“Was that a trick question?” Gara asked as she entered the room.
I looked up, and the mirth in her eyes died.
“What’s wrong with you, baby?”
“I . . .”
Gara pulled a chair up next to me and took my hands in hers. Gara had never touched me in all the time we’d been acquainted. She was a proper woman who didn’t want to give the wrong impression.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a problem at home. It’s all right. Nobody’s sick. Nobody’s dying.”
I took a deep breath and pulled away. “What you talkin’ about a trick?”
“There ain’t no General, Colonel, or Major Thaddeus King anywhere in the army, and the only Clarence Miles is a master sergeant in Berlin.”
“Can I smoke in here?” I asked.
“No, but I’ll allow it anyway. You look like you need somethin’.”
The inhalation of cancer-causing smoke felt like the first breath I’d taken in a long time. It reminded me of what a man, I’d forgotten his name, that was friends with my maternal grandfather used to say: “We born dyin’, boy,” he’d opine. “If it wasn’t for death, we’d nevah draw a breath.”
Everything Miles had said was a lie. What he’d said but not what I’d seen. They’d come armed and in force. They all had at least been in the military. They were killers and soldiers inasmuch as they were willing to put their lives, and others’ lives, on the line.
10
I always had a pretty good memory in times of stress. When I felt that my life was threatened or someone I loved was in danger, I began to pay very close attention to detail. It was like that when the liar Captain Miles and his men came in on me. Many of those details, including the decorated MP’s medals, had stuck in my mind.
One medal had red and yellow stripes with a bronze leaf across it and an ornate bronze circle dangling underneath; another had a yellow background with green and yellow stripes on it with a medal like a coin; the last ribbon was green, yellow, red, yellow, and green, holding up a bright red star.
Gara let me go into the small military library after seeing my haunted expression. She probably thought I was upset because someone I loved was dying or near death. If I had told her about Bonnie, she would probably have laughed and sent me packing. A broken heart was no reason to put her job in jeopardy.
The medals on my soldier’s chest were all earned in Vietnam: the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross, the Vietnam Service Medal, and a medal given specifically for wounds.
I wrote down the names and came out to the lounge to see Gara once again in her big green chair. She’d finished Salinger’s masterpiece and moved on to some fat tome. She was drinking from a sixteen-ounce soda bottle, smirking at the text.
“I have a need,” I said, all the sadness and remorse gone from my face and my voice.
“We all do,” she replied, continuing her reading and drinking.
“I need to know what soldiers have received these three medals in the last five years.”
I placed the list on the table next to her.
“Here at the library we lead the horse to water, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “We don’t get down on our knees and drink for him.”
I placed one of Miles’s hundred-dollar bills on top of the list. That was just another example of my emotional distress. If I had been in a normal state, I would have put a twenty down. Twenty dollars was enough for what I was asking. But there was something poetic, something that resonated with justice, about paying for my information with the very money the liar had given me.
Gara put down her sparkling sugar water and her book. Then she took up the hundred-dollar bill and the short list.
“I’ll have it by three o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “If it’s earlier than that, I’ll call you.”
I smiled and made a mock salute.
I was about to leave when she asked, “How’s the kids?”
“Fine. Great. Jesus and his girl had a baby.”
“They gettin’ married?”
“We’ll see.”
“How’s Bonnie?”
“We’ll see,” I said again.
I headed for the door before she could question my answers.
THE LITTLE YELLOW DOG must have been chasing gophers in the backyard, because he wasn’t barking as I came up on the porch. Frenchie knew the sound of my car. Bonnie had told me that she knew I was coming from a block away just because of his angry bark.
But that day I made it all the way to the front door undetected. The door was open and so only the screen separated me from the sounds of the house. I could hear Essie crying a few rooms away and Feather speaking in French. Her time in Switzerland in the clinic and then later with Bonnie and Jesus had taught Feather to converse easily in that tongue. But the only person she spoke French to on the phone was Bonnie. Now that my daughter was becoming a woman, they chattered like girlfriends.
I reached for the door handle and stopped. Feather laughed out loud and said something that was both a question and an exultation. I spoke some French, Creole mostly from my childhood in Louisiana, but the fast-paced Parisian that Bonnie had taught Feather was too much for me.
I pulled the screen door open but didn’t walk right in.
“He’s here,” Feather said in a voice she tried to muffle. “I gotta go.”
She’d hung up by the time I came in.
“Daddy!” she cried, and ran up to hug me.
I held her harder than I should have. But I needed to hold on to someone who loved me.
“Hi, baby.”
Feather leaned back and looked into my eyes. She knew that I’d heard her. She wanted to help me feel better.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“Hi, Dad,” Jesus said.
He was standing at the door to the kitchen wearing a brown apron and yellow rubber gloves.
“Hey, boy.”
“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said. She was standing by Jesus’s leg, flour on her hands and cheeks.
“You guys cookin’, huh?” I said.
“I’m making pound cake,” the little doll said. “And Juice is washing the dishes and helping.”
“You want to help me with lunch?” I asked her.
The child’s black eyes glittered and her mouth opened into a perfect circle. Domesticity was her bastion of power in her father’s house. He never made a decision about household matters without first consulting her. And Easter almost always had the last word.
I HAD OXTAILS in the refrigerator. We dredged them in flour and seared them in lard with green peppers, diced onions, and minced garlic. While they simmered, we took out the pound cake, set rice boiling, and chopped up some brussels sprouts, which we sautéed in butter and then laced with soy sauce.
While we did all this cooking, the child and I discussed our adventures.
Feather was spending another day at home taking care of her. They had gone to the art museum, then read Feather’s history book and done her lessons for school. I realized that I had to enroll Easter in school or Feather’s education would suffer.
I tried not to think about how Bonnie would have taken care of all that when she was there.
Bonnie had made the house run smoothly, even when she was away on international flights for Air France. She hired people and had friends do chores that made my life easier.
How could I have thrown that concern away?
“Did you find my father?” Easter asked, and I was drawn back into the world.
“Gettin’ close. How long did you live in that house across the street from the big tire?”
“I don’t know . . . a week, maybe.”
“Hm. I found some people who might know where he is,” I said. “They’re supposed to call me tomorrow morning with what they know.”
“Who did you talk to?” she asked.
“A man named Captain Miles. Black guy in the army. Have you ever met him?”
Easter was standing on a chai
r next to me at the stove. It was her job to drop in the vegetables while I stirred them in the hot butter.
She thought for a moment and then shook her head.
“No. No Captain Miles has ever been to our house. Not when I was awake.”
“Do people come over in the night when you’re asleep?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen any of them? I mean, maybe you woke up and looked downstairs.”
“No,” she said very seriously. “That would be spying and spying is bad. But . . .”
“Yeah?”
“But one time that lady with yellow hair came at night, and she was still there in the morning.”
“What was she like?”
“Very sad.” Easter nodded to assure me of what she was saying.
“About what?”
“Her husband was in trouble. His friends were mad at him and they were mad at her too.”
“Did she say anything else about those men?”
“No. Can we have strawberries on our pound cake?”
“I’ll send Jesus to the store to get some.”
Our conversation went back and forth about cooking and the people her father knew. There wasn’t much useful to me. But when E.D. was making the rice, I remembered the bar of soap wrapped in paper.
“Mr. Fishy,” she cried, unwrapping the bar. “I thought I lost you.”
“I found it at the place across the street from the big tire.”
“Was my daddy there?” Easter Dawn asked.
“No. No, he wasn’t. But I wondered . . . Did you drive down to LA in your father’s Jeep?”
“No. The lady had a green car. Daddy drove that.”
“And did she let him keep it?”
“No. He borrowed a blue car from a friend of his, but then he said he was going to buy a red truck with a camper on it from that funny man.”
“What funny man?”
“The one on the TV who has the animals and the pretty girls around him all the time.”
11
Mel Marvel’s Used Cars was an institution in Compton. Every car on his lot was good as new; at least that’s what his late-night TV ads said. He was a rotund white Texan who kept himself surrounded by pretty white girls in bathing suits, smiling for the cameras. Very often he had caged lions and trained elephants on the lot. Marvel was a con man who knew that most people wanted to be fooled.
A few years before, I’d bought a car from one of Mel’s salesmen, Charles Mung. It was a sky blue Falcon. My Ford was in the shop for a couple of weeks, and I thought I’d drive the Falcon around until mine was fixed. Then I’d give it to Jesus.
The trouble was that a back tire broke off on the way home from Compton. It popped right off the axle and rolled down the street.
I hired a tow truck and brought the car back to the lot.
Charles Mung was a tall white guy with freckles and cornflower blue eyes.
“Tire broke right off,” I told him under a blazing sun on the five-acre lot. It was only three hours into my thirty-day guarantee.
“We don’t cover accidents,” he replied as he turned to walk away.
I grabbed his arm, and three very big men came out of nowhere. They crowded me, freeing the salesman from my grip as they did so.
“You owe me four hundred dollars,” I said over an ugly car thug’s shoulder.
“Show Mr. Rawlins off the lot, will you, Thunder?” Mung replied.
They didn’t hurt me. Just deposited me on the curb.
“Come back here again,” Thunder, a polar bear of a man, told me, “and me and my friends will break all your fingers.”
It’s funny the things that stay with you. I was so humiliated by that treatment that all the way home on the bus I planned my revenge. I was going to get my gun and go back there. If they didn’t return my money, I was going to kill Mung and Thunder.
I was in the bedroom loading my third pistol when Mouse called.
“What’s wrong, man?” he asked after I’d only said hello.
I told him my problem and my intentions.
“Hold tight, Easy,” he said to me. “I got friends down there. Why’on’t you let me call ’em first?”
“They humiliated me, Ray. I ain’t gonna stand for that.”
“Do me a favor, Easy,” he said. “Let me call my friend first. If it don’t work, I’ll go down there with ya.”
I agreed, and later on, after Feather and Jesus got home from school, I came to my senses. I was about to go on a killing spree over four hundred dollars and four fools.
I made dinner and put the kids to bed.
I was sitting in the living room, watching the ten o’clock news, when there was a knock on my door. It was Charles Mung. He wore a thick white bandage that completely covered his left eye, and his right hand was swollen, obviously the source of great pain.
“Here,” he said, handing me a big manila envelope.
Before I could ask him what it was, he rushed away.
The envelope contained automobile registration papers and four hundred and twenty dollars. The car, which was parked in front of my house, was Mung’s own ’62 Cadillac.
I used the money to buy another car and gave the Caddy to my old friend Primo, who made travel money by selling American cars down in Mexico.
I LEFT BEFORE EATING but promised Feather and Easter that I’d be back for dinner.
The huge car lot was twice the size it had been the last time I was there. Mel had bought out the property across the street and built a three-story showroom. The showroom was surrounded by huge columns of red and blue balloons and topped with a forty-foot American flag.
The place was so big now that it seemed like a military installation.
I parked in the customers’ lot and walked toward the glittering steel-and-glass headquarters. When I reached the doorway, a skinny man in a bright green suit approached me.
“May I help you?” the gray-colored black man asked. This was also a new addition, a Negro salesman.
His eyes were fevered. His smile twisted like an earthworm in the sun.
“I need to speak to somebody in records,” I said, showing him my PI’s license.
He held the card between quivering fingers. He was a pill popper, no doubt. I was sure that he couldn’t concentrate on my identification.
He winked, blinked, and grimaced at the card for a few seconds and then handed it back.
“Brad Knowles,” he told me. “Out on the lot somewhere.”
“What does he look like?” I asked.
“Knowles,” the hopped-up salesman said. “Out on the lot.”
I WANDERED AROUND for a while looking for somebody named Knowles. Most of the people walking around were customers pretending that they knew something about cars. But there was security too. After the Watts riots of ’65 everybody had security: convenience and liquor stores, supermarkets, gas stations . . . everyplace but schools; our most precious possession, our children, were left to fend for themselves.
I went up to this one big brawny white guy and asked, “Brad Knowles?”
He pointed over my left shoulder. When I gazed in that direction I spied a white guy wearing a cherry red blazer. He was gabbing with a young white woman. If somebody looked at me the way he was gawking at her, I would have run or pulled out a gun. But the woman seemed to be enjoying the attention.
“Thanks,” I said to the white muscleman, and made my way across baking asphalt, past a hundred dying automobiles, toward the wolf and his willing prey.
“Mr. Knowles?” I said in my friendliest voice.
Even in that awful coat, Knowles was a handsome devil. The woman, who was plain faced and well built, frowned at me.
“Excuse me a moment, ma’am,” I said through the rising heat. “I just need to ask Mr. Knowles a quick question.”
“What is it?” he asked.
I wondered if I was a white man would he have put a sir on the end of that sentence.
�
��I bought a car from a man named Black,” I said as affably as I could. “He left his power tools behind the front seat. The only things I know for sure about him are that his first name is Christmas and he bought the car, truck actually, on this lot.”
Power tools, honest citizen — I had all the bases covered. Not only would I get the information, I might also receive a medal.
“Get the fuck off my lot,” Brad Knowles said to me.
I was actually speechless, so surprised that for a moment I forgot my deep sorrow. My mouth hung open.
“Do I have to call security and have you removed?” Brad added.
Despite my shock I could still shake my head and did so.
The plain white woman smiled at me, at my humiliation.
I turned and walked away, wondering what had happened.
Was it my interruption of his line on that woman? Was it racism? Or maybe they’d cheated Christmas on his truck. His complaint might have raised some hackles.
I OPENED MY CAR DOOR and waited a minute for the interior to cool down a little before I climbed in. I drove out of the lot and around the back of the big glass showroom, where a sign said there was overflow parking. I parked again and made my way into the building.
A young Asian woman, Korean I thought at the time, came up to me with a big smile on her face.
“May I help you, sir?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said as I looked through the glass walls, hoping I hadn’t been seen by the indelicate lot boss. “Brad Knowles told me that I could find out something I need to know from somebody in records.”
“Miss Goss?” the woman asked.
“Yes. That’s who it is.”
“Third floor. The stairs are behind you.”
THE STAIRWAY was next to the glass wall. As I made my way up, I felt like a hornet in a clear plastic bag. Just a glance at the building would have shown Knowles that I was there. All he had to do was put down his foot to get rid of me.
I’d hoped that the records office had solid walls to hide behind, but it didn’t. All that separated me from the outside world was a wall of colorless glass. I was the best man trying to take the groom’s place at the top of a three-tiered wedding cake.
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