Read Online A Red Death: Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Si (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online

entryway that led to the dinette. The kitchen was in the back. It was a short alley with a counter and a stove. The bedroom was small too. It was a house big enough for one man; and it held me just fine.
    “Get up from there, LaMarque,” Etta said. “The man always sit at the head of the table.”
    “But …” LaMarque began to say, and then he thought better of it.
    He ate three plates of beans and counted to one hundred and sixty-eight for me—twice. When he finished Etta sent him outside.
    “Don’t be doin’ no more gard’nin’, though,” she warned him.
    “’Kay.”

    W E SAT ACROSS THE TABLE from each other. I looked into her eyes and thought about poetry and my father.
    I was swinging from a tree on the tire of a Model A Ford. My father came up to me and said, “Ezekiel, you learn to read an’ ain’t nuthin’ you cain’t do.”
    I laughed, because I loved it when my father talked to me. He left that night and I never knew if he had abandoned me or was killed on his way home.
    Now I was half the way through Shakespeare’s sonnets in my third English course at LACC. The love that poetry espoused and my love for EttaMae and my father knotted in my chest so that I could hardly even breathe. And EttaMae wasn’t something slight like a sonnet; behind her eyes was an epic, the whole history of me and mine.
    Then I remembered, again, that she belonged to another man; a murderer.
    “It’s good to see you, Easy.”
    “Yeah.”
    She leaned forward with her elbows on the table, placed her chin in the palm of her hand, and said, “Ezekiel Rawlins.”
    That was my real name. Only my best friends used it.
    “What are you doing here, Etta? Where’s Mouse?”
    “You know we broke up years ago, honey.”
    “I heard you took him back.”
    “Just a tryout. I wanted to see if he could be a good husband and a father. But he couldn’t, so I threw him out again.”
    The last moments of Joppy Shag’s life flashed through my mind. He was lashed to an oaken chair, sweat and blood streamed from his bald head. When Mouse shot him in the groin he barked and strained like a wild animal. Then Mouse calmly pointed the gun at Joppy’s head….
    “I didn’t know,” I said. “But why are you up here?”
    Instead of answering me Etta got up and started clearing the table. I moved to help her, but she shoved me back into the chair, saying, “You just get in the way, Easy. Sit down and drink your lemonade.”
    I waited a minute and then followed her out to the kitchen.
    “Men sure is a mess.” She was shaking her head at the dirty dishes I had piled on the counter and in the sink. “How can you live like this?”
    “You come all the way from Texas to show me how to wash dishes?”
    And then I was holding her again. It was as if we had taken up where we’d left off in the yard. Etta put her hand against the bare back of my neck, I started running two fingers up and down either side of her spine.
    I had spent years dreaming of kissing Etta again. Sometimes I’d be in bed with another woman and, in my sleep, I’d think it was Etta; the kisses would be like food, so satisfying that I’d wake up, only to realize that it was just a dream.
    When Etta kissed me in the kitchen I woke up in another way. I staggered back from her mumbling, “I cain’t take too much more of this.”
    “I’m sorry, Easy. I know I shouldn’t, but me and LaMarque been in a bus for two days—all the way from Houston. I been thinkin’ ’bout you all that time and I guess I got a little worked up.”
    “Why’d you come?” I felt like I was pleading.
    “Mouse done gone crazy.”
    “What you mean, crazy?”
    “Outta his mind,” Etta continued. “Just gone.”
    “Etta,” I said as calmly as I could. The desire to hold her had subsided for the moment. “Tell me what he did.”
    “Come out to the house at two in the mo’nin’ just about ev’ry other night. Drunk as he could be and wavin’ that long-barreled pistol of his. Stand