I turned to see an older black man wearing clothes that were once colorful but now had devolved into browns and sad, tinted grays.
“Yeah?”
“Can you help a veteran out?” he asked me.
“What war?”
“The big one back in nineteen sixteen.”
“You kill anybody back then?” I asked him, I don’t know why.
He grinned at me and I noticed he only had three teeth; each one looked as strong and brown as an old oak stump.
A giant cockroach ran a jagged line on the sidewalk between us. The store behind him was closed and boarded up.
I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to the man. When he saw the denomination, he was shocked.
“Thank you, mister,” he said with emphasis.
“No problem at all, brother,” I said.
He held out a dirty hand, and I shook it. This contact had a cleansing effect upon me.
“I’m’onna take this money and try and do sumpin’ with it, my friend,” the old man said. “I’m’a try and get myself situated, get a job and put down the wine.”
He was looking me in the eye and I knew he meant every word. What difference would it make if he failed? We all failed in the end.
35
I left the veteran and went back to my car down the street from Perry Tarr’s girlfriend’s house. For the first five minutes, I sat there trying to figure out how I could read and watch her driveway at the same time. It was a problem I always thought about when on a stakeout. But the answer was ever the same: I could not read and watch at the same time. Whenever I came to this understanding, it left me feeling a little sour.
I sat there in my resentful contemplation, hoping that someone would come to or leave the pretty girl’s house soon. Unable to distract myself with reading and not wanting to hear any more music, I started thinking about the woman I’d just met.
Pretty Smart was not Bonnie or Faith or EttaMae Harris. She wasn’t the kind of woman that could move me to put my life on the line. But, I thought, wouldn’t life be better with a woman like Pretty? Wouldn’t it be fine to be with a woman who made your blood run like a teenager’s but who didn’t make you feel like you might die when she was gone?
This line of thinking was an appealing distraction. The idea of beauty without consequence and love that was purely physical allowed my heart a brief span of elation. I didn’t imagine making love with her. It was enough just to have a brief conversation and to see her smile.
While I was having these thoughts, a navy blue Volkswagen backed out of Pretty’s driveway. She was an excellent driver. She backed into the street in a tight arc and drove past my car on some mission that my visit no doubt precipitated. I turned my head as she drove past, but it probably wasn’t necessary. Nobody looks at faces in Los Angeles. In LA people are too busy making hay because the sun never seems to go down.
I COULD HAVE TRIED to follow the dark blue automobile, but in my experience a vehicular tail rarely works. Traffic lights turn against you; bad, sloppy, and drunk drivers cut you off; and even though people don’t look at faces in LA, they certainly keep a sharp eye on their rearview mirrors. You need at least two cars for an adequate tail. With one man, you’re much better off trying B and E while the subject is off in her car.
I knocked at her door again. There was no loud music and no answer.
I went around the back. The windows were all shut. The white paint on the back door was cracking and growing a thin veneer of olive-hued lichen. The blades of grass were long and bright. A bushy pine hid the backyard from view. All of this along with the silence boded well for my kind of business. But the best sign was that Pretty Smart’s back door was unlocked and ajar. If I were dealing with Christmas Black, I would have suspected a trap, but I knew that Miss Smart paid too much attention to her own beauty to be distracted by locks and burglars. After all, her wealth was her beauty, and she carried it around with her.
The back porch was fitted with a washer and dryer, but the kitchen that led from there didn’t even have a pot to warm her leftover takeout meals. The tiny living room was furnished with a very large white sofa that had deep cushions and a high back. There were a dozen or more pillows of various pastel hues on the couch. Before the bed- size divan sat a big walnut coffee table that supported a pink portable TV and a brand-new hi-fi system. The carpet was white shag. Three huge abstract paintings hung from as many walls. The furnishings and decorations were made for a much larger room. It felt as if a giant had moved his furnishings into a room made for a pygmy.
Pretty’s bedroom was surprisingly spartan. A single bed with a metal filing cabinet instead of a dresser or chest of drawers. There were shelves in her closet that held her hose and bras, garters and silk panties. There were five dresses hanging from a rod; three of these still had price tags on them.
The filing cabinet had three deep drawers and a Polaroid camera sitting on top. The back door had not been locked, but the filing cabinet was. I found a screwdriver under the sink in the bathroom and twisted the keyhole until the lock snapped off.
There were seven hanging files in the top drawer, the first of which was labeled MEN. Inside this folder was an eight-by-eleven photo album, maybe forty pages long. Each page held six Polaroids of men’s erections. Black men, white men, men who were neither black nor white. Some were young, others old, a few were so fat that they had to hold their bellies up off their hard cocks. More than a couple were slick and wet, and one was in the middle of an ejaculation.
It was no surprise that Pretty had locked her files away. I wondered how she got the men to pose for her. Probably she said that she wanted to remember their manhood, their night of loving.
