Rose Gold (33 page)

It occurred to me that my debts had no dollar signs attached to them. This thought brought a grin to my lips.

Half an hour later I was sitting in my office chair, reviewing the harvest of my labors.

It was my self-imposed purpose to salvage as much of Uhuru-Bob’s life as I could. I liked the young has-been boxer simply because I understood him. He was a fool and a genius in his own way. If he was born another color he might have been recognized as something special.

It might have been my purpose to protect Bob but my first priority was to help Rosemary Goldsmith. This wasn’t because I was being paid to save her; money helped but I never worried too much about where it was coming from. No, money wasn’t the reason that Rosemary’s predicament took precedence in my work. If the white girl was to go down, then Bob would too—that’s just the way things happened. Innocence was rarely a key factor for justice in the world Bob and I inhabited.

It was a mistake to be sitting alone and thinking about the unfairness that defined my world. The only thing that would come from that line of thought was unbidden rage. And anger at injustice was the last thing I needed in my heart.

But there I was—smoking and infuriated. Why couldn’t I just walk into Chief Parker’s office and tell him that there was a conspiracy, conscious or not, against a poor black man who liked to pretend? Why couldn’t the truth be enough to keep a mostly innocent man from getting shot down in the street?

Try as I might, I couldn’t get the burr of anger out of my heart. I had a job to do but I had to quell the rage inside me.

That’s when Fate came knocking on my door.

I put my right hand on the pistol attached by wires underneath my desk and called out, “Door’s open.”

Percy Bidwell in all his coiffed glory came in wearing a gold iridescent two-piece suit. His shirt was a pale blue and the jacket had only one button.

I hated him on sight but that’s not saying much; I would have hated Black Jesus if he crossed my path just then.

The young man walked right up to my desk and looked down on me.

“Mr. Bidwell,” I hailed in false greeting.

“Call Jewelle.”

I released the pistol, sat back, then stood and came around the desk to face him.

“Say what, young man?”

“I told you to call Jewelle.”

“And why would I want to do that?” Every slight, every insult, every affront to me and all of my ancestors and his were roiling in my breast.

“Because I said so,” Percy said.

Then there came a lull in my rage. This was a bad sign, I knew, but I was beyond instructive experience at that moment.

“She told me to tell you to call her,” Percy said, somehow intuiting that his up-front approach had failed in its purpose.

“Now let me get this right,” I said, almost feeling the calmness my voice exuded. “You gonna fuck my good friend’s wife, bully her to try
and bully me, then you gonna walk in my door and order me to call her. Not ask but command me.”

“That baby—” he managed to say before I hit him with a medium-hard straight right hand.

His head bounced back but he wasn’t hurt or even pushed off-balance.

He threw a left hook over my extended arm and so I lowered on my haunches and came up with both fists against his chin. This moved him half a step backward. I thought that I had hurt him but he was just bracing for his next attack, which was his right fist against my chest.

Who would have ever expected that a man named Percy Bidwell with a beauty shop hairdo would be made from stone? The punch knocked the wind from my lungs and I would have hit the floor if the wall hadn’t been there to keep me from falling.

My eyes opened wide and a wolfish grin came to my lips. When Percy bum-rushed me I tilted to the side and slammed him in the left ear with my right hand. In response he threw a right hook that only managed to numb my shoulder. I lowered my head and butted him in the jaw, then stood up and hit him flush three times.

If he felt any of it you couldn’t tell by his actions.

Arms out wide, he moved to put me in a bear hug but I pushed against his shoulders trying to shove him away. He was too powerful to be moved but I was thrown back and out of reach.

Unafraid that I might hurt him, I kicked Bidwell in the midsection. He buckled six inches, no more, so I hit him twice in the nose.

I felt something snap and blood gushed forth from the fop’s nostrils.

Percy brought his hand to his nose and then looked at it—his fingers were dripping with blood. Rage and childish fear came over his face. He was a powerhouse but untrained in the ways of battle and the self-control needed to overcome pain. So I picked up my least favorite visitor’s chair and hit him for all I was worth.

The chair shattered. Percy finally went down; not all the way but to one knee. I used the wooden leg left in my hand to hit him on the head, then I hit him again. He was sitting by then but still trying to rise.

That’s when common sense took hold and I went around the desk to take the pistol from its nest.

When Percy saw the gun he put up his hands. There was blood coming from his nose and also from the two places I had hit his skull.

“You got a hard head, Percy Bidwell,” I said. “I hope it’s not dense too. Because I wanna tell you that the only way you gonna live to enjoy that college degree is to leave Jewelle and Jackson alone. If I evah hear that you did anything to make them unhappy I will kill you. And if I don’t get to you I’ll make sure my friend Raymond Alexander does.”

“I just—” he said.

“Don’t talk, man. Don’t say a mothahfuckin’ thing. Just get your ass up and outta here. Don’t go back to Jewelle’s office and don’t talk to her. Change your phone number and forget you ever heard about any’a us.”

I pulled back the hammer of the .45-caliber pistol.

Percy rose up on his feet weightlessly, as if a higher force had reached down and grabbed him by the shoulders. He stumbled out of the door trying to stanch the bleeding with his hands.

Three or four minutes after he was gone, still standing there with the cocked pistol in my hand, I exhaled and realized that the rage I’d felt had evaporated.

Sitting on a pine bench at the edge of Belvedere Park in East Los Angeles, I considered the unexpected blessing of Percy Bidwell. If he hadn’t come to me when he did I might have gone off into the world blinded by anger at things I would never control.

I had picked a fight with a man who could have easily killed me with his bare hands. I fought that man and, impossibly, I won. As a youth I might have felt victorious, but nearing fifty I knew that it was just dumb luck that saved my life.

I had been sitting in the park for nearly two hours; long enough for the feeling to return to my left arm—that and the dull ache of wisdom.

The common was filled with brownish people, most of whom had hailed from Mexico or were born to parents that came from there. They spoke Spanish and English with deep accents. From little children to old men, the park was lively. There was the smell of chlorine in the air from the public pool. Young mothers and their babies, silent men and their hefty wives, meandered through the barrio common. They were every color from red to bronze to brown; Indian and Negro mixtures of ancestors who had been raped and plundered by Spanish conquistadors and then left to work the land; the legacy of ancient empires.

I was eating a novelty ice-cream sugar cone that was first dipped in chocolate and then in crushed peanuts. Across from me was a fancy merry-go-round with yellow and brown and red horses prancing in a circle to the upbeat tune of canned calliope music. It was the only carousel of its type in L.A. that I knew of.

I was armed but didn’t need to be. After Percy, I had no intention of getting into another battle. It was late afternoon and I was happy watching the groups of pretty young girls and the boys who pretended not to be watching them.

The barrio was a good place for a crook to hide. Your color hardly mattered there and no one wanted to have undue contact with the authorities. Just pay your rent in cash, speak a few words in Spanish, and remember to keep your head down, and you could go unnoticed for years.

I saw her bandaged hand first. The dressing was white but there was a spot of red on the outside edge of the left palm. She wore a blue-gray shift that hid what little figure she had. Her shoes were yellow rubber flip-flops. Next to her was a tall sand-colored man wearing dark sunglasses and a sleek straw hat. His square-cut shirt was dark navy, his trousers black. There was a big straw purse hanging from her right shoulder and her blond hair was limp and greasy.

Rose had lost a few pounds since the photograph in my pocket was taken. But it was her. She was no longer smiling. Rose’s somber gaze seemed to be turned inward while the man next to her kept looking from side to side.

When they were half the way across the two-block-wide green I got up and wandered in their general direction. They seemed to be alone but I wasn’t taking any chances.

On the other side of the park they were accosted by a rotund honey-colored man carrying a fanciful box draped with Mexican flags and filled with pink and blue cotton candy in clear plastic pouches. He smiled and said something in Spanish. Rose suddenly came to life, chattering with the man and buying one of his flags.

I walked past the couple, considering for a moment a confrontation.

I had a gun and the element of surprise. I could have ended the whole problem with a few quick movements. I might have tried, if not for the blessing of Percy Bidwell. Delbert and Rose probably had guns too. And they were desperate, both of them dialed directly into survival mode.

I reached the pavement and turned right to walk down the crowded sidewalk. Seven steps away there was a man with a Polaroid camera offering to take photographs of babies and lovers for a dollar a shot. A smiling mustachioed man holding a crying infant was posing for the lay photographer. I stopped to watch the spectacle and saw through the corner of my eye Rose and Delbert walk across the street and up the stairs of a big wooden house that was flush up against the opposite sidewalk.

“Smile!” was the only English word the photographer spoke.

I looked up to set in my mind the house that the couple was entering.

At just that moment Most Grand took off his dark glasses and swiveled his gaze in my direction.

Our eyes met for only a moment but that was enough for him, maybe, to have marked me. I turned away and by the time I looked back the revolutionaries were walking through the door of the two-story house.

I went down to the end of the block. From there I could watch the front of the rebel hideout and make a call from a corner phone booth.

Because Delbert might have seen and suspected me I couldn’t leave the scene. If they were paranoid they might pack up and leave. If that happened, either I would have to try to stop them or, more likely, search their place for clues to their next destination.

I thought about calling the police, the FBI, and the State Department in turns. But not one of them was worried about the outcome for Bob. And Bob, after all, was the only one I really cared about.

“Goldsmith residence,” a young woman said after the Dumbarton operator connected me to the presidential suite.

“Redbird please.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” he said, coming onto the line a minute or two later.

“You got a car don’t stand out like a sore thumb?”

For the next hour or so I moved around the park and up and down 1st Street, keeping an eye on the hideout. In that time I marked eight
people coming in and out, including Rose and Delbert. There were two black men, one Asian woman, and three white men all thirty years old or younger except for high-yellow Delbert. He was nearer forty but hale.

Only two, the Asian woman and one of the white guys, actually left the premises. The others sat out on the porch smoking and talking—there was no drinking that I saw.

Redbird and I had made our rendezvous point the corner phone booth at six. He wore faded jeans and a red and black shirt that was long-sleeved wool.

Walking through the park I pointed out the house and related the intelligence I’d gathered.

“We can’t tell the police,” Redbird said after I laid out the situation. “They’d probably just come in with guns blazing. Rosemary might get killed.”

“And you care about her?” I asked.

“I owe her mother.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about Bob. “I guess we all owe somebody something.”

“The ransom payoff is tonight.”

“Where?”

“Crispin couldn’t get the details,” Redbird said. “Goldsmith is making the drop personally. This is our best bet right here.”

“Eight armed and dangerous revolutionaries and us,” I said.

Redbird’s grin had no humor to it.

“Among my people,” he said, “before the Spanish came, if a young man wanted to be a chief he had to hunt and kill a bear armed only with two stones and a flint knife.”

“That ain’t nuthin’. In my neighborhood we got to get through worse than that just walkin’ down the street in the mornin’.”

Redbird and I argued strategies on a park bench not far from the carousel. The sun had set but the sky was still light and there was a mariachi band playing somewhere close by. The park was even more alive and, if I closed my eyes, I had the feeling that I’d left white, European, and English America behind.

“We can take them by ourselves,” Redbird said after ten minutes and no détente in sight.

“That’s not the question, Teh-ha,” I said.

“No? Then what?”

“The question is, can you take them by yourself?”

Redbird was a country unto himself; an independent nation that would fight to the death for the sanctity of its sovereignty. He would have let me walk away if he wasn’t in a war to save the daughter of a woman, a vestige of his prior colonization, who had to be appeased for an obscure article in some ancient treaty, written in a dead language.

“Can you trust these friends of yours?” Redbird asked me, his necessary ally.