Walter Mosley: Cinnamon Kiss

“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.”

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.”

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 indictment 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.

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 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 pulled into 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, carpenters, 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 the main office, where the custodians congregated, and let him know, in no uncertain terms, what would happen to him if I were to lose my temper.

I was on excellent terms with Ada Masters, the diminutive and wealthy principal. Between us we had the school running smooth as satin.

I entered the main building and started my rounds, going down the hallways looking for problems.

A trash can had not been emptied by the night custodian, Miss Arnold, and there were two lights out in the third-floor hallway. The first floor needed mopping. I made meaningless mental notes of the chores and then headed down to the lower campus.

After checking out the yards and bungalows down there I went to the custodians’ building to sit and think. I loved that job. It might have seemed like a lowly position to many people, both black and white, but it was a good job and I did many good things while I was there. Often, when parents were having trouble with their kids or the school, I was the first one they went to. Because I came from the South I could translate the rules and expectations of the institution that many southern Negroes just didn’t understand. And if the vice principals or teachers overstepped their bounds I could always put in a word with Miss Masters. She listened to me because she knew that I knew what was what among the population of Watts.

“ Ain’t is a valid negative if you use it correctly and have never been told that it isn’t proper language,” I once said to her when an English teacher, Miss Patterson, dropped a student two whole letter grades just for using ain’t one time in a report paper.

Miss Masters looked at me as if I had come from some other planet and yet still spoke her tongue.

“You’re right,” she said in an amazed tone. “Mr. Rawlins, you’re right.”

“And you’re white,” I replied, captive to the rhyme and the irony.

We laughed, and from that day on we had weekly meetings where she queried me about what she called my ghetto pedagogy .

They paid me nine thousand dollars a year to do that service. Not nearly enough to float a loan for the thirty-five-plus thousand I needed to maybe save my daughter.

I owned two apartment buildings and a small house with a big yard, all in and around Watts. But after the riots, property values in the black neighborhoods had plummeted. I owed more on the mortgages than the places were worth.