Terry told me that it would be easy to find the White Rabbit room, and I, in my addled state, recast the words: Easy would find the White Rabbit room. It didn’t make sense, what I thought I heard, but Terry was right.
The first door I came to on the manor’s middle floor was black with a crude image of a bunny painted with white slashes for its body and bright red for its disconcerting eyes.
There were five or six beds lined up side by side against the wall of the large room. At least nine naked and nearly naked bodies sprawled on and across the mattresses. A young woman wearing big square-framed glasses was reading a hardback book that had a bright blue cover. As I moved past her, headed for the window in the far wall, she looked up, dug in her nose with a finger, and then went back to her book.
I wanted to ask her what she was reading but managed to squelch that question. Then I wondered what time it was, but said to myself, It’s right now, man. Now move on.
I climbed through the window thinking about Alice through the looking glass.
Outside the big bedroom was a triangular red gravel-and-tarpaper roof—maybe sixteen feet at its widest point. There was a ten-inch-high ledge along the outer edge. Behind me, above the window, was the domed structure of the upper floors. The outside roof on which I stood was cut out of floors three, four, and five. I had never seen a house like that. It must have, I thought, been built up slowly over time. Maybe it started out as a normal two-story home and had been added on to until it became this patchwork novelty.
I shook my head to clear out the errant thoughts and concentrated on the sleeping bag that was up against the ledge at the outer edge of the roof. Next to the occupied bedroll was a thick pile of heavy rope.
The color of the synthetic fabric that covered the sleeping bag was drab green. The only life visible was a thatch of brown hair that was so full and healthy that in other circumstances I might have thought it was an animal pelt—maybe even with a live creature under it.
I hesitated then. Coco, whoever that was, didn’t know me, and even though we were outside this was still a bedroom of sorts. The morning air was fresh with just a slight chill to it. I squatted to sit down, but the pain in my ankle betrayed me and I fell with a thump.
The vibration roused the head of hair. It turned and rose up on both elbows.
Coco was most definitely a young woman. A very beautiful young woman with eyes to match her hair and skin that had absorbed a lot of sun. She sat up. This alone wouldn’t have meant much, but she was naked, and it was hard for me, in that frame of mind, not to allow myself to get distracted by her well-formed charms.
“Who the hell are you?” Coco asked.
I put up my hands in surrender and said, “No disrespect, lady. Ruby and Terry downstairs told me that a woman named Coco was up here and that she might know where I could find Evander Noon.”
Words could be either glue or acid, an old man named Tyner once told me. I was fourteen and staying on his three-acre farm ten miles outside of Houston. I helped him with the chickens and gardening and he let me sleep in the basement, where it remained cool on the hot summer nights. Words are the finest invention that human beings have ever made. They build bridges and burn ’em down. Glue or acid, that’s what the words you say will be. But you got to be careful. Sometimes you might have both parts at the same time. You got to watch out, because some words will at first pull somebody close and then turn him against you in time.
“You’re looking at my tits,” the beauty said. It was hardly an indictment, more like an argument against my claim.
“Um …”
She brought a pink T-shirt out from the sleeping bag and pulled it on.
“I’m not turning in nobody to the cops,” she said. The words came naturally, but her elocution told me that this dialect was a learned language. I wondered where she was from.
“Well?” she asked when I didn’t respond.
“I’m not a cop.” I took the picture of Evander out and handed it to her. “Evander’s mother, Timbale, gave me this and told me that he had gone missing. She’s scared sick. I know that Evander loves his mother and would at least want her to know that he was okay.”
Coco winced at me. There was something in what I said that resonated with her. But she didn’t know me, and I wasn’t dressed, coiffed like, or the right age of the people she trusted. Then again, I was black and Evander was too.
The young woman—I figured her to be around twenty-two—seemed to come to some decision. She stood up from the sleeping bag, unconcerned with the fact that she was nude from the waist down.
In another frame of mind I would have looked away from what my Christian brothers and sisters would have called her shame. But she wasn’t ashamed and neither was I. I had driven my Pontiac off of a cliff and crash-landed in a new world where women like Coco lived according to a whole new set of laws and beliefs.
So I watched while she rooted around for a pair of black sweatpants shoved down into the sleeping bag. I lit a cigarette as she pulled them up and drew the waist string tight. It wasn’t like the shower with Antigone or when I had sex in my sleep with Ruby; I wasn’t aroused. I was just a witness to the new world, like a failed Magellan or Columbus that had been shipwrecked and beached among an unfamiliar people. My job was to take on the local customs or get thrown back into the sea.
“Why do you sleep out here on the roof?” I asked as she went about the task of gathering her other possessions.
“I don’t like most men,” she said as if in answer.
“So it’s just that you want to be alone?”
“Not only.” She took a pair of red sandals, three books, a wallet, a plastic semiopaque golden box, and a see-through blue plastic pouch that had everything from bandages to Q-tips to loose change in it. These things, except for the sandals, she put in a purple velvet bag that was her purse. “I like being outside up here. Even when it rains sometimes I put up a tent.”
I smiled.
“What?” she said in challenge.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s funny to think of pitching a tent right outside the window.”
“You think it’s stupid.”
“Only if you get wet.”
Coco went about rolling up her sleeping bag and binding it.
After waiting a bit I asked, “Do you have disdain for all men?”
I think it was the use of the word disdain that raised her head. She pondered a moment and said, “No. I just don’t waste time with them unless they’re cool.”
She threw the bundle into the corner that cut deepest into the dome of the upper floors and then started pulling on her footwear. She did this standing up. I was impressed by her steadiness.
“Was Evander cool?”
“He was all freaked out,” she said. “Ruby had given him some acid and he had a bad trip that lasted for days. He came here a couple of days ago asking everybody where Ruby was. He was asking if we knew some guy but didn’t know his name. He said that he met him at Lula’s cathouse and that he wore all green. I didn’t know who he was talking about.
“Evander was going around asking everybody his question and crying a little, and this asshole named Yancy got mad and picked a fight with him. Yancy slapped Evander like people do in the movies to stop them from being so scared, but everybody knows that you can’t pull somebody out of a flashback by hitting them. Evander pushed Yancy and Yancy pulled out a knife …”
I wondered if Yancy had that knife on him when we tussled. Terry might have saved my life.
“… so,” Coco continued, “I got between them and told Yancy to fuck off. A couple of other people crashing said he should take a time-out and he split. After Yancy left, me and this girl named Vixie tried to calm Evander down.”
“Did he tell you where he’d been or where he was going?”
“You hungry?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. Then I made the mistake of standing up.
The first pain was in my right ankle—I expected that—but then there was a stitch that felt like a tear running up my left side, and my neck refused to straighten out.
I must have grunted from the pain, because Coco asked, “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Just a cramp.”
“We could go get a good breakfast at a place I know for three bucks each,” she said.
“Sounds good to me. I only want coffee anyway.”
“You got the money?”
“If you got the time.”
Coco smiled at the phrase, went to the pile of rope, and heaved it off the roof. I went to see why she’d done that and saw that the rope had unfurled into a ladder like the ones they use on big sailing ships. It was hooked to two metal bolts that were sunk into the ledge.
“You want me to go first?” she asked.
“We can’t just use the window?”
“I like to stay outside as much as possible.”
“After you,” I said, bobbing my head lightly.