I was reminded of earlier times, when she’d shout my name and then run into me like a small Sherman tank. She was a daddy’s girl. She’d been rough and full of guffaws and squeals.
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But now she lay back with a blood infection that no one on the North American continent knew how to cure.
“The prognosis is not good,” Dr. Beihn had said. “Make her comfortable and make sure she drinks lots of liquid . . .”
I would have drained Hoover Dam to save her life.
Bonnie had that strange look in her eye too. She was tall and dark skinned, Caribbean and lovely. She moved like the ocean, surging up out of that chair and into my arms. Her skin felt hot, as if somehow she was trying to draw the fever out of the girl and into her own body.
“I’ll go get the aspirin,” Bonnie whispered.
I released her and took her place in the folding chair next to my Feather’s pink bed. With my right hand I held the sponge against her forehead. She took my left hand in both of hers and squeezed my point finger and baby finger as hard as she could.
“Why am I so sick, Daddy?” she whined.
“It’s just a little infection, honey,” I said. “You got to wait until it works its way outta your system.”
“But it’s been so long.”
It had been twenty-three days since the diagnosis, a week longer than the doctor thought she’d survive.
“Did anybody come and visit you today?” I asked.
That got her to smile.
“Billy Chipkin did,” she said.
The flaxen-haired, bucktoothed white boy was the fifth and final child of a family that had migrated from Iowa after the war.
Billy’s devotion to my foundling daughter sometimes made my heart swell to the point that it hurt. He was two inches shorter than Feather and came to sit at her side every day after school.
He brought her homework and gossip from the playground.
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they’d hold hands while discussing some teacher’s unfair punish-ments of their unruly friends.
“What did Billy have to say?”
“He got long division homework and I showed him how to do it,” she said proudly. “He don’t know it too good, but if you show him he remembers until tomorrow.”
I touched Feather’s brow with the backs of three fingers. She seemed to be cool at that moment.
“Can I have some of Mama Jo’s black tar?” Feather asked.
Even the witch-woman, Mama Jo, had not been able to cure her. But Jo had given us a dozen black gummy balls, each wrapped up in its own eucalyptus leaf.
“If her fevah gets up past one-oh-three give her one’a these here to chew,” the tall black witch had said. “But nevah more than one in a day an’ aftah these twelve you cain’t give her no mo’.”
There were only three balls left.
“No, honey,” I said. “The fever’s down now.”
“What you do today, Daddy?” Feather asked.
“I saw Raymond.”
“Uncle Mouse?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do with him?”
“We just talked about old times.”
I told her about the time, twenty-seven years earlier, when Mouse and I had gone out looking for orange monarch butterflies that he intended to give his girlfriend instead of flowers.
We’d gone to a marsh that was full of those regal bugs, but we didn’t have a proper net and Raymond brought along some moonshine that Mama Jo made. We got so drunk that both of us had fallen into the muddy water more than once. By the end of the day Mouse had caught only one butterfly. And that night 1 5
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when we got to Mabel’s house, all dirty from our antics, she took one look at the orange-and-black monarch in the glass jar and set him free.
“He just too beautiful to be kept locked up in this bottle,” she told us.
Mouse was so angry that he stormed out of Mabel’s house and didn’t talk to her again for a week.
Feather usually laughed at this story, but that afternoon she fell asleep before I got halfway through.
I hated it when she fell asleep because I didn’t know if she’d wake up again.
w h e n i g o t b a c k to the living room Jesus and Benita were at the door.
“Where you two goin’?” I asked.
“Uh,” Juice grunted, “to the store for dinner.”
“How you doin’, Benita?” I asked the young woman.
She looked at me as if she didn’t understand English or as if I’d asked some extremely personal question that no gentleman should ask a lady.
Benny was in her mid-twenties. She’d had an affair with Mouse which broke her heart and led to an attempted suicide. Bonnie and I took her in for a while but now she had her own apartment.
She still came by to have a home-cooked meal now and then.
Bonnie and she had become friends. And she loved the kids.
Lately it had been good to have Benny around because when Bonnie and I needed to be away she’d stay at Feather’s side.
Jesus would have done it if we asked him to, but he was eighteen and loved being out on his homemade sailboat, cruising up and down the Southern California coast. We hadn’t told him 1 6
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how sick his sister actually was. They were so close we didn’t want to worry him.
“Fine, Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a too-high voice. “I got a job in a clothes store on Slauson. Miss Hilda designs everything she sells. She said she was gonna teach me.”
“Okay,” I said, not really wanting to hear about the young woman’s hopeful life. I wanted Feather to be telling me about her adventures and dreams.
When Benny and Jesus were gone Bonnie came out of the kitchen with a bowl full of spicy beef soup.
“Eat this,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”
Our living room was so small that we only had space for a love seat instead of a proper couch. I slumped down there and she sat on my lap shoving the first spoonful into my mouth.
It was good.
She fed me for a while, looking into my eyes. I could tell that she was thinking something very serious.
“What?” I asked at last.
“I spoke to the man in Switzerland today,” she said.
She waited for me to ask what he said but I didn’t. I couldn’t hear one more piece of bad news about Feather.
I turned away from her gaze. She touched my neck with four fingertips.
“He tested the blood sample that Vicki brought over,” she said. “He thinks that she’s a good candidate for the process.”
I heard the words but my mind refused to understand them.
What if they meant that Feather was going to die? I couldn’t take the chance of knowing that.
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“He thinks that he can cure her, baby,” Bonnie added, understanding the course of my grief. “He has agreed to let her apply to the Bonatelle Clinic.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“In Montreux?”
“Yes.”
“But why would they take a little colored girl in there? Didn’t you say that the Rockefellers and Kennedys go there?”
“I already told you,” Bonnie explained. “I met the doctor on an eight-hour flight from Ghana. I talked to him the whole time about Feather. I guess he felt he had to say yes. I don’t know.”
“What do we have to do next?”
“It’s not free, honey,” she said, but I already knew that. The reason I’d met with Mouse was to raise the cash we might need if the doctors agreed to see my little girl.
“They’ll need thirty-five thousand dollars before the treat-ments can start and at least fifteen t
housand just to be admitted.
It’s a hundred and fifty dollars a day to keep her in the hospital, and then the medicines are all unique, made to order based upon her blood, sex, age, body type, and over fifteen other cate-gories. There are five doctors and a nurse for each patient. And the process may take up to four months.”
We’d covered it all before but Bonnie found solace in details.
She felt that if she dotted every i and crossed every t then everything would turn out fine.
“How do you know that you can trust them?” I asked. “This could just be some scam.”
“I’ve been there, Easy. I visited the hospital. I told you that, baby.”
“But maybe they fooled you,” I said.
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I was afraid to hope. Every day I prayed for a miracle for Feather. But I had lived a life where miracles never happened.
In my experience a death sentence was just that.
“I’m no fool, Easy Rawlins.”
The certainty of her voice and her stare were the only chances I had.
“Money’s no problem,” I said, resolute in my conviction to go down to Texas and rob that armored car. I didn’t want Rayford or his partner to die. I didn’t want to spend a dozen years behind bars. But I’d do that and more to save my little girl.
I went out the back door and into the garage. From the back shelf I pulled down four paint cans labeled Latex Blue. Each was sealed tight and a quarter filled with oiled steel ball bearings to give them the heft of full cans of paint. On top of those pel-lets, wrapped in plastic, lay four piles of tax-free money I’d come across over the years. It was my children’s college fund. Twelve thousand dollars. I brought the money to Bonnie and laid it on her lap.
“What now?” I asked.
“In a few days I’ll take a flight with Vicki to Paris and then transfer to Switzerland. I’ll take Feather and bring her to Dr.
Renee.”
I took a deep breath but still felt the suffocation of fear.
“How will you get the rest?” she asked me.
“I’ll get it.”
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Jesus, Feather, and I were in a small park in Santa Monica we liked to go to when they were younger. I was holding Feather in my arms while she laughed and played catch with Jesus. Her laughter got louder and louder until it turned to screams and I realized that I was holding her too tightly. I laid her out on the grass but she had passed out.
“You killed her, Dad,” Jesus was saying. It wasn’t an indict-ment but merely a statement of fact.
“I know,” I said as the grasses surged upward and began swallowing Feather, blending her with their blades into the soil underneath.
I bent down but the grasses worked so quickly that by the time my lips got there, there was only the turf left to kiss.
I felt a buzzing vibration against my lips and jumped back, trying to avoid being stung by a hornet in the grass.
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Halfway out of bed I realized that the buzzing was my alarm clock.
It felt as if there was a crease in my heart. I took deep breaths, thinking in my groggy state that the intake of air would somehow inflate the veins and arteries.
“Easy.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“What time is it?”
I glanced at the clock with the luminescent turquoise hands.
“Four-twenty. Go back to sleep.”
“No,” Bonnie said, rising up next to me. “I’ll go check on Feather.”
She knew that I was hesitant to go into Feather’s room first thing in the morning. I was afraid to find her dead in there. I hated her sleep and mine. When I was a child I fell asleep once and awoke to find that my mother had passed in the night.
I went to the kitchen counter and plugged in the percolator. I didn’t have to check to see if there was water and coffee inside.
Bonnie and I had a set pattern by then. She got the coffee urn ready the night before and I turned it on in the morning.
I sat down heavily on a chrome and yellow vinyl dinette chair.
The vibrations of the hornet still tickled my lips. I started thinking of what would happen if a bee stung the human tongue.
Would it swell up and suffocate the victim? Is that all it would take to end a life?
Bonnie’s hand caressed the back of my neck.
“She’s sleeping and cool,” she whispered.
The first bubble of water jumped up into the glass knob at the top of the percolator. I took in a deep breath and my heart smoothed out.
Bonnie pulled a chair up beside me. She was wearing a white 2 1
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lace slip that came down to the middle of her dark brown thighs.
I wore only briefs.
“I was thinking,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I love you and I want to be with you and only you.”
When she didn’t say anything I put my hand on hers.
“Let’s get Feather well first, Easy. You don’t want to make these big decisions when you’re so upset. You don’t have to worry — I’m here.”
“But it’s not that,” I argued.
When she leaned over to nuzzle my neck the coffee urn started its staccato beat in earnest. I got up to make toast and we ate in silence, holding hands.
After we’d eaten I went in and kissed Feather’s sleeping face and made it out to my car before the sun was up.
i p u l l e d i n t o the parking lot at five-nineteen, by my watch.
There was an orangish-yellow light under a pile of dark clouds rising behind the eastern mountains. I used my key to unlock the pedestrian gate and then relocked it after I’d entered.
I was the supervising senior head custodian of Sojourner Truth Junior High School, an employee in good standing with the LAUSD. I had over a dozen people who reported directly to me and I was also the manager of all the plumbers, painters, car-penters, electricians, locksmiths, and glaziers who came to service our plant. I was the highest-ranking black person on the campus of a school that was eighty percent black. I had read the study plans for almost every class and often played tutor to the boys and girls who would come to me before they’d dream of asking their white teachers for help. If a big boy decided to see if he could intimidate a small woman teacher I dragged him down to 2 2
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the main office, where the custodians congregated, and let him know, in no uncertain terms, what would happen to him if I were to lose my temper.
I was on excellent terms with Ada Masters, the diminutive and wealthy principal. Between us we had the school running smooth as satin.
I entered the main building and started my rounds, going down the hallways looking for problems.
A trash can had not been emptied by the night custodian, Miss Arnold, and there were two lights out in the third-floor hallway. The first floor needed mopping. I made meaningless mental notes of the chores and then headed down to the lower campus.
After checking out the yards and bungalows down there I went to the custodians’ building to sit and think. I loved that job.
It might have seemed like a lowly position to many people, both black and white, but it was a good job and I did many good things while I was there. Often, when parents were having trouble with their kids or the school, I was the first one they went to. Because I came from the South I could translate the rules and expectations of the institution that many southern Negroes just didn’t understand. And if the vice principals or teachers overstepped their bounds I could always put in a word with Miss Masters. She listened to me because she knew that I knew what was what among the population of Watts.
“Ain’t is a valid negative if you use it correctly and have never been told that it isn’t proper language,” I once said to her when an English teacher, Miss Patterson, dropped a student two whole letter grades just for
using ain’t one time in a report paper.
Miss Masters looked at me as if I had come from some other planet and yet still spoke her tongue.
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“You’re right,” she said in an amazed tone. “Mr. Rawlins, you’re right.”
“And you’re white,” I replied, captive to the rhyme and the irony.
We laughed, and from that day on we had weekly meetings where she queried me about what she called my ghetto pedagogy.
They paid me nine thousand dollars a year to do that service.
Not nearly enough to float a loan for the thirty-five-plus thousand I needed to maybe save my daughter.
I owned two apartment buildings and a small house with a big yard, all in and around Watts. But after the riots, property values in the black neighborhoods had plummeted. I owed more on the mortgages than the places were worth.
In the past few days I had called John and Jackson and Jewelle and the bank. No one but Mouse had come through with an idea. I wondered if at my trial they would take into account all of my good deeds at Truth.
a t a b o u t a q u a r t e r to seven I went out to finish my
rounds. My morning man, Ace, would have been there by then, unlocking the gates and doors for the students, teachers, and staff.
Halfway up the stairs to the upper campus I passed the mid-way lunch court. I thought I saw a motion in there and took the detour out of habit. A boy and girl were kissing on one of the benches. Their faces were plastered together, his hand was on her knee and her hand was on his. I couldn’t tell if she was urging him on or pushing him off. Maybe she didn’t know either.
“Good morning,” I said cheerily.
Those two kids jumped back from each other as if a powerful spring had been released between them. She was wearing a 2 4
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short plaid skirt and a white blouse under a green sweater. He had the jeans and T-shirt that almost every boy wore. They both looked at me speechlessly — exactly the same way Jesus and Benita had looked.
My shock was almost as great as those kids’. Eighteen-year-old Jesus and Benita in her mid-twenties . . . But my surprise subsided quickly.
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