Six Easy Pieces (7 page)

A small woman, somewhere near fifty, appeared in the shadowy screen. Caramel-colored and delicate, she wore glasses with very thick lenses. She stared at me for a moment before saying anything.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Hi. My name is Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for Cedric.”

“He ain’t doin’ too well today, Mr. Rawlins,” the woman said sadly. “Been sittin’ back there for almost a week just shakin’ his head and sobbin’.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He won’t say,” she replied. “But it must be some girl. Young men pour their whole heart and soul out for just one kiss. It takes a while to get back on your feet after somethin’ like that.”

“He’s been like that a whole week?” I asked.

“Just about. He ain’t eat hardly a thing, and you know, he won’t even put on his pants.”

“He don’t even go to work?”

The woman smiled when I mentioned work. “You know he work for the church,” she said happily. “Stay home with his mother and make her proud down at Winter Baptist. He’s the youngest deacon they ever had.”

“And the church don’t mind him stayin’ home?” I asked.

“God bless Minister Winters,” she said, closing her eyes in reverence. “He sent a man down here to tell us that Cedric could take off all the time he needed to.”

“He’s a good man,” I said. “Almost a saint.”

The woman took in a deep breath and smiled as if she had just inhaled God. “He was me and Mr. Boughman’s savior when we come out here from Arkansas. Every Sunday we’d go to that little chapel and hear about how the Lord was testin’ us, makin’ us stronger and better for our kids.” The feeling in her face, the curl of her lip, was ecstatic. “There was always apple pies and pork sandwiches after the sermon so even if you hadn’t eaten all week, at least that one day your body would be satisfied along with your spirit. Mr. Boughman used to say to me, ‘Celia, the Lord put that man on earth to save the poor black man.’”

“Do you think I could see Cedric a minute, Mrs. Boughman?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“He might be able to help me find out what happened to my cousin,” I said. “You see, my cousin, Ray, died in a logging accident. Cedric might know somebody who talked to him before he died.”

Mrs. Boughman peered at me as if trying to puzzle out what I was saying.

“Maybe helpin’ somebody else will help Cedric throw off his blues,” I suggested.

This argument won Celia over. She pushed the door open and pointed the way. When I walked in, I caught a whiff of her perfume, simple rose water.

The house had a low ceiling that gave the feeling it was sinking into the earth. There were no windows except on the front wall, and these were covered with thick, floor-length drapes. There were pictures and plaster statues of saints and Jesus on every wall and surface. The air was stagnant as if it were the ether of an ancient tomb that had just been cracked open after six thousand years.

I went through the living room into a long hallway.

“Keep goin’,” Celia Boughman said at my back. “It’s all the way at the end.”

It was a very long hall. The house looked small from outside, especially because the yard was so deep, but that hallway was long enough to be a building of its own. When I finally came to the end, I found a half-open door. Inside, Italian opera music was playing.

“Cedric,” I called. “Cedric.”

No answer.

I pushed the door open. He was sitting on a piano stool, wearing only blue striped boxers, supporting his big head with the long fingers of his left hand.

“Cedric Boughman,” I said, trying to sound like a parent wanting their child to know it was time to pay attention.

It worked. He looked up at me. A sob came from his chest.

“What?” he said.

“My name’s Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for a friend’a mine—Raymond Alexander.”

“I don’t know him,” Cedric said. He let his head back down into the basket of fingers. He was thin and quite a bit darker than his mother.

“Maybe not, but I think Etheline Teaman did.”

When I mentioned her name, Cedric not only looked up, but got to his feet. It was like he was a puppet, and my words were the strings that gave him life.

“What about Etheline?”

“I think she knew Raymond up in Richmond.”

“Is that where she is? In Virginia?”

“No, man. Richmond, California. Etheline told me that she had a picture of Raymond. Did you ever see it?”

“She had lots of pictures. Lots of ’em. She took snapshots of everybody she knew with that little Brownie camera of hers.”

Cedric stumbled over to a cluttered desk and sifted around, looking for something. He found a small photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of him and the young woman that I first saw as a corpse. They were standing side by side, but there was something wrong. I realized that it wasn’t Etheline standing there next to Cedric, but her reflection in a full-length mirror. She was taking the picture with a camera held at waist level in her left hand. They were standing next to each other, and at the same time gazing across a distance into one another’s eyes.

“That’s some picture,” I said. “She’s good.”

“She’s real smart,” Cedric agreed. “She’s going be a real magazine photographer one day. And she’s an artist too. This is only half of the picture. After we took this one, she made me take the picture of her with me in the mirror. She has that one in her photo book. I told mama that I wanted to get them both blown up and put ’em on either side of my room. Then it’d be like us lookin’ at each other and takin’ pictures of each other too.”

“You gonna do that?” I asked, to pull him further out of his shell.

“Mama didn’t like it. She said it looked wrong to her. I think she’s afraid that I’ll move out or somethin’.”

“When’s the last time you saw Etheline?” I asked.

“A week ago today,” he said, as if he were talking about the creation of the world.

“Where’d you see her?”

“At the church,” he said, the sadness back in his tone and demeanor. “At the church.”

“Winter Baptist?”

“Yes sir. She told me that we should be friends. She had spoken to Reverend Winters and decided to be by herself for a while. She said that, that…”

“You haven’t seen her since then?”

“No.”

“She ever talk to you about Raymond? A little brother with gray eyes and light skin.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said. “Have you talked to her?”

I tried to read his eyes, to see if he was crazy or lying or being sincere. But the pain of his broken heart hid the truth from me.

“Just on the phone,” I said gently. “To ask her if she heard from my friend.”

The music had been soft during our talk. But now a powerful soprano was professing some deep emotion—love or hate, I couldn’t tell which.

CELIA BOUGHMAN was leaning over the wire chicken coop when I came out of the house. By the time I’d come up to her, she’d grabbed one of the frantic hens by the throat.

“Mrs. Boughman?”

“Yes, son?” She held the chicken up and tested it for plumpness.

“Has your son been at home all the time for the past week?”

“Yes he has. Haven’t left his room except to go to the toilet. Haven’t even bathed.”

“Have you been here all that time?”

“Except Monday. Monday’s my shoppin’ day. I have Willard, the boy down the street, drive me to the store and I buy all I need till the next week.”

“How about Sunday?” I asked. “Didn’t you go to church?”

“No. Cedric was so sad, I felt bad leavin’ him to go to the church that he loved. No. I stayed here and made him dinner.”

With that she took the chicken by its head and spun the body around like a child’s noisemaker. She grabbed the neck and twisted it until the head came off of the body, and then dropped them both on the ground. The body jumped up and started running in circles. It bumped into my leg and then headed off in the opposite direction.

“Did Cedric talk to you?” Celia asked pleasantly.

“Yes he did.”

“Oh that’s good. Maybe he’s gettin’ over his broken heart.”

The chicken ran into me again. This time she fell over and lay there on the ground, kicking in the air.

“Thank you, Mrs. Boughman,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“You want to stay for dinner, Mr. Rawlins? We’re havin’ fried chicken.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I just had chicken the other night.”

I ENTERED the department store that had become a church at sunset. Two men in dark suits saw me from up near the pulpit. They headed my way.

“Hold it right there,” one of the men said. If he were standing behind me, I would have worried that there was a rifle aimed at my back.

The front of the church was half a lot away, so I waited patiently. They were deep brown men with frowns on their faces.

“Can I help you?” said one of the men. His big belly protruded so far that it created a cavern in the chest area of his suit.

“Lookin’ for the reverend,” I said.

“He ain’t here,” the other man said. He had small fleshy bumps all over his face and hands.

“That’s funny,” I said. “A man over in the office just told me that he was here, gettin’ ready for the Wednesday night meetin’.”

“Well he ain’t,” Bumpy said.

“That’s too bad—for him,” I replied.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the fat man asked.

“It means that I got a problem in my pocket that he needs to know about. He needs it bad.”

“What you sayin’, man?”

“You just tell the minister that Easy Rawlins wants to talk to him about something of paramount concern. I’ll be sittin’ in this chair right here till you get back.”

Fatso took the message, and Bumpy waited with me. I sat there looking around Winter Baptist. It didn’t feel like a church then, but I knew when the organ started playing and the minister was in his groove that a holy light would shine in. I had friends who didn’t believe in Heaven or its Host, but still they never missed a Sunday sermon at Winter Baptist.

Birds were chirping from somewhere up around the ceiling. They had come into the church and set up their nests. I thought that the minister probably left them there to make that sacred space seem something like the Garden of Eden.

“Do I know you?” a gravelly voice asked.

He had come in from behind me, probably hoping to see if he knew me and my implied threat.

“No, sir,” I said, rising to my feet. “My name’s Easy Rawlins.”

“What do you want?” Reverend Winters looked more country than usual that evening. He wore blue jeans and a checkered red work shirt. The brown leather of his shoes was old and worn out. You could see the impression of his baby toes on the outer edges. A pair of shoes like that might have outlasted a marriage.

“Can we talk privately for a moment, Reverend Winters?”

The minister made a gesture with his head, and Bumpy started patting me down. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t lay him out either. Bumpy grunted and Winters motioned toward the other side of the room.

We walked together, under the scrutiny of his private guards.

“Well?” he asked me. “Let’s get this over with. I got a sermon to deliver in just an hour and a half.”

Winters wasn’t tall or striking, neither was he delicate or particularly strong. His chin was subpar, and the top of his head was almost large enough to indicate a whole new species of man. His skin had the color and luster of dark honey standing on the windowsill. But it was his voice that set him apart from mortal men. As I said, it was raspy, but it was also rich and commanding. His voice alone made you want to go along with whatever words he was making. It was very disconcerting, but other things bothered me more.

“Cedric Boughman and Etheline Teaman,” I said.

That brought the minister up short. He seemed to be studying his own reflection in my eyes.

“This some kinda blackmail or somethin’?” he whispered.

“Never did like that word,” I said. “And you don’t have nuthin’ I want, except maybe the truth.”

“Fuck you.” The words shocked me. For some reason I never expected a man of God to be coarse in that way. But the shock went deeper than that. It was like a slap in my face, making me aware of my situation.

“Somebody stole somethin’ from Etheline,” I said. “An album of photographs.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

“I got my ways, Brother Winters. Believe me. Someone stole her photograph album.”

“So what?”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Why would I?”

“Etheline was a prostitute not a month ago,” I said. “She had a regular, a man in your employ name of Cedric Boughman. She also attended your church. She got special instructions from you—in person. Now Cedric is cryin’ in his bedroom and you sendin’ him his salary until he’s fit to come back to work.”

“This is a Christian institution, Mr. Rawlins. We don’t turn away lost sheep. We don’t persecute a man when he loses someone he cares for.”

“That sounds good, but it’s a lie. Cedric is either crazy or he don’t even know that Etheline is dead.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I don’t know what’s goin’ on,” I said. “I don’t know who killed Etheline or why. All I know is that there’s a picture I need to see lost somewhere, and I intend to find it. I will keep on asking questions until I do find it.”

“Easy,” the minister said. “That’s your Christian name?”

“Ezekiel.”

“Good name. Where you from, Ezekiel?”

“Texas mostly. I was born in Louisiana.”

“New Orleans?”

“New Iberia.”

“Country, huh? Like me.”

Just that quickly, Winters had gotten the upper hand. If we were boxing, I would have been the tomato can from Podunk, and he would have been Archie Moore.

“You know country is plain and simple,” the minister said. “A country man does what he does, day in and day out. If the year is good then his wife got a few extra pounds on her. If it’s bad he works a little harder. That’s all.”

I would have bet that those words were destined for that evening’s sermon.

“Brother Boughman is in charge of school administration. He’s a good boy, but young. He gave in to temptation. He had congress with the devil, but what he found in that devil’s pit was a lost angel. He talked her into coming to church. Then he talked her into leaving that house of sin. And when she did that, he sent her here to me.”