I waited until Coco had made it down to the lawn before clambering over the side.
It was a foolish thing for me to scramble down that shaky ladder. With each step the ladder’s swing became more pronounced, the bodily pains increased, and my sense of balance flailed from side to side. But this was all of a piece, because everything I was doing right then was foolish; just the fact that I was out in the world rather than at home in the bosom of my family seemed like a fatal gaffe.
Chuckling at my own reckless nature made the netting wobble more, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Watch it!” Coco called. She steadied the rope and I took the last half dozen rungs with hardly a misstep.
On the lawn I was exhilarated, like a child who had successfully taken his first ride on the slide under his own power.
“You almost fell,” Coco said.
“Almost being the operant word.”
Once again my use of language gave her pause.
Since she was just standing there, looking at me, I asked, “Where’s the breakfast place?”
“Down on Pico. You got a car?”
“Ten or eleven blocks from here.”
Sunset was almost empty at that time of day. As much as I’d enjoyed the throngs of the night before, I was grateful for the silence that accompanied the early morning. Coco and I had made it to San Vicente before we started talking again.
“So what was Evander so freaked out about?” I asked.
“He kept saying that he forgot almost everything over the last few days, but then there was something about blood and money that he didn’t understand. He wanted to ask Ruby what had happened, but neither me nor Vixie knew where she was. Vix said that Ruby was bound to come back, but that Evander should get his head together first. So she told him that maybe they should go up to Caller’s Creek, up above Malibu, to let the trip wear off. You know, Ruby and your friend’s son did this acid that people call STP. It lasts a lot longer.”
“What’s this Vixie like?” I asked.
“I don’t really know her. She crashes at Terry’s sometimes. I mean, Terry’s cool, but he likes to have sex, and the girls know it and so sometimes they come up and ball him and he lets them hang around for a few days or whatever.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you friends with Terry like that?”
“No. Of course not. I like that roof ’cause I can sleep out there alone. I’m almost like part of the family at Terry’s.”
“Ruby too?”
“She could be, but Ruby’s all over the place. She sells her flowers and goes off any way the wind blows. I like her.”
“Here,” I said. “Let me make a stop at this phone booth.”
It was a free-standing booth on the corner. I closeted myself inside and dropped the dime.
“Hello?” Feather answered after quite some time.
“Hey, girl. You sleep okay?”
“Uh-huh. Where are you, Daddy?”
“Up in Hollywood, near there. I think I might be going down to the beach looking for that guy Uncle Ray wanted me to find.”
“He said that he was going to be staying at our Genesee house the next few days.”
“Uh-huh. When are you coming home?”
“Pretty soon. Um, tell me something, Feather.”
“What?”
“Did you know an older girl who used to go to Burnside named Beatrix Noon?”
“Yes. She was one of the nice girls. I taught her a nursery rhyme in French. What about her?”
“Did you ever meet her mother or her brother?”
“She has a little sister named LaTonya. She’s still at Burnside. And … and her brother—I don’t remember his name—he would meet her after school sometimes and walk her home. He worked at this supermarket that made their own buttermilk doughnuts. Beatrix gave me half of one one time. Why?”
“It’s Beatrix’s brother, Evander, that I’m looking for.”
“How come?”
“He went off and his mother’s worried.”
“I hope you find him then. He was really nice to me. He said that he wanted to go to the University of California at Berkeley.”
“He didn’t seem strange or anything?”
“Nuh-uh. He was just serious like.”
“Is Jesus there?”
“He’s asleep. You wanna talk to him?”
“No. But tell him that I’d like it if he and Benita stay with you until I’m back.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, baby, I gotta go. Have fun at summer school.”
“Okay.”
Coco and I walked on. My gait, I noticed, was oddly light. It was as if I was sneaking down the street, avoiding being noticed by some greater power that preyed on flesh like mine. I wasn’t exactly weak, but the gas tank, once again, was near empty.
When we reached the Barracuda I went right to the trunk, took out one of Mama Jo’s bottles, and drained it in one gulp. The heat was there almost immediately, but it would be a while before the fire ignited.
“What’s that?” Coco asked.
“For all I know it’s voodoo,” I said. “I don’t even believe in it, but it still has faith in me.”
Coco’s beautiful face broke out into a resplendent smile.
When we were in the car, driving south toward Pico, she said, “You’re a very unusual man, Easy.”
“In what way?”
“How you talk, this crazy low-rider car—the way you almost fell coming down that ladder. It’s kind of like you’re coming from four different directions at once.”
I laughed heartily in reply. This humor rose from the anticipation of the minor resurrection Jo’s medicine would have on my body, and the recognition of the actual definition of a black man’s life from that white girl’s lips.
Not long after that we came to Pete and Petra’s Diner, a little bit west of Sepulveda on Pico. It was a ramshackle barnlike building with a huge blacktop parking lot for a yard. There were lots of cars parked there in the early morning. This was a weekday workingman and workingwoman’s joint. A place where three dollars would keep you stoked until it was time for the brown-bag lunch in the backseat.
The morning restaurant was vast and crowded. With not much natural light there were fluorescent fixtures hung in random fashion above the diners. There must have been sixty people eating their eggs and bacon, pancakes and ham. Most of them were white, but there were some blacks and Asians, even a Mexican here and there.
A man in a light blue suit brought Coco and me to a booth made for two at a rare small window. He left us with menus and muttered something that I didn’t catch. The Gator’s Blood was gaining strength, and I was distracted by the internal physical changes caused by the elixir.
“What can I get you?” a middle-aged and portly waitress with bottle-black hair and cornflower blue eyes asked us.
I gestured at Coco and she said, “Coffee, hot chocolate, pecan pancakes, a side of bacon, and a side of ham.”
“Toast?” the jolly woman asked, and I smiled.
“No, thanks.”
“What can I get for you, Bright Eyes?” the waitress asked me.
Her name tag read HARA.
“Well, Hara …” I began, but then I noticed a man sitting at a booth with five other men, staring at me—or at least he was looking in my direction. “Well, Hara, I already had something to eat, so if you just bring me a coffee I’ll be doing fine.”
“Regular?”
“Black.” Back in those days regular meant with cream and sugar.
Hara left me with the notion of being called Bright Eyes. The medicine was coming up to the surface—I could feel it and the waitress could see it; the curious white guy in the dark blue work shirt maybe could sense it from his table of friends.
“So tell me about yourself, Coco,” I said, sitting back and letting the world flow around me.
“Why?”
“Why? Because we’re sitting here on a beautiful clear morning with food on the way and nobody after us. Because you’re a young white woman and I’m a middle-aged black man, and a waitress just took our order without even a second look.”
I was beginning to experience Coco’s smiles as little gifts.
“I was born in Dearborn,” she said.
“Near Detroit?”
“You been there?”
“No. But I read about the Detroit riots.”
“We lived in a big house,” she continued, “and went to church. I was gonna go to college back east and then one day the police came and arrested my father.”
“For what?” I looked up and saw the white workman staring me in the eye.
“He had robbed a bank before he met my mother, used the money to start a ball-bearing business for the car companies.”
“Wow.”
“Two weeks after he was put in prison my mom comes home with this guy named Lawrence and says that they were getting married and we were moving to Spokane. She said that we were gonna start goin’ to Catholic mass because Larry was a Catholic. I never liked it, and so one day I hitched to the coast and then down to L.A. And here I am.”
By then the Gator’s Blood had seeped all the way to my fingertips. I was ready for anything. Life stopped being normal and it was more like I was living in a movie. And then I thought about my life like it was one of those 3-D tableaus the architects make to represent their projects. I saw that there was never anything natural about my life in the first place: not my being orphaned, black, a soldier in World War II, or my life of found children and detective work that was more like a secret war where you fought on both sides at once.
“Well?” Coco asked.
“Did you ask me something?”
“Yes. I asked, do you think I’m weird?”
“Not at all,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned you’re the most interesting woman in the room.”
“Excuse me,” a man’s voice said.
I wasn’t surprised to see the white man in the blue work shirt standing on the exact spot where Hara had taken our orders.
I looked at him but didn’t say anything. There was nothing for us to say to each other; I knew that but he did not.
“Let me ask you something,” he said to me.
I glanced over at the table he’d come from. I wanted to see if the men were smiling or in any other way anticipatory. They were not, which was a relief. I moved my hand away from the pistol in my belt.
Coco was looking up at the man now.
“I just wonder,” the man continued, “why a nigger needs to take up with a white chick when there’s so many colored gals walkin’ the streets.”
It was the second time that morning I’d been called a nigger by a white man, and still it came as a surprise.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Coco said loudly, and then she stood up from the stumpy little booth. “We aren’t messing with you. We weren’t talking to you. All we’re doing is sitting here and trying to get some food and some coffee like everybody else. And you come over here with this fucking shit about niggers and chicks and gals in the street. Just who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?”
“Listen, girl,” the man said.
He was a few years my junior, early forties. I would have been happy to let him go on talking, but he held out a hand as if he might have wanted to lay it on her.
So I stood up. My right hand turned into a fist and my left shoulder slanted forward so I could pull it back, adding to the force of the blow that by now was a foregone conclusion.
But there’s one thing I’ve learned about inevitability—it never is.
Before I could execute my punch the other guys from our detractor’s table came up in a group and grabbed hold of him.
“Come on, Lucas; let’s get out of here,” one of them said.
Lucas made a rather weak attempt at shaking his friends off and then allowed them to pull him away.
Coco and I were standing there. Everyone in the room was looking either at us or at the men as they piled out the door.
Hara came up with Coco’s breakfast and my coffee on a perfectly balanced, very large cork-lined resin tray.
“Sit down,” she urged. “Sit down. Don’t worry about some fool like him.”
We did sit. After a while Coco started eating. I leaned back in silence, thinking about the disjointed movie in which I was an unknown bit actor: like Lynne Hua—exotic yet forgettable.
“That was fucked-up,” Coco said after a few minutes had passed.
I smiled.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked.
“I used to know these two brothers,” I said. “Romulus and Remus, I kid you not. That’s what their mother named them. Anyway, the wolf brothers were rough-and-tumble. They’d go to some restaurant or diner or what have you in a part of town where people didn’t know ’em. They’d sit apart and order two big-ass meals. And just when they were almost through one would say something to the other and they’d commence to fight. Now, they’d fight for fun anyway, but the people in the restaurant didn’t know that. After they crashed around a few minutes or so the owners would throw them out, not even thinkin’ about them payin’ for the meals.”
Coco’s anger turned quizzical and she asked, “Are you really that thick-skinned?”
“My mother could have named me Rhino and she wouldn’t have been half-wrong.”