Six Easy Pieces (12 page)

“Yes I am,” I replied.

“What they do to you?”

“Stoled my car,” I said in good old Fifth Ward lingo.

“Bastids,” she spat. “Make the whole neighborhood a pigsty. Noisy and vulgar, I hate ’em.”

“The man who stoled my ride was with this girl,” I said, showing the angry old woman my photograph of Misty.

“I seen her. Yeah. She was wit’ some guest’a theirs. A man drove a old red truck. It had Texas plates on it.”

“That’s the guy took my car. He asked me could he borrow it. Left me a suitcase to hold. All it had was some underwear and that picture of the girl drove off with him.”

“You wanna use my phone to call the cops?” the woman asked.

“I sure do. But first I wanna wait here and make sure he’s in there. ’Cause if I call and he ain’t there, that old bitch Clovis’ll just say they never heard of him.”

“You got her ticket, brother,” the old woman agreed. “I’m right over there in the white-and-green house. You need somethin’ you just come over to me.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “Just as soon as that man show up. He come here much?”

“Almost every day. In the mornin’ too. You probably don’t have long to wait.”

With that the old lady left for her home. I was sure that she’d be watching but that was all right. If I fell asleep again she’d rouse me to the mysterious Texan’s arrival.

HE GOT THERE AT ABOUT EIGHT. The truck was an interesting combination of dull red paint and brown rust, like lichen rolling over a scarlet stone. The black man at the wheel was large with muscle, about thirty. He wore overalls and a T-shirt. I wondered if there was a straw hat on the seat next to him. He drove right up on the lawn and ran to the front door. Antoinette, the prettiest MacDonald next to JJ, ran out to meet him. Antoinette was a healthy girl. Even under her loose one-piece dress you could see her large upstanding breasts. They hugged and kissed, and kissed again. Clovis came out then, talking in a loud voice, though not loud enough for me to make out the words.

Antoinette stood back, seemingly afraid of what was being said. The big Texan was nodding at every word, listening hard. When she was finished he asked something and Clovis yelled something back. The Texan jumped into his truck and took off. I waited a second and followed him.

Clovis and Antoinette didn’t seem to notice me.

THE TEXAN LED ME on a long drive through L.A. He took side streets, always headed south. We went down into Compton. We were still in L.A. county, but the houses became sparse and the street was barely covered by asphalt. I had dropped almost two blocks behind the Texas truck because there was hardly any traffic. When I saw the red pickup turn right up ahead, I increased my speed to make sure I didn’t lose him.

I turned the corner just in time to see the truck park in the driveway of a small blue house. I went all the way to the end of the block, turned the corner, and pulled to the curb.

My heart was racing but not from fear. I was excited by my proximity to the solution of JJ’s dilemma.

Sitting in the car I wondered how to get past the cowboy’s defenses. I needed a distraction.

My first thought was to set the house on fire. There had recently been a fire at Truth. Everyone always runs out to the curb when threatened by flame and smoke. But maybe, if Misty was a hostage in the house—tied up and gagged—maybe the kidnapper would leave her in there rather than be implicated in the capital crime of kidnapping.

Two women in pink and blue dresses were making their way down the street. The one in blue carried a small white cardboard box about the size of a workman’s lunch pail. This box had cardboard handles that folded out from the top.

I thought about the police. Looking back on it now I realize that I should have called the cops. I could have said that I saw a woman, bound hand and foot, carried into the house. But I was never happy about dealing with the city’s armed thugs. Even though the cowboy was probably guilty I couldn’t call the law in on him until I was sure.

The ladies were handing two long rectangular bars to a woman standing at the front of the house nearest me. When they came back to the sidewalk I was waiting for them.

“Excuse me, ladies,” I said.

The taller one was in the pink dress suit. It was Sunday attire; all that was missing was a hat. She was tall and dark-skinned. There was a gold wedding ring on her finger so I supposed that someone had once found her beautiful. I suspected that that was a long time ago. She had a frown that would give children nightmares.

“What do you want?” she demanded. It was as if she recognized me as the no-good black sheep of the family and wasn’t about to let me get an inch too close.

“Are those church chocolates?”

“Oh yes,” said the shorter woman wearing the powder-blue dress. She was dark too. But she was sweet all the way through. “A big grin and big butt on a black woman and you know I be a happy man,” my uncle Stanley used to profess. He would have been happy seeing what I saw.

“With almonds?” I asked the friendlier church lady.

“Yes,” she said.

“You know I love church candy.”

“This ain’t no tea party, young man,” the lady in pink said. “We’re selling these chocolates.”

“Hester,” the lady in blue complained. “There’s no need to be rude.”

“I have a house to take care of, Minne Roland,” Hester replied. “So now, mister, if you would please move—”

“I would like to buy all of your candies, ladies,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “How many have you got left?”

“Almost twenty,” Blue Minne replied.

The bars sold for thirty-five cents a piece. I gave them seven dollars and they thanked me. Hester made a grimace that I was sure was meant to be a smile.

I walked off toward the cowboy’s house laden with chocolates and high hopes.

THE FRONT DOOR hadn’t been used much recently. There were spider webs at the corners and leaves sticking out from underneath the welcome mat. There were stains on the peeling white door left from the last rainstorm three months ago.

I pressed the doorbell. There was no sound from inside.

I knocked on the door.

There came the sound of footsteps. But not the heavy-booted feet of the black cowboy I’d been following. The door whined and cracked as it opened. The short honey-brown woman had a wide smile and smaller eyes than JJ’s photograph indicated.

“Hey y’all,” she said, greeting me with all the friendliness of the country.

“Hi,” I said, widening my eyes in surprise.

Misty took my stare as a compliment; it might have been if it were not for my astonishment at her carefree attitude.

“You sellin’ candy?” she asked.

“You bet,” I said. “Milk chocolate and almonds for twenty-five cents a bar.”

“Misty, who you talkin’ too?” The man’s voice was hard and serious.

The cowboy appeared in the disheveled room behind the young Texan miss. His skin was rough and brown with the strong aura of drab green emanating from underneath. His eyes were brown too but just barely. This cowboy’s ancestors could have well included a rattlesnake or two.

“Anthony Lender,” I said, remembering the name of a white private I once went to war with. “Sellin’ chocolate.”

“What you wanna knock on this door for?” he asked me.

“To sell a pretty young lady somethin’ sweet,” I said.

Misty smiled at me and the snake pushed her aside.

“It don’t look like no one live in here,” he said. “Why you wanna come up here?”

“I saw you drive up when I was across the street goin’ door to door,” I said, stalling for time. “I’m sellin’ chocolate to build the house for our minister. It’s really good chocolate and cheap…”

While I spoke I reached into the box as if I were going to show him just how good my candies were. But instead of chocolate I whipped out my .38 caliber pistol and hit him in the center of his forehead. As the cowboy fell backward I hit him again on the side of the jaw. He fell heavily and I knew that he was no longer conscious. I pulled the door closed behind me and presented the muzzle of my gun to the once smiling face of Misty.

“This gun can shout a lot louder than you,” I said. “So I suggest you keep it down and do what I say.”

Misty was not only pretty, she was smart. She nodded and glanced at her boyfriend.

“You got some sheets somewhere?” I asked her.

“In the bedroom.”

“Show me.”

She led me through a doorway into a room so small it would not have been large enough to contain a vain woman’s wardrobe. There was a single bed and sheets strewn around it.

“Take that sheet and bring it back out front,” I commanded.

She did as I said.

“Now tear it into five long strips,” I said handing her my pocket knife.

“We ain’t got no money, mister,” she said as she worked.

“But you will soon enough won’t you, Misty?”

She stopped cutting for a second.

When she was through with the sheets I used the strips to hogtie the cowboy and gag him. When I was through I had Misty sit down on the floor in front of me.

“You gonna rape me?” she asked.

“No.”

“What you want wit’ me an’ Crawford? And how come you know my name?”

“How much they payin’?”

“Who?”

“Clovis and them,” I said, falling into the rhythm of the Texan dialect.

Misty was good. She looked like and talked like a hick off the back of a watermelon truck, but she knew how to feint and lie.

“I don’t know no Clovis,” she said, her voice a fraction softer than it had been before.

“You made the right choice comin’ to L.A., girl,” I said. “But wrong in goin’ in against your half-sister. I know you know Clovis. Clovis is your family too. So now you tell me what’s happenin’ or I’ma make sure you spend your pretty years in jail for extortion.”

“I didn’t do nuthin’,” she said. “I just been livin’ in this shitty house.”

“I bet you Clovis owns the deed on this house.”

“What if she do?”

“Put that together with Clovis forcing JJ to sign over half her business to her and you got prison stamped all over it.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“Come with me,” I said. And we left the tethered cowboy dreaming of money that he would never collect.

“DID YOU PLAN IT from the beginning?” I asked her on the long drive back to Laurel Canyon.

“What?”

“Did you plan to steal your sister’s business when you were writin’ her from down Texas?”

“No. I didn’t even know she had nuthin’ when I was down there. She’d just write and say how she lived with this old man Mofass and how they loved each other. She said that he was too sick to work but she loved him anyway so I thought that they was poor.”

“So when did you get in with the plan?”

“I left Crawford a note tellin’ him that I was comin’ up here. He called Clovis an’ told her. He wanted her to talk me into comin’ back.”

“Yeah?” I prodded.

“She told him to get up here and then they all met me at the bus stop in San Diego.”

“How they know when you gonna get there?”

“They’s on’y one bus a day to L.A. from Dallas.”

“But why would you let them turn you against your sister?”

“I told you already.”

“Told me what?”

“She lied makin’ me think that her an’ her boyfriend was poor. She never sent me no money or tried to help me get on my feet. An’ she stole Clovis’s money in the first place.”

“So you wanted to steal it back from her?”

At that question Misty went silent.

For the rest of the ride she stared out of the window.

“WHERE WE GOIN’?” she asked when we turned off onto JJ’s road.

“Where you think?”

“You said to the police.”

“I figured I’d skip the constabulary and go straight to the judge,” I said.

When we got to Mofass’s door, I expected to have to pull JJ off of Misty. But there were no fireworks, no waterworks either. JJ grinned when she saw her missing sister. The smile faded when I told her what was what. JJ didn’t ask why and Misty offered no excuse.

“Well I guess that’s it,” JJ said when I was through explaining.

I TOOK MISTY back down to Compton and dropped her off about six blocks from her hogtied cowboy.

On the way home I thought about JJ. She must have been brokenhearted over her sister’s betrayal. Money, I thought, is a harsh master in poor people’s lives. It warps us and makes us so hungry that we turn feral and evil. If Misty and JJ had stayed back home in their poor shacks, they would have been friends for fifty years baking pies and raising children side by side.

JESUS HAD BOUGHT a sleeping bag with money he’d saved from work. We sat up late into the night talking about my experiences camping out in France and Germany with the small troop I belonged to.

“Did you kill a lotta Germans?” the bright-eyed boy asked.

“Yes I did.”

“Did you hate ’em?”

“I thought I did–—at first. But after a while I began to realize that the German soldiers and the white American soldiers felt the same about me. I used my rifle a little less after that.”

“How come?”

“Because I didn’t really know who it was I wanted to shoot.”

“So you didn’t kill any more?”

“I didn’t kill except if I absolutely had to.”

I showed Jesus how to camp so that nobody could see you. I cautioned him to stay low when he heard something in the bushes.

“Be careful out there, son,” I said to him. “You know I love you more than anything.”

THE PHONE RANG at two thirty-five.

“Yes,” I said, expecting it to be Bonnie.

“Easy,” she cried. “Easy, come quick. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

I filled an empty mayonnaise jar with water and then drove the car I’d borrowed from Primo toward the canyons. At the base of the hills I got out and made mud from the dirt at the side of the road. I smeared the mud on Primo’s license plates.