saved my life once and on another occasion she literally brought Mouse back from the dead.
Things got a little hazy after I drank the brew, which managed to be both slimy and chalky. I remember her putting poultices on my head and mouth. I thought I saw a great black feathered bird spreading his wings on a branch behind her.
“Easy Rawlins!” I heard her deformed son announce as was his wont whenever he saw me.
I was looking at the roof and slowly it disappeared. Above me were ten thousand stars on a backdrop of black. The air in my nostrils was crisp and cold and I was the only person in the wide world, safe at last from the pain of hatred and the pain of love.
The events of the past two weeks—the riots, the death of Nola Payne, the pursuit of Harold the woman killer, and the memories that Juanda kindled in me all came together and spun me out like a bird clipped by a stone. I was spinning through the sky, seeing pieces of everything—out of control.
Then I crashed. For a moment the aching from my fight was excruciating, then I felt nothing, and then I knew nothing.
“YOU CAN GET up now, baby,” Jo said.
“Hi, Easy,” her hunchbacked son cried.
“Hey, Dom. How you doin’?”
“Hey, Ease,” Mouse said. I couldn’t see him from where I lay but it was him.
A large black bird cried and flared its wings.
“You got a crow as a pet?” I asked Jo as I sat up on the floor mat.
“Raven,” she said. “This here’s a raven. Talks an’ everything. He keeps me company.”
“Who did this to you, Easy?” Mouse asked.
He was standing to the side. Just looking at him made me smile.
Mouse was wearing a greenish gray two-piece suit with a black shirt and a tie made up of every shade of yellow that you could imagine. His shoes were fashioned from alligator skin.
“Poor Howard make you those shoes?”
“Oh yeah. You know Howard got his cousins bringin’ up gator hide from bayou country. He sellin’ ’em for four hunnert dollars a pair.”
Howard was a dark-skinned Cajun acquaintance of ours from Louisiana. He lived in the wilds around L.A. because he was a fugitive from Louisiana justice. He had killed a white man, so running was the only choice he had.
“You gonna answer my question?” Mouse asked.
“It was just a misunderstandin’, Ray. Nuthin’ to get upset about.”
“How you feelin’, darlin’?” Jo asked me.
She’d always had a soft spot for me. I could still hear it in her tone.
“Good,” I said. “Great. I don’t hardly hurt at all.” I was a country boy again, even in the way I spoke.
She handed me a mirror and I saw that all of the swelling on my face had gone. Her teas and poultices rivaled the medicines most doctors prescribed.
“You got to take it easy, baby,” she said. “You know a man’s body don’t bounce back too fast after he pass forty.”
“You wanna go fishin’, Easy?” Domaque shouted.
I turned to Jo’s powerful and lopsided son. He was big and misshapen in almost every part of his body. Something was wrong with his nasal passages, so his mouth hung open showing crooked teeth and red gums. His arms and legs were all different lengths and his mind, though extremely intelligent, held on to all of the innocence of childhood. The first time you saw Dom he’d scare you silly but if you knew him you would feel that you’d met one of the finest human beings on this earth.
“No, Dom. I got to do some huntin’ first. But you know, my boy Jesus has built him a sailboat.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. It floats and goes where he tells it to. I bet he’d take us out for some fishin’.”
The glee on that child-man’s face gave me one of my first feelings of true happiness since the riots began.
“I got to go,” I said.
I rose to my feet. I was fully dressed except that Jo had taken off my socks and shoes.
While I tied my laces she said, “Here, drink this, Easy.” She proffered a cloudy quartz bottle.
“What is it?”
“It’s what you need, baby. You gonna take that body back into the street, you better have a little get-up-n- go.”
I drank the liquid down in one swallow. There wasn’t any alcohol in it but it certainly had a kick.
“After six hours get yourself into bed, honey,” she said.
“Don’t forget about Jesus,” Dom said.
“I’ll ride with ya, Easy,” Mouse informed me. “When Jo called about you, LaMarque drove me over. He needed the car to impress some girl.”
