Walter Mosley: A Red Death

The sun was coming through a little window in the back of the kitchen. Tiny motes of dust, like a school of minute silvery fish, floated in the ray. I thought of the Magnolia Street apartments and of Mofass, that shit-brown carp, pulling himself up the long stairs.

After a while my stomach settled down. My tooth socket barely ached.

“Here you are,” Flower said. She was holding out a handful of tea bags. “If it hurts, bite down on one of these until it goes away.”

I pocketed the bags and asked, “Where’s Primo?”

“He went to see his brother in San Diego. They gonna come up here while we’re down south.”

So the plan was in action.

“Thanks for the dentist work, Flower. I guess I was a little outta my head what with the pain and the dope.”

“We love you, Easy,” was her reply.

It was all I could do to keep from crying.

When I got home I took a long shower and calmed down. Murder was quieter in my heart. It was still there but softer, a little less insistent. I took a long time toweling off and dressing. I took time to appreciate the crisp lines of my walnut chairs and the spirally grain of the pine floor in the bedroom.

I put on a nice tan pair of slacks that an old girlfriend had bought me but I had only worn once, and a red Jamaican shirt that was hand-painted with designs of giant green palm leaves. I put on white nylon socks and basketlike woven black leather shoes. My. 38 was the last item I chose. It hung unnoticed at the back of my pants, under the billowing red blouse.

Once I was dressed I went out into the yard to appreciate the garden. I sat, hidden from the street, in the cast-iron chair for half an hour watching a jay dance in the grass. He was proud and happy in moist grass that had gotten too tall in past weeks. He didn’t have a natural enemy in sight, and that was all he needed to be happy.

I thought about the Mexican badlands. They sounded pretty good.

Roberta Jefferson, Mofass’s sister, didn’t live far from my house. She and her husband, George, had a small place. They both worked for the Los Angeles Board of Education. He was with the board’s internal delivery service and she was a breakfast cook at Lincoln High School.

She was home when I got there, wearing a big yellow handkerchief around her round brown face. I took my time walking up to the door. She was inside ironing shirts; there was the smell of collard greens in the air. Dozens of iridescent green flies hovered around the screen door. Flies love the smell of cooked greens.

There was no need to knock.

“Hi, Easy,” Roberta said. “How you doin’?”

“Fine, Ro, just fine.”

I stood there in the doorway, taking my time, waiting.

“Come on in, baby, what brings you here?”

“Lookin’ fo’ Mofass is all.”

“I ain’t seen’im in two or three days. But you know sometimes a month go by an’ he don’t come ’round.”

“Yeah,” I said. I pulled up a high stool next to where she was ironing. “He left me a note to pull a refrigerator out of one’a his places, but he didn’t say what apartment. You know I don’t wanna be pullin’ out no po’ son’s icebox. I might be takin’ his last po’k chop.”

We laughed nicely and then Roberta said, “Well, I ain’t seen’im, Easy. He show up though. You know Billy-boy don’t trust nobody an’ he will make sure you did it right.”

“That’s what you call’im?”

Roberta laughed. “Yeah. Billy-boy Wharton. That’s why he don’t like seein’ us, ’cause I ain’t about t’let him fo’get his Christian name.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

I asked her about her husband and children. They were fine. George Jr. had just gotten over a case of the chicken pox and little Mozelle had grown titties and said she wanted a baby to go with them. Normal things. Roberta said that the board was hiring and maybe it was time for me to get a regular job. I said I’d look into it.

“Your momma down Louisiana, ain’t she, Ro?” I asked to finish off the questions about her family.

“She’ll live there till she dies.”

“How old is she now?”

“Close enough to seventy so she could kiss it, but she always say sixty-two. Not that she don’t look young enough to lie ’bout it. My sister Regina tole me jus’ yestiday that Momma got a new boyfriend down there.”

“At seventy!” I was scandalized.

“I guess it ain’t worn out yet.”

“She must be in good health.”

“Strong as a hog,” Roberta answered.

We traded some more pleasantries and then I excused myself.

I rode down to the Magnolia Street apartments next. It was like walking into the past. Nothing had changed. I saw an aluminum gum wrapper that had been in the gutter across the street the last time I had been there. I was amazed to think that the apartments were still my property. Who had maintained my rights on them while I was gone these long days?

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins,” Mrs. Trajillo said.

“Morn’in, ma’am. How are you today?”

She smiled in answer and I walked up to her window. There was a portrait of Christ on the wall behind her. His chest was cut open, revealing a Valentine’s heart crowned in thorns. He was staring at me, holding up two fingers as if to say, “Go slow, child, find your nemesis.”

“Have the police been back?” I asked.

“Sealed off the apartment and asked us all questions about who did it.”

“Did they know? Did they find the killer?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Rawlins, but they asked a lot about you and Mr. Mofass.”

“Mofass was here that day?”

“I didn’t see him, and I told that nice colored man that Mr. Mofass wouldn’t crawl through a window.”

Only just on his belly, like a snake, I thought.

“I told them everything I saw, Mr. Rawlins. There was only the people that live here and the postman with a special delivery and a white insurance salesman.”

“What salesman was that?” I asked.

“Just some white man in an old suit. He said that it was life insurance he was selling.” Mrs. Trajillo snorted. “Just trying to steal poor people’s money.” She didn’t like white people too well.

“Did he try to sell any to you?”

“I wasn’t interested, but he went up and down in here looking for somebody to rob.”

I wasn’t interested in an insurance man, though. “So that was it, huh?”

“I think so, Mr. Rawlins. That white policeman was checking the door around back. He said that it looked like it had been forced open not too long ago.”

I thanked her and bid her good-bye. But I must have looked grim, because she said after me, “You take care now, Mr. Rawlins. You know it is nobody’s fault when someone dies.”

“No?”

“It is only God who takes life.”

I kept the laughter inside of me, like a caged wolf.

I still felt dirty when I got home, so I took a long bath. I wanted to be clean, perfect. I put a chair beside the tub and laid my. 38 on it. I left the door open and all the lights on. Shadows would be my alarm.

I called Dupree but Mouse was out, playing with LaMarque.

There was one chance that I had of staying in Los Angeles. That chance depended on some creative handling of the top-secret papers.

So I dressed in dark worker clothes, loaded a squirt gun with ammonia, wrapped a canvas tarp I used for painting, and bought three steaks from the corner store. Then I went to the car graveyard on Vernon and went around the back, because it was nighttime and the place was closed. I made it over the barbed-wire fence by laying the canvas tarp over it. I didn’t have time for the regular business hours.

The yard was made up of wide alleys formed by stacks of automobiles. I had worked my way down three lanes before the dogs got my scent. I saw two of them, a boxerlike monster and a shepherd, ’round the aisle of cars. The first one was growling and running at me fast, his brother hot on his tail. I squirted them both directly on their snouts with my ammonia gun. A dog would rather gnaw off his tail than have a snout full of that poison.