Little Green (17 page)

“Did Haskell ask you anything when he burned you?” I asked, ignoring Mouse.

“ ‘Where is the money? Where is the money?’ ” He was mimicking the men that tormented him.

“Did Vixie tell them about the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you tell them?”

“Maybe. Maybe I did.…” Evander’s eyes latched onto a tableau outside the confines of my small TV room. “It was like I was trippin’ again and I was doin’ all the same things I done before.…”

Raymond was about to ask something else, but I put a hand on his shoulder and shook my head.

“I woke up to blood and money,” Evander continued. “I washed off as much of the blood as I could. The money was in these burlap sacks that were covered with blood too. It felt like I shoulda known where the money come from, but it’s like when you forget somebody you know’s name. So I wrapped the sacks of money in a sheet and took it down to the … to the … to the bus station and put it in a locker. Yeah, that’s what I did. I remember that it took me a long time, because I kept seein’ things like snakes and lynchers. I took a lotta buses.”

“Is that what you told those men?”

“I don’t remember, but Haskell kept hittin’ me and askin’ me what was the locker number and where was the key. And then …”

“Then what?” I said. It was more a suggestion than a question.

“It was cold,” Evander said with a shiver in his voice. “I was tied to the tree and there was six devils on my back prickin’ me with their pitchforks. I counted ’em. It was like my eyes floated up behind my back like Dr. Strange does in the comic books. And then Vixie come up and say that they was gonna kill me if I told where the money was. I told her I didn’t remember. And she said that even if I do I shouldn’t say.

“She told me that I should tell her where the key was, but I couldn’t say even if I wanted to, because every time they had hit me or burnt me the memory just went deeper. It was the acid. It made my mind like a deep dark hole.

“Vixie left that night. Haskell thought I told her sumpin’ but I didn’t. He hit me and I still didn’t. Then he hit me again and I was a
black crow in a blue sky bein’ attacked by blackbirds protectin’ their nests.”

“Where’s the key, Evander?” I asked.

The kid turned to me, his face like a fallow field in the late fall under the first frost of the season to come.

I cut my eyes to see what was up with Raymond. He usually got very excited when the question of money came up. But that night on the comfortable sofa, on the other side of the door from a blood-spattered porch, Raymond seemed more interested in the boy than the story being told.

“What happened after you put the money in the bus depot locker?” I asked.

“I went to the house to find Ruby.”

“In the morning?”

“Uh-uh, I don’t think so.”

“What time did you wake up in the motel?”

“Mornin’ time.”

“So what did you do between the bus depot and the house where Ruby was supposed to be at?”

The thaw was slow and ponderous. He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. He looked up at Raymond. I thought he might ask again if Ray was his father, but he seemed to go through that discussion in his head—silently.

“I went to see Esther,” Evander said, surprised and delighted by the memory.

“Esther who?”

“Corey. Esther Corey.”

“Angeline Corey’s daughter?”

“Yeah.”

“How you know her?” Mouse asked.

“We went to L.A. High together. We sat three seats apart at the graduation.”

“You went to her house …” I primed.

“And she kissed me … on the lips.”

I heard Mouse sigh. I knew exactly what he was thinking.

Angeline Brown had been married to a man named Charles Corey. Charles was a straight-up fence who moved stolen merchandise at a low profit margin but also at a prodigious rate. He had outlets from Redondo Beach to Beverly Hills.

His business was so good, as a matter of fact, that a fellow named Cool Louie, a white guy from the gambling mob downtown, decided to take Charles out and assume the business.

Louie managed the hit but he couldn’t run the business, because he didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that could maintain the low profit margin.

In the meanwhile Angeline took up with a man named Ashton Burnet. Burnet killed Louie and his three top lieutenants, thus returning the business to Angeline.

But Angeline, being smarter than Louie, her dead husband, or Ashton, turned the business into a request company. People came to her when they needed some commodity or other and she would assign the job to any of dozens of freelance operatives. Everybody worked for Angeline, be they white, black, or Spanish-speaking. There were even a few Koreans in her stable.

Combining Angeline’s fearlessness and smarts with Ashton’s violent tendencies, you had one serious, very formidable threat.

“Did you give Esther the key?” I asked Evander.

“Yes, sir. I sure did. I told her about the blood and money and she wasn’t bothered at all. She washed my face and kissed my mouth. She said that she always liked me. And you know, that felt good.”

I had more questions, lots of them, but it was late and Evander’s mind stopped at the oasis of Esther Corey. He couldn’t remember anything else, and that was fine—for the moment.

Mouse said, “I gotta get outta here, Easy.”

“Evander’s gonna stay with me tonight,” I replied, “until we get him presentable enough that his mother doesn’t lose her mind.”

“Okay, then.” Mouse rose to his feet. “You take care’a yourself, Li’l Green.”

“I’ma call you after I told Mama what you said,” the boy replied.

“That’s fine. Just ask Easy. He always knows how to get in touch with me.”

“I’ll walk you to the car, Ray,” I said.

Mouse’s pink Cadillac was in my driveway. It was after midnight and the stronger stars were glistening in the sky.

“How much for findin’ the boy?” he asked.

“Nuthin’.”

He smiled and opened the driver’s-side door. For some reason this reminded me of him as Death in my waking dream.

“Well, let me say thanks then.” He held out a hand and I grasped it.

“You the only real friend I evah had, Easy.”

“Don’t I know it.”

After Ray drove off I backed the Barracuda all the way up into the driveway so that no one would see me take two bottles from the rude crate of Mama Jo’s medicines into the side door to my house. I don’t know why I felt so secretive about Jo’s elixir; I guess it was because she never really cared if her ingredients were legal or not.

When I returned to the front room Evander was standing with his back to the northwest corner, looking up at the ceiling.

“What you doin’, son?” I asked.

“Um, uh … I got a little jumpy and had to get to my feet. You know … the acid makes it like things are movin’ around the edges. I think it might be a rat or sumpin’, so I get up. And then there’s voices and sounds sometimes too.”

I took the boy by the elbow and led him to the chair.

“Sit down,” I said.

“What?”

“Sit down.”

When we were both seated I handed him one of Mama Jo’s tar balls.

“Eat this,” I said.

It was the size of a large jawbreaker, but Evander put the whole thing in his mouth. He chewed at it a minute or so before saying in a garbled voice, “This taste like it comes from Mama Jo.”

I got him to his feet and led him down the hallway to my bedroom. On the way I pointed out the bathroom.

By the time he stepped out of Domaque’s oversize old shoes he was drifting.

“I’m sleepy,” he said from a seated position at the side of my bed. “That tar ball will put away all the dreams and nightmares,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me.

Evander slumped down on the bedspread.

Looking at him lying there, I felt exhaustion rest a heavy arm on me like a Santa Ana wind descending on Southern California.

I literally staggered back to the couch in the front room and then collapsed on the cushions as Evander had done on my bed.

I think I went to sleep, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

With my skull wedged against the armrest, it came to me that I had died and was resurrected by a smiling devil dispatched on a witch’s errand from her hut in the woods. Sunset Boulevard and Caller’s Creek were all part of a limbo that I was passing through on my way—maybe to life or possibly some eternity that was beyond any value system I could apply. The sofa was like a piece of turf where I was forced by fatigue to rest before continuing the unlikely journey.

I was asleep or maybe just half the way to that blissful state. I wasn’t sure, because I heard breathing as if it came from someone next to me, but I knew that I was the only person in the room. It’s possible that sleep for me in that brief period was death, and the manifestation of life—my breath—kept rousing me like Lynne Hua had done when I emerged from the semicoma.

The knocking came after many, many breaths. In my sleep state I was trying to justify the hard sound with the repetitive and slow susurration of respiration. But the rapping, like a foreign language, insisted that it was something different, something indecipherable that still needed to be heeded.

When I opened my eyes the room was dark except for a weak glow that came from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I remembered leaving the forty-watt hall light on so that Evander could find his way if he awoke in the night.

The knocking sounded again, rousing me to a higher state of consciousness. It felt like every time I woke up I was a different man. Instead of the one man I had been when I drove off that cliff I was now a series of men, each being born out of the husk of the last.

Knocking.

I smiled at the concussion or the existential reaction of a mind that had given up to death only to find that it was a feint. I sat up and the soft rapping came again. I pulled the pistol from my jacket pocket and took the two steps to the door.

After flipping the light switch on the wall I yanked the door wide
with my left hand while halfway lifting the pistol in my right. I was ready for anything—almost. It could have been Jeffrey, a red-shirted hippie, or even my mother come to ask when was I going to give up the mortal coil and come to spend eternity with her. It could have been anyone or anything.

Anything or anyone but Bonnie Shay decked out in her Air France flight attendant uniform.

“What happened to your suit?” she asked.

Putting the gun back in my pocket I said, “I went on a hike in the woods to find a lost boy.”

“Did you find him?” Her smile lit up the question.

I fell in love all over again, even with one foot planted solidly in another world.

“He’s asleep in my bed.”

“That’s good.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost three.” Her Guyanese lilt thrilled me.

“Why are you here?”

“It’s cold out here, Ezekiel.”

“Yeah, yeah, right, come on in.”

We went into the kitchen, where I brewed English breakfast. I was happy that Jeffrey hadn’t used my honey, because Bonnie had to have honey in her tea. She liked to have a lemon wedge too, but that wasn’t essential. She needed honey and I had it right there.

We settled across from each other at the dinette table. We hadn’t spoken hardly at all since she’d come in.

I wanted to say something, many things, but looking at her was overwhelming. I still loved her, and that love was the same as it had been, but in the interim I had changed. Seeing Bonnie I knew that she was lost to me: like the old country to an émigré; like a dead parent buried in another state decades ago in a grave I never visited, in an abandoned graveyard that I wouldn’t be able to find.

“Feather called me when your car was found in the ocean,” Bonnie said. “I was at the Bel-Air house when Raymond called to say that he’d found you alive. That was eighteen hours later. Not even a day, but my feelings settled and set. I realized when I thought you were dead that you were my man. You saved my life and you forgave me later on.”

“Too late,” I said, repeating the last words I remembered her saying to me before I went to drive off the side of a mountain.

“No,” Bonnie said, “not too late. You brought Jesus and Feather into my life, and when you lost your mind over me and Joguye I should have understood. I should have called you and asked you to forgive me. I should have known that a real man can’t stand by and watch his woman … his woman being loved by another man.”

“I should have asked you to come back,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“And now I’ve died and everything that was fell away like snakeskin.”

“Before Raymond called I told Joguye that it was over, that I would not marry him.”

“What did he say?” I asked, wondering why I cared.

“He didn’t understand. He is royalty and rich, a part of a world that no black American or Caribbean could ever really understand or imagine. But I told him that you were my man, dead or alive.”

We finished our tea and repaired to the sleeping couch of the front room. I was sitting side by side with the woman I loved as much as I had my Big Mama, who died of pneumonia when I was too young to fully understand death. I was there but still mostly silent.