He had robbed a bank before he met my mother, used the money to start a ball-bearing business for the car companies.”

“Wow.”

“Two weeks after he was put in prison my mom comes home with this guy named Lawrence and says that they were getting married and we were moving to Spokane. She said that we were gonna start goin’ to Catholic mass because Larry was a Catholic. I never liked it, and so one day I hitched to the coast and then down to L.A. And here I am.”

By then the Gator’s Blood had seeped all the way to my fingertips. I was ready for anything. Life stopped being normal and it was more like I was living in a movie. And then I thought about my life like it was one of those 3-D tableaus the architects make to represent their projects. I saw that there was never anything natural about my life in the first place: not my being orphaned, black, a soldier in World War II, or my life of found children and detective work that was more like a secret war where you fought on both sides at once.

“Well?” Coco asked.

“Did you ask me something?”

“Yes. I asked, do you think I’m weird?”

“Not at all,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned you’re the most interesting woman in the room.”

“Excuse me,” a man’s voice said.

I wasn’t surprised to see the white man in the blue work shirt standing on the exact spot where Hara had taken our orders.

I looked at him but didn’t say anything. There was nothing for us to say to each other; I knew that but he did not.

“Let me ask you something,” he said to me.

I glanced over at the table he’d come from. I wanted to see if the
men were smiling or in any other way anticipatory. They were not, which was a relief. I moved my hand away from the pistol in my belt.

Coco was looking up at the man now.

“I just wonder,” the man continued, “why a nigger needs to take up with a white chick when there’s so many colored gals walkin’ the streets.”

It was the second time that morning I’d been called a nigger by a white man, and still it came as a surprise.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Coco said loudly, and then she stood up from the stumpy little booth. “We aren’t messing with you. We weren’t talking to you. All we’re doing is sitting here and trying to get some food and some coffee like everybody else. And you come over here with this fucking shit about niggers and chicks and gals in the street. Just who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?”

“Listen, girl,” the man said.

He was a few years my junior, early forties. I would have been happy to let him go on talking, but he held out a hand as if he might have wanted to lay it on her.

So I stood up. My right hand turned into a fist and my left shoulder slanted forward so I could pull it back, adding to the force of the blow that by now was a foregone conclusion.

But there’s one thing I’ve learned about inevitability—it never is.

Before I could execute my punch the other guys from our detractor’s table came up in a group and grabbed hold of him.

“Come on, Lucas; let’s get out of here,” one of them said.

Lucas made a rather weak attempt at shaking his friends off and then allowed them to pull him away.

Coco and I were standing there. Everyone in the room was looking either at us or at the men as they piled out the door.

Hara came up with Coco’s breakfast and my coffee on a perfectly balanced, very large cork-lined resin tray.

“Sit down,” she urged. “Sit down. Don’t worry about some fool like him.”

We did sit. After a while Coco started eating. I leaned back
in silence, thinking about the disjointed movie in which I was an unknown bit actor: like Lynne Hua—exotic yet forgettable.

“That was fucked-up,” Coco said after a few minutes had passed.

I smiled.

“Why are you laughing?” she asked.

“I used to know these two brothers,” I said. “Romulus and Remus, I kid you not. That’s what their mother named them. Anyway, the wolf brothers were rough-and-tumble. They’d go to some restaurant or diner or what have you in a part of town where people didn’t know ’em. They’d sit apart and order two big-ass meals. And just when they were almost through one would say something to the other and they’d commence to fight. Now, they’d fight for fun anyway, but the people in the restaurant didn’t know that. After they crashed around a few minutes or so the owners would throw them out, not even thinkin’ about them payin’ for the meals.”

Coco’s anger turned quizzical and she asked, “Are you really that thick-skinned?”

“My mother could have named me Rhino and she wouldn’t have been half-wrong.”

The drive down to Santa Monica was uneventful and blissfully quiet. The radio stayed off and there was no chatter about things that didn’t matter, or that did matter but we couldn’t change. There was a certain comfortableness between the young white woman and me that I wouldn’t understand for many years to come.

“Just follow the coast highway up,” she said when we got down to the beach.

I wasn’t expecting the drive to have any kind of emotional effect on me. After all, I had taken that ride a hundred times since moving to L.A. in 1946. But the last time I’d cruised up that highway, in the wee hours, I was barefoot, drunk, and heartbroken.

As I passed Sunset Boulevard where it ran into the highway, my breath was loud in my ears like a bellows, and my hands were shaking nervously on the wheel.

“What’s wrong, Easy?” Coco asked. It’s a good thing she did, because I might have become the man I had been when I drove headlong off the road otherwise.

“I was just remembering the accident.”

“What accident?”

I told her about the last night before I awoke from my partial coma.

“Sounds more like a suicide attempt than an accident,” the clear-eyed, overly blunt young woman said.

This straight talk made me smile and relax.

“Yeah, it does,” I said. “I learned back in the army that when a
man’s at war his impending death has no more hold on him than a drink of water or the need for a nap.”

“What war?” she asked, looking around at the road in front of us.

“We’re always at war,” I said, not really thinking about the words I spoke. “Vietnam is a war we’re in. But not only that—the Strip is a war of the new against the old, my skin is a war not of my making, and love … love is a war too.”

“That’s very romantic, Mr. Rawlins,” Coco said. I think she meant it as a compliment.

After that we drove for over an hour. Coco took one of the three books from her velvet bag and began reading. I didn’t mind the silence.

My mind was filled with images and imaginings about life before and after the car crash. I was thinking about sharecroppers again: those small-bodied, powerful men and women who dragged bulging sacks up to five times their size across fields of cotton. This image seemed the appropriate metaphor for my life. That huge sack was my house, my car, my job hunting down a boy I never met. Rather than a burden, this weight, this millstone was my chance at deliverance. If I could survive that labor then my rest would be deserved.

We’d passed through Oxnard and Ventura and were well on our way to Santa Barbara and Isla Vista when Coco said, “You see that sign that says Caller’s?”

Up ahead was an unofficial little white sign, like a flag of surrender on a green pole that had the name rudely painted on it.

“Yeah. That’s not a regular highway sign.”

“There’s an action group called Puck and His Magic Tricksters that puts up signs like that for hippie folk. It tells us where the magic is at.

“About a mile up is this dirt turnoff to the right. You can tell because there’ll be just a green stick to mark it. You go in and there’s an underpass to the beach. That’s where you can get in to hike up to Caller’s.”

I followed her directions, making it down to a leveled lot where there was nary a car. I parked and got out. The salt air was lovely. I breathed it in, hardly thinking of the night when I followed that scent over the side of a mountain.

“Come on,” she said. “The path is back this way across that little stream.”

The stream was just a trickle and the dense foliage beyond might have daunted me except for the Gator’s Blood. I was at full tilt at that moment, ready for anything—at least, that’s what I thought.

“It just looks impassable,” the educated hippie said, “but after about twenty feet of bush there’s a little trail.”

This was true. The trail was actually a creek bed that had gone dry. It was rocky and uneven, but I welcomed the irregular pace, because this was all a part of my rejuvenation. It was my Yellow Brick Road. This was the path Mouse had set me on, that Mama Jo medicated me for, that I had to travel if I was going to make it home in one living piece.

As I walked I felt that something was missing. After a while it came to me that it was the pain in my ankle that was absent. I wondered at the power of Jo’s elixir. She was a backwoods genius and I was the nonbelieving beneficiary of her craft.

We hiked up a pretty steep incline for twenty minutes or so. Coco was breathing hard, but I fell into my role as a GI in the Italian Alps and the walk was like nothing to me.

When we got to the clearing the young woman sat down on a fallen tree and I squatted next to her.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“I don’t get it, man,” she said. “This morning you could hardly climb down a ladder but now you run up this hill like you were a mountain goat or somethin’.”

“I just needed to get warmed up. It this it?”

“It’s what most people call Caller’s Creek, but it’s not where we’re
going. Across the way there’s an old oak tree and behind that are these two big boulders. If you go between them for thirty feet or so there’s another path that leads down into Rev’s Commune.”

I stood up to look around.

“I think you’ve ruined your suit,” Coco said.

She was right. The cuffs of my pants were stained beyond cleaning, and there were spots of tree sap on my jacket, but I didn’t care.

“Pretty silly for me to be dressed like this,” I said.

“You didn’t know.” Coco got up and marched us to the oak tree and then around to the close-standing sandstone boulders.

It was a tight fit for me down the corridor of stone, but I made it through.

On the other side was a proper trail under the sun-dappled shade of various trees leading downward. This decline was a relief for Coco.

The pace was faster and we reached a turn in the path in less than fifteen minutes. Instead of continuing on, Coco studied the bushes to our right and spread them apart.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Terry has these friends up here who keep to themselves. It’s like a commune but not everybody is invited to stay. I’m pretty sure that’s where Vixie took your friend.”

“Lead on.”

The tiny zigzag path beyond the wall of bushes brought us to a stone ledge that looked down upon a crude campsite which seemed empty except for one occupant—a bare-chested black man with his arms bound behind him, around a pretty thick sapling elm. His head was bowed as if in sleep or defeat, and my heart sang an unbidden, bitter song of revenge.

“Is that him?” I asked.

“You don’t know what he looks like?”

“All I’ve seen is the picture, and his head is hanging down.”

“That’s Evander.”

“How many people live here?”

“It’s usually just four guys. I don’t know their names. There used to be a street preacher named Rev that lived here, but after these guys moved in he went up north.”

“I don’t have to know their names,” I said, needing to challenge something.