Cinnamon Kiss (2 page)

I felt as if I had died and that the steps I was taking were the final unerring, unalterable footfalls toward hell. And even though I was a black man, in a country that seemed to be teetering on the edge of a race war, my color and race had nothing to do with my pain.

Every man’s hell is a private club,
my father used to tell me when I was small.
That’s why when I look at these white people sneerin’ at me I always smile an’ say, “Sure thing, boss.”

He knew that the hammer would fall on them too. He forgot to say that it would also get me one day.

I drove a zigzag side street path back toward the west side of town. At every intersection I remembered people that I’d known in Los Angeles. Many of those same folks I had known in Texas. We’d moved, en masse it seemed, from the Deep South to the haven of California. Joppy the bartender, dead all these years, and Jackson the liar; EttaMae, my first serious love, and Mouse, her man and my best friend. We came here looking for a better life—the reason most people move—and many of us believed that we had found it.

…You put a pistol to the back of the neck of the one come in last…

I could see myself, unseen by anyone else, with a pistol in my hand, planning to rob a big oil concern of its monthly payroll. Nearly twenty years of trying to be an upright citizen making an honest wage and it all disappears because of a bucketful of bad blood.

With this thought I looked up and realized that a woman pushing a baby carriage, with two small kids at her side, was in the middle of the street not ten feet in front of my bumper. I hit the brake and swerved to the left, in front of a ’48 wood-paneled station wagon. He hit his brakes too. Horns were blaring.

The woman screamed, “Oh Lord!” and I pictured one of her babies crushed under the wheel of my Ford.

I jumped out the door, almost before the car came to a stop, and ran around to where the dead child lay in my fears.

But I found the small woman on her knees, hugging her children to her breast. They were crying while she screamed for the Lord.

An older man got out of the station wagon. He was black with silver hair and broad shoulders. He had a limp and wore metal-rimmed glasses. I remember being calmed by the concern in his eyes.

“Mothahfuckah!” the small, walnut-shell-colored woman shouted. “What the fuck is the mattah wit’ you? Cain’t you see I got babies here?”

The older man, who was at first coming toward me, veered toward the woman. He got down on one knee even though it was difficult because of his bum leg.

“They okay, baby,” he said. “Your kids is fine. They fine. But let’s get ’em out the street. Out the street before somebody else comes and hits ’em.”

The man led the kids and their mother to the curb at Florence and San Pedro. I stood there watching them, unable to move. Cars were backed up on all sides. Some people were getting out to see what had happened. Nobody was honking yet because they thought that maybe someone had been killed.

The silver-haired man walked back to me with a stern look in his eye. I expected to be scolded for my careless behavior. I’m sure I saw the reprimand in his eyes. But when he got close up he saw something in me.

“You okay, mister?” he asked.

I opened my mouth to reply but the words did not come. I looked over at the mother, she was kissing the young girl. I noticed that all of them—the mother, her toddler son, and the six- or seven-year-old girl—were wearing the same color brown pants.

“You bettah watch out, mister,” the older man was saying. “It can get to ya sometimes but don’t let it get ya.”

I nodded and maybe even mumbled something. Then I stumbled back to my car.

The engine was still running. It was in neutral but I hadn’t engaged the parking brake.

I was an accident waiting to happen.

For the rest of the ride home I was preoccupied with the image of that woman holding her little girl. When Feather was five and we were at a beach near Redondo she had taken a tumble down a small hill that was full of thorny weeds. She cried as Jesus held her, kissing her brow. When I came up and lifted her into my arms she said, “Don’t be mad at Juice, Daddy. He didn’t make me fall.”

I pulled to the curb so as not to have another accident. I sat there with the admonition in my ears.
It can get to ya sometimes but don’t let it get ya.

W
hen I came in the front door I found my adopted son, Jesus, and Benita Flag sitting on the couch in the front room. They looked up at me, both with odd looks on their faces.

“Is she all right?” I asked, feeling my heart do a flip-flop.

“Bonnie’s with her,” Jesus said.

Benita just nodded and I hurried toward Feather’s room, down the small hallway, and through my little girl’s door.

Bonnie was sitting there dabbing the light-skinned child’s brow with isopropyl alcohol. The evaporation on her skin was meant to cool the fever.

“Daddy,” Feather called weakly.

I was reminded of earlier times, when she’d shout my name and then run into me like a small Sherman tank. She was a daddy’s girl. She’d been rough and full of guffaws and squeals. But now she lay back with a blood infection that no one on the North American continent knew how to cure.

“The prognosis is not good,” Dr. Beihn had said. “Make her comfortable and make sure she drinks lots of liquid…”

I would have drained Hoover Dam to save her life.

Bonnie had that strange look in her eye too. She was tall and dark skinned, Caribbean and lovely. She moved like the ocean, surging up out of that chair and into my arms. Her skin felt hot, as if somehow she was trying to draw the fever out of the girl and into her own body.

“I’ll go get the aspirin,” Bonnie whispered.

I released her and took her place in the folding chair next to my Feather’s pink bed. With my right hand I held the sponge against her forehead. She took my left hand in both of hers and squeezed my point finger and baby finger as hard as she could.

“Why am I so sick, Daddy?” she whined.

“It’s just a little infection, honey,” I said. “You got to wait until it works its way outta your system.”

“But it’s been so long.”

It had been twenty-three days since the diagnosis, a week longer than the doctor thought she’d survive.

“Did anybody come and visit you today?” I asked.

That got her to smile.

“Billy Chipkin did,” she said.

The flaxen-haired, bucktoothed white boy was the fifth and final child of a family that had migrated from Iowa after the war. Billy’s devotion to my foundling daughter sometimes made my heart swell to the point that it hurt. He was two inches shorter than Feather and came to sit at her side every day after school. He brought her homework and gossip from the playground.

Sometimes, when they thought that no one was looking, they’d hold hands while discussing some teacher’s unfair punishments of their unruly friends.

“What did Billy have to say?”

“He got long division homework and I showed him how to do it,” she said proudly. “He don’t know it too good, but if you show him he remembers until tomorrow.”

I touched Feather’s brow with the backs of three fingers. She seemed to be cool at that moment.

“Can I have some of Mama Jo’s black tar?” Feather asked.

Even the witch-woman, Mama Jo, had not been able to cure her. But Jo had given us a dozen black gummy balls, each wrapped up in its own eucalyptus leaf.

“If her fevah gets up past one-oh-three give her one’a these here to chew,” the tall black witch had said. “But nevah more than one in a day an’ aftah these twelve you cain’t give her no mo’.”

There were only three balls left.

“No, honey,” I said. “The fever’s down now.”

“What you do today, Daddy?” Feather asked.

“I saw Raymond.”

“Uncle Mouse?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do with him?”

“We just talked about old times.”

I told her about the time, twenty-seven years earlier, when Mouse and I had gone out looking for orange monarch butterflies that he intended to give his girlfriend instead of flowers. We’d gone to a marsh that was full of those regal bugs, but we didn’t have a proper net and Raymond brought along some moonshine that Mama Jo made. We got so drunk that both of us had fallen into the muddy water more than once. By the end of the day Mouse had caught only one butterfly. And that night when we got to Mabel’s house, all dirty from our antics, she took one look at the orange-and-black monarch in the glass jar and set him free.

“He just too beautiful to be kept locked up in this bottle,” she told us.

Mouse was so angry that he stormed out of Mabel’s house and didn’t talk to her again for a week.

Feather usually laughed at this story, but that afternoon she fell asleep before I got halfway through.

I hated it when she fell asleep because I didn’t know if she’d wake up again.

WHEN I GOT BACK to the living room Jesus and Benita were at the door.

“Where you two goin’?” I asked.

“Uh,” Juice grunted, “to the store for dinner.”

“How you doin’, Benita?” I asked the young woman.

She looked at me as if she didn’t understand English or as if I’d asked some extremely personal question that no gentleman should ask a lady.

Benny was in her mid-twenties. She’d had an affair with Mouse which broke her heart and led to an attempted suicide. Bonnie and I took her in for a while but now she had her own apartment. She still came by to have a home-cooked meal now and then. Bonnie and she had become friends. And she loved the kids.

Lately it had been good to have Benny around because when Bonnie and I needed to be away she’d stay at Feather’s side.

Jesus would have done it if we asked him to, but he was eighteen and loved being out on his homemade sailboat, cruising up and down the Southern California coast. We hadn’t told him how sick his sister actually was. They were so close we didn’t want to worry him.

“Fine, Mr. Rawlins,” she said in a too-high voice. “I got a job in a clothes store on Slauson. Miss Hilda designs everything she sells. She said she was gonna teach me.”

“Okay,” I said, not really wanting to hear about the young woman’s hopeful life. I wanted Feather to be telling me about her adventures and dreams.

When Benny and Jesus were gone Bonnie came out of the kitchen with a bowl full of spicy beef soup.

“Eat this,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“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.

“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 treatments 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 categories. 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.

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 pellets, 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.”