“Everything seems to be in order,” the ogre said at last. “I’ll take Miss Black to her classroom.”
“Have Feather walk her home, please,” I said, happy to be mannered and victorious with a single word.
18
I took Easter’s shoulder bag with me because it seemed a better idea than leaving it with her or taking out the two bound stacks of thousand-dollar bills inside.
Thousand-dollar bills. Two hundred of them.
Christmas was a soldier and he planned for almost every exigency. He knew that I would have to put Easter in school. He knew better than I did what the school would demand for her admittance. There was a sealed envelope in the satchel that had a list of names and addresses: his lawyer, Thelda Kim; Easter’s doctor, Martin Lewis; a bank officer in Riverside oddly named Bertrand Bill; and his parents. Each name had a phone number and an address beside it. The parents must have been separated. Christmas had told me that almost all the marriages in his family dissolved; something to do with military rigor among professional soldiers.
In his mind Christmas was ready for everything — even what he’d left out of his typewritten catalog proved this.
There was no letter or even a note to me. Not one detail about why he had gone to ground, passing his most precious possession into my hands. This negative space, this silence, was a clear message that I should work with what I was given — and sit tight.
Christmas Black, despite his civilian status, thought of himself as my superior. He was the tactical commander, and I was just a grunt with a stripe or two.
That’s what Christmas thought, but he didn’t know me all that well. I was a dog that got cut from the pack at an early age. I was no man’s soldier, no leader’s peon. The president of the United States stood on two feet and so did I.
AND SO I DROVE out to Venice Beach to look up Glen Thorn on Orchard Lane, the first of the names I’d narrowed down from Gara’s list.
It was a small cottagelike house behind three crab apple trees. There was a porch and a green front door that was solid and locked. I knocked with the butt of my pistol and called out in a raspy voice, hoping that would conceal my identity. No one attacked or answered me.
The window was locked too, but the wood had become rather punky. I just pulled hard, ripping off a piece of the sill with the lock, and climbed in.
I was sure that Glen Thorn was not my man from the state of that one-room hut. The sink was overflowing with dishes, and the floor was cluttered with clothes, fast-food bags and boxes, girlie magazines, and sensationalist rags. BABY WITH TWO HEADS BORN TO SECRET KENNEDY COUSIN. ALIENS CONTROL LADY BIRD’S MIND. BROKENHEARTED LOVER EMASCULATES SELF IN TIJUANA TOILET.
There were no weapons or pictures of him in evidence or secreted away in any drawer or the closet. The war hero I had seen had nothing in common with this mess. Mentally I crossed him off my list, then went through the front door and out to my car.
I WANTED MY QUARRY to be Glen Thorn because Tomas Hight lived all the way out in Bellflower; that was a long drive through enemy territory.
It was very, very white out in Bellflower. Many of the people around those parts had southern accents, and even though I knew racists came in all dialects, I had experienced my worst bigotry accompanied by sneers and southern drawls.
But I was an American citizen and I had a right to drive into danger if I wanted to.
TOMAS HIGHT LIVED in a six-story lavender apartment building on Northern Boulevard, a kind of main drag. There were a lot of people out on his block and almost all of them were very interested in me: white women pushing baby carriages and white men having loud arguments on the corner, white teenagers who when they saw me saw glimmers of something that their parents could never comprehend, and of course the police — the white police.
A cruiser slowed down a little to study my profile but then moved on.
Being alone in the late-morning sun was the only thing that saved me from an immediate rousting. More than one Negro at a time in a white neighborhood in 1967 was an invitation to a rumble or a roust.
I came to the front door of the apartment building, wondering if the series of lies I’d constructed would get me over the hump I’d been riding since the age of eight.
I’d tell Hight that I noticed his medals and looked them up, finding his address. I’d tell him that I’d found Christmas but that the man nearly killed me. I was afraid to go to my office and so I didn’t know how to get in touch with his captain. I’d lull the former MP and then, when he began to trust me, I’d pistol-whip him and get the lowdown on what he was doing.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it fit my state of mind and my need for an outlet for all that anger.
A big, powerful-looking white man with long, long dirty blond hair flowing from his head and jaw stood up from the stairs to bar my way into the building.
There were crumbs and naps in his beard. He smelled of sweat and incense oils. The mild vapors of alcohol wafted around him and so did a big, lazy fly.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a Texas drawl that I felt all the way down to the soles of my feet. Then my right testicle began aching, and I knew that the dark side of my mind was preparing to go to war.
“Looking for Tomas,” I said, as if I weren’t preparing to kill this big aberration of the hippie movement.
“And who the fuck are you?”
“Why don’t we ask Tomas?” I said airily.
“You messin’ with me, nigger?”
“If I was to mess with you, brother,” I said in the same light tone, “you would never even know it.”
“Say what?”
