“Why?”
“To buy me time. I wanna look at Clovis, see what’s happenin’ at that house of theirs. Do you have a picture of Misty around?”
JJ reached into a fold of her cranberry dress and came out with a faded photograph. The sepia tones revealed a tomboy, with a space between her front teeth, smiling so wide that you wondered if she had ever known sorrow.
I must have grinned when I saw the photo.
“She’s the closest person to me in the world,” JJ said. It was both a vow and a threat.
Clovis shared a big four-story house with her brothers and sisters on Peters Lane, up in Baldwin Hills. They lived there with various other husbands and wives, and some children.
I parked down the street in a run-down old Ford sedan that I borrowed from my mechanic friend, Primo. I got there at four-thirty in the afternoon.
The MacDonald clan was a filthy lot. They parked their cars on the lawn and kept a ratty old sofa out on the front porch. The paint was peeling off the walls. But even though they lived like sharecroppers I knew they had money in the bank. While Clovis had Mofass under her power she’d siphoned off enough money to buy property under her own name.
At six, the brothers, Fitts and Clavell MacDonald, came out of the house with two dark-skinned women, laughing loudly, probably half drunk already, they climbed into a new Buick and drove off.
As the evening wore on I saw most of the whole ugly tribe. Grover, Tyrone, Renee, Clovis and her husband Duke. There were other men, women, and children who seemed to live there. But there was no one who matched up with Misty’s photograph.
I DROVE HOME AT EIGHT O’CLOCK.
Feather had refused to go to bed until I was there. Jesus sat up with her watching some show that was mostly canned laughter.
“Daddy!” my little girl shouted when I came in.
I guess Jesus was worried too. He kissed me, which is something the seventeen-year-old hadn’t done in two years. I put Feather to bed and talked with Jesus about his boat for a while.
“I want to go camping with some friends next weekend,” he told me.
“Where?”
“Around Santa Cruz.”
“Who you goin’ with?”
“A girl and some of her friends.”
“Who’s that?”
“Marlene.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“You can get in trouble behind that shit, boy.”
Again he was silent. Jesus never argued with me. When he disagreed or got angry he just clammed up.
“White girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Friends too?”
He nodded.
I stared at my adopted son. He was my child more than blood might have been. For many years he was mute. He had been molested as an infant and young child, sold to men for sex. I took him out of that. For a while I had him living with Primo because I thought that a Mexican child needed a Mexican family. But Jesus wanted to be with me and somehow it just felt right.
I wanted to protect him but telling him no or which way to go would never work. Jesus had a mind of his own and all I could do was make suggestions.
“Be careful,” I said, feeling as helpless as I feared he might be.
Jesus smiled and hugged me.
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY I was still up, reading Anthem by Ayn Rand in the living room. The little yellow dog had taken up his post at the hallway, guarding Feather’s sleeping place from the grim ogre–—me. As time had gone by I had begun to appreciate the dog. He came to me, the last living testament of a woman who had been murdered. He hated me because he blamed me for his mistress’s death. Now his love was for Feather and he took her protection as his purpose in life. I had grown to respect him for his devotion to my daughter and so our regular standoffs at the door to her room made me smile every evening at bedtime.
The phone rang. I picked it up before it was through the first bell.
“Hello.”
“Easy?” she said in a brittle voice.
“Hey, baby. How are you?”
“A little tired,” Bonnie Shay said. “I just woke up. They’ve been running us ragged.”
“Where are you?”
“In Paris. For the last ten days we’ve been in West Africa so I couldn’t call.”
“The ambassadors and princes been askin’ for your number?” I said in a joking voice.
“No. What do those men care about a stewardess?” she said. But there was fraction of a second of delay in her voice.
“Easy?” she asked in the static of long distance.
“What?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, baby,” I said. “I just miss you. I need you here with me.”
“Can you hear me smiling?” she asked, and I felt ashamed of my suspicious heart.
“Loud as daybreak,” I said.
“How are Feather and Jesus?”
“He’s planning some kind of camping trip and she’s gettin’ bolder every minute.”
“Tell them I love them.”
“Sure will.”
“I love you too, Mr. Rawlins.”
“And I love you.”
There was another pause. We were too old to profess love back and forth, over and over, and too young to just hang up.
Finally Bonnie said, “I should go.”
“I’ll hang up first,” I suggested.
“Okay.”
I LEFT THE HOUSE at four the next morning. The streets were empty and dark. I made good time to the MacDonald residence. The lights were off and four cars were parked on the lawn. I lit up the first of ten Chesterfield cigarettes I allotted for myself per day. I sat back in the smoky haze thinking about how much I loved being a silent watcher.
The dark street looked like a stage after the play is long over and the actors and the audience have gone home. I was thinking about Jesus growing up, and Bonnie so many thousands of miles away. About Mouse being gone from my life, like my dead mother and my father who, in fleeing a lynch mob, also abandoned me.
I imagined my father running into the darkness, his own dark skin blending with the night. A calm came over me as he disappeared because I knew they would never catch him. I knew that he was alive and breathing—–somewhere.
“HEY, MISTER!” the old lady shouted. I started awake. The sun was just coming up. Two cars were already gone from the MacDonald lawn. The woman’s face on the other side of the glass was pocked and haggard, deep molasses brown and relenting to the pull of gravity.
“What?” I said.
She motioned for me to roll down the window.
I did what she wanted and asked, “What do you want?”
“You watchin’ them?” she asked, pointing toward the MacDonald residence.
When you wake up suddenly from a deep sleep, as I just had, part of your mind is still in dreams. And in dreams time is almost meaningless. There are times I’ve dozed off for just a minute and had dreams that covered an hour or more of activity. That’s how it was for me at that moment. I saw the woman, read the lines on her face, deciphered the obvious anger in her tone, and decided that she wasn’t mad at me but at those filthy, uncouth MacDonalds. She was also, I surmised in a fraction of a second, a first-degree busybody who had more information on the kidnappers than the police could gather in seven years.
“Yes I am,” I replied.
“What they do to you?”
“Stoled my car,” I said in good old Fifth Ward lingo.
“Bastids,” she spat. “Make the whole neighborhood a pigsty. Noisy and vulgar, I hate ’em.”
“The man who stoled my ride was with this girl,” I said, showing the angry old woman my photograph of Misty.
“I seen her. Yeah. She was wit’ some guest’a theirs. A man drove a old red truck. It had Texas plates on it.”
“That’s the guy took my car. He asked me could he borrow it. Left me a suitcase to hold. All it had was some underwear and that picture of the girl drove off with him.”
“You wanna use my phone to call the cops?” the woman asked.