As we walked out from between Jo’s trees her elixir hit me. I felt like I could go out and run a ten-mile race.
38
You talked to Benita?” Raymond asked me after I’d driven about six blocks.
I don’t know what it was that Jo had given me but I could feel the blood pumping in my veins. I was wide awake and ready for anything—even the implied threat in Raymond’s tone.
“Yeah,” I said confidently. “Yes I did.”
“What for?”
“I was just goin’ around lookin’ for my boy—Harold. I run into her at Stud’s.”
“What she say?”
“That she loves you, that she misses you, that you broke her heart.”
“Then what?”
I pulled the car to the curb, came to a halt, and yanked on the parking brake.
“I took her home,” I said. “Then I read the phone book while she fell asleep in the bathtub. After that I left. You wanna make somethin’ outta that?”
Ray’s gray eyes seemed to flash as he looked at me.
He was a small man. That’s where most men who went up against him made their biggest mistake. They thought that a small man had to cave in to a bigger one. They didn’t know that Mouse was strong as a man twice his size. But that’s not what made him dangerous. Mouse was fast and he was a killer. He killed without a second thought or a moment’s remorse. He was a soldier who had been at war his entire life.
“What’s wrong with you, Easy? You crazy or sumpin’?”
“You wouldn’t understand, Ray. What’s been goin’ on the last few days don’t mean nuthin’ but business to you. But this shit has fucked me up. I’m lookin’ for this killer and the streets I’m walkin’ down today ain’t what they were last week. I’m your friend, Ray. But you know that girl has let herself go all the way down to the ground over you. She could die.”
“Die? What she gonna die from, man? It’s not poison.”
I was breathing hard. I knew that my friend could see it. I hoped he knew that I wasn’t a threat to him.
“Black women, Ray. You know how they are. Tough as you ever wanna be. Go up against a whole gang to protect her man. Ready to walk away if you do her wrong the next day. But you know about her heart. You know when you talk that sweet shit, she gonna believe every word even if she knows it ain’t true. And when you leave her alone it eats at her like acid.
“I went home with her because she needed someone to look after her. I ain’t interested in your girl. I just don’t want her to feel like she’s all alone.”
While I spoke Ray didn’t say a word. He just stared with those killer eyes. For all I knew he was waiting for me to finish so he could say I had my last words.
But instead of killing me he scratched his nose.
“You know they’s hardly anybody talk to me like that, Ease. I once killed a man fightin’ over a woman and you know that woman was his wife. But you right. Just ’cause I tell ’er about Etta don’t mean I don’t snake up in there an’ confuse her mind. Yeah.”
He turned around and faced forward. We sat there for a while and then I turned over the engine.
I let Raymond off at his house. He got out of the car and walked away without another word.
I drove off thinking that I would never take another one of Mama Jo’s potions without asking her how it was going to affect me.
IT WAS NIGHTTIME and I hadn’t spoken to Bonnie in quite a while. I was running low on gas too. So I pulled into an A-Plus gas station on Normandie and waited for the attendant. It was a white guy in a tan jumpsuit with “A+” printed over his breast pocket. He was back on the job and the end of the riots wasn’t three days old.
“What can I get you, mister?” he said.
“Two dollars,” I said.
“Right away.”
He attached the nozzle to my car and the pump started ringing. I got out and stretched my legs. I took a deep breath that went all the way to my toes. There was a phone booth at the corner of the lot. I took a few steps toward it, when three squad cars ran up on the curb and surrounded me.
Those three cars contained a dozen policemen.
One of them yelled, “Put your hands where I can see them!” He had a shotgun pointed at me.
All the cops had guns out. Six of them took positions around the perimeter of the station and the rest pounced on me.
In a normal state of mind I would have held out my hands in surrender. But with Mama Jo’s drug in me my whole body, from my fingers to my anklebones, went rigid. It took all of those young white men to subdue me. I didn’t say a word and I didn’t fight. I just stood there thinking that those men were no more than rodents trying to intimidate me with their squeals.
Once they got me down they had a problem because there wasn’t any room in their cars for a prisoner. None of them wanted to be on foot and in uniform in the black neighborhood after nightfall. They had learned to respect the anger that glared at them from the darkness.
