“If the patio door was open last night,” Harry said, “it’s still open. Karen’s never been good at locking doors, closing windows when it rains, putting her top up . . .”
“When you were living together?”
“Anytime. She’d come in, forget to shut off the alarm system. Then the company that put it in calls and you have to give them an identifying code, three digits, that’s all. But Karen could never remember the numbers. Pretty soon the cops pull up in the drive . . .”
“Harry, if Karen sets up Michael for you, what does she get?”
“She already got it.” Harry said, “Me. I made her a movie star. She wasn’t too bad, for that kind of picture. There aren’t any lines that run more than ten words. Now she’s reading for a part . . . Hasn’t worked in seven years, she wants to get back in it. I don’t know why—Michael set her up for life.”
“What?”
“
Harry gave him a quick glance. Looking at the road again he said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks she doesn’t get the part.”
11 
Bo Catlett liked to change his clothes two or three times a day, get to wear different outfits. In less than two hours he was meeting friends at Mateo’s in Westwood, so he had dressed for dinner before driving out to the airport.
Seated now in the Delta terminal, across the aisle from the gate where the mule from Miami would arrive by way of Atlanta, Catlett had on his dove-gray double-breasted Armani with the nice long roll lapel. He had on a light-blue shirt with a pearl-gray necktie and pearl cufflinks. He had on light-blue hose and dark-brown Cole-Haan loafers, spit-shined. The loafers matched the attache case next to him on the row of seats. Resting on the attache case was a Delta ticket envelope, boarding pass showing—for anyone who might think he was sitting here with some other purpose in mind. Anyone who might think they recognized him from times before. Like that casual young dude wearing the plaid wool shirt over his white T-shirt, with the jeans and black Nikes.
Catlett liked to watch people going by, all the different shapes and sizes in all different kinds of clothes, wondering, when they got up in the morning if they gave two seconds to what they were going to wear, or they just got dressed, took it off a chair or reached in the closet and put it on. He could pick out the ones who had given it some thought. They weren’t necessarily the ones all dressed up, either.
The young dude in the jeans and the wool shirt hanging out, he’d given that outfit some thought. A friendly young dude, said hi to the ladies behind the airline counter and they said hi back like they knew him.
Catlett wondered if the Bear had noticed that.
The Bear, having shown himself once, like reporting in, was around someplace: the Bear in a green and red Hawaiian shirt today with his baby girl.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in L.A. did not know shit about how to dress or seem to care. Nobody wore a necktie. They’d wear a suit and leave the shirt open. Or the thing now, they’d button the shirt collar, wearing it with a suit but no tie, and look like they’d just come off the fucking reservation. Ronnie Wingate, not knowing shit either, said, “Why wear a tie if you don’t have to?” Like not wearing it was getting away with something. He had told Ronnie one time, “I use to dress just like you when I was a child and didn’t know better.” Living in migrant camps, moving from Florida to Texas to Colorado to Michigan, out here to California, the whole family doing stoop labor in hand-me-down clothes.
He said to Ronnie Wingate, “You know what changed my whole life?” Ronnie said what and he told him, “Finding out at age fourteen, not till then, I was part black.”
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Asshole Ronnie saying, “Negro?”
“Black. And if you’re part, man, you’re all.”
Finding it out in a photograph the time he and his mother and three sisters went to visit his grandmother about to die; drove all the way to Benson, Arizona, from Bakersfield and his grandma got out her old pictures in an album to show them. The first ones, her own grandparents in separate brownish photos. An Indian woman in a blanket. (He had been told about having some Warm Springs Apache Indian blood, so this fat woman in the blanket came as no surprise.) It was the next photo that knocked him out. A black guy in the picture, no doubt about it. But not just any black guy. This one had a fucking sword, man, and sergeant stripes on his uniform. He was a U.S. Cavalryman, had served twenty-four years in the Army and fought in the Civil War when he was fifteen years old and was wounded at a place called Honey Springs in Missouri. Across the bottom of the photo it said:
He asked could he have the photo and his grandma gave it to him.
“I think it was the sword did it,” Catlett said to Ronnie that time. “I kept thinking about it a year until now
Asshole Ronnie didn’t get it. “Detroit?” Even sucking on his base pipe didn’t get it or ever would, ’cause the man would always be from Santa Barbara and never know shit about Detroit, about Motown, about Marvin Gaye . . .
Catlett spotted the Bear in his Hawaiian shirt, the Bear coming along carrying his three-year-old baby, cute little girl licking an ice-cream cone, dripping it on the Bear’s shirt. The Bear looked this way without making eye contact, turned his head toward the young dude in the wool shirt and back this way again, wiping his little girl’s mouth with a paper napkin, the Bear playing he was big and dumb but a nice daddy.
A voice just then announced the Atlanta flight was on the ground and would be at the gate in a few minutes.
Catlett got his mind ready. He’d been told the mule coming with the product this trip was a Colombian dude he had met one time before by the name of Yayo. Like so many of those people a mean little Colombian dude, but no size on him to speak of, going maybe one-thirty. They saw that movie
The Bear and his baby girl were among the people by the gate now. Passengers were coming out of
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the ramp from the plane. The way it was set up, Yayo would have his ticket envelope in his hand, the envelope with a baggage claim check stapled inside. He’d lay the envelope on the trash container right there, not stick it down in, and keep coming. The Bear would step over, pick up the envelope and take off with his little girl to the baggage claim area. There it was happening . . .
And now Yayo was looking straight ahead coming through the people waiting—Catlett seeing them from behind moving aside to give this ignorant bean picker who looked like he’d never been in an airport before the right of way. That’s what he reminded Catlett of, a migrant picker dressed for Saturday night in a clean starched shirt and khakis too big for him. Ignorant man, didn’t know shit. Look at him being cool looking this way, coming over now.
As Yayo reached him Catlett said, “Don’t say nothing to me. Turn around and act like you’re waiting for somebody suppose to meet you.”
“The
“Ain’t in the case. Now turn around and be
