“Have I scandalized you, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No . . . I mean, yes.”
“You don’t think a woman has to do these things to get by?”
“Oh, no, yes, yes, of course they do. It’s not that,” I said. “It’s you telling me about it.”
“You think I should tell Raymond what I do to get work?”
“No. I’m just wondering why tell me?”
“I have to tell somebody.” Her face was completely straight and honest looking. The words she spoke, I was sure, were the absolute truth.
“But why me?”
“Because,” Lynne said, “Raymond says that you are the most trustworthy man he has ever known. He says that you can tell Easy anything. He says that it’s like dropping a killing gun in the deepest part of the ocean.”
Watermelon juice and vodka were the prescription for her moments alone. I had just happened along when she was under the sway of her medicine.
“That’s why I wanted to make love to you,” she said.
“Because why?”
“I thought afterward I could tell you what I did and you would forgive me and I would keep our secret. But I didn’t even have to do that, did I?”
I held out a hand to her, and she wrapped her arms around me. We stood there a moment in that embrace. I kissed the top of her head and squeezed her shoulder.
When we let go, I asked, “How would you go about finding Mouse if you had to, Lynne?”
“Mama Jo.”
Of course.
22
Leaving Lynne’s neighborhood, I took Olympic down to Santa Monica. On the way I tried to resolve the differences between people like the Chinese actress and Tomas Hight. Lynne lived an exciting life that was split between black gangsters and glittering Hollywood parties. She was well educated, I believed, and bright as a cloudless day in the Palm Springs desert. Tomas, on the other hand, didn’t have much — maybe didn’t understand very much. All he had was a job working construction and one room to live in. The difference was that Tomas could be president of the United States one day, and all Lynne could hope for would be to give the president a blow job.
This reality had nothing to do with my being black, Negro, or colored, bearing the inheritance of slavery. Lynne came from a culture that remembered itself all the way back before America’s colonizers could even speculate.
While having these idle thoughts, I was driving past palm trees, coral trees, eucalyptus trees . . . a whole arboretum of trees of every species. That was Los Angeles too. We were a desert with all the water we needed, a breeding ground for the contradiction of nature. Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in LA had to believe that there was a chance to thrive. Living in Southern California was like waking up in a children’s book titled
But the desert was waiting for all of us. One day the water would stop flowing, and then the masters of that land would reclaim their domain.
I PARKED ON Lincoln Boulevard a block north of Olympic. Strolling a block east brought me to Beachland Savings. The building was shaped like a slice of pie, crust side out, placed on the corner. The front was a wide arc of glass revealing the comings and goings of everyday people tending their checking accounts and Christmas clubs.
I walked in happy about the fact that I would not be likely to find a dead military man in that building, happy just to be moving forward.
I was still in my gray suit, still looking presentable, but this was Santa Monica, and all the business in that bank was being conducted by white people. In 1964, I would have been an anomaly walking in there, obviously far from home, looking around at the faces of employees and customers alike. But in 1967, two years after the Watts riots, I was no longer a mere abnormality but a threat.
“Excuse me, sir,” a uniformed guard said as he walked up to me.
“Yes?”
“Can I help you?”
He was shorter than I, red faced and pale eyed. There was a stolid certainty in his stare. His body was telling me that I couldn’t move forward before answering his question, so I considered the different routes to my goal.
After a moment went by, I asked: “You still got them new fans in here? It’s hotter than a oven down at my place. My girlfriend wants me to get a air conditioner, but you know it’s not just what the unit cost but all that electricity it suck down.”
“You have to start a checking account with a hundred-dollar minimum in order to get a fan.”
I took out one of my two remaining hundred-dollar bills and held it out to him as if he were an usher who needed to read my ticket in order to guide me to my seat.
He almost reached for the bill, but then he remembered who he was and where we were. Resentment replaced the indifference in his gaze. His nostrils flared a bit. He waited as long as he could and then gestured to the left, where an old lady and a man in a checkered suit were sitting on a long marble bench.
