The policemen stopping me was wrong, but it most certainly saved me from more trouble up ahead.
I hung around the front of the garage for a few minutes thanking Bertie and Sammy for standing up on my behalf. Then I had to wait for another light. When I made it across the street I was bone-tired. So I sat down on a bus stop bench, breathing and wishing I had a cigarette. This was a desire and not a craving. The days of unconsciousness had weaned me off of the worst part of the smoking addiction. But the cigarettes I had with Mouse had reminded my system of their draw.
These thoughts blossomed into a full-fledged reexamination of waking up from death, not sleep, and now looking for a way back to what was before.
“Easy,” Mouse called.
He had turned off of Pico and pulled to the curb so that his car was pointing north on Genesee—he’d even thrown the passenger’s door open wide.
I went over to the car and got in without a word.
“You see?” he said jauntily. “I told you you shouldn’ta walked. I might’ve had to pick you up from the gutter.”
“You mighta had to go my bail.”
My place was just a few houses up from the corner. Mouse pulled into the driveway and jumped out faster than I was able. He was approaching the front door when I was just coming around the car.
“Do’s open,” he announced.
I remember wondering, inanely, if I had locked up when I’d last gone out—two months before.
A tall white man got to the door from inside at the same moment I came from up behind Mouse.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
He was lanky and courteous, wearing a gray, short-sleeved shirt with little dark blue dots all over and black buttons. He had on black trousers but no shoes or socks. It was the fact that this stranger was standing barefoot in my home that roused me from fatigue.
“You could tell us what you doin’ in my friend’s house,” Mouse suggested.
“I don’t understand,” the white man said. “This is my house.”
He had sandy brown hair that was in retreat from his forehead, a jutting nose, and one pimple over the left side of his upper lip. His skin was the color of those white-sand beaches I saw along the West African coast. I didn’t have time to register the color of his eyes right then because Mouse distracted me.
Raymond glanced quickly behind him. I mimicked the motion because I knew his next move: If there was no one there he intended some kind of violence.
The street was empty.
The next thing I knew there was that old long-barreled .41 in my friend’s hand.
Before the white man could react Ray had hit him in the center of his vast forehead, knocking him into the living room and flat on his back.
Mouse stalked in over his victim, shouting to me, “Come on in and close that do’, Easy!”
Once again, in greatly different circumstances, I did as I was told.
The white man was rising up on his right elbow when Mouse pushed him back with his foot.
When the stunned man tried to get up again, Raymond leveled the muzzle of his gun and said once more, “Stay down.”
The lights were on but the California sun outside had been much brighter. My eyes were as fatigued as the rest of me, and so I struggled to get my vision clear.
“What’s yo’ name, man?” Mouse said.
“Jeffrey.”
“Well, Jeff, let me ask you again. What you doin’ barefoot in Easy here’s house?”
“I live here,” he claimed indignantly. “The man who owned this place died and I … and I homesteaded it.”
There was blood coming from Jeffrey’s forehead, but we all knew that that was the least of his problems.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I had an accident but I didn’t die. I’m back now and you should leave.”
“Or I will kill you,” Mouse agreed. “Right here, right now.”
“I have to, have to put my things … I have to pack.” Events were moving very fast for Jeff. One minute he was luxuriating in his home and the next he was homeless.
“What day is trash day, Easy?” Mouse asked.
“Tuesday.”
“You could come by next Tuesday and pick what you want outta the trash.”
“But that’s—”
Mouse pulled back the hammer on his revolver to cut Jeffrey’s complaint short.
As the squatter got to his feet I opened the door.
“What about my shoes,” he whined. “I got to have my shoes.”
In reply Mouse hit him on the side of his head with the pistol. The impact propelled Jeffrey out the door and down to his knees on the front lawn. Mouse stood in the doorway waving his gun and said, “If I see you again I will kill you, Jeff. You don’t know me, but believe it when I tell you I don’t fuck around.”
Mouse slammed the door and turned to me.
“Can you believe that shit? Mothahfuckah wanna come here and take your house. Claimin’ to be some kinda homesteadah acting like he rolled up on the wagon train.”
That’s when I started to laugh. Between waking up from death, the acres of pain in Timbale Noon’s eyes, the cops stopping me for walking, and now this squatter, I knew that, even if the whole world had changed, there was still a hard row to go and no hoe in sight.
Ray laughed with me. I lowered myself onto the sofa and he sat in the padded chair on the side.
I noticed then that he was carrying a grease-stained brown paper bag in his left hand.
It struck me as absurd that a man could exhibit such violence while holding on to a bag full of burgers and fries.
He placed the bag on the low coffee table and ripped it open. The strong smells made me realize how hungry I was and, at the same time, sickened me.
“They aksed me if I wanted chili and cheese on ’em, Easy,” Mouse was saying as he tore the tawny paper wrapper off of his burger. “I said okay to the cheese but I thought chili might be too much for your gut.”
I picked up my hefty sandwich and determined to swallow at least eight bites. It was my job to learn how to walk and eat and live like a man in a world where every step was a challenge.
“You seen Jackson Blue since the accident?” I asked Mouse some hours later.
I had already called the kids and talked to them. I told Feather that I was going to stay at the Genesee house because I was too tired to move around. She said that she loved me and that she was so happy that I was alive.
“Yeah,” Mouse said in answer to the question about Jackson. “You know I got to like old Blue. He can do things that nobody else can, with them computers and telephone lines. I kinda collect special friends like that—especially if they black, but not only.”
“You still hooked up with Lynne Hua?”
“Not really. She’s gettin’ married to this TV actor dude.”
“And you don’t mind that?”
“It’s okay wit’ me. I mean, she still gimme some’a that sweet thing if I want it. Woman need to be married.… Man too.”
He was inviting me to talk about Bonnie Shay but I didn’t take the bait.
“You wanna drink, Ray?” I asked instead. “I think there might be a bottle in the kitchen closet if Jeff didn’t get at it.”
“No, thanks, Ease. I don’t wanna send you down no wrong path.”
I’d swallowed the eight bites and even had a few French fries. My stomach gave me serious grief but I rode that out.
By late afternoon the room seemed to be fading.
Mouse was telling the story of how I was the first one to bring him out to Los Angeles, when I called EttaMae down in Houston.
“Yo’ ass was in serious trouble,” he reminded me, “but I liked the weather.”
He said more but I don’t remember it. I leaned back and the room receded once more. I was falling for a moment and then there was sudden bliss.