There’s something wonderful about domestic life: not much struggle and hardly anything to think about. It’s like being in love and asleep at the same time, blissfully floating.
“Go on home, you two,” I said. “I’ll take Feather where she’ll be safe.”
At poolside I pulled a plastic yellow chair next to Feather. Frenchie, the little yellow dog, looked at me for a moment, remembering, I think, the days that I was his enemy. But he trotted right up to me and sniffed my shoes in greeting.
“Hey, baby,” I said to the daughter of my heart.
“Oh,” she said, “hi.”
“I’m sorry for all this. I mean, I didn’t plan it; it’s just that I knew I had to get a jump start or I might have died.”
“I know.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
Even though she was lean and endowed with a cutting intelligence, Feather’s visage was often soft and contemplative. Her stare was like a large unidentifiable object submerged just far enough underwater to keep its true nature hidden.
“What?” I asked.
“I still want to know about my mother,” she said with gravity. “Juice told me that all he remembered was the day that you brought me to the house and told him that he had a new sister.”
My other worries, seemingly of their own volition, climbed quietly over into the backseat of my headlong life.
“Well?” Feather asked.
“Well what?”
“Did you know my mother? Are you my father?”
“No,” I said. “I never knew your mother. I never met her. She was already dead and you had no place to go, and so I brought you home with me.”
“I want to know what happened.”
There was a long moment of silence inside my mind. In that hush was the memory of a white mother slaughtered to protect her family from shame, killed by her own father and disowned by a mother who was so distraught that she’d been institutionalized afterward.
“Daddy?”
“It’s a hard story, baby, but I know it all. I got to keep my mind clear until I finish this thing with Uncle Ray, but I promise you that I will tell you just as soon as this mess is over.”
“You promise?” It was her child’s voice.
“Cross my heart and yours too.”
She jumped out of her chair and dropped onto my lap. There was some vestigial pain from the car accident, but Jo’s medicine had done more than mask the symptoms—I was on the mend.
An hour later Feather and I were pulling up into the driveway of Royal Crest not far from Olympic. The green-and-white house had a wide porch and rare double doors for an entrance.
Feather and I walked up the six porch stairs, but Bonnie opened the doors wide before we could ring the bell. She was wearing a white dress that had drapelike creases from the waistline to her calves.
“Hello,” she said, kissing Feather twice in the European fashion.
She hesitated half a second before kissing my lips.
Looking over her shoulder in the middle of the peck, I saw why.
Joguye Cham, Ashanti royalty personified, was standing in the living room gazing bitterly upon our intimacy. We had never met, but I had seen his photograph more than once in the Los Angeles Times and Examiner.
“Joguye!” Feather said as she ran to the tall, slender, night-dark man.
He embraced my daughter. Why shouldn’t he? It was his influence and wealth that had saved her life.
“Come in,” Bonnie was saying to me.
The sunken living room was decorated with real African art and furniture. Horn and hide, feather and foreign wood made up the room, which smelled of frankincense.
Joguye and I were introduced. I don’t remember shaking hands.
The discomfort in the room was made clear by the fact that no one sat down.
I asked Bonnie if Feather could stay with her a few days until my business was through.
After agreeing, Bonnie started talking about a new route that would take her to the South Pacific twice a month. Feather expressed interest. Bonnie said that they could go together in August.…
“So you want your woman back after sending her away like a dog,” Joguye said.
“Cham!” Bonnie complained.
“That’s about the size of it, brother,” I heard myself say. “I been down so many dead ends that I didn’t know a throughway when I saw it.”
“Feather is not your daughter.”
He knew this because Bonnie had to tell his doctors that a blood test from me wouldn’t help their treatments.
“Not by blood,” I halfway agreed.
“I am building a new nation, a world that would embrace both of them,” Joguye said, and for a moment I saw the zealot that lived inside his body.
“And all I got to offer,” I replied, “is a hard road that you have to crawl on as often as not.”
“My people are warriors,” he said.
“And mine are sick of war.”
Feather moved half a step away from Joguye.
Bonnie came up and took me by the arm.
Joguye blinked. I think that this might have been tears for him. He nodded once and walked around us toward the door.
“Cham,” Bonnie called.
But he just kept on going, out the door and into the street.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Bonnie.
“It’s not you, Easy. Humiliation is a cultural stigma for most African men. Their pride is magnificent, and also an Achilles’ heel.”
Bonnie made us hot dogs with French mustard and sourdough bread. After a while we were all laughing and happy. Joguye was no more than a shadow cast from a tree outside, through a window that protected us from wind and rain.
45
The front door of Terry Aldrich’s mansion was ajar. This worried me, but I decided to leave the pistol nestled under the belt on the left side of my waist. The foyer was crowded with shoes and coats, duffel bags and two or three suitcases. It was an upscale hippie crash pad, and an open door might have been just as much policy as the sign of a crime.
I heard sounds to the left and followed a corridor of small doorways to an unfurnished room almost large enough to be called a hall.
Ten or twelve young people dressed in gaudy rags sat in the riches of that home. Terry was one of them. Ruby was sitting on his lap. Coco/Helen sat apart from the group on the marble ledge of a dead fireplace.
Two fat joints were being passed around. A woman was softly playing a large guitar in Spanish style with great speed and articulation. There were two black members of the temporary tribe: a man and a woman, both of whom wore brightly colored and beaded headbands, though they didn’t sit together.
“Easy!” Ruby shouted.
She jumped out of Terry’s lap, ran to me, and kissed my lips wetly.
“Come on in,” Terry hailed, waving me over.
I managed to lever myself down on the marble floor next to Terry. Ruby got back on his lap and took me by the hand. This gesture, more than anything else at the time, showed me the heart of hippie logic and philosophy. All the old rules about gender and race, class and relationship had been temporarily jettisoned for the hope that people could come together like any other social animal. We could sniff butts and rub noses, share our warmth and howl at the moon together without spoken agreements, contracts, or laws. There might have been a hierarchy, but this was a shifting thing, and the herd was more important than any temporary leader.
Somebody offered me a joint but I just passed it on.
“You a narc?” a redheaded, broad-shouldered young man asked. This accusation, strangely, carried no ire.
“No. I just need to stay straight to make sure I don’t get my head shot off.”
“Nobody’s gonna shoot you here, man,” said a young woman with hair so fair that it didn’t seem human.
“This is just a stop on my way,” I replied. “Terry?”
Terry took a hit off the joint I passed on, and so it was a moment befo
re he could exhale and then catch enough breath to talk.
“Yes, Easy?”
“Can I get you and Ruby and Coco to go somewhere where we can talk privately?”
“Sure, brother. Come on, girls.”
“Women,” Coco corrected.
“Women,” the ugly young man said with a grin and an awkward, stoned nod.
There was a redwood picnic table in the overgrown backyard. Grasshoppers leaped and bumblebees hummed around us. There were green hummingbirds making the rounds of passion fruit vines. A cool breeze that passed one way and then another moved like an invisible snake weaving its way between and beyond us.
Ruby and Terry were high, very much so. Coco seemed as she had before.
“What can I do for you, Easy?” Terry said, placing both hands palms down on the table before him like a king at his judgment table.
“Three men broke into my office today,” I said. “I think they meant me harm. One of them was a guy named Keith Handel. He said that he found out about me from people in your house.”
“Bummer,” Terry replied.
“Is it true?”
Terry paused, staring at me with both distraction and intent. He nodded to himself and then said, “Yancy was moving his stuff out and Vixie came over with Keith. That was yesterday, I think. I don’t know what they talked about.”
“How do you know Handel?”
“He works for this dealer, Haman Rose. I buy a kilo from Haman almost every week, you know, to keep my friends high.”
“And Keith delivers?”
“No, no …” Terry drifted off then, looking at something in the sky.
“Terry.”
“What, man?”
“How does Haman deliver?”
“He doesn’t. Ruby or somebody else goes down to this Laundromat in Venice and picks it up for me. I let whoever it is that goes drive my Jaguar.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said with a dumb grin. “You just go in and act like you dropped off some laundry and they give you a cloth bag full’a dope.”
“What about the police?”
“They got a deal with Haman,” Coco said.
“You know him too?”
“Everybody up around here knows Haman. He supplies a lot of the grass and hash. Keith Handel makes sure people don’t get ripped off.”
“Oh.”
“Handel had been looking for this guy Maurice,” Coco said. “He was lookin’ for Maurice and Evander. Vixie musta told him Evander’s name.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said. “Vixie told me that Keith was looking for me, but then she told him what he wanted to know.”
“He was asking everybody where could he find Evander,” Coco added. “I told him I didn’t know anything.”
“Me too,” Ruby added, “but Yancy had already told him your name.”
“Have you been out to Mama Jo’s?” Coco asked me.
“Not since we were there.”
“I’d like to see her again.”
“I’ll tell her that,” I said to Coco, and then to Terry, “When do you make your pickups from Rose?”
“Anytime. I’m one of his special customers.”
“You mind if I go down with Ruby to pick up a key?”
“No problem. You wanna drive my Jag?”
“Yeah,” Ruby said greedily.
“I’ll drive,” I said.
I stood up and then stopped, because King Terry looked as if he was about to utter some royal decree.
“You wanna talk to Vixie?” he asked me.
“Where is she?”
“She was sitting in the big room with us. Why don’t you stay here and I’ll bring her back.”
Terry went to find the informer. Ruby went to change clothes, and Coco said that she was going upstairs to the roof. And so I was left there in the mansion’s backyard. It was lovely and sumptuous, a shaggy retreat for the wealthy and their children.
It occurred to me that before my encounter with mortality I believed that wealth could somehow save me. This illusion had been dispelled by experience. I knew that all I owned was my body and its mind, and that was a tenuous bargain that would be scratched off in time.
“Here you go, Easy,” Terry said, coming out of the back door.
Accompanying him was a sharp-featured, small-eyed redhead that I’d only glimpsed in the pot-smoking circle. She wore a black shift and had a reluctant frown on her face.
“Vixie?” I asked.
“What?” she said petulantly.
“The men you told about my man Easy here attacked him,” Terry said. “He needs to know why they’re after him.”
“He already knows,” she said, not looking in my direction. “He ripped off Keith Handel.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
My tone made her look at me.
“He said so,” she said.
“What did he say, exactly?”
“That you and Maurice stole his money.”
“What about Evander?”
The question seemed to confuse her.
“Him too,” she said, uncertainly.
“Him too what?”
“He said that Maurice and a black guy … you … I don’t remember exactly. But he was lookin’ for you because you were looking for Evander.”
“Did you take Evander up to Caller’s Creek?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Did he tell you about blood on some money?”
“He was tripping,” she said defensively.
“Why did you leave him up there when you knew those men would have killed him?”
“I … I didn’t know.”
“You knew they tied him to a tree. You asked him where was the key to the bus locker and then left him with those animals. Why didn’t you tell the cops?”
“I’m only sixteen. They would have sent me home or to juvy.”
“You could have told me,” Terry said. “I would have called the police to save him.”
“What did Keith tell you about Evander?”
“That him and Maurice ripped him and Giles off?”
“Who’s Giles?”
“He works for Rose too,” Terry said. “And you don’t have to worry about Haskell and his friends.”
“Why?”
“They got busted tryin’ to move the dope out of their camp when there was a fire the other day.”
I wanted to say something else to Vixie. I wanted to make her understand, or at least to feel the kind of pain and danger she brought down on others. I wanted to hurt her.
So instead I shook Terry’s hand and walked away from the false security of his wealth.
46
I took Ruby down to the beach in the Barracuda. She was wearing jeans shorts and a peacock blue halter. Her bare feet were up on the dashboard and her thin brown hair blew into the backseat from the window wind.
I noticed that her feet were white and clean.
“Do you ever wear shoes?” I asked her.
“If it gets cold or if I know I’m going someplace that has broken glass or a lotta rocks. Otherwise no. I like going barefoot. The only time I hate it is when you step on a cigarette butt. It’s that burn that comes outta nowhere and won’t go away.”
“How often do you wash your feet?”
“I do it pretty much every day, and then there’s Edgar.”
“What is?”
“I know this guy named Edgar who lives down on Venice. He’s married, you know, but he’s kinda crazy about me,” she said. “Well, maybe not about me, but people like me, and I don’t think he’s weird.”
“And what’s that got to do with your feet?”
“Edgar works at this parking lot over on Pico, and I go there and he washes my feet.”
“Just washes them?”
“Yeah. He gets all excited about feet, and I don’t like it when they get too dirty. He tries to pay me but I only take money if I need it for something. I tell Edgar that we’re there for each other and he doesn’t have t
o feel like it’s for sale.”
“What’s he like?” I don’t know why I asked. Maybe I suspected that there was more to the story.
“He’s fat with curly hair and short fingers. Sometimes he cries when he’s washing them. It’s like some really important thing but really not about me at all.”
I was quiet for a long while after that. Ruby was a truth that I didn’t need to know. I wasn’t afraid of or repulsed by her, but she was so loose in her approach to life that she flung doors open that wanted to stay closed.
“He’s married and has three kids,” Ruby said after a few minutes had passed. “I always call before I hitch down there. I asked him if he wanted to ball me one time but he said, ‘No, ma’am, I couldn’t do that.’ I really like it that he calls me ma’am and then washes between my toes.”
“We might have to lie to Haman Rose,” I said.
“Why?”
“That guy Maurice used Evander somehow to steal money that I think belongs to Haman. Haman wants to hurt Evander, and I’d rather he didn’t, and so I want to feel him out without letting on that I know Evander. You know how to lie, right?”
Ruby scrunched up her long face as if this notion was some long-ago memory.
“The best kind of lying,” I continued, “is by limiting the truth.”
“What does that mean?”
“Answer anything he says without letting on about me and my interest in Evander.”
The hippie’s eyebrows knitted as she gazed at me the way someone might look at a strange creature in a zoo. Then she nodded and smiled as if she had worked out my species.
“But what if he already knows?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. Keith Handel knew, but Keith was still in jail—I hoped. “Even if he does, you don’t have to. You just say that I know Terry, and Terry sent us both down there.”
The Laundromat was on Lincoln Boulevard a few blocks south of Venice. It was a broad and shallow front with twenty or so coin-operated washers and maybe half that many dryers. On the right side as you entered was a waist-high counter behind which stood an Asian woman (I thought she might have been Vietnamese but wasn’t sure) who worked folding clothes that customers dropped off to get washed and folded for fifty cents a pound.
“Hi, Loo,” Ruby said to the short, rum-colored woman.
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