A Little Yellow Dog

7

Many men would have drowned Pharaoh right then. He was no good to anybody. But I had lived a dog’s life and knew what it was to have the big world turn against you.

I drove about ten blocks from the school and then let Pharaoh out of his bag.

At least he wasn’t grinning at me anymore.

I took surface streets out of Watts, back toward West Los Angeles and my home. I was trying to live the quiet life with my kids back then, away from the people and problems that I knew during my earlier years in L.A.

It was a nice house. Three small bedrooms and a kitchen that looked out on a bright green lawn. I had rosebushes and dahlias along the back fence and no fence against the southern yard; there I just let my neighbor’s wild ferns and bamboo do the job.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Feather yelled as I came through the door.

Pharaoh leaped out of my arms and went straight for her.

“Watch out!” I shouted. But I didn’t have to worry. Pharaoh jumped up into Feather’s arms and started licking her face. She laughed and giggled. Pharaoh jumped away from her and then leapt back into her arms — then he jumped away again. It was like they had been playmates for years.

“Daddy, thank you,” Feather said. “He’s beautiful.”

“We’re not keepin’ him, honey,” I said. Feather’s instant frown made me dislike that dog even more. “He’s only gonna stay a day or two. I told my friend that you’d want to take care of him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Angina.”

“What?”

“Angina. It’s a French name,” I said. “Means a pain in my heart. Where’s your brother?”

“He went out with Eddie to the store.”

Jesus was supposed to stay with Feather until I got home from work. That was his job.

Feather didn’t look anything like me, and Jesus did even less. They were both pickup children that I’d managed to save during the years when my employer was the street. She was seven then with crinkled golden hair and café-au-lait skin. Her eyes were like topaz at that time but they had been changing color over the years. Jesus had made her braids like the horns of a ewe going back and following the curve of her skull.

She had on a green dress that she’d picked out herself, with a puffy pink sweater.

“I love you,” I said.

When I picked her up the dog started barking. She was staring down at him, and I kissed her chubby cheek. I felt something wadded up in her shallow sweater pocket.

“What’s this?” I asked, fingering the lump.

Feather’s expression said, Uh-oh.

In the floppy open pocket was a fold of six or seven twenty-dollar bills.

“Where’d you get this money, honey?”

“Um. I dunno. I fount it.”

When I put Feather down, Pharaoh jumped up between us, barking at me and then turning to lick her fingertips.

“Honey, where did you get this money?”

“In a place.”

“What place?”

“In Juice room.”

Nobody wanted to use the Lord’s name in vain, so Jesus became Juice at Hamilton High School.

Feather led me to a corner in Juice’s closet where there was a cardboard chest that used to hold hundreds of little plastic soldiers. But the soldiers had all died or gone AWOL and in their place were neat stacks of different denominations of bills from one to twenty. Four hundred and eighty-nine dollars in all.

“It’s Juice treasure chest,” Feather said. “But it’s a secret, okay?”

I sat down on the floor. Pharaoh was growling at my elbow. There was too much money there to hope that he would get away from court with a warning.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Can I go downstairs and feed Frenchie?”

She’d already given the damn dog her own name. I went outside to have a cigarette and wait for my boy. He was lucky that he stayed away. In the mood I was in I might have struck him — and that was something I swore I’d never do.

My next-door neighbor, Mrs. Horn, came home before Jesus did. She was a skinny and nervous woman from white Christian California stock. Still, I never found any reason to distrust or dislike her.

“Hi, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.

I went over to help her with her bag of groceries.

“Jesus is out, Mrs. Horn,” I said. “And I got an appointment to keep.”

“That’s okay. You go on. I’ll come over and look after Feather. You know she’s just a darling little girl. I really love her.”

I’m sure she did.

Before I went down to my car I said, “Um, when Jesus gets here, please tell him not to go anywhere and wait for me.”

Mrs. Horn gave me a second look; she could hear the threat in my words.

The ride back to Sojourner Truth was quick. I got there just a little before six. Everyone from the administration building had gone home. I used my keys to get into the office. There I opened the key closet where they kept the keys to the personnel files drawer.

Turner was her maiden name even though she called herself “Mrs.” Her husband’s name was Holland Gasteau.

She was thirty-two years old and had been born in French Guiana but had immigrated to America when she was four years old. I unlocked the phone plug on the rotary and dialed the Turner-Gasteau residence. I let it ring fifteen times before hanging up. I redialed but still no one answered.

I wrote down her Butler Place address, a street above Hollywood Boulevard, and also the address and phone number of a Miss B. Shay, who was given as someone to get in touch with in case of an emergency.

I didn’t know for a fact that the handsome dead man was Idabell’s husband, but I knew that she was in trouble and that she’d lied about the dog.

Coming out of the administration building I ran into Sergeant Sanchez. A lock of his longish black hair had trailed down onto his forehead.

“Working late, aren’t you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“How’s the investigation going?” I replied.

He didn’t like my answer. He didn’t like my clothes or the way I walked. If we’d worked side by side on a road gang, swinging sixteen-pound hammers, he wouldn’t have liked the way that I smelled.

“You find out his name yet?” I was actually sweating under his gaze.

“Where’s your night man?” Sanchez asked.

“I don’t know. Mr. Alexander follows his own schedule. All I care about is that the work is done when I come in in the morning.”

“And is it always done?”

“He’s a good worker.”

“Mr. Newgate says that there’s been some property missing from the school over the last year. TVs, musical instruments.” Sanchez the fisherman.

The only thing I was sure of about the thefts was that Mouse hadn’t been involved. Mouse would never have wasted his time with petty theft. But I couldn’t tell Sanchez that.

“You have a little time to walk me around the grounds to find your night man?” Sanchez asked.

“No. I got to make dinner for my kids.”

A frown knitted itself into the policeman’s brow. “You married?”

Of course, I thought, he’d read my files.

“No,” I said. “I mean, I was. But things didn’t work out.”

“And she left you with the kids?”

I could feel my heart swell in fear. Neither Jesus nor Feather was legally mine. I had gotten Jesus the papers of a child that had died in infancy, but his real story was worse than most orphans. He’d been sold as a child prostitute when he was about two and had probably come from Mexico, or maybe even from further down south.

There was no birth certificate for Feather at all. If the sergeant started looking into my private life everything could have fallen apart.

“Any more questions?” I asked him.

He shook his head but it was more disapproval than an answer to my question.

“Don’t you find it strange that someone would come into the school to hide something, Mr. Rawlins?” Sanchez asked. “I mean, why, how would they even know to do it?”

I wanted Sanchez to see me as an honest and hard worker. So I asked, “What was it they were hiding?” not because I cared or wanted to know but because I thought that that was the kind of question an honest man would ask.

“That’s police business,” he said. “Why don’t you answer my question?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t understand it. But I figure that if you want to do some late-night larceny the garden is the perfect place for it. You can’t see the lights on in the garden building because it’s surrounded by trees and bushes.”

“Oh?” he said speculatively. “And how would somebody know that?”

“Well,” I said, still the stuttering honest man, “I mean, the custodians know ’cause you can’t just look over there and see. You got to walk over there, open the gate, and go down behind the trees to tell.”

“I see,” he said.

I was beginning to dislike Sanchez as much as I did Mrs. Turner’s dog.

“Why don’t we take a walk and look for your night man?” Sanchez asked again.

“I told you. I got to get home to my kids.”

“It’ll just take a little while. We could answer some important questions.”

“That’s your job, sergeant,” I said. “My job is at home.”

He shook his head again.

“Excuse me,” I said. And then I turned my back on him.