Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley Page B

interchange.
    “How do you know these things?” Lorraine asked. “What makes you so sure?”
    “How does anybody know anything?” he countered.
    Lorraine nodded and smiled.
    “I hate you, you know.”
    “Yeah?” he said. “Does that bother you?”
    Lorraine’s response was to nod and stand up. “I’ll be back soon,” she said.

 
    NINETEEN
    F OR SOME WHILE, Ronnie wasn’t sure how long, after Lorraine had climbed out of the stone grotto, he felt the distant stirrings of restlessness. It was a long time since he’d been alone—a lifetime. Before, the person he used to be would seek out others in this mood; to fight, fuck, get high with, or just to laugh. Ronnie could laugh with almost anybody about some misery or missed opportunity.
    If I had known the mothahfuckah had ten thousand dollars in that pocket, I would have cut his mothahfuckin’ throat, he once said about a man who had just paid off a loan shark and on the way walked past Ronnie on an uptown corner.
    Girl, I need me some’a that coochie you sittin’ on, he remembered saying to a young black woman he had just met. Her name was Freya Levering.
    You at least gonna buy me some little sandwich and a soda first? Freya replied.
    Ronnie considered these memories, and many like them, feeling as if the person he had been was a close and unruly relative who’d died. The blade hand of the South Vietnamese military cop couldn’t kill him; he earned death by pouring life into the girl he’d murdered. Life was strong in the man he had been; his life was strong and he spoke the truth to everyone except maybe his mother and the cops, teachers, and marks. He would have killed anyone for ten thousand dollars. He bought Freya a pastrami sandwich and celery soda, just like she told him to.
    He lived a hard truth and a strong honesty. And now, like the Silver Box’s Laz, these realities lay dormant behind a closed door. That door, he managed to think, was what his life had been. That door was closed, and that Ronnie was dead but still alive in memory.
    He took a deep breath and looked up at the clouds. He could smell the blood on his clothes and so disrobed there in the very eye of existence.
    *   *   *
    L ORRAINE WENT TO the used clothes store Ronnie had taken her to before. She bought him a pair of shark gray pants, a maroon square-cut shirt, and bone-colored shoes. She also got him a handsome straw hat and sunglasses.
    On her way back, she was feeling the jitters in her fast legs. She wanted to run but at the same time she was enjoying making herself walk at a normal, slow pace.
    “Hey, mama, you got a nice piece’a ass for a white girl,” someone said.
    Lorraine stopped and turned to see who had addressed her. She was thinking that four weeks ago, such an intrusion would have frightened her.
    “What?” she asked.
    He was a well-built dark-skinned young man with his shirt open, showing the musculature of his chest and stomach. When he stood up from the park bench, Lorraine saw that he was tall and long limbed. She felt a sexual response like when she was with Ronnie, but he was unwilling, maybe unable, to be with her.
    Ronnie’s like my brother, she thought, only closer. Too close for that.
    “I said you got a fine ass,” the young man said. “I could hit on that so good, you’d leave all your white boyfriends.”
    “I already left him,” she said.
    “Then how ’bout givin’ me a chance?” he asked with a leer.
    “You want my pussy?”
    The young man’s eyes lit up and he smiled. “That’s right.”
    “Right here in the park?”
    “Anywhere I could get it.”
    Lorraine paused for a moment, pretending to consider the brash youth’s desire.
    “You know,” she said, “I just don’t give this pussy out to any wanna-be, bare-chested Romeo hanging out in the park with no job and no chances.”
    She wondered if these words had passed into her from Ronnie.
    “I gotta job,” the young man claimed. “Work at the Sandford Hotel in the