He ate three plates of beans and counted to one hundred and sixty-eight for me-twice. When he finished Etta sent him outside.
“Don’t be doin’ no more gard’nin’, though,” she warned him.
“’Kay.”
We sat across the table from each other. I looked into her eyes and thought about poetry and my father.
I was swinging from a tree on the tire of a Model A Ford. My father came up to me and said, “Ezekiel, you learn to read an’ ain’t nuthin’ you cain’t do.”
I laughed, because I loved it when my father talked to me. He left that night and I never knew if he had abandoned me or was killed on his way home.
Now I was half the way through Shakespeare’s sonnets in my third English course at LACC. The love that poetry espoused and my love for EttaMae and my father knotted in my chest so that I could hardly even breathe. And EttaMae wasn’t something slight like a sonnet; behind her eyes was an epic, the whole history of me and mine.
Then I remembered, again, that she belonged to another man; a murderer.
“It’s good to see you, Easy.”
“Yeah.”
She leaned forward with her elbows on the table, placed her chin in the palm of her hand, and said, “Ezekiel Rawlins.”
That was my real name. Only my best friends used it.
“What are you doing here, Etta? Where’s Mouse?”
“You know we broke up years ago, honey.”
“I heard you took him back.”
“Just a tryout. I wanted to see if he could be a good husband and a father. But he couldn’t, so I threw him out again.”
The last moments of Joppy Shag’s life flashed through my mind. He was lashed to an oaken chair, sweat and blood streamed from his bald head. When Mouse shot him in the groin he barked and strained like a wild animal. Then Mouse calmly pointed the gun at Joppy’s head…
“I didn’t know,” I said. “But why are you up here?”
Instead of answering me Etta got up and started clearing the table. I moved to help her, but she shoved me back into the chair, saying, “You just get in the way, Easy. Sit down and drink your lemonade.”
I waited a minute and then followed her out to the kitchen.
“Men sure is a mess.” She was shaking her head at the dirty dishes I had piled on the counter and in the sink. “How can you live like this?”
“You come all the way from Texas to show me how to wash dishes?”
And then I was holding her again. It was as if we had taken up where we’d left off in the yard. Etta put her hand against the bare back of my neck, I started running two fingers up and down either side of her spine.
I had spent years dreaming of kissing Etta again. Sometimes I’d be in bed with another woman and, in my sleep, I’d think it was Etta; the kisses would be like food, so satisfying that I’d wake up, only to realize that it was just a dream.
When Etta kissed me in the kitchen I woke up in another way. I staggered back from her mumbling, “I cain’t take too much more of this.”
“I’m sorry, Easy. I know I shouldn’t, but me and LaMarque been in a bus for two days-all the way from Houston. I been thinkin’ ’bout you all that time and I guess I got a little worked up.”
“Why’d you come?” I felt like I was pleading.
“Mouse done gone crazy.”
“What you mean, crazy?”
“Outta his mind,” Etta continued. “Just gone.”
“Etta,” I said as calmly as I could. The desire to hold her had subsided for the moment. “Tell me what he did.”
“Come out to the house at two in the mo’nin’ just about ev’ry other night. Drunk as he could be and wavin’ that long-barreled pistol of his. Stand out in the middle’a the street yellin’ ’bout how he bought my house and how he burn it down before he let us treat him like we did.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, Easy. Mouse is crazy.”
That had always been true. When we were younger men Mouse carried a gun and a knife. He killed men who crossed him and others who stood in the way of him making some coin. Mouse murdered his own stepfather, Daddy Reese, but he rarely turned on friends, and I never expected him to go against EttaMae.
“So you sayin’ he run you outta Texas?”
“Run?” Etta was surprised. “I ain’t runnin’ from that little rat-faced man, or no other one’a God’s creatures.”
“Then why come here?”
“How it gonna look to LaMarque when he grow up if I done killed his father? ’Cause you know I had him in my sight every night he was out there in the street.”
I remembered that Etta had a. 22-caliber rifle and a. 38 for her purse.
“After he done that for ovah a month I made up my mind to kill ’im. But the night I was gonna do it LaMarque woke up an’ come in the room. I was waitin’ for Raymond to come out. LaMarque asked me what I was doin’ with that rifle, and you know I ain’t never lied to that boy, Easy. He asked me what I was fixin’ t’ do with that rifle and I told him that I was gonna pack it and we was goin’ to California.”
Etta reached out and took both of my hands in hers. She said, “And that was the first thing I said, Easy. I didn’t think about goin’ to my mother or my sister down in Galveston. I thought’a you. I thought about how sweet you was before Raymond and me got married. So I come to you.”
“I just popped into your head after all these years?”
“Well.” Etta smiled and looked down at our tangled fingers. “Corinth Lye helped some.”
“Corinth?” She was a friend from Houston. If I happened to run into her at Targets Bar I’d buy a bottle of gin and we’d put it away; sit there all night and drink like men. I’d told her many deep feelings and secrets in the early hours. It wasn’t the first time that I was betrayed by alcohol.
“Yeah,” Etta said. “I wrote her about Mouse when it all started. She wrote me about how much you still cared for me. She said I should come up here, away from all that.”
“Then why ain’t you wit’ her?”
“I wus s’posed t’, honey. But you know I got t’ thinkin’ ’bout you on that ride, an’ I tole LaMarque all about you till we decided that we was gonna come straight here.”
“You did?”
“Mmm-hm,” Etta hummed, nodding her head. “An’ you know I was glad we did.” Etta’s grin was shameless.
She smiled at me and the years fell away.
The one night I had spent with Etta, the best night of my life, she woke up the next morning talking about Mouse. She told me how wonderful he was and how lucky I was to have him for a friend.
L AMARQUE HAD NEVER SEEN a television. He watched everything that came on, even the news. Some poor soul was in the spotlight that night. His name was Charles Winters. He was discovered stealing classified documents at his government job. The reporter said that Winters could get four ninety-nine-year sentences if he was found guilty.
“What’s a comanisk, Unca Easy?”
“What, you think that just ’cause this is my TV that I should know everything it says?”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded. LaMarque was a treasure.
“There’s all kindsa communists, LaMarque.”
“That one there,” he said, pointing at the television. But the picture of Mr. Winters was gone. Instead there was a picture of Ike in the middle of a golf swing.
