“What time?”
“After I wake up.”
“This is serious, man,” he told me.
Those words from his lips had been the prelude to many a man’s death but I didn’t care.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “In the mornin’.” And then I hung up.
I turned on the radio. There was a jazz station from USC that was playing twenty-four hours of John Coltrane. I liked the new jazz but my heart was still with Fats Waller and Duke Elling-ton — that big band sound.
I turned on the T V. Some detective show was on. I don’t know what it was about, just a lot of shouting and cars screech-ing, a shot now and then, and a woman who screamed when she got scared.
I’d been rereading Native Son by Richard Wright lately so I hefted it off the shelf and opened to a dog-eared page. The words scrambled and the radio hummed. Every now and then I’d look up to see that a new show was on the boob tube. By midnight every light in the house was burning. I’d switched them on one at a time as I got up now and then to check out various parts of the house.
I was reading about a group of boys masturbating in a movie theater when the phone rang again. For a moment I resisted answering. If Mouse had gotten mad I didn’t know if I could pla-cate him. If it was Bonnie telling me that Feather was dead I didn’t know that I could survive.
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
“Hello.”
“Mr. Rawlins?” It was Maya Adamant.
“How’d you get my home number?”
“Saul Lynx gave it to me.”
“What do you want, Miss Adamant?”
“There has been a resolution to the Bowers case,” she said.
“You found the briefcase?”
“All I can tell you is that we have reached a determination about the disposition of the papers and of Mr. Bowers.”
“You don’t even want me to report on what I’ve found?” I asked.
This caused a momentary pause in my dismissal.
“What information?” she asked.
“I found Axel,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. He came down to L.A. to get away from Haffernon. Also to be nearer to Miss Cargill.”
“She’s down there? You’ve seen her?”
“Sure have,” I lied.
Another silence. In that time I tried to figure Maya’s response to my talking to Cinnamon. Her surprise might have been a clue that she knew Philomena was dead. Then again . . . maybe she’d been given contradictory information . . .
“What did Bowers say?” she asked.
“Am I fired, Miss Adamant?”
“You’ve been paid fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Against ten thousand,” I added.
“Does that mean you are withholding intelligence from Mr.
Lee?”
“I’m not talking to Mr. Lee.”
“I carry his authority.”
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C i n n a m o n K i s s
“I spent a summer unloading cargo ships down in Galveston back in the thirties,” I said. “Smelled like tar and fish, and you know I was only fifteen — with a sensitive nose. My back hurt carryin’ them cartons of clothes and fine china and whatever else the man said I should carry for thirty-five cents a day. I had his authority but I was just a day laborer still and all.”
“What did Axel say?”
“Am I fired?”
“No,” she said after a very long pause.
“Let Lee call me back and say that.”
“Robert E. Lee is not a man to fool with, Mr. Rawlins.”
“I like it when you call me mister,” I said. “It shows that you respect me. So listen up — if I’m fired then I’m through. If Lee wants me to be a consultant based on what I know then let him call me himself.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Easy.”
“Mistake was made before I was even born, honey. I came into it cryin’ and I’ll go out hollerin’ too.”
She hung up without another word. I couldn’t blame her. But neither could I walk away without trying to make my daughter’s money.
i s a u t é e d chopped garlic, minced fresh jalapeño, green pep-per, and a diced shallot in ghee that I’d rendered myself. I added some ground beef and, after the meat had browned, I put in some cooked rice from a pot in the refrigerator. That was my meal for the night.
I fell asleep on the loveseat with every light in the house on, the television flashing, and John Coltrane bleating about his favorite things.
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24
Imoved the trunk in front of the big brass elephant. Underneath was the crushed, cubical body of Axel Bowers. I watched him, worrying once again about the degradation of his carcass. I told him that I was sorry and he moved his head in a little semicircle as if trying to work out a kink in his neck. With his hands he lifted his head, raising it up from the hole. It took him a long while to crawl out of the makeshift grave — and longer still to straighten out all of the bloody, cracked, and shattered limbs. He looked to me like a butterfly just out of the co-coon, unfolding its wet wings.
All of that work he did without noticing me. Pulling on his left arm, turning his foot around until the ankle snapped into place, pressing his temples until his forehead was once more round and hard.
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C i n n a m o n K i s s
He was putting his fingers back into alignment when he happened to look up and notice me.
“I’m going to need a new hip,” he said.
“What?”
“The hip bones don’t reform like other bones,” he said. “They need to be replaced or I won’t be able to walk very far.”
“Where you got to go?” I asked.
“There’s a Nazi hiding in Egypt. He’s going to assassinate the president.”
“The president was assassinated three years ago,” I said.
“There’s a new president,” Axel assured me. “And if this one goes we’ll be in deep shit.”
The phone rang.
“You going to get that?” Axel asked.
“I should stay with you.”
“Don’t worry, I can’t go anywhere. I’m stuck right here on my broken hips.”
The phone rang.
I wandered back through the house. In the kitchen Dizzy Gillespie had taken Coltrane’s place. He was standing in front of the sink with his cheeks puffed out like a bullfrog’s, blowing on that trumpet. The front door was open and The Mummy was playing outside. The movie was now somehow like a play being enacted in the street. On the sidewalks all the way up to the corners, extras and actors with small roles were smoking cigarettes and talking, waiting to come onstage to do their parts.
Egypt, I thought and the phone rang.
I came back in the house but the phone wasn’t on its little table. Above, on the bookshelf, Bigger Thomas was strangling a woman who was laughing at him.
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W a lt e r M o s l e y
“You can’t kill me,” she said. “I’m better than you are. I’m still alive.”
The phone rang again.
I returned to the brass elephant to tell Axel something but he was back in his hole, crushed and debased.
“My hips were my downfall,” he said.
“You can make it,” I told him. “Lots of people live in wheelchairs.”
“I will not be a cripple.”
The phone rang and he disappeared.
I opened my eyes. The Mummy, with Boris Karloff, was playing on T V. Coltrane had not been replaced, and every light in the house was still on.
I wondered about the coincidence of a movie about a corpse rising from the dead in Egypt and Axel’s trips to that country.
The phone rang.
“Somebody must really wanna talk,” I said to myself, thinking that the phone must have rung nearly a dozen times.
I went to the podium and picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
“Why are you looking for me?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Philomena? Is that you?”
“I asked you a question.”
My lips felt numb. Coltrane hit a discordant note.