I picked an odd spot to get into Mosley's extensive run of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, as he starts this book in a months-long semi-coma after getting wasted and driving his car off a cliff in drunken depression. But he's awake (mostly), and his friend Raymond needs Easy's help finding the son of a woman he knows for reasons he won't explain.
As these types of situations typically do, things get complicated. The boy is mixed up in something he doesn't entirely understand, because he was drugged out of his mind after a girl slipped him LSD during a kiss. So even after Easy finds the young man, he has to figure out what's going on with the bag full of bloody money.
This book feels like a book of transition. Mosley often has Easy remark about how he feels like he's awoken in a different world. There's a line where Easy remarks that the man he was seems to have died in that crash, and now he's a different man each time he wakes up, emerging from the husk of the last. It was a nice line, and Mosley works with the idea that sometimes things can change in a relatively brief time.
Easy's case means he spends time around hippy, free love types, and many (though not all) seem to be trying to move past the kinds of unspoken rules Easy has lived under his whole life. Rules about his being black, about how he has to behave around police, about who he can be seen walking around with and how he can afford to react towards people being hostile to him. He's not steady on his feet in the early going, and when some cops hassle him just for stumbling on the sidewalk, basically the entire staff of an auto mechanic shop, white and black, come out and give the cops shit. And the cops back down.
It feels to Easy like maybe these younger people don't care about the things that hang over his life, are trying to change things, and might just pull it off. And Easy sees the family he's gathered around him (he seems to have at least two teenage or older children he's adopted or taken under his wing) and realizes how much he has, and how much he nearly threw away. People that would have been heartbroken if he hadn't survived.
I'm not sure having the woman he was heartbroken over change her mind and come back is really necessary, but I don't know all their history. Maybe it fits. I also don't know if that translates to Easy handling things differently. He certainly seems to try and handle things with talking or making smart preparations, but he seems smart enough to have been doing that regularly. It probably isn't safe for a black man in 1960s L.A., even one the cops occasionally rely on, to be involved in too much violence.
But when he learns why Raymond is concerned with this missing boy (and no, it's not because Ray is his dad), he understands how things are going to play out, and he works to avert it. I don't think he changes Raymond's nature, but at least this one time, he convinces him to handle things differently. To not let it come down to some macho need to "settle" things. Unmake the fist.
Of course, at the very end, Easy is attacked in his own home by a white man with a gun, and kills him. And he knows that's bad news, so he and Raymond dispose of the body with the help of a voodoo priestess lady named Mama Jo. So maybe things haven't changed so much after all.
'On the back bench sat an ancient human being clad all in faded rags who was leaning sideways, maybe asleep. This person could have been either a man or a woman. The race was also a thing of speculation, but the napper's place in the world was definite. He or she had been descending for decades and was very near toppling over.'
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