Gray Dawn

13

The sun had gone down, and a deep shadow settled across Los Angeles — a kind of darkness that only the desert sky or the heavens above the ocean many miles away from shore could approximate. Almost total blackness blanketed each moonless night of the city I called home.

It was time to drive southeast again, all the way to Compton once more. The drive was shorter, but that heavy curtain of night made the journey feel longer.

Mama Jo lived in one of the last bastions of wilderness out there. It was a large tract of land that was buggy and overrun by an acres-deep thicket of lively and durable bamboo. It was a dense cane forest that was nearly impassable unless you knew the secret paths that Jo had carved into it. The slender shoots of rattan were over eight feet tall, and they resisted all attempts at exploration with fibrous tenacity.

Mama Jo had set up a false wall of bamboo at an isolated border of this unrelenting grove. If you knew where to go, and Jo was willing to remove the camouflage screen, you might could slide your car into a secret cove she maintained back there, hidden from the world.

At that time Jo kept a trio of pet wolves that dissuaded those more intrepid explorers who wanted to investigate her wastelands. The whole area looked abandoned and wild, but one of Jo’s patients, a man she’d saved from a death the doctors promised was coming soon, had bought the collection of lots and signed them over to her.

I stopped at a gas station a few miles away from the hidden entrance and made me a call.

He answered after maybe a dozen rings, “Who is this?”

“It’s Easy. I’m ten minutes away from her.”

The man who answered hung up and I went back to my car. I’d never met the sentinel whose number I called. I didn’t know his name. All I knew was, if I dialed his number, he would somehow get a message to Jo, one of my oldest friends and mentors.

By the time I got to the bamboo scrim, it had been pulled away, revealing the car-wide path that went maybe thirty feet before coming to a clearing. I drove the route, parked, and by the time I got out of the car, she was there.

Mama Jo was tall, her skin the matte hue of finished wire-brushed onyx. She was dressed in a simple frock that was designed for hard work without denying femininity. Jo looked ageless but I knew that she was at least seventy years old. She was my height, had been even taller in her youth, and she was strong of mind and of sinew. Her face was handsome or beautiful, the ideal of any race, human or not.

“Easy,” she greeted, and she kissed me on the lips like a mother or a lover or an innocent child.

“You lookin’ good, Jo.”

She smiled and said, “You lookin’ for Jesus and them?”

“You got ’em out here?” I asked.

Nodding, she said, “In a little cabin out behind my place. I’ll show you.”

Leading down a footpath through the thick brush, she marched maybe twenty paces before the wolves joined us. They were gray wolves, about a hundred pounds apiece. When they neared me, my heartbeat increased. I don’t know if this was from excitement or fear. These were wild animals loyal to one another and to Mama Jo. If she had wanted to, she could have had them kill me right then.

We skirted Jo’s grass-covered hut and went in a direction that was unfamiliar to me. The center of Jo’s property was inhabited by huge oaks that hid the buildings she maintained.

The wolves left us and at last we came to an aluminum hut that I’d not seen before.

“They’re there,” Jo told me. “You know the way back to your car.”

“The wolves won’t mind me walking alone out here?”

“Not unless you mess wit’ ’em.”

I walked up to the door of the metal shelter and knocked.

“I’ll get it,” I heard a child shout. A child I knew well.

“No!” a woman cried.

But it was too late. The door swung open and little Essie looked up at me and smiled, saying, “Hi, Granddad.”

Hefting little Essie up in my arms, I walked into the odd-shaped room to see Jesus and Benita, the former with a pistol in his hand and his wife holding a silvery knife that had a five-inch double-edged blade.

“Hey,” I greeted. “How you all doin’?”

“Hi, Dad,” Jesus said on a relieved sigh.

Benita put down the knife, kissed my cheek, and hugged me while Juice put away his gun. Benita had a slight frame and was medium brown in color. She’d once had a dalliance with Mouse, but when I brought her home after an attempted suicide, my son fell for her and, luckily, Raymond didn’t mind.

The room was larger than I’d expected, with beds against opposite walls, a woodstove, and a twelve-foot-high ceiling. There were chairs and a table in the middle of the floor, between the beds.

“This looks homey,” I said.

“Sit down, Mr. Rawlins,” Benita offered.

Jesus, Essie, and I sat while Benita brought out beers for the men and a lemonade for the child.

“What you think of it out here in the bamboo?” I asked my granddaughter.

“They got three big dogs that like to play. And... and... and there’s a pomegranted tree and a lemon tree too.”

“That sounds delicious,” I replied, running my tongue over my upper lip.

Essie laughed because she loved me.

Thinking about love, I turned to my son and said, “I hear the BNDD wanna talk to you.”

“Yeah.”

“You did what they say?”

It took a few seconds before he admitted, “Yeah.”

“Essie,” Benita said.

“Huh, mom?”

“You wanna go up to Mama Jo’s house and play with her house lynx?”

Essie was excited to go, but then she looked at me.

“Are you gonna come, Granddad?”

“Right after I have a little talk with your father.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Not with me.”

She laughed and leaped from her chair. Two minutes later my son and I were alone in Jo’s visitor’s cabin.

He avoided my gaze but that wasn’t a problem.

“What you wanna do about it?” I asked him.

He turned to me and said, “Whatever you say, Dad.”

“If that’s so, then why you didn’t come to me about this shit in the first place?”

“Embarrassed, I guess.”

When he was a toddler and I took him in, Jesus never talked, not a word. It wasn’t until Feather came to live with us that he began to make conversation with her, secretly. He never needed corrections, punishments, or lectures. He was as sure of himself as any athlete training for a competition. So, for him to defer to me meant that he was aware that he was way out at the shark-infested end of the pool.

“Why they after you, son?”

“’Cause I wanted to stop dealing dope for them.”

“What? They had you dealin’ for them? Like some kind of informant?”

“Naw. They straightforward pushers.”

“And they got their hooks into you?”

“Yeah. Those federal agents are all-the-way bent.”

“I don’t understand, boy. Why would they choose you to be their mule?”

When he turned away, I knew that he’d opened the door to his own troubles. There wasn’t any rush. For that matter, there wasn’t any one person or persons that bore the guilt. I should have talked more to him about his fishing success. Amethystine was right: There was a depression in the Southern California fishing business.

“At first we was just havin’ fun,” he said. “We went down to Ensenada before every fishin’ trip. We met these people who were great. Mexican Mexicans that liked to party. We’d get high sometimes but there wasn’t anything wrong with that.”

“How long ago did all this start?” I asked.

“Around when we came back down home from Alaska. Just about two years. And then one time, about a year ago, this one dude, Diego, gave me a pound of weed and asked did I know people I could sell it to. I didn’t know anybody but he said that he had some friends.” Jesus shrugged, a nonverbal admission of his mistake. “By the time a year had gone by, we were dealin’ in tons.”

“Tons,” I repeated.

“It was so easy, Dad. I mean, when you’re way out there on the water, there doesn’t seem to be any laws, you know what I mean?”

“How long were you dealing the heavy weight?”

“About nine months.”

“How much?”

“Me and Nita made around two hundred fifty thousand.”

“Dollars?”

He nodded.

“What you do with it?”

“Buried it out in Baldwin Hills. Near one’a the oil derricks. Number—”

“I don’t need to know the exact location. I mean, you trust me and all, but money like that can cause anybody to go crazy.”

“Yeah,” Jesus said. “Yeah.”

“So how did the BNDD get involved?”

“I don’t know how they found out, but they did. We brought in a shipment to the usual port dock, and they were waiting. These two agents confiscated the load and then locked us up for three days.”

I remembered then a time when Jaunice called me because Jesus and Benita were supposed to get Essie after a fishing run, but they hadn’t shown up. By the time I had got it in mind to go out and find them, they were back.

“What happened after you were arrested?”

“They told us that if we did two more runs for ’em they’d lose the arrest records. We did the runs, they took all of both loads, and after the last time I told ’em we was finished.”

“And what they say?” I asked, my anger rising.

“They said that we’d be finished when we were dead.”

That pronouncement was accompanied by a necessary spate of silence.

Then: “You know anything about these guys?” I asked.

“Not too much. But one time I did the drop alone. I told them that Essie was sick and Benita was takin’ care’a her. But really Benita went to where I dropped off the load and she followed ’em to a warehouse out in Bellflower. It was called Warehouse Eighty-Six.”

My son was calming down now that he had someone to talk to, someone who at least offered a glimmer of hope.

“What’s this about you sinkin’ your boat?”

The question caused the young fisherman to gaze at me quizzically. That was when he first began to wonder how much I knew.

“I just stopped workin’ for ’em,” he said on a shrug. “I figured that they couldn’t do anything after all we had done together. I went back to fishin’ while Bennie stayed out in Watts with one’a her sisters.”

“Then what happened?”

“I was out past Catalina checkin’ these nets I set for crabs when I saw this fast motorboat comin’ at me. They started shootin’ when they were still outta range. I knew they were gonna kill me, so I jumped off the side with a scuba tank and a weight belt. They set my boat on fire. I watched it burn from under the water.

“It was so cold down there that I thought I was gonna die.”

“Then what?”

“I waited. Just waited until they was gone. Then I swam to this tiny... what you call it? A little island. I was shiverin’ so hard, and my chest hurt.”

You could read the anger in his eyes. It was a certainty that we had to solve his problem before the government had to add capital murder to his crimes.

“What’s the agents’ names?” I asked.

“They called themselves Warren and Scott. Scott has a scar under his lower lip that comes down like a backward comma.”

“What do they look like?”

“White dudes with short hair. Other than that one scar I don’t think I could describe either one.”

“Scott’s the one with the scar,” I said to make sure.

“Yeah, but I don’t think they gave us their real names.”

“Did they ever take you to an office or a real headquarters?”

“Maybe the first time, when we got arrested. But they put chains on us, and blindfolds. When Benita asked why we had to be blindfolded, they said it was because if we got out, they didn’t want our gangs to know where they were workin’ from.”

“Man,” I complained. “They got you comin’ and goin’.”

“Can we do anything, so I don’t have to go to Uncle Raymond?”

That request, that threat, was stunning. I could imagine Benita telling her husband, my son, about what the streets knew of the man called Mouse. Ray would have no compunction about killing crooked federal agents. And there was all that cash Jesus had stashed away.

“No,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will. You think I’d let them mess with my family?”

“I... I thought you would be mad.”

“Naw. I don’t like drugs. But people use ’em, and weed is prob’ly less of a threat than alcohol.”

It was a pleasure to see the tension drain out of Jesus’s face.

“Do you know anything else about these agents?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure that one of ’em arrested this guy I know named Terry Lomax. He’s a street dealer out in the Valley. White guy. When I told him about the scar on Scott’s lip, he said that was one of the ones who busted him. He said the other name too, but I don’t remember it.”

“You wanna write down Terry’s phone number?”

“Sure.”

“And his address too, if you know it.”

After he did this, I asked, “So, how you holdin’ up, Juice?”

“Good, now that I’m talkin’ to you. I feel stupid about what we did, but it’s kinda cool stayin’ out here. It makes me feel like I’m a cowboy or sumpin’ in the Old West. And you know, Mama Jo is somethin’ else.”

“Essie okay?”

“She’s fine. She knows that somethin’s wrong, but she’s not worried.”

“You need anything?” I asked. “Money? Food?”

“No, Dad. You get us outta this and I promise that I’ll never ask you for anything, ever again.”

“They were dealing weed?” Amethystine asked me. “Tons at a time?”

“Probably just one ton at a go.”

“Still. He’s such a quiet, sweet boy.”

“Man,” I corrected.

“I guess.”

We were on the chaise lounge set on the jutting terrace that looked out over the side of our mountain home. She was reclining against the raised cushion as I lay with my head resting between her legs.

“What are you gonna do about it?” she asked.

“Benita suggested going to Mouse.”

“That killer you know?”

I nodded, feeling the strength of her thigh.

“You gonna do it?”

“No. I’m too old for that kinda shit, and Jesus is too young.”

“So what, then?”

“Great thing about bein’ a detective is that you don’t need to know what before you have to act.”

“What does that mean?”

“The boy and his family are safe where they are. So, now all I gotta do is see what I can see.”

She leaned down and kissed the top of my forehead. Soon after that, I was peacefully asleep.