“His friends?” she asked.
I nodded and squeezed her hands.
“What good is friends when you ain’t got nuthin’ and they never call?”
“They might know something, Mrs. Tarr. He might have said something about where he was hanging out.”
“They put a eviction notice on my door,” she said. “Where Perry’s friends gonna be when I’m out on the street with twelve kids? Where the police gonna be when I’m diggin’ through trash cans tryin’ t’feed my babies?” She looked at me then. “Where you gonna be when that’s happenin’? I’ll tell you where, asleep in your bed while we livin’ with the rats.”
Being poor and being black were not the same things in America, not exactly. But there were many truths that all black people and poor persons of every color had in common. One of the most important particulars in our lives was the understanding of the parable of the Gordian knot. You had to be able to cut through that which bound you. Maybe that was leaving a woman behind or breaking into a bank under cover of darkness; maybe it was bowing your head and saying “Yessir” when a man had just called your wife a whore and your children dogs. Maybe you spent your whole life like some John Henry banging away at a boulder that would never give.
I took a hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and pressed it into Meredith’s hand. I could have cajoled her, called a social worker, talked until I was blue in the face. But the knot was the rent and the sword was that hundred-dollar bill.
“What’s this?” she asked, lucid at last.
“It’s what you need, right?”
Leafa was standing in the doorway behind her mother. I was happy that she had witnessed our exchange.
“Mama?” Leafa said.
“Is somebody hurt?” Meredith asked, still watching me.
“No.”
“Can you take care of it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Then go away, baby. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Leafa backed out of the room as Meredith sat up straight.
“Why you givin’ this to me?” she asked suspiciously.
“My client is paying,” I said truthfully. “I need to know who Perry’s friends are, and you need the rent. I’ll put you down in my books as an informant.”
It was a logic that she had never encountered before. Nothing in her life had ever had monetary value, just cost or sweat.
“I give you the names of three worthless niggahs and I can keep this here money?”
“The money is yours,” I said. “I just gave it to you. Now I’m asking for those names.”
Leafa appeared again at the doorway. This time she remained silent.
“That don’t make no sense,” Meredith said. She was angry.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s what they call irrational. But you see, Mrs. Tarr, we, all human beings, just think we’re rational when really we never do anything that makes sense. What sense does it make to throw a poor woman and her kids into the street? What sense does it make for a man to hate me for my accent or my skin color? What sense war or TV shows, guns or Pericles’ dying?”
I got to her with that. Her life, my life, President Johnson’s life in the White House, none of it made any sense. We were all crazy, pretending that our lives were sane.
30
There was a small park down in the center of Watts next to a giant sculpture called the Watts Towers. The gaudy towers were built by a man named Rodia over a period of thirty-three years. He built them from refuse and simple material. It was a whimsical place in a very grim part of town.
The park had a few trees and picnic tables on grass worn thin by hundreds of children’s tramping feet. Meredith Tarr had told me that Timor Reed and Blix Redford were there almost every day, “Drinkin’ gin and wastin’ time.” Pericles would go to visit Tim and Blix once a week or so to share their rotgut and play checkers.
I got there just before noon. There was loud music coming from one house across the street, two teenage lovers playing hooky in order to study the facts of life, and two men of uncertain age sitting across from each other at a redwood picnic table, leaning over a folding paper checkerboard. The board was held together by once clear, now yellowing adhesive tape. About half of the pieces were light-colored stones with crayon X’s, either red or black, scrawled on top.
Looking at those men and that board, I felt as if I were witnessing the devolution of a culture. The decrepit park, the shabby clothes Blix and Timor wore, even Otis Redding moaning about the dock of the bay on tinny but loud speakers, spoke of a world that was grinding to a halt.
“Mr. Reed. Mr. Redford,” I said to the men.
They looked up at me like two soldiers from vastly disparate battlefields who had died simultaneously and were now sitting in Limbo awaiting the verdict of Valhalla.
One man was fat and wore a gray-and-black hat with tiny ventilation eyes sewn in along the side and an old gray trench coat. From Meredith’s description, I knew this was Blix Redford. He smiled expectantly and stood up, saying, “Yes, sir, do I know you?”
