Little Green (8 page)

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Most fish can sleep after a fashion,” I said. “They get under a rock on the ocean floor or float with a big school of their brethren with guards posted around the edges. But some fish, like the shark, can never stop moving forward. If a shark stops moving he will suffocate in his sleep.

“If I was to stay in the bed in that big house I’d perish just as sure as a shark would in a fish tank. I can feel it, Feather, in my chest and my heart. I was dying in that fancy bedroom until Uncle Ray came up there and held out his hand.”

“But you’re so weak,” Feather protested. She had already been convinced, but this knowledge did not allay her fears.

“I know I am. But I think I can get around that. Yes, sir, I believe I can.”

I sipped my coffee and felt at ease because I had spoken a truth to my daughter that I had not completely understood.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah?” I thought she would ask me about how I planned to regain my strength.

“You know when you had the accident and they called and said that you were dead.”

“Uh-huh.” I could hear the pain in her words.

“When I thought that you were … that you were gone, I started thinking about if I had a mother somewhere.”

I held my breath, knowing what would come next.

“Juice told me that he remembered the day that you brought me home.”

There’s no rest for the weary
, a woman, I forget her name, used to say when I lived in Texas. Six words with one contraction, and there was more truth in there than in the Christian Bible,
Das Kapital
, and
The Interpretation of Dreams
rolled up into one.

“Who was my mother?” Feather asked.

It was the question I most dreaded. I loved Feather, but the truth, I feared, would damage her more than all the love in the world could heal.

“Easy!”

Loud knocking came at the front door. I pushed up from the dinette table and moved toward the living room. I had never been happier to hear Mouse’s bark.

He was standing on the front porch next to tall and flaxen Peter Rhone.

Peter was carrying a bag full of groceries. He wore faded jeans and a baby blue T-shirt. Mouse had on pearl gray pants and a square-cut green shirt that was short-sleeved and loose-fitting.

“Ray,” I said, moving back to allow the two entrée. “Peter.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” Peter greeted me.

“Me and Pete brought you some food, Easy,” Mouse said, making his way toward the kitchen.

Feather came out and smiled, as most women did, for the enigmatic killer.

“Hi, Uncle Ray.”

“What you doin’ here, Feather? I thought you was in summer school?”

He asked this question while pressing past my daughter into the kitchen.

The rest of us followed.

“I came to take care of Daddy.”

Mouse just nodded while he took groceries from Peter’s arms.

“I got breakfast here,” he said. “Slab bacon, grits, and eggs. If that don’t make him better I don’t know what will.”

“How’s LaMarque?” Feather asked about Raymond’s twenty-two-year-old son.

“Didn’t I tell you? Oh, yeah, that was Juice. Etta send him down
to Texas to stay with her brother and his wife. She said that a summer on the farm might firm him up some.”

While he talked Mouse was taking the breakfast ingredients out of the bag and placing them on the counter. He had everything from eggs to butter to salt and pepper. He wasn’t about to rely on any stores that the squatter Jeffrey kept.

“Sit down, you guys,” he said. “I’ll cook up everything. Feather?”

“Yes, Uncle Ray?”

“You clean up this kitchen? ’Cause you know it was a mess last night.”

“Uh-huh.”

While Mouse busied himself with cooking, Peter took a seat across from Feather and me.

“We came together because Mr. Alexander needed me to drive over from Primo’s,” the young man said.

Peter worked part-time for my friend Primo in a garage that the elder, Mexican-born mechanic managed.

“Why?” I asked.

“Bright red nineteen sixty-fi’e two-door Plymouth Barracuda,” Mouse said excitedly. “Sittin’ still that baby look like she goin’ fast.”

While Mouse opined, Peter put the keys down in front of me.

“What?” I said.

“Mr. Alexander said that you needed a car, and Primo had the Barracuda that he planned to sell in Mexico later this month. He and I were going to drive it down, but when he heard you needed a car he made what he called a permanent loan.”

“Ray, you know I don’t do my work in loud cars,” I said.

“Loud car got it ovah a bus that never comes. You better believe that.”

That was all the fight I had in me. I sat back while Mouse cooked breakfast and Peter talked to Feather about her algebra homework.
I was floating, like one of those coastal vultures, enjoying a moment of rest on the long migration of life.

The four of us ate heartily, and my stomach hardly protested at all. Ray had some stories about small conflicts that he and Primo had gotten into when they went down to Tijuana once a few years back.

“… mothahfuckahs didn’t think I could talk Spanish,” Ray was saying, “and so when I heard ’em say that they was gonna get the fat Southerner, I warned Primo and we got the hell outta there.”

I could have objected to his language around my daughter, but she knew how I felt, and asking Ray to edit his words was like requiring a porcupine to leave its quills at the door.

By the time breakfast was over I felt almost strong enough to do what I had to in order to keep moving forward.

“I told Primo that I’d have Peter back before the day was over,” Mouse was saying as Feather washed dishes and Peter dried. “So we better be off.”

“Take Feather back up to the Bel-Air house, will you, Ray?”

“I wanna stay here with you, Daddy.”

“I have to do something for Uncle Ray,” I said, “and there was this strange guy hanging around here. I’d feel safer if you were up in there.”

“Okay. But are you coming back home tonight?”

“If I don’t I will certainly call.”

I saw my friends and family off at the front door. They cruised up Genesee in Raymond’s pink Caddy. Feather was waving out the back window as they went.

Seeing them go I had to resist the impression that my lifeblood was draining away in their wake.

Back in the house I called Martin Martins, who was, for lack of a better term, a handyman.

Martins had moved to L.A. from Mississippi in the late forties like I had from Texas. He was a genius at anything mechanical or that had to do with building. Most of his leisure hours were spent studying machines and architectural design by looking at devices of all sorts and watching builders at work. I believe that he could have single-handedly built a skyscraper given enough time and resources—he was that good.

A few years earlier Martins was shot as he came out of a bar on Avalon at around midnight. The bullet, aimed at his heart, was true, but the shooter didn’t know that the mechanic had an iron device, given to him by the bartender, in his left breast pocket. People were always giving Mr. Martins odd gadgets and tools because he loved to study any technology new to him. He liked to get just a piece or section of some larger device and try, from that one puzzle piece, to figure out the function of the machine it came from.

The .45 slug knocked Martin for a loop, and luckily for him, the shooter ran rather than check out his work.

At two that morning Jackson Blue called me asking for a late meeting with his friend Martins.

“Do you know who shot you?” I asked Martins at a few minutes shy of three a.m. We were sitting at a corner table in Cox Bar—an unlicensed establishment hidden off of an unnamed alley in the bowels of Watts.

“It looked like Bill Fern,” the long-limbed master craftsman replied.

Martin was the color of a dark plum and formed from many angles. His face was nearly a perfect triangle set on the point of his chin. He had high cheekbones, long fingers, and a flat plane of chest that spoke of a day laborer’s strength. “But I don’t know why he wanna shoot at me. I mean, we hardly even know each other, and I can’t think of one wrong I’ve done him.”

“What’s this Bill do for a living?” I asked.

“Work for the city, I think, collectin’ trash. At least, that’s what he used to do a few years ago.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“My wife’s coworker Nanette Yomen had a party for all the colored people she knew worked for the city.”

“Did your wife know Bill?”

Even Martin’s eyes were composed of angles. The orbital bones formed squares around the orbs. It’s always a pleasure working with an intelligent man. He squeezed those squares down into thin quadrangles while peering inside his own mind.

After maybe two minutes he said, “I got twenty-one thousand dollars in the bank.”

That’s all he had to say. We—me, him, and Jackson Blue, who was there for the introduction—all understood what had transpired.

I knew a disbarred lawyer named Milo Sweet who wrote up the divorce agreement. They split everything minus five hundred dollars for expenses. Bill Fern was at the final meeting. He apologized to Martin and said that there was no reason to hold a grudge.

I gave the five hundred to Mouse and asked him to visit Bill at his apartment and impress upon him that if any violence happened to Martin that Ray had already been paid to take Bill’s life.

I didn’t charge a dime for that job. A good handyman in my corner outweighed any fee.

“Hello?” Hela Klineman answered.

Hela was a German woman who came to the U.S. after World War II. She’d been married to a black soldier named Mortimer Revert, but that union foundered at just about the time Martin’s did. They got together but did not wed—both of them having serious reservations about the institution of marriage. They had a child, however, and seemed to be deeply in love.

“It’s Easy, Hela.”

“Hold on.”

“Hey, Easy, how are you?” Martin said when he got on the line. That man loved me.

“I need some help.”

“Name it.”

“Could you install bars on all my windows and new locks, good locks, on the doors?”

“How soon?”

“The sooner the better.”

“I’ll be over there in an hour then.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Materials,” he said. “And I’ll get you my builder’s discount.”

I might have died but the world still remembered me.

After making sure of the security of my home I went out the front door. I made it to the sidewalk, where I stopped and remembered that I had forgotten something, not knowing exactly what that something was. I went back into the house and stood in the front room waiting for insight. Then I smiled.

In the bedroom closet, on the shelf above the hangers, was a little door that was not immediately obvious in the gloom. On the other side of that door sat a .22-caliber pistol and a box of shells. I loaded the gun and spent a few moments reacquainting my hand with its weight.

After that I left the house again.

The Barracuda looked like a bloody wound on the street. I climbed in, though, and drove off just like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It was on Central Avenue that the memories started coming back.

I was smoking a Camel cigarette from a new pack that I picked up at a liquor store along the way. The window was open and the air whipped around the inside of that Barracuda like a man-made tornado.

Aretha Franklin was belting out Otis Redding’s song “Respect” on the radio, and I was feeling only slightly anchored to the world that I had left behind.

Down Tucker Street, in the heart of Compton, if you drive far enough, you come to a dead end. The asphalt turns to hard yellow soil. Thirty feet after that a seemingly impenetrable stand of avocado and eucalyptus trees blocks the way. Through and beyond the trees are dense bushes, many of them with thorns. If you push past the bushes you come to an unexpected door that seems like just another part of the forest, a yellow door with green lichen growing on it.

I stopped there to consider my actions. This was not a threshold that one, even a man in my condition, crossed lightly.

I waited a moment and the door opened of its own accord.

Jo was taller and darker and more substantial than I was even before the accident. She was in her sixties but might have been forty except for the heavy toll experience had left on her dark eyes.

“I wondered when you was gonna get here, Easy,” she said in a strong tenor voice that man or woman would have been proud of.

I inhaled, taking in the strange odors of the backwoods alchemist’s lair. The smells were sweet and bitter, vegetable and mammal, fish and also the deep, rich odor of the earth in its various refined guises.

I exhaled, feeling that the breath coming out of me carried an imprint of my soul that the house itself would study and pass judgment on.

“Come on in, Easy,” Mama Jo offered. “Take a weight off them shaky legs.”

Mama Jo’s home was like no other in Southern California: one generous room that performed every function of a house and a backwoods clinic. The floor was packed earth and the furniture could have been built by peasant hands in Europe’s Dark Ages. There was a hearth with a mantelpiece that had thirteen skulls on it. Twelve were armadillo heads and one was Domaque, the father of Jo’s only child, and the one true love of her life.

She had a pet raven moving back and forth on its T-shaped oak stand, and two live armadillos that stayed to the corners of the wide room. I saw something else move in the shadow under her long worktable but failed to make out the species.

“Sit down ovah here, baby,” she said.

I lowered myself into a chair made from arm-thick branches and animal hide. It was the chair I most often used at Jo’s house.

Jo sat down on the bench placed at her worktable. Behind her were dozens of crocks and jars, hanging bunches of dried leaves and branches, and more than a few hand-bound volumes.

There was barely six inches of space between our knees. Jo reached out for my hands and I gave them willingly, focusing my eyes on her bare feet.