The police were surprisingly gentle with me. No slaps or insults.
They even called me mister and corrected me with respect when I turned the wrong way or didn’t understand their commands.
The officer who arrested me, Patrolman Briggs, even dropped by the cell to inform me that Nate and Alicia Roman were doing just fine and were both expected to be released from the hospital that day.
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“Here you go,” my cellmate said.
He was holding out a hand-rolled cigarette. I took it and he lit it. The smoke in my lungs brought my mind back into the cell.
My benefactor was a white man about ten years my junior, thirty-five or -six. He had stringy black hair that came down to his armpits and sparse facial hair. His shirt was made from various bright-colored scraps. His eyes were different colors too.
“Reefer Bob,” he said.
“Easy Rawlins.”
“What they got you for, Easy?”
“I ran into two people in their car. Ran a red light. You?”
“They found me with a burlap sack in a field of marijuana up in the hills.”
“Really? In the middle of the day?”
“It was midnight. I guess I should’a kept the flashlight off.”
I chuckled and then felt a tidal wave of hysterical laughter in my chest. I took a deep draw on the cigarette to stem the surge.
“Yeah,” Reefer Bob was saying. “I was stupid but they can’t keep me.”
“Why not?”
“Because the bag was empty. My lawyer’ll tell ’em that I was just looking for my way outta the woods, that I’m a naturalist and was looking for mushrooms.”
He grinned and I thought about Dream Dog.
“Good for you,” I said.
“You wanna get high, Easy?”
“No thanks.”
“I got some reefer in a couple’a these cigarettes here.”
“You know, Bob,” I said. “The cops put spies in these cells.
And they’d love nothing more than to catch you with contraband in here.”
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“You a spy, Easy?” he asked.
“No. A spy would never let you know.”
“You blowin’ my mind, man,” he said. “You blowin’ my mind.”
He crawled into the lower bunk in our eight-by-six cell. I laid on my stomach in the upper bed and stared out of the criss-crossed bars of steel. I thought back to midday, when I’d buckled Feather into her seat.
Axel Bowers was far off in my mind.
I felt that somehow I’d been defeated by my own lack of heart.
g u a r d s c a m e d o w n
the hallway at midnight exactly. The jail was dark but they had flashlights to show them the way.
When they came into the cell Reefer Bob yelled, “He killed Axel.
He told me when he thought I wasn’t listening. He killed him and then stuffed him up in a elephant’s ass.”
They told me to get up and I obeyed. They asked me if I needed handcuffs and I shook my head.
We walked down the long aisle toward a faraway light.
When we reached the room I realized that this was the day of my execution. They strapped me into the gas chamber chair. On the wall there was the stopwatch that Jesus used to have to time his races when he was in high school.
I had one minute left to live when they closed the door to the chamber.
A hornet was buzzing at the portal of the door. It flew right at my eyes. I shook my head around trying to get the stinger away from my face. When it finally flew off I looked back at the stopwatch: I only had three seconds left to live.
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Rawlins!” The guard’s shout jarred me awake.
I’d dozed off for only a few moments.
“Yo!” I hopped down to the concrete floor.
Bob was huddled into a ball in the back corner of his bunk. I wondered if he really thought I was a spy. If so he’d flush the dope into our corroded tin toilet. I might have saved him three years of hard time.
e t t a m a e h a r r i s was in the transit room when they got me there.
She was a big woman but no larger that day than she had been back when we were coming up in the late thirties in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Back then she was everything I ever wanted in a woman except for the fact that she was Mouse’s wife.
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She hugged me and kissed my forehead while I was buckling my belt.
Etta didn’t utter more than three words in the jailhouse. She didn’t talk around cops. That was an old habit that never died with her. In her eyes the police were the enemy.
She wasn’t wrong.
Out in front of the precinct building LaMarque Alexander, Raymond and Etta’s boy, sat behind the wheel of his father’s red El Dorado. He was a willowy boy with his father’s eyes. But where Mouse had supremely confident bravado in his mien his son was petulant and somewhat petty. Even though he was pushing twenty he was still just a kid.
By the time Raymond was his son’s age he had already killed three men — that I knew of.
I tumbled into the backseat. Etta climbed in the front and turned around to regard me.
“Your office?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
It was only a few blocks from the precinct. LaMarque pulled away from the curb.
“How’s college, LaMarque?” I asked the taciturn boy.
“Okay.”
“What you studyin’?”
“Nuthin’.”
“He’s learnin’ about electronics and computers, Easy,” Etta said.
“If he wants to know about computers he should talk to Jackson Blue. Jackson knows everything about computers.”
“You hear that, LaMarque?”
“Yeah.”
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When he pulled up in front of my office building at Eighty-sixth and Central, Etta said, “Wait here till I come back down.”
“But I was goin’ down to Craig’s, Mom,” he complained.
EttaMae didn’t even answer him. She just grunted and opened her door. I jumped out and helped her. Then together we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.
I ushered her into my office and held my client’s chair for her.
Only when we were both settled did Etta feel it was time to talk.
“How’s your baby doin’?” she asked.
“Bonnie took her to Europe. They got doctors over there worked with these kinds of blood diseases.”
Etta heard more in my tone and squinted at me. For my part I felt like I was floating on a tidal wave of panic. I stayed very still while the world seemed to move around me.
Etta stared for half a minute or so and then she broke out with a smile. The smile turned into a grin.
“What you smirkin’ ’bout?” I asked.
“You,” she said with emphasis.
“Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout me.”
“Oh yes there is.”
“How do you see that?”
“Easy Rawlins,” she said, “if you wandered into a minefield you’d make it through whole. You could sleep with a girl named Typhoid an’ wake up with just sniffles. If you fell out a windah you could be sure that there’d be a bush down on the ground t’ break yo’ fall. Now it might be a thorn bush but what’s a few scratches up next to death?”
I had to laugh. Seeing myself through Etta’s eyes gave me hope out there in the void. I guess I was lucky compared to all those I’d known who’d died of disease, gunshot wounds, lynch-1 3 2
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ing, and alcohol poisoning. Maybe I did have a lucky star.
Dim — but lucky still and all.
“How’s that boy Peter?” I asked.
Peter Rhone was a white man whom I’d saved from the LAPD
when they needed to pin a murder on somebody his color. His only crime was that he loved a black woman. That love had killed her. And when it was all over Peter had a breakdown and Etta took him in.
“He bettah,” she said, the trace of a grin still on her lips. “I got him livin’ out on the back porch. He do the shoppin’ an’ any odd jobs I might need.”