Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley Page B

cardboard box under her arm.
    “I brought you a drink,” she said to Mofass. “But you weren’t in your room.”
    “Cain’t I come out and see my friend?” he complained.
    “Sure you can,” she replied.
    She put down the drinks on the table and began fussing with Mofass’s robe. You could see the love those two had for each other. They behaved like people who had been together for decades. Jewelle was barely in her twenties but she had an old soul.
    After she had him squared away she handed me the box. “Here it is, Mr. Rawlins.”
    “What’s that?” Mofass asked.
    “Piece’a mail come for me at Equity,” I said. “Somebody didn’t know my address and then JJ opened it by mistake.”
    “That’s why you should be listed,” my old property manager chided. His voice was still deep and raspy but it was also feeble, like the distant rumble of a thunderstorm that has almost passed from earshot.
    I took out the bear and the paper it was wrapped in. It was just a tattered old doll made of cotton, sewn with hemp, and given green eyes made from glass. It smelled a little like buttermilk. The newspaper the doll was wrapped in was the Dallas
Gazette,
dated two weeks before. The postmark on the box was L.A. three days earlier.
    “What is that stuff?” Mofass asked.
    “Just a joke, Mo,” I said. “Old friend’a mine tellin’ me that she’s in town.”
    “Don’t…seem…too…funny….” Mofass gasped between each breath. He reached out with his right hand and JJ was there to catch it. She helped him to his feet. I tried to lend a hand but she pushed me off.
    “I’ll take care of him,” she told me.
    She put herself under his arm like a human crutch. They made their way across the immense living room and then passed through a door.
    While they were gone I considered the box and its contents. I knew a cop who might have been interested but it was slim evidence and there would be no action before the next day when Clovis wanted to close the deal.
    I had a pretty clear notion of what to do next but I couldn’t begin until JJ returned. So I sat in the window, drinking my cola.
    No complex ideas or deep emotions came to me; just the image of an orphaned child, at the age of eight, on his own and moving fast. He traveled from Louisiana to Houston, and from there to North Africa, Italy, Paris, and finally the Battle of the Bulge. I’d encountered death and destruction from the very start. I came to L.A. to get away from it but death clung to me—–he was my oldest friend, my only constant star. I thought about my years trading in
favors
on the streets of L.A.
I’ll do for you if you do for me
, was my motto and creed.
    Sitting there in that window, looking out over a city that had no idea I was there, made me feel powerful in a funny way. At the Board of Education they told you the kind of broom you needed and the amount of time it would take you to sweep up a classroom or hallway. They took out taxes and retirement funds from your paycheck and told you what days you could take off and how often you could be sick. Everything was preplanned and managed. The paperback rule book was three-hundred-and-forty-seven pages long.
    I yearned to be sitting where I was sitting, to be my own man. Loving freedom and loving danger are one and the same thing for most black men. Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we’re feeling liberation we know that there’s somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.
    That’s why I always loved Mouse. He was crazy and a killer and trouble in any circumstances. But he never accepted our slave heritage. He never bowed his head in front of an enemy. “Kill me if you can,” he said more than once. “But if you cain’t you better know how to run.”
    “Easy,” JJ said.
    I hadn’t noticed her return in my reverie.
    “How is he?”
    “Sleepin’. You know he can’t be out