“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlings. Did he hurt someone close to you?”
“Not really. But since I’ve been looking for him I’ve seen things that were just as bad as the war.” I paused and then asked, “Do you know where I can find him?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you, Mr. Rawlings. You know, I carried that boy in my arms when he couldn’t even crawl.”
“He’s a man now, Miss May. And men have to stand on their own two feet.”
“But he’s had it so hard,” she argued. “You know that no white judge is gonna care about what happened to him.”
“Do you have a daughter, Miss May? Or a mother or sister?”
She smiled but it was as if I had reached into her breast and wrenched the grin out against her will.
“Right here.” She walked over to a shelf near the window and took down a brass frame containing a Polaroid photograph of a young woman cut from her mold. “Sienna May. She married a man named Helms but we all still call her Sienna May ’cause it sounds right.”
I stood up and went over to the window. I took the frame from the big woman’s hand and admired it. Then I turned it so that she could see it.
“If Helms was a white man Howard would have choked your girl until her eyes and tongue was poppin’ outta her head,” I said. “She’d be cold and dead as a Christmas ham in the icebox. And there’d be a dozen other girls layin’ right up in there next to her.”
Honey grabbed the picture from my hand.
“No!” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “That’s just what I said when I realized it almost a year ago. And when I went to the cops and told ’em they said that I must’ve been mistaken, no vagabond could get around them like that. Now there’s another woman dead. And I’m askin’ you to help me stop Harold.”
“But why should I believe you, Mr. Rawlings?”
“Because you know the man I’m talkin’ about. You know where he comes from and what he might do. You see him doin’ just what I say and you know why.”
Honey May let herself fall onto the sofa. She looked down at her lap and tears fell from her eyes. She shook her head and her shoulders slumped forward.
“It’s my fault too,” she said. “I knew his mama was colored the minute I laid eyes on her. But I never said so. I didn’t argue when she hinted that things would go better for Harold if people thought that I was his mother. But I never lied to Harold. I told him that Miss Ostenberg was his mother and I was just his big mama. I guess I shoulda taken him wit’ me when I left. But you know I didn’t have the strength.”
“Did he come to you after he ran away?” I asked.
“He’d come stay with me and Sienna May now and then. But you know he was so wild. Most the time he was out in the street, livin’ in empty lots or shelters.”
“Didn’t the state come after him?”
“They did but Harold would just run away. They didn’t want him all that bad and he always looked older than he was. That’s because his face was so hard.”
“Do you know where I can find him, Miss May?”
“He comes by here once a year or so,” she said to the floor. “Last time was four or five months ago. He said that he liked the north side of Will Rogers Park because there was some good guys like to play dominoes there.”
“I won’t kill him, Miss May,” I said. “I want to but I won’t. I’ll just make sure the police get him.”
She looked up at me with those big eyes.
“I can tell that you’re a good man, Mr. Rawlings,” she whispered. “But I know Harold too. He wanna be good but he just don’t know how.”
“Do you have a picture of Harold that I can show to them?”
There was a tiny chest of three drawers next to the Murphy bed. She pulled open the middle drawer and took out a simple dark-wood frame. She handed this to me.
Harold was in his twenties when the picture had been taken, wearing a coat that was too large for him, probably borrowed from the portrait photographer. His eyes weren’t as dull and there was some hope in him at that moment. I wondered if he had already started murdering women then.
“Can I have it back when they’re through, Mr. Rawlings?” Honey May asked me.
“Just as soon as we’re through with it,” I said.
We looked at each other, both knowing what my words meant.
44
It was nearly ten at night. No domino players would be out that late. I drove back to my office and called home.
“Hello,” Feather said.
“What are you doing up so late, girl?” I asked the daughter of my heart.
“Daddy!” she shouted. “It’s you.”
“Sure it is, baby girl. Did you think I ran away?”
“I was scared that you were hurt down in the riot places.”
“No, baby. I’ve just been workin’ at my office. You know sometimes grown-ups have to work day and night.”
“But why can’t you come home, Daddy? I miss you.”
“I’ll be home when you wake up in the morning, baby. I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart,” I said. “Is Bonnie there?”
“Uh-huh. Here.”
“Where are you, Easy?” Bonnie asked.
“At the office. What’s wrong?”
“A woman named Ginny Wright called at about eight. She said that Benita Flag had been looking around for sleeping pills. She tried to call Raymond but he wasn’t home. She said that you might want to know that.”
I took a deep breath. The world was feeling too big for me to handle. I wanted to go home and see my family. I wanted to sleep for a week. And when I got up I wanted to go to my job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School, mopping up spilled milk and checking to see that there was no litter in the schoolyard.
“I was gonna come right home, baby,” I said. “But I better look into this. Benita is one’a Raymond’s friends and she’s been under a lotta pressure lately.”
“That’s okay, Easy,” Bonnie cooed. “Jesus is here and he’s going to wait until you get back before he goes out on his boat again.”
WHEN NOBODY ANSWERED I knocked the door in. If I was wrong about Benita I could always put it back on its hinges. Living poor and black had done many things for me. It had made me a plumber and a carpenter, an electrician and a mason. I could put in windows, take a car engine apart, pave a highway, or run a steam engine. Being poor made more out of many men than any Harvard or army could imagine.
Benita Flag was on her bed with white foam coming from her mouth. She didn’t respond to shaking or slaps or cold water in her face.
I could have called an ambulance but poverty had taught me a lesson about that too. I had her at Mercy in less than twelve minutes. They pumped her stomach and shot medicine in her veins. A doctor named Palmer told me that she was so close to death that he didn’t know if they had done enough.
“You did the right thing,” he told me.
“What good is doin’ the right thing if women are dyin’ whichever way I look?” I said.
I think the doctor was put off or worried by my words. But he patted my shoulder and showed me to a chair.
What else did I have to do? It was only one in the morning. I had many hours before I would set up watch at the domino tables at Will Rogers Park. Why not sit in a chair at the hospital, waiting to see if yet another woman had died?
THE EMERGENCY ROOM at any hospital in the middle of the night is mainly made up of the consequences of love. Men and women and children with fearful parents. The men and women had gotten into fights over passionate jealousies and the children were there because their parents had nowhere to turn.