A Little Yellow Dog

30

There were butter-grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and lemonade, made from the lemons in my yard, waiting on the kitchen table. A raven was stalking around outside the back window, searching the lawn for seed.

“You got someplace to go?” I asked her. “To lay low.”

“I have friends in France.”

“Can you get on a flight?”

“I’d rather stay in L.A. until I know what’s happening. I mean, I want to be sure.”

“Why would you stay here in Los Angeles if you’re in trouble with gangsters and the police?” I asked. “You got somethin’ else on your mind?”

“You can’t run from trouble, Mr. Rawlins,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you’re right about that. Yeah. You can stay here for a while. After that we’ll see.”

I picked up the phone and dialed. Mouse answered on the seventh ring.

“Hello?”

“Raymond?”

“Hey, Easy. How you doin’?” He didn’t seem to care much.

“I need a ride in to the school today. You wanna come and get me?”

“Now? You mean you want me to come in to work early?”

“You could do some overtime. I can give it to you. I’m the boss.”

“Yeah, but for how long?”

“What’s that s’posed t’mean?”

“Nuthin’. I’ll talk to you later, man.”

Bonnie went back to bed.

After she was asleep again I bathed and shaved. By the time Mouse got there I was ready to go. He pulled up in front of the house in his tan Ford and tapped on the horn.

It felt good running out to get into a buddy’s car for a ride to work.

“What you mean about that crack about me not bein’ around?” I asked while he drove.

“Newgate come ’round askin’ ’bout you,” Mouse said. “He wondered if you missed work a lot. Then he asked me stuff about what you used to do — before you come to work for the Board.”

“That all?”

“He said that it was unusual for you to get such a high job of responsibility so fast without no college.” Mouse grinned. “Then he said that somebody like me might have to work a dozen years to get that high.”

“Oh,” I said. Then, “You know, Raymond, I might need some help from you later on.”

“Sumpin’ at the school?”

“No.”

Mouse cut his gray eyes at me. “You don’t want me to do sumpin’ wrong now, do ya?”

“If there’s any doin’ t’be done I’ll do it,” I said. “It would just be good if I had somebody to come with me.”

“Hm.” Mouse brought a finger to his chin. “ ’Cause you know I went down to Etta’s preacher yesterday afternoon.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. I asked him what a sinner could do to repent, an’ he said to admit my sins and to accept Jesus. He said that way I could be forgave. He said if I did that then the Lord would give me a sign, just like you said.

“I tried to confess right there but he heard the first few words and told me to shut up. He said that we wasn’t Catholics to hear confession. He said that my repentance was just between me an’ God.

“That was my first sign, I know.”

Mouse had answered my request, but I didn’t understand him.

“Will you come with me tonight?” I asked again.

“Sure, Easy. Who knows where my next sign might be?”

When we got to school I found four messages for me in the administration office. They were from the boys’ vice principal, the principal, Mr. Stowe down at the central office, and Sergeant Sanchez up in Mrs. Teale’s room.

I went to see Mr. Langdon in his wood shop.

His classroom was a bungalow like the ones on the lower campus but it was older and placed up next to the science building. The turtlelike teacher was pawing over thin flats of wood with four of his advanced students. They were building a large chest of six drawers, each of which was designed to be a unique size. You could see the intention by the frame of the chest that was standing behind them.

“Mr. Rawlins,” he said when he saw me.

His serious students looked up, and one of them even blinked like Langdon did.

“I have something to discuss with you, Mr. Langdon,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re in the middle of a very delicate operation right now. Maybe if you came by tomorrow morning, before class…”

Mr. Langdon had regained his confidence and so now I was the well-dressed janitor again; a man who would have to wait no matter what he needed to know.

“Okay,” I said mildly. “I just wanted to know about that special croquet set you worked on for our friend.”

To see a pale man turn white is a frightening thing.

“Go on, boys,” Langdon said. “We’ll start over tomorrow.”

“But the glue is ready, Mr.—”

“Go on now. Go, go,” the great white turtle stuttered and snapped.

The boys left complaining under their breath.

I sat down on the long bench of vises and smiled.

“What, what… what can I…” Langdon was floundering on his own tongue.

“You hollowed out a set of croquet balls and mallets for Roman Gasteau, right? Some Italian carpet balls and wooden dolls too.”

Now Langdon could only gasp.

“You did that,” I went on. “And he used them to smuggle drugs.”

“No, no, no,” Langdon said.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I said.

He looked around the room for help but we were alone. “It’s not so bad really, Mr. Rawlins. I did make the croquet set but it was just for grass. We used to have marijuana parties.” He was talking loudly. I knew then that Roman Gasteau had been a fool. Only a fool would have taken on a partner like Langdon. A child could have forced the truth out of that wood shop teacher.

“With Idabell, Roman, and Holland?”

“Lots of people would come over.”

“How could you be such a fool to get involved with dope smugglin’?”

“It’s not like it was real drugs,” Casper said. “It was only pot. Roman used to go down to Tijuana and stuff the mallets or the dolls or the lawn balls with grass, sometimes hash.”

I didn’t correct Casper because I couldn’t see why he should know more than he admitted. He was scared enough to be involved with marijuana.

“It’s a girl, right?” I asked.

Langdon looked down. He held out his hands in front of his face and big tears splatted down on his fingers.

“What’s her name, Mr. Langdon?”

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

“Yes it is,” I said. “Roman took you out an’ got you high. Then he showed you a girl didn’t need any kind of promises or flowers. I know. I know.”

“She liked me.” Langdon blinked his heavy lids. The droplets clung to his eyelashes.

“What’s her name?”

“Grace,” he said. “But I haven’t seen her in two months.”

Any hope that I had for innocence was gone with a name. Roman knew Grace. I knew Grace. Grace was how I came to my job. It was as if I had been looking for the criminal and came upon myself on the way.

“Grace Phillips?”

“Yes.”

I don’t know how long I stood there speechless, staring at his fat white cheeks.

Finally I turned away from him and went to the bungalow door.

“Mr. Rawlins?” Langdon called from across the room.

“What?”

“Are you going to tell the police or, or Mr. Newgate?”

“The cops haven’t talked to you about this?”

“No. They showed me a picture of Roman and asked me if I knew him. I told them that he was Mrs. Turner’s brother-in-law. That’s all they wanted to know.”

“Well, you better hope that they don’t come back to you, Mr. Langdon. But if they do come back you better be quiet about what you know. Roman might have told you that it was all right but I don’t think that Sergeant Sanchez would agree.”

“Oh my God.”

Sergeant Sanchez was sitting at Miss Teale’s desk.

“So, you decided to come in to work at last, eh, Rawlins?”

“Well, you know, there were some things that I had to do.”

He smiled. “You ready to talk to me?”

“Nuthin’ t’say, officer. I don’t know a thing.”

“Nothing? What about heroin, Mr. Rawlins?”

“No thanks.”

“This is no joke, man,” Sanchez said. “We got a serious drug problem here. The Gasteau twins were selling drugs.”

“Really?”

“We found traces in a wax paper bag in the hole in the garden. He had everything there he needed to cut drugs and package them.”

“What difference does it make?” I asked. “Those men are dead. Unless you think they gonna be sending drugs up from hell then that case is closed.”

“This is serious,” he said again. Maybe he was going to say something else but I cut him off.

“Naw, man. What’s serious is you got four or five dozen kids in this neighborhood climbin’ up under the bushes in front’a the school ev’ry night disintegratin’ their brains on airplane glue.” I was mad. “Every mornin’ you walk right over the rags. You see the kids stalkin’ an’ staggerin’ around and what you do? You come in here an’ try’n scare me because of somethin’ that happened years ago. I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no heroin. I do know about glue though. You wanna hear about that?”

“That’s just penny-ante,” Sanchez said. He was dead serious.

“So what you worried ’bout is how much the drugs cost, you don’t care about what they do.”

Sanchez probably cared about what was happening to the glue sniffers. Many of them were his own people as well as mine. But there was no budget to stop the flow of wine and glue in the ghetto streets.

“So you don’t know anything about the drugs?” he asked.

“Man, I never even met either one’a them men,” I proclaimed. “It’s you who think I’m in it. It’s you come on out to my house and trick me down to a lineup on some lies. I’m just doin’ my job, sergeant. I’m just livin’ my life.”

“I got you on more than that, Rawlins,” he said darkly.

I gritted down, intent on silence.

“We got a call down at the station, Ezekiel. About all those burglaries from your school and other ones too.”

“Yeah. Somebody blamed it on me, I know.”

“This time they told us where you hid the loot.”

I stood up. “Come on, man.”

“Sit down.” The steel in his voice told me that it was all true. “I think that you better come on over to the station with us.”

Right on cue two cops came in from the hallway.

“I’m under arrest?”

“It’s just questioning for the moment, but I will arrest you if you refuse.”

The Seventy-seventh street station hadn’t changed much. The same yellow wax covered the dark-green-and-white-tile floor. The furniture hadn’t aged well.

“Down the hall past the sergeant’s desk — to your left,” Sanchez said.

I knew the way.

I knew the room.

I still remembered the corroded plaster and the mildewed floorboards. I took a quick glance at the corner to see if the mouse, crushed fifteen years ago, was still there.

It wasn’t a clean room.

“Sit down,” Sanchez said.

There were two wooden chairs. I took the one facing the door.

As I sat a tall white man came in, closing the door behind him. He wore dark gray pants and a white shirt with sleeves rolled high above his elbows. He took his place behind the seated Sanchez, and practiced making fists with his left hand.

Sanchez’s smile told me that he’d been waiting for this moment. I tried to look brave but that only made him gloat harder.

“You see, Drake?” Sanchez seemed to be talking to me.

The white shirted man nodded, clenching his fist hard enough to pop a knuckle.

“Okay,” Sanchez said. I didn’t know who he was saying it to. “Now we’re going to have a serious talk with some serious answers.”

My mouth opened — I wanted to speak — but there were no words to say.

Sanchez did a meaty drumroll against thighs with open hands.

“Just to show you that I’m an okay guy,” he said, “I’ll answer your question.”

I hadn’t asked any questions but maybe Sanchez thought that he could read my mind.

“You asked me how I got my stripes.”

Actually I had asked him when he’d become a sergeant but I saw no reason to point that out.

“I had a lot of help,” he continued. “People like you helped me. Negro people and my own Mexicanos — living like dogs instead of standing up and taking advantage of what’s right in front of them.

“It was hard for me to get this job because the bosses downtown didn’t believe that a Mexican could speak good English or work hard. They think our people are lazy, Ezekiel. They think that we’re all no-good crooks. Because of people like you. And because of you I made myself perfect to get this job.

“And now I have it. And I’m not going to hold your hand and say how sorry and sad I am that you were poor or that you think it’s too hard to be as good as other people. That’s why you’re going to talk to me now — because I know what you are and I don’t give a shit about you.”

There was a lot I could have said but I didn’t. Sergeant Sanchez was a zealot and he couldn’t hear anything unless you told him that you believed in his vision. And seeing that his vision was that I was a lazy crook — silence was my best choice.

“You can start with the little shack down on Olympic,” he said. “How’d all those wind instruments from Locke High get down there?”

Half a minute passed; then thirty seconds more.

“I don’t have all the patience in the world, Mr. Rawlins,” Sanchez said.

I prayed silently and was rewarded with a knock on the door.

A uniformed officer came in.

“What?” Sanchez’s lip curled as if he might damage whoever it was that interrupted us.

The uniform, a beefy specimen with a red bristle brush for a mustache, crossed over to Sanchez and whispered something.

“What?” the sergeant barked again.

“That’s what he said.” The uniform hunched his shoulders.

Sanchez stood up so quickly that I flinched, thinking that he was on the attack.

“Come on, Drake,” he said.

“Come on where?”

“Just come on.”

Sanchez went out in long angry strides followed by the red-whiskered cop. But Drake lingered for a moment, cradling his fist.

“Drake,” Sanchez called from the open doorway.

Drake was pulled by his superior’s voice but I could see that he wanted to hit me at least once before going.

“Drake! Let’s go!”

Drake opened his fist and used his big hand to blow me a kiss.

Another good-bye kiss. He closed the door and I was back fifteen years. A long time had passed but the helplessness felt just the same. The fear was the same too.

I sat remembering that the last time I was in that room I hadn’t tested the door. Maybe it wasn’t locked. I wasn’t under arrest. If the door was open I could walk free.

I was going to test the door this time. But I just needed a moment to steel myself.

I skipped the moment and went for the door. The knob turned. When I pushed the door open my heart was pounding and I wondered if every time I breathed hard I would be reminded of Idabell and our moments of love. I didn’t think long though. I stepped into the hall and ran into a man who was approaching my door.

“Hello, Easy,” Lieutenant Arno T. Lewis said. He was almost smiling.

Long and lean, hard as ironwood, the bespectacled policeman angled his opaque lenses at me. “Looks like I just saved you from a good ass-kicking.”

“I’m gettin’ too old for this shit,” I said.