Rose Gold (27 page)

Athena used to tutor the boy after school, and then one day he didn’t show at the appointed hour; the next morning his uncle came to her office and told her that Fennell had run away from home.

The principal and I had coffee once a week and she knew something about my past and future life.

“His uncle Suleiman believes that he’s run off with his father, Oxell Prideworth,” Athena told me behind the closed door of her office.

“Not ‘Bryson’?” I asked.

“Oxell never married Suleiman’s poor sister. When she died she left her son only the family name. I want you to find him.”

“That’ll be kind of hard, A,” I said. “You know I work all day and I got kids at home.”

“I’ll give you an informal leave of absence. Mr. Reed can do your job. I’ll pay him extra out of my own pocket and you can spend every day looking for the child.”

“What do you know about this Oxell guy?”

Athena was a good principal, she did her homework. From Suleiman she’d gotten a photograph of the father, and she gave me her own picture of the thirteen-year-old boy. It seemed like a chore for the boy to manufacture a smile but he did the work for his beloved tutor.

“The father has been arrested for robbery and spent time in prison,” she told me. “He gets into fights and drinks. I want you to find Fennell and make sure that he’s all right. If his father really cares about him they should be together but I’m worried that this is not the case.”

My old friend from Houston, John the Bartender, had his own bar at the time. I dropped by that very afternoon.

“That’s Ox, all right,” the broad-shouldered Texan said when I showed him the photograph. “I’ll ask around.”

Three days later I put on some of my old work clothes and checked into a men’s shelter in L.A.’s Skid Row. That night Oxell and his boy came in. I stayed in the shadows and corners as much as I could because, even with my skullcap and shades, I worried that the boy might recognize me from school.

Oxell was ten years younger, two inches shorter, and thirty pounds heavier than I was. Not all of his extra weight was fat. He was a habitual drunk and naturally angry. He took out the brunt of his inner rage correcting and criticizing his son. But Fennell didn’t seem to mind. He took it like a soldier proud that he could carry an eighty-pound backpack on a thirty-mile forced march.

I watched while the man bellowed and barked at his son.

“Nobody gives a fuck about you, boy,” he said at one point at the long table in the communal dining room. “Not these bums and niggahs in here and not your uncle or that school. Mothahfuckahs wanna keep us down, keep us apart. They don’t know the love a man’s got for his son.”

I was struck by the drunkard’s words. I had loved my father when I was a boy. He went off on a logging job down in southern Louisiana
and never came back. I was eight years old. When I looked under his bed I found an old coffee can filled with silver quarters. I cried over those coins, wishing that I could trade them for just five minutes to kiss my father good-bye.

Athena Wharton had paid me up front and well. So after Fennell had fallen asleep I offered his father a cigarette and a sip of wine on the fire escape out a back window.

“Where you from, Rawlins?” the drunk asked.

“Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, is where I became a man.”

He took a deep draught from the bottle and said, “Texans can fight.” And then he took another drink.

“I know a rich woman named Athena,” I said.

“That’s a rich name.”

“She wants to adopt your son.”

“The fuck she does. That’s my boy in there and I will keep him with me.”

“I told her that,” I said, pretending to take a sip from the bottle. “And you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said to tell you that she would pay you a thousand dollars if you gave up your right to him.”

“Shit,” his mouth said, but his eyes told a whole other story.

The business was transacted the next day at a lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills. I paid Oxell money out of my own pocket, half the sum I had received from Athena. He would have taken a hundred dollars but I wanted to give him enough rope. Six weeks later the money was gone and Oxell was headed for prison after trying to rob a bank with an empty gun.

I could have given him a hundred dollars but money never meant much to me after I inherited that can of silver quarters.

“We need to speak to your daughter,” I said to the Purdys after pushing down the painful memories of childhood.

“What about you?” Johnson asked the man behind me.

“Rose is in trouble,” Redbird said. “Her mother wants us to help her if we can.”

“Is that true, Mr. Rawlins?” Virginia Purdy asked. I got the definite feeling that they didn’t trust Teh-ha.

“As far as I can tell.”

The couple looked at each other. The woman nodded and the husband did too.

“She’s living in a house on the ocean seventeen miles north of San Diego,” she said. “When she was a child she had a make-believe friend named Alexis Storyman. That’s the name she’s using down there.”

They gave us the address.

“Can we have the phone number?” Redbird asked.

“She doesn’t have a phone,” Virginia said.

“Then I guess we better be going,” I said.

“Would you like me to make you some sandwiches to take along?” the rich wife offered.

At the front door of the four-story estate I stopped and turned to my hosts. Redbird was already walking down to the car.

“Does anybody else live here with you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Virginia asked.

“Servants, gardeners, security.”

“We are, each of us, wealthy by inheritance, Mr. Rawlins,” Johnson said. “I do my own gardening and there’s a maid that comes in three times a week to help my wife with the cleaning. A man must support his own weight, no matter how much money or power he has; that is the law of gravity.”

“Pass me one’a those sandwiches, will ya, Redbird?” I said when we were on the highway going south.

“Cheese and salami?”

“Sure.”

Taking a bite, I said, “This is good. Bread tastes homemade.”

“Okay,” the copper man said.

“Where you from?” I asked just to make conversation.

“I am the last of the Taaqtam. My people lived in what you call the San Bernardino Mountains. They were here for many thousands of years.”

“You from a reservation?”

“My uncle raised me in the desert. I liked to read and count things so he sent me to school. I went to college so that I could learn about my people and tell my uncle what had happened to us … before he died.” An entire biography in three sentences; I was impressed.

“They taught about your people in college?”

“They gave me the tools.”

I had rarely met a man or woman who actually went to school for knowledge. Most people were preparing for a job or career, trying to get a leg up on their competitors.

“What about Lenore?”

“I work. She pays me.”

“She seems to collect different races up in there.”

“Yes.”

“What’s up with that?”

“I don’t know. I think she’s looking for something, trying to make something. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Looking up, I saw an exit sign that read
HADLEY
’
S CROSS
.

“There it is,” I said, and the spoken history lesson was over.

The off-ramp turned into a two-lane road that wound around until it ran southward along a white shell-strewn beach. Now and then there was a house or trailer to the left. At that time in Southern California these beaches were pretty empty, the land around them sparsely populated.

We came upon a large pink house that stood on a bluff. It was a three-story rambling wood structure. There was a large gateway made from graying timbers but no fence. A multicolored painted sign hanging from the upper timber announced
GENESIS FARM
.

We drove through the portal up to the house, where there were nearly a dozen other vehicles parked. Three young white men were sitting on the big porch passing a joint between them. One wore blue and red overalls, another army camouflage, and the third went bare-chested in loose-fitting swimming trunks. They all had long hair that ran from brunette to blond. They had beards and mustaches too, though with two of them the facial hair was rather sparse.

“Hey, brothers,” the blond-haired swimmer greeted.

“Hi,” I said.

“What can we do for you?”

“We want to talk to Alexis.”

“Why?”

“Just to ask a question.”

“What question?”

Our inquisitor and his two friends got to their feet.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine named Robert Mantle, also called Uhuru Nolicé.”

“What you want with him?”

“His mother is worried sick that he’s in trouble and she asked me to find him.”

“And how did you get here?” the brown-haired man in camouflage asked.

“Alexis’s mother told us where she lived.”

I was hoping that the Purdys paid the bills at Genesis Farm. That way the tenants might be beholden to them. I wanted to make our way as smooth as possible because I suspected that soft-spoken Redbird was not a very peaceful man.

“My mom?” a young woman said.

A naked girl, not three years out of adolescence, stood framed in the pink doorway. Her figure was youthful, defying if not actually denying the weight of the world. She walked out onto the porch and all three of the young men looked at her. I could tell by the way she moved, and the absence of tan lines, that she spent most of her days in this state of undress.

“Her and your father too,” I said, concentrating on her face.

Her features were unremarkable but who cared about that?

“Why?”

“Look, Dawn, let’s just say I’m from another planet. Back where I come from, on Mars, men go crazy around a naked woman. So could you please put something on? For me and my pal here.”

“Hi, Bird,” the girl said to my companion.

“Miss Purdy.”

The woman ducked into the front door and came out again in less than a quarter minute. She was donning a long-sleeved, red-flannel man’s shirt. I will, for the rest of my life, remember the last glimpse of her perfectly formed and weightless breast.

“Yes?” she said.

“Can we talk alone?”

“You don’t have to go with them,” Redhair in overalls said. His voice was higher than I would have suspected.

“It’s okay, Akra,” Alexis/Dawn said. “I know Bird. Come on, guys, we can go to my garden.”

She led us around the right side of the house into a fenced-in flower garden. There was a slender path through the profusion of brightly colored blooms. Among the blossoms were dozens of types of flowers, including delphinium, poppies, miniature sunflowers, dandelions, and fuchsia.

The path led to a smallish redwood picnic table. Pulling Redbird by the arm, Dawn made him sit next to her. I settled across from them.

“We’re looking for Rosemary,” the Indian said.

Dawn smiled.

“We think she’s in trouble,” I added.

“Rose is always in trouble,” the young woman assured me. “That’s the way she likes it.”

“Somebody cut off one of her fingers,” I said, “and sent it to her father with a note demanding a million dollars.”

“Really?” she asked Redbird.

He nodded and she frowned, dropping her light mood.

“Oh, no.”

“Do you know where she is?” I asked again.

“No. We haven’t talked since we left the ashram.”

“What’s an ashram?”

“It’s a place where people meditate and pray. A guy who calls himself Vandal is the leader. It’s up in Laurel Canyon.”

“You think she’s there?”

She shook her head and said, “We left together. Vandal wanted us to get money for him from our parents. He wanted to buy land in the desert where he could start a real commune. When we said that we wouldn’t help him he locked us in the pool house but we got away.”

“You think she’d go back to him?”

“No,” Dawn said with certainty.

“Do you know anybody that she’d go to if she was in trouble?”

“You mean like getting her finger cut off?”

“The kind of trouble you couldn’t tell the police about.”

“There was this guy we called Minx. He broke us out of that pool house one night when everybody else was asleep. Minx was in love with Rose.”

“They had a thing?” I asked.

“No. She didn’t like him like that.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Do you know his full name?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“This is serious, Miss Purdy,” Redbird said.

“I really don’t know. After leaving the ashram Rose and I split up.
My parents bought this place and put me here. I was afraid that Vandal would come after me.”

“How did he plan to get money from you?”

“He just wanted me to ask my parents and there was this secret that Rose knew.” She hesitated a bit then.

“What secret?”

“It was something about her father’s business. She said that he did something illegal with some revolutionaries or something. Vandal wanted to blackmail him.”

“And this Vandal’s in Laurel Canyon still?”

“I guess. It’s at the top of Buena Vista Court. A real big house that belongs to the Newmans.”

“You know the address?”

“It’s the big blue house with golden rosebushes on the pathway leading up to the door.”

Walking back to our car we were watched by nine pairs of hippie eyes. Most of the commune had come out to protect their meal ticket. I couldn’t blame them. It was an idyllic existence down there looking over the ocean. Their life, I remember thinking, was as delicate as the wildflowers in Dawn’s garden. It didn’t matter that it wouldn’t last.

Beauty never did.

Most of the ride back to Los Angeles, Redbird and I were silent, but that’s not to say we were uncommunicative.

When I lit a cigarette he opened his side vent window.

I turned on the soul station KGFJ. After listening for twenty minutes or so Redbird switched the channel until he found a station playing classical piano.