Little Scarlet

“Willy,” I said. “Willy Mofass.”

As I have gotten older I find that I use the names of dead friends to mask my secret passages. I do this partly because it is easy for me to remember their names and partly to keep them alive—at least in my mind.

“Well, Willy,” the man said. “You can have soup and bread for dinner and a place to stay for two bits.”

“I don’t have a nickel much less a quarter,” I said. “Blue said that this place was free.”

“Ain’t nuthin’ free, Brother Willy. No sir. You got to pay. But we could let you slide for a day or two. But you got to pay the kitty if you gonna stay here more’n that.”

“Where the fuck I’ma get twenty-fi’e cent a day. If I had that right now, I get me a bottle’a wine and climb in a cardboard box down near Metro High.”

I knew the layout of Los Angeles. I knew where the hobos went to sleep unmolested.

“Billy will help you get a job,” the little man said. “Remember though. No wine on the premises. No drugs or liquor or women neither. This here’s a Christian men’s shelter. It’s clean.”

As he said this a light brown roach darted across the desk. That bug was quick but the gatekeeper was quicker. He slammed that roach so hard that the only things left to identify it were two legs and a quivering wing.

30

I camped out at the far end of the sofa furthest away from the desk. The snaky man, Lewis was his name, was a little too interested in the whereabouts of Jackson for me. So I sat there and read the papers.

Gemini 5 was ready to take off. The Russians offered hope for a peace treaty in Vietnam. But mainly the news was about the riots and race relations across the nation.

The news was all the more fuel for Gerald Jordan’s fears. A Catholic priest and a seminary student had been gunned down by local lawmen in Hayneville, Alabama. It seems that they had been trying to integrate a country store. Lyndon Baines Johnson declared that the rioters in the streets of L.A. were no better than Klan riders. Two more people died, so the official death toll in the riots had risen to thirty-five. In a statement Martin Luther King made before leaving L.A. he said that he couldn’t find the kind of creative and sensitive leadership among our elected officials to solve the problems that caused the riots.

Even Martin Luther King had given up on a nonviolent solution.

“Hey, man,” someone said.

I looked up to see a tall young man with bright eyes and a nice smile except for one broken and brown tooth.

“Hey,” I replied.

He sat on my couch, about three hand spans distant, looked me up and down and asked, “Where you from?”

“Galveston.” It was true pretty much. I had come from a lot of places. Baton Rouge, New Iberia, New Orleans, Houston, Galveston, and many other towns. I had been to Africa, Italy, France, and Germany during the war. And someone had shot at me at least once in every location.

“You know a man name of Tiny?” the young man asked me.

“I know a whole slew’a Tinys: A man, another man, a woman, and one don’t know what he is.”

The young man smiled again.

“You read?” he asked.

I nodded and folded the newspaper across my lap.

“I wanna read,” he said.

“Why?”

“What you mean ‘why’? You read, don’t you, niggah?” Just that fast the pleasant young man was ready to fight.

“All I did was ask you why, man,” I said. “You know, people always got a reason t’do somethin’ and I collect reasons.”

“Collect ’em?”

“Yeah. Somebody tell me they go to church I ask ’em why. I wanna know if they go there because they love the Lord or because they afraid’a hell. Somebody tell me that they like America I ask ’em why. You know, I once knew a woman loved a man so hard that she’d do anything for him. But he beat her just about every Saturday night. When I asked her why she said, ‘’Cause he give me flowers every Sunday—just about.’”

By the time I was through with my explanation the young man’s anger was gone.

“You crazy, niggah,” he said.

“You know a old boy name of Harold?” I asked then. “Short guy, kinda wide. His hands is kinda fat like.”

The young man shook his head. “Naw. You got two dollars?”

“I got half a pack of Lucky Strikes. You want one?”

We smoked for a while and two other men came up to us. They looked like brothers with their coal-colored skin and bloodshot eyes. They both had long hair that was matted and infused with dust.

“Mickey,” one of the men said to me.

“Terry,” the other said.