Benita put down the knife, kissed my cheek, and hugged me while Juice put away his gun. Benita had a slight frame and was medium brown in color. She’d once had a dalliance with Mouse, but when I brought her home after an attempted suicide, my son fell for her and, luckily, Raymond didn’t mind.
The room was larger than I’d expected, with beds against opposite walls, a woodstove, and a twelve-foot-high ceiling. There were chairs and a table in the middle of the floor, between the beds.
“This looks homey,” I said.
“Sit down, Mr. Rawlins,” Benita offered.
Jesus, Essie, and I sat while Benita brought out beers for the men and a lemonade for the child.
“What you think of it out here in the bamboo?” I asked my granddaughter.
“They got three big dogs that like to play. And... and... and there’s a pomegranted tree and a lemon tree too.”
“That sounds delicious,” I replied, running my tongue over my upper lip.
Essie laughed because she loved me.
Thinking about love, I turned to my son and said, “I hear the BNDD wanna talk to you.”
“Yeah.”
“You did what they say?”
It took a few seconds before he admitted, “Yeah.”
“Essie,” Benita said.
“Huh, mom?”
“You wanna go up to Mama Jo’s house and play with her house lynx?”
Essie was excited to go, but then she looked at me.
“Are you gonna come, Granddad?”
“Right after I have a little talk with your father.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“Not with me.”
She laughed and leaped from her chair. Two minutes later my son and I were alone in Jo’s visitor’s cabin.
He avoided my gaze but that wasn’t a problem.
“What you wanna do about it?” I asked him.
He turned to me and said, “Whatever you say, Dad.”
“If that’s so, then why you didn’t come to me about this shit in the first place?”
“Embarrassed, I guess.”
When he was a toddler and I took him in, Jesus never talked, not a word. It wasn’t until Feather came to live with us that he began to make conversation with her, secretly. He never needed corrections, punishments, or lectures. He was as sure of himself as any athlete training for a competition. So, for him to defer to me meant that he was aware that he was way out at the shark-infested end of the pool.
“Why they after you, son?”
“’Cause I wanted to stop dealing dope for them.”
“What? They had you dealin’ for them? Like some kind of informant?”
“Naw. They straightforward pushers.”
“And they got their hooks into you?”
“Yeah. Those federal agents are all-the-way bent.”
“I don’t understand, boy. Why would they choose you to be their mule?”
When he turned away, I knew that he’d opened the door to his own troubles. There wasn’t any rush. For that matter, there wasn’t any one person or persons that bore the guilt. I should have talked more to him about his fishing success. Amethystine was right: There was a depression in the Southern California fishing business.
“At first we was just havin’ fun,” he said. “We went down to Ensenada before every fishin’ trip. We met these people who were great. Mexican Mexicans that liked to party. We’d get high sometimes but there wasn’t anything wrong with that.”
“How long ago did all this start?” I asked.
“Around when we came back down home from Alaska. Just about two years. And then one time, about a year ago, this one dude, Diego, gave me a pound of weed and asked did I know people I could sell it to. I didn’t know anybody but he said that he had some friends.” Jesus shrugged, a nonverbal admission of his mistake. “By the time a year had gone by, we were dealin’ in tons.”
“Tons,” I repeated.
“It was so easy, Dad. I mean, when you’re way out there on the water, there doesn’t seem to be any laws, you know what I mean?”
“How long were you dealing the heavy weight?”
“About nine months.”
“How much?”
“Me and Nita made around two hundred fifty thousand.”
“Dollars?”
He nodded.
“What you do with it?”
“Buried it out in Baldwin Hills. Near one’a the oil derricks. Number—”
“I don’t need to know the exact location. I mean, you trust me and all, but money like that can cause anybody to go crazy.”
“Yeah,” Jesus said. “Yeah.”
“So how did the BNDD get involved?”
“I don’t know how they found out, but they did. We brought in a shipment to the usual port dock, and they were waiting. These two agents confiscated the load and then locked us up for three days.”
I remembered then a time when Jaunice called me because Jesus and Benita were supposed to get Essie after a fishing run, but they hadn’t shown up. By the time I had got it in mind to go out and find them, they were back.
“What happened after you were arrested?”
“They told us that if we did two more runs for ’em they’d lose the arrest records. We did the runs, they took all of both loads, and after the last time I told ’em we was finished.”
“And what they say?” I asked, my anger rising.
“They said that we’d be finished when we were dead.”
That pronouncement was accompanied by a necessary spate of silence.
Then: “You know anything about these guys?” I asked.
“Not too much. But one time I did the drop alone. I told them that Essie was sick and Benita was takin’ care’a her. But really Benita went to where I dropped off the load and she followed ’em to a warehouse out in Bellflower. It was called Warehouse Eighty-Six.”
My son was calming down now that he had someone to talk to, someone who at least offered a glimmer of hope.
“What’s this about you sinkin’ your boat?”
The question caused the young fisherman to gaze at me quizzically. That was when he first began to wonder how much I knew.
“I just stopped workin’ for ’em,” he said on a shrug. “I figured that they couldn’t do anything after all we had done together. I went back to fishin’ while Bennie stayed out in Watts with one’a her sisters.”
“Then what happened?”
“I was out past Catalina checkin’ these nets I set for crabs when I saw this fast motorboat comin’ at me. They started shootin’ when they were still outta range. I knew they were gonna kill me, so I jumped off the side with a scuba tank and a weight belt. They set my boat on fire. I watched it burn from under the water.
“It was so cold down there that I thought I was gonna die.”
“Then what?”
“I waited. Just waited until they was gone. Then I swam to this tiny... what you call it? A little island. I was shiverin’ so hard, and my chest hurt.”
You could read the anger in his eyes. It was a certainty that we had to solve his problem before the government had to add capital murder to his crimes.
“What’s the agents’ names?” I asked.
“They called themselves Warren and Scott. Scott has a scar under his lower lip that comes down like a backward comma.”
“What do they look like?”
“White dudes with short hair. Other than that one scar I don’t think I could describe either one.”
“Scott’s the one with the scar,” I said to make sure.
“Yeah, but I don’t think they gave us their real names.”
“Did they ever take you to an office or a real headquarters?”
“Maybe the first time, when we got arrested. But they put chains on us, and blindfolds. When Benita asked why we had to be blindfolded, they said it was because if we got out, they didn’t want our gangs to know where they were workin’ from.”
“Man,” I complained. “They got you comin’ and goin’.”