A Little Yellow Dog

16

It was a little after nine when I got home. I was soaking from the rain that had started while I asked questions. It was that blanket type of L.A. rain and I’d left the umbrella a block away in my car.

Feather was asleep on the couch with the damn dog nestled in her arms. Jesus was watching a western on channel thirteen. He was nodding. Jesus spent two or three hours every day practicing for track and field. He ate large meals and went to bed early but he always tried to stay up until I got home. In the earlier years it was because he felt bad for me after my wife, Regina, had left. But now it was just habit. I was used to my kiss good night and he was used to giving it to me.

“You better go to bed, Juice.”

He nodded and then reached over to shake Feather but I said, “Leave her. I’ll get her to bed.”

He came over to hug me and I kissed him on the top of his head. Then he stumbled down to the hallway toward his bed.

I went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. There was ice water in an old-fashioned milk bottle in the refrigerator.

I took the phone on its long tangled cord into the living room and sat down on the couch next to my girl. When Pharaoh growled I battled his nose with my finger. He moved away from me, down to the other end of the sofa, and considered dog curses to lay upon my soul.

I placed the phone in my lap and was about to dial a number when the thing rang. I picked it up quickly. Feather moved her head up and opened her eyes, but when she saw me she closed them again.

The first thing I heard was the racket of a crowded room or maybe a public space. There were people talking and things being moved and slammed down. There was laughter too.

“Easy?” Her voice was loud to get over the din and also hoarse because she wanted to whisper. But as strained as the words were I still knew who it was.

“Idabell?”

“Oh, it is you. Thank God.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“A little place on Santa Barbara. I have to talk to somebody here. Oh, I’m in a lot of trouble, honey. A lot of trouble.”

Somebody laughed in the background, a good joke being told in some other part of town. There was music but its words and melody were lost in the static of the telephone wire.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Somebody killed my husband,” she whispered. “And, and…”

“And what?”

“And his twin brother… Roman.”

“Who killed them?”

When she said, “Easy?” I knew that she wasn’t going to give up any information right away.

“What?”

“How’s Pharaoh?”

The cur raised his head from his corner of the couch. Maybe his dog ears picked up the name on her lips.

“He’s fine,” I said.

“Can I talk to him?”

“Talk to him? No. The kids’re ’sleep. But don’t worry, he’s fine.”

“I have to get away, Easy.”

“Idabell, what happened? What happened to your husband?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered.

Pharaoh raised his head a half an inch more.

“I left home just like I told you. Holland was high, I guess I didn’t tell you that. He’d been drinking, drinking.” She repeated the word as if she were trying to convince me of its accuracy. “And then he went out.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But as soon as he was gone I left with Pharaoh.”

“Why were you so scared, Idabell?”

“He’d gone crazy.”

“Crazy from what?”

“I don’t know, Easy,” she whined. “I don’t know.”

“And did he call you at school?”

“Yes.”

“And you went to meet him?”

There was an explosion of laughter somewhere in the restaurant.

“No,” she said. “He said that he was going to come down to the school to get me and Pharaoh. He said that he would pull me right out of the classroom if I didn’t come. You know he would have done it. So I ran. I’m sorry that I left Pharaoh with you but I was scared that if Holly found me with him he would have done what he said.”

“And so then you went to go’n tell Mr. Preston about this?”

“How did… I mean, yes. I went to tell Bill, because I was scared. You had already helped me with Pharaoh. I couldn’t ask for any more than that.”

“Uh-huh.” I was thinking that Holland wasn’t the only one to ever hate that dog. “So why are you callin’ me if you got so much trouble? We don’t even know each other.”

“Don’t be like that, Easy. I meant yesterday. You’re the first person in a long time that I feel safe with.”

“What about Mr. Preston?” I asked.

She paused for a moment and then said, very softly, “I called you, not him.”

“Because you feel safe with me?”

“Yes.”

“But what about me?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, am I safe? The cops are on me already. I asked where you were gone to and now the cops wanna talk to me.”

“You didn’t tell them about Pharaoh, did you?”

“No, I didn’t. But I woulda told’em if I didn’t think that they’d throw me together with you. For all I know you’d tell ’em that I killed your husband ’cause we had a roll on the desktop.”

She had no answer to that.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked her.

“I don’t know what to say, except that if you don’t help me I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Hold up, Mrs. Turner. I don’t even know you. I don’t give a damn about you or your husband an’ I surely don’t care ’bout that damn dog—”

Pharaoh jumped to his feet and yelped once. I swatted him off the couch and he went running, probably to look for my other slipper.

“Was that him?” Idabell asked. “Was that Pharaoh?”

“Yeah, but I can’t put him on right now. He had to go to the bathroom.”

Feather shifted peacefully, putting her arm up on my lap.

“I know you’re angry, Easy,” she said. I was sorry that I’d told her my name. “It’s not your problem, you’re right. But I still need you to do one thing for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Could you bring me my dog? I’m going to leave L.A. I’m going to leave the country. All I need is Pharaoh.”

“That dog’ll mark you,” I said. “You’d be better off leavin’ him somewhere and having him sent on later.”

And I didn’t feel guilty either. If Ida was running that meant she thought the police could get her on something. If she ran their attention would concentrate on her. But if they got frustrated and wanted to give me heat, and if I knew where she was — well then…

“I couldn’t live without my little man, Easy. He’s all I have. Bring him to me. Please.”

“If I was going to give’im to you when would you want him?”

“Tonight. Late though. I can’t get to the place I’m staying until late.”

“How late?”

“Not before eleven.”

“Where?”

She gave me an address on Hoagland Street, off of Adams Boulevard. It was a house and not an apartment. She promised that she’d be there by twelve.

So did I.

“Daddy, where’s Frenchie?” Feather had been sleeping with the top of her head nuzzled up against my thigh for nearly half an hour. I didn’t have anywhere to go and no place that I’d rather be.

“He ran off in the back somewhere,” I said. “But the woman who owns him called. She wants him back. You know she really loves him.”

I wanted to be able to say the next day that I’d told her about returning Pharaoh to Idabell. She might get upset but at least she wouldn’t think that I was doing things behind her back.

She sat up pushing her little hands against my chest and asked, “What was my momma like, Daddy?”

“Oh,” I crooned in a low voice. I lifted her and held her in my lap. “She was light-skinned and a very beautiful dancer. I only ever met her once,” I lied. “That’s when she asked me to take care of you. She was flying away to Europe somewhere to dance for somebody really important but the plane crashed and she was lost out there in the ocean.”

It was a story that we’d made up together over the years.

Most of it was true. Her mother was actually white. And she was a dancer, of the exotic variety. I never knew who Feather’s father was; her mother might not have known either. As a matter of fact I had never even met her mother. I found Feather after the police had forced me to help them catch her mother’s killer.

“Was my real daddy on that plane too?”

“Uh-huh.”

Feather nestled her head against my chest.

“Did they love me a whole lot?”

“More than anything, honey. More than anybody. That’s why they asked me to take care of you forever if anything happened, because they loved you so much.”

Feather went to sleep with the declaration of love burrowing down into her dreams. I took her to her room and undressed her. I placed her in the high bed that she wanted so much and hung all of her clothes in the stand-up closet that I’d built for her.

A girl’s voice answered my call to Mofass. “Hello?”

“Jewelle?”

She hesitated for a second and then said, “Hi, Mr. Rawlins. How are you?”

“Fine, JJ. Just fine. Mofass there?”

“Uncle Willy up in the bed. He’s sick.”

My real estate agent, Mofass, had emphysema and surprised the doctors with every breath he drew.

“I got to talk to him, honey.”

“Sorry, Mr. Rawlins, but I can’t get him outta the bed at this time of night.”

Jewelle was a distant cousin of Mofass’s ex-girlfriend, Clovis MacDonald. She was only sixteen two years before when she helped Mofass contact me to get away from her auntie. Clovis was trying to bleed away everything that Mofass had, but we put a stop to that.

After that Jewelle worked for Mofass and lived with EttaMae. But as soon as she turned eighteen she moved in with Mofass.

Jewelle had one of the toughest minds I had ever encountered in man or woman. She was a straight-A student all through Crenshaw High School but she decided against college because Uncle Willy, her pet name for Mofass, needed her. Clovis and her brothers had it in for them, so Jewelle moved them to an isolated little home in Laurel Canyon. She got a place there through a man who owned property down in Watts that Mofass represented. Then she hired Buford D. Howell, a UAW man from Detroit, to collect the rent and maintain the properties.

On the night of her eighteenth birthday she moved in with Mofass. She said that he was sick, she still called him Uncle Willy, but we all knew that there was more to that relationship than good friends.

If you wanted to get a letter to Mofass you had to send it to his PO box. If you wanted to call him you had to use his answering service — unless you were one of the three people who had his private number. He and Jewelle stayed in their posh little house perched up over Sunset Boulevard living like two young lovers; him hacking from emphysema and her holding camphor and menthol under his nose.

“I got to talk to him, Jewelle,” I said.

“What about?”

“Did the cops call your service?”

“Yeah, but you cain’t talk to Uncle Willy ’bout that. He didn’t even get the message.”

“Okay,” I said. “All right. But listen, I told the cops I was out lookin’ at the apartments night before last. I said I was with Mofass. Could you get him to back me up on that?”

“Sure can. I’ll tell’im first thing when he get up.” She thought for a moment and then said, “At breakfast, I mean.”

“Do you wanna know why I’m askin’?” I wondered if she understood what she was getting into.

“It don’t matter, Mr. Rawlins. Uncle Willy owe you his life and I owe you too. It don’t matter what you want. Anything we got is yours.”

“Is that true?” I asked, no longer thinking that I was talking to a child.

“You could drink it,” she answered in a phrase formed in north Texas.

Never in my long years of knowing Mofass could I trust him completely. He was small-minded and cowardly. All he ever thought about was the money roll in his pocket. But when Jewelle came along he became as constant as the tide.

“Thanks, honey,” I said, ready to get on with the rest of my troubles.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yeah?”

“Um, well…”

“Come on, JJ, spit it out. I got to go now.”

“Uncle Willy an’ me was just wonderin’ if maybe you wanna come work for him. I mean, you’d be making more money from us than they pay at the schools. You know all about how buildin’s work and stuff. Mr. Howell have people he trust to do work but you know they won’t even talk to a girl. I figure, I mean me an’ Uncle Willy, that you could show me how stuff works and then I could make better decisions on the spot.”

She was right. Men didn’t like women who wanted to be independent. I could have taught her everything she needed to know about real estate maintenance and value. But that’s not why she wanted me to work for them. She loved Mofass but she was lonely too. She needed somebody who read books to talk to sometimes. Buford Howell read the racing forms on Saturdays and the hymnal on Sundays — that was it.

Jewelle needed someone to talk to her about the paper and the big world out beyond a paycheck or a dirty joke.

“I can’t just up and quit my job, honey. It’s not so much the salary but the benefits and the future.”

Her silence told me how sad I’d made her.

“But maybe I could work with you on the weekends. Maybe every other one, you know, like a consultant.”

“That would be great,” she said. And I was happy because she sounded young again.

I cleaned up and put on my good brown woolen suit. My shirt was buff silk and the cuff links were yellow gold and onyx. My shoes were a soft, light brown leather, and the socks matched my shirt in fabric and in color.

I looked at myself in the mirror and smiled. Then I thought about the Gasteau brothers; they were dressed fine too. It hadn’t helped them.

I left a note on the kitchen table for Jesus. If Feather woke up he would take care of her.

I walked out of the house exhilarated that I could still get out, and scared that it felt so good.