City buses were running and the police made their presence felt. They were still riding four to a car, some wearing riot helmets or holding shotguns upright in their laps. They were still jumpy from days and nights when the Negro population rose up and fought back.
Bonnie let me off in front of my building. She kissed me and told me to be careful and then she kissed me again.
“Call if you’re going to be late, honey,” she said. “You know Feather will be worried.”
I kissed her and then walked off to my car.
TRINI’S CREOLE CAFe on 105th and Central was just an open-air coffee stand with a fancy name. All Trini had were a counter and six stools under a dirty yellow awning.
“You opened the minute they called the curfew off, huh, Trini?” I said to the open-air restaurateur.
“I been open every day, Mr. Rawlins,” Trini replied.
“With all this riotin’ and snipin’ goin’ on?” I asked.
“Dollar don’t make itself, brother.”
He had straight black hair from his Mexican father and the chocolate brown face and flat nose of his mother, who worked in the kitchen.
“Didn’t they give you any trouble?” I asked after enjoying the first real laugh I’d had in a week.
“Most of your serious riotin’ was done at nighttime. I’m mainly a breakfast place. I had looters, rioters, even cops and soldiers buyin’ coffee and jelly doughnuts.”
“Cops and looters at the same counter?”
“Oh yeah. You know the cops come six and eight at a time, and so it wasn’t too much to worry about. But mostly it was just neighborhood peoples comin’ out for to see what had been burnt down and tryin’ to feel a little normal.”
“Weren’t you supposed to be closed?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. They come by and told me to shut down a time or two but what was they gonna do, book me with the bombs goin’ off around their heads?”
I laughed again. Trini was about my age. He held himself like an elder, though. Wisdom was his crutch. He never worried about anything because he could explain it all away with a few sage words.
“So I guess you know all the dirt, huh?” I asked.
“So much I got to wash my hands every ten minutes.”
I smiled. “Lemme have another one’a those lemon-filled doughnuts, will ya?”
The sun was up and the streets were halfway normal. While Trini got my doughnut, I turned over a question in my mind.
The stock-and-trade of wise men was to educate. That meant they always had to feel they knew something you didn’t know. So when asking a question of a wise man it was always best to ask it in the wrong way.
Trini brought my doughnut on a thick tan plate.
“You hear about some white dude got dragged outta his car and killed down on Grape Street?” I asked when he set the plate down.
“You ain’t got that one quite right, Easy,” he replied.
“No? Why not?”
“There was a boy drivin’ ’round lookin’ at the play when a couple’a the brothers saw him and drug him out for a dustin’.”
“They didn’t kill him?”
“Nope. Just a citizen that some’a our boys beat on. They say he run off so quick that nobody could catch him. Nobody said nuthin’ about no body.”
“I ain’t read about that at all.”
“That’s street talk, brother. You know what it’s like.”
“So you sayin’ a white boy come down here in his car and gets dragged out and beaten and the papers don’t even cover it?” I shook my head as if to say that that just couldn’t be true.
“Oh yeah, Easy. Yes sir. Bobby Grant told me himself and he live right around the corner from there.”
I sucked the lemon custard out of its pastry pocket. I liked Trini’s mother’s lemon filling because she didn’t add so much sugar that the lemon lost its tang.
“You got some cigarettes back there, Trini?”
“What’s your brand this week?” he asked.
“I’m gonna need a man’s cigarette down around here,” I said. “How about Chesterfields or Pall Malls.”
“I only got Lucky Strike in the filterless, Easy.”
“Gimme one’a them then . . . no, no. Gimme two packs.”
I COULD HAVE asked Trini for Bobby Grant’s address or phone number—if I wanted everybody who came into his shop for the next three days to know about it. The reason so many people braved the violent streets to come to Trini’s cafe was that they knew all the information of the neighborhood filtered through him. Anything he heard he repeated. And Trini had a piercing voice, so he could be talking to a man at one end of the counter and you heard every word six stools away.
