“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”
Our living room was so small that we only had space for a love seat instead of a proper couch. I slumped down there and she sat on my lap shoving the first spoonful into my mouth.
It was good.
She fed me for a while, looking into my eyes. I could tell that she was thinking something very serious.
“What?” I asked at last.
“I spoke to the man in Switzerland today,” she said.
She waited for me to ask what he said but I didn’t. I couldn’t hear one more piece of bad news about Feather.
I turned away from her gaze. She touched my neck with four fingertips.
“He tested the blood sample that Vicki brought over,” she said. “He thinks that she’s a good candidate for the process.”
I heard the words but my mind refused to understand them.
What if they meant that Feather was going to die? I couldn’t take the chance of knowing that.
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“He thinks that he can cure her, baby,” Bonnie added, understanding the course of my grief. “He has agreed to let her apply to the Bonatelle Clinic.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“In Montreux?”
“Yes.”
“But why would they take a little colored girl in there? Didn’t you say that the Rockefellers and Kennedys go there?”
“I already told you,” Bonnie explained. “I met the doctor on an eight-hour flight from Ghana. I talked to him the whole time about Feather. I guess he felt he had to say yes. I don’t know.”
“What do we have to do next?”
“It’s not free, honey,” she said, but I already knew that. The reason I’d met with Mouse was to raise the cash we might need if the doctors agreed to see my little girl.
“They’ll need thirty-five thousand dollars before the treat-ments can start and at least fifteen thousand just to be admitted.
It’s a hundred and fifty dollars a day to keep her in the hospital, and then the medicines are all unique, made to order based upon her blood, sex, age, body type, and over fifteen other cate-gories. There are five doctors and a nurse for each patient. And the process may take up to four months.”
We’d covered it all before but Bonnie found solace in details.
She felt that if she dotted every i and crossed every t then everything would turn out fine.
“How do you know that you can trust them?” I asked. “This could just be some scam.”
“I’ve been there, Easy. I visited the hospital. I told you that, baby.”
“But maybe they fooled you,” I said.
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I was afraid to hope. Every day I prayed for a miracle for Feather. But I had lived a life where miracles never happened.
In my experience a death sentence was just that.
“I’m no fool, Easy Rawlins.”
The certainty of her voice and her stare were the only chances I had.
“Money’s no problem,” I said, resolute in my conviction to go down to Texas and rob that armored car. I didn’t want Rayford or his partner to die. I didn’t want to spend a dozen years behind bars. But I’d do that and more to save my little girl.
I went out the back door and into the garage. From the back shelf I pulled down four paint cans labeled Latex Blue. Each was sealed tight and a quarter filled with oiled steel ball bearings to give them the heft of full cans of paint. On top of those pel-lets, wrapped in plastic, lay four piles of tax-free money I’d come across over the years. It was my children’s college fund. Twelve thousand dollars. I brought the money to Bonnie and laid it on her lap.
“What now?” I asked.
“In a few days I’ll take a flight with Vicki to Paris and then transfer to Switzerland. I’ll take Feather and bring her to Dr.
Renee.”
I took a deep breath but still felt the suffocation of fear.
“How will you get the rest?” she asked me.
“I’ll get it.”
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4
Jesus, Feather, and I were in a small park in Santa Monica we liked to go to when they were younger. I was holding Feather in my arms while she laughed and played catch with Jesus. Her laughter got louder and louder until it turned to screams and I realized that I was holding her too tightly. I laid her out on the grass but she had passed out.
“You killed her, Dad,” Jesus was saying. It wasn’t an indict-ment but merely a statement of fact.
“I know,” I said as the grasses surged upward and began swallowing Feather, blending her with their blades into the soil underneath.
I bent down but the grasses worked so quickly that by the time my lips got there, there was only the turf left to kiss.
I felt a buzzing vibration against my lips and jumped back, trying to avoid being stung by a hornet in the grass.
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Halfway out of bed I realized that the buzzing was my alarm clock.
It felt as if there was a crease in my heart. I took deep breaths, thinking in my groggy state that the intake of air would somehow inflate the veins and arteries.
“Easy.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“What time is it?”
I glanced at the clock with the luminescent turquoise hands.
“Four-twenty. Go back to sleep.”
“No,” Bonnie said, rising up next to me. “I’ll go check on Feather.”
She knew that I was hesitant to go into Feather’s room first thing in the morning. I was afraid to find her dead in there. I hated her sleep and mine. When I was a child I fell asleep once and awoke to find that my mother had passed in the night.
I went to the kitchen counter and plugged in the percolator. I didn’t have to check to see if there was water and coffee inside.
Bonnie and I had a set pattern by then. She got the coffee urn ready the night before and I turned it on in the morning.
I sat down heavily on a chrome and yellow vinyl dinette chair.
The vibrations of the hornet still tickled my lips. I started thinking of what would happen if a bee stung the human tongue.
Would it swell up and suffocate the victim? Is that all it would take to end a life?
Bonnie’s hand caressed the back of my neck.
“She’s sleeping and cool,” she whispered.
The first bubble of water jumped up into the glass knob at the top of the percolator. I took in a deep breath and my heart smoothed out.
Bonnie pulled a chair up beside me. She was wearing a white 2 1
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lace slip that came down to the middle of her dark brown thighs.
I wore only briefs.
“I was thinking,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I love you and I want to be with you and only you.”
When she didn’t say anything I put my hand on hers.
“Let’s get Feather well first, Easy. You don’t want to make these big decisions when you’re so upset. You don’t have to worry — I’m here.”
“But it’s not that,” I argued.
When she leaned over to nuzzle my neck the coffee urn started its staccato beat in earnest. I got up to make toast and we ate in silence, holding hands.
After we’d eaten I went in and kissed Feather’s sleeping face and made it out to my car before the sun was up.
i p u l l e d i n t o the parking lot at five-nineteen, by my watch.
There was an orangish-yellow light under a pile of dark clouds rising behind the eastern mountains. I used my key to unlock the pedestrian gate and then relocked it after I’d entered.
I was the supervising senior head custodian of Sojourner Truth Junior High School, an employee in good standing with the LAUSD. I had over a dozen people who reported directly to me and I was also the manager of all the plumbers, painters, car-penters, electricians, locksmiths, and glaziers who came to service our plant. I was the highest-ranking black person on the campus of a school that was eighty percent black. I had read the study plans for almost every class and often played tutor to the boys and girls who would come to me before they’d dream of asking their white teachers for help. If a big boy decided to see if he could intimidate a small woman teacher I dragged him down to 2 2