Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“You want me to come ovah there, Mr. James?”

“More than anything I ever wanted, Miss Loam.”

The phone rang late that night. Toni Loam was half out of the covers, her butt partly revealed. The room smelled of sex, and Sovereign felt the stirrings of an erection as he looked down on the young woman’s strong right leg.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hail King James,” a man’s voice intoned. There was the hint of an unidentifiable accent in the otherwise American voice.

“Eddie?”

“They been callin’ me Jinx for the last twenty-five years or so.”

Toni was sound asleep. The digital alarm clock next to the bed read four-oh-seven. There were four used condoms under the green glow of the clock, strewn on the night table. Sovereign got up with the cordless phone and walked out of the bedroom to the high counter that separated the living room from the open kitchen. All across Lower Manhattan electric lights glimmered and winked from ten thousand office windows set in a hundred and more skyscrapers. The New Jersey skyline rivaled Manhattan’s.

“Eddie?” he said again.

“Fit as a fiddle and tight as a drum.” It was something their father used to say when he wasn’t disciplining the boy.

“How’d you get my number?”

“I call Mama once a year,” he said. “That anniversary happened to be yesterday, and she said that Lurlene Twyst said that you went blind.”

“It was a psychological condition. I got better.”

“That’s good. I thought I might have to pony up for a Seein’ Eye dog. You know, the kind that carry a keg of brandy ’round their necks.”

“You talk to Mama every year?”

“Ever since Daddy died.”

“FBI still after you?”

“Statute of limitations is up on that.”

“Where are you, Eddie?”

“You okay, Jimmy James?” Drum had half a dozen nicknames for his brother.

“A guy attacked me and I got mad. I beat him pretty bad... at least, that’s what they tell me.”

“Wow, Jimmy J, you gonna be a bigger gangster than me.”

“You didn’t say where you were, Eddie.”

“Down around São Paulo, man. Down around there.”

“Brazil?”

“Portuguese and Carnival.”

“So Mom has known where you were all this time?”

“I didn’t want her to worry more than she had to after Pops died, and I wanted to know if she needed anything.”

“She sure kept your secret. Does Zenith know?”

“She been talkin’ to Mama, man.”

During the long span of silence Sovereign studied the muted colors in the dim rooms: reluctant blues, hesitant red, and yellow remembering light gray in its sleep.

“You need any help, JJ?”

“I’d like to see you, Drum.”

“Come on down. I promise if you get here I will show you the best time you ever had.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“No wife and kids, huh?”

“No... not yet anyway. You?”

“Consuelo’s my bride. Pedro, Sistene, and Sovereign the kids.”

“Oh.”

“Catch you later, brother. Don’t give ’em an inch and they can’t drag you down.”

The phone disengaged but Sovereign stood there with the receiver pressed to his ear, the caress almost unconscious. He had missed his brother from the day he’d gone.

“Sovereign?”

Her standing there next to him was almost a crime; that was the first thought he had seeing the naked girl. She kissed his lower lip and bit it lightly. He touched her shoulder and she bent her head to caress the sore knuckles.

“Who was that?”

“My brother.”

“What he want?”

“He heard that I was blind and was worried.”

She took his hand in hers.

“I never knew you liked me that much,” she said.

“Maybe I didn’t either.”

“Why didn’t you say sumpin’?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that I wanted to say anything.”

“You gettin’ hard again.”

“Maybe we should calm down a little,” Sovereign said, feeling that he was both pleading and lying in the same statement.

“Is he comin’ ovah?”

“Who?”

“Your brother.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

Lounging on her back in the bed, Toni had her head on his thigh.

“I thought you said that your brother robbed a bank and disappeared thirty years ago.”

The sun was a crack of silver and scarlet at the far end of the horizon. Sovereign once more had a full erection, due partly to Toni Loam running her thumb up one side and down the other. The motion was an idle one and this excited the older man all the more.

“That’s right.”

“How he even know your number?”

“Drum-Eddie can find anything he sets his mind to,” Sovereign said, experiencing jealousy and desire, despair and satisfaction.

“That’s a funny name.”

“He called me out of the blue. For all I knew he was dead... No, that’s not true. I never really thought he was dead.”

“Are you going to see him?”

“I shouldn’t be seeing you,” Sovereign said.

“Why not? You like me, right?”

“Our ages, our needs make us different enough. Too much.”

“Felt to me that you needed exactly what I did,” she said. “Feels like it right now.”

“Then there’s Lemuel.”

She moved her thumb away.

“If the court sees us as lovers they’ll believe we set him up,” Sovereign added.

“But we didn’t, and they gonna have to believe that.”

“Just because we say it’s true doesn’t mean that they will believe us,” Sovereign said, thinking that the way Drum-Eddie and Toni spoke was similar.

“That don’t mattah... not if you really love me.”

“How can we know something like that, Toni? I mean, I only said those words on the phone yesterday.”

“I always liked you,” she said. “I just thought that you was too fancy and the only reason you had me around was to keep you company until you could see again.”

“You thought that I’d regain my sight?”

“You wasn’t evah blind, not really. I mean, if a bird went by the windah or a fly flew past you’d always flinch. You didn’t seem to know it but you did. It’s just that you didn’t want to see anything.”

She ran her thumb down the underside of the older man’s penis with a little more pressure and the phallus pushed back.

She smiled at that.

“But I’m so much older than you are,” he said, feeling the thrill and rise in his shoulders.

“Up where I come from, girls got boyfriends twenty years older than them all the time.”

“I’m even older than that.”

“We been together, Mr. James,” she said. “We got to know each other. So what if they think sumpin’ else?”

“What if they hold it against us in court?”

“So what?” she asked. “I’m’a cut off my hands so they cain’t put handcuffs on me?”

Sovereign laughed and Toni climbed up to kiss him. He moved his head once but she took hold of his hair and lowered her lips on his.

After a long and promising kiss, Sovereign said, “I’ll call the lawyers and tell them what we’ve decided. But right now I have to start getting ready to go to work.”

“Do you have to go?” she said with a playful whine.

“Yes. We’re going to need the money.”

“Can I stay here and watch TV?”

“My house is yours.”

Sovereign arrived at Techno-Sym at nine fifty-seven that morning. The company had done well forming partnerships throughout Asia, making tools that facilitated the furtherance of mass production techniques that helped the Eastern juggernaut compete so well with Western corporations.

We are a cancer on the American labor field , Martin LeRoy used to say to Sovereign. Sometimes the White House and Senate send people down here to question us about what we’re doing for the Chinese and Vietnamese factories. They can’t shut us down so they use us kinda like spies .