Gray Dawn

1

The phone was ringing. Ringing. Those evenly measured burps of jangled sound were a warning that my life was falling apart — that much I knew. I don’t know how many times it rang, but my conscious count was up to six when I finally rolled across the king-size bed to the other side, where the night table stood. Before I lifted the receiver from the cradle, I looked out the window into the wafting mists and fog that inundated the mountainside all the way down to where the ocean was usually visible. It felt like a poisonous sky had come down to choke both land and sea.

“Hello?” I whined, as if begging for some kind of miracle or release.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Feather? That you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s wrong?” Fear for my daughter’s safety pulled me from sleeping dread into wakeful worry.

“Nothing. I just thought I’d use the phone card to say hi.”

I had just woken up, and I was already exhausted. It felt as if I had run full speed down a long city block, my heart thundering, breath coming in shallow gasps.

Feather was in Dijon, France, with a national high school group called the American Institute for Foreign Study. Gone for five weeks already, she was there to study French language and culture.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You sounded scared or somethin’.”

“Maybe I was havin’ a nightmare, sumpin’ like that.”

“Nightmare about what?”

“I don’t know, honey, but I sure am happy to hear your voice. How’s your classes goin’?”

“Good. I got top marks in everything.”

“That’s great.” My fearful heart began to ease. “Have you heard from Bonnie?”

“She’s in Ghana right now, but she’s comin’ when school’s over. We’re gonna go to Paris.”

The joy in her voice was greater than the weight on my soul.

“That’s great, baby. I know how much she loves you.”

Bonnie and I had been lovers when Feather was an orphaned infant, lost in the world. We were the closest things to parents she’d ever have. And that was more of a blessing for us than it was for her.

“You sound sad,” Feather said.

“A little bit. Jesus and Benita spend most’a their time on the water, and you’re fifty-seven hundred miles away. All I got here is the dogs and June gloom.”

“I don’t have to go to Paris if you don’t want.”

“Yeah, you do. I’m okay. And I want one’a those little statues of the Eiffel Tower.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “But if you need me, I could come home.”

“You havin’ a good time?”

“Yeah,” she replied with a little more gravitas than she meant to express. Probably thinking about a sip of wine, her first cigarette, or maybe a kiss. That’s what I thought.

“I gotta go to a lecture, Papa,” she told me.

“Bien. Allez,” I said back.

The second after hanging up I was beset by a pack of dogs.

The two little ones felt like birds prancing wildly on my chest. But number three, Prince Valiant, weighed 180 pounds when the vet last hoisted him on a scale. PV was what Fearless Jones called mostly bull mastiff, stronger than your everyday wolf, friend to loved ones, and death to any threat.

I followed them down the stairs to the first floor and the exit to the backyard of our lighthouse-like dwelling. The smallest mongrel was Frenchie. He was the oldest and the titular leader of the pack. The next was a brown mutt who only wanted to play. These two each got a bowl full of dry food. The big dog, Prince Valiant, was fed three pounds of ground meat twice a day.

Back when I was a child in New Iberia, Louisiana, three pounds of prime ground beef would be enough to feed a family of three for two days. Back then I was, and everyone I knew was, so poor that the end of the Depression was no big deal because we didn’t even know it had happened. In those days a nickel would buy a sandwich that lasted from morning till night. It was a hard life, but I felt loved and cared for. So, at the age of eight, I was terrified when my parents died and I had to hop a boxcar to make it to the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. I went there to find my grandfather. After a week of wandering around, asking people if they knew him, I met a madwoman who pointed the way. My granddad gave me a place to sleep but said I had to provide my own victuals. By the time I was used to supporting myself, Uncle Sam said I had to go to war in Africa and Europe. After World War II, I went to California, where, they said, a poor soul could sleep on the ground and eat off the trees.

I did well, became one of the few colored private detectives in Southern California, invested in real estate, and experienced a few fortunate windfalls. Now I lived in a gated community atop a mountain for the fee of a penny a year. I had money in the bank and in the ground. I adopted and raised two children and had quite a few friends, a couple that I even trusted.

Considering where I came from, I’d done very well indeed.

But two years ago I was involved in a missing person case, and by the time I’d found the victim — a forensic accountant — he was dead. That by itself wasn’t so bad, but somehow I fell for the woman who hired me to find the man — her ex. She had committed a murder for which I would never have turned her in. She was justified but I had to let her go.

I went through the rest of the morning almost mechanically. After watering the rose garden on the roof, where I smoked my one cigarette of the day, I went down to the second-floor kitchen and made coffee and buttered toast. After that I donned a short-sleeved off-white dress shirt, brown trousers, blue-and-brown argyle socks, rubber-soled shoes made from black fabric, just in case I came across the unexpected necessity to run, and, finally, a dark, dark brown sports jacket.

Before taking the funicular down the mountain I went to the rough-cut Olympic-size, almost natural grotto of a swimming pool that was just perfect for my daughter to practice in for her swimming meets.

Looking down at the water, I could imagine Feather’s laugh and the smooth, steady strokes of her hours of practice. For some reason this made me climb over to the edge of our mountaintop and scale down the side until reaching the tall, and sometimes electrified, twelve-foot-high razor-wire fence that circled the six homes comprising my community.

Sitting there at the edge of the barrier, I felt like this was some kind of symbol of my life, a prisoner in a paradise of my own making.

I wanted another cigarette but had none. I wanted the fog to dissipate, but that wasn’t to be either.

“What are you doing out here, my friend?” a rough voice in a deep accent asked.

I didn’t have to turn to know that this was Erculi Longo, sire of the four adult brothers who protected the rich woman’s mountain. He was burly but not tall, old but looked less so, and deadly as a Tasmanian devil, at least that’s what his sons had told me. His pants, shoes, and workman’s jacket were neither gray nor brown, creating a kind of natural camouflage. His dark eyes and dark olive skin spoke of both sides of the Mediterranean, the Maghreb.

“Signor Erculi,” I greeted. “What are you doing down the hill?”

“I saw you,” he explained. “And I say to myself that you never have climbed down here before.”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Just seemed like somethin’ to do.”

That called up what I’d come to know as the Sicilian Stare. It was a silent inquisition unafraid of what you might have thought or wished to hide. There was a powerful mind behind that weathered face, the kind of focus that few human beings could manage. His family had been through a decades-long feud with a rival clan. When a shift in power came about, and the body count was piling up, Erculi decided to move his sons to America, where they’d have a chance to breathe and breed. He somehow met Orchestra Solomon, the owner of our mountain, and she realized how he could protect her and those she had chosen to live in her little community.

“You miss Feather?” he asked at last.

“Yeah.” I nodded toward the mist.

“But it is something else,” he concluded.

It was my turn for silent reflection. This was probably the longest talk I’d ever had with the stoic warrior. I understood that his gaze was an offering that I had a debt to answer.

“I don’t know, Signor. I feed my dogs, water the roses, go to work, and do whatever is asked of me. But it’s all habit. I could lie on my bed all day long and that would be just the same. I eat food but don’t really taste it. I drink liquor but it doesn’t feel like anything.”

Giving a shrug he said, “That is what we must do. Life is not pleasure for men like us. Life is only the future. It is our children... and their children. It is our young people. They see the world with new eyes when ours grow old and gray. We go blind and toothless... for them.”

I hadn’t been to church in many years. A minister’s palaver about sin and eternal life, the sacrifices of the testaments old and new, the hope of forgiveness, none of that seemed, in any way, true. I’d lived with good and evil since before I could speak, and I had never been able to separate them. In the life I’d lived through, good men turned their backs on suffering and bad ones loved their brothers without reservation.

I hadn’t been to church for a very long time, but it felt like I was in the pews on that mountainside with that patriarch who had also been a slayer.

“So, what should I do now?” I asked honestly.

“Go to work, my friend.”