Then, just a week later, he left for logging up in Mississippi. He never came back down. Nobody knew what had happened. Nobody knew a thing. Maybe he died. Maybe he found a new wife and moved away. Maybe he got in a fight one night and killed somebody and he was arrested and sent to jail for the rest of my boyhood.
I sat at the kitchen table and watched the sun edge across it. I watched the floor until I could see the trails of dried mop markings from the last time that Regina had cleaned.
Then I cried. I cried the same misery I had when I was a child. My eyes and nose ran. And I felt my father’s hand and an old woman hovering behind me and cried for my loss.
I howled and banged the table. Whenever I let myself feel the pain of that loss I have no fear of Death. I hate him a little. I’d like for him to come meet me outside where I could poke out his eyes.
When it was over my feelings for Regina were gone. At least they weren’t yelling in my ears. I still missed Edna like I missed my own childhood, such as it was.
The phone rang just as my breathing returned to normal. It was like a signal.
“Yeah?” I said. I knew that it wasn’t Regina. I knew that I’d never hear from her again.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Sylvia Bride.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you come up wit’ somethin’ if I give you the girl?”
“Whose girl is it?”
“Fuck you!”
“That don’t tell me nuthin’. I ain’t gonna scam nobody. If you could prove it then I might do somethin’. They might too.”
She was quiet for a moment. I heard a baby stammer in the silence.
“You know the Beldin Arms?”
“Sure.” It was an apartment building on Sixty-third Street.
“Meet me there in an hour.”
“What apartment?”
“Just go there,” she said and then she hung up.
I dressed casually for the meeting. Tan cotton slacks with a green-and-blue square-cut shirt. I wore sandals without socks. There was a .38 pistol hooked to the back of my belt and a .25 in my pocket.
The phone was ringing when I left but I let it ring. There was nothing so important that it couldn’t wait.
I got to the front of the Beldin Arms in exactly one hour. I looked at the mailboxes in the entrance hall, but there was no Sylvia Bride.
While I stood there a small boy ran up the steps. He was short and stocky. He swaggered from side to side as boys are likely to do when they feel important. He seemed to be looking around for accolades on the beautiful job he was doing at playing the child.
He stopped in front of me. “You lookin’ fo’a lady?”
“What?” I asked.
“She said you gimme a dollar if I show you.”
I handed him a dollar and he started to run out the door, saying over his shoulder, “She in the park.”
“What park?”
He waved his right hand indicating the direction and said, “Down there,” as if he were talking to a very stupid little brother.
At the end of the block was Beldin Park. Mostly concrete. Four scraggly pines amid a small, balding patch of grass. Sylvia Bride sat on the bench.
She wore red silk pants tapered at the ankle and a red Chinese blouse. Her shoes were powder-blue and her hair could have used some work. It was unwashed and brushed back in bold strokes. She smoked Luckies. There was a half-empty pack in her lap.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked, standing above her.
“Sit down.” She was quiet and almost demure.
I sat down and asked her, “Where’s the baby?”
She took a photograph from inside the cellophane wrapper of the Lucky pack and handed it to me. It was a picture of Cyndi Starr and a small, brown baby.
“I’ve got a whole album of pictures with them. Any blind fool could see that they’re mother and child. I have her diary too. She wrote pages and pages about Feather.”
“Is it a daily thing?”
“Huh?”
“Is it a daily journal or is it just about the baby?”
“Oh, no. Cyndi was real smart. She went to college, you know. Every day she’d write down poems and how she felt… ”
“Is it up to the day she was killed?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t read it. I mean it was hers.”
“But… ” I began to say and then I held back. No reason to let her realize the book was worth anything.
“I want two thousand dollars. I want it in my hands, and then you can have the baby, the diary, and the album.”
I reached for my pocket. “Now lemme see, you want that in tens or twenties?”
She smiled at me. I might have liked Sylvia Bride in another world.
“We could switch. But it has to be someplace safe. And I need two thousand.”
“I’ll get you the money if I can. We could do it in the zoo or at the beach. I don’t care where. But before you see the money my people will have to look at what you got. If that convinces them, then we make the trade.”
Sylvia bit her red lips with small, sharp teeth. “Okay,” she said. “My number’s on the back of that picture. Call me when you find out something.”
“Tell me something before you go.”
“What?”
“Who killed Cyndi?”
She fumbled for a cigarette. I lit it for her.
“I don’t know. It was some crazy man, right?”
“I don’t think so. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Everybody loved her. She was great.”
“Was Bull Horker a friend of hers too?”
“He let her stay at his place down near Redondo while she was pregnant. But that’s all.”
“He the father?”
“God knows who the father is, Mr. Rawlins.”
“How was she living when she couldn’t work?”
“She borrowed from Bull. But he didn’t do it. She was going to pay him three thousand dollars.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know, honey. She said that she was going to get it from some man.”
“A white man?”
“She never said. I mean… ” Sylvia stopped talking and turned her head at an angle.
“She said,” Sylvia continued, “that she didn’t like somebody but that they had to pay up.”
We both let that one sit until she got up to go.
“Why you come to me, Sylvia?” I said.
“You came to me. You’re the one.”
“But you could have called that girl’s parents yourself. You could do it now.”
“I’m not talking to white people about this,” she said.
I’d heard that all the time. Half the black people I knew would walk an extra mile to avoid straightforward contact with white people. It didn’t surprise me that white people might not trust each other. I couldn’t trust them, so why should they trust each other?
Sylvia crossed the street and walked down the block. At the end of the street she got into the passenger’s seat of a new Ford. I thought I knew who the driver was.
— 36 —
JESUS AND I WENT to Pecos Bob’s Barbecue Heaven for dinner. He had two servings of ribs. Then we went to the penny arcade at the Santa Monica pier. He played the little coin games and rode the merry-go-round. It was great fun.
I bought a beer but didn’t drink it. Jesus had cotton candy and caramel corn, but that was okay, he needed to feel good. We went home feeling dizzy from the red flashing lights and bells.
He was kind of slow in the morning but at least he slept in his own bed. I watched him trail off toward school. He met up with two little girls from across the street. I never even knew that Jesus had friends he walked to school with.
Mrs. Garnett was home.
“Two thousand dollars?” she gasped.
“That’s what she said. But first you get to see the diary, the photo album with all the pictures of Cyn—of R
obin and her baby.”
I didn’t mention that the baby was black. Many times little black babies look white when they’re born. The color sets in later on. I figured I’d let the shock of race set in on them without my trying to soften it. After all, a black baby didn’t bother me.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to my husband.”
“Okay. I’ll call you tonight. But if he says yeah, then how long before you get the money?”
“I don’t know if he will agree.”
“But if he does?”
She hesitated but then said, “Day after tomorrow, maybe.”
I spent the day cleaning up. I threw Regina’s things away. She’d left clothing and costume jewelry and knickknacks all over the house. I threw all of that out. Edna’s toys and blankets, those that were left, I piled in her crib. I covered all of that with a big blanket and left it in the living room.
I spent the afternoon reading The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. It was a book Jackson Blue told me about years before.
Jesus came home at about three-thirty and we played catch until six. We had pork chops, mashed potatoes with sautéed onions, and canned asparagus for dinner. After that Jesus split a candy bar with me and I asked him to wash the dishes.
The phone rang at eight o’clock.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Rawlins. My wife tells me that you’ve found our baby.”
“Maybe, sir. I don’t know. Woman had a picture of your daughter and a little baby. She says that she’s got an album full of enough pictures to prove to anybody that it’s your granddaughter.”
“What’s this woman’s name and what does she have to do with Robin?”
“She was Robin’s friend. Her name is Sylvia.”
“Sylvia what?”
“You not gonna find her in any phone book, Mr. Garnett.”
“But maybe I know her. If she was my daughter’s friend I might know her.”
“Bride,” I said. “Sylvia Bride.”
“No. I never heard that name before. You say she wants two thousand dollars?”
“She said that.”
“It’s a lot of money for something we don’t even know for sure.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’ll call her and make a meeting where she will show you the book. If you think the baby in the pictures is the daughter, then you can make a deal. You don’t have to bring the money with you. Leave it with your lawyer. I’ll call her after this an’ say that we all gonna meet tomorrow at four on the front stairs of the main library downtown. Okay?”
“My wife said something about a diary.”
“Yeah. It seems like she did a lot of writing about Feather. Sylvia seems to think that it will help to identify the baby.” I paused for a moment.
“Listen, Mr. Garnett. I don’t think that that crazy man killed your girl.”
“What?”
“I can’t go into all of it right now but I think that somebody killed her and made it seem like she was the crazy man’s victim.”
“But nobody knew about the crazy man until after she was dead.”
“People all over my neighborhood did. Some of them might even have found out about those burns.”
“It doesn’t sound likely, Mr. Rawlins. That’s all pretty elaborate.”
“She was seen with some man the day she was killed. And Sylvia told me that somebody was going to give Cyndi some money. Maybe this diary will tell us who that is.”
“My God,” Garnett said. He sounded so broken up that I felt sorry I had confided in him. There was enough pain in his life.
After a long minute he said, “I hope you’re wrong. I hope… Well, nothing to do but meet this woman and see what she’s got.”
“You sure now?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m certain.”
“All right. Then I’ll call her an’ make the date. If sumpin’ happens I’ll call you back, all right?”
He took a deep breath and then said, “Okay.”
SYLVIA WAS UNHAPPY AT FIRST. But I told her that she didn’t have to have the baby there. All she had to have was the photographs and the diary. The library was as public and safe as she was about to get.
Jesus went to sleep early and was off to school before I was out of bed.
I was working in the garden around noon when Quinten Naylor and Roland Hobbes drove up in front of my house. They walked abreast and each of them gave me a noncommittal stare.
“Ezekiel Rawlins… ” Roland Hobbes started the speech.
“Hold it, man,” I said. “Lemme get a call on the phone before you take me down. My wife is gone and my little boy is mute. Lemme call somebody down here ’fore you take me in.”
Hobbes and Naylor exchanged glances. Neither one of them said a thing. Finally Naylor nodded and Hobbes accompanied me to the telephone.
“Hola,” said Flower. Her voice was deep and dark as a South American rain forest. Even listening to her brought images of large white lilies on a black bough. I could hear children in the background. The children Jesus called brother and sister before he came to live with me.
I told her to send Primo, her husband, up for the boy. I told her that I was going to jail. She gave me a friendly sigh of sorrow and said okay. The thought that I still had a friend in the world lightened my heart a little.
I hung up the phone and Roland Hobbes said, “Ezekiel Rawlins, you are under arrest.”
THEY DIDN’T TELL ME a thing. Just cuffed me and drove me down to the station house.
They put me in a holding cell, where I sat until seven-thirty the next morning. It wasn’t much of a cell. It was more like a high-ceilinged hopper room with a chair and a light fixture. There were no windows, nor even bars. Just a gray room with a chair. They took my cigarettes, so I was edgy.
There was an eye hole in the gray metal door. Every once in a while it seemed to darken a little, as if someone were looking in at me.
Two uniformed cops came to escort me to court. I met my court-appointed lawyer before the bench. I didn’t catch his name. He didn’t shake my hand.
Then my lawyer and the prosecution went to the bench and talked with the judge. They discussed my fate for thirty seconds and my lawyer came back to where I stood.
He was a sandy-haired, short man with ears that stood straight away from his head. He was middle-aged and skinny but he still had bad posture and shirttails that brimmed out of his pants.
“What’s this all about?” I asked him.
He shuffled his papers together and walked away from the desk. The judge said, “Next case,” just like on television, and the court officers started to hustle me off.
I grabbed at my lawyer’s jacket.
“Lemme talk to my man a minute,” I begged.
“What do you want, Mr. Rawlins?” the little lawyer, whose name I never knew, asked.
“What am I in here for an’ what happens now?”
“You’re in here for extortion, Mr. Rawlins, and you go to jail until somebody posts twenty-five thousand dollars or your trial comes up.”
The lawyer turned away and I was dragged to a room where four other men slept. A half hour later the sleeping men were roused by three court officers.
We were hustled into a bus that had wire mesh over all the windows and a cell door separating us from the driver. He didn’t need that protection, though, because each of the prisoners was manacled by his handcuffs to a bolt under his seat.
We were driven to a flat building near the southern outskirts of town.
The building we were taken to wasn’t originally a jail. Maybe they made ball bearings there, or apricot jam. The walls were made of concrete, probably reinforced with steel.
The prisoners were led to a large room, half a football field in size. In the middle of the big room the state had erected steel cages. Like the cages in the older zoos. There looked to be forty-five or fifty of the cells. About half of them were occupied.
One cage to a man. Each one was eight by eight by eight an
d furnished with a small cot. There were two pails on the floor. One had a cup to drink from, the other was there when you needed to relieve yourself.
One of the other prisoners sold me a pack of cigarettes for a five-dollar bill that I had palmed before leaving the house. When the guards were gone and I was safely locked away, I lit up.
I still remember how good that cigarette tasted. As bad as my life had turned in those few days I still remember that moment as being one of the most satisfying in my life.
For a while the new inmates talked to the old ones. I asked the guy in the cell next to mine, “What kinda jail is this?”
“Temporary,” the gray old white man said. “They’re buildin’ a new one and this is just the overflow.”
I handed him a cigarette and lit it.
“Obliged,” he said.
Then the guards told us to be quiet.
Somebody might not believe what happened to me. They might say that a prisoner in America always knows the specific crime of which he is accused. They might say that a man has a right to good counsel and at least a phone call.
At one time I would have said that white people had those rights but colored ones didn’t. But as time went by I came to understand that we’re all just one step away from an anonymous grave. You don’t have to live in a communist country to be assassinated; just ask J. T. Saunders about that.
The police could come to your house today and drag you from your bed. They could beat you until you swallow teeth and they can lock you in a hole for months.
I knew all that but I put it far out of my mind. I just lay back on my cot and savored the cigarette.
— 37 —
I WAS IN THE CELL but I wasn’t alone. Naylor, Voss, Violette, and Hobbes were in there with me.
Naylor said, “You didn’t want to help a black woman but you go out for some white whore.”
“I saw you with her,” Hobbes said.
Voss just shook his head and spit.
Then Violette unholstered his pistol. When he cocked back the hammer it made a squeaking sound instead of a crack.
Then I hear, outside of the dream, “Look out, boy!” And then I felt a cold spray against my face. Another voice curses but by that time I’m doubling up from the cot.
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