Walter Mosley - A Little Yellow Dog

I don’t think he realized what he was saying.

Mouse, who was sitting in the backseat, put his hand on Jackson’s shoulder. “Let up on it, Blue. It’s time to move on.”

Mouse had a persuasive hand.

Jackson directed us to a Bekins storage warehouse on Pico where he had hidden his boxes. There were fourteen of them. Small black wooden cases, each one about double the size of a table humidor for cigars. Along with them he had a notebook full of the numbers of his clients.

“How do these things work, man?” Mouse asked Jackson. He had one of the boxes opened up across his lap, revealing a small transistor tape recorder and a large dry-cell battery.

“It’s just a circuit switch,” Jackson answered, a little distracted. “After it rings, the switch go off an’ the recorder go on. Then the one who call give their number and the bet.”

When Mouse smiled the blue jewel on his front tooth sparkled.

We all went back to my house to wait. Jackson didn’t want to go with us to meet Stetz, and we had an hour to kill.

“What the hell is this?” There was a dog turd in the middle of my neatly made bed.

I ran that dog all over the house. He scuttled under the couch and I yanked the thing away from the wall.

“He headed out t’the kitchen!” Mouse yelled out.

I ran right into the kitchen table and banged my thigh pretty bad. Jackson and Mouse tried to help me corner him but Pharaoh was too quick and they were mostly laughing anyway.

He finally took a bad turn into Feather’s room and I got him in a corner. He started yowling like Death had gotten hold of him — he wasn’t too far from wrong. The running had tired me and cut my anger a hair; if I had caught him a second sooner he would have had something to scream about. As it was I brought him out to the car and threw him into the trunk.

“Easy, you shouldn’t let that dog get under yo’ skin like that, man. He just a dumb dog,” Mouse said. “He don’t know what he doin’.”

I would have hit anyone but Mouse. I might have been angry but I hadn’t yet gone mad.

I cleaned up my bed and sulked on the couch. Jackson sat across from me, writing out his instructions on how to use the bookie boxes.

Mouse was squatting down next to the door — reading a book!

“You read?” I asked him.

“Li’l bit, brother. Li’l bit. EttaMae make me an’ LaMarque sit’own sometimes an’ go through his readin’ lessons. I picked up a little.”

“What’s that you readin’?”

Mouse showed me his gold-encrusted teeth and said, “ Treasure Island. ”

I could feel the world turning under my feet. At any minute I could have gone spinning off into space. My children were changing every day. The headlines spoke of every kind of tragedy. You couldn’t just live life anymore — that’s how it seemed to me; you had to take notes and study charts just to know how to take the same road to the same place you’d always gone. And even when you got there, it was no longer the same.

The morning edition of the paper was still on the front porch. It said that the Bird Man of Alcatraz was dead. The man who had become a scientist in his cell. He was a hero down among my people because he was one white man who understood the odds that we faced. The prison officials interviewed said that he was just a criminal and that the public, and the movies, were mistaken in thinking that he was a good man.

They had no idea of goodness or honesty. They had power and that’s what they thought was good.

I would have mourned the passing of Robert Stroud, but there was no time to grieve.

“All right, boys,” I said. “Let’s hit it.”

Mouse slammed the book shut and put it on the floor. He stood up and smiled at me like he had done so many times since we were children in the Houston slums.

Mouse stood up but Jackson stayed in his chair.

“Come on, Jackson,” I said. “You could wait for us in the car.”

“I cain’t, man. I cain’t go.”

I didn’t press him. I didn’t care. Jackson wasn’t going to be of any help. And I was happy that he played the coward; at least that way the world made a little sense.

“Mouse,” I called out.

“Yeah, Easy. I’m out here in the kitchen.”

I heard a drawer close shut and then Mouse appeared. He met my eye with a somber face. I shuddered but I wasn’t quite sure why.

“Easy,” Mouse said when we got out to his car, “what you plan to do with that dog?”

“Take him out to Primo. Primo could find some old lady like a dog like that.”

“Gimme the keys.”

“Naw, man,” I said. “Leave him in the trunk.”

“Gimme the keys.”

“What for?”

“Dog could suffocate in there, Easy. Don’t worry, I’ll watch him. You drive an’ I’ll hold the dog.”

Pharaoh was calm in Mouse’s lap. We went downtown to Phyllo Place off Alameda. We made good time because the traffic was unusually light.

The address Stetz had given me was on the side of an alley that fed out onto the street. There was an arrow that pointed back into the alley for the number we wanted.

I parked the car and looked.

“Don’t look good,” I said to Raymond.

“But it’s a business deal, right?” Mouse said, the soul of logic.

“Yeah, but it’s a little close back there.”

“They ain’t after you, Easy. They just want them tape recorders. You ain’t chargin’, so why they wanna hurt you?”

The world had surely changed if I was going to listen to Mouse about what was safe and what wasn’t. But he made sense. All I was doing was handing over a fortune to Stetz. And I was going to help Beam too. At least until I could tell Lieutenant Lewis about who had the aitch he was moving.

I took the turn into the alley and drove down the red brick path until I came to another turn that led to a large garage door.

Mouse and I got out of the car, leaving Pharaoh whining inside.

We were in a deep hole of gray cement walls. It was a bright day, but there wasn’t much sun that found its way to that gangster’s door. The walls went up about nine floors but there was only one slender slit of a window.

I was happy that I’d remembered to bring my pistol — just in case Mouse was wrong.

“Watch it, Easy!” my friend yelled.

I turned and saw two men and then Mouse rammed me with his shoulder. Two shots sounded and echoed in the chamber of walls. The side window of the car exploded. Mouse pulled a meat cleaver from his belt and sent it twirling at the man who had taken the shots. It was Joey Beam. He was taking aim at me when the spinning blade hacked into the side of his neck.

The next two shots caught Mouse. He grunted each time he was hit and sank to his knees.

Sallie Monroe was swinging to shoot me when I leapt up on top of the roof of Mouse’s car and landed on top of the fat gangster. He dropped his gun. I threw a left hook a little wide of his head.

Sallie jumped on me when I missed and bore me down to the ground with his weight. He was good with his girth. He’d let his stomach fall against my ribs and then, when I was stunned, he’d ball his fist and hit me in the head.

Sallie grabbed me around the throat and started to squeeze. Out of one side of my sight I saw Mouse trying to rise, but he failed. On the other side Joey Beam was doing his last dance lying flat on his back, yellow jacket sopping up his own blood.

Suddenly the little yellow dog came into view. He was snarling and snapping. I waited for his attack on Sallie to throw the big man off. I had remembered my pistol by then and only needed a little room to lay my hands on it. All I needed was Pharaoh’s distraction.

That’s when the yellow dog launched his attack on me.