A Red Death er-2 Read online

  20

  I knew that I was bound to suffer a fall. In a perfect world I would have had Etta for my bride and Chaim for my best man. But after that last talk with Craxton my hopes for a happy life just sank. Everything I was doing seemed wrong. The police were suspicious. The IRS wanted me in jail. Even Craxton was lying to me, and I didn’t know why. There was no room for escape, so I turned to alcohol. I had a drink or two and went through the motions of cleaning up. But the bath didn’t cleanse and the whiskey didn’t work.

  I wasn’t only worried about Mouse and what he might do to exact vengeance on me. I’m not a meek man and I will fight for what I believe is right, regardless of the odds. If I’d felt it was right for me to love Etta, then I wouldn’t have cared about what Mouse might do; at least I would have been at peace with myself. But Mouse was my friend and he was in pain; I knew that when I looked into his eyes at Targets. But I hadn’t worried about him at all. All I cared about was how I felt. The fact that I was so selfish sickened me.

  It was same with Chaim Wenzler. He might have been a communist but he was a friend to me. We’d drink out of the same glass sometimes, and we talked from our hearts. Craxton and Lawrence had me so worried about my money and my freedom that I had become their slave. At least Mouse and Chaim acted from their natures. They were the innocent ones while I was the villain.

  Finally, when I succumbed to the whiskey, I began to think about Poinsettia Jackson.

  All I could think about was that young woman and how my coldheartedness had caused her to take her own life. I liked what the detective Quinten Naylor was doing, but I didn’t agree with him. Why would someone want to kill a woman whose every moment was torture and pain? If it was someone who wanted to put her out of her misery they wouldn’t have hung her. A bullet in the head would have been more humane. No. Poinsettia took her own life because she lost her beauty and her job, and when she begged me to let her at least have a roof over her head, I took that too.

  I was in a foul mood when I went down to First African that evening. I was more than a little drunk and willing to blame anybody else for the wrong that was in me.

  I’d promised Odell that I’d come down to the elementary school that the church ran and do something about their ants. They had a problem with red ants.

  Los Angeles had a special breed of red ant. They were about three times the size of the regular black ant and they were fire-engine red. But the real problem with them was their bite. The red ant’s bite was painful, and on many people it made a great welt. That would have been bad enough, but children seemed to be especially bothered by the ants. And little kids loved to play in the dirt where red ants made their nests.

  I had a poison that killed them in the hive. And I was so upset about everything, and so drunk, that I didn’t have the sense to stay home.

  I used the key Odell had given me and went down to the basement of the church, looking for a funnel. When I got to the cafeteria I saw that the lights were on. That didn’t bother me, though. There were often people working in the church.

  I got the funnel from a hopper room, then headed for the exit at the back of the basement. When I walked through the main room I saw them. Chaim Wenzler and a young woman who had black hair and pale skin.

  “Easy,” Chaim said with a smile. He rose and crossed the room to shake my hand.

  “Hi, Chaim,” I said.

  He pulled me across the room by my hand, saying, “This is my daughter, Shirley.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. “But listen, Chaim, I got some work I gotta do an’ there’s a problem back home.”

  I must have sounded sincere, because Chaim and Shirley both frowned. They had identical dimples at the center of their chins.

  I wanted to get away from there. The room seemed to be too dark and too hot. Just the idea that I was there to fool those people, the same way I fooled Poinsettia with my lies about being a helpless janitor, made my stomach turn. Before they could say their words of concern I threw myself toward the exit.

  The schoolyard was a vast sandy lot that had three bungalows placed end to end at the northern side. The ants dug their nests against the salmon brick walls at the back. I set up my electric torch and took out the amber bottle of poison. I also had a flask of Teachers. I took a sip of my poison and then poured the ants a dram of theirs through the funnel.

  What followed was a weird scene.

  I’d never watched to see what happened after the poison hit a hive. Under electric light the sand looked like a real desert around the mound. At first there was just a wisp of smoke rising from the hole, but then about twenty of the ants came rushing out. They were frantic, running in widening arcs and stamping on the sand like parading horses held under a tight rein. These ants ran off into the night but were followed by weaker, more confused ants.

  I saw no more than four of them actually die, but I knew that the hives were full of the dead. I knew that they had fallen where they stood, because the poison is very deadly in close quarters. Like in Dachau when we got there, the dead strewn like chips of wood at a lumberyard.

  There were six holes in all. Six separate hives to slaughter. I went through the ritual, drinking whiskey and staring hard at the few corpses.

  They were all the same except for the last one. For some reason, when I gave that one the dose of poison the ants flooded out of there in the hundreds. There were so many that I had to back away to avoid them swarming over me. I was so scared that I ran, stumbling twice.

  I ran all the way back to the church. Before I went in, I drained the scotch and threw the bottle in the street.

  I made it down into the basement, tripping on my own feet and the stairs. Chaim and his daughter were still there. The way they looked at me I wondered if I had been talking to myself.

  Chaim gazed into my face with almost colorless eyes. I imagined he knew everything. About the FBI and Craxton, about the ants, about Poinsettia and Daddy Reese. He probably knew about the time I fell asleep and when I woke up my mother was dead.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.

  “Nuthin’,” I said. I took a step forward. The impact of my foot on the floor sounded in my head like a giant kettle drum. “It’s just that

  …”

  “What?” Chaim grunted as he caught me by my arms. I realized that I was falling and tried to regain a foothold.

  I kept talking too. “Ain’t nuthin’,” I said. I tried to back away but the wall stopped me.

  Shirley, his daughter, moved in close behind Chaim. There was concern in her porcelain face.

  “Stand still, Easy,” Chaim was saying. Then he laughed, “I don’t think you’ll be sorting clothes tomorrow morning.”

  I laughed with him. “You be better off wit’ somebody else helpin’ you anyways, man.”

  He shook me the way people do when they’re trying to awaken someone. “ You are my friend, Easy.” His somber look saddened me even more. I thought of the victims I had seen. Men wasted to the size of boys, mass graves full of innocence.

  “I ain’t no friend’a yours, man. Uh-uh. Th’ew her outta her own place. Th’ew her out an’ now she’s dead. You cain’t trust no niggah like me, Chaim. You do better jus’ t’ shine me on.”

  With that I leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.

  “We can’t just leave him here, Poppa,” Shirley said. He said something back, but it sounded like music to me, a song that I forgot the words to. I thought for a moment that he understood my confession, that he intended to kill me in the church basement.

  But instead they got me to my feet, and pushed me toward the door. I walked under my own steam for the most part but every now and then I tripped.

  There was a loud drumming in my head and lamplights hanging against a completely black sky. I could hear the moths banging against the glass covers in between the thunder of my footsteps.

  The light snapped on in the car and I fell into the backseat; Chaim pushed my legs in behind me.


  I remember motion and soothing words. But I don’t remember going into the house. Then I fell again, this time into a soft bed. I had been crying for a long time.

  21

  I heard a door slam somewhere below me. Sometime after that I opened my eyes.

  The window had a lace curtain over its lower half. There were big white clouds moving fast across a perfectly blue sky in the upper panes. Watching that sky helped my breathing. I remember how deeply I inhaled, not even wanting to let it out.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rawlins.” It was a woman’s voice. “How are you feeling?”

  “What time is it?” I asked, sitting up. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and the blankets came down to my stomach. Shirley Wenzler’s eyes were fast to my chest.

  “Ten, I guess.”

  She wore a no-sleeve one-piece cotton dress that had slanting stripes of blue, green, and gold, all very bright. Squinting at those bright colors let me know that I had a hangover.

  “This your house?” I asked.

  “Kind of. I rent. Poppa lives all the way in Santa Monica so we thought we’d take you here for the night.”

  “How’d I get in bed?”

  “You walked.”

  “I don’t remember.” It was partially true.

  “You were kind of drunk, Mr. Rawlins.” She giggled and covered her mouth. She was a very pretty young woman with extremely pale skin against jet-black hair. Her face was heart-shaped, everything seemed to point at her smile.

  “Poppa just shouted at you, and told you where to go, and he kept on shouting until you did it. You…” She hesitated.

  “Yeah?”

  “You were kind of like crying.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “About a dead woman. You said she killed herself because you made her leave. Is that true?”

  “No, no it’s not. She got evicted from a place I clean for. That’s all.”

  “Oh,” she whispered and then looked at my chest.

  I liked the attention, so I left the blankets alone.

  “Is Chaim here?” I asked.

  “I took him to the church. I just got back. He said that you’d come later if you weren’t too sick.”

  “Is this your room?” I asked, looking around.

  “Uh-huh. But I stayed in the spare room in the attic. It has a bed and I like to go up there and read sometimes. Especially in the spring or fall when it isn’t too hot or too cold.

  “Poppa slept on the couch,” she added. “He does that sometimes.”

  “Oh,” I said, partly because I didn’t know what to say, and partly because my head hurt.

  I watched her watching me for a few moments until she finally said. “I’ve never seen a man’s chest, I mean, like yours.”

  “All it is is brown, honey. Ain’t that different.”

  “Not that, I mean the hair, I mean you don’t have much and it’s so curly and…”

  “And what?”

  Just then the doorbell rang. Three short chimes that sounded like they were in some other world. Shirley, who had turned bright red, made to leave. I guess that she was kind of flustered. I was too.

  When she was gone I looked around the room. The furniture was all hand-crafted from a yellowish-brown wood that I couldn’t identify. Not a surface was flat. Everything curved and arced, from the mirrored bureau to the chest of drawers.

  There was a thick white carpet and a few upholstered chairs. It was a small, feminine room; just exactly the right size and gender for my hangover.

  After a while I heard men’s voices. I went to the window and saw Shirley Wenzler standing outside of a wire fence in front of a well-manicured little yard. She was talking to two men who were wearing dark suits and short-brimmed hats. I remember thinking that the men must have gone shopping together to get clothes that were so similar.

  Shirley got angry and shouted something that I couldn’t make out. Finally she walked away from them, turning every now and then to see if they’d gone. But they just stared at her attentively, like sentinels of a wolf pack.

  While I watched I hustled on my pants. When I heard the door slam I wanted to go ask her what had happened, but the twins interested me. They walked slowly across the street and got into a dark blue or black Buick sedan. They didn’t start the car and drive away; they just sat there, watching the house.

  “So you’re up?” Shirley Wenzler said from the doorway. She was smiling again.

  I turned from the window and said, “Nice neighborhood you live in. Hollywood?”

  “Almost.” She smiled. “We’re near La Brea and Melrose.”

  “That’s a long drive from where you got me.”

  She laughed, a little too loudly, and came into the room. She sat in a plush-bottomed chair across from the bed. I sat down on the mattress to keep her company.

  “Did some woman really die?” she asked.

  “Woman over where I clean couldn’t pay the rent and she killed herself.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Yeah.” But all I could remember was Poinsettia’s dripping toe.

  “My poppa saw things like that.” There was a strange light in her eyes. Not haunted like Chaim’s, but empty.

  “Many Jews,” she continued, as if reciting a prayer she’d gone to bed with her whole life. “Mothers and sons.”

  “Yeah,” I said, also softly.

  At Dachau I’d seen many men and women like Wenzler; small and slight from starvation. Most of them were dead, strewn across the paths between bungalows like those ants, I imagined, stretched out in their hives.

  “You think you could have saved her?” she asked. I had the crazy feeling that I was talking to her father, not her.

  “What?”

  “The woman who died. You think you could have saved her?”

  “I know it. I got the ear’a the man run the place. He’da let ’er stay.”

  “No,” she said simply.

  “What you mean, no?”

  “We are all of us trapped, Mr. Rawlins. Trapped in amber, trapped in work. If you can’t pay the rent you die.”

  “That ain’t right,” I said.

  Her eyes brightened even more and she smiled at me. “No, Mr. Rawlins. It is wrong.”

  It sounded so true and so final that I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I held my peace, staring at her pale delicate hands. I could see the trace of blue veins pulsing just under the white skin.

  “Come on down when you’re ready,” she said, rising and moving toward the door. “I’m making breakfast now.”

  As if she’d conjured it, I suddenly smelled coffee and bacon.

  She sat at a maple table in an alcove that looked out onto a very green backyard. There was a tangerine tree right out the window. It was covered with waxy white blossoms. The flowers were being picked over by dozens of hovering bees.

  “Come have a seat,” she said to me. She got up and took my arm just above the elbow. It was a friendly gesture, and it gave me a pang of guilt in the chest.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Coffee?” Shirley asked. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “Love it,” I said as sexy as I could with a hangover.

  She poured the coffee. She had long, lovely arms and skin as white as the sandy beaches down in Mexico. White-skinned women amazed me back in those days. They were worth your life just to look at in the South. And anything that valuable held great allure.

  “Before the war started my father sent me out of Poland in a box,” she said as if continuing a conversation.

  “He’s a pretty smart guy, your father.”

  “He said that he could smell it-the Nazis coming.” She looked like a young girl. I had the urge to kiss her but I held it in check.

  “That’s why my father works with you, Mr. Rawlins. He knows that the trouble he felt in Poland is just like what you feel here.” There were tears in Shirley’s eyes.

  I thought of why I was there and the toast dried on my tongue.
r />   “Your father is a good man,” I said, meaning it. “He wants to make things better.”

  “But he has to think of himself too!” she blurted out. “He can’t keep doing things that will take him away from his family. He has to be here. He’s getting old, you know, and you can’t keep taking things out of him.”

  “I guess he might spend a little too much time out on his charities, huh?”

  “And what if no one worries about him? What happens when the Cossack comes to his door? Is anybody going to stand up for him?”

  I could feel her tears in my own eyes. Nothing had changed since the night before. I was still traitorous and evil.

  Shirley got up and went into the kitchen. Actually she ran there.

  “Would you like some more toast, Mr. Rawlins?” Shirley asked when she’d come back in from the kitchen. Her eyes were red.

  “No thanks,” I said. “What time you got?”

  “Almost twelve.”

  “Damn. I better get down there to help your father or he’s gonna wonder what we been doin’.”

  Shirley smiled. “I can drive you.”

  It was a nice smile. I shuddered to see her trust me, because her father’s ruin was my only salvation.

  “You’re pretty quiet,” Shirley Wenzler said in the car.

  “Just thinkin’.”

  “About what?”

  “About how you got the advantage on me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I leaned over and whispered, “Well, you got to give your opinion on my chest but the jury still out on yours.”

  She focused her attention back on the road and blushed nicely.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I always like to flirt with pretty girls.”

  “I think that was a little bit more than flirting.”

  “ ’Pends on where you come from,” I said. “Down here that was just a little compliment from an admirer.” That was a lie, but she didn’t know it.

  “Well, I’m not used to men talking to me like that.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  She let me out at First African. I shook her hand, holding it a little longer than I should have. But she smiled and was still smiling as she left.