Cinnamon Kiss (3 page)

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.”

J
esus, 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 indictment 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.

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 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 PULLED INTO 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, carpenters, 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 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.

“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.

AT ABOUT A QUARTER 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 midway 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 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.

“Go on up to your lockers or somethin’,” I said to the children.

As they scuttled off I thought about the Mexican boy I had adopted. He’d been a man since the age of ten, taking care of me and Feather like a fierce and silent mama bear. Benita was a lost child and here my boy had a good job at a supermarket and a sailboat he’d made with his own hands.

Thinking of Feather dying in her bed, I couldn’t get angry with them for hurrying after love.

The rest of the campus was still empty. I recognized myself in the barren yards and halls and classrooms. Every step I took or door I closed was an exit and a farewell.

“GOOD MORNING, Mr. Rawlins,” Ada Masters said when I appeared at her door. “Come in. Come in.”

She was sitting on top of her desk, shoes off, rubbing her left foot.

“These damn new shoes hurt just on the walk from my car to the office.”

We never stood on ceremony or false manners. Though white and very wealthy, she was like many down-to-earth black women I’d known.

“I’m taking a leave of absence,” I said and the crease twisted my heart again.

“For how long?”

“It might be a week or a month,” I said. But I was thinking that it might be ten years with good behavior.

“When?”

“Effective right now.”

I knew that Ada was hurt by my pronouncement. But she and I respected each other and we came from a generation that did not pry.

“I’ll get the paperwork,” she said. “And I’ll have Kathy send you whatever you have to sign.”

“Thanks.” I turned to leave.

“Can I be of any help, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked my profile.

She was a rich woman. A very rich woman if I knew my clothes and jewelry. Maybe if I was a different man I could have stayed there by borrowing from her. But at that time in my life I was unable to ask for help. I convinced myself that Ada wouldn’t be able to float me that kind of loan. And one more refusal would have sunk me.

“Thanks anyway,” I said. “This is somethin’ I got to take care of for myself.”

Life is such a knotty tangle that I don’t know even today whether I made the right decision turning away from her offer.

I
had changed the sign on my office door from EASY RAWLINS—RESEARCH AND DELIVERY to simply INVESTIGATIONS. I made the switch after the Los Angeles Police Department had granted me a private detective’s license for my part in keeping the Watts riots from flaring up again by squelching the ugly rumor that a white man had murdered a black woman in the dark heart of our boiler-pot city.

I went to my fourth-floor office on Central and Eighty-sixth to check the answering machine that Jackson Blue had given me. But I found little hope there. Bonnie had left a message saying that she’d called the clinic in Montreux and they would allow Feather’s admission with the understanding that the rest of the money would be forthcoming.

Forthcoming. The people in that neighborhood had heart disease and high blood pressure, cancer of every type, and deep self-loathing for being forced to their knees on a daily basis. There was a war waging overseas, being fought in great part by young black men who had no quarrel with the Vietnamese people. All of that was happening but I didn’t have the time to worry about it. I was thinking about a lucky streak in Vegas or that maybe I should go out and rob a bank all on my own.

Forthcoming. The money would be forthcoming all right. Rayford would have a gun at the back of his neck and I’d be sure to have a fully loaded .44 in my sweating hand.

There was one hang-up on the tape. Back then, in 1966, most folks weren’t used to answering machines. Few people knew that Jackson Blue had invented that device to compete with the downtown mob’s control of the numbers business. The underworld still had a bounty on his head.

The row of buildings across the street were all boarded up—every one of them. The riots had shut down SouthCentral L.A. like a coffin. White businesses had fled and black-owned stores flickered in and out of existence on a weekly basis. All we had left were liquor stores for solace and check-cashing storefronts in place of banks. The few stores that had survived were gated with steel bars that protected armed clerks.

At least here the view matched my inner desolation. The economy of Watts was like Feather’s blood infection. Both futures seemed devoid of hope.

I couldn’t seem to pull myself from the window. That’s because I knew that the next thing I had to do was call Raymond and tell him that I was ready to take a drive down south.

The knock on the door startled me. I suppose that in my grief I felt alone and invisible. But when I looked at the frosted glass I knew who belonged to that silhouette. The big shapeless nose and the slight frame were a dead giveaway.

“Come on in, Saul,” I called.

He hesitated. Saul Lynx was a cautious man. But that made sense. He was a Jewish private detective married to a black woman. They had three brown children and the enmity of at least one out of every two people they met.

But we were friends and so he opened the door.

Saul’s greatest professional asset was his face—it was almost totally nondescript even with his large nose. He squinted a lot but if he ever opened his eyes wide in surprise or appreciation you got a shot of emerald that can only be described as beautiful.

But Saul was rarely surprised.

“Hey, Easy,” he said, giving a quick grin and looking around for anything out of place.

“Saul.”

“How’s Feather?”

“Pretty bad. But there’s this clinic in Switzerland that’s had very good results with cases like hers.”

Saul made his way to my client’s chair. I went behind the desk, realizing as I sat that I could feel my heart beating.

Saul scratched the side of his mouth and moved his shoulder like a stretching cat.

“What is it, Saul?”

“You said that you needed work, right?”

“Yeah. I need it if it pays.”

Saul was wearing a dark brown jacket and light brown pants. Brown was his color. He reached into the breast pocket and came out with a tan envelope. This he dropped on the desk.

“Fifteen hundred dollars.”