Little Green (15 page)

“These guys get grass off a boat that comes up from Mexico every two weeks or so. Terry buys a few keys from them now and then. But he doesn’t like them too much.”

Just then three long-haired men came out from behind a tree at the far end of the camp. I laced my fingers together so that I wouldn’t grab my pistol and go down there shooting.

The men spoke to each other but we were too far away to make out what they were saying. One of them, sporting dirty blond hair and wearing a dark red shirt, nudged Evander with his foot and the young man jolted awake.

“I don’t remember,” the prisoner said loud and clear.

Redshirt leaned down and slapped him.

“We should go get the cops,” Coco said.

“What’s on the other side of that tree where they came from?”

“It’s a shed they built to hold the dope until they move it.”

“Come on.”

I was a sergeant again, in the army again, waging war on the Germans—the absolute white men of the twentieth century—again. My army was a brown-haired white girl who fell into line behind my command.

We worked our way through the wilderness around the smugglers’ camp. When we got to the storage shed I went inside and found it vacant. Maybe the fourth man had joined his friends. That was a stroke of luck for him, because I would have certainly strangled him as I had done to five Germans during my brief tenure as defender of the American way.

There was a kerosene lantern and a cheap pine table in the room that was piled high with plastic bundles of marijuana. I took the glass guard off the lantern, lit the wick, turned the flame up high, and placed it directly under the table. Then I hurried out and gestured for Coco to head back the way we’d come.

“What did you do?” she asked as we went.

“Made a diversion.”

“A diversion for what?”

“For I don’t kill them hippies like I want to do.”

Back at the ledge I could see that all four hippie men were having a meal around their prisoner. Evander was wild-eyed, looking back and forth between his captors. I studied my breathing and waited for my moment.

“What did you do back there?” Coco asked after a minute or so.

And, as if in answer, Redshirt yelled, “Smoke!”

He pointed at the air above the trees. Their stash was on fire and so the whole tribe rushed to put it out.

“Come on,” I said again to Coco.

We ran down to the campsite and I used a knife from one of the tin plates to cut Evander’s bonds.

His hands were swollen and he cried out when the rope was cut.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Friends of your mother, Evander,” I said. “Now get up, because we got to run.”

The young man had a thick build and was quite strong, though not from exercise. When I mentioned his mother he jumped to his feet and we began the long trek, the hazardous escape from his captors.

Coco ran in front of us, Evander staggered behind her, and I took up the rear, making sure that the man we were saving didn’t tumble to the creek bed or run into a tree. Every third or fourth step that Evander took was precarious. It was as if, during his time of captivity, he’d lost his sense of equilibrium. He’d veer off to the side, lower to his knees now and then, as if the chase was over and now we might stop for a catnap.

Coco paused whenever Evander did.

“Keep on going,” I said the last time she did this. “Just keep on running till you’re back at the car.” I threw her the keys and she caught them, just barely. “Unlock it and start it up. That way we’ll be ready to go when I get him there.”

The young woman, whom I hadn’t known six hours before, nodded and took off with our hope in her hands. I believed in her, but at the back of my mind I was well aware that I could have been wrong. What if she was so scared that she drove off before I could get Evander to the beach?

I shrugged at the possibility and pulled the boy up by his arm.

“Come on, Evander,” I said. “There’s bad men after us and I’d like not to have to kill them if possible.”

Pushing him forward I saw the burns on his shoulders and back. Those thick welts would leave scars like the bullwhips made on our
slave ancestors. I forced myself to go on, not backward—toward liberation rather than retribution.

Evander cried out in pain as we passed through the sandstone corridor. The rough rock scraped against his wounds. I would have given him my shirt but I didn’t feel we had the time. The smugglers would realize soon enough that their prisoner was gone. They might very well come after us.

Evander fell flat on his face in the dry creek bed when the scent of salt air was strong. He tried to rise but failed. I could see that he was exhausted and defeated by our run, so I put his left arm around my shoulders and brought him to a standing position. His weight didn’t feel like anything. I didn’t know if it was Gator’s Blood or adrenaline, but I made the last three hundred feet dragging that bulky kid along like one of those sacks of cotton on a Mississippi sharecropper’s farm.

The red Barracuda was still there, with Coco sitting behind the wheel.

This was another moment in the development of a friendship that I would come to value over time.

She jumped out of the car to help me pile the nearly unconscious bare-chested boy into the backseat.

“Easy!” she cried as I was folding Evander’s legs up on the cushions.

I pulled my pistol for the first time and turned to study the coastal foliage from which we had come.

Four long-haired white men, two of them with pistols of their own, came out from the leaves. There was a great plume of white smoke in the sky behind them. The color of this plume told me that they had managed to extinguish the fire.

Redshirt pointed at us, making a guttural sound that had meaning without linguistic articulation. He wanted us dead and there was no argument that would dissuade him.

The man’s yowl seemed to go on beyond his breath. It came to me that a nearby siren had extended his promise and threat.

Redshirt heard the fire engine too. Or maybe it was the police.

“Get back behind the wheel,” I said to Coco.

She didn’t argue.

Redshirt pointed his pistol at me and the far-off wail got closer. He lowered the gun, wishing with his gaze that I was close enough for him to strike me. Then all four men faded back into the coastal trees—wild-eyed primitives retreating to their primordial home.

I went to the driver’s-side door.

“Get in the backseat with Evander,” I said. “I’ll drive.”

She hopped over the seat and I put the red Barracuda in gear.

“Is there another way out of here?”

“If you drive north along the beach about half a mile there’s a regular turnoff.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice.

“He’s got a fever, Easy,” Coco said two hours later, when we were on the Santa Monica Freeway headed east for L.A. proper.

We had passed six fire trucks headed north toward Caller’s Creek. I could only hope that Redshirt and his crew were caught, or at least that they didn’t recognize Coco sitting in the car.

“I don’t know where the money is!” the boy shouted. “I don’t know where the blood came from!”

He had been calling out now and then, delirious after the ordeal.

I stopped at a gas station that had a sign for ice. I got fifteen pounds and took a couple of extra plastic bags. These I gave to Coco to apply to Evander’s head and shoulders.

“We have to take him to a hospital,” she said.

“I got a better place in mind.”

Coco argued the whole way.

“This man is sick and wounded,” she said. “He’s been tied to a tree and beaten. He needs a doctor.”

“You already said that, girl. I’m just askin’ for you to help me bring him to this woman I know. If, after we get there, you think he needs a doctor, I will be happy to oblige.”

“But that could be too late.”

“Honey, I have carried wounded men across battlefields. I have been too late more than once. Evander is hurt but he’s not dyin’. Not yet.”

When we got to Mama Jo’s it was midafternoon.

Coco helped me carry Evander through the trees to Jo’s yellow door. We passed through, and when Coco laid eyes on Jo all the complaints stopped.

I put the boy on Jo’s visitor’s cot and without introduction she began to work on his wounds, burns, and bruises.

“Hand me that white pottery jug,” she said to Coco. “And gimme that glass jar … the square one. Okay now, take three white buds off’a that hangin’ bunch’a herbs on the far right and …”

Coco did everything Jo said without error or complaint. She didn’t ask questions; nor did she make any objection.

I sat back in my regular chair and the last iota of strength fled from my limbs. I could watch but that was all. My job, for the moment, was over. After a while my eyes started to close. I fought sleep, because I knew that it would lead either to death or nightmare—neither of which I was prepared for.

“Do you want some more soup?” Jo asked on the other side of closed eyelids.

“Yes, ma’am,” a young man replied.

“This is delicious,” a woman added.

“Thank you, Coco.”

“My real name is Helen Ray,” the woman I knew as Coco said.

“I like your nickname.” There was something odd in Jo’s voice, but I was too out of it to try to figure out what that something was.

My purpose in life right then was to open my eyes and sit up from wherever it was that I had been laid down. I was on my side and decided visual reconnaissance should be my first act.

Jo, Evander, and Helen “Coco” Ray were sitting at the medieval table, sharing a meal.

I wondered about that table. Maybe it had been constructed in some ancient Spanish canton in the twelfth or thirteenth century, moved from place to place until it found its way aboard a galleon bound for the New World. It had come to Louisiana and finally to Jo’s country fortress. Now that same table, so well built that it had outlasted its own history, was in a California home that conformed to its forgotten origins.

“Easy,” Jo said, and I focused, as well as I could, on her. “Evander, go help Easy up.”

The young man that I virtually carried through the coastal woods now pulled me up from a straw bundle on the floor.

The house raven squalled and the armadillos wrestled in their corner. The lynx-cat was nowhere to be seen.

Jo served me oxtail stew over yellow rice, and for the first time since my revivification the food didn’t hurt my stomach.

“How are you, Easy?” Jo asked.

Upon hearing Jo’s tone, Coco looked at me as if for the first time.

“Like a bleeding, wounded shark among his brother sharks,” I said.

“You saved Evander here.”

“Those men had him tied to a tree,” I answered.

“Coco says that she wanted to run and call the cops, but you planned the whole escape in just one minute and didn’t even have to kill nobody.” There was pride in Jo’s voice.

“I thought there mighta been a guy out back of the camp. If there was I woulda killed him,” I promised.

“I know,” said Jo. “I know that you a man do what he have to.”

Now Evander was looking at me.

“Did my mother really send you?” he asked.

“Her, LaTonya, and Beatrix too.”

“Well, thank you,” said the young man that Mouse called Little Green. “I don’t know for sure, but I think those guys mighta killed me.” He was wearing a loose gray shirt that was three or four sizes too big even for his large frame.

“Is that shirt Domaque Junior’s?” I asked the air.

“Uh-huh,” Jo grunted.

“How is your son?”

“Him and that girl he was livin’ wit’ on the commune, Loretta, have moved up to north Alaska and got themselves a fishin’ boat.”

“Damn.”

“Do you need an assistant or something, Miss Jo?” Coco asked.

Jo turned to the beautiful white girl and stared. Raymond had told me that she had what was known as second sight that she used now and then when the truth was there but unspoken. I never
believed any tales like that except when I was actually in Jo’s physical presence.

“You go on with Easy,” Jo said after a minute or two. “If you still interested after ten days’ time, call him and he will bring you here to me.”

“What time is it?” I asked Jo.

“I don’t have no clock,” she said. “Maybe nine, ten.”

“How long was I out?”

“A few hours,” she said. “You should get a better rest before you take any more’a that elixir.”

“Then it’s time to go, Evander,” I said, a little loudly for the small space. “You too, Coco Helen Ray.”

Now both youngsters were looking at me. Leaving that medieval cottage was the last thing on their minds.

“Easy’s right,” Jo said, adding her authority to mine. “You children got business to take care on.”

Evander had gone through the yellow door, and Coco was just about to follow when she turned and gave Jo a serious kiss on the lips. Their embrace ended when Jo gently shoved the girl on.

Then Jo kissed me lightly and said, “Watch that medicine, Easy. It will push you further along than you used to goin’.”

“That’s okay, Jo. I got a long way to go.”

She smiled and kissed me again.

The next thing I knew I was driving through Watts. There were still lots of boarded-up, burned-out buildings that indicated the businesses that had yet to return to the ’hood after the devastating riots. My community had suffered decimation as I had. It was trying to come back, but there was no promise that it would rise again either.