When the man smiled I could see that he was missing two or three teeth. But instead of making him ugly the spaces reminded me of a child playing pirate with pasted-on whiskers and a cos-tume that his mother made from scraps.
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You know about karma, brother?” Dream Dog asked as I snaked my hand down to turn the lock on the doorknob.
“Hindu religion,” I said, remembering a talk I’d had with Jackson Blue in which he explained how much he disagreed with the Indian system of the moral interpretation of responsibility.
You know, the undersized genius had said, ain’t no way in the world that black folks could’a done enough bad to call all them centuries’a pain down on our heads.
Dream Dog smiled. “Yeah. Hindu. All about what you do an’
how it comes back to you.”
“Is this apron Cinnamon’s?” I asked.
We were in the door.
“Sure is. But you know she wasn’t really a maid or nuthin’ like that. She had a business degree from Berkeley and wanted to get on Wall Street. Oh yeah, that Philomena got her some spunk.”
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“I knew she was in school,” I said. “The whole family is very proud of her. That’s why they’re so worried. Did she tell you where she was going?”
“Uh-uh,” Dream Dog said while he gauged my words.
The utility room led into a long kitchen that had a lengthy butcher block counter with a copper sink on one side and a six-burner stove-oven on the other. It was a well-appointed kitchen with copper pots hanging from the walls and glass cabinets filled with all kinds of canned goods, spices, and fine china. It was very neat and ordered, even the teacup set tidily in the copper sink spoke to the owner’s sense of order.
Dream Dog opened a cabinet and pulled down a box of Oreo cookies. He took out three and then placed the box back on the shelf.
“Axel keeps ’em for me,” he said. “My mom can’t eat ’em on account’a she’s got an allergy to coconut oil and sometimes they use coconut oil in these here. But you know I love ’em. An’ Axel keeps ’em for me on this shelf right here.”
There was a reverence and pride in Dream Dog’s words —
and something else too.
t h e l i v i n g r o o m
had three plush chaise lounges set in a square with one side missing. The backless sofas stood upon at least a dozen Persian rugs. The carpets had been thrown with no particular design one on top of the other and gave the room a definitely Arabian flavor. The smell of incense helped the mood as did the stone mosaics hung upon the walls. These tiled images were obviously old, probably original, coming from Rome and maybe the Middle East. One was of a snarling, long-tongued wolf harrying a naked brown maiden; another one was a scene of 6 4
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a bacchanal with men, women, children, and dogs drinking, dancing, kissing, fornicating, and leaping for joy.
In each of the four corners was a five-foot-high Grecian urn glazed in black and brown-red and festooned with the images of naked men in various competitions.
“I love these couches, man,” Dream Dog said to me. He had stretched out on the middle lounger. “They’re worth a lotta money. I told Axel that somebody might come in and steal his furniture while he was outta town, and that’s when he asked me to look out for him.”
“He outta town a lot?”
“Yeah. For the past year he been goin’ to Germany and Switzerland and Cairo. You know Cairo’s in Egypt and Egypt is part of Africa. I learned that from a brother talks down on the campus before they have the Congo drum line.”
“You think he’s in Cairo now?” I asked.
“Nah, he’s always down at the campus on Sunday talkin’ history before the drum line.”
“Not the guy at school,” I said patiently, “Axel.”
Dream Dog bounced off the couch and held an Oreo out to me.
“Cookie?”
I’m not much for sweets but even if I had a sugar tooth the size of Texas I wouldn’t have eaten from his filthy claws.
“Watchin’ my weight,” I said.
On a side table, set at the nexus where two of the loungers met, were two squat liquor glasses. Both had been filled with brandy but the drinks had evaporated, leaving a golden film at the bottom of each glass. Next to the glasses was an ashtray in which a lit cigarette had been set and left to burn down to its 6 5
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filter. There was also a photograph of a man, his arms around an older woman, with them both looking at the camera.
“Who’s this?” I asked my companion.
“That’s Axel and his mom. She died three years ago,” Dream Dog said. “His father passed away from grief a year and a half later.”
The younger Bowers couldn’t have been over twenty-five, maybe younger. He had light brown hair and a handsome smile.
You could tell by his clothes and his mother’s jewelry that there was money there. But there was also sorrow in both their smiles and I thought that maybe a poor childhood in southern Louisiana wasn’t the worst place that a man could come from.
“I told him that he should open the drapes too,” Dream Dog was saying. “I mean God gives sunlight to warm you and to let you see.”
“Where’s the bedroom?” I asked.
“Axel’s cool though,” my new friend said as he led me through a double-wide door on the other side of the room. “He comes from money and stuff, but he knows that people are worth more than money and that we got to share the wealth, that a ship made outta gold will sink . . .”
He flipped a wall switch and we found ourselves in a wide, wood-paneled hallway. Down one side of the hall were Japanese woodprints framed in simple cherrywood. Each of these prints (which looked original) had the moon in one aspect or another as part of the subject. There were warriors and poets, fishermen and fine ladies. Down the other side were smaller paintings. I recognized one that I’d seen in an art book at Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. It was the work of Paul Klee. Upon closer examination I saw that all of the paintings on that side of the wall were done by him.
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“I paint some too,” Dream Dog said when I stopped to exam-ine the signature. “Animals mostly. Dogs and cats and ducks. I told Axel that he could have some of my drawings when he got tired’a this stuff.”
It was a large bedroom. The oversized bed seemed like a raft on a wide river of blue carpet. The sheets and covers were a jaundiced yellow and the windows looked out under a broad redwood that dominated the backyard.
A newspaper, the Chronicle, was folded at the foot of the bed.
The date was March 29.
There were whiskey glasses at the side of the unmade bed.
They also had the sheen of dried liquor. The pillows smelled sweetly, of a powerful perfume. I had the feeling that vigorous sex had transpired there before the end, but that might have been some leftover feeling I had about Maya Adamant.
The room was so large that it had its own dressing nook. I thought that this was a very feminine touch for a man, but then maybe the previous owners had been a couple and this was the woman’s corner.
There was an empty briefcase next to the cushioned brown hassock that sat there between three mirrors. Next to the handle was a shiny brass nameplate that had the initials ANB stamped on it.
There was a bottle of cologne on the little dressing table; it smelled nothing like those pillows.
“Axel entertain a lot?” I asked my hippie guide.
“Oh man,” Dream Dog said. “I seen three, four women in here at the same time. Axel gets down. And he shares the wealth too. Sometimes he calls me in and we all get so high that nobody knows who’s doin’ what to who — if you know what I mean.”
I did not really know and felt no need for clarification.
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; The dressing table had three drawers. One contained two plastic bags of dried leaves, marijuana by the smell of them. Another drawer held condoms and various lubricants. The bottom drawer held a typed letter, with an official heading, from a man named Haffernon. There was also a handwritten envelope with Axel’s name scrawled on it. There was no stamp or address or postmark on that letter.
“I’m going to take these letters,” I said to my escort. “Maybe I can get to Axel or Cinnamon through somebody here.”
“But you’re gonna leave the dope?” Dream Dog sounded almost disappointed.
“I’m not a thief, brother.”
The little white man smiled and I realized that his attitude toward me was different from that of most whites. He was protect-ing his friend from invasion, but this had nothing to do with my being black. That was a rare experience for me at that time.
There was an empty teacup on the dressing table too. It was also dried up. From the smell I knew that it had been a very strong brew.
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When we were back out on the sidewalk I felt as if a weight had been taken off of me. Something about the house, how it seemed as if it were frozen into a snapshot, made me feel that something sudden and violent had occurred.
“You spend a lot of time with Bowers?” I asked the hippie.
“He gives these big old dinners and your cousin’s always there with some other straights from over in Frisco. Axel buys real good wine in big bottles and has Hannah’s Kitchen make a vegetarian feast.”
Dream Dog was around thirty, but he looked older because of the facial hair and skin weathered by many days and nights outside.
I was smoking Parliaments at that time. I offered him one and he took it. I lit us both up and we stood there on Derby surrounded by all kinds of hippies and music and multicolored cars.
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“We trip a lot,” Dream Dog said.
“What’s that?”
“Drop acid.”
“What kind of acid?” I asked.
“LSD. Where you from? We drop acid. We trip.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. You do drugs together.”
“Not drugs, man,” Dream Dog said with disdain. “Acid. Drugs close down your mind. They put you to sleep. Acid opens your crown chakra. It lets God leak in — or the devil.”
I didn’t know very much about psychedelics back then. I’d heard about the “acid test” that they gave at certain clubs up on Sunset Strip but that wasn’t my hangout. I knew my share of heroin addicts, glue sniffers, and potheads. But this sounded like something else.
“What happens when you drop?” I asked.
“Trip,” he said, correcting my usage.
“Okay. What happens?”
“This one time it was really weird. He played an album by Yusef Lateef. Rite of Spring but in a jazz mode. And there was this chick there named Polly or Molly . . . somethin’ like that.
And we all made love and ate some brownies that she was sellin’
door-to-door. I remember this one moment when me and Axel were each suckin’ on a nipple and I felt like I was a baby and she was as big as the moon. I started laughin’ and I wanted to go off in the corner but I had to crawl because I was a baby and I didn’t know how to walk yet.”
Dream Dog was back in the hallucination. His snaggletoothed grin was beatific.
“What did Axel do?” I asked.
“That’s when his bad trip started,” Dream Dog said. His smile faded. “He remembered something about his dad and that made 7 0
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him mad. It was his dad and two of his dad’s friends. He called them vulture-men feeding off of carrion. He ran around the ashram swinging this stick. He knocked out this tooth’a mines right here.” Dream Dog flipped up his lip and pointed at the gap.
“Why was he so mad?” I asked.
“It’s always somethin’ inside’a you,” the hippie explained. “I mean it’s always there but you never look at it, or maybe on the trip you see what you always knew in a new way.
“After he knocked me down Polly put her arms around him and kissed his head. She kept tellin’ him that things were gonna be fine, that he could chase the vultures away and bury the dead . . .”
“And he calmed down?”
“He went into a birth trip, man. All the way back to the fetus in the womb. He went through the whole trip just like as if he was being born again. He came out and started cryin’ and me and Polly held him. But then she an’ me were holdin’ each other and before you know it we’re makin’ love again. But by then Axel was sitting up and smiling. He told us that he had been given a plan.”
“What plan?”
“He didn’t say,” Dream Dog said, shaking his head and smiling. “But he was happy and we all went to sleep. We slept for twenty-four hours and when we woke up Axel was all calm and sure. That was when he started doin’ all’a that travelin’ and stuff.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“A year maybe. A little more.”
“Around the time his father died?” I asked.
“Now that you say it . . . yeah. His father died two weeks before — that’s why we did acid.”
“And where is this Polly or Molly?”
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“Her? I dunno, man. She was goin’ from door to door sellin’
brownies. Axel an’ me were ready to trip and we asked her if she wanted to join in. Axel told her that if she did he’d buy all’a her brownies.”
“But I thought you said that you were at this other place.
Asham?”
“Ashram,” Dream Dog said. “That’s the prayer temple that Axel built out behind the trees in his backyard. That’s his holy place.”
“Where do you live?” I asked Dream Dog.
“On this block mainly.”
“Which house?”
“There’s about five or six let me crash now and then. You know it depends on how they’re feelin’ and if I got some money to throw in for the soup.”
“If I need to find you is there somebody around here that might know how to get in touch?” I asked.
“Sadie down in the purple place at the end of the block. They call her place the Roller Derby ’cause of the street and because so many people crash there. She knows where I am usually.
Yeah, Sadie.”
Dream Dog’s gaze wandered down the street, fastening upon a young woman wearing a red wraparound dress and a crimson scarf. She was barefoot.
“Hey, Ruby!” Dream Dog called. “Wait up.”
The girl smiled and waved.
“One more thing,” I said before he could sprint away.
“What’s that, Dupree?”
“Do you know where Axel’s San Francisco office is?”
“The People’s Legal Aid Center. Just go on down to Haight-Ashbury and ask anyone.”
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I handed Dream Dog a twenty-dollar bill and proffered my hand. He smiled and pulled me into a fragrant hug. Then he ran off to join the red-clad Ruby.
The idea of karma was still buzzing around my head. I was thinking that maybe if I was nice to Dream Dog, someone somewhere would be kind to my little girl.
i w a l k e d a r o u n d
the block after Dream Dog was gone. I didn’t want him or anybody else to see me investigate the ashram, so I came in through one of the neighbors’ driveways and into the backyard of Axel Bowers.
It was a garden house set behind two weeping willows. You might not have seen it even looking straight at it because the walls and doors were painted green like the leaves and lawn.
The door was unlocked.
Axel’s holy place was a single room with bare and unfinished pine floors and a niche in one of the walls where there sat a large brass elephant that had six arms. Its beard sprouted many half-burned sticks of incense.
Their sweet odor filled the room but there was a stink under that.
A five-foot-square bamboo mat marked the exact center of the floor but beyond that there was no other furniture.
All of the smells, both good and bad, seemed to emanate from the brass elephant. It was five feet high and the same in width.
At its feet lay a traveling trunk with the decals of many nations glued to it.
Somebody had already snapped off the padlock, and so all I had to do was throw the trunk open. Because of the foul odor that cow-ered underneath the sweet incense I thought that I’d find a body in the trunk. It was too small for a man but maybe, I thought, there would be some animal sacrificed in the holy ashram.
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Failing an animal corpse, I thought I might find some other fine art like the pieces that graced the house.
The last thing I expected was a trove of Nazi memorabilia.
And not just the run-of-the-mill pictures of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags. There was a dagger that had a garnet-encrusted swastika on its hilt, and the leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf was signed by Hitler himself. The contents of the trunk were all jumbled, which added to the theory that someone had already searched it. Bobby Lee said that he’d sent people to look for Philomena — maybe this was their work.
There was a pair of leather motorcycle gloves in the trunk. I accepted this providence and donned the gloves. I’d made sure to touch as few surfaces as possible in the house but gloves were even better.
A box for a deck of cards held instead a stack of pocket photographs of a man I did not recognize posing with Mussolini and Hitler, Göring and Hess. The man had an ugly-looking scar around his left eye. That orb looked out in stunned blindness.
For a moment I remembered the boy I killed in Germany after he had slaughtered the white Americans who’d made fun of me.
I also remembered the concentration camp we’d liberated and the starved, skeletal bodies of the few survivors.
The putrid odor was worse inside the trunk but there was no evidence of even a dead rat. There were a Nazi captain’s uniform and various weapons, including a well-oiled Luger with three clips of ammo. There was also, hidden inside a package that looked like it contained soap, a thick stack of homemade pornographic postcards. They were photographs of the same heavyset man who had posed with the Nazi leaders. Now he was in various sexual positions with young women and girls. He had a very large erection and all of the pictures were of him penetrating 7 4
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