Walter Mosley: A Red Death

“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.

“That kind is a man who thinks he can make things better by tearin’ down what we got here in America and buildin’ up like what they got in Russia.”

LaMarque opened his eyes and his mouth as far as he could. “You mean they wanna tear down Momma house and Momma TV up here in America?”

“The kinda world he wants, nobody owns anything. It’s like this here TV would be for everybody.”

“Uh-uh!”

LaMarque jumped up, balling his little fists.

“LaMarque!” Etta shouted. “What’s got into you?”

“Comanisk gonna take our TV!”

“Time for you to go t’bed, boy.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“I say yes,” Etta said softly. She cocked her head to the side and tilted a little on the couch. LaMarque lowered his head and moved to turn off the set.

“Tell Unca Easy g’night.”

“G’night, Unca Easy,” LaMarque whispered. He climbed on the couch to kiss me, then he crawled into Etta’s lap. She carried him into my bedroom.

We’d decided after the meal that they’d take my bed and I’d take the couch.

I was resting on the couch at about midnight, watching a bull’s-eye pattern on the TV screen. I was smoking Pall Malls, drinking vodka with grapefruit soda, and wondering if Mouse could kill me even if I was in a federal jail. In my imagination, he could.

“Easy?” she called from the bedroom door.

“Yeah, Etta?”

Etta wore a satiny gown. Coral. She sat down in the chair to my right.

“You sleepin’, baby?” she asked.

“Uh-uh, no. Just thinkin’.”

“Thinkin’ what?”

“ ’Bout when I went down to see you in Galveston. You know, when you an’ Mouse was just engaged.”

She smiled at me, and I had to make myself stay where I was.

“You remember that night?” I asked.

“Sure do. That was nice.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “You see, that’s what’s wrong, Etta.”

“I don’t follah.” Even her frown made me want to kiss her.

“That was the best night of my life. When I woke up in the morning I was truly surprised, because I knew I had to die, good as that felt.”

“Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that, Easy.”

“Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with it until you tell me that ‘it was nice’ stuff. You know what you said to me when you got up?”