Little Green (33 page)

“He bled to death from a gunshot wound three or four days ago.”

“Wow. That’s something.”

“What do you know about it, Easy?”

“Melvin, I was looking for the live Giles just this morning. I had no idea he was dead.”

“We busted the Laundromat,” Suggs put in.

“Did they know?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m sorry, Brother Suggs. But that’s what gangsters do, right? They kill each other.”

“Walk softly, Easy Rawlins. You might survive this and you might
survive that, but once you’re in their sights they will keep after you until they get you.”

“Is that all you have?” I asked.

He hung up then. Like any intelligent man Suggs knew when the discussion was over.

I dithered around the house for an hour or so cleaning up little messes that the squatter Jeffrey had made. Putting the house back in order, I wondered about my mortality, about moving and thinking while so many others I had known were under the ground, their deeds not even memories to their descendants, any value they accrued either erased or perverted. In the middle of sweeping the kitchen I stopped and downed Mama Jo’s second-to-last bottle of medicine. I didn’t need it, but it struck me that I’d like to feel one last jolt of power before returning to the day-to-day existence of a workingman in a cracked world.

I went to the TV room to sit down to experience Jo’s magic.

The heat from that dose was different than before. It made me feel warm like a sunbather in the noon sun of the hottest day of a heat wave. I passed in and out of conscious awareness, remembering details of a life I’d no right to have endured.

A feeling like the moments before awareness when Lynne Hua sat next to me settled in. I remembered my mother teaching me to laugh and sing, her big soft lap always my refuge from a hard world. I was no longer being tossed about and battered, even though that was the only life I’d ever known.

From outside I could hear the passing of cars, which sounded like gusts of wind. I considered turning on the TV, but the idea of electric sound was too harsh for my mood.

And then there came a soft footfall, a sound so slight it might have been imagined.

In the gray-brown, bulging, cyclopean eye of the TV I saw his form in the doorway behind me and to the left.…

I took a fraction of a moment to allow my mind to go blank. Then, with my left hand, I took hold of the cushion next to me and flung it with just enough accuracy. I was up and leaping toward the intruder before the stiff square pillow hit his arm. The .22 pistol fired, sounding no louder than a cap gun.

We were falling in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, the distance to the floor encompassing two entire lifetimes of fighting and struggle.

Keith Handel was still bigger and younger and stronger than I. The last time we met, his Las Vegas friend pushed me down with only some effort. But this time I was at full power, reliving every fight I had ever been in. There were backwoods juke joints orchestrating my gyrations; the stench of rotting corpses set by the side of the victory road on our drive into Berlin fueled my heart, and there was blood in my mouth, its bitter tang warning me that it was all or nothing right there in my own house.

I strained against my would-be killer with a primordial effort. I wasn’t thinking about the attack but relying on the automatic skills driven into my body by three years of warfare and forty-seven years of life on the wrong side of the white man’s tracks.

I pressed against Handel with all the power in me, and then all at once my strength was gone. I collapsed on the floor, unable even to raise my arms, incapable of responding to the cramps in my chest and thighs. I was breathing like a Greco-Roman wrestler after his greatest challenge, lost.

Keith Handel, I knew, was gathering his resources, lifting his pistol, readying to shoot me in the back of the head.

Why wasn’t I dead? How long did it take to pull a trigger?

Then I remembered that he, Handel, was there to retrieve his loot from the robbery.

He needed me alive, at least for a little while.

After long moments of deep, deep breathing I heaved up on my
side, expecting to see the man standing over me with a gun in his hand.

Instead I saw that he was on the floor, on his side too, his back turned to me. I could see both his hands. Neither one held a gun. I wasn’t strong enough to get to my feet, so I crawled toward Handel. I grabbed onto his shoulder, turning him over and pushing myself to a sitting position in the same motion.

Keith Handel was dead—strangled by a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. His eyes were wide-open and his mouth agape.

I sat there next to my attacker feeling like he looked. While I was gasping for air it occurred to me that the only reason he pulled off that shot was because I hit him with that pillow.

I searched but luckily there was no liquor in the house. Jeffrey must’ve finished off the bottle I kept for guests. If not, I would have drained it, no doubt. But I needed to be sober to figure out the conundrum of the killer’s corpse on the floor.

What was I supposed to do?

If I was a white man the answer to the riddle would have been simple. If I was a white man there wouldn’t have been a riddle at all. A man breaks into your house with a gun and you fought back and won—that was self-defense in any world. Any world except the home of a black man in an America nourished on the bonemeal of his ancestors.

When I couldn’t find any liquor, I poured a glass of water and sat at the table to get my wind back and consider the possibilities. Looking at the tabletop I noticed drops of blood plopping down, spraying tinier droplets around their red centers.

I was bleeding. The bullet Keith Handel fired had grazed my left cheek. I pressed the heel of my palm against the flesh wound. For some reason this had a clearing effect on my mind.

I was a black man in a white world where black men were hated—and worse, feared. Keith Handel, for all his shortcomings, was white. He was dead and I had survived. Where I came from that was a crime in itself.

When the bleeding was stanched I knew what I had to do. Even Melvin Suggs couldn’t keep a killing like this from the courts, and once on trial I would be crucified. There was a part of my mind that said this might not be true, that I might be found innocent by a jury of my peers.

This optimism made me laugh; it brought out the rough guffaws of all my dead ancestors back to the slave ships.

“Hello?” EttaMae Harris said at ten minutes past eleven.

“Etta.”

“What’s wrong, Easy?”

“I need Mouse.”

“Hang on.”

There was no complaint about the lateness of the call. Etta would never ask me why I would need a man like her husband.

“Hey, Easy, what’s up?” Raymond asked on a yawn.

“You got to come over, Ray. I need your help.”

“Sit tight, baby, the cavalry on its way.”

He was at the door by midnight. I let him in and gestured at the corpse.

I had huddled the body into a fetal position so that if we had to take it somewhere it would be the right shape to fit in a trunk.

“That’s one’a the dudes from your office,” Mouse said as a matter of fact.

“Him and two others got Evander in that jam. It was just a fluke, but trouble still and all.”

“How’d he sneak up on you?”

“I figure he picked the back door lock earlier in the day and then snuck through when he knew I’d be in.”

“Why was he after you?” Mouse said while squatting down to see my handiwork up close.

“Money, man. The money the guy who fooled Evander stole.”

“How much?”

“Over two hundred thousand.”

“Damn, I guess that’s worth a craps throw with the Grim Reaper.”

“Or maybe no.”

“Maybe no,” Mouse agreed, patting the stiffening corpse on the shoulder.

He bounced to his feet like a much younger man and slapped his hands together.

“What do you suggest we do with him?” I asked.

“Mama Jo the only way to go when a brothah kills a white man.”

“Mama Jo?”

“Easy, I hope you don’t think you the first colored killed a Caucasian when there weren’t no other choice.”

“I guess not.”

“When that event occurs the best bet is Jo’s backyard vat. Here, lemme hold your car keys.”

“What for?”

“I’m gonna turn your car around so we can get Slick here into the trunk without bein’ seen by pryin’ eyes.”

On the way out to Compton I told Raymond about my talk with Timbale. I was in a mild state of shock and had to talk about something.

“So she’s gonna tell him that she really don’t know who killed Frank?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“And what if he come up on me and ask me point-blank if I did it?”

“Tell him what you’d tell anybody, Ray.”

“You mean I should lie?”

“Either that or we go over his house and kill him right now. And while we’re at it we might as well shoot Esther Corey too, because the way they been goin’ at it she probably pregnant with his son. And then there’s her mama and Ashton Burnet. Might as well go scorched earth and kill everyone.”

I was driving and Mouse was facing me, leaning against the door. He rubbed his chin as if he was counting up bullets and then said, “All right, man. I don’t like it, not one bit. I don’t wanna lie to the boy, but you right about Esther, Angeline, and Ashton. And then Timbale would probably wanna get in on the act too. That much bloodshed is bad for business.”

I would have laughed, but I didn’t in deference to the dead man in the trunk.

Raymond had me back my red car up between two old eucalyptus trees at the side of Jo’s lot.

We went to the hidden front door then and knocked. After a few minutes Jo appeared in a bright blue housecoat and cranberry slippers.

“What is it, Raymond?” she asked.

“We need the backyard vat, Jo.”

Her minor vexation vanished in an instant.

“You parked at the back entrance?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay. Go around to the gate and I’ll let you in.”

Raymond and I opened the trunk, allowing the dead gangster to be illuminated by moonlight.

What seemed like a stand of bushy vines turned out to be a double-doored gate that Jo pulled open from the inside. This portal revealed a large grassy lot that was surrounded on all sides by trees. I suspected that there was fencing beyond the wood that was invisible to me.

Beside Jo was a deep wheelbarrow. Mouse and I didn’t need any direction to pick up the dead man and deposit him in the one-wheeled cart.

“Here now, Easy,” Jo said. “Wheel this man ovah to the far corner with me.”

There was a magical feel to the big yard. A half-moon shone down, shedding light on big white flowers and light-colored stones placed here and there. We got to a shadowy grotto in the center of a group of trees that I couldn’t identify. Jo reached up in the leaves and a weak electric light sparked. Sitting in shadow was a huge oak barrel four times the width of the largest barrel I’d ever seen.

“Can you lift him up?” Jo asked.

I looked around and saw that Mouse had stayed by the gate.
Maybe he was guarding the entrance, or maybe the disposal of bodies was the job of the killer in Jo’s gospel. Whatever it was I said, “I can sure try.”

She lifted the round wooden lid from the top of the four-foot-high barrel. Inside, filling the vat to three-quarters full, was a black liquid that showed sparks here and there that looked like stars if there was no atmosphere to lessen their brilliance. The liquid also seemed to be motile, exhibiting a subtle motion beneath its surface.

“Throw him in,” Jo said, and I realized that this was to be my last trial on the journey back to the living world.

I got my arms under the big dead man and then, lifting from my thighs, I wrestled against his weight, which felt like a living thing struggling to get back to the ground. I was breathing hard again. I moved next to the barrel, allowing part of the weight to rest above the center bulge. Then I pressed with all my might, pushing Keith Handel up an inch at a time toward the rim. Twice he began to roll down and twice I lifted him back up again. Maybe three inches from my goal I stopped, knowing that I couldn’t budge him one more inch.

That’s when Mama Jo got in behind me and pushed, grunting as she did so. Together we got the clay of Keith Handel up and over the edge of the big vat and his body tumbled in, immersed in the dark glittering oil.

I stared after the corpse. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the liquid. There were a few more sparks and maybe a fraction more of added movement.

“In three days there won’t be anything left of the flesh, clothes, hair, bones, or teeth,” Jo said. “Even metal erodes in this vat here. It’s where dead men come to the very end of their journey.”

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Life,” she said, like a Baptist minister exhorting the spirit of an entire congregation.