Little Green (4 page)

“I’m doing summer school French and algebra at Pasteur,” she said, “advanced placement. I want to graduate from Hamilton High at least by seventeen so I can get away from these children.”

Jesus and Feather left the house as they had for all the years they’d been together. He would walk her to elementary school before taking the bus to Hamilton High, and he brought her with him everywhere he went. His capacity for love, in spite of the hard knocks of his childhood before he came to me, was as great as any pyramid.

After my adopted family had gone I sat over a cup of coffee and stared out into the rich woman’s yard. A hummingbird flitted from one citrus blossom to the next while Frenchie ran around under it, leaping now and then for practice.

I was trying to remember Evander’s last name. Noon, that’s what it was—midday: the highest point of life and work. Looking for noon sounded like just the thing that a wreck like me needed.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

Benita was standing there with the freshly changed baby in her arms.

“Yeah, Bennie?”

“I have to go to work too. I got a practical nurse’s trainee position down at Lance Holtz Medical Center in Santa Monica.”

“What do you do with Essie?”

“I pay Antigone an extra six dollars to look after her while she’s here with you. You know, all she had to do was change your IV and look in on you now and then.”

“I guess that easy job is over,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How are you, Benita?”

“I like livin’ here wit’ Juice and your family. Sometimes when Essie cries at night Feather gets up to walk with her. You know, it’s kinda like what my mama used to say Alabama was like when she was a kid—everybody livin’ together an’ helpin’ each other out. Only here we are in this big old house and everybody’s got a job or school.” Benita hesitated a few seconds, staring into my face. “You look tired, Mr. Rawlins, but at least you’re awake again. I used to come in your room at night with Essie and just sit there, because you know you saved my life and brought Juice into it too. I know you coulda told him that I wasn’t no good. I know you didn’t have to let me in like you did, and I really appreciate it, and I’m very happy that you woke up.”

We gazed at each other while Essie made soft cooing sounds.

When the doorbell rang I felt a sense of relief. The connection between Benita and me, at that moment, was beyond the limit of my emotional reserves.

The mother and child left the room and immediately I began thinking about a woman named Timbale and a son who had failed to come home. It was odd for Raymond to ask me for help, certainly for something as mundane as a young man going off into a dangerous world.

“People die,” Mouse had said to me on many occasions. “They die and get born every second of every day. You know I can’t be botherin’ myself with all the people fallin’ by the wayside. If I did that I wouldn’t have enough time to pee.”

I grinned at the memory and wondered again: What was Raymond’s interest in Evander Noon?

“Mr. Rawlins?” Benita said. “This is Antigone Fowler, RN.”

I looked up to see a strawberry brown woman, maybe five-five, with hair tied tightly back, and businesslike efficiency about her like a ring around the sun.

“Pleased to meet you at last, sir,” she said. She wasn’t from the South, but the accent was from somewhere in the U.S.

“Eyes open and everything,” I agreed.

“Well,” Benita said, “I’ma go put Essie in the crib in her room and then I’m gone.”

When Benita came over and kissed my cheek I had the feeling that she got into that habit when I was comatose. She walked out of the swinging pink door.

I watched her go, feeling something like loss.

“Now let’s get you upstairs to bed,” the nurse said, her competence expressing itself with mechanical precision.

She came right up to me and took me by the arm. She tried to lift but I let the deadweight of my body resist.

“You have to help me, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Have a seat, Nurse Fowler.”

“I have to go take care of the baby, make lunch for you, check all your vitals, and call the doctor to get instructions on what to do now that you’re awake,” she said. “I don’t have time to sit.”

“Then you go do all those things and, just before the vitals check, you come back and have a seat.”

“That’s not how it’s going to work,” she replied sharply.

Sometimes you take a liking or a dislike to a person you meet—immediately. Just a few words pass between you, but you know everything you’ll ever need to about how you are going to interact. Nurse Fowler and I were not going to get along; that much was sure. What I had to do was to figure out how to settle our differences then and there so that I could get along with my resurrection or final rites.

“How much have my doctor and family told you about me, Nurse Fowler?”

“I’m not here for conversation,” she said. It was clear that she was also trying to set the ground rules.

I took in a quick breath through my nostrils and rolled my shoulders forward.

“Fine,” I said. “Then you can either listen or walk away.”

I managed not to smile at her enraged stare.

“I almost died not too long ago, and for all I care I am dead. But in the life I lived before that, I have, for good and for bad, battled more men than I wish to remember. In the war I did it by rifle, pistol, bayonet, and hand-to-hand. With these hands,” I said, holding up my dark brown mitts, “I bettered men younger, larger, and stronger than me. I am no child, Nurse Fowler, no senile old man that you can fold into whatever position you want. I am a man sittin’ here, and I will not be disrespected by you or anyone else. So back the fuck up and do what I say or get your ass outta here.
Comprende?
”

Somewhere in the middle of that tirade Antigone Fowler saw something that she recognized. She was a tough woman—I could see that—and she was willing to tussle. But she could tell that there was no give in me either. She probably thought she would come out victorious if we struggled, but she heard my willingness to go down in the fight.

“What is it you want from me, Mr. Rawlins?”

While Antigone was upstairs taking care of the baby and doing whatever she had to do to prepare for an aware patient, I was involved with the monumental struggle of getting up out of the kitchen chair and then staggering to the section of wall next to the window that looked out on the pool. There was a baby blue wall phone there and a tall redwood stool, set in its own little corner, that I could prop myself on.

The phone number was a LUdlow exchange that I had been calling more than fifteen years. I could have dialed it in my sleep. I might have mumbled it in the grave.

“Hello?” a white man said, answering on the third ring.

“Peter?”

“Mr. Rawlins,” the proper young man said. “How are you, sir?”

“Pretty good, Mr. Rhone. How are you?”

“Just about the same, I guess. Mr. Alexander said that you had regained consciousness. Everyone here is very happy about that.”

Peter Rhone was a blond-haired, blue-eyed young man who, though he was married to a perfectly appropriate white wife, had fallen in love with a young black woman named Nola Payne. After Nola was murdered by a homicidal maniac during the Watts Riots of 1965, Peter suffered what can only be described as a dissolution of spirit. He left his wife and ended up living on the screened-in side porch of EttaMae Harris, one of my oldest friends and Raymond Alexander’s wife. Peter was serving some kind of self-imposed penance,
because he believed that he in some way shared the guilt for the racism and neglect that took his lover’s life.

I was never sure if Etta kept him around because she liked having a man Friday to help her with chores and duties when Mouse was off who knows where, or if she felt his pain and was trying to help the poor white boy get up on his feet again.

“Mouse around?” I asked.

“No. Would you like to speak to EttaMae?”

“I’d always like to jaw with Etta, but it’s Raymond that I need to speak to.”

“Um …”

“It’s important, Peter.”

“Okay,” he said, and then he whispered a number so softly that I had to ask him to repeat it—twice. I scrawled it down on a notepad that was on the counter under the phone.

I had to rest for a few minutes after the chat with Etta’s manservant. Sitting there I realized how lucky I was that Antigone didn’t decide to take up my gauntlet—she would have mopped the floor with me.

I tried the number that Peter gave. It rang a dozen times before someone answered.

“Yes?” She sounded put out by the intrusion.

“I’m lookin’ for Mouse.” I’m usually more civil. I use phrases like
excuse me
and
sorry to bother you
, but I just didn’t have the wherewithal to exhibit good manners.

“Who is this?” It was a white woman, I was almost sure. Maybe there was some kind of European accent.

“Ezekiel Rawlins,” I said. “Easy.”

“Why did you let the phone ring so many times?” she asked. “Don’t you understand that if no one comes on the first few rings, they might not want to be bothered?”

“Is Raymond there or not?” I had certainly abandoned all etiquette.

There was a sharp intake of angry breath in my ear and then the
banging of the receiver being thrown down. For a minute or two there was complete silence, and then came the sound of the angry woman ranting in the background.

“Hello?” Mouse said into the phone. “Who is this?”

“Me, Ray.”

“Easy.” I could almost hear his smile. Then, “Baby, baby, stop it. It’s my man Easy.… No, I don’t know why he’s callin’, but I do know we have to talk. So go make another drink and I’ll be right in.” Finishing with the woman’s anger, Mouse turned his words back to me. “What you need, Easy?”

“Did you come see me up in my room last night?” I asked.

“Sure did.”

“And there’s some woman named Timbale Noon who has a son named Evander who has gone missing?”

“I know you didn’t hit your head too hard, Easy, ’cause your memory is like a steel trap.”

“Okay. Now let me ask you something.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you have any kind of grudge against that woman or her son?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m not kiddin’ now, Ray. I will not help you on some vendetta.”

“Easy, you just saved my life from them police two months ago. Do you honestly think I would let a little revenge come between us?”

“So if I find this Evander it won’t get him into trouble?”

“What I want is to get him out of trouble. Scout’s honor.”

“When were you ever a scout?”

“I had me enough onetime Girl Scouts to be an honorary member.”

Mouse could always get me to smile.

“Okay, then,” I said, feeling a little stronger. “I’ll do it. Come on over here and pick me up.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“But, Easy, you done just got out the sickbed.”

“She can wait, Raymond. She sit on that passion a little bit and it might get better.”

Mouse snickered and said, “It might at that.”

I hung up the phone and stayed in place, leaning against the high stool. Antigone Fowler came in a few minutes later. She was surprised to see me standing almost upright. I got the feeling that she thought I might be asleep or at least a little more docile.

She walked up to me and wrinkled her nose.

“You need a bath,” she said.

“I’ll take a shower if you got one handy.”

I wanted a shower because I knew that after lying down in a warm tub I wouldn’t be able to get up again. We haggled a bit but I won the major points. Antigone told me that she wouldn’t be being responsible if she left a man in my weakened condition standing alone in a tile shower.

“If you fell and broke your neck that would be on me,” she said.

So we settled on me getting in the stall but leaving the door open for her to be there in case I slipped and fell.

I wasn’t shy about taking off my clothes. I had been naked in front of enough strangers in my life. In North Africa I’d take showers with up to two dozen men, jostling over the soap and spray.

One thing I noticed was a nine-inch gash going down the front of my left thigh. It was partly healed and scabbed over, but I could see that it was a vicious wound, a scar that I could have to recall an accident which I no longer clearly remembered.

The shower was going pretty well. We didn’t make the water too hot and so the spray refreshed me a little. Feeling the sourness wash away had a recuperative effect of its own. But we hadn’t taken into account my many weeks of enforced celibacy. I don’t think I could have managed a serious bout of kissing, but just a few minutes
of standing naked next to that stern but handsome woman got me harder than I had been in years.

She was fully dressed in her short-sleeved white nurse’s uniform, and about as erotic as a dead mackerel, but just her proximity had its impact on my long-dormant sexuality.

I didn’t feel excitement. The insistence of the erection embarrassed me, but that didn’t change a thing. I mean, I have never thought of myself as being exceptionally well-endowed, but it seemed like there were three of us in the bathroom—me, Nurse Fowler, and Hard John.

Antigone didn’t remark on my condition. She just stood there, reaching in now and then if I moved too quickly or bent at all. She stayed with me when I got out, even helped me to dry off. The only thing I wanted was for my adolescent hard-on to go down, but it refused even after I pulled on the pajamas.

“Would you like to go up to your bed now?” she asked when we came out of the small first-floor bathroom.

“I guess I better, huh?”

That was the only time Antigone gave up a little smile. She looked me in the eye and shook her head about all men.

Looking back on it now I can see how the blood pumping helped to revive me even more than the shower. It was as if my body was using its natural wiles to prepare me for the trials I had yet to face.

I was about to allow myself to be herded up to bed, in order to hide my shame, when the doorbell sounded.

“Who could that be?” Antigone said to herself.