Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page B

to get to the meat.
    “We can all go,” I said. “I mean, Bonnie’s fun, but the three of us can still have fun together too.”
    “Oh boy!” Feather shouted.
    Jesus, who rarely smiled, always did so when his little sister was happy. He’d gotten a haircut that day. The straight black hairs stood up like bristles on his tea-brown head.
    “How’s the boat comin’?” I asked my adopted son.
    “Good.”
    “You work on it today?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How much did you get done?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Jesus was seventeen. He’d dropped out that school year and spent his days building a single-mast sailboat. I asked him many times what he planned to do with that boat, but he didn’t seem to know.
    “How was work today?” I asked him.
    “Okay. They need you to sign a letter saying that I can work when I’m supposed to be in school.”
    “Okay. You go down to Santa Monica?”
    “I saw this guy,” Jesus said, his voice suddenly full of emotion. “He was fixing a sail. Sewin’ it. He told me that a long time ago people from Europe and Africa on the sea in between them had big colored sails with pictures on them.”
    “The Phoenicians,” I said. “The Athenians too, I bet.”
    “Are there pictures?” Jesus asked.
    “In the library.”
    The light dimmed a little in his eyes. Jesus was always adrift around too many books.
    “That’s okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll find the book and sit there while you read it to me. That’ll be our lessons for the next couple’a weeks.”
    Since Jesus dropped out of school I had a reading session with him every day for an hour and a half. He’d read to me out loud for forty-five minutes and then we’d talk, or he’d write about what he’d read for another forty-five. If either of us missed a day, we had to make it up on the weekend.
    After hearing about books on sails, Jesus sat up straight and made conversation. He was a good boy. At seventeen he was a better man than I.
     
     
    I WENT TO WORK on Friday. We had no principal since Hiram Newgate’s attempted suicide. He was now bedridden, mostly paralyzed. I checked out the work of my custodians. I had to get on Mrs. Plates, because she didn’t empty the big cans in the main hall of the Language Arts building.
    “I’m just a woman, Mr. Rawlins,” she complained. “You cain’t expect me to lift them big heavy things.”
    One year before I arrived at Truth, a man came on the campus without any business. Mrs. Plates asked him to leave, and he cursed at her. A fistfight ensued, and the man had to be taken away in an ambulance. Helen Plates was stronger than most of the men who worked for me. But I couldn’t say that to her. She was a woman, and therefore had to be treated more delicately.
    “Well,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll get Ace to empty your cans, and then you can do all his toilets.”
    “Toilets!”
    “Yeah. No heavy liftin’ in toilets.”
    “Mr. Rawlins, you know three little cans ain’t worf two floors of toilets.”
    “I know,” I said. “But Ace got to come all the way up to the upper campus to unload them things for you.”
    Helen sighed heavily. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll empty the cans. But if I hurt my back, the school board gonna have to pay my disability.”
     
* * *
     
    SATURDAY THE KIDS and I went to the tar pits and the art museum. I found a book on ancient sailboats that Jesus and I read that night. On Sunday we went to the marina, where Jesus pointed out all kinds of boats to Feather and me.
     
     
    THE CALL CAME a little before nine o’clock Sunday night.
    “Mr. Rawlins?” a young woman’s voice asked.
    “Who is this?”
    “Etheline Teaman.”
    “Oh. Hello, Miss Teaman. Thank you for calling.”
    “I didn’t understand your note,” she said. But she did. She was insinuating that she didn’t want me to put her business out there at the church.
    “You know my friend—Jackson Blue,” I said.
    “Um. I don’t think I know