It was on Central Avenue that the memories started coming back.
I was smoking a Camel cigarette from a new pack that I picked up at a liquor store along the way. The window was open and the air whipped around the inside of that Barracuda like a man-made tornado.
Aretha Franklin was belting out Otis Redding’s song “Respect” on the radio, and I was feeling only slightly anchored to the world that I had left behind.
Down Tucker Street, in the heart of Compton, if you drive far enough, you come to a dead end. The asphalt turns to hard yellow soil. Thirty feet after that a seemingly impenetrable stand of avocado and eucalyptus trees blocks the way. Through and beyond the trees are dense bushes, many of them with thorns. If you push past the bushes you come to an unexpected door that seems like just another part of the forest, a yellow door with green lichen growing on it.
I stopped there to consider my actions. This was not a threshold that one, even a man in my condition, crossed lightly.
I waited a moment and the door opened of its own accord.
Jo was taller and darker and more substantial than I was even before the accident. She was in her sixties but might have been forty except for the heavy toll experience had left on her dark eyes.
“I wondered when you was gonna get here, Easy,” she said in a strong tenor voice that man or woman would have been proud of.
I inhaled, taking in the strange odors of the backwoods alchemist’s lair. The smells were sweet and bitter, vegetable and mammal, fish and also the deep, rich odor of the earth in its various refined guises.
I exhaled, feeling that the breath coming out of me carried an imprint of my soul that the house itself would study and pass judgment on.
“Come on in, Easy,” Mama Jo offered. “Take a weight off them shaky legs.”
Mama Jo’s home was like no other in Southern California: one generous room that performed every function of a house and a backwoods clinic. The floor was packed earth and the furniture could have been built by peasant hands in Europe’s Dark Ages. There was a hearth with a mantelpiece that had thirteen skulls on it. Twelve were armadillo heads and one was Domaque, the father of Jo’s only child, and the one true love of her life.
She had a pet raven moving back and forth on its T-shaped oak stand, and two live armadillos that stayed to the corners of the wide room. I saw something else move in the shadow under her long worktable but failed to make out the species.
“Sit down ovah here, baby,” she said.
I lowered myself into a chair made from arm-thick branches and animal hide. It was the chair I most often used at Jo’s house.
Jo sat down on the bench placed at her worktable. Behind her were dozens of crocks and jars, hanging bunches of dried leaves and branches, and more than a few hand-bound volumes.
There was barely six inches of space between our knees. Jo reached out for my hands and I gave them willingly, focusing my eyes on her bare feet.
“Easy,” she said, and I looked up.
We sat there for an interminable period, passing breath and feeling between us. My hands began to sweat and that was just another form of communication.
After a long time Jo blinked twice and let me go.
“It’s like you was dead out there in them bushes, Easy,” she said.
I nodded and sighed.
“You were down there in the pit and it was Raymond’s love that dragged you out. You two is just like chirren on a seesaw. One’a you is up and the other one down. That’s how it goes.”
I grinned but had no words to say.
“Man is a animal, Easy,” Jo continued on her impromptu and yet ready sermon. “Bobcat can have the biggest fight of his life on a Tuesday noon. And win or lose, either way, on Wednesday, if he still alive, he’ll need water and meat to survive.
“It’s a good thing that you run up off’a that cliff. A good thing. Because when you hit the bottom there is only one place left for you to go. You know that, don’t ya?”
“I don’t know a goddamned thing, Jo,” I said, unable to keep my anger in check. “Not a fuckin’ thing.”
“You know you tried to kill yourself and that Death threw you back. He held you in his hand a minute and then said, ‘Maybe.’ ”
I laughed deeply in spite of the pains in my chest and back. The idea of the Absolute looking at life and tossing it aside sounded so right that it was almost unbearable.
“I’m lookin’ for somebody for Raymond,” I said when the laughter subsided. “Evander Noon.”
“That’s just the seesaw action,” Jo replied. “You lookin’ for yourself.”
“I’m not sure if it’s for Evander or me,” I said, knowing that there was no arguing metaphysics with her. “All I do know is that I walked a block and a half yesterday and nearly collapsed. And here I got miles up ahead of me.”
“And that’s why you come here?”
“You gave Mouse this little vial for hangovers,” I said.
“Hangovah ain’t like dyin’,” she replied. “That’s just a little pick-me-up after a night out.”
“You got somethin’ stronger?” I asked.
“There’s health in your body, sugah, and death in your soul. I can give ya somethin’ help to see you through this thing, but I can’t tell whether you gonna come back alive or not.”
“All I know is if I stop right now I will be dead in a week. I know it.”
Jo’s hard black face cracked into a girlish grin.
“I knew when you was just a teenager that you were gonna be one helluva man, Mr. Rawlins. You look at the world and see what’s there. You know there ain’t one person outta three hundred could lay claim to half’a that.”
Jo got up and turned around to reach for something on a high shelf above the long and deep worktable. I had been looking almost only into her eyes since entering the cottage—either that or her workwoman’s feet and near-feral pets. Jo had the kind of will that kept you engaged. But when she turned I noted that she was wearing an almost festive yellow dress that came down to the middle of her calves. She had dressed for company. She had dressed for me.
“Here we go,” she said.
She handed me a wooden crate divided into eight three-inch-square sections. In each slatted section was nestled a little green bottle—all of them stoppered with hand-cut cork plugs. The liquid inside the bottles was dark and thick.
“I call this here Gator’s Blood,” Jo said as she regained her seat. “That there is some powerful juju. You take yourself a nap and then if you feelin’ weak you drink down one bottle. After that you’ll be good to go for whatever time your condition will allow. When you get tired again don’t take another bottle until you done falled asleep and woke up naturally. It’s some powerful shit, Easy, so don’t think you can break them rules.… But if you do what I say, not only will this medicine give you strength but it will help you heal.”
“This is great, Jo,” I said, “just what I wanted. I was wonderin’ if you had some tar balls too?”
“What for?”
“I don’t have any trouble falling asleep, but the dreams I’ve been having are sometimes too strong. And if I remember right, those tar balls cut down the strength of dreams.”
“They up on the shelf. But lemme make you some tea right now. I think that would be the right thing.”
Jo sat me on her hemp-padded sleeping cot and pulled the chair I’d been sitting in up next to it. She served me a sour-smelling sweet-tasting tea in an earthenware cup that might have been a century old. I took a sip and yawned.
“It’s good to see you, Easy,” Jo whispered.
“It’s good to be here.”
I took another sip and my eyes felt like they needed to close.
“You can’t fight with Death,” she said. “All you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don’t fall out from under you.”
“Can you get word to Juice and Feather that I’m here and that I’m all right?” I said as she took the cup from my hand.
“I’ll tell ’em that you’re here,” she said, and I fell on my side, sleep coming up around me like high tide.