“That’s no problem, Mr. Rawlins,” she said fetchingly. “You’ll see.”
CHRISTMAS WAS QUIET the rest of the ride. He was a soldier in defeat. There was no revenge or retaliation that would relieve him. He’d been crushed by the enemy after having won every battle. No condemnation could be worse; no tribunal could recommend a stiffer punishment than what he already felt.
“How you find me, Easy?” Mouse asked as we cruised down Sunset Boulevard past the strip.
“I asked Pericles nicely.”
“How you find him?”
“I told his wife that I was hired by Etta to prove you innocent,” I began. Ten minutes later we were at the address Jewelle had given me, and I was just finishing my tale.
Mouse was laughing about Jean-Paul and Pretty Smart, and Christmas languished in hell.
The address was on a big iron door in a great stone wall. You couldn’t see over the barricade except for a few trees that towered on the other side.
I had to get out of the car to press the button on the intercom system.
“ ’Allo?” Feather said with a put-on French accent.
“It’s me, baby.”
“Daddy!” she yelled. “Drive on up to the house.”
She must have activated some mechanism, because slowly the iron gate moved inward, revealing a curving asphalt road that wound through the arboretum used as a yard.
I got back in the car and drove. You couldn’t even see the house until we’d taken three turns along the way. Then we could see the place in the distance.
One man’s house is another man’s mansion, I’m told. We were all the other men in my car driving up to that place. It was four stories, constructed from blond wood and thick glass. There was a stand of bushy pines around the place and a fountain in front. The fountain was a sculpture of naked women and men dancing in a circle around a gushing spout of water that could have been coming out of a great blue whale.
“Where are we?” Christmas asked.
“Hell if I know.”
The front door to the house was red with an alternating black and yellow frame. It was ten feet high at least and twice as wide as a normal door. It flew open as we were getting out of the car, and all my family and Christmas’s family too came running toward us.
“Daddy!” shouted Feather and Easter Dawn.
After them came Jesus in swimming trunks and Benita with Essie in her arms. Between all those legs the little yellow dog came snarling and barking, the hair standing up on his back and his eyes actually glittering with hatred.
As I hugged my daughter, I took in my friends. Mouse shook hands with Jesus and congratulated him on his child. He tried to kiss Benita on the cheek, but she turned away. Christmas picked E.D. up over his head, almost threw her, and she laughed with hilarity that she had not shown in my presence.
“Daddy,” Feather said, leaning away, her fingers laced behind my neck, “I’m so sorry.”
“About what?”
“About hurting you.”
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say to her that I could not be hurt, that I was her father and beyond the pain and tears that are so important to children. I wanted to, but I could not. Because I knew that if I tried to refute her claim, she would see the pain in my heart.
“Why don’t you show me the house, baby,” I said.
47
And this is the backyard,” Feather said with feigned nonchalance.
We had already seen what E.D. had dubbed the Big Room with its long, long table and rough-hewn, heavy oak chairs. We’d seen the library with its hundreds of books, the kitchen that had four stoves and a freestanding wood-burning oven, the roof garden, eight of the twelve bedrooms, including the master bedroom, and five or six other rooms whose purposes were not immediately apparent.
I was amazed along with my friends, but in my heart there was a war going on. I’d think of Bonnie, of walking with her from the house to the tree garden. The pain of that impossibility brought back to mind my name written thirty times by a woman who was killed as she was falling in love.
“Goddamn,” Mouse exclaimed. “Will you look at that pool? It’s like a goddamned lake.”
To accent Mouse’s claim, Jesus ran forward and jumped in, followed by Feather even though she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The pool led to a lawn and the lawn ended at a cliff overlooking a valley. In the distance you could see the Pacific Ocean.
I wondered what kind of deal Jewelle had made to come up with a place like that. She was always looking around, buying up lots of land on the cheap in hopes of future projects. A lot that prevented the construction of a downtown skyscraper might have been worth this hidden mansion.
Easter took Christmas to her room to show him what it looked like. Benita went to the other side of the pool to watch her lover and his sister while at the same time avoiding any contact with Raymond.
“She hates me, huh, Easy?” Mouse said.
“Sure do.”
“Well . . . I guess she got good reason.”
We were sitting on a pink-and-gray marble bench that was anchored in the concrete. He was wearing a blue-and-purple Hawaiian shirt and white pants.
“You should go stay with Lynne Hua for a while, Ray.”
“Fuck that. Cops want me, they better be ready to lose a few’a they own.”
“Just two days, man,” I said.
“I thought you wanted me to help you kill this Sammy dude.”
“I do and you will.”
Ray grinned his friendliest and deadliest smile.
“You askin’ me this for a favor?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You been to see Lynne?”
The question threw me, but I didn’t show it.
“Yeah. Lookin’ for you.”
“That all?”
“Ray, how long you known me, man?”
He snorted and took out a cigarette.
I got up and wandered into the California dream house, looking for a phone.
“HELLO,” she said quickly, expectantly on the first ring.
I froze. The paralysis started in my gut but traveled swiftly to my fingertips and tongue. I had every intention of speaking, of saying hello like any ordinary person would do. I wanted to say hey, but I couldn’t even breathe.
“Hello?” Bonnie Shay asked again. “Who’s there?”
One of the reasons I couldn’t speak was that my mind was ahead of my vocal cords. I was in the middle of telling her about Sammy Sansoam and poor Faith Laneer, but I had yet to open my mouth.
My heart throbbed rather than beat. It seemed to make a sound, a high-pitched chatter that reminded me of a winter’s day in southern Louisiana five weeks after my mother had died.
It was after one of those rare Louisiana snowstorms in the early morning. A quarter inch of the fine powder covered the ground. A daddy longlegs spider was hobbling back and forth on a broad plain of white. As a child, I figured that he was probably looking for the summer again, that he thought he was lost and that there was solid ground and warm earth somewhere . . . if he could only find it.
My heart was that spider way back then.
“Easy?” Bonnie said softly.
I hung up.
JESUS WAS WAITING for me outside the library. He had a keen sense about my feelings and a belief that he was the only one who could save me from myself.
“Jewelle told me to tell you that we could stay here as long as we wanted, Dad.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I need you up here for a while.”
“Did you talk to Bonnie?”
I looked at my son, proud of his talents and his gentle ways.
“No,” I said. “Uh-uh. I was about to make a call to the police about somethin’, but then I thought that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”
WHEN CHRISTMAS told Easter Dawn that it was time to go, she broke down crying. She didn’t want to leave her new room or her sister, Feather. I told the disgraced soldier that we had the house for as long as we wanted and that I’d like him to stay around to make sure that my family and his were safe.