Bad Boy Brawley Brown

Daphne had the bag in a YWCA locker.

Back in East L.A. Mouse counted out ten thousand for each of us. He let Daphne keep the bag.

She called a cab and I went out with her to wait by the granite lamppost at the curb.

'Stay with me,' I said. Moths fluttered around us in that small circle of light.

'I can't, Easy, I can't stay with you.'

'Why not?' I asked.

'I just can't.'

I put my hand out but she moved away saying, 'Don't touch me.'

'I've done more than touch you, honey.'

'That wasn't me.'

'What you mean? Who was it if it wasn't you?' I moved toward her and she got behind her bag.

'I'll talk to you, Easy. I'll talk to you till the car comes but just don't touch me. Don't touch me or I'll yell.'

'What's wrong?'

'You know what's wrong. You know who I am; what I am.'

'You ain't no different than me. We both just people, Daphne. That's all we are.'

'I'm not Daphne. My given name is Ruby Hanks and I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I'm different than you because I'm two people. I'm her and I'm me. I never went to that zoo, she did. She was there and that's where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came home and fell in my bed about as many times as he fell in my mother's. He did that until one night Frank killed him.'

When she looked up at me I had the feeling that she wanted to reach out to me, not out of love or passion but to implore me.

'Bury Frank,' she said.

'Okay. But you could stay here with me and we could bury him together.'

'I can't. Do me one other favor?'

'What's that?'

'Do something about the boy.'

I didn't really want her to stay. Daphne Monet was death herself. I was glad that she was leaving.

But I would have taken her in a second if she'd asked me to.

The cab driver could tell something was wrong. He kept looking around as if he expected to be mugged any second. She asked him to carry her bag. She put her hand on his arm to thank him but she wouldn't even shake my hand goodbye.

'Why'd you kill him, Mouse?'

'Who?'

'Joppy!'

Mouse was whistling and wrapping his money in a package fashioned from brown paper bags.

'He the cause of all yo' pain, Easy. And anyway, I needed to show that girl how serious I was.'

'But she already hated him fo' Frank; maybe you could'a worked on that.'

'It was me killed Frank,' he said. This time it was Mouse reminding me of DeWitt Albright.

'You killed him?'

'So what? What you think he gonna do fo' you? You think he wasn't gonna kill you?'

'That don't mean I had t'kill'im.'

'Hell it don't!' Mouse flashed his eyes angrily at me.

It was murder and I had to swallow it.

'You just like Ruby,' Mouse said.

'What you say?'

'She wanna be white. All them years people be tellin' her how she light-skinned and beautiful but all the time she knows that she can't have what white people have. So she pretend and then she lose it all. She can love a white man but all he can love is the white girl he think she is.'

'What's that got to do with me?'

'That's just like you, Easy. You learn stuff and you be thinkin' like white men be thinkin'. You be thinkin' that what's right fo' them is right fo' you. She look like she white and you think like you white. But brother you don't know that you both poor niggers. And a nigger ain't never gonna be happy 'less he accept what he is.'

30

They found DeWitt Albright slumped over his steering wheel just north of Santa Barbara; it took him that long