Walter Mosley - A Red Death

So I was unsettled when I saw the remorse and bitterness in Mouse’s gaze. A man who is already insane was frightening enough, but when he goes crazy…

“Where she go?”

“She asked me not to tell ya, Raymond. She said t’tell her how she could call you an’ she’d do it-when she was ready.”

Mouse just stared at me. His eyes were clear again. He might have killed me then. Who knows? Maybe if it all happened at a different time I would have acted differently. But I didn’t know how to give in to my fear. In two days I had prepared to lose all my property and my freedom, I had settled on becoming a murderer, and I had become a flunky for the FBI. I decided to let fate hold my cards.

“You ain’t gonna tell me where she is?”

“She upset, Raymond. If you don’t let her do it her way she gonna blow up at you, an’ me too.”

Mouse watched me like a little boy might watch a butterfly. John hovered behind him while he put down short glasses filled with various amber liquors and ice.

“Easy got yo’ number, Dupree?” Mouse asked at last.

“Ain’t ya, Ease?” Dupree asked me.

“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

Mouse laughed. “Well then, that’s business. Let’s have some drinks.”

Dupree got drunk and told stories after a while. Wholesome stories about foolish men at Champion Aircraft. The kind of stories that workmen tell. How somebody lost count when assembling a jet engine and how that engine blew the roof off of the construction bungalow. And when the boss asked what happened the perpetrator just opened his eyes and said something like “Somebody musta lit a match.”

At one point I asked Dupree, “You seen Andre Lavender ’round there lately?”

“Uh-uh, man. He got the politics bug pretty bad there for a while. Union. But then he just disappeared one day.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah, man. Gone. I think he stole sumpin’, ’cause they had all kindsa cops there. But no one know what happened.”

“Didn’t his li’l girlfriend…” I snapped my fingers trying to remember.

“Juanita,” Dupree said, frowning.

“Yeah. Juanita. Didn’t she know where he was?”

“Nope. She come around the plant lookin’ fo’im the next day, but nobody could help. But you know I did hear that Andre blew town with Winthrop Hughes’s ole lady.”

“You mean Shaker’s girl?”

“Uh-huh. They say Andre took her, his bank book, an’ his car.”

“No shit?” I let it drop there. Andre could wait for a while.

When Dupree passed out (which is what he did whenever he drank) we carried him out to the car. We piled him in the back and Jackson jumped into the passenger’s seat. Before Mouse pulled in behind the wheel he leaned very close to my face and said, “If you see’er, you tell’er that I give it a couple’a days. You tell’er that I won’t be denied. I will not be denied.” Then he grabbed my shirt with thin fingers that were hard as nails. “An’ if you get in my way, Easy, or if you take her side, I kill you too.”

As I watched them drive away I breathed a quiet sigh of relief that Etta had moved out of my house. I figured that EttaMae could handle Mouse, especially if she wasn’t with me.

The next morning I called Etta to tell her about my talk with Mouse. She snorted once and had nothing else to say. I offered to escort her to church on Sunday. She accepted and excused herself, polite and cold.

As a kind of treat for my new freedom from the IRS and Raymond Alexander, I decided to let myself loll in the sunny halls of the Magnolia Street apartments.

Mrs. Trajillo was at her window rolling out corn tortillas on a breadboard balanced on the windowsill. Her skin was a deep olive color dappled with various-size freckles and one large mole at the center of her chin. Her long hair was salt and pepper and hung in one thick braid down to about the middle of her thigh. She was short but sturdily built, and though she had never had a job, her hands were strong from years of doing housework, raising children, and making food from scratch.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” she greeted me.

“Hello, ma’am. How’re you today?”

“Oh, pretty good I guess. My granddaughter had her confirmation last Sunday.”

“That a fact?”

“You look good,” she said. “I was worried about you and poor Mr. Mofass the other day. You weren’t smiling at all, and that terrible girl…” She brought her fingers to her chest and made an O-shape with her lips. “The things she yelled at him. You know I was glad the children were still in school.”

“I guess Poinsettia was upset. You know how she’s sick and all.”

“God gives you what you earn, Mr. Rawlins.”

That seemed like a terrible curse coming from such a kind woman.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The way she was with men before. No girl of mine would be like that. I’m not telling you anything, Mr. Rawlins, but God knows.”

It didn’t bother me much. I know that older women often forget how it is to be loved by young men. Or maybe they do remember and hate it all the more.

I went upstairs and stood on the second floor for an hour or more just feeling the sun and looking at nothing. But after a while I picked up the trace of a foul scent.

The sun was shining in on the third floor too. It was beautiful but the smell was bad. The door to Apartment J was ajar; that’s where the smell came from.

Really what I should call it is smells. There was the sweet smell of three or four kinds of incense that she used in her prayer altar and the odor of sickness that had been bottled up in her small rooms for the most part of six months. There were all kinds of rotting odors beyond that smell.

But now, I figured, she was gone, moved out after Mofass had threatened her with eviction. The door was open and I knew she had probably left me a major cleaning job.

Poinsettia had gone off for a vacation weekend six months before and come back two weeks later in a private ambulance. The attendants had told Mrs. Trajillo that Poinsettia had been in a bad car accident and that her boyfriend had paid to have her moved from the hospital back home. Her bones and bruises healed, but something happened to her nerves. She couldn’t work anymore or even walk right. Somewhere in her late twenties, she had been a beautiful woman until that accident. It was a shame to see her come down so far. But what could I do about it? Mofass was hard but he was right when he said that I couldn’t pay her rent.

The living room was a mess. The shades were drawn and the curtains pulled, so it was twilight in the musty rooms. Ghostly white cartons of Chinese food were open and moldering on the table, trash everywhere. I flicked the light switch, but the bulb had burned out. Against a far wall there sat an altar she had made from a small alcove. Inside she had glued a picture of Jesus. It was painted like a mosaic. He had a halo and held two fingers and a thumb above three saints who were bowing to receive his blessing. All around the painting there were old flowers wired to the walls. They were unidentifiable brown things that she’d probably brought home from mass or after a funeral.

At the foot of the painting was the bronze dish that she also used to burn the incense. The sweet smell was much stronger there. Little ashes, like white maggots, were littered around the brimming dish. And there was a black, gummy substance on the ledge and down the wall to the floor.

The bathroom was disgusting. All kinds of cosmetic bottles open and dried until the liquids had caked and cracked. Mildewed towels on the floor. A spider spun its web over the bathtub faucet.

The worst smells came from the bedroom, and I hesitated to go in there. It’s a funny thing how smell is such an animal instinct. The first thing a dog will do is sniff. And if it doesn’t smell right there’s a natural reluctance to get any closer.