Parishioner (43 page)

The first nine steps were a real pleasure. I was up on my feet and walking just as if I was a living man in the real world who knew about gravity but didn’t worry about it bringing him down.

That got me to the concrete path at the side of the front apartment building. The concrete used to lay the path had been tinted a blue color that was meant to match with the turquoise plaster of the buildings—instead it clashed. When I noticed the discord of coloration my step began, ever so slightly, to falter.

All that means is that I’m still a little weak
, I said to myself.

I was walking just as well as any other man: one step after another, evenly, in a forward motion.

But when I got to the little raised patio that served as a buffer between the two buildings I stopped before taking the step up. I was like a sentient gas engine that suspected that the fuel gauge was past empty. I was going just fine but at any moment the flow might begin to sputter.

I took the step up to the brick courtyard and strode in six paces to the bottom of the stairs. I estimated twenty-one white stonelike steps to the upper landing. Twenty-one.

Those stairs might have been one of the seven trials of Hercules. Between the pain in my ankle, the dizziness, and the unfamiliar strain on the muscles pulling my body weight upward, I felt like a juggler forced to ply his trade just a few seconds after being shaken out of a deep sleep.

I also had the almost hallucinatory impression of leaving an image of myself on each passing stair. Every progressive Easy was a few years older and weaker than the last. When I made it to the small stone landing it felt like I had reached the century mark.

My lungs were working harder than a blacksmith’s bellows against white fire. I was sweating like a long-distance runner on the last leg of a losing race.

The turquoise door was open but the gray screen was closed. I put my hand against the doorjamb and counted out four deep breaths before pressing the ivory colored plastic button next to my hand.

The ensuing bell was the two-tone economy brand, the kind of bell that a builder bought in bulk expecting to be asked to erect another building like the last and the one before that.

When there was no immediate answer my mind began making up things again. I imagined that I was almost a dead man and the bell was my request for eternal sleep. The reason for no answer was that my application had to be reviewed. I was being forced to hold on to the pain and exhaustion of life until the powers that be could make a judgment on the long list of things I’d done wrong.

The notion was ridiculous enough to get me to smile.

“Can I help you?” a woman asked.

She was dark skinned and short, with hair cut closer than a marine recruit’s. Her build, in the simple, short-sleeved olive-colored dress, was slender and yet brawny, like many a sharecropper I’d known in my days in the South. I noted that the dress had one big pocket on the left thigh. I knew she was in her mid-thirties but she could have passed for fifty easily. Her brutal face was softened by the roundness of her features and also by the slightly fearful tone under the anger in her voice.

She wasn’t in any way pretty, but this woman was what the black sons of cotton pickers dreamed about when they had women in mind.

“Miss Noon?”

“Who’s askin’?”

“My name is Easy Rawlins.” Just saying these words dispelled the greater part of my exhaustion and banished pain to the outer regions of awareness. “I’m here because Ray Alexander asked me to come. He told me that your son, Evander, has gone missing and you might need someone to root him out.”

The permanent scowl on Timbale’s face hid any reaction she might have had to these words. But I didn’t care. I was still tickled at the magic quality of speaking my name.

“You a preacher, Mr. Rawlins?”

“No, ma’am, a private detective.”

“I never met a Negro detective before.”

“We’re a rare breed,” I acknowledged. “But you know a black man has to be twice as good if he claims to be equal with a white.”

The hardscrabble woman nodded against her will. When the truth is spoken among women and men like us there had to be an amen, had to be.

“You don’t look like you could root out a radish from sandy soil,” she said, thick Mississippi in her words.

“If you’re saying that I look tired, you’re right,” I said. “I wouldn’t refuse a chair and some lemonade.”

Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.

“Come on in then,” she said.

She unlatched the screen door, pulled it open, and, after a stutter of hesitation, moved to the side.

I entered the small and bare foyer. The floor was waxed pine and the wallpaper was light lime paper decorated with tiny cherry branches that were set in slanting lines. Timbale walked through to a slip of a room that ended, after only fifteen feet or so, at a glass door that opened up to a plant-filled terrace. It was a small veranda with room for just two iron chairs, painted white, and a low glass-topped cast-iron table.

We didn’t go outside, however. Timbale had me sit on a backless couch in the den; then she went off to see to my refreshment.

“Excuse me a minute, Mr. Rawlins,” she said as she went.

There were so many plants out on the platform that all I could see above them was the sky. Succulents, ferns, and a couple of potted pines made up most of the greenery. Plants that were simple to pot and grow.

A rattling from a distant place in the apartment caused me, for no identifiable reason, to wonder exactly what I was doing there. This inner question brought me to a memory of when I had been wounded six days after the Battle of the Bulge. A sniper had been aiming somewhere else, missed the mark, and the ricochet grazed my shoulder… .

“Here we go,” Timbale said.

She came back into the room carrying a plastic tumbler in each fist. The liquid contained in the semiopaque containers was reddish in color.

“Don’t have no fresh-squeezed lemonade,” she said. “Kool-Aid will have to do.”

She put the glass down on the TV stand next to me. I let my whole body list forward to pick up the plastic tumbler.

“What you got to do with Ray Alexander?” There was no give in her voice.

“He has retained me to help you find Evander, if that’s what you want to do.”

A spasm of anger went through her thin body. A little red sugar water sloshed out and down her knuckles.

“You really are a detective?” she asked.

I took out my wallet and showed her the license I’d procured after helping the police with a crime that they would have never solved on their own.

She read it, nodding her head angrily, and then passed the little card back.

“I was at work,” she said. It was the beginning of a story that she had gone over again and again, hoping for a different ending. “… at Proxy Nine, where I’m a nighttime security guard—”

“Proxy Nine?” I asked. “The French insurance company?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Nothing. I mean, I got friend named Jackson Blue that works there.”

“I never heard’a him. He work days?”

“Mostly.”

“Anyway,” Timbale said, “I was at work at a little after nine o’clock and Evander called me. He always calls around then. I could tell that he was outside, because I heard traffic, and so I asked him where he was. He didn’t wanna say, but finally he told me that he had gone up to the Sunset Strip to see what all the hippies looked like and met up with these people that invited him to go to this club.”

“Which club?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Mr. Alexander said that it was a girl that asked him.”

“How he know that?”

I raised my palms and shrugged.

“It was a girl,” Timbale agreed. “He didn’t wanna tell me at first, but after I kept askin’ he said. Her name was Ruby, but she was a white girl. I told him I didn’t want him to go, but he wouldn’t listen. He’s almost twenty years old and got a job workin’ for the Tolucca Mart grocery store on Robertson. At least, he did have that job. They told me that they had to fire him when I called to see if he had been there.”

“Had he been there?”

“No. Nobody done seen him since he called that night.”

Timbale Noon had cried all her tears in an earlier life. At this late stage the best she could do was frown and shake her head over one more blow to her attempt at happiness.

“Can you find him, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked, looking up.

“I can sure look.”

The smile that crossed her lips and faded was like one of those rare flowers that blossom once a year for twenty-four hours and then wither.

Before I could ask another question the screen door flew open, followed by the clatter of feet. Two girls, a teenager and a younger one, burst into the den.

“Hi, Mom!” the younger girl exclaimed. “Did Evy call?”

“No, baby,” Timbale said.

She reached out and pulled the child onto her lap. The girl was a little too old for this, maybe nine. She was lighter in color than her mother but still a strong brown.

The adolescent girl was probably thirteen. She eyed me with some suspicion. She was already starting to have the hard visage of her mother.

Both children were clad in simple one-color dresses, red for the small one and ochre for the older. The hems on both came down below the knee. I thought they might have had different fathers, but the imprint of Timbale was strong on both of them.

“This is Mr. Rawlins, LaTonya,” Timbale said to the girl on her lap. “What do you say?”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Rawlins.”

“And this is Beatrix,” Timbale said, introducing me to the older girl.

“Do you have a daughter named Feather?” Beatrix asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“I thought so. She’s gonna go to Louis Pasteur with me in the fall. I saw you with her once at the Christmas choral they had at Burnside Elementary.”

“You two go on now,” Timbale said. “Me and Mr. Rawlins have to finish talking and then I’ll make you a snack.”

LaTonya bounded off. Beatrix moved away more slowly, stopping at the doorway to the foyer, where she looked hard at me again.

“Beautiful children,” I said when they were gone.

“I have made a whole lotta mistakes in my life, Mr. Rawlins, but I’ve had my share of blessings. Evander was my biggest mistake and a godsend too.”

“Does he have any good friends that might have an idea where he’s gone?”

“He’s a real bookish boy. Most’a my friends complain about their kids bein’ on the phone day and night. Beatrix does a lotta that, but Evy ain’t never on the phone.”

“Maybe the girls know about people he knows,” I suggested.

“I already talked to them about it. They said that he talked about the hippies sometimes but he never went up there.”

It would have been better for me to question the girls myself, but I could see that Timbale would not let that happen.

I took a business card from the wallet that was still on my lap and handed it to her.

“Do you have a picture of Evander?”

The working woman put her hand in the solitary pocket and pulled out a three-by-five photograph. After gazing on it for a moment she handed the picture over to me. It was the color photo of a smiling broad-faced boy wearing a graduation cap and gown. There was something familiar about that face but I thought, at the time, it was the look that Timbale had stamped on all her kids.

“Isn’t he handsome?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I took a deep breath and stood up with nary a waver.

“I’ll go up to Sunset tonight and canvass the whole boulevard.”

She winced at my vow. Maybe she worried that a dead man was only good for finding corpses.

At the door I stopped and asked her, “What’s the trouble between you and Mr. Alexander?”

“No trouble. It’s just if I ever see him I will send his narrow high-yellah ass to hell.”

People have often told me that walking downhill is harder than climbing up. That might be true, but it felt a lot easier descending the stairway from Timbale Noon’s second-floor apartment.

Before I got to the bottom I heard LaTonya laughing carelessly. I stopped for a few moments, listening to the squeals of childhood’s abandon. It seemed very far away.

Maybe it was the sugar from the Kool-Aid and not the evocation of my name but walking back to the car was easier than I expected. I jerked the handle to pull the car door open then lowered into the passenger’s seat with great concentration.

“Well?” Mouse asked.