Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

I slapped his gun hand with my left and socked him at half strength with my right. I grabbed his wrist, twisted, and pulled the gun away from his loosened fingers.

“Stop!” Tina shouted.

I turned toward her with my hands in the air.

“I’m just goin’ to the toilet,” I said. “Fuck a niggah keep me from my bodily functions. Where is it?”

Tina’s eyes darted at a door that stood perpendicular to the window. I went into it and relieved myself without closing the door behind me.

When I came out Tina had propped Xavier up to a sitting position on the floor, but he was still too stunned to rise.

“I’m sorry I had to hit you, man,” I said. “But you don’t treat somebody like that. You don’t push a gun in his face when he ain’t done nuthin’ to you.”

Tina was too scared to talk and Xavier was still seeing double, wondering which image of me was the one talking to him.

“Can I take another cigarette?” I asked Tina.

She nodded and I picked up her purse from where she’d dropped it on the floor.

“Gimme one, too, will ya?” she asked.

I lit two at once and handed her one.

Xavier groaned and put his hand to his head.

“You didn’t have to hit him,” Tina said.

“No. Instead I could have peed in my pants. But let me tell you, it take a badder motherfuckah than your boy here to make me do that.”

“What do you want?” Xavier managed to get out before he grimaced in pain.

“I been tellin’ you the whole time, man,” I said. “I been asked by Brawly’s mother to make sure he was okay. If he isn’t in too deep, I’m gonna try and rectify the situation. The only thing I care about the First Men is that Brawly is a part member.”

“I don’t know where Brawly is,” Xavier said.

He held out his arm and Tina helped him to his feet. I doubt if he weighed more than she did.

“I know that. I know that. But maybe you could help me anyway.”

“What?” Xavier wasn’t afraid even though I had his pistol and proved my superior strength.

I really liked the kid.

“First,” I said. “What are you guys doin’ with them guns?”

“What guns?”

“The guns at Brawly’s girlfriend’s place. Guns like this one here.” I took out the 45-caliber pistol I’d taken from underneath BobbiAnne’s bed.

Both kids were impressed by the size and heft of the gun.

“You got that from Clarissa’s place?” Xavier asked me.

“No, from BobbiAnne’s.”

“Who’s BobbiAnne?”

I went through the same talk with Xavier that I’d had with Tina. Both of them claimed that they didn’t know of any white girl that Brawly ran with.

“We don’t make people do anything, but it’s frowned upon when one of the Party takes a white woman over one of our black sisters,” Xavier said. “We wouldn’t say he couldn’t be with her but we would damn sure know if he was.”

“And what about Henry Strong?” I asked.

Tina stiffened and Xavier asked, “What about him?”

“How long has he been down here?” I asked. “The other night it sounded like he was just down from Oakland to give a talk to your organization. But from what I’ve heard since then, it seems like he’s been here for a few weeks at least.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody murdered him,” I said. “They murdered him not five blocks away from where Brawly worked up until a few weeks ago. That ties in Brawly, so I’d like to know how.”

“Mr. Strong is connected with various political organizations in the Bay Area,” Xavier said. “He’d been watchin’ us for a while and wanted to bring some money down our way. You see, they had some supporters in Berkeley that liked what we were doing. The special thing we wanted to do was to start a school for kids from the first grade to the eighth. We were going to buy the old Kleggman Bakery on Alameda but we needed more money.”

“And Henry was going to get you that?”

“He’s been coming down for the past few months, havin’ meetings with some of the officers of the First Men,” Xavier said.

“Then why would he ever know Brawly?” I asked.

“Brawly said that he knew builders and contractors that were black,” Tina offered. “When he first came to us and he heard that we wanted to make the bakery into a school, he started talking to us about his mother’s boyfriend and the project he had down Compton.”

“He said that John could help with your school?”

“At first he was just bragging,” Tina said. “You know, how he was a contractor and he could get together a good black crew. We didn’t listen until he said that there was a woman, a black woman who helped finance his mother’s friend’s project. When Henry heard about that, he began talking to Brawly.”

“You don’t say,” I mused.

“How did you find out where we lived?” Xavier asked.

“Lakeland,” I said. “He got your picture, your history, your numbers, and all the gold fillin’s in your teeth noted down on paper in a file cabinet.”

The lovers clasped hands.

“Tell me about this school,” I said. “From everything I’ve heard and read so far, I thought you guys were trying to bring down the system, not educate children.”

“That’s just your fear talking,” Xavier, the flyweight, said. “If you really listened, if you really read our manifesto, you’d know that the school is our first priority. We want to start a school, a publishing house, a community center, and a lunch program for our children and our elderly.”

Tina’s eyes were fastened on her skinny boyfriend’s profile. I wondered at her — in love with two powerful men. She was at the center of everything she loved and held dear.

After a while she got into the conversation. She said that black women had to learn to love their own beauty and their men.

“We can’t let them dictate how we live and love and learn,” she said. “That’s our responsibility and if we don’t take the reins, we’ll never be truly free.”

I wondered who she included with them. Was I one of the ones holding back the black race?

We talked for quite a while. Xavier was a dreamer, that much was sure. He lived in the possibilities scrawled down by idealistic philosophers far from the front lines and battlefields. He wanted free hospitals and schools and no war whatsoever. The Urban Revolutionary Party was the first step in his broad global plan. People like Handsome Conrad and idealistic Brawly were a part of that plan, though they may not have completely understood the goals.

Xavier was the mouthpiece and the visionary, but Tina was definitely the smarter of the two.

“If we don’t do anything,” she said, “then the world will pass black people by. We’ll still be takin’ the bus while other people will be takin’ rockets to the moon.”

Her argument reminded me of Sam Houston telling me about my rattling automobile.

“This BobbiAnne told me that Conrad and Brawly had brought the guns to her place,” I said. “You think that they would be so different from you that they’d plan to do it with guns rather than schools?”

“There you go with that BobbiAnne shit again,” Xavier said. “Brawly don’t know no girl but Clarissa.”

“He wouldn’t even let me kiss him good-bye,” Tina added. “There’s no girl on his mind but her.”

“Big girl,” I said. “Red-blond hair and freckles comin’ down off her nose...”

Xavier shook his head but Tina said, “That could be the girl that’s been hangin’ around Conrad. What was her name?”

“Yeah. Conrad’s friend,” Xavier said. “She’s been coming around for a couple’a months now. Mostly she’d just be sitting in the car, waiting for him. I don’t know if he ever even said her name.”