Gone Fishin' (16 page)

I told her
to tell Mouse not to worry. I’d be there with a tux and a
smile. But I said that I couldn’t come to rehearsal because I
was still sick and there was a lot to prepare. We hugged and laughed
for the next hour. I felt closer to her as a friend than a lover.

After she
left I went down to the Jewish tailor on Claxton to rent a tuxedo.
Then I went to the train station to buy my ticket.

Late that
night I went to the bathroom down the hall and bathed and shaved and
got myself back together.

I slept
for twenty hours after that.

When I
woke up it was early evening. The sun was just down and people were
in the street. Some were sitting out in front of their houses and
others were wandering around; going to work or looking for a good
time. I broke out some cheese and chocolate and brought a chair to
the window. Watching them soothed me. People living their lives. I
believed that they all had secrets like mine but they kept on moving.

At about
midnight a fight broke out between two men who had been drinking
together on a stoop across the street. They’d been throwing
dice for an hour before one of them called the other one a liar.

I watched
them beat each other. I saw the short one pull out a knife. The fat
one grabbed at his chest and staggered down the street, one hand
clutching the wall. A woman was screaming and people ran around like
ants. I just watched it;

I knew
that my day would come and I was in no rush to get there.

That was
longest month of my life. Every minute stands out like an hour; every
hour stands out like a day. I met the strangest people and went to
places that I could never have imagined. I lost what a religious man
would call his soul.

Pariah is
gone.

Miss Dixon
died a month after Mouse was married and her relatives came down from
Chicago to split up the land. They levelled Pariah and moved all of
the people out of the area. They charged back rent on the land, so
everyone ran away; they didn’t have any money. Momma Jo and
Domaque and Ernestine disappeared too. They didn’t come to
Mouse’s wedding. I think that he didn’t want stories
about Reese’s death to be around when he had so much cash.

On that
Saturday every soul that I knew in Houston was at the biggest wedding
Victory Church ever had. There must have been two hundred people
there. Flattop and lips brought their band to play at the reception.
Little Red was there, and Jellyhead, with his greased-back and conked
hairdo. All of Mouse’s old girlfriends came; Etta’s
admirers were there with them.

It was
something else.

Etta and
Raymond walked up to the gazebo. The minister stood there waiting. A
breeze was blowing and the pastel silk flags that hung from the roof
of the gazebo waved like angels calling out the great day. There were
children who could barely hold in their excitement. The women were in
fine dress; all of them in tears. I wondered if they cried because
Mouse was going off the market or because they were so happy or
because they knew how hard Etta’s life would be with a man like
that. The bachelors were standing around snickering and wondering
what being married meant —not in much of a hurry to test it
out themselves.

The
minister asked his questions and the wind blew harder. I stood there
next to Raymond. He was sharp as a tack and so cool that you could
almost see the mist rising from him. His eye was certain. Etta was
beautiful at his side.

‘I
do,’ Mouse said.

And when
the question was asked of Etta she hesitated for just a second, less
than that. And I remembered those boys Mouse had told me about; the
ones that killed rats on the docks down in Galveston. I wondered how
well Etta would stand up to Mouse’s harsh life but I was still
happy for her. She was taking her chance and that’s all we can
do in this life.

The party
moved to the social club across the street. Flattop’s trio
played music of the modern age: jazz. And we danced and drank hard
until the milkman came to join us. Some people left the party to go
to morning service in the church.

Etta
kissed every man twice and Mouse got a chair and just watched her. He
was so calm and so happy that it was hard for me to remember him
desperate or mean.

‘Hey,
Easy,’ Otum Chenier said to me when the party had just begun.

‘Hiya,
Otum.’

‘Mouse
say you two took my car down to Pariah fo’a week.’

‘Uh…’
I didn’t know what to say.

‘He
give me the money.’ Otum opened up into a smile. ‘I guess
you did right, I mean I could use that twenty-five.’

He laughed and I did too.

‘How’s yo’ momma, Otum?’

‘You
know that’s what get me. Luanda got that call ‘bout Momma
but when I got down there they said they didn’t call. I had me
a good time though. You know what they got up here cain’t
compare to the food they got down there.’ He patted his solid
potbelly.

I said,
‘Drink up, Otum, whiskey gonna run all night.’

‘Yessir!’

The party
was right. People came from all over Fifth Ward and beyond. There
were churchgoers and gangsters, day labourers and cotton choppers
from the farm. There were Mouse’s best friends and people we
never knew who just heard about the party somewhere and came by to
help us celebrate.

‘…
an’ help themselves,’ Mouse said with a smile.

Everyone
said that it was the best party that they had ever been to; it was
even more than that for me.

I was
feeling romantic that night. It wasn’t that I was looking for a
woman; I had lost my wild passion for young girls after that night
with Jo. Jo showed me something about love. She showed me that I
didn’t know what it was… But I wasn’t feeling romantic
toward a woman; I felt that way about my life - the life I had lived
in Fifth Ward for years.

All of my
friends, and people who could have been my friends, were dancing and
drinking. Some of them were around Mouse, listening to his wild
stories. It was so beautiful but it was my last night there. It was
Mouse’s wedding party and it was my goodbye.

I couldn’t
live with those people anymore. They were living on the edge of
despair; like those two friends fighting on my street. I had the
image that we were all, all of us in Houston and Pariah, living
between Miss Dixon and Mouse. It was a deadly line we had to walk and
the only thing that kept us going was some kind of faith. Either you
believed in God or family or love. I didn’t believe in any of
those things anymore. Maybe I never had.

So I had a
ticket for Dallas, Texas, and a hundred dollars in my pocket. I was
as happy as I could be at that party because I felt safe. I felt
safer with that ticket in my pocket than I would have felt with a
gun.

They
couldn’t hurt me anymore. Mouse couldn’t come banging on
my door in the middle of the night. Married women and old witches
couldn’t seduce me on dirt floors.

I needed a
place where life was a little easier and where nobody knew me. I knew
that if I could be alone I could make it. All the people around me
dancing, having a good time; they were just holding me back, wanting
me to be the same old poor Easy — not a nickel in my pocket or
a dream in my head.

I didn’t
have a thing, just like everybody around me; all the money I had was
in my pocket and all the clothes I had were on my back. That’s
how life was back then. You couldn’t hold me responsible for
anything because I didn’t have anything. And, realising that,
it was time for me to go.

‘Hey, Easy.’ Mouse strolled up, pleased as he could be.

‘Sumpin’ else, man.’

‘Ain’t it.’ He flashed a smile. ‘I’m
really happy you stood by me, Ease.’

‘I wou’n’ta missed it, Raymond.’

We shook hands.

‘I’ma
take me a little trip after the weddin’,’ I said. ‘Gonna
see what it’s like back east.’

‘Uh-huh.’
He watched me closely. ‘You think they got sumpin’ out
there you want?’

‘We’ll
see.’ I was looking him directly in the eye.

‘You
take care, Easy,’ he said. Those were the last words we spoke.

Texas by
train is a real desert. They have miles of flat gray stone and
tumbleweeds blowing and plenty of nothing.

I watched
the desolate earth through my reflection in the window with a deep
feeling inside me. I was the only one who cared about my leaving. No
mother or father to wonder where I was. I could be dead; Mouse could
have shot me for refusing his gift and who would have known? He would
come back to Houston and Etta would ask him, ‘Where’s
Easy, baby?’ and he would answer, ‘Easy say he gone up to
California, babe.’ And that would be it. I’d just be a
corpse mouldering under some bridge or an ornament on Jo’s
mantel.

Poor men
like me are no more than a pair of hands to work, if there’s
work to be had.

The train
was loaded with people. All those Texans headed north. The only car
with room to stretch out in was the colored car in back. There was
just a few of us.

Sitting
across from me in the almost empty car was an elderly couple from
Galveston. He had a bent back from working around the docks for so
many years and she had the peaceful face of a woman who is most at
home in church.

They were
quiet and well dressed, though I suspected that the clothes they wore
were their only good clothes. He was very black and thin. She was the
color of light sand. Her head and shoulders were small but the rest
of her body blossomed out into a bulb of a body.

I didn’t
talk to them much at first; I was too busy feeling the sweet pain of
leaving. But I looked past them at the door to the car once when a
porter came in to sit down and smoke a cigarette. She caught my eye
then.

Her name
was Clementine and her husband’s was Theodore. Russell was
their last name.

‘We
goin t’live with our son in California,’ she said, and he
smiled.

‘What’s
his name?’

‘John
Alvin is what we called him. He has three brothers and a sister, but
she died last spring.’

‘I’m
sorry to hear it.’

‘It
was terrible. Her husband passed just three months before, it was
that influenza. Cut young people down like wheat.’

Mr.
Russell said, ‘It was a shame but John Alvin took his niece and
nephew an’ now he sent us a ticket.’ He smiled, showing
me at least three missing teeth. ‘Yeah, he’s some boy.’

‘Sounds
like it,’ I said. ‘What is it he works at?’

‘They
let him be a machinist at the Arthur airplane factory out there. They
need smart boys in them places. You should meet John Alvin, I bet he
could help you find some work too.’

California
was a little too far away for me then. At least I had heard of people
going to Dallas. No. California would have to wait.

I saw
three people die the first week I was in Dallas; two car accidents
and a heart attack. I didn’t get a good job but I got gardening
work. I learned how to read just about well enough that when Uncle
Sam called on me he put me in a tent with a typewriter, with a rifle
under my desk.

But
through all of that I dreamt about Reese and Clifton almost every
week. They were always covered with blood, gasping as if they were
just about to die. But they didn’t die. They grabbed at Mouse’s
cuffs while he was sitting in a big chair counting out my three
hundred dollars.

‘I
don’t know what you worried ‘bout, Ease,’ he said
as he rubbed a blister of blood with the corner of a five-dollar
bill. ‘You ain’t done nuthin’, man.’

Now I’ve
been through a world war and I’m on my way back home. They’ve
given us three weeks R&R in Paris. I’ve got a room at the
Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail. This hotel was recently
vacated by the Gestapo and now houses our military elite. I got a
room here because I saved a white major’s ass in the front
lines and so he thinks I’m a hero.

I got
tired of all the white soldiers calling me a coward for working
behind the lines. So when the call came up for any soldier, black or
white, to volunteer for Patron’s push I raised my hand. Maybe I
thought I could make up for my failure in Pariah.

But being
a white man’s hero doesn’t make any difference to me.
Maybe that’s why I’ve spent the last two weeks
remembering what happened in Pariah, and looking at the Eiffel Tower,
rather than thinking about this white man’s war.

Maybe, if
I have a son one day, and he asks me about the war, I’ll tell
him about the time I had in Pariah. I’ll tell him that that was
my real war.

When they
asked me where home was I said Houston. It wasn’t until that
night, hours after I was asleep, that I realised I had bought a
ticket back to Etta and Raymond and everything I had left behind.

But it
didn’t bother me. There were gangs of white American soldiers
roaming the streets, killing solitary black enlisted men. There were
gangs of black soldiers getting their revenge.

All over
Paris there were thieves, escaping Nazis, and loaded guns in hungry
men’s’ hands. I had a transport ship to survive and
America yet to see again. Every step could mean death to a black man
like me.

Why worry
about the destination when the road is full of vipers? Mouse is
probably dead by now anyway. How could a man so violent and reckless
survive? And if he has endured, then married life has changed him.
Maybe he’s fat now, working as a cook in some hotel.

There’s
no way for me to tell the future from this room in Paris. All I can
do is follow my footsteps, not at all like my father, and go back
home.