“All you got to do is call EttaMae before you come back to the house. There’s a man I got to talk to first.”
“It’s been hard on me too, Easy. I had to do what I’ve done just to get —”
“Is Feather there?”
“No. She’s in the hospital, in a room with three other children.”
“There a phone in there?”
“Yes.”
2 4 4
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“Can I have the number?”
“Easy.”
“The number, Bonnie. Whatever we feelin’ it cain’t touch what’s goin’ on with her.”
“ h e l l o ? ”
“It’s your daddy, sugar,” I said.
“Daddy! Daddy! Where are you?”
“At Uncle Raymond’s. How are you, baby?”
“The nurses are so nice, Daddy. And the other girls with me are very sick, sicker than me. And they don’t speak English but I’m learning French ’cause they’re just too tired to learn a new language. One girl is named Antoinette like the queen and one is Julia . . .”
She sounded so happy but after a short while she was tired again.
“ h e l l o ? ”
“It’s me, Jackson.”
“Easy, do you know what time it is?”
It was four forty-seven by my watch.
“Were you asleep?” I asked. Jackson Blue was a night owl.
He’d party until near dawn and then read Voltaire for breakfast.
“No, but Jewelle is.”
“Sorry. You made any progress on those bonds?”
“I put the numbers through a telex in the foreign department.
They good to go, man. Good to go.”
“How much?”
“The one you told me about is eight thousand four hunnert eighty-two dollars and thirty-nine cent. That’s before fees.”
A hundred thousand dollars, maybe a little more. I couldn’t 2 4 5
W a lt e r M o s l e y
see Haffernon putting his life on the line for money like that. So it had to be the letter.
“Jackson.”
“Yeah, Ease?”
“You ever hear of a guy name of Joe Cicero? They call him Chickpea.”
“Never heard of him but he got to be a literate son of a bitch.”
“Why you say that?”
“ ’Cause the first Cicero, the Roman statesman, was called Chickpea. That’s what Cicero means, only in the old Latin they had hard
“Yeah. He got a kick all right.”
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38
Idreamed that I was a dead man in a coffin underground.
Down there nobody could get to me but I could see everything. Feather was playing in the yard, Jesus and Benny had a child that looked like me. Bonnie lived with Joguye Cham on a mountaintop in Switzerland that somehow overlooked the continent of Africa. Across the street from the cemetery there was a jail and in it were all the people, living and dead, who had ever tried to harm my loved ones.
I’d fallen asleep on my back with my hands on my thighs. I woke up in the same position. I was completely rested and happy that Mouse’s dreams infected mine.
It was after two. I had no job so the calendar and the clock lost meaning to me. It was like when I was a youngblood, running the streets hunting down love and the rent.
My passion had cooled in that imagined grave. The cold earth 2 4 7
W a lt e r M o s l e y
had leached out the pain and rage in my heart. Feather had a chance and I had a hundred thousand dollars in
