“He is afraid, and frightened men are almost always fools,” the small man said to me.
“I’m not too much better,” I said, “puffin’ up like that.”
“You can’t help but to stand up for yourself,” he said. “Even if you struck him, it would have been okay. Maybe he would learn something.”
“That’s a hard school you talkin’ about there,” I said.
The little man in the gray suit smiled. “I am Henry Berg,” he said. “I own a watch shop up a block from here, on the east side of the street. If you need a timepiece fixed bring it to me.”
We shook hands and I walked away thinking that I had to keep the lid on. Because if I didn’t all hell might boil over.
7
Even if I had had my car I wouldn’t have been able to put it in the garage because there was a sailboat in the driveway. Bonnie Shay’s new pink Rambler was parked in the street in front of the house. From behind the boat I could hear the monotonous, back and forth rasping of a sandpaper block on wood.
“That you, Juice?” I called.
Jesus stood up from behind the boat and smiled. He’d taken his single sail out every day for three months before the riots. I made him stay home while the curfew was on, though. He took the time to fix any damage the craft had suffered.
“Hey, Dad,” he said in a voice made strong by the sea. “Bonnie’s home.”
He wasn’t very tall, five six in his deck shoes. His skin was the color of brown eggshell. His eyes were dark and almond shaped and he was fluent in English, Spanish, and French. The latter he picked up from Bonnie as easily as some people acquire an accent by moving to a different part of the country.
When Jesus came to live with me he was five and had never spoken a word. He didn’t speak for many years because of abuse that he was exposed to at a very early age. And even after he did start talking, it was seldom and soft.
But then he decided to drop out of high school and build himself a boat. I allowed him to do it, even though everyone told me it was a mistake. Jesus had promise in school. His grades were just average, but he excelled as a long-distance runner. UCLA had been talking to the track coach about Jesus, but then I let him drop out to build his boat and take reading lessons with me at night.
The sea made him stand taller and speak out loud. He was the master of his own fate when he no longer had to deal with anyone he didn’t want to, like all of the teachers who didn’t believe that little Mexican kids were worth the seats they sat in.
“How’s it goin’, boy?” I asked.
“Daddy!” Feather yelled. She came running out of the front door with her thick blond-brown hair bouncing behind her. She’d shot up in the few months that Jesus was sailing. In just a few years she’d be taller than the brother of her heart. She was light skinned, even lighter than Jesus, but definitely American Negro—that’s black mixed in with something else. Her mother was a white stripper who died and her father was someone like me. She came to live in my home before she was eight months old. I was the only father she knew.
She ran right into me and hugged me as hard as she could.
“Are you all right?” she asked, whining.
“Sure I am, baby girl. Were you worried?”
“Juice said that you were going down to your office. Where the black people are shooting up everybody they see.”
“Juice didn’t say that part about the black people, did he, honey?”
“No. Graham did.”
“That little boy with the green eyes?”
Feather was still holding me. She looked up and nodded.
I kissed her forehead and carried her to the short stack of concrete stairs that led to our front door. When I sat down she twisted so that she was sitting in my lap. It was a dance step we’d developed over the nine years she’d been my girl.
She’d left the front door open. Her little yellow dog, Frenchie, came to the door and bared his sharp teeth. He hated me, dreamt every night, I was sure, about ripping out my throat. But we both loved Feather and so kept an uneasy truce.
“I don’t care what they say around here or over at Carthay Circle, honey, but black people aren’t running around crazy, shooting at people.”
“That’s what they say on the news,” she said.
“I know they do. But they don’t talk about why people are mad. They don’t talk about all the bad things that have happened to our people. You see, sometimes people get so mad that they just have to do something. Later on they might wish that they didn’t but by then it’s too late.”
“Is that why you were crying, Daddy?”
“When was I crying?”
“The other night when you were looking at the news and I was supposed to be in bed.”
“Oh.” I remembered. It was late and Bonnie had been stranded in Europe because of a series of thunderstorms around Paris. I was watching images of the rioters on the late news with the volume turned off, witnessing those poor souls out in the street fighting against an enemy that I recognized just as well as they. I had read the
