I had more questions, lots of them, but it was late and Evander’s mind stopped at the oasis of Esther Corey. He couldn’t remember anything else, and that was fine—for the moment.
Mouse said, “I gotta get outta here, Easy.”
“Evander’s gonna stay with me tonight,” I replied, “until we get him presentable enough that his mother doesn’t lose her mind.”
“Okay, then.” Mouse rose to his feet. “You take care’a yourself, Li’l Green.”
“I’ma call you after I told Mama what you said,” the boy replied.
“That’s fine. Just ask Easy. He always knows how to get in touch with me.”
“I’ll walk you to the car, Ray,” I said.
Mouse’s pink Cadillac was in my driveway. It was after midnight and the stronger stars were glistening in the sky.
“How much for findin’ the boy?” he asked.
“Nuthin’.”
He smiled and opened the driver’s-side door. For some reason this reminded me of him as Death in my waking dream.
“Well, let me say thanks then.” He held out a hand and I grasped it.
“You the only real friend I evah had, Easy.”
“Don’t I know it.”
After Ray drove off I backed the Barracuda all the way up into the driveway so that no one would see me take two bottles from the rude crate of Mama Jo’s medicines into the side door to my house. I don’t know why I felt so secretive about Jo’s elixir; I guess it was because she never really cared if her ingredients were legal or not.
When I returned to the front room Evander was standing with his back to the northwest corner, looking up at the ceiling.
“What you doin’, son?” I asked.
“Um, uh … I got a little jumpy and had to get to my feet. You know … the acid makes it like things are movin’ around the edges. I think it might be a rat or sumpin’, so I get up. And then there’s voices and sounds sometimes too.”
I took the boy by the elbow and led him to the chair.
“Sit down,” I said.
“What?”
“Sit down.”
When we were both seated I handed him one of Mama Jo’s tar balls.
“Eat this,” I said.
It was the size of a large jawbreaker, but Evander put the whole thing in his mouth. He chewed at it a minute or so before saying in a garbled voice, “This taste like it comes from Mama Jo.”
I got him to his feet and led him down the hallway to my bedroom. On the way I pointed out the bathroom.
By the time he stepped out of Domaque’s oversize old shoes he was drifting.
“I’m sleepy,” he said from a seated position at the side of my bed. “That tar ball will put away all the dreams and nightmares,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me.
Evander slumped down on the bedspread.
Looking at him lying there, I felt exhaustion rest a heavy arm on me like a Santa Ana wind descending on Southern California.
I literally staggered back to the couch in the front room and then collapsed on the cushions as Evander had done on my bed.
I think I went to sleep, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.
With my skull wedged against the armrest, it came to me that I had died and was resurrected by a smiling devil dispatched on a witch’s errand from her hut in the woods. Sunset Boulevard and Caller’s Creek were all part of a limbo that I was passing through on my way—maybe to life or possibly some eternity that was beyond any value system I could apply. The sofa was like a piece of turf where I was forced by fatigue to rest before continuing the unlikely journey.
I was asleep or maybe just half the way to that blissful state. I wasn’t sure, because I heard breathing as if it came from someone next to me, but I knew that I was the only person in the room. It’s possible that sleep for me in that brief period was death, and the manifestation of life—my breath—kept rousing me like Lynne Hua had done when I emerged from the semicoma.
The knocking came after many, many breaths. In my sleep state I was trying to justify the hard sound with the repetitive and slow susurration of respiration. But the rapping, like a foreign language, insisted that it was something different, something indecipherable that still needed to be heeded.
When I opened my eyes the room was dark except for a weak glow that came from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I remembered leaving the forty-watt hall light on so that Evander could find his way if he awoke in the night.
The knocking sounded again, rousing me to a higher state of consciousness. It felt like every time I woke up I was a different man. Instead of the one man I had been when I drove off that cliff I was now a series of men, each being born out of the husk of the last.
Knocking.
I smiled at the concussion or the existential reaction of a mind that had given up to death only to find that it was a feint. I sat up and the soft rapping came again. I pulled the pistol from my jacket pocket and took the two steps to the door.
After flipping the light switch on the wall I yanked the door wide with my left hand while halfway lifting the pistol in my right. I was ready for anything—almost. It could have been Jeffrey, a red-shirted hippie, or even my mother come to ask when was I going to give up the mortal coil and come to spend eternity with her. It could have been anyone or anything.
Anything or anyone but Bonnie Shay decked out in her Air France flight attendant uniform.
“What happened to your suit?” she asked.
Putting the gun back in my pocket I said, “I went on a hike in the woods to find a lost boy.”
“Did you find him?” Her smile lit up the question.
I fell in love all over again, even with one foot planted solidly in another world.
“He’s asleep in my bed.”
“That’s good.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost three.” Her Guyanese lilt thrilled me.
“Why are you here?”
“It’s cold out here, Ezekiel.”
“Yeah, yeah, right, come on in.”
We went into the kitchen, where I brewed English breakfast. I was happy that Jeffrey hadn’t used my honey, because Bonnie had to have honey in her tea. She liked to have a lemon wedge too, but that wasn’t essential. She needed honey and I had it right there.
We settled across from each other at the dinette table. We hadn’t spoken hardly at all since she’d come in.
I wanted to say something, many things, but looking at her was overwhelming. I still loved her, and that love was the same as it had been, but in the interim I had changed. Seeing Bonnie I knew that she was lost to me: like the old country to an émigré; like a dead parent buried in another state decades ago in a grave I never visited, in an abandoned graveyard that I wouldn’t be able to find.
“Feather called me when your car was found in the ocean,” Bonnie said. “I was at the Bel-Air house when Raymond called to say that he’d found you alive. That was eighteen hours later. Not even a day, but my feelings settled and set. I realized when I thought you were dead that you were my man. You saved my life and you forgave me later on.”
“Too late,” I said, repeating the last words I remembered her saying to me before I went to drive off the side of a mountain.
“No,” Bonnie said, “not too late. You brought Jesus and Feather into my life, and when you lost your mind over me and Joguye I should have understood. I should have called you and asked you to forgive me. I should have known that a real man can’t stand by and watch his woman … his woman being loved by another man.”
“I should have asked you to come back,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“And now I’ve died and everything that was fell away like snakeskin.”
“Before Raymond called I told Joguye that it was over, that I would not marry him.”
“What did he say?” I asked, wondering why I cared.
“He didn’t understand. He is royalty and rich, a part of a world that no black American or Caribbean could ever really understand or imagine. But I told him that you were my man, dead or alive.”
We finished our tea and repaired to the sleeping couch of the front room. I was sitting side by side with the woman I loved as much as I had my Big Mama, who died of pneumonia when I was too young to fully understand death. I was there but still mostly silent.
“Easy.”
“I was in a semicoma,” I said to the floor. “That’s what they told me. Part of me feels like I still am. It’s just Jo’s chemistry experiments keepin’ me goin’.”
“Feather says that you’re on a case.”
“What is it?”
“It was finding the boy in the back room. But now it might be something else.”
She put a hand on my knee. I liked Bonnie’s long brown fingers and her sensibly trimmed nails.
“When it’s over call me,” she said. “We can go out for dinner and talk.”
“Like a date?”
Instead of answering she leaned over and kissed me. The force of that contact made me lean back. Bonnie followed, kissing me all the way down. When I was prone again I started counting osculations: One, two, three, and I was asleep again. This time it was a deep rest with no breaths or knocking or questions about the road between here and there.