them in the hot butter.
She thought for a moment and then shook her head.
“No. No Captain Miles has ever been to our house. Not when I was awake.”
“Do people come over in the night when you’re asleep?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen any of them? I mean, maybe you woke up and looked downstairs.”
“No,” she said very seriously. “That would be spying and spying is bad. But . . .”
“Yeah?”
“But one time that lady with yellow hair came at night, and she was still there in the morning.”
“What was she like?”
“Very sad.” Easter nodded to assure me of what she was saying.
“About what?”
“Her husband was in trouble. His friends were mad at him and they were mad at her too.”
“Did she say anything else about those men?”
“No. Can we have strawberries on our pound cake?”
“I’ll send Jesus to the store to get some.”
Our conversation went back and forth about cooking and the people her father knew. There wasn’t much useful to me. But when E.D. was making the rice, I remembered the bar of soap wrapped in paper.
“Mr. Fishy,” she cried, unwrapping the bar. “I thought I lost you.”
“I found it at the place across the street from the big tire.”
“Was my daddy there?” Easter Dawn asked.
“No. No, he wasn’t. But I wondered . . . Did you drive down to LA in your father’s Jeep?”
“No. The lady had a green car. Daddy drove that.”
“And did she let him keep it?”
“No. He borrowed a blue car from a friend of his, but then he said he was going to buy a red truck with a camper on it from that funny man.”
“What funny man?”
“The one on the TV who has the animals and the pretty girls around him all the time.”
11
Mel Marvel’s Used Cars was an institution in Compton. Every car on his lot was good as new; at least that’s what his late-night TV ads said. He was a rotund white Texan who kept himself surrounded by pretty white girls in bathing suits, smiling for the cameras. Very often he had caged lions and trained elephants on the lot. Marvel was a con man who knew that most people wanted to be fooled.
A few years before, I’d bought a car from one of Mel’s salesmen, Charles Mung. It was a sky blue Falcon. My Ford was in the shop for a couple of weeks, and I thought I’d drive the Falcon around until mine was fixed. Then I’d give it to Jesus.
The trouble was that a back tire broke off on the way home from Compton. It popped right off the axle and rolled down the street.
I hired a tow truck and brought the car back to the lot.
Charles Mung was a tall white guy with freckles and cornflower blue eyes.
“Tire broke right off,” I told him under a blazing sun on the five-acre lot. It was only three hours into my thirty- day guarantee.
“We don’t cover accidents,” he replied as he turned to walk away.
I grabbed his arm, and three very big men came out of nowhere. They crowded me, freeing the salesman from my grip as they did so.
“You owe me four hundred dollars,” I said over an ugly car thug’s shoulder.
“Show Mr. Rawlins off the lot, will you, Thunder?” Mung replied.
They didn’t hurt me. Just deposited me on the curb.
“Come back here again,” Thunder, a polar bear of a man, told me, “and me and my friends will break all your fingers.”
It’s funny the things that stay with you. I was so humiliated by that treatment that all the way home on the bus I planned my revenge. I was going to get my gun and go back there. If they didn’t return my money, I was going to kill Mung and Thunder.
I was in the bedroom loading my third pistol when Mouse called.
“What’s wrong, man?” he asked after I’d only said hello.
