T-shirt had been white before the bleeding started. His shoes were brown with eyes but no laces.
“They shot me,” the man said.
“Dean and Merry?” I asked.
He nodded and winced.
“You Axel?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Who’re you?”
“Friend of Domaque.”
“I’m sorry ’bout him. It was just the money was all. The money they said we could get. I shouldn’ta done it. Shouldn’ta.”
Axel coughed and dribbled blood down into his beard.
“You better save your breath,” I said.
“Help me.”
“You got a phone?”
“They pult it outta the wall.”
“Why’d they shoot you?” I asked.
“So to keep the money and be sure I didn’t tell.”
“You told them about Domaque?”
“I’m sorry about that. I really am.”
I looked around for something to use to stop Axel’s bleeding. His home was just one big room, messy, unadorned, and pretty bare. There was a white-enameled wood stove in one corner and a bed in another. Next to the bed was a pile of clothing that he probably chose from now and then when he needed to change. I took out two long-sleeved shirts and shredded them to make a bandage that I could tie around his chest.
“What are you doin’ here, Mister?” Axel asked while I worked on his wound.
It wasn’t bleeding much. The hole, below his right nipple, was even and pretty small.
“Tryin’ to find Merry and Dean. They framed Dom and Dom’s my friend.”
“They’re in L.A.,” the old man said. “Spendin’ my money and laughin’ at us fools.”
“Where exactly?”
“He’s a surfer. Likes the water. So they’re down near the ocean somewhere, that’s for sure.”
“Did they live around here?”
“In a trailer on Bibi Wyler Road. Bibi Wyler Road,” he said again. Then he coughed up a great deal of blood and died.
I WENT BACK DOWN to the Esso station and called the cops, then I got a map and made my way to Bibi Wyler Road.
There was only one trailer on the three-block street. It was abandoned. There were clothes strewn around but no mail or written material of any kind. In one pants pocket I found an empty billfold with a photograph folded into the “secret compartment.” It was of a blond girl with a sharp smile standing arm in arm with a brutish-looking man whose black hair went down to the collar of his shirt.
I considered asking the neighbors about the occupants of the trailer but then I decided that the fewer people who saw me the better. After all, there had already been three murders in Santa Maria and the only suspect was a black man.
I GOT HOME in the late afternoon and played with my children. Bonnie watched me from the back door. I think she was worried but she didn’t say anything.
That night I dreamed about fishing in the ocean with Domaque and Raymond. We were in Jesus’s boat far out on the ocean. Mouse was catching one fish after the other, reeling them in to Domaque’s squeals of delight. I had my line in the water with bait on the hook but no fish nibbled or bit.
“Don’t worry, Easy,” Mouse said to me. “As long as you got friends you can eat.”
Those words soothed me and I clambered down into the bottom of the boat and slept on a rocking sea of deep silence.
* * *
“GOOD MORNING, MR. RAWLINS,” Ada Masters greeted. It was the next day and we were in the main hall of Sojourner Truth junior high school.
It was 5:30 A.M.
“Good morning to you too but you know you shouldn’t come to the school so early, Mrs. Masters,” I said. “It’s not safe for a woman alone.”
I was one of the few people who could tell it like it was to our new principal. She liked me. I liked her too.
“I’m not worried, Mr. Rawlins. And this is my school. I like to walk around and see what it looks like before children come in. How are you?”
Somehow Mrs. Masters knew that I had been in a funk. Her pale blue eyes saw past my facades. The suit she was wearing cost more than most other women’s wardrobes but you had to know something about clothes to tell that. We were perfect partners for the maintenance and care of the body and spirit of Truth.
