Bad Boy Brawley Brown

'Could I buy it like that too,' I asked, as if it was the first time I had ever heard of buying hijack.

'I don't know, honey. You know Momma and me let Huey take care of the shoppin'.'

That was it for me. Huey wasn't the kind of man to ask about Frank Green. Huey was like Junior Forney—mean and spiteful. He was no one to tell my business.

I drove Ronald home at about nine. He was crying on my shoulder when I let him out at his house.

'Please don't make me go in there, Easy. Take me with you, brother.'

I was trying to keep from laughing. I could see Mary at the door. She was thin except for her belly and there was a baby boy in each of her arms. All their children crowded around her in the doorway pushing each other back to get a look at their father coming home.

'Come on now, Ron. You made all them babies, now you got to sleep in your bed.'

I remember thinking that if I lived through the troubles I had then, my life would be pretty good. But Ronald didn't have any chance to be happy, unless he broke his poor family's heart.

During the next day I went to the bars that Frank sold hijack to and to the alley crap games that he frequented. I never brought up Frank's name though. Frank was skitterish, like all gangsters, and if he felt that people were talking about him he got nervous; if Frank was nervous he might have killed me before I had time to make my pitch.

It was those two days more than any other time that made me a detective.

I felt a secret glee when I went into a bar and ordered a beer with money someone else had paid me. I'd ask the bartender his name and talk about anything, but, really, behind my friendly talk, I was working to find something. Nobody knew what I was up to and that made me sort of invisible; people thought that they saw me but what they really saw was an illusion of me, something that wasn't real.

I never got bored or frustrated. I wasn't even afraid of DeWitt Albright during those days. I felt, foolishly, safe from even his crazy violence.

19

Zeppo could always be found on the corner of Forty-ninth and McKinley. He was half Negro, half Italian, and palsied. He stood there looking to the world like a skinny, knotted-up minister when the word of the Lord gets in him. He'd shake and writhe with all kinds of frowns on his face. Sometimes he'd bend all the way down to the ground and place both palms on the pavement as if the street were trying to swallow him and he was pushing it away.

Ernest, the barber, let Zeppo stand out in front of his shop to beg because he knew that the neighborhood children wouldn't bother Zeppo as long as he stood in front of the barber's pane.

'Hey, Zep, how you doin'?' I asked.

'J-j-ju-j-just fi-f-f-fi-f-fine, Ease.' Sometimes words would come easy to him and other times he couldn't even finish a sentence.

'Nice day, huh?'

'Y-y-y-yeah. G-go-g-g-go-good d-day,' he stammered, holding his hands before his face, like claws.

'Alright,' I said, and then I walked into the barbershop.

'Hey, Easy,' Ernest said as he folded his newspaper and stood up from his barber's chair. I took his place and he blossomed the crisp white sheet over me, knotting the bib snug at my throat.

'I thought you come in on Thursdays, Ease?'

'Man can't always be the same, Ernest. Man gotta change with the days.'

'Hotcha! Lord, give me that seven!' someone shouted from the back of the narrow shop. There was always a game of craps at the back of Ernest's shop; a group of five men were on their knees back beyond the third barber chair.

'So you looked in the mirror this mo'nin' and saw a haircut, huh?' Ernest asked me.

'Grizzly as a bear.'

Ernest laughed and took a couple of practice snips with his scissors.

Ernest always played Italian opera on the radio. If you asked him why he'd just say that Zeppo like it. But Zeppo couldn't hear that radio from the street and Ernest only had him in the shop once a month, for his free haircut.

Ernest's father had been a drinking man. He beat poor little Ernest and Ernest's mother until the blood ran. So Ernest didn't have much patience with drinkers. And Zeppo was a drinker. I guess all that shaking didn't seem so bad if he had a snout full of cheap whiskey. So he'd beg until he had enough for a can of beans and a half-pint of scotch. Then Zeppo would get drunk.

It was because Zeppo was almost always drunk, or on the way to being drunk, that Ernest wouldn't allow him in the shop.

I once asked him why he'd let Zeppo hang out in front of the store if he hated drunks so much. And he told me, 'The Lord might ask one day why I didn't look over my little brother.'

We shot the breeze while the men threw their bones and Zeppo twisted and jerked in the window; Don Giovanni whispered from the radio. I wanted to find out the whereabouts of Frank Green but it had to come up in normal conversation. Most barbers know all the important information in the community. That's why I was getting my hair cut.

Ernest was brushing the hot lather around my ears when Jackson Blue came in the door.

'Happenin', Ernest, Ease,' he hailed.