“What are you talking about?”
I took two steps toward her. I must have looked a little off wearing only briefs and an open bathrobe in the middle of a workday.
Bonnie took a half-step backward.
“The flowers,” I said. “I was wondering about the flowers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They been sittin’ there since the special delivery man dropped them off. Me and the kids were curious.”
“About what?”
“Who sent ‘em.” The tone of my voice was high and pleasant, but the silence underneath was dead.
“I don’t understand,” Bonnie said. I almost believed her.
“They’re for you.”
“Well?” she said. “Then you must have seen the note.”
“Envelope is sealed,” I said. “You know I always try to teach my children that other people’s mail is private. Now what would I look like openin’ your letter?”
She heard the my in “my children.”
Bonnie stared at me for a moment. I gestured with my right hand toward the tiny envelope clipped to an upper stem. She ripped off the top flowers getting the envelope free. She tore it open and read. I think she must have read it through three times before putting it in her pocket.
“Well?”
“From one of the passengers,” she said. “Jogaye Cham. He was on quite a few of the flights. “
“Oh? He send all the stewardesses flowers?”
“I don’t know. Probably. He’s from a royal Senegalese family. His father is a chief. He’s working to unite the emancipated colonies.”
There was a quiet pride in her words.
“He was on at least half of the flights we took, and I was nice to him,” Bonnie continued. “I made sure that we had the foods he liked, and we talked about freedom.”
“Freedom,” I said. “Must be a good line.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, suddenly angry. “Black people in America have been free for a hundred years. Those of us from the Caribbean and Africa still feel the bite of the white man’s whips.”
It was an odd turn of a phrase — “the white man’s whips.” I was reminded that when a couple first become lovers they begin to talk alike. I wondered if Jogaye’s speeches concerned the white man’s whips.
I didn’t respond to what she said, just inhaled some more smoke and looked at her.
After a brief hesitation, Bonnie picked up her suitcase and carried it into our bedroom. I returned to the big chair, put out the butt, and lit up another, my regimen of only ten cigarettes a day forgotten. After awhile I heard the shower come on.
I had installed that shower especially for Bonnie.
If someone were to walk in on me right then, they might have thought that I was somber but calm. Really, I was a maniac trapped by a woman who would neither lie nor tell the truth.
I’d read the note, steamed it open, and then glued it shut. It was written in French, but I used a school dictionary to decipher most of the words. He was thanking her for the small holiday that they took on Madagascar in between the grueling sessions with the French, the English, and the Americans. It was only her warm company that kept his mind clear enough to argue for the kind of freedom that all of Africa must one day attain.
If she had told me that it was a gift from the airlines or the pilot or some girlfriend that knew she liked lavender, then I could have raged at her lies. But all she did was leave out the island of Madagascar.
I had looked it up in the encyclopedia. It’s five hundred miles off the West African coastline, almost a quarter million square miles in area. The people are not Negro, or at least do not consider themselves so, and are more closely related to the peoples of Indonesia. Almost five million people lived there. A big place to leave out.
I wanted to drag her out of the shower by her hair, naked and wet, into the living room. I wanted to make her tell me everything that I had imagined her and her royal boyfriend doing on a deserted beach eight thousand miles away.
The bouquet had been sent to her care of the Air France office. Her boyfriend expected them to hold it there. But some fool sent it on, special delivery.
I decided to go into the bathroom and ask her if she expected me to lie down like a dog and take her abuse. My hands were fists. My heart was a pounding hammer. I stood up recklessly and knocked the glass ashtray from the arm of the chair. It shattered. It probably made a loud crashing sound, but I didn’t notice. My anger was louder than anything short of a forty-five.
“Easy,” she called from the shower. “What was that?”
I took a step toward the bathroom and the phone rang.
“Can you get that, honey?” she called.
Honey.
“Hello?”
“Easy, is that you?”
I recognized the voice but could not place it for my rage.
“Who is this?”
“It’s EttaMae,” she said.
I sat down again. Actually, I fell into the chair so hard that it tilted over on its side. The end table toppled, taking the lamp with it. More broken glass.
“What?”
“I called Sojourner Truth,” she was saying, “and they said you had called in sick.”
“Etta, it’s really you?”
Bonnie came rushing out of the bathroom.
“What happened?” she cried.
Seeing her naked body, thinking of another man caressing it, holding on to the phone and hearing a woman that I had been searching for for months — I was almost speechless.
“I need a minute, baby,” I said to both women at once.
“Hold on a minute,” I said to Etta while waving Bonnie back to her shower. “Hold on.”
Bonnie stared for a moment. She seemed about to say something and then retreated to the bathroom.
I sat there on the floor with the phone in my lap. If I had had a gun in my hand, I would have gone outside and killed the yellow dog.
The receiver was making noise, so I brought it to my head.
“. . . Easy, what’s goin’ on over there?”
“Etta?”
“Yes?”
“Where have you been?”
“There’s no time for that now, Easy. I got to talk to you.”
“Where are you?”
She gave me an address on the Pacific Coast Highway, at Malibu Beach.
I hung up and went to the bedroom. Three minutes later I was dressed and ready to go,
“Who was that?” Bonnie called from the bathroom.
I went out of the front door without answering because all I had in my lungs was a scream.
~ * ~
I don’t remember the drive from West L.A., where I lived, to the beach. I don’t remember thinking about Bonnie’s betrayal or my crime against my best friend. My mind kind of shorted out, and all I could do for a while there was drive and smoke.
There wasn’t another building within fifty yards of the house, but it looked as if it belonged nestled between cozy neighboring homes. The wire fence had been decorated with clam and mussel shells. The wooden railing around the porch had dozens of different-colored wine bottles across the top. The house had been built on ground below street level so that it would have been possible to hop on the roof from the curb. It was a small dwelling, designed for one or maybe one and a half.
I opened the gate and descended the concrete stairs. She met me at the door. Sepia-skinned and big-boned, she had always been my standard for beauty. EttaMae Harris had been my friend and my lover in turns. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year because I was the man who had gotten her husband shot.
“You look wild, Easy,” was the first thing she said.
“What?”
“Your hair’s all lumpy and you ain’t shaved. What’s wrong?”
“Where’s LaMarque?”
“He’s with my people up in Ventura.”
“What people?” I asked. My heart skipped, and for an
instant Bonnie Shay was completely out of my mind.
“Just a cousin’a mines. She got a little place out in the country around there.”
“Where’s Mouse?”
Etta peered at me as if from some great height. She was a witch woman, a Delphic seer, and Walter Cronkite on the seven o’clock news all rolled into one.
“Dead,” she said. “You know he is.”
“But the doctor,” I said, almost pleading. “The doctor hadn’t made the pronouncement.”
“Doctor don’t decide when a man dies.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“Where?”
“I buried him out in the country. Put him in the ground with my own two hands.”
It was certainly possible. EttaMae was the kind of black woman who made it so hard for the rest. She was powerful of arm and iron-willed. She had thrown a full-grown man over her shoulder and carried him from the hospital after knocking out a big white orderly with a metal tray.
“Can I go to the grave?”
“Maybe one day, baby,” she said kindly. “Not soon, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because the hurt is too fresh. That’s why I ain’t called you in so long.”
“You mad at me?”
“Mad at everything. You, Raymond. I’m even mad at LaMarque.”
“He’s just a child, Etta. He ain’t responsible.”
“The child now will become the man,” she preached. “And when he do, you can bet he will be just as bad if not worse than what went before.”
“Raymond’s dead?” I asked again.
“The only thing more I could wish would be if he would be gone from our minds.” Etta looked up over my head and into the sky as if her sermon of man-hating had become a prayer for deliverance from our stupidity.
And we were stupid, there was no arguing about that. How else could I explain being ambushed in an alley when I should have been at home lamenting the assassination of our president? How could I ever tell Mouse’s son that he got killed trying to help me out with a little problem I had with gangsters and thugs?
“Come on in, Easy,” she said.
~ * ~
The living room was decorated like a sea captain’s cabin in a Walt Disney film. A hammock in the corner with fish nets full of glass-ball floats beside it. The floor was sealed with a clear coating so that it looked rough and finished at the same time. The windows were round portals, and the chandelier was made from a ship’s wheel.
“Sit down, Easy.”
I sat on a bench that could have easily been an oarsman’s seat. Etta lowered herself onto a blue couch that had gilded clamshells for feet.
“How have you been?” she asked me.
“No no, baby,” I said. “It’s you who called me outta my house after more than eleven months of me searchin’ high and low. Why am there?”
“I just wondered if you were sick,” she said. “They said at work that —”
“Talk to me, Etta. Talk to me or let me go. ‘Cause you know as much as I want to see you and try to make it up to you, I will walk my ass right outta here if you don’t tell me why you called after all this time.”
Her face got hard and, I imagined, there were some rough words on the tip of her tongue. But Etta held back and took a deep breath.
“This ain’t my house,” she said.
“I could see that.”
“It belongs to the Merchant family.”
“Pierre Merchant?” I asked. “The millionaire from up north?”
“Lymon,” Etta said, shaking her head, “his cousin runs the strawberry business north’a L.A. I work for his wife. She has me take care’a the house and her kids.”
“Okay. And so she let you stay here when you come down to town. So what?”
“No. She don’t know I’m here. This is a place that Mr. Merchant has for some’a his clients and business partners when they come in town.”
“Etta,” I said. “What you call me for?”
“Mrs. Merchant have four chirren,” she said. “The youngest one is thirteen and the oldest is twenty-two.”
I was about to say something else to urge her along. I didn’t want there to be too much silence or space in the room. Silence would allow me to think about what I had just learned — that my best friend since I was a teenager was dead, dead because of me. For the past year I had hoped that he was alive, that somehow EttaMae had nursed him where the hospital could not. But now my hopes were crushed. And if I couldn’t keep talking, I feared that I would fall into despair.
But I didn’t push Etta because I heard a catch at the back of her throat. And EttaMae Harris was not a woman to show that kind of weakness. Something was very wrong, and she needed me to make it right. I grabbed on to that possibility and took her hand.
A tear rolled down her face.
“It was hard for me to call on you, Easy. You know I blame you for what happened to Raymond.”
“I know.”
“But I got to get past that,” she said. “It’s not just your fault. Raymond always lived a hard life an’ he did a lotta wrong. He made up his own mind to go with you into that alley. So it’s not just that I need your help that I’m here. I been thinkin’ for some time that I should talk to you. “
I increased the pressure of my grip. EttaMae had a working woman’s hands, hard and strong. My clenching fingers might have hurt some office worker, man or woman, but it was merely an embrace for her.
“Mrs. Merchant’s second-to-oldest is a girl named Sinestra. She’s twenty and wild. She been a pain to her mama and daddy too. Kicked out of school an’ messin’ around with boys when she was a child. Runnin’ from one bad egg to another now that she’s a woman.”
“She too old for you to look after, Etta,” I said.
“I don’t care about that little bitch. She’s one’a them women that ambush men one after the other. Her daddy think that they doin’ to her, but he don’t see that Sinestra the rottenest apple in the barrel.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Sinestra done run away.”
“She’s twenty,” I said. “That means she can walk away without havin’ to run.”
“Not if her daddy’s one of the richest men in the state,” Etta assured me. “Not if she done run off with a black boy don’t have the sense to come in outta the rain.”
“Who’s that?”
“Willis Longtree. Hobo child from up around Seattle. He showed up one day with a crew to do some work for the Merchants. You know the foreman of their ranch would go down near the railroad yards in Oxnard whenever he needed to pick up some day labor. They got hobos ride the rails and Mexicans between harvests all around down there. Mr. Woodson —”
“Who?” I asked.
“Mr. Woodson, the foreman,” she said. “He brought about a dozen men down to the lower field around four months ago. They was buildin’ a foundation for a greenhouse Mr. Merchant wanted. He grows exotic plants and the like. He’s a real expert on plants.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So was my cousin Smith. He could grow anything given the right amount’a light and rainfall.”
“Mr. Merchant don’t have to rely on nature.”
“That’s why they build greenhouses instead’a churches,” I said.
“Are you gonna let me talk?”
“Sure, Etta. Go on.”
“All that Willis boy owned was a guitar and a mouth harp on a harness. Whenever they took a break, he entertained the men playin’ old-time tunes. Minstrel, blues, even some Dixieland. I went down there one day after young Lionel Merchant, the thirteen-year-old. The music was so fine that I stayed all through lunch.”
“I bet Sinestra loved his barrelhousin’,” I said.
“Yes, she did. Everybody did. It took the crew four days to dig the foundation. After that Mr. Merchant himself offered Willis a job. He made him the assistant groundskeeper and had him playin’ music for his guests when he gave parties
.”
“Mighty ungrateful of that boy to think he deserved the boss’s daughter,” I said.
“It’s not funny, Easy. Mr. Merchant got a whole security force work for him. They use it to keep the Mexicans in line on the farms. He told the top man, Abel Snow, that he’d pay ten thousand dollars to solve the problem.”