Free Little Green by Walter Mosley Page B

armadillos that stayed to the corners of the wide room. I saw something else move in the shadow under her long worktable but failed to make out the species.
    “Sit down ovah here, baby,” she said.
    I lowered myself into a chair made from arm-thick branches and animal hide. It was the chair I most often used at Jo’s house.
    Jo sat down on the bench placed at her worktable. Behind her were dozens of crocks and jars, hanging bunches of dried leaves and branches, and more than a few hand-bound volumes.
    There was barely six inches of space between our knees. Jo reached out for my hands and I gave them willingly, focusing my eyes on her bare feet.
    “Easy,” she said, and I looked up.
    We sat there for an interminable period, passing breath and feelingbetween us. My hands began to sweat and that was just another form of communication.
    After a long time Jo blinked twice and let me go.
    “It’s like you was dead out there in them bushes, Easy,” she said.
    I nodded and sighed.
    “You were down there in the pit and it was Raymond’s love that dragged you out. You two is just like chirren on a seesaw. One’a you is up and the other one down. That’s how it goes.”
    I grinned but had no words to say.
    “Man is a animal, Easy,” Jo continued on her impromptu and yet ready sermon. “Bobcat can have the biggest fight of his life on a Tuesday noon. And win or lose, either way, on Wednesday, if he still alive, he’ll need water and meat to survive.
    “It’s a good thing that you run up off’a that cliff. A good thing. Because when you hit the bottom there is only one place left for you to go. You know that, don’t ya?”
    “I don’t know a goddamned thing, Jo,” I said, unable to keep my anger in check. “Not a fuckin’ thing.”
    “You know you tried to kill yourself and that Death threw you back. He held you in his hand a minute and then said, ‘Maybe.’ ”
    I laughed deeply in spite of the pains in my chest and back. The idea of the Absolute looking at life and tossing it aside sounded so right that it was almost unbearable.
    “I’m lookin’ for somebody for Raymond,” I said when the laughter subsided. “Evander Noon.”
    “That’s just the seesaw action,” Jo replied. “You lookin’ for yourself.”
    “I’m not sure if it’s for Evander or me,” I said, knowing that there was no arguing metaphysics with her. “All I do know is that I walked a block and a half yesterday and nearly collapsed. And here I got miles up ahead of me.”
    “And that’s why you come here?”
    “You gave Mouse this little vial for hangovers,” I said.
    “Hangovah ain’t like dyin’,” she replied. “That’s just a little pick-me-up after a night out.”
    “You got somethin’ stronger?” I asked.
    “There’s health in your body, sugah, and death in your soul. I can give ya somethin’ help to see you through this thing, but I can’t tell whether you gonna come back alive or not.”
    “All I know is if I stop right now I will be dead in a week. I know it.”
    Jo’s hard black face cracked into a girlish grin.
    “I knew when you was just a teenager that you were gonna be one helluva man, Mr. Rawlins. You look at the world and see what’s there. You know there ain’t one person outta three hundred could lay claim to half’a that.”
    Jo got up and turned around to reach for something on a high shelf above the long and deep worktable. I had been looking almost only into her eyes since entering the cottage—either that or her workwoman’s feet and near-feral pets. Jo had the kind of will that kept you engaged. But when she turned I noted that she was wearing an almost festive yellow dress that came down to the middle of her calves. She had dressed for company. She had dressed for me.
    “Here we go,” she said.
    She handed me a wooden crate divided into eight three-inch-square sections. In each slatted section was nestled a little green bottle—all of them stoppered with hand-cut cork plugs. The