Wilson
a cognizant original v5 release november 04 2010
1
It’s hard to get lost when you’re coming home from work. When you have a job, and a paycheck, the road is set right out in front of you: a paved highway with no exits except yours. There’s the parking lot, the grocery store, the kids’ school, the cleaner’s, the gas station, and then your front door.
But I hadn’t had a regular job in a year and here it was two in the afternoon and I was pulling into my driveway wondering what I was doing there. I cut off the engine and then shuddered, trying to fit inside the sudden stillness.
All morning I had been thinking about Bonnie and what I’d lost when I sent her away. She’d saved my adopted daughter’s life, and I had repaid her by making her leave our home.
In order to get little Feather into a Swiss clinic, Bonnie had reacquainted herself with Joguye Cham, a West African prince she had met in her work as a flight attendant for Air France. He made a temporary home for Feather, and Bonnie stayed there with her — and him.
I threw open the car door but didn’t get out. Part of my lethargy was exhaustion from being up for the past twenty-four hours.
I didn’t have a regular job, but I worked like a dog.
Martel Johnson had hired me to find his runaway sixteen-year-old daughter, Chevette. He’d gone to the police and they had taken down her information, but two weeks had gone by and they hadn’t turned up a thing. I told Martel that I’d do the footwork for three hundred dollars. On any other transaction he would have tried to dicker with me, giving me a down payment and promising the balance when and if I did the job. But when a man loves his child he will do anything to have her safely home.
I pocketed the money, spoke to a dozen of Chevette’s high school friends, and then made the rounds of various alleys in the general vicinity of Watts.
MOST OF THAT TIME I was thinking about Bonnie, about calling her and asking her to come home to me. I missed her milky breath and the spiced teas she brewed. I missed her mild Guyanese accent and our long talks about freedom. I missed everything about her and me, but I couldn’t make myself stop at a pay phone.
Where I came from — Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas — another man sleeping with your woman was more than reason enough for justifiable double homicide. Every time I thought of her in his arms my vision sputtered and I had to close my eyes.
My adoptive daughter still saw Bonnie at least once a week. The boy I raised as my son, Jesus, and his common-law wife, Benita Flagg, treated Bonnie as the grandmother of their newborn daughter, Essie.
I loved them all and in turning my back on Bonnie I had lost them.
And so, at 1:30 in the morning, at the mouth of an alley off Avalon, when a buxom young thing in a miniskirt and halter top had come up to my window, I rolled down the glass and asked, “How much to suck my dick?”
“Fifteen dollars, daddy,” she said in a voice both sweet and high.
“Um,” I stalled. “Up front or after?”
She sucked a tooth and stuck out a hand. I put three new five-dollar bills across her palm, and she hurried around to the passenger side of my late-model Ford. She had dark skin and full cheeks ready to smile for the man with the money.
When I turned toward her I detected a momentary shyness in her eyes, but then she put on a brazen look and said, “Let’s see what you got.”
“Can I ask you somethin’ first?”
“You paid for ten minutes; you can do whatever you want with it.”
“Are you happy doing this, Chevette?”
Her years went from thirty to sixteen in one second flat. She reached for the door, but I grabbed her wrist.
“I’m not tryin’ to stop you, girl,” I said.
“Then let me go.”
“You got my money. All I’m askin’ is my ten minutes,” I said, letting her wrist go.
Chevette settled down after looking at my other hand and around the front seat for signs of danger.
“Okay,” she said, staring into the darkness of the floor. “But we stay right here.”
I lifted her chin with one finger and gazed into her big eyes until she turned away.
“Martel hired me to find you,” I said. “He’s all broken up. I told him I’d ask you to come home but I wouldn’t drag you there.”
The woman-child glanced at me then.
“But I have to tell him where you are . . . and about Porky.”
“You cain’t tell Daddy ’bout him,” she pleaded. “One’a them get killed sure.”
Porky the Pimp had recruited Chevette three blocks away from Jordan High. He was a pock-faced fat man with a penchant for razors, diamond rings, and women.
“Martel’s your father,” I reasoned. “He deserves to know what happened with you.”
“Porky’ll cut him. He’ll kill him.”
“Or the other way around,” I said. “Martel hired me to find you and tell him where you are. That’s how I pay my
