A Little Yellow Dog

21

Sanchez and Fogherty showed me bloody Felix, they told me that I could end up like him, but they stopped short of arresting me and throwing me into the cell with Jones.

They wanted something from me, but what was it? There was only small coverage of the murder of the two brothers in the paper; nothing about the circumstances of their deaths. That lack of coverage in itself might have been surprising if it wasn’t for the fact that Roman and Holland were black men and it was early in the sixties.

You had to kill somebody white to get any kind of news splash in the sixties.

Foreign blacks made the news, however. That very day the Congolese had jailed two Russians for espionage, and five hundred Haitians had been reported dead from flooding. To the white press, and many white Americans, black people were easier to see as exotic foreigners, somebody else’s people. But the lives of black Americans were treated with silence.

I didn’t know when they’d identify Idabell. Los Angeles is a vast complex of unassociated towns and municipalities. The bureaucracies didn’t communicate well and so Idabell’s identity might take a day or two to surface.

The storm dominated the headlines. The Congolese and a political science teacher who claimed that the Russians had framed him for a spy were below that. Idabell’s death was ignored by the radio and TV and newspapers.

Ignored by everyone except me — me and the little yellow dog.

But for a while I put revenge out of my mind. I rolled up my sleeves and started to get ready for dinner with my kids.

I decided to go Mexican because the kids loved it and it was a lot of preparing. I defrosted a large stack of corn tortillas that Flower kept me stocked with. Flower was a Panamanian but she learned Mexican cuisine because that was all that Primo would eat — at home.

I deseeded dried ancho chiles and then pan-roasted them for about fifteen minutes, to get that smoky flavor. After that I softened them with hot water and ran them and the water through the purée cycle of the blender. I filtered out the flecks of skin by passing the liquid through a metal strainer and made a roux, with wheat flour and margarine, to thicken the sauce so that it would stick to the flat tortillas.

I grated my yellow cheddar and Monterey Jack. There was the ground beef and chicken to sauté, separately of course.

When the meat started steaming, Pharaoh slinked into the room. He crouched down and growled while he sniffed. He wanted some food but I’d be damned if I ever fed a mouth that bit me. The food I cook is too good for that.

I love to cook. When I was a boy down in Louisiana, and later on in Texas, I spent many a day with no food and no prospects. So when a piece of meat or some grain passed my way I knew what to do. Preparing a meal for me was like going to church; there was a miracle and a deep satisfaction in my soul.

It wasn’t until I was heating lard in a large iron skillet that I started thinking about my problems again. It hardly seemed real; two dead brothers and a woman too. I couldn’t imagine my simple little working life at Sojourner Truth mixed up with murder and death.

It had to be money. I lit a Camel and watched the steady gas flame under the black pan. It had to be money. That phrase played over about twenty-five times in my mind but it didn’t lead anywhere.

I dipped a stiff tortilla into the hot lard. Instantly it took on the texture of a wet sheet of paper. I immersed the flimsy bread into the sauce and then flattened it out on a plate. I put a line of chicken down the center of that one, rolled it all up, and placed it in its corner of a large ceramic baking dish.

Whoever killed Idabell wanted that croquet set; that child’s toy and revenge.

She and her husband, and his brother, stole it from him. He wanted his property — and the people who stole it. Bonnie had said that she hadn’t seen Idabell in months, but that was a lie. Idabell said that they had gone to Paris together and, to prove it, the killer was waiting for Bonnie to come home. Maybe Bonnie knew more than Idabell thought.

Along with the letter I had three scraps of paper from her purse. A laundry receipt, something that looked like a restaurant tab with the amounts in francs, and, finally, there was a handwritten note. The note read “William, Whitehead’s.” There was an address scrawled at the bottom.

I put the tray of enchiladas in the refrigerator to keep until dinnertime. Then I chopped tomatoes, Bermuda onions, and a little green pepper together with ripe avocado to make a light relish-like salad. I laced it with lime and a touch of cayenne (I couldn’t make it too hot because then Feather wouldn’t be able to eat it).

The rice I baked in a tomato sauce mixed with minced garlic and two hot peppers. I sprinkled in a handful of tiny dried shrimps to give my kids a treat.

The house was smelling pretty good when Jesus and Feather came bursting in the door. Pharaoh went mad whimpering, wagging, and licking all over Feather.

“You better feed that dog,” I told her.

“Can we keep him?”

“No. His mother be back the middle’a next week. She said that she’ll come and get him.” I still planned to take Pharaoh out to Primo.

“Come on,” Feather whispered to the dog.

“What you gonna give him?” I called out into the kitchen. “I don’t want him eating anything that I cooked.”

“I bought him some dog food with the grocery money, Dad,” Jesus said.

“You did, huh?”

Juice nodded and looked at my feet.

“Did you put any’a that money upstairs in your soldier box?”

He shook his head.

“Why the hell you take my money? Why the hell you take it?” It came out of me suddenly. I didn’t want to confront him until I was out of the woods with Sanchez. I didn’t want to get mad for the wrong reasons. But the words leapt out of my mouth like vomit from an unexpected stomach virus that just had to have its way.

“I was savin’ it, Daddy.”

“Savin’? What the hell for? Don’t I give you everything you need?”

Jesus raised his head. “In case we didn’t have no money and you were broke.”

The damage in Juice’s face stood out like an extra nose. The half-remembered nightmares of his infancy as a slave; the insecurity of living with me. All the times I’d come home bruised or bleeding came back to me; them and my deep blue moods he could never understand.

Jesus loved me but he didn’t trust that I could handle the hard world. He was my backup and I didn’t even know it.

He was more of a man than I was.

“Go on,” I said. “Do your homework.”