Little Green (2 page)

“No.”

The nondescript room behind Lynne got lighter but I still couldn’t make it out.

“Where?”

“It’s the house that Jewelle MacDonald got you when you were trying to protect your family.”

“How did I get here, Lynne? What happened?”

“I don’t know the whole story, Easy.”

“Tell me what you do know.”

“The doctor said that when you came to and could talk we should make sure you stay calm.”

“I’m calm. I need to know what happened.”

“You were drunk, trying to pass a truck on Highway One.”

“So you’re saying that if I’m not dead I should be.”

“Everybody thought you were,” Lynne said. “Ray got the call from your son at four in the morning. They found your license on the beach and the registration in the glove compartment of your car. It had crashed into the surf.”

“And I was in the water too?”

“Your body was lost. The driver’s-side door was torn off. The police told us that you had probably floated out on the tide.”

“So what happened?”

“I went up to the house with Raymond. Later in the morning after Christmas Black came to watch the kids, Ray and I drove over to Mama Jo’s.”

The image of the tall black witch-woman came up into my mind’s eye. Just the thought of her power and magnetism anchored my floating thoughts.

“What did Jo have to do with it?” I was imagining some mystical rite where the witch had made a bargain with the Devil to raise the dead.

“Ray told her that you had died and that he wanted her to perform the funeral ceremony, especially since the body had been washed away.”

“And did she agree?”

“She looked Raymond in the eye and grabbed him by both shoulders,” Lynne said, still astonished by the act. “She even lifted him
up on his toes. And all Ray did was stare back. After a minute or so she let him go and stood up so tall that her head almost touched the roof of the cottage and she said, ‘Your friend is not dead, Raymond. While you’re here feelin’ sorry for yourself he’s out there in pain, near death. Go back to where that accident happened and look for him. Look close.’

“I drove him up to the place you went off the cliff and he climbed down. He was gone for two hours searching through the hillside and bushes, between the big boulders and down along the beach. I just sat there and waited, thinking about how much Ray loved you and how sure Mama Jo was that you had survived. And then, after I knew there was no hope, Raymond came up the side of that mountain with you slung across his back. You know he’s a small man, Ezekiel; you’re almost twice his size, but he carried you halfway up that steep climb, brought you all the way to the car and laid you in the backseat like you were a child.”

“Where was I?” I asked.

“Raymond said that when your car hit the first boulder the door flew off and you were probably thrown free. You fell into these thick bushes. They broke your fall but they also hid you from view. I guess the police just figured you were dead once they saw the car. You’d been there for almost a day and so were suffering from exposure as well as a bad concussion.”

There came a ripple in the atmosphere between me and Lynne.

It felt as if an invisible wall had suddenly come down between us. She was still talking but I could no longer make out the words. I wanted to know everything about my death, but I couldn’t speak or even gesture, and Lynne was slowly moving backward as if her chair was being drawn away by cables into the depths of the featureless room. As she moved off into the distance the light lowered and soon I was, once again, dead and dreaming.

The next thing I heard was the chirping of crickets. They cried out in the night like an orchestra of mad violinists playing what they really felt—not what anybody but their potential lovers wanted to hear. For long minutes there was just me under the covers surrounded by the love-hungry insects. I imagined that my bed had been dragged out of the room and I was now in a garden—the twittering chirps were that strong.

And there was something else. There was a breeze wafting over me: a chilly nighttime desert breeze that made me shiver and almost want to giggle. I was awake but my eyes were closed.

There was a scratchy striking sound and then a brief susurration. I smelled the sharp sulfuric odor of a struck match and then, five seconds later, there came the delicious scent of burning tobacco. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled with a grunt of pure satisfaction.

One day cigarettes would kill me, but ten thousand days before that final hour they would be a balm, a medicine, and a doorway to a whole lifetime of memories, like Proust’s fateful madeleine.

This last thought reminded me that I was, basically, an uneducated reader, a man who loved books beyond any other thing outside of family and close friends. André Malraux and Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and T. S. Eliot lived in me just as surely as back-country lynchings and the scent of a lover’s sex.

I opened my eyes and was not surprised to see Raymond Alexander sitting in the chair that Lynne Hua last inhabited. He was hatless
in a glimmering, silver-colored suit and a muted red dress shirt with no tie, open at the collar. Smoke was wafting around his sharp features, and his smile seemed to move with the sinuous wisps.

“You shouldn’t never take another drink as long as you live, man” were his first words to me.

We were good friends, old friends. Our camaraderie had worn down to a comfortable patter that we’d share standing next to each other in front of a firing squad or with one of us visiting the other on his deathbed.

“Lynne said that I almost died,” I said by way of a thank-you for his mythic effort on my behalf.

“Almost?” Mouse replied, holding his hands a foot apart to show the enormity of my understatement. “You
was
dead, brother. I seen me a whole lotta dead men and you made half’a them look like they might get up and tap their toes. Shit. If Jo didn’t tell me I was lookin’ for a live man I might’a buried you right there under them bushes rather than strain my back.”

He took a pack of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket, teased out a cigarette, and lit it with the one he was smoking. He leaned over and placed the new cigarette between my lips. This intimate gesture reminded me of family. I inhaled deeply, grateful for that brief moment of feeling.

“Yeah, Easy,” Mouse said. “You know I been dead before too. It wasn’t only that time I was shot and Etta dragged my body off to Jo. Uh-uh. You know when you was off in the war me and this girl, Lorelle Pinchot Richards, started talkin’ ’bout this rich white lady she worked for. Lorelle told me that Mrs. Lottie Montou had all kindsa gold and cash and jewels up in her house. I had told Lorelle that I was in with this bent white dude named Bill that was happy to take whatevah I stole and sell it in New Orleans or Atlanta. He was my fence and my front too. Anyway, Lorelle had this, what she called a first cousin named Vince, and she hinted that me and Vince could empty out the house after she drugged her mistress with a sleepin’ powder.

“We did all that and then, when we was at Vince’s cabin Lorelle held out her arms and said, ‘Come here, baby; gimme some sugah.’ I was young and stupid, and after I took one step Vince, who I later found out was not her cousin, shot me dead in the back. I pitched forward, missed Lorelle, and hit the wall.

“The next thing I knew I had dirt in my mouth and a knot in my back like a mothahfuckah. I sat up and the dirt from the shallow grave fell down around my shoulders. Doc Halberman said that the bullet must have had a weak charge and wedged in a bone, and I was just lucky that when I fell I hit my head and knocked myself out so they thought I was dead.

“Halberman told me to rest, but you know I had business to take care of, so I had him put a plaster patch on the wound and I went right out to Bill’s little farm to warn him about Lorelle and Vince. You know when he come to the back door and saw me he turned another whole shade’a white.

“ ‘Are you a ghost?’ he asted me, and I told him, ‘Close, but not quite yet.’

“Then he give me a shot’a whiskey and took two for himself and led me down to the storm cellar. There was Vince’s corpse and Lorelle all tied up like a turkey hen before you throw her in the oven. The minute Lorelle and Vince walked in on Bill he shot the boy and bound the girl. I had told him from the begin that I’d be the only one to bring him any loot. He told me that we had to kill her but that he didn’t have the heart to shoot no woman, even if she was colored.

“You know I had got me some good pussy off that girl and I knew that it was Vince had pulled the trigger, so I just dragged Vince’s body out to Bill’s hog pen and let them get rid of the evidence, such as it was. Then I took Lorelle to this place I knew and told her that if she could bring a smile to my dead lips then maybe I’d just let her go.”

I was at the butt end of my cigarette and so dropped it in a glass
of water on the night table while Mouse lit me another. I took a deep draw and then asked, “So what happened?”

“You know, Easy, the threat of death has a miraculous effect on some poor souls. Lorelle loved me harder that night than any woman has ever done before or since. She had me strainin’ so hard over that stuff that I give myself what they call a hemorrhoid. Shit, that thing hurt me longer than the bullet wound.”

“And did you kill her?” I asked. Before that cricket night I wouldn’t have dared ask Mouse a question like that, but right then I felt beyond petty fears of mortality or guilt.

“Naw, man,” Mouse said. “She couldn’t do nuthin’ to me. She saw her boyfriend gunned down by a white man that she could never lay blame on and then I saved her. After that she joined Calvary Baptist in Galveston. You know she get down on her knees to thank God ever goddamned day. And me? I rose up out the grave a dead man among the livin’. And you know that wasn’t the only time.”

Mouse grinned, shook his head, and took another drag off his cigarette.

I smoked, slowly contemplating the man who had carried me out from my grave.

“Why are you here, Raymond?”

“What kinda question is that, Easy? You my friend, my best friend.”

“That might be true, but Mama Jo already told you I’ma be okay, and Lynne must’a called you to say I was out of that coma. You runnin’ over here in the middle’a the night when a sick man should be gettin’ his rest mean that there’s something you want, no … something you need from me.”

Raymond Alexander sat back in the boxy padded chair and smiled, then grinned.

“They say Jackson Blue is some kinda genius, but there ain’t a man I evah met knows people better than you, Ease. You read a man’s face like a little kid readin’ Dick and Jane.”

“So what is Jane and her boyfriend up to?” I asked.

Mouse’s good humor faded as it had in my dream. A serious look crossed his face, and he stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray he had in his lap.

“There’s a woman live two maybe three blocks from your Genesee house named Timbale Noon. She got three kids. The oldest one, who she named Evander, is nineteen, twenty. He should be a man but he’s immature for his age. You know that’s a bad combination. He’s gone missin’. I haven’t talked to Timbale directly, but I heard from a friend’a hers that a few days ago Evander called his mama from up on the Sunset Strip and told her that he met this girl, that he might be late because they were goin’ to listen to some music at a club up there.

“That was the last Timbale heard from Evander, and she is heartbroken. The police won’t even take down a report. And you know a thirty-four-year-old black woman is not gonna get anything outta them hippies up there. I spent two days lookin’ for him, but I couldn’t turn up a damn thing. I mean, if I knew who to shoot it’d be different, but I need that Easy magic, that readin’ faces like a child’s primer.”

I tried to imagine getting up out of the bed, putting on a pair of pants, and walking out of a door. Just thinking about it exhausted me.

“Can you do this for me, Easy?” Mouse asked.

If it was anyone else I would have said no. But Raymond had crawled out of a grave with a bullet in his back; he had shimmied up a seaside mountain with my body across his shoulders. And there were other, as yet unarticulated reasons too.

“I’ll do it,” I said, and then I passed out.

My next bout of consciousness was announced by sunlight battering up against my eyelids. It was warm and red. A breeze was still wafting but it wasn’t chill. I opened my eyes and saw clearly the room I was in for the first time. It was quite large, with a cream-colored bureau against one wall and a solid oak desk next to an open sliding glass door. The bed I was in was king-size, and the chair next to it was ivory, not white. Dark blue carpeting covered the floor, and the ceiling was high and light blue enough to almost be a sky.

Inhaling, I picked up the sour smell coming from under the covers. The fresh morning breeze was the perfect counterpoint to the odor rising from my recently deceased and then partially resurrected body.

I lay still for a while, thinking about Lynne Hua and Mouse. Had they been there or were they phantoms my mind used while paving its way back to consciousness? I didn’t remember much about the accident that Lynne had spoken of. I couldn’t imagine little Raymond carrying my hundred and eighty-some pounds up a seaside cliff.

And when a man ran off the side of a mountain in a three-ton car he died. Didn’t he?

These thoughts made the circuit of my mind six or seven times before I realized that I would never come up with the answer on my own. I decided then that I’d have to see what was outside of the well-appointed, unfamiliar blue bedroom.

I raised up on one elbow and fell back with a thump. The pain
going through my head felt like a jagged lightning bolt come out of nowhere on a perfectly clear afternoon. That was okay. I’d had hangovers before that made rising a two-effort affair. I tried again, but this time I didn’t make it as far up as on the first attempt. My next effort was more a thought than any kind of physical motion.

Finally I decided to roll to the edge of the bed and swing my legs over the side one at a time. The tug of gravity helped to pull my torso into a mostly upright position. The billowing curtains from the glass sliding doors seemed to be cheering me on.