Cinnamon Kiss (13 page)

“Mister?”

She was past sixty with blue-gray hair and a big red coat made from cotton—the Southern California answer to the eastern overcoat. There was concern on her lined white face.

“Yes?” My voice cracked.

“Are you all right?”

That’s when I realized that tears were running from my eyes. I tried to speak but my throat closed. I nodded and touched the woman’s shoulder. Then I staggered away amid the stares of dozens of travelers.

I DIDN’T TURN the ignition key right away.

“Snap out of it, Easy,” a voice, only partly my own, said. “You know once a man break down the wreck ain’t far off. You don’t have no time to wallow. You don’t have it like some rich boy can feel sorry for hisself.”

I drove on surface streets with no destination in mind. Even the next day I couldn’t have recalled the route I’d taken. But my instinct was to head in the direction of my office.

I was on Avalon, crossing Manchester, when I heard two horns. I looked up just as my car slammed into a white Chrysler. The next thing I did was to check out the traffic light—it was against me. I had been distracted and a fool for the past few days, but something told me to take that German pistol out of my pocket and hide it under my seat before I did anything else.

I jumped out of my car and ran to the boatlike Chrysler.

There was a middle-aged black couple in the front seat. The man, who wore a brown suit, was clutching his arm and the woman, who was easily twice the man’s size, was bleeding freely from a cut over her left eye.

“Nate,” she was saying. “Nate, are you okay?”

The man held his left arm between the elbow and shoulder.

I opened the door.

“Let’s get you outta there, man,” I said.

“Thank you,” he mouthed, his face twisted with the pain.

When I got him set up against the hood of his car I went around to the passenger’s side. It was then that I heard the first siren, a distant cry.

“Is my husband okay?” the woman asked.

She and Nate both had very dark skin and large facial features. Her mouth was wide and so were her nostrils. The blood was coming down but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Just a hurt arm,” I said. “He’s standing up on the other side.”

I took off my shirt and tore it in half, then I pressed the material against her wound.

“Why you pushin’ on my head?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I am?” she said, the growing panic crowding her words.

When she looked down at her hands her eyes, nostrils, and mouth all grew to extraordinary proportions.

She screamed.

“Alicia!” Nate called. He was shambling around the front of the car.

A lanky woman came up to steady him.

There were people all around but most of them stayed back.

Three sirens wailed not far away.

“It’s okay, ma’am,” I was saying. “I stopped the bleeding now.”

“Am I bleedin’?” she asked. “Am I bleedin’?”

“No,” I said. “I stopped it with this bandage.”

“All right now, back away!” a voice said.

Two white men dressed all in white except for their shoes ran up.

“Two, Joseph,” one man said. “A stretch for each.”

“Got it,” the other man said.

The nearest ambulance attendant took the torn shirt from my hands and began speaking to the woman.

“What’s your name, lady?” he asked.

“Alicia Roman.”

“I need you to lie down, Alicia, so that I can get you into the ambulance and stop this cut from bleeding.”

There was authority in the white man’s voice. Alicia allowed him to lower her onto the asphalt. The other attendant, Joseph, came up with a stretcher. This he put down beside her.

The lanky woman was helping Nate to the back of the ambulance. She was plain looking and high brown, like a polished pecan. There was no expression on her face. She was just doing her part.

I looked down at my hands. Alicia’s blood had trailed over my palms and down my forearms. The blood had splattered onto my T-shirt too.

“Are you hurt?” a man asked me.

It was a policeman who came up from the crowd. I saw three other policemen directing traffic and keeping pedestrians out of the street.

“No,” I said. “This is her blood.”

“Were you in their car?” The cop was blond but he had what white people call swarthy skin. The racial blend hadn’t worked too well on him. I remember thinking that the top of his head was in Sweden but his face reflected the Maghreb.

“No,” I said. “I ran into them.”

“They ran the light?”

“No. I did.”

A surprised look came into his face.

“Come over here,” he said, leading me to the curb.

He made me touch my nose then walk a straight line, turn around, and come back again.

“You seem sober,” he told me.

The ambulance was taking off.

“Are they gonna be okay?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Put your hands behind your back.”

THEY TOOK AWAY my belt, which was a good thing. I was so miserable in that cell that I might have done myself in. Jesus wasn’t home. Neither was Raymond or Jackson, Etta or Saul Lynx. If I stayed in jail until the trial Feather might be kicked out of the clinic and die. I wondered if Joguye Cham, Bonnie’s African prince, would help my little girl. I’d be the best man at their wedding if he did that for me.

I finally got Theodore Steinman at his shoe shop down the street from my house. I told him to keep calling EttaMae.

“I’ll come down and get you, Ezekiel,” Steinman said.

“Wait for Etta,” I told him. “She does this shit with Mouse at least once every few months.”

“CIGARETTE?” my cellmate asked.

I didn’t know if he was offering or wanting one but I didn’t reply. I hadn’t uttered more than three sentences since the arrest. The police were surprisingly gentle with me. No slaps or insults. They even called me mister and corrected me with respect when I turned the wrong way or didn’t understand their commands.

The officer who arrested me, Patrolman Briggs, even dropped by the cell to inform me that Nate and Alicia Roman were doing just fine and were both expected to be released from the hospital that day.

“Here you go,” my cellmate said.

He was holding out a hand-rolled cigarette. I took it and he lit it. The smoke in my lungs brought my mind back into the cell.

My benefactor was a white man about ten years my junior, thirty-five or -six. He had stringy black hair that came down to his armpits and sparse facial hair. His shirt was made from various bright-colored scraps. His eyes were different colors too.

“Reefer Bob,” he said.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“What they got you for, Easy?”

“I ran into two people in their car. Ran a red light. You?”

“They found me with a burlap sack in a field of marijuana up in the hills.”

“Really? In the middle of the day?”

“It was midnight. I guess I should’a kept the flashlight off.”

I chuckled and then felt a tidal wave of hysterical laughter in my chest. I took a deep draw on the cigarette to stem the surge.

“Yeah,” Reefer Bob was saying. “I was stupid but they can’t keep me.”

“Why not?”

“Because the bag was empty. My lawyer’ll tell ’em that I was just looking for my way outta the woods, that I’m a naturalist and was looking for mushrooms.”

He grinned and I thought about Dream Dog.

“Good for you,” I said.

“You wanna get high, Easy?”

“No thanks.”

“I got some reefer in a couple’a these cigarettes here.”

“You know, Bob,” I said. “The cops put spies in these cells. And they’d love nothing more than to catch you with contraband in here.”

“You a spy, Easy?” he asked.

“No. A spy would never let you know.”

“You blowin’ my mind, man,” he said. “You blowin’ my mind.”

He crawled into the lower bunk in our eight-by-six cell. I laid on my stomach in the upper bed and stared out of the crisscrossed bars of steel. I thought back to midday, when I’d buckled Feather into her seat.

Axel Bowers was far off in my mind.

I felt that somehow I’d been defeated by my own lack of heart.

GUARDS CAME DOWN the hallway at midnight exactly. The jail was dark but they had flashlights to show them the way. When they came into the cell Reefer Bob yelled, “He killed Axel. He told me when he thought I wasn’t listening. He killed him and then stuffed him up in a elephant’s ass.”

They told me to get up and I obeyed. They asked me if I needed handcuffs and I shook my head.

We walked down the long aisle toward a faraway light.

When we reached the room I realized that this was the day of my execution. They strapped me into the gas chamber chair. On the wall there was the stopwatch that Jesus used to have to time his races when he was in high school.

I had one minute left to live when they closed the door to the chamber.

A hornet was buzzing at the portal of the door. It flew right at my eyes. I shook my head around trying to get the stinger away from my face. When it finally flew off I looked back at the stopwatch: I only had three seconds left to live.

R
awlins!” The guard’s shout jarred me awake. I’d dozed off for only a few moments.

“Yo!” I hopped down to the concrete floor.

Bob was huddled into a ball in the back corner of his bunk. I wondered if he really thought I was a spy. If so he’d flush the dope into our corroded tin toilet. I might have saved him three years of hard time.

ETTAMAE HARRIS was in the transit room when they got me there.

She was a big woman but no larger that day than she had been back when we were coming up in the late thirties in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Back then she was everything I ever wanted in a woman except for the fact that she was Mouse’s wife.

She hugged me and kissed my forehead while I was buckling my belt.

Etta didn’t utter more than three words in the jailhouse. She didn’t talk around cops. That was an old habit that never died with her. In her eyes the police were the enemy.

She wasn’t wrong.

Out in front of the precinct building LaMarque Alexander, Raymond and Etta’s boy, sat behind the wheel of his father’s red El Dorado. He was a willowy boy with his father’s eyes. But where Mouse had supremely confident bravado in his mien his son was petulant and somewhat petty. Even though he was pushing twenty he was still just a kid.

By the time Raymond was his son’s age he had already killed three men—that I knew of.

I tumbled into the backseat. Etta climbed in the front and turned around to regard me.

“Your office?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

It was only a few blocks from the precinct. LaMarque pulled away from the curb.

“How’s college, LaMarque?” I asked the taciturn boy.

“Okay.”

“What you studyin’?”

“Nuthin’.”

“He’s learnin’ about electronics and computers, Easy,” Etta said.

“If he wants to know about computers he should talk to Jackson Blue. Jackson knows everything about computers.”

“You hear that, LaMarque?”

“Yeah.”

When he pulled up in front of my office building at Eighty-sixth and Central, Etta said, “Wait here till I come back down.”

“But I was goin’ down to Craig’s, Mom,” he complained.

EttaMae didn’t even answer him. She just grunted and opened her door. I jumped out and helped her. Then together we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.

I ushered her into my office and held my client’s chair for her.

Only when we were both settled did Etta feel it was time to talk.

“How’s your baby doin’?” she asked.

“Bonnie took her to Europe. They got doctors over there worked with these kinds of blood diseases.”

Etta heard more in my tone and squinted at me. For my part I felt like I was floating on a tidal wave of panic. I stayed very still while the world seemed to move around me.

Etta stared for half a minute or so and then she broke out with a smile. The smile turned into a grin.

“What you smirkin’ ’bout?” I asked.

“You,” she said with emphasis.

“Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout me.”

“Oh yes there is.”

“How do you see that?”

“Easy Rawlins,” she said, “if you wandered into a minefield you’d make it through whole. You could sleep with a girl named Typhoid an’ wake up with just sniffles. If you fell out a windah you could be sure that there’d be a bush down on the ground t’ break yo’ fall. Now it might be a thorn bush but what’s a few scratches up next to death?”

I had to laugh. Seeing myself through Etta’s eyes gave me hope out there in the void. I guess I was lucky compared to all those I’d known who’d died of disease, gunshot wounds, lynching, and alcohol poisoning. Maybe I did have a lucky star. Dim—but lucky still and all.

“How’s that boy Peter?” I asked.

Peter Rhone was a white man whom I’d saved from the LAPD when they needed to pin a murder on somebody his color. His only crime was that he loved a black woman. That love had killed her. And when it was all over Peter had a breakdown and Etta took him in.

“He bettah,” she said, the trace of a grin still on her lips. “I got him livin’ out on the back porch. He do the shoppin’ an’ any odd jobs I might need.”

“An’ Mouse doesn’t mind?”

“Naw. The first day I brought him home he called Raymond Mr. Alexander. You know Ray always been a sucker for a white boy with manners.”

We both laughed.

Etta reached into her purse and pulled out the Luger that had been under the seat of my Ford. She put it on the desk.

“Primo got your car out the pound. He left his Pontiac parked out back.” She brought out a silver key and placed it next to the pistol. “He said that he’ll have your Ford ready in two weeks.”

I had friends in the world. For a moment there I had more than an inkling that things would turn out okay.

Etta stood up.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Here.”