“Fine.” Her tone was reserved. But why not? I thought. She was taking a big chance calling me. The last time we spoke, I had kicked her out of my house.
“I was just sittin’ here in front of the TV,” I said. “Jesus and Benita sleepin’ in my bed. Easter Dawn is here. You don’t know her, but she’s the daughter of a friend’a mine.”
Bonnie didn’t reply to all that. I remember thinking that Feather had probably told Bonnie about Easter. She and Christmas had been by a few times. The ex-soldier thought that his little girl needed to have friends, and because he homeschooled her he was worried about her being too influenced by his being a man.
“It’s funny that you should call,” I said in the voice and demeanor of a man alien to me. “I’ve been thinking about you. Not all the time, I mean, but thinking about what happened . . .”
“I’m going to be married to Joguye in September,” she said.
My spine felt like a xylophone being played by a dissonant bebop master. I actually stood up and gasped as the discordant vibrations ripped through me. The spasms came on suddenly, like a downpour or an explosion, but Bonnie was still talking as if the world had not come to an end.
“. . . I wanted to tell you,” she said, “because Jesus and Feather will be part of the wedding and I . . .”
Was that what I had seen in Juice’s eyes? Did he know that Bonnie planned this, this betrayal? Betrayal? What betrayal? I had sent her away. It wasn’t her fault.
“I waited for you to call. . . .”
I should have called. I knew that I should. I knew that I would, one day. But not soon enough.
“Easy?” she said.
I opened my mouth, trying to answer her. The tremors subsided and I eased back onto the sofa.
“Easy?”
I cradled the phone, hanging up on a life that might have been, if I had only picked up a telephone and spoken my heart.
5
You can’t wake up from a nightmare if you never fall asleep. I was out of the house by 4:30 that morning. I had showered and shaved, trimmed my nails, and brushed my teeth. I drank the rest of the pot that Feather had brewed the afternoon before and spent every other minute trying not to think about Bonnie Shay and suicide.
The only big tire on a roof in South Los Angeles at that time was a Goodyear advertisement atop Falcon’s Nest Bakery on Centinela.
The sky was lightening at the edges and traffic was only just picking up. I could feel my teeth and fingertips and not much else.
I wasn’t angry, but if Porky the Pimp had walked by me then, I would have pulled out my licensed .38 and shot him six times. I might have even reloaded and shot him again.
THE BIG BLUE BUILDING across from Falcon’s Nest Bakery was the Pride of Bethlehem Negro People’s Congregational Church. There was a bright red cross on the roof and a yellow double door for the entrance.
These colors seemed hopeful in the dawning light.
I tried for the first time since I was a child to imagine what God was like. I remembered men and women going into apoplectic convulsions in church when
I lit a Camel, thought about the taste of sour mash, tried and failed to push Bonnie out of my mind, and climbed out of the car like Bela Lugosi from his coffin.
THE LONG WHITE BUNGALOWS behind the Pride of Bethlehem were on church property. They looked like the downscale military barracks of an army that had lost the war. There had once been a patch of lawn between the two long buildings, but now there was only hard yellow earth and a few weeds. The white plank walls were dirty and lusterless, and the green tar paper on the roofs had begun to curl as the cheap glue that once held them lost adhesive strength.
The forty-foot-long structures faced each other and were perpendicular to the back of the church.
At the center of each long wall was a plain door. I went up to the door on the right. There were labels on either side that had inked names on them that had faded in the sun.
Shellman was on the left and Purvis on the right.
The opposite door was Black and Alcorn.
I opened this door to the slender entrance chamber.
Alcorn was a regular family. In the dim light of the utility hall, I could see that they had left a broken hobbyhorse, a filthy mop, and three pairs of worn-down shoes outside their door. There was dust and dirt on the black rubber doormat and a child’s jelly fingerprints under the doorknob.
The Black residence was a whole different experience. Christmas had a stiff push broom leaned up against the wall like a soldier standing at attention. There was a mop in a lime green plastic bucket that exuded the odor of harsh cleanliness. The concrete floor before this entrance had been washed, and the white door was newly painted.
I smiled for the first time that morning, thinking about how Christmas and Easter formed the world around them just as surely as the holidays they were named for.
I knocked and waited and then knocked again. You didn’t just walk in unannounced on Christmas Black.
After a few more attempts, I tried the doorknob. It gave easily. The studio apartment was cleaner than a new hospital wing.
There was a tan couch against the center wall across from a long window that looked out on two lonely pines. On the left side of the far end of the room was an army cot and on the right was a child’s bed with pink sheets and
