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and then, “By the way …”
    “Yeah?” He looked at me with the same dead-ahead look that he had for a customer ordering whiskey or an armed robber demanding what was in the till.
    “Some people been talkin’ ’bout them buildin’s I bought a while back.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “You tell anybody ’bout them papers we did?”
    At first he moved his shoulders, as if he were going to turn away without a word. But then he straightened up and said, “Easy, if I wanted to get you I could put sumpin’ in yo’ drink. Or I could get one’a these niggahs in here t’cut yo’ th’oat. But now you know better than that, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, I know, John. But you know that I had t’ask.”
    We shook hands again, still friends, and I moved away from the bar.
    I said hello to Odell. We made plans to get together in the next couple of days. It felt like I was back in the war again. Back then I’d see somebody and make plans, just a few hours away, but I wondered if I’d be alive to make the date.

    “H I, EASY,” ETTA SAID in a cool voice when I got to the door. The potatoes were replanted and the flower beds were tended. My house smelled cleaner than it ever had, and I was sorry, so sorry that I wanted to cry.
    “Hi, Unca Easy,” LaMarque yelled. He was jumping up and down on my couch. Up and down, over and over, like a little madman, or a little boy.
    “Mouse went to John McKenzie’s bar t’day. He was lookin’ fo’ you an’ askin’ ’bout me,” I told Etta.
    “He be here tomorrow then, an’ me an’ LaMarque be gone.”
    “How you know he ain’t on his way here right now?”
    “You say he was in John McKenzie’s bar just today?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So he had t’ be either wit’ a girl or after one.”
    I didn’t say anything to that, so Etta went on, “Raymond always gotta get his thing wet when he get to a new place. So he be here tomorrah, after he get that pussy.”
    I was ashamed to hear her talk like that and looked around to see where LaMarque was. But something about her bold talk excited me too. I didn’t like to feel anything about Mouse’s woman, but things were going so poorly in my life that I was feeling a little reckless.
    Luckily Alfred drove up then. He was a tiny young man, hardly larger than a punk kid, but he could work. We put Etta’s bags and a bed from my garage in the truck. I also gave her a chair and a table from my store of abandoned furniture.
    Etta softened a little before she left.
    “You gonna come an’ see us, Easy?” she asked. “You know LaMarque likes you.”
    “Just gotta get this tax man offa my butt an’ I be by, Etta. Two days, three at top.”
    “You tell Raymond that I don’t wanna see ’im. Tell ’im that I tole you not t’give’im my address.”
    “What if he pulls a gun on me? You want me to shoot ’im?”
    “If he pulls his gun, Easy, then we all be dead.”

— 7 —

    A FTER EVERYONE WAS GONE I sat down by the phone. That was five minutes to three. If Lawrence had called me when he said he was I might have been okay. But the minutes stretched into half an hour and then to an hour. During that time I thought about all that I was going to lose; my property, my money, my freedom. And I thought about the way he called me son so easily. In those days many white people still took it for granted that a black man was little more than a child.
    It was well after four by the time Lawrence called.
    “Rawlins?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I want you to come to my office at six-thirty this evening. I’ve notified someone downstairs so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in.”
    “Tonight? I cain’t have all that by then, man.”
    But I was wasting my words, because he had already hung up.
    I went to the garage and pulled out my box of papers. I had paid taxes on the money I paid myself through Mofass, but I didn’t pay taxes on the stolen money because it was still hot in 1948 and after that it was already undeclared. Most of the profit from the