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sun was coming right down at my eye because there were few trees landscaped in Georgette’s neighborhood.
    Georgette shook her head. It didn’t surprise me. Maybe Marlon had gotten tired of throwing his money away.
    “What’s his real name?” she asked.
    “Marlon,” I said. “Marlon Eady.”
    “Oooooh, you mean Ed Sullivan.”
    “You know’im?”
    “Oh yeah, I know Marlon. We ain’t never called him no Bluto. He had some kinda accident that got the bones in his neck fused. I think he said that it was a cop beatin’ him that did it. They called him No-Neck at first and then, after that show started, they called him Ed Sullivan. He really kinda looked like him. Yeah, baby, he been puttin’ down bets with me since 1946. Mmm-hm. Marlon give the spread mo’ money than any other po’ soul out here.” Georgette looked out over her children as if they were the ones who called in their bets. Who knows? Maybe they would all grow up calling their old nanny to put two dollars on some nag’s nose.
    “You know his sister?”
    “Betty?” Georgette got wistful. “All I know is that Marlon’s sun rise and set on that girl. You get him talkin’ ’bout his sister an’ he could go on for days.”
    “You know her?”
    “Uh-uh. Marlon said that she lived at some rich people’s house up in them canyons somewhere. She stayed up there all the time.”
    “You know where I could find him?”
    “No, baby. He was workin’ doin’ civilian work at the navy yards down in San Diego for a while but he got sick. He had somethin’ wit’ his lungs and the work just got too much. He moved out in the desert. I don’t know where.” But there was a thought brewing at the back of the schoolteacher’s brain. I waited to hear its conclusion.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s right.… Linda! You get up offa Darleen! She done told you she don’t wanna play!” Georgette stared at a little girl who was standing astride her prone playmate.
    When the girl moved off, Georgette, still staring hard, said, “Marlon was bettin’ pretty thick wit’ Terry Tyler there for a while not too long ago. Terry used to stay here wit’ me when he was a baby.”
    “That’s the boxer Terry T?”
    “Mmm-hm. That’s him.”
    “You know where I could find Terry?”
    “No. Uh-uh. I don’t go to the fights. An’ his parents both done passed away. But you know Marlon was like Terry’s godfather. He used to always be takin’ him around. Half the time he’d come over to my old house to pick him up.”
    I didn’t want to move. If Georgette had offered me a glass of milk and a graham cracker I would have toddled off to her living room and napped the afternoon by.
    But I was a grown man. No more sweet cookies and sweet dreams for me.
    “You take care now,” I said, pulling myself up to a standing position. A small boy wearing tiny little overalls and no shirt stared at me. He was two and a half feet tall and I was a giant. I relished the moment of his gaping awe. I wasn’t going to be that powerful in the world that waited for me.
     
     
     

— 5 —
     
     
    I DROVE DOWN MANCHESTER to La Cienega, then up La Cienega to Venice Boulevard. When I got to Robertson I went northward. I cruised up past Jesus’s high school toward Airdrome and the small branch of the L.A. library there.
    It was a solitary library, barely used on weekdays. Miss Eto was the librarian. She’d been living in the wine country up north when her family was relocated to a concentration camp during World War Two. Her parents both died while detained. Miss Eto came down to work in L.A. after the war. She was a pleasant woman. I’d helped her out once when a man, Charles Emory, kept coming around the library and bothering her.
    One day when I was there to pick up Jesus I noticed that she was upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that a man had been bothering her. I don’t think she would have mentioned it except that Emory had just been there and she had