I waited by the bathroom door somewhere in the vastness of the first floor while Antigone went off to see who our visitor was. I remembered that the house was actually an estate with an electronic gate that kept out any but those that knew the proper codes or had a key.
I knew who was coming and so the erection flagged and finally failed.
He came smiling down the hall a minute later.
“Easy!” Mouse exclaimed. “It’s a real pleasure to see you on your feet, brother.”
“Ray,” I said on an exhalation.
He was wearing dark blue work pants and an equally dark gray sweater. The blouse was cashmere, but most people couldn’t tell that from a glance. The color scheme, or the darkness of it, told those in the know that Raymond was ready to do business: the kind of illegal business that he’d been practicing since childhood.
“Why don’t you go upstairs and pull out Easy’s tan suit, the linen one, a blue shirt, and his felt brown shoes,” Mouse said to Antigone.
“Why?” the registered nurse asked, bureaucratic danger in her voice.
“Because me and Easy got to go out in the world and do some business.”
“No,” Antigone Fowler said.
Mouse looked at her and grinned.
“I mean it, Mr. Alexander,” she continued. “Mr. Rawlins is not nearly strong enough to be out and active. He’s suffered a terrible blow to his system. He needs rest.”
“Listen, Annie,” Mouse said in an almost sympathetic tone. “Either go upstairs and get Easy’s things or go on home. I will send you the money I owe you by Friday next.”
The anger and hardness in “Annie” Fowler’s face spoke of her deep commitment to her profession. Raymond was her employer and he could dismiss her at any time. But I was her responsibility, her charge. She could leave—she wanted to—but that would be abandoning her duty, and that was something this woman would never do.
She nodded her reluctant assent.
“While you’re at it,” I said, “could you collect my wallet and keys and any loose change that I might have?”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Yeah. What’s the phone number here?”
“I can tell ya that, Ease,” Mouse said.
Upon hearing this, Antigone Fowler walked away to reluctantly do our bidding.
“You got the new number memorized?” I asked my oldest friend.
“It was easy too,” he said, “because it’s the old number with a new exchange.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Jewelle got an in with the phone company.”
Twenty-five minutes later Mouse and I were driving off in his brand-new 1967 El Dorado. It was pink, as many of Mouse’s cars were.
Nurse Fowler had removed the IV needle from my arm and put a bandage over the puncture.
Raymond drove down the curvy cobblestone path through the arboretum of a front yard until finally coming to a great iron gate in the middle of a fourteen-foot-high stone wall. Mouse got out and did something at the side of the gate and it slowly swung open. He drove us outside into the outer driveway, got out, and performed some other juju to close the entrance.
As we drove southward out of Bel-Air I sat back and began to fade from consciousness.
“You okay, Easy?” Mouse asked, causing my mind to blunder back toward awareness.
“You know, maybe Antigone was right,” I said. “I mean, you even had to tie my shoes back there.”
“Open up the glove compartment,” he said as if in reply.
I did as he asked.
“Under the maps,” Mouse urged.
There, beneath a folded map of Arkansas, was a small crystal vial filled to its cork stopper with about an ounce and a half of lemon yellow liquid.
“Arkansas?” I said, picking up the vial.
“Did a little job out there a few weeks ago,” he muttered. “Drink it down, man.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell ya what’s in it. I just know what it does. Mama Jo give me twenty’a them li’l bottles for when I get hangovers. She said that when I need to be able to keep sharp this will do the trick. Go on, drink it.”
I pulled out the stopper and downed the contents in one draft. It had the strong taste of fruit: not berry or citrus, apple or grape, but all of those flavors, highly concentrated—enough to make me pull my head back as if I had just slugged down an especially strong alcohol drink.
“Somethin’, huh?” Mouse said.
“Wow.” Within seconds I could feel the effects of the homemade medicine. It was like the sun rising in my chest and a clear sky blooming in my head. “What is that?”
“You know Jo,” Raymond said. “She studied with every Chinese, Mexican, Indian, and savage tryin’ to learn what she can. She does things make most doctors say, ‘No, she did not.’ ”
I was coming awake for the first time since opening my eyes in the upstairs bedroom. I still felt like a dead man, but a dead man with a jig in his heart.
Mouse drove and I sat there next to him listening to radio station KGFJ. The song playing, I remember, was “Higher and Higher.” Your love keeps lifting me higher.… Maybe it was the subject of the song that made Raymond decide to broach Bonnie Shay.
“You call her?” he asked. He didn’t need to say who.
“I’ll tell you what, Raymond.”
“What’s that?”
“You want me to go out looking for this boy, right?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then let’s not talk about who I am and am not callin’.”
“You got it, Easy.”
Mouse was the most dangerous man I ever knew. He was deadly and criminal, vengeful and capable of taking matters into his own hands. But for all of that he appreciated the simple things in life: a well-told joke, a blunt statement of fact.
He wanted to talk about Bonnie and I didn’t, so we sat there listening to Otis Redding, the Association, and the Fifth Dimension on L.A.’s premier soul station.
I was surprised at how clearheaded Jo’s elixir had made me. My memory was still spotty, but my body felt like it belonged to me and would at least try to obey if I gave it a command.
When the news came on I turned the radio off.
“Did you really carry me all the way up half the side of that cliff?” I asked.
“Sure did,” he said, shaking his head to emphasize the energy exerted.
“Not really.”
“If you was a boxer you could hardly make lightweight, Ray. I’m a light-heavy at least.”
“That’s true. But you know I got this thing in my head.”
“What thing?”
“When the need comes it just opens up and I’m like two people. I think twice as fast and I get stronger than a motherfucker. When I seen you lyin’ there like that I just grabbed you and threw you ’cross my back. I didn’t think that I couldn’t do it. No, sir, not me. I do what has to be done. That’s all there is to it.”
We made it to Fairfax and drove down to Pico, turned left and cruised about five blocks, where we turned right on Stanley. Not four buildings south of Pico was a turquoise duplex. We pulled to the curb in front of this building.
“Timbale live here?” I asked.
“There’s another duplex, exactly the same, right behind this one,” he said. “She lives in the top unit.”
“Is she home?”
“I think so.”
“Didn’t you call?”
Mouse shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Little Green was up on Sunset,” he said instead of answering my question. “He met a white girl up there. I don’t remember the name. Anyway, she had told him that they should go to this discotheque and he was all excited about it.
“Timbale is from the Deep South, and so she told him to come home. But he was stubborn and she said to be careful around those white people and spent the whole night waitin’ up for him. But he didn’t come home and he didn’t call. And when the days went by she got desperate.”
“She ain’t call me, man. She got this friend named Lissa, who I know to talk to. Lissa called me and told me what I just told you.”
“You called Evander Little Green,” I said. “How come?”
“That’s my nickname for him.”
“So you are a friend of the family?”
“Not really.”
“But even so we gonna go up there and talk to Timbale.”
“You gonna to have to go on up there by yourself, Easy.”
“Why?”
“Me and Timbale don’t really get along. I mean, that woman hates the water I drink and the sun that shine on my back.”
“But you’re worried about her and her son?”
“There’s many a time when Etta hate my guts. That don’t mean I can’t love her.”
“Timbale was a girlfriend?”
“Never,” he said with a curl to his lip.
“Can you give me any more than that?”
“Easy, I give ya what you need to know. A boy is missin’. His mother is on the top apartment behind this one. She’s the last one that talked to him. It don’t mattah what me and Timbale have between us.”
It was perplexing, my friend’s motivation, but it didn’t seem to be all that important. He was right—the problem was before me, not in that car.