Six Easy Pieces Read Online Free Page B

Jackson Blue was right; I was way out of my prescribed world there at the Exchequer.
    I had fallen back into bad habits.
    “Can I help you?”
    It was yet another white man, this time a bartender. His words offered help, but his tone was asking me to leave.
    “Mr. Haas,” I said, pointing toward the gloom.
    A shimmering copper mass was emerging. Big Ears came up to me. “Come on.”
     
* * *
     
    IT WAS POSSIBLY the darkest room I had ever been in that wasn’t intended for sleep. A man sat at a table under an intolerably weak red light. His suit was dark and his hair was perfect. Even though he was seated, I could tell that he was a small man. The only thing remarkable about his face were the eyebrows; they were thick and combed.
    “Alexander?” he said.
    I took a seat across from him without being bidden. “Mr. Alexander,” I said.
    His lips protruded a quarter inch; maybe he smiled. “I’ve heard of you,” he ventured.
    “I got a proposition. You wanna hear it?”
    Ghostly hands rose from the table, giving his assent.
    “There’s a group of wealthy colored businessmen, from pimps to real estate agents, who wanna start a regular poker game. It’s gonna float down around South L.A., some places I got lined up.”
    “So? Am I invited to play?”
    “Five thousand dollars against thirty percent of the house.”
    Haas grinned. He had tiny teeth.
    “You want I should just turn it over right now? Maybe you want me to lie down on the floor and let you walk on me too.”
    Haas’s voice had become like steel. I would have been afraid, but because I was using Mouse’s name, there was no fear in me.
    “I’d be happy to walk on you if you let me, but I figure you got the sense to check me out first.”
    The grin fled. It was replaced by a twitch in the gangster’s left eye.
    “I don’t do penny-ante shit, Mr. Alexander. You want to have a card game it’s nothin’ to me.” He adjusted his shoulders like James Cagney in
Public Enemy.
    “Okay,” I said. I stood up.
    “But I know a guy.”
    I said nothing.
    “Emile Lund,” Haas continued. “He eats breakfast in Tito’s Diner on Temple. He likes the cards. But he doesn’t throw money around.”
    “Neither do I,” I said, or maybe it was Raymond who said it and I was just his mouthpiece in that dark dark room way outside the limit of the law.
    The old folks were gone when I emerged from the hotel. I missed seeing the old lady. I remember thinking that that old woman would probably be dead before I thought of her again.
     
     
    FEATHER WAS ASLEEP in front of a plate with a half-eaten hot dog and a pile of baked beans on it.
Astro Boy,
her favorite cartoon, was playing on the TV. Jesus was in the backyard, hammering sporadically. I picked up my adopted daughter and kissed her. She smiled with her eyes still closed and said, “Daddy.”
    “How you know who it is?” I asked playfully. “You too lazy to open your eyes.”
    “I know your smell,” she said.
    “You have hot dogs?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “What you do at school all day?”
    At first she denied that anything had happened or been learned at Carthay Circle elementary school. But after a while she woke up and remembered a bird that flew in her classroom window and how Trisha Berkshaw said that her father could lift a hundred pounds up over his head.
    “Nobody better tickle him when he’s doin’ that,” I said, and we both laughed.
    Feather told me what her homework assignment was, and I set her up at the dinette table to get to work on her studies. Then I went outside to see Jesus.
    He was rubbing oil into the timbers of his sailboat’s frame.
    “How’s it goin’, Popeye?” I asked.
    “Sinbad,” he said.
    “Why you finishin’ it before it’s finished?”
    “To make it waterproof inside and out,” he said. “That’s what the book says to do. That way if water gets inside it won’t rot.”
    His face was the color of a medium tea; his features were closer to the Mayans than to me.