A Red Death (17 page)

“No, no it’s not. She got evicted from a place I clean for. That’s all.”

“Oh,” she whispered and then looked at my chest.

I liked the attention, so I left the blankets alone.

“Is Chaim here?” I asked.

“I took him to the church. I just got back. He said that you’d come later if you weren’t too sick.”

“Is this your room?” I asked, looking around.

“Uh-huh. But I stayed in the spare room in the attic. It has a bed and I like to go up there and read sometimes. Especially in the spring or fall when it isn’t too hot or too cold.

“Poppa slept on the couch,” she added. “He does that sometimes.”

“Oh,” I said, partly because I didn’t know what to say, and partly because my head hurt.

I watched her watching me for a few moments until she finally said. “I’ve never seen a man’s chest, I mean, like yours.”

“All it is is brown, honey. Ain’t that different.”

“Not that, I mean the hair, I mean you don’t have much and it’s so curly and …”

“And what?”

Just then the doorbell rang. Three short chimes that sounded like they were in some other world. Shirley, who had turned bright red, made to leave. I guess that she was kind of flustered. I was too.

When she was gone I looked around the room. The furniture was all hand-crafted from a yellowish-brown wood that I couldn’t identify. Not a surface was flat. Everything curved and arced, from the mirrored bureau to the chest of drawers.

There was a thick white carpet and a few upholstered chairs. It was a small, feminine room; just exactly the right size and gender for my hangover.

After a while I heard men’s voices. I went to the window and saw Shirley Wenzler standing outside of a wire fence in front of a well-manicured little yard. She was talking to two men who were wearing dark suits and short-brimmed hats. I remember thinking that the men must have gone shopping together to get clothes that were so similar.

Shirley got angry and shouted something that I couldn’t make out. Finally she walked away from them, turning every now and then to see if they’d gone. But they just stared at her attentively, like sentinels of a wolf pack.

While I watched I hustled on my pants. When I heard the door slam I wanted to go ask her what had happened, but the twins interested me. They walked slowly across the street and got into a dark blue or black Buick sedan. They didn’t start the car and drive away; they just sat there, watching the house.

“So you’re up?” Shirley Wenzler said from the doorway. She was smiling again.

I turned from the window and said, “Nice neighborhood you live in. Hollywood?”

“Almost.” She smiled. “We’re near La Brea and Melrose.”

“That’s a long drive from where you got me.”

She laughed, a little too loudly, and came into the room. She sat in a plush-bottomed chair across from the bed. I sat down on the mattress to keep her company.

“Did some woman really die?” she asked.

“Woman over where I clean couldn’t pay the rent and she killed herself.”

“You saw it?”

“Yeah.” But all I could remember was Poinsettia’s dripping toe.

“My poppa saw things like that.” There was a strange light in her eyes. Not haunted like Chaim’s, but empty.

“Many Jews,” she continued, as if reciting a prayer she’d gone to bed with her whole life. “Mothers and sons.”

“Yeah,” I said, also softly.

At Dachau I’d seen many men and women like Wenzler; small and slight from starvation. Most of them were dead, strewn across the paths between bungalows like those ants, I imagined, stretched out in their hives.

“You think you could have saved her?” she asked. I had the crazy feeling that I was talking to her father, not her.

“What?”

“The woman who died. You think you could have saved her?”

“I know it. I got the ear’a the man run the place. He’da let ’er stay.”

“No,” she said simply.

“What you mean, no?”

“We are all of us trapped, Mr. Rawlins. Trapped in amber, trapped in work. If you can’t pay the rent you die.”

“That ain’t right,” I said.

Her eyes brightened even more and she smiled at me. “No, Mr. Rawlins. It is wrong.”

It sounded so true and so final that I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I held my peace, staring at her pale delicate hands. I could see the trace of blue veins pulsing just under the white skin.

“Come on down when you’re ready,” she said, rising and moving toward the door. “I’m making breakfast now.”

As if she’d conjured it, I suddenly smelled coffee and bacon.

S
HE SAT AT A MAPLE TABLE in an alcove that looked out onto a very green backyard. There was a tangerine tree right out the window. It was covered with waxy white blossoms. The flowers were being picked over by dozens of hovering bees.

“Come have a seat,” she said to me. She got up and took my arm just above the elbow. It was a friendly gesture, and it gave me a pang of guilt in the chest.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Coffee?” Shirley asked. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Love it,” I said as sexy as I could with a hangover.

She poured the coffee. She had long, lovely arms and skin as white as the sandy beaches down in Mexico. White-skinned women amazed me back in those days. They were worth your life just to look at in the South. And anything that valuable held great allure.

“Before the war started my father sent me out of Poland in a box,” she said as if continuing a conversation.

“He’s a pretty smart guy, your father.”

“He said that he could smell it—the Nazis coming.” She looked like a young girl. I had the urge to kiss her but I held it in check.

“That’s why my father works with you, Mr. Rawlins. He knows that the trouble he felt in Poland is just like what you feel here.” There were tears in Shirley’s eyes.

I thought of why I was there and the toast dried on my tongue.

“Your father is a good man,” I said, meaning it. “He wants to make things better.”

“But he has to think of himself too!” she blurted out. “He can’t keep doing things that will take him away from his family. He has to be here. He’s getting old, you know, and you can’t keep taking things out of him.”

“I guess he might spend a little too much time out on his charities, huh?”

“And what if no one worries about him? What happens when the Cossack comes to his door? Is anybody going to stand up for him?”

I could feel her tears in my own eyes. Nothing had changed since the night before. I was still traitorous and evil.

Shirley got up and went into the kitchen. Actually she ran there.

“W
OULD YOU LIKE some more toast, Mr. Rawlins?” Shirley asked when she’d come back in from the kitchen. Her eyes were red.

“No thanks,” I said. “What time you got?”

“Almost twelve.”

“Damn. I better get down there to help your father or he’s gonna wonder what we been doin’.”

Shirley smiled. “I can drive you.”

It was a nice smile. I shuddered to see her trust me, because her father’s ruin was my only salvation.

“Y
OU’RE PRETTY QUIET,” Shirley Wenzler said in the car.

“Just thinkin’.”

“About what?”

“About how you got the advantage on me.”

“What do you mean?”

I leaned over and whispered, “Well, you got to give your opinion on my chest but the jury still out on yours.”

She focused her attention back on the road and blushed nicely.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I always like to flirt with pretty girls.”

“I think that was a little bit more than flirting.”

“ ’Pends on where you come from,” I said. “Down here that was just a little compliment from an admirer.” That was a lie, but she didn’t know it.

“Well, I’m not used to men talking to me like that.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

She let me out at First African. I shook her hand, holding it a little longer than I should have. But she smiled and was still smiling as she left.

I watched the little Studebaker drive away. After that I noticed the dark Buick with the two dark-suited men. They were parked across from the church then. Just sitting there as if they were salesmen breaking for an afternoon lunch.

— 22 —

F
IRST AFRICAN HAD AN empty look to it on weekdays.

Christ still hung over the entrance but he looked like more of an ornament when the churchgoers weren’t gathered around the stairs. I always stopped to look up at him, though. I understood the idea of pain and death at the hands of another—most colored people did. As terrible as Poinsettia’s death was, she wasn’t the first person I’d seen hung.

I’d seen lynchings and burnings, shootings and stonings. I’d seen a man, Jessup Howard, hung for looking at a white woman. And I’d seen two brothers who were lynched from two nooses on the same rope because they complained about the higher prices they were charged at the county store. The brothers had ripped off their shirts and gouged deep scratches in each other’s skin in their struggles to keep from strangling. Both of their necks, broken at last, were horribly enlongated as they hung.

Part of that powerful feeling that black people have for Jesus comes from understanding his plight. He was innocent and they crucified him; he lifted his head to tell the truth and he died.

While I looked at him I heard something, but it was like something at the back of my mind. Like a crackle of a lit match and the sigh of an old timber in a windstorm.

Chaim was down in the basement, already working on boxes of clothes. He was holding up an old sequined dress, squinting at the glitter.

“Looks good,” I said.

“Not bad, eh, Easy? Maybe Mrs. Cantella could find a new husband?” His smile was conspiratorial.

“Probably won’t be no better than the last nine men she had.”

We both laughed. Then I started helping him. We moved clothes from one box to another while putting prices on them with little eight-sided paper tags and safety pins. For plain dresses we charged a dollar and for a fancy one we charged one seventy-five. All pants were sixty-five cents, and hats and handkerchiefs ran about a quarter.

“Shirley’s a good girl,” Chaim said after a while.

I nodded. “I guess so. Takes a generous woman to take in some drunk that she don’t even know.”

“Sometimes you have to drink.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true too.”

“You’re a good man, Easy. I’m glad to have you in my daughter’s house.”

We moved boxes around for another few minutes in silence.

I was just beginning to think seriously about how I could stay out of jail without getting Chaim in trouble when we heard the scream. It sounded far off but you could tell that it was full of terror.

Chaim and I looked at each other and then I headed for the stairs. I was halfway to the second floor when Winona Fitzpatrick came at me. She was running down with her arms out so I couldn’t avoid her. She was crying and yelling and one of her shoes was off.

“Winona!” I cried. “Winona!”

“Blooddead,” she moaned and then she fell into my arms.

Winona weighed at least two hundred pounds. I did my best to slow her fall till we came to the first floor. Then I let her down as gently as I could, but I still had to put her on the floor.

“Dead,” she said.

“Who?”

“Dead. Blood,” she said.

I decided that Chaim would come and take care of her and so I sprinted up the stairs. When I got to the minister’s apartment on the second floor I slowed a bit. I began to wonder, at that very moment, what was happening to me. I gazed at the plywood door and thought about the Texas swamplands southeast of Houston. I thought about how a man could lose himself in those swampy lands for years and nobody could find him. I knew things had to be bad if I was missing that hard country.

Reverend Towne was sprawled back on the couch. His pants were down around his ankles and his boxer shorts were just below his knees. His penis was still half erect and I’m sure the pious men and women of the congregation would have been surprised that it was so small. You think of a Baptist minister as being a virile man, but I’d seen little boys that had more than him.

Another strange thing was the color of his skin. Most black men’s skin gets darker in the genital area, but his was lighter, some strange quirk in his lineage.

The blood on his white shirt and his stunned expression told me that he was dead. I would have run to him to check it out but my way was blocked by the woman doubled over her own lap, sitting on her heels, at his feet. There was blood at the back of her head.

Nothing seemed to be out of place other than the two corpses. It was a modern apartment, there were no walls separating the rooms. The pine kitchen to the left had an electric range and a window that looked out the front of the church. On the right the bedroom, all made up and neat, sported African masks, shields, and tapestries on the far wall. A bright red blanket lay at the foot of the bed. The center of the apartment had a floor that was lower than the rooms that flanked it.