“Little Jimmy Long,” I said, testing out the name. “Try that on for a while. I can get you a job as a custodian at my school. Do that for a while and try to meet your dreams. Who knows? Maybe you will be some kinda star one day.”
“Little Jimmy Jones,” Willis said. “I like that even better.”
I GOT HOME in the early afternoon. Bonnie wasn’t there but her clothes were still in the closet. I went to the garage and got my gardener’s tool box. I clipped off all the roses, put them in a big bowl on the bedroom chest of drawers. Then I took the saw and hacked down both rose bushes. I left them lying there on either side of the door.
The little yellow dog must have known what I was doing. He yelped and barked at me until I finished the job.
I went off to work then. I got there at the three o’clock bell and worked until eleven.
When I got home the bushes had been removed. Bonnie, Jesus, and Feather were all sleeping in their beds. There were no packed suitcases in the closet, no angry notes on the kitchen table.
I laid down on the couch and thought about Mouse, that he was really dead. Sleep came quickly after that and I knew that my time of mourning was near an end.
Gator Green
EASY?” Bonnie’s voice came from the kitchen window.
“Yeah,” I said.
I was sitting in a maple chair on the concrete apron that spread out around our back door. I’d just started Jesus’s advanced sailboat-building book. It was going to be his reading assignment for the next three weeks and I wanted to make sure I understood it before he and I started our lessons.
“There’s a man at the front door.”
“He want you or me?” I said in an unfriendly tone.
“Easy.”
She was outside now. All I had to do was turn around and I could see her. But I didn’t turn. I pretended to go on reading even though the words had turned into squirming worms across the page.
“He wants to talk to you,” she said.
I put Juice’s book down on the chair and stood. I stared straight ahead, childishly avoiding her gaze. She touched my arm as I passed her. She always touched me when I was close enough. Especially lately, when I was so upset that I couldn’t even sleep in my own bed.
“WHY YOU SLEEP in the livin’ room, Daddy?” my adopted daughter, Feather, asked when she came upon me one morning and realized that she couldn’t watch cartoons on the living room TV set.
“I been restless,” I said.
“Why don’t you go to a doctor?”
“There’s nuthin’ the doctor got for this.”
I must have sounded sad because Feather put her little golden hand on my neck and sat over me until I fell back to sleep.
“MORNIN’, MR. RAWLINS,” the small white man hailed. He was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
“Saul,” I replied. “What are you doing here?”
“Got a little problem I thought you might help me with.”
“Would you like some coffee, Mister…?” Bonnie asked.
“Lynx,” the man told her, “Saul Lynx. And yeah, I’d love a little java in a cup with some milk.”
Saul Lynx was a private detective. He and I worked a case that he started and I took over some years before. When I first met him I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust many white people. But as it turned out he was okay. It wasn’t until some time later that I found out he had a black wife and three children as light as Feather.
“What’s up?” I asked, herding him into the living room.
“That your wife? She’s beautiful.”
“Bonnie Shay. She lives here with us. Now what is it you want, Saul?” It was Saturday and I was tired from a hard couple of months of work—both on and off the job.
My son, Jesus, had dropped out of school but I was still teaching him every evening; making him read to me and then having him explain what he read. My lover, Bonnie, had admitted that she’d gone away to Madagascar with an African prince who was trying to liberate the continent. She said that they slept in separate rooms but still I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her good night.
I had been slipping back into the street in spite of my respectable job as supervising senior head custodian at Sojourner Truth Junior High School. In less than three months I had investigated arson, murder, and a missing person. I had also been party to a killing that the police might have called murder.
But worst of all, I had found out that my best friend in life was definitely dead. Raymond Alexander, Mouse, had died trying to help me. There wasn’t a place in my mind that I could turn to for hope or a laugh.
THE COFFEE WAS ALREADY BREWED. Bonnie brought Saul his cup and I led the way into the backyard carrying a maple chair for him. We sat side by side looking up at the enormous shade tree that dominated half the yard.
