Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online

mind was very quiet while I sat and thought and cleaned. I suspected that I, and at times my needs, controlled the level of interference that the many I was comprised of could exert.
    When the door chimes sounded, I had just spent a good hour in almost absolute internal silence.
    While I approached the door, points of view began to pop up like unbidden ads on a computer screen when you’re surfing the net.
    “It might be the gangsters,” someone painted in red letters on a brick wall.
    “There’s a man out there,” came the paraphrased snippet from a paranoid blues song.
    “Let me get that door,” Sergeant Mortman offered.
    Ignoring my disparate sensibilities, I pulled the door open.
    Anna had put on some weight in the last seven years, and the small lines around her eyes were just a bit more pronounced. She was still lovely however. …
    This last thought surprised me. The Ron Tremont in me never thought, or allowed myself to think, about this bronze-skinned woman romantically. We were partners. After a few years, we were even friends. She tried to give me CPR and mouth-to-mouth on that desolate highway in the early morning, when I was dying and she had tears running down her face. …
    “Who are you?” she said, letting her hand drop into the open purse hanging from her right shoulder.
    “You bring Little Benny or Big Bertha?” I asked referring to her pistols of choice.
    The confusion on her face brought a friendly smile to my lips and eyes.
    “I always told you that I didn’t believe in reincarnation, but …” I began the old quote.
    “… if it was true, they’d bring you back in the body of a federal felon just to show you how the other half lives,” she said completing the quote. “Ron, it doesn’t look like you. Not even a little bit.”
    “Come on in. I’ll make you an egg sandwich.”
    I turned my back on her and walked toward the kitchen. Every word I said was calculated to remind her of her dead partner, Ron Tremont. I was him: the big fat white guy who felt that his country, culture, and race were the only things holding back the darkness that the rest of the world represented.
    In the kitchen, he had the five-six FBI agent sit on a high stool next to the countertop stove. Bacon was sizzling in a sectioned cast-iron pan while two whole-wheat slices from the refrigerator waited patiently in the toaster.
    “I know you like ’em runny,” I said as she stared.
    “What name are you going by?” she asked.
    “Jack Strong.”
    “And how is it that Jack Strong says all the things that my dead partner used to say seven years ago?”
    There was tension in her face and eyes. No one but Ron Tremont would have seen it. That, more than anything else so far, convinced me that I was some kind of abomination set loose upon the world for reasons unknown.
    I melted butter in the two smaller squares of the skillet and broke eggs into them.
    “Did you see the black van parked outside?” I asked.
    “They’re watching you?”
    I depressed the lever on the toaster and said, “There’s no mustard, but she has mayonnaise. I sliced some onion and tomato, too.”
    “Why are they on you?” she replied.
    I took that as my cue to tell the story of Jack Strong: how he woke up in a hotel bed with scars and patches, a black man’s ring finger and a woman’s pinky, with memories so broad and far-reaching that he does not believe that he is just one man or woman, or maybe not even wholly human. I left out the part about the slaughter of three thugs in a back room at the Steadman Casino—Anna was a law enforcement official, after all.
    Her response was to question me in detail about memories of being Ron Tremont. Foods I liked and transgressions I committed. For a while there, the fat man had a hot and heavy affair with a nineteen-year-old named, of all things, Cherry. He didn’t think that Anna knew about the liaison, but now she disabused him of that notion.
    “Tell me the nickname, the real nickname,”