“Hello?” Bonnie Shay said, answering her phone on the first ring.
“Hey.” I was sitting on my TV room couch feeling almost like an ordinary citizen.
Upon hearing my voice she went silent, appreciating the normalcy of us talking on the phone. I did not interrupt that quiet with useless words.
“How are you, Easy?” the island woman asked maybe a minute later.
“Better than ever,” I said. “Good.”
“Your business with Raymond finished?”
“Just about. Almost done. I went through the whole thing without even getting bruised up or arrested. You know I must be doin’ somethin’ right.”
“It’s very nice hearing your voice.”
“It’s nice hearing my voice talking to you.”
That earned us another spate of blissful calm.
“Feather’s here,” Bonnie said at last. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Hi, Daddy,” my big girl said a moment later.
“Hey, baby.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Really good.”
“Frenchie likes you now, huh?” she said.
“A kind of miracle.”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, babe?”
“You can talk to me about my mother when you feel like it, okay?”
“Just as soon as we’re settled and a family again.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
At that moment I fully realized what I had almost lost. An ache filled my chest and I stood up from the sofa.
“Everything’s going to be all right, Feather. I promise you that.”
Soon after I got off the phone with my almost-again family, it rang.
“Hello?”
“How was your talk with Giles Lehman?” Melvin Suggs asked.
“He wasn’t home.”
“No?”
“Come on, Melvin,” I said. “What kind of trick are you tryin’ to play?”
“Whenever somebody asks me about someone and then that someone turns up dead, my mind starts playing tricks.”
“Giles is dead?”
“Yes, he is, very much so.”
“At his house?”
“In an abandoned building down on skid row. It’s a place where people meet to do business off the books.”
“When?”
“He bled to death from a gunshot wound three or four days ago.”
“Wow. That’s something.”
“What do you know about it, Easy?”
“Melvin, I was looking for the live Giles just this morning. I had no idea he was dead.”
“We busted the Laundromat,” Suggs put in.
“Did they know?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m sorry, Brother Suggs. But that’s what gangsters do, right? They kill each other.”
“Walk softly, Easy Rawlins. You might survive this and you might survive that, but once you’re in their sights they will keep after you until they get you.”
“Is that all you have?” I asked.
He hung up then. Like any intelligent man Suggs knew when the discussion was over.
I dithered around the house for an hour or so cleaning up little messes that the squatter Jeffrey had made. Putting the house back in order, I wondered about my mortality, about moving and thinking while so many others I had known were under the ground, their deeds not even memories to their descendants, any value they accrued either erased or perverted. In the middle of sweeping the kitchen I stopped and downed Mama Jo’s second-to-last bottle of medicine. I didn’t need it, but it struck me that I’d like to feel one last jolt of power before returning to the day-to-day existence of a workingman in a cracked world.
I went to the TV room to sit down to experience Jo’s magic.
The heat from that dose was different than before. It made me feel warm like a sunbather in the noon sun of the hottest day of a heat wave. I passed in and out of conscious awareness, remembering details of a life I’d no right to have endured.
A feeling like the moments before awareness when Lynne Hua sat next to me settled in. I remembered my mother teaching me to laugh and sing, her big soft lap always my refuge from a hard world. I was no longer being tossed about and battered, even though that was the only life I’d ever known.
From outside I could hear the passing of cars, which sounded like gusts of wind. I considered turning on the TV, but the idea of electric sound was too harsh for my mood.
And then there came a soft footfall, a sound so slight it might have been imagined.
In the gray-brown, bulging, cyclopean eye of the TV I saw his form in the doorway behind me and to the left.…
I took a fraction of a moment to allow my mind to go blank. Then, with my left hand, I took hold of the cushion next to me and flung it with just enough accuracy. I was up and leaping toward the intruder before the stiff square pillow hit his arm. The .22 pistol fired, sounding no louder than a cap gun.
We were falling in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, the distance to the floor encompassing two entire lifetimes of fighting and struggle.
Keith Handel was still bigger and younger and stronger than I. The last time we met, his Las Vegas friend pushed me down with only some effort. But this time I was at full power, reliving every fight I had ever been in. There were backwoods juke joints orchestrating my gyrations; the stench of rotting corpses set by the side of the victory road on our drive into Berlin fueled my heart, and there was blood in my mouth, its bitter tang warning me that it was all or nothing right there in my own house.
I strained against my would-be killer with a primordial effort. I wasn’t thinking about the attack but relying on the automatic skills driven into my body by three years of warfare and forty-seven years of life on the wrong side of the white man’s tracks.
I pressed against Handel with all the power in me, and then all at once my strength was gone. I collapsed on the floor, unable even to raise my arms, incapable of responding to the cramps in my chest and thighs. I was breathing like a Greco-Roman wrestler after his greatest challenge, lost.
Keith Handel, I knew, was gathering his resources, lifting his pistol, readying to shoot me in the back of the head.
Why wasn’t I dead? How long did it take to pull a trigger?
Then I remembered that he, Handel, was there to retrieve his loot from the robbery.
He needed me alive, at least for a little while.
After long moments of deep, deep breathing I heaved up on my side, expecting to see the man standing over me with a gun in his hand.
Instead I saw that he was on the floor, on his side too, his back turned to me. I could see both his hands. Neither one held a gun. I wasn’t strong enough to get to my feet, so I crawled toward Handel. I grabbed onto his shoulder, turning him over and pushing myself to a sitting position in the same motion.
Keith Handel was dead—strangled by a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. His eyes were wide-open and his mouth agape.
I sat there next to my attacker feeling like he looked. While I was gasping for air it occurred to me that the only reason he pulled off that shot was because I hit him with that pillow.
I searched but luckily there was no liquor in the house. Jeffrey must’ve finished off the bottle I kept for guests. If not, I would have drained it, no doubt. But I needed to be sober to figure out the conundrum of the killer’s corpse on the floor.
What was I supposed to do?
If I was a white man the answer to the riddle would have been simple. If I was a white man there wouldn’t have been a riddle at all. A man breaks into your house with a gun and you fought back and won—that was self-defense in any world. Any world except the home of a black man in an America nourished on the bonemeal of his ancestors.
When I couldn’t find any liquor, I poured a glass of water and sat at the table to get my wind back and consider the possibilities. Looking at the tabletop I noticed drops of blood plopping down, spraying tinier droplets around their red centers.
I was bleeding. The bullet Keith Handel fired had grazed my left cheek. I pressed the heel of my palm against the flesh wound. For some reason this had a clearing effect on my mind.
I was a black man in a white world where black men were hated—and worse, feared. Keith Handel, for all his shortcomings, was white. He was dead and I had survived. Where I came from that was a crime in itself.
When the bleeding was stanched I knew what I had to do. Even Melvin Suggs couldn’t keep a killing like this from the courts, and once on trial I would be crucified. There was a part of my mind that said this might not be true, that I might be found innocent by a jury of my peers.
This optimism made me laugh; it brought out the rough guffaws of all my dead ancestors back to the slave ships.
“Hello?” EttaMae Harris said at ten minutes past eleven.
“Etta.”
“What’s wrong, Easy?”
“I need Mouse.”
“Hang on.”
There was no complaint about the lateness of the call. Etta would never ask me why I would need a man like her husband.
“Hey, Easy, what’s up?” Raymond asked on a yawn.
“You got to come over, Ray. I need your help.”
“Sit tight, baby, the cavalry on its way.”