Walter Mosley - Bad Boy Brawly Brown

“All right,” I said. “That’s important because Juice is going to learn in a different way. From now on he’s going to study being a boatbuilder. He’s found his calling in that, and I won’t stand in his way. But if he’s going to do that, he has to study even harder than if he was in school. I know all of the curriculum for school and I’m going to make you read out loud to me for forty-five minutes every night. And after you read, then we’re gonna spend another forty-five minutes talking about what you read. You hear me? And if you ever stop working on that boat, you have to get right back in school. I don’t care if you just turned eighteen, you still have to go back. You hear?”

Jesus looked up then and nodded with the kind of conviction that only young men can have. If he was any other child, I would have dismissed the hard look in his eye. But I knew my boy. Not only would he finish the boat but it would be seaworthy and so would he. And he would read to me every night. And he would love it. I realized that he wasn’t the type of child who could learn from white strangers who couldn’t hide their natural contempt for Mexicans. I had seen it at Sojourner Truth. Most children ignored the signs or connected with the two or three teachers who really did care about them. But Jesus wasn’t like that. He was connected to me, and it was my job to make sure that he learned what he needed to make it through life.

“I’d rather you stay in school,” I said. “’Cause you know it ain’t gonna be easy goin’ through your lessons every day. Some days I might be late. Some days I might miss, and then you’ll have to do double duty the next night.”

Jesus grinned and I realized that this was what he had always wanted.

“I’ll help on nights that you can’t be home,” Bonnie said.

“You got them papers up in your room?” I asked Juice.

He nodded.

“Leave ’em on the table for me. I’ll read ’em after you go to bed.”

Are you really going to do all that, Easy?” Bonnie asked me after I’d signed the papers and we were both in bed.

“What?”

“Read with Jesus every night.”

“Oh yeah. Now that I made the promise, I got to do it. That’s our deal.”

“What do you mean? What deal?”

“When he came to live with me. He couldn’t even talk, because he’d been through so much. But he’d sit by my side and listen to every word I said. And if I said somethin’, then he took it for truth. If I said to jump off a building ’cause he wouldn’t break his leg, then he would jump. And if he hurt himself, he would know that I had tried to tell him what was right but somehow had made a mistake. And if I told him to jump again — he would. That kinda faith makes a truthful man outta you.”

“But suppose you can’t do it?” Bonnie asked. “Can’t do what?”

“Can’t keep your word.”

“But I will keep my word,” I said. “That’s what you don’t understand. I have to keep my word to that boy.”

“But what will you teach him?”

“The Iliad and the Odyssey, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island. Anything with a boat and a man in it. That’s what I’ll teach him first. And then I’ll take whatever math he’s got to know to make the boat and try and make sure he understands it. Work with what you have, that’s what I always did.”

“But wouldn’t it be easier if he just stayed in school?”

“No, baby. I mean, I understand what you sayin’, but what me and the boy got between us is hardscrabble road as far back as we can remember and as far up as we ever gonna go. If Jesus don’t trust you or like you, he won’t let you in. He sure as hell ain’t gonna learn from teachers he doesn’t respect. And anyway, while I been lookin’ around for Alva’s son I found out a couple’a things that helped me come to this decision.”

Bonnie was already convinced. I knew by the way she put her head on my shoulder. But she asked, “What’s that?”

“First it’s just Brawly himself. I haven’t seen the boy more than five minutes but I know from lookin’ that he’s a mess ’cause he didn’t have a mother or a father the way a boy needs to have parents. He was abandoned and then, when he was found, he was abused. He could have the best education in the world, but it wouldn’t help him. I knew that when I saw the diplomas on a killer cop’s wall. He got the education but he ain’t learned a goddamned thing.”

After Bonnie was asleep I got up and called Liselle Latour.

“Yeah?” she said in a sleepy voice.

“Hey, Liselle. It’s Easy.”

“What time is it?”

“’Bout ten-thirty,” I said. It was really ten to eleven. “I’m sorry to bother you, honey, but did Tina come back in?”

“They had her in jail.”

“Tell her that I’ma come by tomorrow morning, about eight-thirty. If she doesn’t wanna talk to me, maybe she should already be gone.”

“Okay,” Liselle said.

Her breath sounded as if she might have had a question, but I cut her off with thank-you and hung up the phone.

Tina was waiting for me at the door. I liked that. I’ve always been a punctual man. It was my army training. If a man said 7:59, you got there on time because by eight you might be dead.

When she opened the door I saw that she had a raised bruise on her right temple. There was a small scab at the center of the bump, surrounded by yellowish skin.

“Let’s get away from here,” she said to me at the doorstep.

“Where to?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said carelessly. “Down Central.”

We went to the car and drove off.

“How long have you been out?” she asked me.

“They let me go a few hours after they caught us,” I said. “How about you?”

“Just over a day. They had me in a cell with drunks and women livin’ on the street.”

“That’s where you got the knot on your head?”

Instinctively, Tina brought up her hand to cover the injury.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I got in a fight with a woman who got mad at me for not having a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “They shouldn’ta done that to you.”

“How did you get out so fast?” Tina asked.

“I called the man city hall’s got on you. He sent word upstairs and they kicked me aloose.”

“So you were working with the men who arrested us?” she said, not so much accusing me as verifying what she’d already believed.

“No,” I replied. “The men who arrested you think that they’re the ones on you, but really it’s a secret squad, the one I told you about. They got a soldier been to Vietnam runnin’ it. They’re the ones you got to worry about. They tapped me because they think I’ll turn you over.”

“If that’s true, then why would you tell me?”

“Same reason I called Liselle last night,” I said. “Because I don’t wanna push you or trick you. You got enough people on your ass.”

“Who else?”

“Even though he’s dead, there’s Henry Strong. Whatever he was doin’, it might’a looked like it was for you but really it would’a led to your downfall. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that he was a stool for the cops. And then there’s the secret group he was workin’ with inside the First Men—”

“What secret group?” Tina asked. There was a deadness to the question, almost as if she didn’t care if I answered.

“Conrad, Brawly, and Strong are the only ones I’m sure were in it. And whatever they were planning to do, it has to do with them guns Brawly and Conrad were hiding at BobbiAnne’s.”

Christina Montes was quiet for a moment then. She gazed out of the passenger’s window at the stores on Central.