“In Vietnam?”
“I guess it was. He didn’t give the town a name. Maybe it was Cambodia or Laos maybe. Shit, the way he tell it, it could’a been anywhere. They just put that boy in a plane an’ give him a para-chute an’ a duffel bag full’a guns an’ bombs. Wherever he land people had to die.”
“How do you know him?”
“Met once down in Compton. There was some guys thought they was bad messin’ wit’ a friend’a his. The dudes called themselves my friends an’ so I looked into it. When I fount out what they was doin’ I jes’ smiled at Christmas. He taught ’em a lesson an’ we went out to eat sour pork an’ rice.”
I was sure that there was more to the story but Raymond didn’t brag about his crimes much anymore.
“So he left the army after killin’ that village?”
“Yeah. I guess if you do sumpin’ like that it’s a li’l hard to live wit’. For him.”
“You wouldn’t take it hard if you had to kill like that?”
“I wouldn’t never have to kill like that, Easy. I ain’t never gonna be in no mothahfuckah’s army, jumpin’ out no plane, killin’ li’l brown folk. If I kill a town it’a be for me. An’ if it’s for me then I’ma be fine wit’ it.”
I rolled up my window then, the chill of Raymond’s words being enough for me.
For a long while I remained silent, even in my mind.
When we got to L.A. I asked Raymond where he was going.
“Home,” he said.
“With Etta and LaMarque?”
“What other home you evah hear me talk about?”
That was how I learned that his exile was over.
“You know what to do at Mike’s?”
2 4 2
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“What, now I’m stupid too?”
“Come on, Ray. You know how serious I am about this.”
“Sure I know what to do. When you get there we gonna be ready for Mr. Lee.”
I dropped him off at maybe three in the morning. He gave me the keys for his place on Denker. I went there, scaled the stairs, and climbed into bed, fully dressed. The sheets smelled of Georgette. I inhaled her tomato garden bouquet and was suddenly awake. Not the wakefulness of a man aroused by the memory of a woman. Georgette’s scent had aroused me but I had Christmas Black’s story in my mind.
I was so close to death at that time that my senses were at-tuned to its intricacies. My country was sending out lone killers to murder women and children in far-flung nations. While I slept in the security of Mouse’s hideaway innocent people were dying. And the taxes I paid on my cigarettes and the taxes they took out of my paycheck were buying the bullets and gassing up the bombers.
It was a state of mind, sure, but that didn’t mean that I was wrong. All those years our people had struggled and prayed for freedom and now a man like Christmas, who came from a whole line of heroes, was just another killer like all those white men had been for us.
Is that what we labored for all those years? Was it just to have the right to step on some other poor soul’s neck? Were we any better than the white men who lynched us in the night if we killed Easter Dawn’s mother and father, sister and brother, cousins and friends? If we could kill like that, everything that we fought for would be called into question. If we became the white men we hated and who hated us, then we were nowhere, nowhere at all.
2 4 3
W a lt e r M o s l e y
The sorrow in my heart finally came to rest on Feather. I thought about her dying and so I picked up the phone and called the long-distance operator.
“Allo?” Bonnie said in the French accent that came out whenever she was on the job in either Europe or Africa.
“It’s me.”
“Oh . . . hi, baby.”
“Hey . . . how’s Feather doin’?”
“The doctors say that she’s very, very sick.” She paused for a moment to hold back the grief. I took in a great gulp of air. “But they believe that with the proper transfusions and herbs, they can arrest the infection. And you don’t have to worry about the money for a few months. They’ll wait that long.”
“Thank Mr. Cham for that,” I said with hardly any bitterness in the words.
“Easy.”
“Yeah?”
“We have to talk, honey.”
“Yes. Yes we do. But right now I got my hands full with tryin’
to get Feather’s hospital bills paid without havin’ medical bills of my own.”
“I, I got your message,” she said, not identifying the man who answered the phone. “Is everything okay?”
