Bad Boy Brawly Brown Read online

  5

  NOT TEN WORDS PASSED between John and me on the ride back to the site. He was naturally a quiet man, but this silence was sullen and heavy. There was something else on his mind. But whatever it was, he wasn’t sharing it with me.

  When I was driving off I could hear him shouting orders at the ex-burglars.

  The fever was still burning in me. For the first time I thought that I might have had some kind of flu. I went down three blocks of dirt road to the first paved street. There I pulled over to the curb to catch my breath. The February air was chilly and the sky was still blue. I was like a child, so excited that it was hard to concentrate on anything but sensations.

  I knew that I had to calm down. I had to think. John called on me because he knew that I had been among desperate men my whole life. I could see when the blow was coming. But I couldn’t see anything if I didn’t relax.

  I lit up a cigarette and took a deep draw. The smoke coiling around my dashboard brought on the cool resolve of the snake it resembled.

  The pamphlet was mimeographed on newsprint, folded and stapled by hand. The Urban Revolutionary Party was a cultural group, it said, that sought the restitution and recognition of the builders of our world — African men and women. They didn’t believe in slave laws, that is to say, any laws imposed on black men by whites, just as they didn’t accept forced military service or white political leadership. They rejected the white man’s notion of history, even the history of Europe. But mostly they seemed perturbed about taxes as they applied to social needs and services; the distribution of wealth, the blurred purple words explained, as it applies to our labor, and the dreams that we hardly dare to imagine, is woefully inadequate.

  I’d read similar ideas before. I had read a lot in my time. Most of it white man’s fictions and his histories, too. I was a sucker for history.

  A car drove up and parked while I was remembering what I’d read about the plebes of ancient Rome. Two car doors slammed one after the other, but I was busy wondering whether that ancient oppressed people had some kind of pamphlets, or was it all word of mouth?

  But when I heard “Step out of the car,” I was dragged back to the present.

  The policemen had flanked my Pontiac. One of them had his hand on his holster and the other actually had his pistol drawn. My hands rose quickly like the wings of a flightless bird when frightened by a sudden sound.

  “No problem, Officers,” I said.

  “Use your left hand to open the door,” the closer cop commanded. He was young — they both were, pale boys with guns among men who had been living on a diet of pamphlets and poverty.

  I did what I was told, then stepped out of the car cautiously and slow. My hands stayed at shoulder level.

  The difference between the cops was that one was a dark brunet and the other was black-haired. They were both about my height, just over six feet. The black-haired one looked into my open door as the other one tried to spin me around and push me up against the car. I say tried because even though I had reached my forty-fourth year, I was still sturdy.

  But I turned anyway and put my hands on the roof. He holstered his gun and moved up close behind me, sliding his hands in my front pockets. After feeling around my thighs for a moment, he slapped my back pockets. I felt like a woman being groped. It wasn’t pleasant. But the worst thing about it was his breath. It was so rank that I became nauseous. I tried to breathe through my mouth but even then I could taste the disease blowing out of his lungs.

  When he stepped back I almost thanked him.

  “Open the trunk,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Listen, man.” The fever had gripped me again. “I was just sittin’ there, readin’ my paper. I’m parked legally. Why you wanna roust me?”

  His reply was to pull out his billy club.

  A voice in my head said, “Kill ’im,” and I went cold inside.

  “The key is in the ignition,” I explained.

  The brown-haired cop slid in and took the key. It was awkward for him because he had his club out, too.

  They made me watch while they opened up the trunk. All they found was a flat spare tire that I had been meaning to fix and a tool-box full of tools.

  The black-haired cop slammed the trunk shut.

  Then his partner said, “There’s been some theft and vandalism around the construction out here. We’re just keeping an eye on things.”

  I made a mental note to ask Jewelle what was really going on.

  WHEN I GOT to Isolda Moore’s house, I parked way down the block because of those cops. I was upset with myself for not paying attention. If I was going to be in the streets again, I had to be better prepared than that.

  Alva’s cousin lived on Harcourt Avenue, near Rimpau. It was one of those working-class L.A. fantasy homes. Powder blue, small and rounded. There was hardly a straight line to the place. The eaves of the roof were cut in the form of waves. Even the window frames were irregular and absent of straight lines. The front door was surrounded by a waist-high turret of white stucco.

  As I pushed the whitewashed gate open I wondered if Isolda would be as beautiful as her cousin. Maybe Brawly would be sitting at her kitchen table, eating ribs and blowing off steam about some argument that he’d had with Alva or John.

  Instead, I came upon a corpse that was half in and half out of the doorway.

  He was a big man, especially around the middle. Black, he wore blue work pants and a blue work shirt that had been pulled almost off of his back. His head was crushed from behind and there were deep bloody marks in his back also made by the bludgeon.

  He resembled the carcass of a beached sea lion left by the tide.

  There were dozens of columns of tiny black ants making their way to and from the body. Given enough time, they might have consumed it.

  The day’s mail was sticking out from under his gut.

  The company of the dead doesn’t bother me much, not after the front lines of World War II. I’d seen death in all colors and sexes, in all sizes and states of decomposition. That’s why I could step over that spilled life into Isolda’s powder-blue oceanic home.

  The fight and flight were evident in upturned furniture and bloody hand- and footprints on the walls and floor. It was a spare house with pine floors and not much furniture. The walls were white and the furniture mostly an ugly violet hue. The stuffed chair and couch were on their sides. In the sunny kitchen a cabinet had been ripped from the wall, and all the china and glass had shattered on the floor. There was a dollop of blood frozen in a spilling motion from the drain board into the sink.

  I traced the fight from its beginning in the kitchen, through to the living room, and from there back to the front door, where the fat man had lost his race with Death.

  In the corner of the little front patio I saw the weapon. It was a meat-tenderizing mallet. A stainless-steel hammer with a head made of a four-inch cube that had jagged teeth to mash up tough flesh. The mallet was slick with dark gore.

  I went back in the house, into a woman’s bedroom. Here the color scheme was white and pink. The neatly made bed was covered with a satin coverlet and piled with small quilted pillows at the head. The room seemed so innocent that, compared with the bedlam in the other parts of the house, it took on a sinister air.

  There were four pictures taped to Isolda’s bureau mirror. One was of a burly man — maybe the corpse, I couldn’t be sure without turning him over. The next two were of Brawly somewhere in his teens and also as a grown-up. The last photo was of a good-looking woman in her late thirties wearing a bathing suit and laughing at Brawly, who was rubbing water out of his eyes. That picture had been taken near the Santa Monica Pier.

  In one drawer I found a red and black envelope of photographs. Most of the pictures were of the woman modeling in a two-piece bathing suit. She looked rather inviting. The odd thing was that the pictures were taken inside, in a room that I hadn’t seen in her house. In one photo she was ly
ing on a bed with her legs splayed and her back arched. She was beaming a smile that could have made a new sire out of an eighty-year-old man.

  While I was staring at those photographs a car door somewhere slammed. At first it was just a faraway sound, meaningless to me. Then, for some reason, I thought of the black-and-white photographs I had once seen in a book about ancient Rome. I wondered what could have made me think about the Colosseum. Then the cops came back into my mind. I ran to the front and peeked out from behind the violet drapes.

  The sight of the four policemen deflated me for a second. The fact that two squad cars had been dispatched meant that someone had seen the body and called it in. I had that helpless give-it-up emotion that comes on me sometimes.

  But it passed quickly.

  Running was a fool’s enterprise, but I took it up with vigor. I pocketed the pictures and ran to the door at the back of the kitchen. I used my shirttail as a glove to turn the knob. As I left out of there I heard a man’s voice call, “Watch it, Drake. Man down.”

  I ducked low in the bare backyard and headed for the fence. Over that hurdle I made it to the next street through the back neighbor’s driveway. Most people, men and women, in that neighborhood spent the day at work, so I wasn’t too worried about being seen. I dropped the photographs into a trash can, set out for the weekly pickup, just in case I was stopped by the cops.

  The only trouble I had left was walking to my car without being noticed. In any other city that would have been easy. But not in L.A.

  I went the long way around and turned up two blocks on Henry. By the time I got to Isolda’s block there were four police cars parked out front. An approaching patrol car drove past me. They slowed down to watch. I turned and glanced at them and kept on walking.

  I guess the lure of real action pulled them away. A dead man in a doorway was still news back then.

  I got the key in the ignition slot on the fourth try and drove well within the speed limit past the powder blue dream. The police in their dark uniforms reminded me of the ants that were swarming over the corpse at their feet.

  6

  FROM THE MOMENT I heard John’s voice I had expected trouble. I was looking for it. But the dead man had sobered me somewhat. I didn’t want to get that far into somebody else’s grief. I didn’t want to be used, either. But I doubted that John and Alva would have lied to me — not about murder, anyway.

  I decided not to call them until I had at least seen Brawly. If I were to tell Alva that I had come upon a dead man instead of her son, there’s no telling where her imagination might have taken her. I would go to the headquarters of the Urban Revolutionary Party, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young man.

  But first came food. I hadn’t eaten since Juice’s pancakes, and fear always stoked my appetite.

  HAMBONES WAS A SOUL FOOD diner on Hooper, not far from the First Men’s storefront address. I hadn’t been there for a while because it catered to a rough clientele and I had spent the past few years (with one major slip) trying to deny that I ever traveled in those crowds.

  Sam Houston, proud black son of Texas, owned the place. It was one long room with tables running down the length of the walls and a kitchen in the back. If you wanted to eat at the Hambone, you had to sit next to your honey and look at the man across the way.

  Sam was standing at his waist-high counter at the back of the place. Behind him was the kitchen full of his family members, their spouses, and friends.

  “Sam,” I hailed as I walked toward him.

  “I knew they was gonna take it, Easy,” he bellowed. Sam’s speaking voice would have been a shout for a normal man.

  “Take what?”

  “The Star of India,” he said in a smug and satisfied tone. “Right outta the Museum of Natch’l History up there in New York City. I knew it.”

  I had come to his countertop by then. His loud pronouncement irritated me.

  “You knew what?”

  “I knew that they had to steal sumpin’ like that. You cain’t have no million-dollar jewel lyin’ around for just any old motherfucker t’be lookin’ at. I read it right here in the Examiner.” Sam gestured at a rumpled pile of papers lying next to him on the counter.

  “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, Sam?” I hadn’t seen the man in at least two years, but the first words out of his mouth had already made me mad. “All the shit in the news and you gonna be worried ’bout some goddamned piece’a glass?”

  “It’s the money, man. Got to go wit’ the money. I feel for them civil rights workers, but they dead. And them white men kilt ’em? They gonna see a white judge for tea and they mamas for dinner that night.”

  “How the hell you figure that?”

  “I know what I know, Easy. I know what I know.”

  “Man, you don’t know shit.”

  The tall man cocked his head and grinned at me just as if he was saying, Got ya.

  Sam Houston always made me angry. It was the way he took everything he heard, saw, or read and made it seem that he was the expert. If you came up to him and said that you put up a new cinder-block wall, he’d start lecturing you on the way to build a foundation and the type of drainoff that you’d need. He hadn’t lifted a finger, but now he’s going to tell you what it was you did wrong.

  And far too often he was right.

  Sam was tall, as I said, but added to that, he had an extremely long neck. His skin had the texture of medium-brown leather with gray highlights and his eyes were great googly things that rolled around dramatically no matter what he was saying or, less often, listening to.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, Easy. All you got to do is read that newspaper and the whole world falls right into place.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “You own a car?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What year?”

  “’Fifty-eight Pontiac,” I said.

  “So if you push it over fifty, it’s rattlin’, right?”

  How did he know that?

  “Now,” Sam went on, “Craig Breedlove broke five hundred miles per hour in his car, on the Salt Flats. You doin’ the shimmy at fifty while he’s solid-state at five hundred. That’s where you are. The white man got cars fifty years in the future and you ain’t hardly out the Dark Ages.”

  I nodded. I could have asked what kind of car he was driving. I could have asked how fast he could go. I could have broken his long neck. But instead, I nodded and got the first of the two things I wanted at Hambones.

  Sam turned around and said, “Clarissa! Bring Easy some’a them braised short ribs!”

  “Okay,” said a taciturn young woman wearing pink shorts and a pink blouse. She had a green ribbon holding back her straightened hair.

  “So, Easy,” Sam said. “What you doin’ here?”

  Sam didn’t let many people eat at his counter. You went back there and ordered for sit-down or take-home. But he didn’t want you loitering around and obstructing his view. Most men who tried to start a conversation with Sam were told, “Sit your ass down, man. I ain’t got time to fool with you. This here’s a business.”

  The fact that he could stare and shout down most of his clientele was saying quite a lot. Because the men that patronized Hambones were not to be pushed.

  Before answering Sam’s question, I looked out along the walls. There were three men and four women. Each of the men had a girlfriend, and one of those girlfriends had brought a friend along. That extra woman had on a red dress that must’ve fit her when she was a size or so smaller. I think that it probably looked better, however, straining against her womanly form. She was looking at me and I felt that fever again. Her gaze didn’t move me, though. I wasn’t looking for any more love than Bonnie Shay could deliver.

  I didn’t know any of the men but I could feel their violence. Hard men in dark suits and white shirts with dirty collars and small cigarette holes down the breast. Felons, murderers, and sneak thiefs, too. I never understood why Sam surrounded himself with so much dang
er.

  “Oh, nuthin’,” I said, answering Sam’s question.

  “Uh-uh, Easy. You got to do better’n that now. I ain’t seen you in two years. Odell done told me that you got a job workin’ at the Board of Education, that you moved to West L.A. and bought a house. You got to need somethin’ if you gonna cross all’a them lines to come here to me.”

  “Here you go,” the pink-clad girl said, placing a heaping plate of short ribs in front of me.

  “What’s wrong wit’ you, girl?” Sam asked angrily.

  “What?” Clarissa complained.

  “Go get him some greens an’ corn. He ain’t no animal just gonna tear at the meat. He needs him a balanced meal.” Sam shook his head in disappointment and his waitress pouted.

  “You want collard or turnip greens, Easy?” Sam asked me.

  “Collard.”

  “Yeah, man, me too. You know them turnip greens is bitter.” He sang the last word to accent his distaste. Sam Houston was a Texan all the way down to his socks.

  “You know a young man name’a Brawly Brown?” I asked when Clarissa had slouched her way back to get my vegetables.

  Sam pulled out a bottle of Tabasco sauce from under the counter. I opened it and doused my dark meat and gravy.

  “Bad boy Brawly Brown,” Sam said, and sighed. “Mm, mm, mm. Now that boy is trouble an’ he don’t even know it.”

  “You know him, then?”

  “Oh yeah. Brawly got a chip on his shoulder, ants in his pants, eyes twice as big as his stomach, and a heart just drippin’ right off his sleeve. If it could be too much, then that there’s Brawly.”

  “So he’s like a big kid?” I asked in a deferential tone.

  “He’s just too much, that’s all, Easy. One day he come in here sayin’ he’s gonna sign up in the army an’ be a paratrooper over in Asia somewhere. Gonna make him some good money and then go to college on the GI Bill. Next week he wandered the wrong way down the street, now he’s a revolutionary. He wanna tell me that I’m just a slave workin’ for my white master. Can you imagine? Boy look like a butterball come in here, eat my food, and insult me.”