Little Green (9 page)

“Easy,” she said, and I looked up.

We sat there for an interminable period, passing breath and feeling
between us. My hands began to sweat and that was just another form of communication.

After a long time Jo blinked twice and let me go.

“It’s like you was dead out there in them bushes, Easy,” she said.

I nodded and sighed.

“You were down there in the pit and it was Raymond’s love that dragged you out. You two is just like chirren on a seesaw. One’a you is up and the other one down. That’s how it goes.”

I grinned but had no words to say.

“Man is a animal, Easy,” Jo continued on her impromptu and yet ready sermon. “Bobcat can have the biggest fight of his life on a Tuesday noon. And win or lose, either way, on Wednesday, if he still alive, he’ll need water and meat to survive.

“It’s a good thing that you run up off’a that cliff. A good thing. Because when you hit the bottom there is only one place left for you to go. You know that, don’t ya?”

“I don’t know a goddamned thing, Jo,” I said, unable to keep my anger in check. “Not a fuckin’ thing.”

“You know you tried to kill yourself and that Death threw you back. He held you in his hand a minute and then said, ‘Maybe.’ ”

I laughed deeply in spite of the pains in my chest and back. The idea of the Absolute looking at life and tossing it aside sounded so right that it was almost unbearable.

“I’m lookin’ for somebody for Raymond,” I said when the laughter subsided. “Evander Noon.”

“That’s just the seesaw action,” Jo replied. “You lookin’ for yourself.”

“I’m not sure if it’s for Evander or me,” I said, knowing that there was no arguing metaphysics with her. “All I do know is that I walked a block and a half yesterday and nearly collapsed. And here I got miles up ahead of me.”

“And that’s why you come here?”

“You gave Mouse this little vial for hangovers,” I said.

“Hangovah ain’t like dyin’,” she replied. “That’s just a little pick-me-up after a night out.”

“You got somethin’ stronger?” I asked.

“There’s health in your body, sugah, and death in your soul. I can give ya somethin’ help to see you through this thing, but I can’t tell whether you gonna come back alive or not.”

“All I know is if I stop right now I will be dead in a week. I know it.”

Jo’s hard black face cracked into a girlish grin.

“I knew when you was just a teenager that you were gonna be one helluva man, Mr. Rawlins. You look at the world and see what’s there. You know there ain’t one person outta three hundred could lay claim to half’a that.”

Jo got up and turned around to reach for something on a high shelf above the long and deep worktable. I had been looking almost only into her eyes since entering the cottage—either that or her workwoman’s feet and near-feral pets. Jo had the kind of will that kept you engaged. But when she turned I noted that she was wearing an almost festive yellow dress that came down to the middle of her calves. She had dressed for company. She had dressed for me.

“Here we go,” she said.

She handed me a wooden crate divided into eight three-inch-square sections. In each slatted section was nestled a little green bottle—all of them stoppered with hand-cut cork plugs. The liquid inside the bottles was dark and thick.

“I call this here Gator’s Blood,” Jo said as she regained her seat. “That there is some powerful juju. You take yourself a nap and then if you feelin’ weak you drink down one bottle. After that you’ll be good to go for whatever time your condition will allow. When you get tired again don’t take another bottle until you done falled asleep and woke up naturally. It’s some powerful shit, Easy, so don’t think you can break them rules.… But if you do what I say, not only will this medicine give you strength but it will help you heal.”

“This is great, Jo,” I said, “just what I wanted. I was wonderin’ if you had some tar balls too?”

“What for?”

“I don’t have any trouble falling asleep, but the dreams I’ve been
having are sometimes too strong. And if I remember right, those tar balls cut down the strength of dreams.”

“They up on the shelf. But lemme make you some tea right now. I think that would be the right thing.”

Jo sat me on her hemp-padded sleeping cot and pulled the chair I’d been sitting in up next to it. She served me a sour-smelling sweet-tasting tea in an earthenware cup that might have been a century old. I took a sip and yawned.

“It’s good to see you, Easy,” Jo whispered.

“It’s good to be here.”

I took another sip and my eyes felt like they needed to close.

“You can’t fight with Death,” she said. “All you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don’t fall out from under you.”

“Can you get word to Juice and Feather that I’m here and that I’m all right?” I said as she took the cup from my hand.

“I’ll tell ’em that you’re here,” she said, and I fell on my side, sleep coming up around me like high tide.

I came awake alone in Jo’s Compton cottage. She was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t know if it was day or night, because Jo’s place had no windows and it was always lit by oil lanterns and candles. Breezes came through the walls and ceilings to ventilate the place, but I never knew how this process was achieved.

On the worktable there was a plate of food under a flat-topped crystal cover. Standing on this glass protector stood a cat that had pointed ears like a lynx but weighed no more than five or six pounds. The feline hissed at me and I laughed.

I really enjoyed the soul food repast: pig tails, dirty rice, and collard greens cooked with ham hocks and finished with white vinegar. My stomach hardly complained. There was a cola bottle with a bottle opener next to the plate. Next to the meal sat the wooden tray of Gator’s Blood bottles with five rice paper–wrapped lumps, which looked like tar balls, wedged in between them.

I took one of the bottles, teased out the cork plug, and drank the contents, five or six ounces, in one draft. The concoction tasted like equal parts hard cider and swamp mud. The medicine was astringent against my tongue and throat. It felt like acid burning away the lining down to my stomach. This burning, which was at first painful, quickly spread through my chest, out along my arms, and finally up into my head. I broke out into a sweat and stood up because I had to.

I rose to my full height in the middle of Jo’s place shivering, witnessed by the avian, feline, and rodent roommates of the absent Southern witch. The heat in my chest turned to hilarity and the
being in my soul was momentarily transformed into a hyena when the moon is full and the hunt is on.

After thirty minutes or so I was feeling better than I had in years. It was nighttime outside. There was a warm breeze blowing and the sky was both clear and black, except for a few stars.

I put the remaining Gator’s Blood bottles and tar balls in the trunk of the red Barracuda and then attended to the sky for a minute or two more.

I drove until coming to a World gas station, where I used the pay phone to call the Bel-Air house.

“Hello?” Feather answered.

“Hey, baby girl.”

“Daddy?”

“How are you?” I asked my daughter.

“Fine. Mama Jo called and said that you were taking a nap at her house. Are you okay?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Why? Because you had that accident. You just got out of the bed yesterday morning.”

It hadn’t yet been two days, but it felt like there were months between me and the partial coma.

“I’m going up to the Sunset Strip to do something for Uncle Ray,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. Jo gave me some of her special medicine and I’m as strong as a bull.”

“You sound funny, Daddy.”

“That’s the medicine working. It makes me feel good.”

“You should come home,” Feather said.

“And I will just as soon as I finish this job for Ray. Don’t worry, Feather; I will come back to you and I will answer every question you have about where you came from before you came to us.”

After that I jumped into the borrowed car and blazed my way toward the future.

L.A. at night, back in the sixties, was a wonderful place to drive. There were lots of people but it wasn’t overcrowded. The avenues and boulevards were wide and open to free-flowing traffic. I felt great with Jo’s concoction in my system and the desert wind coming in through the windows. The Temptations were singing “My Girl” on the radio, and people seemed happy and alive in their cars.

I wore Death on my shoulders like a superhero’s cape, but that didn’t matter. I was going to fight the good fight and, win or lose, I’d be counted as a man who struggled against his own fate.

I parked on San Vicente, five or six blocks down from the Strip, and walked from there because my legs needed stretching. The energy thrumming in my body had to be burned off some before I started talking to people about Evander “Little Green” Noon. In the state I was in I might have started off by yelling and grabbing strangers by their lapels.

Just down from the corner of San Vicente and Sunset there was a small liquor store done up in yellow plaster and red neon. When I walked in the diminutive white clerk stuck his hand down under the counter. I had the pistol in my belt, but the few blocks of fast walking saved that man from getting his face perforated.

Lifting my hands to shoulder level I said, “Just here for a carton of Camels, my man. I already done robbed my quota of liquor stores this month.”

There were three men and one woman customer in the place, wandering up and down the aisles looking for potato chips, candy, and other sundries that California liquor stores sold. They looked at me oddly, wondering.

The little clerk frowned, which struck me as funny, because he had very thick and black eyebrows like Groucho. His right hand was still out of sight. I suppose that even a Marx Brother didn’t get every joke. No one else in the store was laughing, so I allowed my own smile to fade.

“Look, man,” I said. “I’m gonna put my hand in my back pocket and come out with a wallet. I’m gonna take five dollars from that and put it down in front of you. Then you’re gonna give me a carton of Camels in one’a those long paper bags you got on the shelf next to that gun you’re holding.…”

“I don’t have Camels in cartons,” he said. It was almost a plea.

“Lucky Strikes?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got them in cartons.”

“I’m easy,” I said.

It still took a moment for the clerk to move to my demands. He was so scared that he trembled a bit.

That’s what the Watts Riots did for L.A. For the first time West Coast Caucasians were frightened of almost any black face that loomed before them. We had proved that we were willing to fight, but most white people didn’t understand our complaints and so were afraid of almost anything we did.

Armed with my bag of two hundred cigarettes I made my way west on Sunset.

It was about ten p.m. and the sidewalks were crowded with literally thousands of long-haired, barefoot, dope-smoking, acid-tripping, free-loving hippies. There were rock clubs and head shops, Hare Krishnas chanting joyously, and a whole host of policemen in
uniform and not. You could identify the plainclothes cops by their leather shoes and the telltale creases in their trousers.

The hippies were not just white people either. They made up a rainbow of black, white, brown, yellow, and red. There were runaways, throwaways, and some no-way-at-all youngsters traveling in the company of older hipsters. They were talking mind-altering chemistry, philosophy, music, and religion. They carried guitars, harmonicas, and, hidden in their pockets, homemade pipes constructed of anything from durable aluminum foil to fragile handblown glass.

Music blared from clubs like Whiskey a Go Go and also from passing automobiles. One young black man who wore farmer’s jeans and a shirt made from chains carried a huge radio on his shoulder playing the Chambers Brothers.

I felt at home for the first time since regaining consciousness. This was like a primal purgatory where transient human spirits stopped to party until the final decision was laid upon their brows. I was just another soul passing through, making believe that the illusion of my life had substance.

I handed out cigarettes and showed Evander’s graduation photograph to anyone who’d talk to me: longhairs, militants, and lay monks of many stripes.

“His mother just wants to know if he’s alive,” I’d say, or, “Want a cigarette? I’m looking for somebody,” or, “He’s my brother and he’s got an asthma condition.”

I’d handed out over half of my supply of cigarettes and got nothing but shrugs, frowns, and maybes. But that didn’t stop me.

I even asked a policeman. I figured if something happened to Evander, maybe an official would know.

“Haven’t seen him,” the rangy cop said. He was studying me closely. “Your son?”

“My friend’s boy. He’s down lookin’ for him at the beach.”

At the corner of Doheny and Sunset I saw a pretty blond teenager and three young longhairs talking. I was on the job, so I stopped to jaw with them.

“You want some cigarettes?” I asked.