A Red Death Read Free Page A

nothin’, far as I can see. And you got me t’lie for ya. But ya know if they come after my books I gotta give ’em up.”
    “So what you sayin’?”
    “Go on in there and lie, Mr. Rawlins. Tell ’em you don’t own nuthin’. Tell ’em that you a workin’ man and that somebody must have it out for you to lie and say you got that property. Tell ’em that and then see what they gotta say. They don’t know your bank or your banker.”
    “Yeah. I guess I’ma have to feel it out,” I said after a while.
    Mofass was thinking something as he looked at me. He was probably wondering if the next landlord would use him.

— 3 —

    I T WASN’T FAR TO MY HOUSE. Mofass offered to drive, but I liked to use my legs, especially when I had thinking to do.
    I went down Central. The sidewalks were pretty empty at midday, because most people were hard at work. Of course, the streets of L.A. were usually deserted; Los Angeles has always been a car-driving city, most people won’t even walk to the corner store.
    I had solitude but I soon realized that there was nothing for me to consider. When Uncle Sam wanted me to put my life on the line, fighting the Germans, I did it. And I knew that I’d go to prison if he told me to do that. In the forties and fifties we obeyed the law, as far as poor people could, because the law kept us safe from the enemy. Back then we thought we knew who the enemy was. He was a white man with a foreign accent and a hatred for freedom. In the war it was Hitler and his Nazis; after that it was Comrade Stalin and the communists; later on, Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese took on an honorary white status. All of them bad men with evil designs on the free world.
    My somber mood lifted when I came to 116th Street. I had a small house, but that made for a large front lawn. In recent years I had taken to gardening. I had daylilies and wild roses against the fence, and strawberries and potatoes in large rectangular plots at the center of the yard. There was a trellis that enclosed my porch, and I always had flowering vines growing there. The year before I had planted wild passion fruit.
    But what I loved the most was my avocado tree. It was forty feet high with leaves so thick and dark that it was always cool under its shade. I had a white cast-iron bench set next to the trunk. When things got really hard, I’d sit down there to watch the birds chase insects through the grass.
    When I came up to the fence I had almost forgotten the tax man. He didn’t know about me. How could he? He was just grabbing at empty air.
    Then I saw the boy.
    He was doing a crazy dance in my potato patch. He held both hands in the air, with his head thrown back, and cackled deep down in his throat. Every now and then he’d stamp his feet, like little pistons, and reach both hands down into the soil, coming out with long tan roots that had the nubs of future potatoes dangling from them.
    When I pushed open the gate it creaked and he swung around to look at me. His eyes got big and he swiveled his head to one side and the other, looking for an escape route. When he saw that there was no escape he put on a smile and held the potato roots out at me. Then he laughed.
    It was a ploy I had used when I was small.
    I wanted to be stern with him, but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t keep from smiling.
    “What you doin’, boy?”
    “Playin’,” he said in a thick Texas drawl.
    “That’s my potatas you stampin’ on. Know that?”
    “Uh-uh.” He shook his head. He was a small, very dark boy with a big head and tiny ears. I figured him for five years old.
    “Whose potatas you think you got in your hands?”
    “My momma’s.”
    “Yo’ momma?”
    “Um-huh. This my momma’s house.”
    “Since when?” I asked.
    The question was too much for him. He scrunched his eyes and hunched his boy shoulders. “It just is, thas all.”
    “How long you been here kickin’ up my garden?” I looked around to see daylilies and rose petals strewn