She was the girlfriend of the now-dead Tiny Cox and he was my best friend.
They sat across from each other in the gloom, under a dim light, playing blackjack. Ginny had sixty years, three hundred pounds, and one of the best memories I had ever encountered on her side. Mouse had what he called the “luck of the black man” on his.
“Easy,” he had once told me, “you know a black man has to be luckier than any white guy you ever met.”
“How you get that?” I asked.
“Well you know white men had it easy. They had jobs and guns and the western plains for them. All we had was chains and nooses and shit like that. For a white man’s father’s father to survive was nuthin’. But if one of our people lived it was only because of the best luck. Jackson Blue said it to me. He said that this scientist, Derwin I think, said that you got things from your ancestors through the blood. I got luck from mines.”
That didn’t explain why Mouse thought he was luckier than other black men, but I didn’t question his beliefs because he was the luckiest man I had ever known.
“Twenty-one,” Mouse shouted, slapping down a red queen. “Pay up Ginny. You owe me thirty-seven cents.”
Ginny Cox was slow and deliberate, more than twice the size of Mouse. She looked at his cards and then looked at hers. Then she brought out a change purse and counted out her losses.
“Another game?” she asked then.
Women liked Mouse. It passed through my mind that she might have lost games often enough to keep Mouse around. Who knows? One drunken night she might just drag him off to bed.
“Not right now if you don’t mind, Raymond,” I said.
“Easy.” Mouse turned to me and smiled, his gold-edged teeth glittering.
“I need your company, Ray.”
“You gonna get me shot again?”
“I hope not,” I said. “But you never know.”
“Well if I could beat Ginny here then I must be on a streak. I might even be lucky enough to survive Easy Rawlins.”
With those words he stood and walked out into the alley with me.
WE DROVE THE FEW BLOCKS over to Parmelee, Trevor McKenzie’s street. On the way I told Mouse about the girl Jackie Jay and the friend of Theodore Steinman.
“Teddy’s cool,” Mouse said. “You know him and me go out barhoppin’ sometimes.”
“You do?”
“Oh yeah. Teddy like them bars with the girls got the naked titties hangin’ out. He won’t touch ’em though, not him. He wouldn’t do that to Sylvie—”
“You know his wife too?” I was shocked. For some reason I didn’t imagine Raymond with everyday people.
“Yeah, man,” Raymond said. “One time I brought him a pair of rattlesnake boots that Poor Howard made.”
Poor Howard was a Cajun who lived in the woods of southern Louisiana. I hadn’t thought of him in years. He was a cobbler. All of his shoes were made from the things you could gather in the swamplands. From alligator hide to water moccasin skin, from opossum fur to cougar fleece—Poor Howard made it all.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“Howard up around here nowadays, man. He killed a white boy slapped his woman and then made beeline for L.A.”
“He’s in town?”
“You know Howard,” Mouse said. “He’s somewhere. In the woods or down by the sea. Settin’ traps and whatnot. Anyway when Theodore got a look at those snakeskin boots, he was my best friend from then on. I like the guy. Them Frenchmen are all right.”
“He’s not French,” I said. “He’s a German.”
“Same thing,” Mouse said with a shrug.
I would have argued further but we were at the McKenzie house.
I knocked while Mouse stood off to the side. After a moment or so a woman answered. She was small and blunt-looking, dark-skinned with eyes that never looked straight at anything.
“Yes sir?”
“Mrs. McKenzie?”
“Miss McKenzie.”
“Is your son here, ma’am?”
“Who wants to see him?”
“Tell him that it’s the man who hit him in the head earlier today. I came by to apologize and ask him a question.”
Miss McKenzie’s mouth came open showing no teeth and resembling a cornered Gila monster.
