Bad Boy Brawley Brown

'How much?'

'Five dollars for a night.'

'What?'

'It's a whole house, Easy. Made for love.' He winked at me.

I could have argued him down and I would have done it for fun, but I had other things on my mind.

'Alright.'

I gave him a ten-dollar bill and he showed us to the path that led around the big house to the house out back. He started to come with us but I stopped him.

'Primo, my man,' I said. 'I'll come on up tomorrow an' we do some damage to a fifth of tequila. Alright?'

He smiled and thumped my arm before he turned to leave. I wished that my life was still so simple that all I was after was a wild night with a white girl.

The first thing we saw was a mass of flowering bushes with honeysuckle, snapdragons, and passion fruit weaving through. A jagged, man-sized hole was hacked from the branches. Past that doorway was a small building like a coach house or the gardener's quarters on a big estate. Three sides of the house were glass doors from ceiling to floor. All the doors could open outward onto the cement patio that surrounded these three sides of the house, but they were all shut. The front door was wood, painted green.

Long white curtains were drawn over all the windows.

Inside, the house was just a big room with a fallen-down spring-bed on one side and a two-burner gas range on the other. There was a table with a toaster on it and four spindly chairs. There was a big stuffed sofa upholstered with a dark brown material that had giant yellow flowers stitched into it.

'It's just beautiful,' Daphne exclaimed.

My face must've said that she was crazy because she blushed a little and added, 'Well it could use some work but I think we could make something out of it.'

'Maybe if we tore it down …'

Daphne laughed and that was very nice. As I said before, she was like a child and her childish pleasure touched me.

'It is beautiful,' she said. 'Maybe not rich but it's quiet and it's private. Nobody else could see us here.'

I put her bags down next to the sofa.

'I gotta go out for a little while,' I said. Once I had her in place I saw how to get things moving.

'Stay.'

'I got to, Daphne. I got two bad men and the L.A. police on my trail.'

'What bad men?' She sat at the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. She had put on a yellow sundress at the motel, and it showed off her tan shoulders.

'The man your friend hired and Frank Green, your other friend.'

'What does Frankie have to do with you?'

I went up to her and she stood to meet me. I pulled my collar down and showed her my gashed throat, saying, 'That's what Frankie done to Easy.'

'Oh, honey!' She reached out gently for my neck.

Maybe it was just the touch of woman that got to me or maybe it was finally realizing all that had happened to me in the previous week; I don't know.

'Look at that! That's the cops!' I said, pointing at the bruise on my eye. 'I been arrested twice, blamed for four murders, threatened by people I wished I never met, and …' I felt that my liver was going to come out between my teeth.

'Oh my poor man,' she said as she took me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. She didn't let go of my arm while she turned on the water for the bath. She was right there with me, unbuttoning my shirt, letting down my pants.

I was sitting there, naked on the toilet seat, and watching her go through the mirror-doored medicine cabinet. I felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting.

'Death,' the saxophone rasps. But, really, I didn't care.

26

Daphne Monet, a woman who I didn't know at all personally, had me laid back in the deep porcelain tub while she carefully washed between my toes and then up my legs. I had an erection lying flat against my stomach and I was breathing slowly, like a small boy poised to catch a butterfly. Every once in a while she'd say, 'Shh, honey, it's all right.' And for some reason that caused me pain.

When she finished with my legs she washed my whole body with a rough hand towel and a bar of soap that had pumice in it.

I never felt drawn to a woman the way I was to Daphne Monet. Most beautiful women make me feel like I want to touch them, own them. But Daphne made me look inside myself. She'd whisper a sweet word and I was brought back to the first time I felt love and loss. I was remembering my mother's death, back when I was only eight, by the time Daphne got to my belly. I held my breath as she lifted the erection to wash underneath it; she looked into my face, with eyes that had become blue over the water, and stroked my erection up and down, twice. She smiled when she finished and pressed it back down against my flesh.

I couldn't say a word.