Walter Mosley - Parishioner

Hatless, her hair had been ruthlessly dyed an impossible black. Her face was neither round, oval, nor heart-shaped, but rather like a box with the corners smoothed by age. She was eighty, maybe more. Her dark eyes had all the awareness of a long life spent traveling on a one-lane highway with no exits and no end in sight.

“This is Mr. Noland,” Doris Milne said with bland deference.

The elderly white lady made an expression that was intended to be a smile.

“Hello, Mr. Knowles,” she said, gesturing at another metal chair on the opposite side from her. This seat was painted turquoise.

As Xavier moved forward Doris asked, “Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Noland?”

“What’s in the glass?”

“Lime rickey,” Sedra said with a real smile.

“I’ll take one of those if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Sedra said for her niece. “Go make up another pitcher, hon. Use the good gin.”

And so Xavier sat under the shifting template of shadows and sun as Doris went off to mix the alcohol and Kool-Aid.

The predators gazed lazily across the expanse of the table both of them deeply honest and still insincere.

“You told Dodo that you were here about somebody named Ben?” Sedra asked.

“Benol. That’s a woman’s name.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember her?”

“No. No. And I think I’d remember such a unique name.”

“She and her boyfriend, Brayton Starmon, sold you three blond male babies for forty-two thousand dollars twenty-three years ago.”

“Excuse me? What did you say?”

“I said that I’m working for John and Minnie Van Dam,” Xavier replied, using names from Benol’s confession. “They hired me to find their son, Michael, who was kidnapped from a private child-care home by Benol and Brayton.”

His voice was the hammer while the words were nails. Sedra gave almost no inkling of the pain or fear he inflicted, but Ecks was not fooled.

When the old woman’s left eye fluttered Xavier was sure of at least one part of his client’s story.

At that moment the cell phone in his breast pocket throbbed. A few seconds later Doris came out carrying a silver tray on which stood a large, sweaty tumbler filled with bright green fluid.

“Are you two getting along?” the niece asked.

“Like pigs in slop,” Xavier said.

“Excuse me?”

“Everything’s fine, Dodo,” Sedra said. “Leave us alone, would you, dear?”

“Are you okay?” Doris asked.

“Fine. Fine. I just want to speak privately to Mr. Knowles.”

“Noland,” Xavier corrected.

“Yes,” Sedra agreed.

“I’ll be in the den knitting,” Doris said, but she didn’t move.

“Go on,” her aunt urged. “I’ll be just fine.”

Niece and aunt exchanged glances.

Xavier took a sip of the green cocktail to show that he wasn’t bothered by their concern. The drink was sweet, tart, and very strong.

As he put the glass down on the table Doris was leaving once more and Sedra tried to smile again.

“I don’t know who you are,” the spinster said, “but I will not be threatened in my own house.”

“I’m looking for the boy,” Xavier said easily. “I don’t care about you or Benol or anybody else. The Van Dams hired me to do the work that the police failed to do.”

He considered taking another sip but decided against it. Drinking had its place but that wasn’t in the middle of a showdown between villains.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sedra said in a metered tone that seemed to be saying, or at least meaning, something else.

“All I have to do is give the police what I have,” he said. “Just give them your name and let the pieces fall where they will.”

Sedra opened her mouth but no words came out. A confused look came over her face. This artificial expression, added to the sound of a deep bass gong going off in Xavier’s head, tipped him to the unspoken narrative of his predicament.

He stood up suddenly and turned. Doris was standing there with a Louisville Slugger grasped in both hands.

“Hit him!” Sedra yelled.

Another deep vibration detonated behind Xavier’s eyes. He knew that he couldn’t avoid the young woman’s bat for too long and so he went on the offensive.

The bat arced down, glancing off the left side of his head.

“Hit him!” Sedra was screaming.

He was aiming for her jaw, but Xavier’s fist hit Doris over the heart. She grunted in a decidedly unfeminine manner and fell on her bottom.

When Xavier was stepping over her she grabbed at his ankle. If he hadn’t taken that sip her grip wouldn’t have fazed him. As it was he tripped, pulling away from her and staggering forward. He would have tumbled to the bricks if there weren’t a house there to catch his fall.

Sedra was screaming without words now and the living room seemed even more menacing as he plunged ahead. He made it to the foyer and out the front door.

Ecks felt clumsy. It was as if his body had somehow duplicated itself while neglecting to double the motor skills. He’d become two men with four legs but still could move only one foot at a time.

“That wasn’t just no knockout powder,” the Ecks running behind himself said. “That girl was trying to kill us with that drink.”

The Parishioner almost turned around to catch a glimpse of himself muttering.

“Run, fool!” the voice shouted, strangely echoing the desperation in Sedra’s screams.

By then Xavier was in the front yard and on his way to the sidewalk. He knew that his car was somewhere near, but this intelligence was useless to him. He started running in one direction with all the strength his four spaghetti legs could muster. The world before his eyes was reduced to snatches of scenes like blurry snapshots taken from a speeding car-through a tinted window.

He was running, almost falling, going straight ahead, away from people who were trying to destroy him. Xavier didn’t bother with any logic more complex than this. He didn’t worry about arrest or the discovery of his past. There was no later if he didn’t run right now.

There arose a sound like music, like jazz … no, a car’s horn. There was a red light overhead, a hard shove, then someone, not Sedra or the other him, shouting. At that point gravity decided to take over and he fell, landing on his shoulder, then rolling up into the air. Before he came down again, the burden of consciousness had lifted with something akin to sleep taking its place.

He woke up choking from a noxious gas that filled his sinuses.

The burning odor shot up his nose like a venomous snake writhing in and biting the inside of his head.

“What the fuck?” He rose up on a hospital bed flanked by two men and a woman.

She was a nurse, probably Korean, young, her hard black eyes disapproving. The Hispanic police captain in full uniform loomed from behind her, searching Xavier’s eyes for awareness and subterfuge. Next to the cop stood a short white man with very long fingers, dressed in a too blue suit.

Shaking his head in an attempt to dislodge the nasal viper, Xavier still had the wherewithal to wonder where his clothes were. He shopped for suits sometimes for months before he found just the right one. He was hoping that the accident hadn’t ripped the cloth too badly.

“I want to say again, Dr. Mendel, that this is not proper procedure,” the Korean nurse said in perfect California English.

“This is a special circumstance,” the policeman murmured. Ecks knew that this man rarely raised his voice.

Across the room a thin man with a manicured mustache and a thick mat of brown hair was sitting up in his hospital bed to watch the altercation.

A television set was on, tuned to a nostalgia channel playing a repeat episode of I Dream of Jeannie .