Little Green (16 page)

It was not yet ten p.m. when we reached Terry’s Hollywood mansion. Coco, Evander, and I had said fewer than a dozen words on the long drive. I was exhausted but not as depleted as I had been the day before. Evander was in a nightmare that he could not decipher. And Coco had met her first muse, a black witch-woman from a place most men had never even dreamed of.

Coco climbed out from the backseat, came around to the driver’s window, and kissed me on the lips.

“Maybe not all men are so bad,” she said.

“It took Jo sayin’ it to make you know it.”

“She’s an amazing woman.”

“It’s an amazing world out there if you give it half a chance.”

I watched Coco until she was in the front door and then I went around the driveway back to the street.

Three blocks away I started talking.

“A man named Raymond Alexander hired me to go to your mother and ask her if she wanted me to go looking for you.”

“That can’t be,” he said definitively.

“What? You don’t think your mother would send a stranger out looking for you?”

“I don’t think she’d talk to you if you came from Mr. Alexander.”

“Why not?”

“When I was a kid,” he said, “maybe ten or so, it was my birthday and I was playin’ in the front yard. This fancy man came up and gave me a toy pistol that made a sound like a ricochet. He patted my head and called me Little Green. I asked him who he was and he said Ray Alexander. And when I went back to the house Mama threw away my toy and then that night she called somebody on the phone and started cursin’ at him. I never heard my mother curse before or since.

“But the funny thing is that she gets these envelopes once a month
with money in ’em. One time she threw one away and the return address had the name Alexander written on it.”

I pulled to the curb near La Cienega and Pico. It was a few minutes before eleven.

“Evander.”

“Yes, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I don’t know what it is between Raymond and your mother, but she did tell me about your call from the Strip, and she gave me this picture to help look for you.”

He took the graduation photo, looked at it, and then handed it back.

“I live about three blocks away from your house. I can either take you home the way you are or you can come to my house and get yourself a little more together to keep Timbale from distress. I mean, Jo has tended to your bruises and burns, but you need maybe a day for the swelling on your face to go down.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to your house.”

“Raymond might be there.”

“Good.”

The porch light was shining above my front door.

I wasn’t exactly surprised to see an ounce or so of what looked like partially dried blood on the top stair of the entrance to my house. There wasn’t enough to assume that someone had died, at least not then and there. The dollop had a bright red eye at the very center and had dried to black around the edges.

I was confounded when my key didn’t fit the lock. For a moment I wondered if, in my tired state, I had come to the wrong house. But then Martin Martins came to mind. He must have changed the locks as he promised to do. I reached up into the brass lanternlike light fixture above the door and found the right key. It was silver and quite long. I used the new key and pushed the door open, going in before Evander. On the first step into the house a man rushed out from the kitchen. He was a crazy-looking gray-brown Negro with dark topaz eyes and curly, not kinky hair. Only five-ten and a hundred and seventy tops, he had huge fists that rivaled those of Sonny Liston.

“Niggah …” he said, as if I had somehow insulted him. “What you doin’ in my house?”

The third man to call me nigger in less than twenty-four hours, but this was a black man and the term, though not friendly, wasn’t actually disparaging either.

“Your house?” Another squatter? Was that Raymond’s blood on the porch? Had the previous trespasser hired this guy to push me out?

“What is it, Mr. Rawlins?” Evander asked from behind me.

I didn’t need Gator’s Blood to push my mind into coming up with an immediate plan that included the intruder and my young guest.

The strategy was simple: I’d stammer something unintelligible and vaguely apologetic, back out of the door as if retreating, pushing Evander as I went. The angry man would follow me, feeling that he had the upper hand. While moving I’d pull out my pistol. He’d be halfway out the front door when I shot him—first in the knee and then, if he reached for a weapon, somewhere in the head.

I wasn’t worried about the police. Even a black man could protect his home from intruders—if those intruders were also black.

“S-s-s-sorry,” I stuttered.

My back pressed Evander off the front steps.

“Where you think you goin’?” the home invader said in the same insulted tone.

“Mister!” another voice yelled from somewhere in the house.

Mouse came out from the hall that led to our bedrooms.

The gray-brown Negro hesitated.

“Ray?” I said, coming back into the house.

Mouse was wearing a loose-fitting royal blue shirt and red-brown silk pants. He had on black shoes that looked like shiny bullets. His expression was casual; he looked unconcerned about the violence about to blossom in front of him.

As I came in Evander followed. When Mouse saw the young man his expression changed. There was a new emotion in his gaze. A look I had never seen in my friend’s mien.

“You go on, Mister,” Raymond said to the madman. “This here’s Easy Rawlins. This his house.”

“He the one gonna pay me?” Mister said, every bit as angry and outraged as when he thought I was an intruder.

“Go on, man,” Raymond said. “I’ll drop by in the morning and settle up.”

“Why not right now?”

Mouse turned his head to look at his temporary henchman, and the aggression drained right out of the man named Mister’s bearing.

“I ain’t gonna tell you again,” Mouse said. “Go on now. I’ll give you your money tomorrow.”

Mister hesitated maybe two seconds, then ducked his head and brushed past me and Evander without another word.

“Some niggahs just don’t know how to act,” Mouse said as he closed the door behind the disgruntled Mister.

Ray parted the closed drapes and watched the nighttime street until we heard an engine turn over and a car drive off.

Ray then turned to Evander and said, “Boy, you look like you been through a meat grinder.”

“Why is there blood on my front porch, Ray?”

“Jeffrey come back with these two fat dudes this evenin’. I figured he might. You need somethin’ to drink, Evander?”

“No, I-I mean, no, thank you.”

“Have a seat, boy,” Ray said.

The boy sat on the sofa and Mouse perched next to him.

I took the chair and said, “The blood on my porch?”

“I figure you was helpin’ me, and so I aksed Mister to come play some penny-ante blackjack while we waited to see if Jeffrey needed some more explainin’.

“First Martin Martins come by to put up bars and new locks on the doors and windows. He had a helper and they did the job in under three hours. You know, I like Martin. The way his mind works is a mystery to me.

“Then later on Jeffrey come up with these two fat dudes. I stabbed one’a them in the leg and Mister used his big fists on the other guy. They lit out. Pretty sure they ain’t comin’ back.”

Raymond shrugged and gave me his innocent look.

“How you doin’, Li’l Green?” he asked Evander.

“I’m okay. I’m all right.” Just then the boy flinched and jerked his head to see what might be happening in the corner.

“You want a beer?” Mouse asked.

“Okay.”

Ray got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with three bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“So what happened to your face?” Raymond asked Evander.

“He was tied to a tree by a gang of dope-smugglin’ hippies and they were torturing him,” I said.

Raymond stood up and I held out a hand.

“Sit down, Ray. This isn’t any simple thing here.”

“No?”

“Evander,” I said.

“Yeah?” He was still glancing into the empty corner as if some threat were crouching there.

“Why did those men have you tied to that tree?”

“They wanted the money.”

“What money?”

Mouse sat down again.

“The money that was in the bed next to me at the Flamingo Motel on Hollywood Boulevard when I woke up.”

“Was there anybody else there?”

“No. But there was a lotta blood and I wasn’t hurt yet.”

“And where’s the money now?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you leave it in the motel?”

“I don’t think so. But I don’t remember too much after that acid trip.”

“Acid?” Mouse said. “Why the fuck you wanna fool around with that shit?”

“I met this girl named Ruby. She just put it on my tongue … with hers. And I swallowed it. After that I only remember things here and there. I was in this place and there was a naked woman on a couch smiling at me. And then there was this guy dressed all in green.”

“Maurice?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said in revelation. “That was his name. Me and him drove off in his convertible Cadillac and we went … we went … to do something. At least, I think that was with him.”

“And then you woke up in a motel with money,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

“How much money?”

“A whole helluva lot. I mean, it was hundred-dollar bills and fifties and everything. It was a whole lot.”

“And you don’t remember anything else?”

“There was a fight and people were yellin’ and I think somebody got shot … maybe more than one person did.”

I looked over at Raymond. He was taking the ad hoc deposition very seriously.

“Are you my father?” Evander asked Mouse.

“No. I am not your father.”

“Do you know who my father is?”

“Yes. I do know. Hasn’t your mother ever told you about your old man?”

“She says that she didn’t even know his name.”

“Is that so? Hm. I don’t mean to say nuthin’ bad about your mother, boy, but she knows his name. She might wanna forget, but she knows his name.”

“Who is he?”

That question was a signal for thoughtful silence.

Then: “A son deserves to know who his father is,” Raymond said in his most serious voice. “It don’t matter who he was or what he’d done. A son deserves to know and make up his own mind what to do and who to be.

“But it’s a mother’s job to give her boy that information.”

“LaTonya and Beatrix got different fathers but they know both’a them,” Evander said, regressing into childhood as he spoke. “Louis Champagne ain’t no good. That’s LaTonya’s father. Bigger Lewis and Mama just don’t get along, but he still loves Beatrix. He comes over and takes her out for ice cream on her birthday.”

“I hear ya, boy,” Mouse said. “I hear ya. I’ll tell you what—I want you to go to your mother and tell her that I said, that Raymond Alexander said if she doesn’t tell you who your real father is then I will. You got to give her the chance to do the right thing, but if she don’t I will.”

Evander, in spite of the bad shape he was in, looked hopeful. All he had to do was follow the bread crumbs and he would arrive at a place that maybe he should never, ever go.

“We got right now to worry about before we have the luxury of revisiting the past,” I said.

Evander turned to me, but Mouse was still studying him.

“The first thing we need to know is why those men had you tied to that tree,” I continued.

Evander’s round face scrunched up, giving him the appearance of a much older man—the man he’d grow to be if he was lucky. He shook his head three or four times, throwing off one remembrance after another.

“I … I … I met a girl name of Vixie,” he said. “It was after I took the acid. I think it was after I woke up in the motel. Yeah, that’s it. I went to this house where I thought Ruby lived at because I didn’t remember where the naked lady was and I wanted Ruby to tell me where I could find Maurice … but … but … but I couldn’t even remember his name.”

Evander stopped there, feeling that he’d answered the question.

“And what happened with you and Vixie?” I asked, seeking substantiation of Coco’s story.

“I was still kinda trippin’, but I knew I had to do somethin’. I asked that girl Coco—”

“What girl Coco?” Raymond asked, showing that he was paying attention.

“She was at the house.”

“What house?”

“I don’t remember. I just went there … you know, like it was in my head, but it didn’t have a street or number or anything.”

“Vixie was there with Coco?” I asked to push the story along.

“She was there. I don’t think Coco liked her much. But this little dude slapped me and Coco told him to go on. That’s when Vixie sat down with us. She told me she knew a place where I could get my head together. She and I hitchhiked up north on the ocean road until we got to this green stick and then we walked a really long time until there was this commune with these guys livin’ outta tents and sleepin’ bags. Vixie told ’em I had a bad trip and could I stay out there a few days. They said yeah and made chili and beans from a can and poured it over tortilla chips. When I ate it, it sounded like a waterfall in my head.”

While Evander was remembering the crashing waters, I was making a checklist that told me at least Coco had been telling the truth.

“Then this guy handed me a joint,” Evander said, as if the conversation going on in his head broke the surface of that water like a shark’s fin. “I never smoked before, but I just took it and inhaled like I’d seen people do with cigarettes. Vixie showed me how to hold the smoke in, and all of a sudden I was trippin’ hard again.

“After that I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember having your hands tied behind that tree?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember when that happened?”

After a moment of serious thought he said, “No.”

“Did they hit you?”

“This one guy they called Haskell took a burning stick and laid it on my shoulder.”

“Easy,” Mouse said, “tell me where these motherfuckers is at.”