“Not cut you or run,” I said.
She twisted my ear pretty hard, and I came so violently that I lost consciousness for a while.
I awoke to the smell of coffee, disoriented because I didn’t know where I was. I had to look around the bare room a couple of times before I remembered Charlotte. The floor was finished pine with no rug. The open closet was a door-size indentation with three dresses hanging on wire hangers. The single bed I was on was the only furniture in the room. I realized that the furniture in the living room must belong to the flat-voiced roommate; that Charlotte had nothing; that she was just a refugee from the violence of her recent past.
I tried to get up, but the bed was too comfortable. The pillow had the sweet smell of some kind of hair product, the sheets were clean. My bed back at Fontanelle’s was a six-year-old’s smelly mattress with no sheet on a gritty, pitted floor. I had the urge to get married right then. I could get married to Charlotte, get a job with the city, move out toward Compton — maybe even change my name.
“Paris, you ’wake?” She was standing at the door.
“Uh,” I admitted.
“I got coffee on the deck.”
IT WAS CROWDED on the deck, and the kitchen chairs we used rocked a little on the metal grating that stood for a floor. But the early evening was pretty, and Charlotte’s conversation was just what I needed.
“What kinda trouble you in?” she asked after her second cup of coffee.
“I don’t really know,” I said.
“How could you not know? Is somebody after you?”
“Maybe. They have been. One or two. One of ’em burnt down my little bookstore over on Eighty-nine and Central.”
“You worked there?”
“I owned it,” I said with faded pride.
“I used to go by there. I mean when it wasn’t burned. I always wanted to go in, but I was scared.”
“Scared’a what?”
“I don’t know. Things out here scare me. People don’t act normal. It’s like you gotta know some kinda secret handshake or sumpin’.”
“You come up here to get away from that man cut you,” I said, only partly as a question.
“Not only that,” Charlotte said. “I wanna be a cook too. Not just a cook that make stuff but a chef. I wanna own my own restaurant. You know my mama was the best cook in our whole town, and I learned from her. Back where I come from, you could only cook for a house fulla dirty kids in a backwood shack, or up in some rich white peoples’ houses. I want my own place.”
“You know I got to go soon, Charlotte.”
“Say that again.”
“You know —”
“No, not that, just my name.”
“Charlotte.”
She smiled and got up to kiss me.
“You was just what I needed, baby,” she said.
28
WHEN I GOT TO the hospital it was almost eight. I left Charlotte with the promise to call in a few days; just that little pledge made me feel that I might be alive and free after this mess was over.
The hospital room smelled sour, like a mound of dead skin.
Fearless was sitting at Sol’s bedside speaking in low tones. That made me happy because it meant that Sol was listening and talking.
“They brought me here to die,” a voice to my left said.
I turned to see an ancient white man sitting up in a bed. He was so small that he seemed like an infant allowed to sleep in a grown-up bed. The odor was coming from him.
“What?”
