A Little Yellow Dog

19

Daddy, Frenchie’s sick.”

She was standing there in her orange dress, the one that had four big white buttons down the front. Bleary light reflected on the mirror of my dresser. That meant it was late in the morning.

“Feather, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at school?”

“Frenchie’s sick,” she said patiently. “I stayed home to take care of him.”

“Where’s Juice?”

“He gone to school. He said that I was gonna be in trouble.” She looked at me with slightly enlarged eyes. “But I told him that Frenchie was sick an’ he needed me to pat him and take his tempachur.”

I was seeing the woman in the child just beginning to flex her muscles. I was sick at heart but I could still smile at the beauty of Feather and her power to love.

“I’ll take care’a the dog, honey,” I said. “You go put together your lunch and I’ll take you to school.”

Pharaoh was moping by the front door. His tiny rat chin rested on slender yellow paws. He looked up at me and tried to growl but the snarl turned into a whimper and he put his head back down.

I had on my painter’s pants, a cross-hatched-red-and-blue flannel shirt, and thick work shoes. I would be unshaven and unbathed that day. I was coming back to the old ways and feeling mean.

It wasn’t far to Burnside Elementary School.

“What happened to the window, Daddy?”

I walked Feather into school and explained, vaguely, that I’d had to keep her home that morning. Nobody seemed to mind.

I went back home and called Trudy Van Dial at Sojourner Truth. She rang for Garland Burns. When he got on I told him that I was working out of the area office for Mr. Stowe for the day.

“You tell Newgate about it,” I said. “He can call up Stowe if he has any problems with it. And make sure that Archie is getting to his assignments.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Rawlins,” Burns said.

“Anything else, Garland?”

“That policeman, Sergeant Sanchez, talked to me and Mrs. Plates yesterday,” the clean-shaven young Christian Scientist said in his schoolboy way.

“Yeah?”

“What he mostly asked about was you.”

“Really?” I said in my most perplexed tone. “Oh, well. See you tomorrow, Mr. Burns.”

“Okay. Bye now, Mr. Rawlins.”

I drove the long ride out to Watts but I wasn’t going to work that day. I went all the way down to 116th Street and the first home I ever owned.

Primo was sitting on the front porch of my house, protected by the overhang from the light drizzle. When I got out of the car he stood up and waved. He yelled something in Spanish into the front door and then limped his way out toward me.

It was in the past couple of years that Primo developed his limp. I didn’t know what had happened and I never asked.

The fence around the yard had been torn down and there were three cars parked on the lawn. One hulk had the engine next to it while another jalopy was up on boxes instead of wheels. The house could have used a touch-up but I knew that it would have been an insult for me to offer to have it painted so I let it ride.

“Easy,” Primo hailed. “How are you, my friend?”

“Well…”

“You don’t have to say it.” Primo smiled, showing me a pitted silver tooth. “I can see that you’re in bad trouble.”

“How can you see that?”

“Because when you’re okay, or maybe just a little bad, you always got a present for us and the kids. You feel like a guest and the guest always brings a gift so everybody knows how happy he is to come there.” Primo raised his hand like a country teacher. “But when you got a problem bringing a gift is like, like a snake making with pretty eyes.”

As he grew older Primo studied philosophy by considering all of the things he knew in Spanish, English, and life. His thoughts were always powerful because the pictures he used to describe them stayed with you over time.

I managed a chuckle and clapped his back. He was still a strong man.

Big black Panamanian Flower came out of the front door. She gave me her wide grin and a big kiss.

“Easy,” she said loudly. “You don’t come out here enough.”

“Working, you know,” my mouth said. But Flower could hear my heart. Her welcoming smile turned sad. She kissed me again and then cupped the back of my neck with her big hand.

“You take care of him now,” she said to her husband.

“Window on my passenger’s side is busted out, Primo,” I said, looking after Flower as she went back into the house. Two little brown kids came running from around the screen door. They had dark and almond-shaped faces and slanting eyes, from the oldest American stock, like Jesus. They were stalking up to us with silly grins on perfectly balanced feet.

“Oh,” Primo said. “You have a accident?”

“Somebody shot my girlfriend through the window while I was droppin’ somethin’ off down the street. She’s dead.” I said it all at once; partly just to say it, to know that it was true, and partly because I didn’t want to get Primo mixed up in anything that he didn’t know about from the beginning.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m just tryin’ t’stay outta trouble, man.”

Primo nodded his head and said, “So clean it up and put in a new window, huh?”

“If you wouldn’t mind. I’ll pay ya for it.”

“You need a car. I got a nice Chevy right out here.”

It was a late model, fierce metallic blue with balloon tires in back.

“Don’t you have somethin’ a li’l quieter?” I asked.

“Sometimes a loud noise is the best way to hide what you don’t want somebody to hear.”

“Do you have another car?” I asked the philosopher again.

“Not that’ll drive.”

“So then this one is just fine. Fine. Fine.”

Primo laughed and I managed to shake my head. The two boys made roaring noises and leapt at us.

“My grandchildren,” Primo told me proudly. “They are jaguars from the deep forest. Killers of great birds.”

The rain had stopped by the time I made it home. I had just pulled Primo’s souped-up Chevy into the driveway and gotten out to go into my house.

“Mr. Rawlins.” I didn’t need to turn around to know Sergeant Sanchez.

He was getting out of a parked car.

I cursed under my breath for not checking out the street before parking. For some reason I felt safe at my own home — a mistake that a poor man should never make.

“Sergeant.” I smiled, trying to read in his bearing whether or not he knew about Idabell Turner’s demise.

I was pretty sure that he didn’t intend to arrest me. He’d come alone, and policemen never arrest a man single-handed if they can help it.

“You’re not at work today,” he said as he approached.

I remained silent.

“Do you have some time for a few questions?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you wanna know.”

“Can we go in your house?”

Remembering Pharaoh moping around the front door I said, “House is a mess, officer, we better stay out here.”

“Oh.” His eyes were looking for an opening through my defense. “That’s a wild car you got there.”

“It takes me from place to place. That’s all you could ask for.”

“Is it yours?” he asked.

“No.”

“Where’s your car?”

“I lent it to my friend Guillermo to ride out to Las Vegas. My car’s better than his and he wanted to trade just for his vacation.”

“Where does this Guillermo live?”

“Out past Compton.”

Sanchez winced, just a hair. It was intuition about my car. He could smell something about it. But he didn’t want to push me, and that was a surprise.

Cops didn’t mind pushing around men like me. That kind of pushing was part of their job. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a white man. Cops is a race all its own. Its members have their own language and their own creed.

I realized then that Sanchez was on the trail of something bigger than me, and bigger than the death of mulatto twins. Something that Idabell Turner had brought to America in a box.

“The man we found at your school was Roman Gasteau,” Sanchez said. “Idabell Turner is his sister-in-law.”

Is.

“His twin brother Holland,” Sanchez continued, “was found dead at his own house night before last and now Mrs. Turner is missing.”

“That’s a lotta happenin’,” I said to Sanchez. “Damn.”

“You don’t know anything about this, Rawlins?”

“Idabell is a kinda friend’a mines, sergeant, but I never had her confidence. I didn’t know her husband or her brother-in-law.”

“She never said anything to you about what her brother-in-law did for a living?” Sanchez was almost human in his need for an answer.

“No sir,” I said. The regret in my lying mouth was real.

“You busy right now?” he asked me. It was a simple question that one friend might ask another on a street corner in May. Maybe he’d met a woman who wanted a date for her girlfriend.

“Well, I got some work to do around the house.”

“This wouldn’t take long. Why don’t you come on up to the Hollywood station with me?” He didn’t sound urgent. “I think you could help.”

“Well…”

“Drive your own car. You’re not under arrest or anything. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Nothing. Just a few questions about Idabell Turner. Captain Fogherty asked me if I’d ask you to drop by. It’s not far, you know. Just up here in Hollywood.”

“Okay,” I said. “If it’ll be short.”

“You can follow me.”

“Uh-huh.”

At that moment Pharaoh started barking. He yipped and whined and barked again. Maybe he wanted to tell Sanchez the truth.

The sergeant heard the dog. He even looked at the house but there wasn’t enough there for him to grab on to and so he turned around and went back to his car.