Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley Page B

curl of her lip, was ecstatic. “There was always apple pies and pork sandwiches after the sermon so even if you hadn’t eaten all week, at least that one day your body would be satisfied along with your spirit. Mr. Boughman used to say to me, ‘Celia, the Lord put that man on earth to save the poor black man.’”
    “Do you think I could see Cedric a minute, Mrs. Boughman?”
    “Oh, I don’t know.”
    “He might be able to help me find out what happened to my cousin,” I said. “You see, my cousin, Ray, died in a logging accident. Cedric might know somebody who talked to him before he died.”
    Mrs. Boughman peered at me as if trying to puzzle out what I was saying.
    “Maybe helpin’ somebody else will help Cedric throw off his blues,” I suggested.
    This argument won Celia over. She pushed the door open and pointed the way. When I walked in, I caught a whiff of her perfume, simple rose water.
    The house had a low ceiling that gave the feeling it was sinking into the earth. There were no windows except on the front wall, and these were covered with thick, floor-length drapes. There were pictures and plaster statues of saints and Jesus on every wall and surface. The air was stagnant as if it were the ether of an ancient tomb that had just been cracked open after six thousand years.
    I went through the living room into a long hallway.
    “Keep goin’,” Celia Boughman said at my back. “It’s all the way at the end.”
    It was a very long hall. The house looked small from outside, especially because the yard was so deep, but that hallway was long enough to be a building of its own. When I finally came to the end, I found a half-open door. Inside, Italian opera music was playing.
    “Cedric,” I called. “Cedric.”
    No answer.
    I pushed the door open. He was sitting on a piano stool, wearing only blue striped boxers, supporting his big head with the long fingers of his left hand.
    “Cedric Boughman,” I said, trying to sound like a parent wanting their child to know it was time to pay attention.
    It worked. He looked up at me. A sob came from his chest.
    “What?” he said.
    “My name’s Rawlins,” I said. “Easy Rawlins. I’m lookin’ for a friend’a mine—Raymond Alexander.”
    “I don’t know him,” Cedric said. He let his head back down into the basket of fingers. He was thin and quite a bit darker than his mother.
    “Maybe not, but I think Etheline Teaman did.”
    When I mentioned her name, Cedric not only looked up, but got to his feet. It was like he was a puppet, and my words were the strings that gave him life.
    “What about Etheline?”
    “I think she knew Raymond up in Richmond.”
    “Is that where she is? In Virginia?”
    “No, man. Richmond, California. Etheline told me that she had a picture of Raymond. Did you ever see it?”
    “She had lots of pictures. Lots of ’em. She took snapshots of everybody she knew with that little Brownie camera of hers.”
    Cedric stumbled over to a cluttered desk and sifted around, looking for something. He found a small photograph and handed it to me. It was a picture of him and the young woman that I first saw as a corpse. They were standing side by side, but there was something wrong. I realized that it wasn’t Etheline standing there next to Cedric, but her reflection in a full-length mirror. She was taking the picture with a camera held at waist level in her left hand. They were standing next to each other, and at the same time gazing across a distance into one another’s eyes.
    “That’s some picture,” I said. “She’s good.”
    “She’s real smart,” Cedric agreed. “She’s going be a real magazine photographer one day. And she’s an artist too. This is only half of the picture. After we took this one, she made me take the picture of her with me in the mirror. She has that one in her photo book. I told mama that I wanted to get them both blown up and put ’em on either side of my room. Then it’d be like us lookin’ at