We got off the phone quickly because Jewelle felt bad asking me for favors. Under different circumstances I would have stayed on the line with her, trying to imagine that my life wasn’t about to spiral out of control.
Between Frisk and Tout Manning, Battling Bob Mantle and Rosemary Goldsmith, I was about to go way out into the deep end of the pool; far enough to find salt water, jagged stones, and circling sharks that didn’t have a moral compass I could comprehend.
I was sitting at the rectangular table set in our new octangular dinette. Three walls of that room had big windows in them. It was a house built for light. The table was too small for the space but it’s what we had. I sat there looking at the grain in the cherrywood, trying to find therein a map that led away from the difficulties of my life.
When he heard about my money problems Jackson had offered me a job at Proxy Nine. The French insurance giant had promoted his career; he thought that it could do the same for me. I would have been the American security chief with a high-five-figure salary and hours that fit my sleeping habits. It was better money than I made as a PI. I would have been treated with respect and there was little chance that I would ever be in physical danger.
I should have taken that job but it would have meant that I would no longer be among my people—the transplanted black folk that had moved from the South looking for dignity. Jean-Paul Villard, the president of P9, was a good man, a French freedom fighter in the war against the Nazis. I liked him but I wasn’t looking for a boss.…
“Daddy?” Feather had come in while I retraced my hapless journey through an unpredictable life that was, once again, on an unerring course.
“Hey, honey, what you have for dinner?”
“Spaghetti and meatballs with green salad and chocolate-chip ice milk for dessert,” she said. “It was good.”
“What’s your friend’s name again?”
“Peggy.”
“She seems nice.”
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Feather sat in the chair opposite me. “Are you mad that I left you instead of staying to help?”
“No,” I said. “No. This is your new home. You need friends on the block.”
“You wanna watch some TV with me?”
“Sure.”
I got the little portable Zenith from a box in the upstairs library and set it on a wooden chair in the echoey living room. I made popcorn sprinkled with sugar and drenched with salty butter. Feather and I ate the snack while watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison on channel 7. After that she watched The F.B.I. with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. while I read the newspaper. When that show was over, Feather was asleep and so I carried her up to bed. She was too old for me to undress her, so I just took off her tennis shoes and threw a blanket over her.
Then I went downstairs to watch the Smothers Brothers on channel 2. I liked their antiwar, liberal sentiments. There was a new America coming; a nation where people like Roger Frisk and Sam Yorty wouldn’t be making the rules—at least that seemed like a possibility at the time.
I was in my old car flying off the side of a cliff over the broad Pacific. It was night but the lunar light was almost as strong as a sun. My car was hurtling down and yet the fall was taking forever. The reflection of the moonlight traveled like lightning across the rippling surface of the ocean, which was coming toward me like some kind of superior life-form that fed off the souls of men.
I was terrified of death and bored with the fall.
I considered lighting a cigarette but somehow this seemed like sacrilege.
The water was less than a foot away. Between the looming impact, the voracious light, and drowning, my death would be both exquisite and excruciating, absolutely final and oddly dull. I looked out through the shattered windshield determined to experience every moment of my demise. I could see, in minute lunar-lit detail, the corrugated surface of the ocean.…
In the dream I was completely calm. But when I opened my eyes, terror crept over my heart.
Feather was saying, “Daddy, I’m making breakfast. You have to get up.”
I sat up from the sofa gasping, expecting my mouth to be filled with brine.
“Are you okay?” my daughter asked.
It’s funny, the things you see when you feel Death’s hand clutching at your chest.
I saw the outline of the faux fireplace in the wall and wondered if there was a real hearth hidden behind the plaster facade. Feather, I noticed, was wearing her old jeans with a baby blue T-shirt and red Keds. This was one of her uniforms for whenever she had a physical job to do.
The sun was at midmorning somewhere outside the big window.
“I need a cigarette,” I said.
“I thought you were quitting.”
“I did. Then I started again.”
I took three drags off of a king-size Pall Mall in the backyard.
By the time I got to the table, Feather was serving French toast, maple smoked bacon, and buttered grits that were just the right consistency. There was coffee and a dish of canned Del Monte fruit cocktail flanking the breakfast plate.
“You got a job I don’t know about?” I asked after tasting the strong French roast.
“Peggy’s mom and dad run a sewing shop with people from their family downtown. I told her that you showed me how to sew and I did some for her mom. They said I could come down with them and work for two-fifty an hour. Can I?”
I was already dressed, so we finished breakfast and walked across the street to a moderate-sized ranch-style house.
A friendly, somewhat Americanized Japanese woman answered the doorbell. She was wearing a calico dress and smiling. Her skinny daughter was standing against the far wall of the sitting room we entered through. When Feather ran to her they clasped hands and giggled.
“Mrs. Nishio?” I said, extending a hand.
She smiled, shook, and almost bowed a little.
“Aiko,” she said.
“Easy,” I said.
“I’m Jun,” a man grunted.
I looked from the pear-shaped, olive-colored face of the Japanese hausfrau to a doorway that framed a broad and short man wearing a dark work suit that was not designed in the West. The coal gray jacket was long-sleeved and might have been a shirt. He wore a light blue shirt underneath. The loose pants were the same color as the jacket. Only his tennis shoes were from this continent.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, reaching out. After our perfunctory handshake I said, “Feather says that you offered to let her go to work with you today.”
“She’s a good seamstress,” the little powerhouse of a man rumbled. He brought to mind a low mountain that was also a sleeping volcano. I liked him.
“I wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t be a bother.”
“She helped with the dishes last night,” Aiko said.
There was a volume of homespun philosophy under that utterance. Feather understood the difference between frivolity and work. She was welcome because she knew what to do when.
“When will she be home?” I asked.
“Twelve forty-five,” Jun Nishio said. “She’s twelve so we will only let her work four hours.”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
Aiko smiled and Jun grunted favorably.
“Have a nice day, honey,” I said to my daughter.
“Love you, Dad.”