Little Green (7 page)

“Why’d you call him a nigger?” the boss, Sammy, asked the clear-skinned cop.

“I didn’t,” he replied, gesturing vaguely at me.

“Not him,” Sammy snapped. “Bertie.”

Cars were slowing down on the street. A couple of them had pulled to the curb.

Sammy was angry and so was Bertie. The rest of the mechanics worked for Sammy and so felt that they had to stand behind him.

I suppressed a snicker. It wasn’t so much a nervous laugh as an evil one: a chuckle spawned in the hell of my early life. Even though I couldn’t have thrown a punch, I wanted to cut loose and fight.

Luckily for all of us, the policeman’s radio started making noise. Mole Man went to the car and grabbed the microphone. He said something; something was garbled back.

“Hey, Jacob,” he said. “Emergency on Olympic, an armed robbery. We gotta go.”

And so they both jumped into the car and took off.

They didn’t even leave us with a warning.

I had the definite feeling that while I was dead, the world had changed somewhat.

The policemen stopping me was wrong, but it most certainly saved me from more trouble up ahead.

I hung around the front of the garage for a few minutes thanking Bertie and Sammy for standing up on my behalf. Then I had to wait for another light. When I made it across the street I was bone-tired. So I sat down on a bus stop bench, breathing and wishing I had a cigarette. This was a desire and not a craving. The days of unconsciousness had weaned me off of the worst part of the smoking addiction. But the cigarettes I had with Mouse had reminded my system of their draw.

These thoughts blossomed into a full-fledged reexamination of waking up from death, not sleep, and now looking for a way back to what was before.

“Easy,” Mouse called.

He had turned off of Pico and pulled to the curb so that his car was pointing north on Genesee—he’d even thrown the passenger’s door open wide.

I went over to the car and got in without a word.

“You see?” he said jauntily. “I told you you shouldn’ta walked. I might’ve had to pick you up from the gutter.”

“You mighta had to go my bail.”

My place was just a few houses up from the corner. Mouse pulled into the driveway and jumped out faster than I was able. He
was approaching the front door when I was just coming around the car.

“Do’s open,” he announced.

I remember wondering, inanely, if I had locked up when I’d last gone out—two months before.

A tall white man got to the door from inside at the same moment I came from up behind Mouse.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

He was lanky and courteous, wearing a gray, short-sleeved shirt with little dark blue dots all over and black buttons. He had on black trousers but no shoes or socks. It was the fact that this stranger was standing barefoot in my home that roused me from fatigue.

“You could tell us what you doin’ in my friend’s house,” Mouse suggested.

“I don’t understand,” the white man said. “This is my house.”

He had sandy brown hair that was in retreat from his forehead, a jutting nose, and one pimple over the left side of his upper lip. His skin was the color of those white-sand beaches I saw along the West African coast. I didn’t have time to register the color of his eyes right then because Mouse distracted me.

Raymond glanced quickly behind him. I mimicked the motion because I knew his next move: If there was no one there he intended some kind of violence.

The street was empty.

The next thing I knew there was that old long-barreled .41 in my friend’s hand.

Before the white man could react Ray had hit him in the center of his vast forehead, knocking him into the living room and flat on his back.

Mouse stalked in over his victim, shouting to me, “Come on in and close that do’, Easy!”

Once again, in greatly different circumstances, I did as I was told.

The white man was rising up on his right elbow when Mouse pushed him back with his foot.

“Stay down.”

When the stunned man tried to get up again, Raymond leveled the muzzle of his gun and said once more, “Stay down.”

The lights were on but the California sun outside had been much brighter. My eyes were as fatigued as the rest of me, and so I struggled to get my vision clear.

“What’s yo’ name, man?” Mouse said.

“Jeffrey.”

“Well, Jeff, let me ask you again. What you doin’ barefoot in Easy here’s house?”

“I live here,” he claimed indignantly. “The man who owned this place died and I … and I homesteaded it.”

There was blood coming from Jeffrey’s forehead, but we all knew that that was the least of his problems.

“It’s my house,” I said. “I had an accident but I didn’t die. I’m back now and you should leave.”

“Or I will kill you,” Mouse agreed. “Right here, right now.”

“I have to, have to put my things … I have to pack.” Events were moving very fast for Jeff. One minute he was luxuriating in his home and the next he was homeless.

“What day is trash day, Easy?” Mouse asked.

“Tuesday.”

“You could come by next Tuesday and pick what you want outta the trash.”

“But that’s—”

Mouse pulled back the hammer on his revolver to cut Jeffrey’s complaint short.

As the squatter got to his feet I opened the door.

“What about my shoes,” he whined. “I got to have my shoes.”

In reply Mouse hit him on the side of his head with the pistol. The impact propelled Jeffrey out the door and down to his knees on the front lawn. Mouse stood in the doorway waving his gun and said, “If I see you again I will kill you, Jeff. You don’t know me, but believe it when I tell you I don’t fuck around.”

Mouse slammed the door and turned to me.

“Can you believe that shit? Mothahfuckah wanna come here and take your house. Claimin’ to be some kinda homesteadah acting like he rolled up on the wagon train.”

That’s when I started to laugh. Between waking up from death, the acres of pain in Timbale Noon’s eyes, the cops stopping me for walking, and now this squatter, I knew that, even if the whole world had changed, there was still a hard row to go and no hoe in sight.

Ray laughed with me. I lowered myself onto the sofa and he sat in the padded chair on the side.

I noticed then that he was carrying a grease-stained brown paper bag in his left hand.

It struck me as absurd that a man could exhibit such violence while holding on to a bag full of burgers and fries.

He placed the bag on the low coffee table and ripped it open. The strong smells made me realize how hungry I was and, at the same time, sickened me.

“They aksed me if I wanted chili and cheese on ’em, Easy,” Mouse was saying as he tore the tawny paper wrapper off of his burger. “I said okay to the cheese but I thought chili might be too much for your gut.”

I picked up my hefty sandwich and determined to swallow at least eight bites. It was my job to learn how to walk and eat and live like a man in a world where every step was a challenge.

“You seen Jackson Blue since the accident?” I asked Mouse some hours later.

I had already called the kids and talked to them. I told Feather that I was going to stay at the Genesee house because I was too tired to move around. She said that she loved me and that she was so happy that I was alive.

“Yeah,” Mouse said in answer to the question about Jackson. “You know I got to like old Blue. He can do things that nobody else can,
with them computers and telephone lines. I kinda collect special friends like that—especially if they black, but not only.”

“You still hooked up with Lynne Hua?”

“Not really. She’s gettin’ married to this TV actor dude.”

“And you don’t mind that?”

“It’s okay wit’ me. I mean, she still gimme some’a that sweet thing if I want it. Woman need to be married.… Man too.”

He was inviting me to talk about Bonnie Shay but I didn’t take the bait.

“You wanna drink, Ray?” I asked instead. “I think there might be a bottle in the kitchen closet if Jeff didn’t get at it.”

“No, thanks, Ease. I don’t wanna send you down no wrong path.”

I’d swallowed the eight bites and even had a few French fries. My stomach gave me serious grief but I rode that out.

By late afternoon the room seemed to be fading.

Mouse was telling the story of how I was the first one to bring him out to Los Angeles, when I called EttaMae down in Houston.

“Yo’ ass was in serious trouble,” he reminded me, “but I liked the weather.”

He said more but I don’t remember it. I leaned back and the room receded once more. I was falling for a moment and then there was sudden bliss.

In the dream I was sitting beside a flat boulder on a white beach. Black vultures hovered on the sea breeze just at the waterline, thousands of them. As far as the eye could see in either direction the scavengers floated. There was no escape and so I took a very deep, very satisfying breath and remained where I was.

There came a clattering. It didn’t sound like a bird.

I looked around but there was no habitation, animal, or even any plant life to be seen. There was only me and those birds—and now the sound of … of hard surfaces clinking together: glass or metal.

I realized then that I had been sleeping, that sleep was much deeper after the accident. The dream was still there too. I was on that beach resting along with the carrion birds. It was a very peaceful feeling and I was loath to come back into the living world.

When I opened my eyes, the conscious awareness I had in the dream faltered. I saw a modern-looking blue-and-green lamp perched like a bird on the little table standing next to my padded chair. The room looked familiar, but where had that lamp come from? Where was I and where had I been?

More clattering sounds interrupted my bout of pedestrian existentialism.

Maybe it was the squatter making that noise. This thought came seemingly of its own accord, not mine. I wondered what was meant by a squatter. Then the memories came back in a rush: Timbale grief-stricken over her missing son, the police, Raymond … the squatter.

I sat up quickly and the room started to spin. Falling back on the sofa, I remembered that I’d been hurt. There was an intruder in my house and I was wounded and unarmed. The intruder had put a lamp on the table next to the chair. Why did he do that?

I closed my eyes and sat up slowly, thinking as I rose that it was probably better that I was unarmed. I wasn’t strong enough to fire a pistol accurately.

After achieving an upright position on the sofa I opened my eyes. The coffee table was littered with the debris of the Meaty Meat-burger feast. There was an ashtray filled with butts.

I hadn’t quit smoking yet.

More rattling came from the kitchen and I began to believe that I wasn’t under siege.

The dream, the fear, the weakness in every corner of my body came together to form the decision of what I had to do next.

I lurched up from the sofa and reeled toward the kitchen, expecting to see Mouse. But instead it was Feather standing at the sink; the tall-for-her-age biracial beauty whom I had stolen from a perilous fate.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, trying her best to sound like my little girl.

“How’d you get here?”

“Juice drove me.”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“Because you drove off the side of a mountain and instead of letting people take care of you, you’re all the way over here all by yourself.”

She was washing the dishes wearing jeans and a tight pink T-shirt. Her breasts were just beginning to form. She’d need looser clothes and a bra before long.

“Where’s Raymond?”

“He wasn’t here. This house is a mess. Has somebody been staying here? There were dirty dishes everywhere, and the sheets on your bed were so soiled that I threw them out.”

“What time is it?”

“Ten thirty. Daddy, you should come back to the big house and rest until you get better. You look sick.”

I put my hands on Feather’s shoulders and stared her in the eye. She was maybe five-seven, but I still dwarfed her.

It was then that I smelled the coffee. The odor brought me unexpectedly back to the dream of the beach. I understood then that the coffee had been part of the dream but not in it. This seemed like a very important piece of information.

“You want some coffee, Daddy?”

“That’d be great.”

“Sit down and I’ll pour it for you.”

We had a table that could squeeze in five at the bay window room attached to the kitchen. My little home was like a tinderbox compared to the big house in Bel-Air, but it was comfortable, and it was mine. Feather poured my coffee and sat down across from me. The morning sun fell on the light brown skin of her right arm.

“Daddy, you have to come home,” she said.

I took her fingers and squeezed them lightly.

“I can’t, baby girl.”

“Why not?”

I looked into my daughter’s face feeling all the fierce love that a father can know, imagining a young man falling for her the way I had been told I’d careened off that coastal cliff. These clashing images elated me.

“You know I come from a hard place,” I said.

“I know,” she replied in an exasperated tone. “Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, where the police left on Friday afternoon and didn’t come back till Sunday morning to count the bodies.”

I laughed and said, “Am I that predictable?”

“I’ve been listening to you tell those stories my whole life. But you have to listen to me sometimes too.”

These last words she learned from Bonnie Shay, I was sure.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll listen, but I want to tell you something first.”

“What?” I appreciated the petulance in her voice. I wanted my little girl to stay a child for a few years more.

“If you got sick,” I said, “or Juice or Essie did, you’d do best to get in the bed until you were better. I’d take you to the doctor and hold your hand if you had to have a shot and I’d give you water with an eyedropper if you were too weak to hold the glass. That would be good for you, but I’m a different breed of fish.”