“Hey, baby. How are you?”
“A little tired,” Bonnie Shay said. “I just woke up. They’ve been running us ragged.”
“Where are you?”
“In Paris. For the last ten days we’ve been in West Africa so I couldn’t call.”
“The ambassadors and princes been askin’ for your number?” I said in a joking voice.
“No. What do those men care about a stewardess?” she said. But there was fraction of a second of delay in her voice.
“Easy?” she asked in the static of long distance.
“What?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, baby,” I said. “I just miss you. I need you here with me.”
“Can you hear me smiling?” she asked, and I felt ashamed of my suspicious heart.
“Loud as daybreak,” I said.
“How are Feather and Jesus?”
“He’s planning some kind of camping trip and she’s gettin’ bolder every minute.”
“Tell them I love them.”
“Sure will.”
“I love you too, Mr. Rawlins.”
“And I love you.”
There was another pause. We were too old to profess love back and forth, over and over, and too young to just hang up.
Finally Bonnie said, “I should go.”
“I’ll hang up first,” I suggested.
“Okay.”
I LEFT THE HOUSE at four the next morning. The streets were empty and dark. I made good time to the MacDonald residence. The lights were off and four cars were parked on the lawn. I lit up the first of ten Chesterfield cigarettes I allotted for myself per day. I sat back in the smoky haze thinking about how much I loved being a silent watcher.
The dark street looked like a stage after the play is long over and the actors and the audience have gone home. I was thinking about Jesus growing up, and Bonnie so many thousands of miles away. About Mouse being gone from my life, like my dead mother and my father who, in fleeing a lynch mob, also abandoned me.
I imagined my father running into the darkness, his own dark skin blending with the night. A calm came over me as he disappeared because I knew they would never catch him. I knew that he was alive and breathing—– somewhere.
“HEY, MISTER!” the old lady shouted. I started awake. The sun was just coming up. Two cars were already gone from the MacDonald lawn. The woman’s face on the other side of the glass was pocked and haggard, deep molasses brown and relenting to the pull of gravity.
“What?” I said.
She motioned for me to roll down the window.
I did what she wanted and asked, “What do you want?”
“You watchin’ them?” she asked, pointing toward the MacDonald residence.
When you wake up suddenly from a deep sleep, as I just had, part of your mind is still in dreams. And in dreams time is almost meaningless. There are times I’ve dozed off for just a minute and had dreams that covered an hour or more of activity. That’s how it was for me at that moment. I saw the woman, read the lines on her face, deciphered the obvious anger in her tone, and decided that she wasn’t mad at me but at those filthy, uncouth MacDonalds. She was also, I surmised in a fraction of a second, a first-degree busybody who had more information on the kidnappers than the police could gather in seven years.
“Yes I am,” I replied.
“What they do to you?”
“Stoled my car,” I said in good old Fifth Ward lingo.
“Bastids,” she spat. “Make the whole neighborhood a pigsty. Noisy and vulgar, I hate ’em.”
“The man who stoled my ride was with this girl,” I said, showing the angry old woman my photograph of Misty.
“I seen her. Yeah. She was wit’ some guest’a theirs. A man drove a old red truck. It had Texas plates on it.”
“That’s the guy took my car. He asked me could he borrow it. Left me a suitcase to hold. All it had was some underwear and that picture of the girl drove off with him.”
“You wanna use my phone to call the cops?” the woman asked.
“I sure do. But first I wanna wait here and make sure he’s in there. ’Cause if I call and he ain’t there, that old bitch Clovis’ll just say they never heard of him.”
