“He says that he’s making up for all the bad things his people have done. I told him that he was loco, that he didn’t owe me or Mouse or Etta anything.”
“Yeah? And what he say to that?”
“That he did owe us because nobody ever made him do what he was doing. He said that because it was his choice to serve her family, that proved he was guilty.”
I had rarely talked to Rhone since clearing him of the murder of his black lover Nola Payne. But hearing his claim, I understood that he wasn’t just another crazy white man. He was nuts, no doubt about that, but the madness was brought about by his sensitivity to sin. I might have spent some hours discussing this oddity with Primo or Gara or even Jackson Blue, but I had other problems to solve.
I told Primo the story about Mouse and Pericles, including a description of the Tarr household, which so reflected his own.
“It’s funny, Easy,” Primo said. “For a man like me, children are a treasure. You raise them like crops and they pay off or die. You love them as Christ loves them, and they love you like God. I feel like this because I am from another country, where my people have a place. Maybe we’re poor, but we are part of the earth.
“But your man Pericles is not like me. Every new child makes him afraid of what will happen. I see it in my own children. In the United States, we are not of the earth but the street. Pericles has known this, but his wife is fertile and he is just a man.”
“You know Perry?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Mouse and him bought a dark blue Pontiac from me three weeks ago.”
“Together?”
“They came together.”
“Really?”
A whole new train of thought opened for me. I would have left that very moment if Primo had not put his hand on my arm.
“I am moving from your house, my friend.”
“Back to Mexico for a while?”
“East LA, where the Mexicans live.”
“You lonely for your amigos?”
“The boys fight all the time with black children now. Especially our grandchildren who look Mexican. It’s the riots. Now all the peoples hate each other.”
Pericles flitted out of my mind as if I had never heard his name. My home was passing from me. I felt that loss deeply.
“You know my lawyer, Tina Monroe?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Go to her next week. I’ll sign a paper selling you this house for a hundred dollars. Sell it and buy you a place wherever you goin’.”
We stared at each other awhile. I could tell that it meant a lot to him, my gift.
“It’s just ’cause I need a place to go now and again,” I added. “I look at it like rent for the future.”
29
I kept a suit in the closet in Primo’s den. That was Flower’s idea.
“You come in the middle of the night, beat up or sweating hard,” she’d said. “Keep some clothes here.”
“I don’t want to be an imposition on your household, Flow,” I’d said at the time.
We were holding hands while Primo sat in a chair in the middle of the lawn, drinking beer.
“It is God’s house,” she said.
AS I DONNED my light brown two-piece, I thought about what she had said. I wasn’t a believer. I didn’t go to church or get chills when the Gospel was quoted. But I did believe that that house was beyond anyone’s control. It was to me a piece of history, a memory to be thankful for.
IT WAS IN that grateful state of mind that I arrived at Portman’s Department Store, about nine-fifteen. Pericles Tarr must have left some shred of his trail at his last place of employment.
They called themselves a department store, but all they sold was furniture. There was a ground floor that displayed cheap goods and a basement filled with junk. The merchandise on the first floor consisted of two maple dining tables with somewhat matching chairs, a red sofa, a dusty reclining chair, and various stools made for the recreation room that everyone wanted but no one built.
Nobody was buying tables and chairs at that time of morning, so the manager was sitting behind his desk at the back of the sparsely stocked room.
This desk was the nicest piece on display. It was dark hardwood with hints of maroon and blond at various places: signs of life under the oppression, or protection of night.
The Negro salesman was made from loose fat held together by skin the color of yellow cream fresh from the cow. His face was flabby; it had once been happy in his twenties and early thirties, but now, midway into the fourth decade, his smile expressed mild discontent.
The plastic nameplate at the edge of his desk told me to call him Larry.
Larry did not stand to greet me. I suppose I didn’t look like a good prospect.
