The girl shouted, “Let me go!” and I slapped her.
I didn’t feel bad about hitting a woman in those circumstances. After all, she had just set me up to get mugged and beaten. Also, I didn’t hit her very hard, just enough sting to get her attention and to keep the police from coming.
“Shut up. I’m not gonna hurt you, girl.”
Her wild eyes were a sight in themselves. I could see in them a great deal of suffering and pain that lived inside her like a parasite that had been in her gut since childhood.
“Then let me go,” she said at a half shout.
“I’ll do you one better,” I said. “I’ll let you go and give you twenty dollars if you tell me where I can find this Evy. That really is his nickname and you couldn’t know that unless you met him.”
Money means freedom; that was what people in the white America thought then. Citizens like me knew that whatever you had could be taken away in an instant. We knew that value was first and foremost defined by the hand that offered it. Those on the receiving end were one-legged tightrope walkers.
But for the white girl in the white dress and blue socks, money would open a door that she could pass through; at least, that was what she believed.
“He was talking to a girl named Ruby down by the Blues Hut near Fairfax,” she said.
“She’s always down there this time of night. She sells flowers that she steals from people’s gardens in Beverly Hills.”
I still had the pistol in my hand. I had a carry permit granted me by one of the assistant chiefs of police who hated my guts but also needed my help from time to time.
I put the gun back under my jacket and took a twenty from my front pocket.
Before handing the money to the girl I said, “You know there’s a whole lotta men would kill you for what you tried to do to me.”
She stared into my eyes, looking for that death blow.
I handed her the bill and let go of her arm. She ran so fast that it was comical.
I laughed and started walking.
I had made it all the way to the mouth of the little lane before my next trial.
A flashlight winked and then shone in my face. I winced but remained otherwise still.
“Stop right there,” a man’s voice said. “Let’s see some ID.”
I didn’t move.
The policemen phased into sight from the darkness and the partial blindness imparted by the flashlight. Both men had pistols in their hands.
“I said,” the man said, “show me some ID.”
“I will certainly do that, Officer,” I replied in a jaunty voice. “But I just wanted to tell you that my wallet is in my back pocket.”
“Move slowly,” the other man said.
I was thinking that I had a good chance of killing those two men. It was merely supposition, but a frightening thought still and all. I took out my driver’s license and private investigator’s ticket and handed them to the second man.
“Look at this, Leon,” the cop said after shining his light on my proofs.
“Private dick?” Leon said incredulously.
I thought about nodding but didn’t.
Leon moved closer to get a better look at me.
“This is you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I never met a colored private dick before.”
“We’re a rare breed.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“May I take something out of my inside breast pocket?”
“What?”
“The picture of the young man I’m looking for.”
“Okay,” he said, leveling the pistol at my chest.
I showed him and his partner Evander’s picture and told them pretty much the truth about my intentions.
“So what are you doin’ up here?” the cop who was not Leon asked.
“I met a girl down on Sunset who said that Evander would sleep behind a Dumpster in the alley back there. I came up to look but instead I see these biker guys fighting.”
“Did one of them fire a gun?” Leon wanted to know.
“No gun that I saw, but they made one helluva racket pushing and fighting around those big Dumpster cans. I called out, thinking that maybe one of them was Evander, but when they ran I saw it wasn’t him.”
The officer-not-Leon handed me my identification and said, “You have to be careful up around here, Mr. Rawlins. A lot of these kids hate the establishment and they sometimes rob men and women dressed like you.”
“I’m beginning to see that. You know, I believe that if those guys weren’t fighting each other they might have attacked me.”
The police left soon after that, looking for bikers that had been fighting in the dark.
I made my way back to Sunset. Somewhere along the way I’d dropped the carton of Lucky Strikes, but I still had Evander’s photograph.
Walking down streets so dense with humanity you don’t really move in a straight line or very fast. All you have is a general forward motion shoved around by couples, corpulence, and unexpected pirouettes of ecstasy. Hiking eastward toward Fairfax felt like a fragrant dance in itself, all the bodies and faces, odors and sounds.
“Hey, man, that’s a groove,” a patchouli-scented white face said.
“Three dollars a lid, I swear,” a marijuana-eyed black hippie announced.
After a while I felt like I was part of a flood, not a singular man at all. It reminded me of outlying Negro towns in Louisiana and Mississippi on Saturday nights, when the workers all hung around the juke joints drinking homemade liquor and dancing. Back then we laughed and cried because we were down under the thumb of racism so strong that there was no escape.
These hippies felt under the gun too. They were ostracized because of their clothes and habits, outraged by the war in Vietnam—but unlike my people in the old days, these young men and women believed that they could change the world that tried to hold them down. They believed that they were part of a revolution.
You could feel the hope coming off of them in waves.
After six or seven blocks I believed it too.
On the southeast corner of Fairfax and Sunset sat a slender white girl on an upside-down red plastic bucket. She wore a tie-dyed yellow-and-violet dress that hugged her figure and went all the way down to her ankles. Her face was long and would become homely as she aged, but that year she had a particular beauty brought out by the mostly peaceful mutiny of people in the street.
As I approached she looked up and smiled. Her eyes were amber. Her hair was long and brown. At her bare feet sat a white plastic bucket with roses, dahlias, small sunflowers, poppies, and maybe half a dozen other flowers arranged at random.
“How much?” I asked.
“Whatever you can give,” she said.
“What if I don’t have anything?”
“Then that’s what you can give.”
“But aren’t you here to make money?”
“I’ll get enough for some bread and honey whether you pay me or not.” Her eyes went a little out of focus. “One time a guy gave me some French bread and strawberry jam and only took one little snapdragon.”
“Are you Ruby?”
“Yes.”
I held out a hand and she rose to shake it.
“What’s your name?”
“Easy.”
“Wow.”
She was standing very close to me. I could smell rose attar and human sweat. People were moving around us, but there was an aura of stillness in the little patch of sidewalk that we occupied.
“Do I know you, Easy?”
I took out the graduation picture and showed it to her.
“Evander,” she said.
“He hasn’t been home in four or five days and his mother wants to make sure he’s okay.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to go home,” she suggested.
“I just need to see him breathing, that’s all.”
Ruby considered me for a moment, came to a decision, and said, “Come on.”
“What about your flowers?”
“Somebody’ll take them.”
She took me by the hand and we waded into the throng. For a brief moment there I felt alive and that something great awaited me.