“That’s where you live?”
“We heard about this commune up there,” the boy said. He smelled of patchouli oil and sweat.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?” he asked.
“Commune. What’s that?”
“You never heard of a commune, man?” the boy asked.
“My name’s Easy,” I said. “Easy Rawlins.”
“Cool,” the girl crooned.
I suppose she meant my name.
“Eric,” the boy said.
“Like the Viking,” I said. “You got the red hair for it.”
He took this as a compliment.
“I’m Star,” the girl said. “An’ a commune is where everybody lives and works together without anybody owning shit or tellin’
anybody else how to live.”
“Kinda like the kibbutz or the Russian farms,” I said.
“Hey man,” Eric said, “don’t put that shit on us.”
“I’m not puttin’ anything on you,” I replied. “I’m just trying to 1 1 2
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understand what you’re saying by comparing it with other places that sound like your commune.”
“There’s never been anything like us, man,” Eric said, filled with the glory of his own dreams. “We’re not gonna live like you people did. We’re gettin’ away from that nine-to-five bullshit.
People don’t have to own everything. The wild lands are free.”
“Yeah,” Star said. Her tone was filled with Eric’s love for himself. “At Cresta everybody gets their own tepee and a share in what everybody else has.”
“Cresta is the name for your commune?”
“That’s right,” Eric said with such certainty that I almost laughed.
“Why don’t you come with us?” Star asked from the backseat.
I looked up and into her eyes through the rearview mirror.
There was a yearning there but I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. Her simple offer shocked me. I could have kept on driving north with those children, to their hippie farm in the middle of nowhere. I knew how to raise a garden and build a fire. I knew how to be poor and in love.
“Watch it!” Eric shouted.
I had drifted into the left lane. A car’s horn blared. I jerked my rented car back just in time. When I looked up into the mirror, Star was still there looking into my eyes.
“That was close, man,” Eric said. Now his voice also contained the pride of saving us. I was once an arrogant boy like him.
“I can’t,” I said into the mirror.
“Why not?” she asked.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen . . . almost.”
“I got a daughter just a few years younger than you. She’s real 1 1 3
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sick. Real sick. I got to get her to a doctor in Switzerland or she’ll die. So no woods for me quite yet.”
“Where is your daughter?” Star asked.
“Los Angeles.”
“Maybe it’s the smog killin’ her,” Eric said. “Maybe if you got her out of there she’d be okay.”
Eric would never know how close he’d come to getting his nose broken in a moving car. It was only Star’s steady gaze that saved him.
“I had a friend once,” I said. “Him and me were something like you guys. We used to ride the rails down in Texas and Louisiana.”
“Ride the rails?” Eric said.
“Jumping into empty boxcars, trains,” I said.
“Like hitchin’,” Eric said.
“Yeah. One night in Galveston we went out on a tear —”
“What’s that?” Star asked.
“A drinking binge. Anyway the next day I woke up and Hollister was nowhere to be seen. He was completely gone. I waited a day or two but then I had to move on before the local authorities arrested me for vagrancy and put me on the chain gang.”
I could see that Eric was now seeing me in a new light. But I didn’t care about that young fool.
“What happened to your friend?” Star asked.
“Twenty years later I was driving down in Compton and I saw him walking down the street. He’d gotten fat and his hair was thinning but it was Hollister all right.”
“Did you ask him what happened?” Eric asked.
“He’d met a girl after I’d passed out that night. They spent the night together and the next couple’a days. They drank the whole time. One day Holly woke up and realized that at some point they’d gotten married — he didn’t even remember saying I do.”
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“Whoa,” Eric said in a low tone.
“Did they stay together?” Star wanted to know.
“I went back with Hollister to his house and met her there.
They had four kids. He was a plumber for the county and she baked pies for a restaurant down the street. You know what she told me?”
“What?” both children asked at once.
“That on the evening she’d met Holly I had picked her up at the local juke joint. We’d hit it off pretty good but I drank too much and passed out. When Holly came into the lean-to where we were stayin’, Sherry, that was his wife’s name, asked him if he would walk her home. That was when they got together.”
“He took your woman?” Eric said indignantly.
“Not mine, brother,” I said. “That lean-to was our own private little commune. What was mine was me, and Sherry had her own thing to give.”
Eric frowned at that, and I believed that I was the first shadow on his bright notions of communal life. That made me smile.
I let them out at the foot of the off-ramp I had to take to get to the airport.
While Eric was wrestling the backpacks out of the backseat Star put her skinny arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re really great.”
I gave her ten dollars and told her to stay safe.
“God’s looking after me,” she said.
Eric handed her a backpack then and they crossed the road.
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18
After leaving my Hertz car at their airport lot I went to the ticket counter. The flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Western Airlines was $24.95.
They took my credit card with no problem.
While waiting for my flight I called home and got Jesus. I gave him the flight number and told him to be there to pick me up.
He didn’t ask any questions. Jesus would have crossed the Pacific for me and never asked why.
In a small airport store — where they sold candy bars, newspapers, and cigarettes — I bought a large brown teddy bear for $6.95.
I sat in the bulkhead aisle seat next to a young white woman who wore a rainbow-print dress that came to about midthigh.
She was a beauty but I wasn’t thinking about her.
I buckled my seat belt and unfolded the morning paper.
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Ky had given in to Buddhist pressure and agreed to have free elections in South Vietnam. The bastion of democracy, the United States, however, said publicly that it still backed the dictator.
A couple who were going to lose a baby they were trying to adopt had attempted suicide. They didn’t die but their baby did.
I put that paper away.
The captain told us to fasten our seat belts and the stewardess showed us how it was done. The engine on the big 707 began to roar and whine.
“Hello,” the young woman said.
“Hi.” I gave her just a glance.
“My name is Candice.” She held out a hand.
It would have been impolite for me to ignore her gesture of friendship.
“Easy Rawlins.”
“Do you fly often, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Every now and then. My girlfriend’s a stewardess for Air France.”
“I don’t. This is only my
second flight and I’m scared to death.”
She wouldn’t let go of my hand. I squeezed and said, “We’ll make it through this one together.”
We held hands through the takeoff and for five minutes into the ascent. Every now and then she increased the pressure. I matched the force of her grip. By the time we were at full alti-tude she had calmed down.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No problem.”
I picked up the paper again but the words scrambled away from my line of vision. I was thinking about Dream Dog and 1 1 7
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karma, then about Axel Bowers and the humiliating treatment he’d received after his death. I thought about that white girl who just needed somebody to hold on to regardless of his color.
Maybe the hippies were right, I thought. Maybe we should all go outside in our underwear and protest the way of the world.
t h e y o u n g w o m a n and I didn’t speak another word to each other. There was no need to.
When I got out of the gate in L.A., Jesus was there waiting for me.
“Hi, Dad,” he said and shook my hand.
He’d driven my car to the airport and I let him drive going back home. He took La Cienega where I would have taken the freeway but that was okay by me.
“Feather had fever again this morning,” he said. “Bonnie gave her Mama Jo’s medicine and it came down.”
“Good,” I said, trying to hide my fear.
“Is she gonna die, Dad?”
“Why you say that?”
“Bonnie told Benny why she had to stay and look after Feather and Benny told me. Is she gonna die?”
There never was a brother and sister closer than Jesus and Feather. I had taken him out of a bad situation when he was an infant, and when I brought Feather into our home he took to her like a mother hen.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“But if Bonnie takes her to Switzerland they might save her?”
“Yeah. They saved other people with infections like hers.”
“Do you want me to go with them?”
“No. The doctors can help. What I need is the money to pay those doctors.”
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“I could sell my boat.”
That boat was everything to Jesus.
“No, son. I think I got a line on a moneymaker. It’s gonna be okay.”
I had planned to talk to him about Benita and the difference in their ages. But when he offered to give his boat up for Feather I couldn’t imagine what there was I had to tell him.
b o n n i e h a d p a c k e d
a large traveling suitcase for Feather.
It seemed as if she’d taken every toy, doll, dress, and book that Feather owned. When I got there they were ready to go to the airport.
There was a bright chrome and red canvas wheelchair in the living room.
Bonnie came out and kissed me, and even though I tried to put some tenderness into the caress she leaned away and gave me an odd stare.
“What’s wrong?”
“If I was to tell you the things I’d seen in the last two days you wouldn’t be asking me that,” I said truthfully.
Bonnie nodded, still frowning.
“Could you put the suitcase into the trunk?” she asked. “The wheelchair folds up and can go on top.”
I knew that they had to get to the airport soon and so I got to work. Jesus helped me figure out that the wheelchair had to go in the backseat.
When I got back in the house Feather was screaming. I ran into her room to find her struggling with Bonnie.
“I want you to carry me, Daddy,” she pleaded.
“It’s okay,” I said and I took her up in my arms.
*
*
*
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b o n n i e d r o v e , Feather slept on my lap, and I stared out the window, wondering how long it would take to drive down to Palestine, Texas. I knew that my work for Lee would be a dead end. Axel was dead. Philomena was probably dead. The papers were long gone. I had gotten a Luger and fifteen hundred dollars in the deal. I could use the German pistol to press against Rayford’s willing neck.
f e a t h e r w o k e u p
when we pulled into the employees’ lot at the airport. She was happy to have a wheelchair and she raced ahead of us at the special employee entrance to TWA. They had to go to San Francisco first and then transfer to the polar flight to Paris. I saw them to the special entrance for the crew.
A woman I recognized met us there — Giselle Martin.
“Aunt Giselle,” Feather cried.
Giselle was a friend of Bonnie’s. She was tall and thin, a brunette with a delicate porcelain beauty that you’d miss if you didn’t take time with it. They worked together for Air France.
She was there to help with Feather.
“Allo, ma chérie,” the French flight attendant said to my little girl. “These big strong men are going to carry you up into the plane.”
Two brawny white men were coming toward us from a doorway to the terminal building.
“I want Daddy to take me,” Feather said.
“It is the rules, ma chérie,” Giselle said.
“That’s okay, honey,” I said to Feather. “They’ll carry you up and then I’ll come buckle you in.”
“You promise?”
“I swear.”
The workmen took hold of the chair from the front and back.
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Feather grabbed on to the armrests, looking scared. I was scared too. I watched them go all the way up the ramp.
I was about to follow when Bonnie touched my arm and asked, “What’s wrong, Easy?”
I had planned for that moment. I thought that if we found ourselves alone and Bonnie wondered at my behavior, I’d tell her all the grisly details of Axel Bowers’s death. I turned to her, but when she looked into my eyes, as so many women had in the past few days, I couldn’t bring myself to lie.
“I read a lot, you know,” I said.
“I know that.” Her dark skin and almond eyes were the most beautiful I had ever seen. Two days ago I had wanted to marry her.
“I read the papers and all about anything I have an interest in.
I read about a group of African dignitaries getting the Senegalese award of service that was symbolized by a bronze pin with a little design enameled on it — a bird in red and white . . .”
There was no panic on Bonnie’s face. The fact that I knew that she had recently received such an important gift from a suitor only served to sadden her.
“He was the only one who could get Feather into that hospital, Easy . . .”
“So there’s nothing between you?”
Bonnie opened her mouth but it was her turn not to lie.
“Thank him for me . . . when you see him,” I said.
I walked past her and up into the plane.
“ w i l l y o u c o m e
and see me in the Alps, Daddy?” Feather asked as I buckled her seat belt.
The plane was still empty.
“I’ll try. But you know Bonnie’ll be there to look after you. And before you know it you’ll be all better and back home again.”
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“But you’ll try and come?”
“I will, honey.”
I walked past Bonnie as she came up the aisle.
Neither of us spoke.
What was there to say?
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19
From the terminal building I could make out the white bow in Feather’s hair through a porthole in the plane. And even though she looked out now and then she never saw me waving. Her skin had been warm when I buckled her in but her eyes weren’t feverish. Bonnie had Mama Jo’s last ball of medicine, I’d made sure of that. Bonnie wouldn’t let Feather die no matter who her heart be
longed to.
The passengers filed on. Final boarding was announced. The jet taxied away and finally, after a long delay, it nosed its way above the amber layer of smog that covered the city.
I stayed at the window watching as a dozen jets lined up and took off.
“Mister?”
She was past sixty with blue-gray hair and a big red coat made 1 2 3
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from cotton — the Southern California answer to the eastern overcoat. There was concern on her lined white face.
“Yes?” My voice cracked.
“Are you all right?”
That’s when I realized that tears were running from my eyes. I tried to speak but my throat closed. I nodded and touched the woman’s shoulder. Then I staggered away amid the stares of dozens of travelers.
i d i d n ’ t t u r n the ignition key right away.
“Snap out of it, Easy,” a voice, only partly my own, said. “You know once a man break down the wreck ain’t far off. You don’t have no time to wallow. You don’t have it like some rich boy can feel sorry for hisself.”
I drove on surface streets with no destination in mind. Even the next day I couldn’t have recalled the route I’d taken. But my instinct was to head in the direction of my office.
I was on Avalon, crossing Manchester, when I heard two horns. I looked up just as my car slammed into a white Chrysler.
The next thing I did was to check out the traffic light — it was against me. I had been distracted and a fool for the past few days, but something told me to take that German pistol out of my pocket and hide it under my seat before I did anything else.
I jumped out of my car and ran to the boatlike Chrysler.
There was a middle-aged black couple in the front seat. The man, who wore a brown suit, was clutching his arm and the woman, who was easily twice the man’s size, was bleeding freely from a cut over her left eye.
“Nate,” she was saying. “Nate, are you okay?”
The man held his left arm between the elbow and shoulder.
I opened the door.
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“Let’s get you outta there, man,” I said.
“Thank you,” he mouthed, his face twisted with the pain.
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