“Her nephew is, maybe.”
“More’n that, Easy. More’n that.”
“Why you say that?”
Looking at his watch again, he said, “Because I know from a long time ago that Lutie goes to be a live-in domestic when she needs to lay low.”
“So, you know how I can get to her?”
Mouse leaned way back in his chair and studied me, like I was a mark, an enemy, or a fool. And then without any warning he started to recite a poem of sorts.
I was a little stunned by the use of verse. Even though it had the earmarks of a song, it was also a poem. A poem that Raymond Alexander had committed to memory.
“Where’d you get that from?” I asked.
“They say Brownie McGhee penned that ditty but it coulda been Sonny Terry. I mean, it coulda been Lightnin’ Hopkins. All three’a them know her.”
“She a singer?”
“C’mon now, Easy. You heard the words. They wasn’t talkin’ ’bout no singer.”
“Okay. Then what do they mean?”
Holding up his pinkie he said, “Typhoid Mary,” the ring finger, “Lucretia Borgia,” the middle finger, “Boxcar Bertha.” I thought that that was it. But then he held up the forefinger and said, “And the Bitch of Buchenwald too.”
It was true that Mouse had changed since the days he started to read, but much of the knowledge he cherished carried the stench of the profane.
“So, what you sayin’?” I asked.
“Not me, the song. ‘If Lutie sets her eyes upon you...’” Raymond’s swaying head expressed the pity he felt for a lost fool like me. Then he looked at his watch again.
“What kinda timepiece is that?” I asked, taking a little break from our two-way interrogation.
“This here is the Rolex Oyster Perpetual Explorer II.” There was that emerald again.
I held up my right hand, showing a leather-banded wristwatch and saying, “This here is what they call a Q Timex. Cost me one hundred twenty-five.”
“Mines costed ten thousand.”
I leaned back and grinned.
“Okay,” I capitulated. “You win.”
Mouse accepted his victory with a brief head bow and then went right back into the subject at hand.
“She a shadow outta darkness. You will never see it comin’. And you should know that, Easy. The minute you seen Brother Forest hang back, you shoulda known what you was inta.”
I started laughing. It was a deep belly laugh that was so strong it scared me a little. I couldn’t stop. For a few moments I couldn’t breathe. And there wasn’t a shred of humor in it either.
“What you laughin’ at, fool?” Mouse asked. He was smiling.
“You know I know what I’m into. You been here, where I am right now, many, many times.”
“Yeah,” he opined. “Jackson Blue talked to me about it one day. He said that this dude like a psychologist said that it was the, um, come... com... compulsion to repeat.”
The laughter died in my chest.
“You mean you and Jackson were discussing Sigmund Freud?”
“That’s his name. Yeah. I aksed Jackson how come some niggahs be makin’ the same mistake ovah and ovah and he told me about that Sigmund man.”
Mouse had bought an encyclopedia and swore that he read in it every night. He’d been my friend for thirty-seven years and he still surprised me.
“So,” I said. “This Lutisha James, she’s like a crime boss or somethin’?”
“Somethin’.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Mouse looked up at me, his smile at the ready. He was about to say something when...
“Hi there, Raymond, Easy.”
We both looked over to see Vu Von Lihn in all her war-torn splendor. She was clad in olive-green long-sleeved coveralls that somehow accented her figure. Vu had been in a bomb blast in the service of the Vietcong against South Vietnam and the U.S. military. The lightning-bolt scar down the right side of her face traveled directly through that side’s eye, killing it, and leaving in its wake a slightly nacreous white scar in the form of an after-eye-like orb.
Raymond bounced up to his feet, fast as a hare who just heard a dog bark. He pulled out a chair and seated her like the finest trained waiter.
“I seen a booth make that salad you like,” he said at her ear. “Just gimme a minute.”
He hurried away.
“He’s so sweet,” the onetime communist insurgent said, looking at him moving away down the long outside aisle of shops and restaurants.
“Especially when his woman is with child,” I appended.
“He told you?” Vu asked.
“Proud as any man can be.”
When talking to Vu I tended to look into her dead eye. There was something beautiful about that wound. It made you feel that you were in the presence of a living secret.
“He’s a good man,” she answered.
“As long as you not on the other side.”
Vu laughed and tapped my knee.
“You are always on his side, Easy. He loves you.”
“I once knew a man raised a lion from a two-week-old cub in the property out behind the back of his house. He’d go back there to feed and play with her almost every night. She loved him like he was her natural mother. But when that three-hundred-fifty-pound cat run up on him and raise her front paws to rest on his shoulders, you better believe that that love was hard to bear.”
Vu leaned forward, looking me in the face. “You are like the old wise men in the village where I lived,” she said. “You teach with stories and make me want to smile.”
“Here it is,” Mouse announced. He was carrying a largish cardboard bowl, filled with Caesar salad. “I aksed him for extra anchovies.”
It was a pleasant visit after that.
Vu said that she was going to sell the garage, which had a chop shop on its lower level.
“You gonna do somethin’ else?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of going to school to study Asian history.”
“As a corrective for Western stupidity?”
“I love Black men,” she replied, blowing me a kiss.
We talked for maybe an hour or so. Mouse was happy and Vu was too. I told them the news from my rose garden and Raymond told us that he planned to spend more time at home.
After a while I decided to leave.
I’d made it all the way to the parking lot in front of Du-par’s restaurant when he came up behind me.
“Easy.”
“Yeah, Ray?”
“Look, man,” he said. “If you want my advice, you should give up lookin’ for Lutie.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“But you gonna keep on?”
“For a little while.”
7
From the Farmers Market I took Wilshire eastward driving toward the heart of downtown. I kept on going until the addresses dwindled down to almost zero and the late-day traffic attained its densest, most sluggish flow. Those six or seven square blocks are LA’s sweet spot, where the banks and other financial institutions, and the corporate headquarters of many a mogul, thrive on the lifeblood of the people, having dug in like ticks, making themselves at home.
Just a few blocks from the end of the fancy boulevard, on the north side of the street, stood one of the city’s tallest glass-and-steel skyscrapers. This edifice represented the crux of business in America: the mining of the sweat and blood, hopes and dreams, of people who have never and will never see the upper reaches of possibility that their squandered labors have wrought.