Free Little Green by Walter Mosley Page A

answered.
    Hela was a German woman who came to the U.S. after World War II. She’d been married to a black soldier named Mortimer Revert, but that union foundered at just about the time Martin’s did. They got together but did not wed—both of them having serious reservations about the institution of marriage. They had a child, however, and seemed to be deeply in love.
    “It’s Easy, Hela.”
    “Hold on.”
    “Hey, Easy, how are you?” Martin said when he got on the line. That man loved me.
    “I need some help.”
    “Name it.”
    “Could you install bars on all my windows and new locks, good locks, on the doors?”
    “How soon?”
    “The sooner the better.”
    “I’ll be over there in an hour then.”
    “How much?” I asked.
    “Materials,” he said. “And I’ll get you my builder’s discount.”
    I might have died but the world still remembered me.
    After making sure of the security of my home I went out the front door. I made it to the sidewalk, where I stopped and remembered that I had forgotten something, not knowing exactly what that something was. I went back into the house and stood in the front room waiting for insight. Then I smiled.
    In the bedroom closet, on the shelf above the hangers, was a little door that was not immediately obvious in the gloom. On the other side of that door sat a .22-caliber pistol and a box of shells. I loaded the gun and spent a few moments reacquainting my hand with its weight.
    After that I left the house again.
    The Barracuda looked like a bloody wound on the street. I climbed in, though, and drove off just like it was the most natural thing in the world.

14
    It was on Central Avenue that the memories started coming back.
    I was smoking a Camel cigarette from a new pack that I picked up at a liquor store along the way. The window was open and the air whipped around the inside of that Barracuda like a man-made tornado.
    Aretha Franklin was belting out Otis Redding’s song “Respect” on the radio, and I was feeling only slightly anchored to the world that I had left behind.
    Down Tucker Street, in the heart of Compton, if you drive far enough, you come to a dead end. The asphalt turns to hard yellow soil. Thirty feet after that a seemingly impenetrable stand of avocado and eucalyptus trees blocks the way. Through and beyond the trees are dense bushes, many of them with thorns. If you push past the bushes you come to an unexpected door that seems like just another part of the forest, a yellow door with green lichen growing on it.
    I stopped there to consider my actions. This was not a threshold that one, even a man in my condition, crossed lightly.
    I waited a moment and the door opened of its own accord.
    Jo was taller and darker and more substantial than I was even before the accident. She was in her sixties but might have been forty except for the heavy toll experience had left on her dark eyes.
    “I wondered when you was gonna get here, Easy,” she said in a strong tenor voice that man or woman would have been proud of.
    I inhaled, taking in the strange odors of the backwoods alchemist’s lair. The smells were sweet and bitter, vegetable and mammal, fish and also the deep, rich odor of the earth in its various refined guises.
    I exhaled, feeling that the breath coming out of me carried an imprint of my soul that the house itself would study and pass judgment on.
    “Come on in, Easy,” Mama Jo offered. “Take a weight off them shaky legs.”
    Mama Jo’s home was like no other in Southern California: one generous room that performed every function of a house and a backwoods clinic. The floor was packed earth and the furniture could have been built by peasant hands in Europe’s Dark Ages. There was a hearth with a mantelpiece that had thirteen skulls on it. Twelve were armadillo heads and one was Domaque, the father of Jo’s only child, and the one true love of her life.
    She had a pet raven moving back and forth on its T-shaped oak stand, and two live