Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“John and Alva think that the First Men is just a gang,” I said. “That’s why they got me lookin’ for Brawly.”

“Older black folks is just scared’a what groups like the First Men stand for. They’re scared to stand up and demand what the white man owes them. They just don’t understand that the only way to get somethin’ is to fight for it.”

“They plannin’ a war?” I asked.

“Only if there’s no other way. What they want is better schools and jobs, history books that tell the truth, and people who look like us in government.”

“Sounds like a tall order.”

“It’s only fair. And Xavier knows that we got to take it slow. He wanted us to turn that storefront into a place where the community could come and talk about our problems. But now the cops busted in, the people will be too scared to trust in it.”

“So now what?” I really wanted to know.

“We got to find another way. That’s all.”

There was something that she wasn’t saying, something that lurked behind her resolute words.

“So they’re into the revolution and not protection?” I asked.

“Protection from what?” she replied.

I laughed then. Maybe I was getting old.

“You got a pencil, Clarissa?”

“Uh-huh, why?”

“Because I’m going to write down my phone numbers — day and night. I don’t wanna mess with Brawly. If he’s happy with what he’s doin’, then that’s okay with me. But if he gets in trouble or if you see that the Party’s not what they say — then you call on me. All right?”

She didn’t answer the question but she did give me pencil and paper. I put down my numbers at work and at home.

Before I left I asked her, “Why do you sound so mad at Isolda? Do you know her?”

“I know what she did to Brawly,” Clarissa said with a sneer.

“What?”

“That ain’t for me to say.”

It was after one in the morning. If I were living the life that I had promised myself, I would have gone home and tucked the kids into their beds. But the fever was still in me and there was someone I needed to talk to who I knew never went to sleep before sunrise.

He lived in a rented house on a street called Ozone Court, only half a block from the beach. It was just a tiny tar-roofed structure, but he was the only black man I knew who had managed to get a place in that neighborhood. While pressing the buzzer I planned to ask him how he got away with living in an exclusively white neighborhood. But the way he answered the door threw that question right out of my head.

“Who’s there?” he asked in a gruff voice that he tried to make sound deep. “What the fuck you want this time’a night?”

Instead of answering, I pressed the buzzer again.

“What?” he said, giving up the deep voice. If that tone were in his hands, they would have been up over his head.

“Jackson Blue?” I said in a commanding voice that was not exactly my own.

“Who is it?”

I laughed then. Cowardly Jackson Blue certainly deserved a prank or two. Ever since he’d stolen Jesus’s money I figured that I had the right to needle him.

He flung the door open and glared at me.

I laughed even harder. Jackson was short and slight, almost as dark as the sky above our heads, with eyes that were both bright and brilliant. Those shining, perpetually bloodshot orbs glared at me.

“What the fuck you think is so funny, niggah?”

“Lemme in, Jackson,” I said. “It’s cold out here.”

He looked around to see if I had anyone with me and then leaned away from the door, allowing me to enter.

Jackson’s house was wedged in between two larger but equally nondescript homes. From the outside his place looked small but it was much more spacious on the inside. That was because the single room that made it up was half a flight of stairs below the front door. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high.

Jackson had a big bed, a table that doubled as a hot-plate kitchen, a table desk like high school kids use, and three walls of bookshelves that ran the full height of the wall. Every inch of shelf space was packed with books. The room smelled of moldering paper. There was a wooden painter’s ladder set up so that little Jackson could reach the higher shelves.

The back door was a sliding glass window that looked out on a vegetable garden.

“Where’d you get all those books, Jackson?”

“Bought ’em, mostly. A lot of ’em I been havin’ for years stored in different people’s garages. When I got this place I brought ’em here.”

I sat at the table. Jackson snaked into his schoolboy’s desk.

“You got what I wanted?” I asked him.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“You know the rent ovah here in the white world ain’t cheap.”

“Listen here, Jackson. I ain’t playin’ wit’ you. You try’n get over on me an’ you will end up bein’ the one payin’.”

Jackson wasn’t worried. He’d known me for more than twenty years. I’d never laid a hand on him in that time and wasn’t likely to start.

“I need to know a few things before I tell you what’s what,” he said.

“Yeah, all right. What is it?”

“First, how did you find where I live at? I thought about what you told me on the phone and I just don’t believe John would’a had my address.”

“Charlene Lorraine told me.”

“How much you have to give her for that?”

“Twenty dollars.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah. I gave her twenty and asked her had she seen you, and she said not much lately but the last she knew you were livin’ down on Ozone.”

“Prob’ly just jealous ’cause I let her ride,” Jackson said, trying to shore up his pride.

“What else?” I asked.

“How much you gettin’ paid to get what I know?”

“A family dinner for me and Bonnie and the kids.”

“You cain’t kid a kidder, man,” Jackson whined. “Naw, brother. You cain’t fool me.”

“Jackson, why would I lie to you?”

“To keep all the loot for yourself, that’s why.”

“What loot?”

“You askin’ ’bout the First Men, right?”

“Yeah.”

Jackson was a man in his forties but he had the body of a boy. He shifted sideways in the constrictive desk and pulled his right knee up to his chin and smiled. He was the Cheshire Cat.

“They plannin’ a revolution,” Jackson said.

“So? What else is new? Must be half a dozen groups talkin’ that shit. But even if it was real, guns and bullets not your kinda loot.”

“But the money to buy ’em is,” Jackson said with a grin.

All the information I’d brought together since meeting with John floated through my head: the dead man, his girlfriend, Brawly and Alva and Clarissa, even the police breaking down the walls.

“What you talkin’ ’bout, Jackson?”

“Bread and bullets, baby. Bread and bullets.”

Jackson was a great intellect but he had a petty soul. Bread and bullets, blood and bravery — it was all just money to him.

“What are you talkin’ about?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “But I hear that them boys is plannin’ somethin’ big, really big. In order to do somethin’ on a grand scale, they got to have some money comin’ in from somewhere. That’s what my information tells me.”

“Who you been talkin’ to?”

“Why you wanna know about these men?”

I told Jackson about John and Alva asking me to find Brawly.

“That’s it?” he asked when I had finished.

“That’s all, baby,” I said.

“So you ain’t have nuthin’ to do with the money?”

“In the first place, this money is just you supposin’,” I said. “And even if you were right, you know me, Blue. I’m not a robber or a thief.”