Six Easy Pieces

bar, I wondered if I had gone crazy somehow without warning. Jackson Blue was right; I was way out of my prescribed world there at the Exchequer.

I had fallen back into bad habits.

“Can I help you?”

It was yet another white man, this time a bartender. His words offered help, but his tone was asking me to leave.

“Mr. Haas,” I said, pointing toward the gloom.

A shimmering copper mass was emerging. Big Ears came up to me. “Come on.”

*   *   *

IT WAS POSSIBLY the darkest room I had ever been in that wasn’t intended for sleep. A man sat at a table under an intolerably weak red light. His suit was dark and his hair was perfect. Even though he was seated, I could tell that he was a small man. The only thing remarkable about his face were the eyebrows; they were thick and combed.

“Alexander?” he said.

I took a seat across from him without being bidden. “Mr. Alexander,” I said.

His lips protruded a quarter inch; maybe he smiled. “I’ve heard of you,” he ventured.

“I got a proposition. You wanna hear it?”

Ghostly hands rose from the table, giving his assent.

“There’s a group of wealthy colored businessmen, from pimps to real estate agents, who wanna start a regular poker game. It’s gonna float down around South L.A., some places I got lined up.”

“So? Am I invited to play?”

“Five thousand dollars against thirty percent of the house.”

Haas grinned. He had tiny teeth.

“You want I should just turn it over right now? Maybe you want me to lie down on the floor and let you walk on me too.”

Haas’s voice had become like steel. I would have been afraid, but because I was using Mouse’s name, there was no fear in me.

“I’d be happy to walk on you if you let me, but I figure you got the sense to check me out first.”

The grin fled. It was replaced by a twitch in the gangster’s left eye.

“I don’t do penny-ante shit, Mr. Alexander. You want to have a card game it’s nothin’ to me.” He adjusted his shoulders like James Cagney in Public Enemy.

“Okay,” I said. I stood up.

“But I know a guy.”

I said nothing.

“Emile Lund,” Haas continued. “He eats breakfast in Tito’s Diner on Temple. He likes the cards. But he doesn’t throw money around.”

“Neither do I,” I said, or maybe it was Raymond who said it and I was just his mouthpiece in that dark dark room way outside the limit of the law.

The old folks were gone when I emerged from the hotel. I missed seeing the old lady. I remember thinking that that old woman would probably be dead before I thought of her again.

FEATHER WAS ASLEEP in front of a plate with a half-eaten hot dog and a pile of baked beans on it. Astro Boy, her favorite cartoon, was playing on the TV. Jesus was in the backyard, hammering sporadically. I picked up my adopted daughter and kissed her. She smiled with her eyes still closed and said, “Daddy.”

“How you know who it is?” I asked playfully. “You too lazy to open your eyes.”

“I know your smell,” she said.

“You have hot dogs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What you do at school all day?”

At first she denied that anything had happened or been learned at Carthay Circle elementary school. But after a while she woke up and remembered a bird that flew in her classroom window and how Trisha Berkshaw said that her father could lift a hundred pounds up over his head.

“Nobody better tickle him when he’s doin’ that,” I said, and we both laughed.

Feather told me what her homework assignment was, and I set her up at the dinette table to get to work on her studies. Then I went outside to see Jesus.

He was rubbing oil into the timbers of his sailboat’s frame.

“How’s it goin’, Popeye?” I asked.

“Sinbad,” he said.

“Why you finishin’ it before it’s finished?”