“Naw. The other car broke down an’ he cain’t get in here.”
“He stuck out there at the house?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. You mind if I go get him?”
“Yeah, I mind. You go back to work, Etta. I’ll go an’ get Mouse.”
Etta smiled. “You always did look after Raymond,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
IT FELT GOOD to be headed down toward Compton. Etta Mae lived there with her son, LaMarque, and, sometimes, with his father—Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.
They were together again in the early sixties. Mouse had a change of heart there for a while and wanted to be a family man, a married man.
The change came about late in ’61. Sweet William Dokes had moved to L.A. from Jenkins, Texas. Sweet William was a barber and a guitar player, somewhere in his sixties. He was a dapper man who had taught Mouse everything about good dress and conduct with the ladies.
Mouse took his own slant on what William had to say and left broken hearts, broken heads, and more dead bodies than anyone knew throughout Texas and southern California.
Mouse was an old-time gangster. A tough who could work with you or go it alone. He wasn’t afraid of prison or death, and that made him the kind of man that people left alone. Even the police didn’t come after Raymond unless they were sure they had something on him.
The first man he killed was his stepfather, daddyReese Corn. Some years later he killed his stepbrother, Navrochet, in a back-alley duel.
Over the years many of my friends have asked me how I could be close with a man like Mouse. A man who was a cold-blooded killer.
I never tried to explain. How could I? In the hard life of the streets you needed somebody like Mouse at your back. I didn’t have a mother or father, or close family or church. All I had was my friends. And among them Mouse packed the largest caliber and the hardest of rock-hard wills.
WHEN SWEET WILLIAM came to town he and Mouse took to the streets together. They plied the pool halls and whore-houses; they gambled and drank deep. William always had his blues guitar with him and because of that they were welcome in almost every door.
People commented on how much they resembled each other. Both had slight builds and long-fingered hands. You would have sworn that they were related and not just good friends.
Raymond treated William like a father and a friend. They lived together and shared the same women. For six months William and Mouse were joined at the hip. And wherever they showed up there was a party going on.
I hadn’t seen much of them because I was sick for a while and then I went to work at the school. Mouse and William didn’t wake up until the afternoon; by the time they were out on the town I was already in my bed.
So I was a little surprised one day when I got home to find Raymond with my adopted children, Jesus and Feather. Mouse sat solemnly in my favorite sofa chair while Feather offered him a glass of green Kool-Aid. Jesus was sitting at the dining table doing his homework. He was a freshman in high school and, even though he could talk by then, Jesus was still a very quiet boy.
“Raymond, what you doin’ here?” I asked.
“Let’s take a ride, Easy,” he said. He stood up, ignoring the glass that five-year-old Feather proffered. Like all females she was in love with him.
“Okay,” I said. I could see that he meant business.
“Don’t you want your Kool-Aid, Uncle Raymond?” Feather asked.
I knelt down and kissed my little girl’s light brown face. “Put it in the icebox till he comes back, baby,” I said. “We got to talk about something right now.”
We went out to my Pontiac and we drove off. I took a southeastern route because, like I said, that was the 1960s and black men couldn’t take a leisurely drive in white Los Angeles without having the cops wanting to know what was going on.
“It’s all ’cause’a my dick, Easy,” Mouse said.
It worried me to hear his words because they indicated that Mouse had been thinking—he was always his deadliest when circumstances forced him to use his mind.
“What’s that, Raymond?”
“You know I got me a big dick,” Mouse answered. “That’s a fact. I don’t know what the girls think about it but you know I like it just fine.”
I was impatient but with Raymond you had to let the story unwind. He couldn’t be rushed, so I concentrated on the white line.
“I mean, sometime it might be saggin’ a little but I could always get the mothahfuckah hard.” He slapped his steely finger against the dashboard. “You know Tisha?”
“Lawrence?”
“Naw, Burnett. Live over in the Russell projects.”
“I don’t think so.”
“She work for John, waitress over there. Sour-faced bitch, but she fine, an’ she know it too.”
