“Hey, Ease,” Mouse said a moment later. “You wanna go take care’a that business now?”
“You already did,” I said.
“What?”
“Somebody told the cops you were at a house on Sixty-fourth. They findin’ out right now that it was those soldiers instead. Turn on the news. You’ll see.”
50
After murdering two men I went up to the farmers’ market on Third and Fairfax and bought a basket of extrafancy strawberries and got three bottles of champagne and a pint of cognac from Stallion Liquors on Pico. I wasn’t feeling a thing, nor was I worried, anxious, or guilt ridden. I knew what I had done, but the reality was like a dream to me.
I went to my house on Genesee after shopping and made a phone call.
“Hello,” Tourmaline Goss answered.
“Can I take you to dinner tonight?”
WE ATE AT A LITTLE French place on Pico near Robertson, where they called chicken
“Were you really burgling a woman’s house when you were on the phone with me?” she asked.
This reminded me of Belinda, of how some women were drawn to danger.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think she’ll mind.”
“Why not?”
I told her about Jean-Paul Villard and how I had come upon Pericles Tarr looking for Mouse, and how the police were searching for Mouse when they attacked the house down in South Central.
“That was the man they were looking for in that shoot-out today?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You mean the police shot up that place lookin’ for somebody who wasn’t even there? They killed two innocent men, veterans, when they just heard that he was in a house down in South Central?”
“Yeah,” I said, the surprise in my voice half real.
“Yes,” Tourmaline said angrily. “Cops shoot up a house, kill two innocent men, but it’s all okay because it’s a colored neighborhood, and one of the men was black, so the other one shouldn’t have been there anyway.”
“CAN I COME in awhile?” I asked as I pulled up the handle on the parking brake.
Her smile was demure, the assent implied.
I took the iced champagne and box of fruit from under a blanket in the backseat and followed her. When we arrived at her door, she put out a hand behind her and I reached out to take that hand.
I popped a cork and poured our champagne into jelly-jar glasses.
“I thought you didn’t drink?” she asked after our fourth or fifth toast and kiss.
“I didn’t back then.”
“Back then? It was just a couple’a days ago.”
“For you, maybe.”
My hands felt as if they were made for her breasts, my lips and tongue for her sex.
“I want you to do everything to me,” she said when she was naked on my lap and I was still fully dressed.
I did everything I knew how, and when I was unsure, she showed me and guided me and called out to gods who were murdered on slave ships long before our parents’ parents’ parents were born.
I couldn’t stop myself. Sex came from me like blood from a wound. The champagne stoked the fires while Tourmaline stroked my heart. I was on top of her on the couch, listening to Otis Redding and making love like a movie star. I could feel a halo around my head while looking deeply into her eyes.
“Don’t stop, baby,” she whispered. “Don’t ever stop.”
That was the moment that decided everything for the rest of my life.
I had been with Tourmaline completely. I was only with her, only wanted her, was ready to marry her and make a new family. There was nothing outside of that room.
But when she looked up at me, asking me to keep on going, I knew in my heart that I could not. It was as if I had inside me a glass ampoule that held the soul apart and separate from my body. Her words made me clench, and the glass shattered like the window in Jewelle’s house. I made that same sound I had with Feather, and I rose up both erect and flaccid.
“Easy?” Toumaline said.
I wanted to answer her, but I could not.
I had gone out that evening dressed to the nines. I had worn my dark green suit, spit-polished black leather shoes, a yellow shirt, and a burgundy, blue, and green tie made from an antique kimono.
I left out of her front door in only pants and a T-shirt. I wasn’t even wearing socks or shoes.
