Little Green (3 page)

The last thing I remembered I was a mature man with the sap still running, driving a car in the night. Now I was middle-aged and achy, dizzy too. It was a foregone conclusion that I would never be young again.

I took six deep breaths, tried to rise to my feet, failed, took another deep inhalation and succeeded. I was a bit wobbly but made it to the door without falling. It felt like victory just standing there holding on to the brass doorknob.

I don’t know how long I lingered at the doorway, but at one point I leaned against the knob and rode the door out into the vestibule at the top of a white wood and blue carpeted stairway. The walls were white and hung with oil paintings of still lifes and of poor and rural black men and women. It struck me that I had rarely seen such intimate renditions of poor black folk. I wondered again where I was. Maybe I had died and gone to a kind of colored heaven, a big house on the edge of the estate where the white people went when they passed on.

There were three closed doors on that landing, but I didn’t want to waste my strength investigating them. So, grasping the banister with both hands, I took the downward-cascading stairs one at a time, trying to keep from stumbling while studying the faces of sharecroppers and day laborers, laundresses and just folks at rest—most of them looking almost as tired as I felt.

One thing that kept me upright was a sharp pain in my right ankle. Every time that foot hit the floor, the shooting sensation
would travel almost to the knee. Rather than resent this ache, I welcomed it, because with each second step I was shocked back to clarity. It was like a bright red spot on a fading gray plain, a distant sun—a jabbing reminder that my blood was still pumping, that life, if not a certainty, was at least a possibility.

I passed three floors and more than a dozen paintings before the staircase ended. On the first floor of the enormous house I felt a little lost. There were hallways with quite a few doors, a living room off to the right that had broad windows and was three steps lower than the floor on which I stood. There were no sounds, no indication of other human beings inhabiting this unlikely architecture.

I was wearing light blue pajamas. These too were unfamiliar to me. My dark brown hands reaching out from the pale sleeves seemed like they didn’t belong in my clothes or that home. I stood there drifting through these aimless thoughts, waiting for a sign.

I didn’t have the strength to go exploring. It felt as if I had a certain but undisclosed number of steps and breaths left in me. I had to husband these resources so as not to give out before reaching my goal—whatever that was.

A muted laugh came from somewhere. I looked around, but the white walls and pine flooring, the many doors and the awkward array of sunlight and shadows remained still and lifeless.

A louder laugh was emitted, and a direction suggested itself.

To my left, on the right half of a broad wall, was an overwide pink door. It was from behind this portal, I was almost sure, that the laughter had come. I released the banister and staggered to a piece of wall next to the pink door. Leaning my head against the white plasterboard I heard speech that was muffled by the barrier. Then there was another high-pitched laugh—a female exhortation of near hilarity.

I hesitated.

This wasn’t my house. This wasn’t the home of any Negro I had
ever known. It was familiar, but no more so than my body, which seemed to have aged a generation from the last time I knew myself.

After a moment of cracked logic I decided that I should go through the door and ask the white people on the other side why I was there in their house wearing somebody else’s pajamas and staggering around like Max Schmeling after his first-round decimation by Joe Louis.

My decision made, I reached for the doorknob but realized that there was none. This simple detail flummoxed me. How could I get through a door if there was no way to open it? I stood there for well over a minute trying to think my way around the problem. I went over it again and again. Early on I thought that maybe I could just push against the pink panel, but for some reason I rejected this simple solution. I considered knocking, looking for another door around the corner, calling out for someone to come let me in, and simply giving up and sitting on the floor until somebody came out and found me. Only after deep consideration of each of these approaches did I finally decide to push the door.

It swung open as easily as the curtains blew inward in the upstairs bedroom.

Laughter and friendly talk were issuing from inside.

The door swung inward but didn’t hit the wall, so no one turned my way. Revealed was a sunlit kitchen about twice the size of most houses I’d lived in. Two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and windows: One side looked out on a long swimming pool and the other onto a broad lawn lined by various citrus trees: grapefruit, tangerine, lemon, lime, and navel orange.

To the right of the cavernous kitchen was a blond table, and on the other side was a built-in eight-foot-square stove that could be accessed from all four sides. Benita Flagg, a slight brown girl in a shapeless calico dress, was flipping pancakes with her profile turned toward me. She was concentrating on her task and so wasn’t aware of my peripheral presence.

“I never said that,” my adopted daughter, Feather, was saying. There was laughter in her young voice, nesting her words with warmth and feeling.

“Yes, you did,” Benita said, still intent on her flapjacks.

Jesus, my other adopted child, now a young man, sat across from Feather, smiling silently as usual.

No one in the room had noticed me yet. This added to my feeling of being dead but not quite gone. I was like the ghosts that so many of my superstitious elders believed inhabited their homes and neighborhoods: blurry images down dark corridors, fleeting and semitransparent, morose, lost, and jealous of the living.

Then there came a yipping cry.

A chubby light brown baby in a pine crib was grinning through
the slats, maybe at me. I thought it possible that only speechless infants could see the dead.

“I’m just telling you,” Feather said, “that Aunt Jewelle said that Uncle JB wouldn’t come over because he said that there must be some kind of voodoo curse here, and he’s never going to go back where people practice things like that. But I never said I believed it.”

Jesus began speaking in mellifluous Spanish, explaining something that I struggled to understand from his hand gestures, but failed. Feather answered in the same tongue. At twelve years old she already spoke three languages fluently.

“If you two are gonna start in talkin’ like that I’ma take Essie upstairs and eat my pancakes with Jack LaLanne.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” Jesus apologized. He would have said more, but in turning toward his common-law wife he caught a glimpse of me.

“Dad,” he said, frozen from the sight of me in the pink doorway.

“Daddy!” Feather cried. She leaped to her feet and ran toward me.

Essie began bawling. Jesus and Benita followed the fleet child in her collision course for my beleaguered body.

Watching the speed of Feather’s approach, I girded myself.

The impact against my side made me feel like a matador when the torquing head of a bull hits its mark. I would have fallen over if Jesus hadn’t rushed up and caught me by the arm. He was a small young man, but years of work on his little fishing boat had hardened his muscles and honed his coordination.

“Hold up, little sister,” he said to Feather. “Dad’s not a hundred percent yet.”

“Not even fifty” were my first words.

“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” Feather said while clinging to my other arm.

My back was against the doorjamb. Essie hollered from her crib. Benita had stopped halfway between me and her frightened daughter.

There was life all around me, and I became aware of an ache on
the inner side of my left forearm which at least gave me a semblance of living.

“How are you, Daddy?” Feather said.

“Come on, Dad,” Jesus added, pulling me so that my right arm wrapped around his shoulders.

Leaning heavily on my son, I moved toward the sunlit table, taking deep breaths and wondering how sick I was. Jesus let me down on a hard wood chair, while Feather pulled her seat up next to mine. Benita had Essie in her arms, and Jesus stood over me, a son at least temporarily taking the headman’s role.

I sat back and felt a knot in the left side of my back. This dull pain reminded me of Mouse being shot and buried alive. My friends and I had lived hard lives. I was happy that my children didn’t have to go through that.

“How are you feeling, Daddy?” Feather asked.

She had light brown hair and café-au-lait skin, the daughter of a black man and a white woman, both murdered before she could utter a word.

Maybe, I thought, my life was easier than some of them coming up behind me.

“How long?” I asked.

“A little more than two months,” Jesus said. “The doctor said it wasn’t a real coma, but you were unconscious and sleeping a lot.”

I remembered then that Lynne had told me the same thing.

“I don’t remember any of it.”

“Doctor said it was the concussion combined with exposure,” Benita said. The chubby brown baby in her arm was trying to stick her fingers up her mother’s nose, but Bennie made her face a moving target while talking.

“So why am I not in a hospital bed?”

“Jo told Raymond that hospitals kill more poor people than they cure, and so he hired this nurse he knows and got Dr. Barstow to come by every few days.”

Barstow was an army doctor I knew from the war. He took care of the children and most of my friends.

“But how did you feed me?”

Feather sidled up to my left side and rolled up my pajama sleeve. There was the needle of an IV taped to the center of my arm.

“It got infected once,” she said, “but Dr. B gave you penicillin when it got too red.”

“I smell like a whole barrel of sour pickles,” I said.

“Antigone only gave you sponge baths every third day,” Jesus told me. “And I turned you every six hours so you didn’t get bedsores and the blood didn’t settle.”

“Antigone?”

“That’s the nurse Raymond done hired,” Benita said.

“So I’ve been up in that bed all this time?”

“Yes,” Feather said, stroking my hand. “Except three days they had you in the hospital. Uncle Ray took you there first. But then we brought you here with Dr. B and Antigone. Everybody was really worried, Daddy.”

Putting a hand on my daughter’s shoulder, I said, “Can I get a half a pancake.”

Eating was almost as difficult as coming downstairs. My stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut, and it ached when just a teaspoon worth of pancake made its way down.

“Don’t you like it, Mr. Rawlins?” Benita asked.

“My mouth thinks it’s great, but the gut says that it’s on strike.”

At that moment I felt something wet and warm on the big toe of my left foot. Maybe if it was at some other time, when my senses were more acute, I would have kicked and jumped. But instead I simply leaned over and looked.

What I beheld was a minor miracle.

Frenchie, the little yellow dog that hated me more than bees hate
bears, was licking away at my foot like it was fresh meat on a silver platter.

Feather noticed this too.

“Me and Frenchie would sit up with you at night the first week you were home, Daddy. I was so sad that he started licking you to maybe help. I guess while he was doing that he started liking you too.”

She giggled and I frowned.

The one thing I could always be sure of was that that little dog hated me, for good reason. That hatred was my barometer when I started to feel that maybe everything would be all right.

We settled into a breakfastlike routine. The kids were all talking, and Frenchie had curled up at my feet. I sipped at a cup of black coffee and thought about a young man named Evander, who was lost and needed to be found. I felt that if he was found, maybe the death sentence hanging over my head would be commuted for another few weeks, maybe even a month.

“I got to take Feather to school, Dad,” Jesus said after washing the dishes, “and then I have to go to work.”

“Kinda late to hit the fishin’ boat, ain’t it, boy?” I said in the language we’d used in his early years down around Watts.

“I’m working for Miss MacDonald.”

“Jewelle?”

“They’re building that big international hotel downtown and she got me a job on the crew. Said that she wanted me to keep an eye on things to make sure that the contractors weren’t cheating or cutting corners.”

The room began to shake slightly—an almost negligible shiver that came from my tentative hold on consciousness.

“So she got you workin’ like a detective,” I said. “Like me.”

That got the boy smiling. He was pure Mexican, Indian at that. Two thousand years ago his direct ancestors were building pyramids and singing their praises of the sun.

“I get sixty-seven thirty-three a week from the job, and Miss MacDonald pays me another seventy-five to keep my eyes and ears open,” he said. “You know I speak mostly Spanish to the other Mexicans they got working there. That way the bosses might let things slip if they don’t think I understand English.”

“Be careful, son,” I told him. “People get a little irrational when they think they got a spy on ’em.”

“I got a special number for Uncle Raymond if things get bad.”

“The other thing you got to remember is that—”

“Mouse is only for if the house is burning down and the fire department is on strike,” Jesus said, finishing a phrase that I’d used a hundred times in the past.

“Bye, Daddy,” Feather said, rushing from somewhere and kissing me on the temple. She was wearing a shamrock green dress with yellow buttons down the front and gray sailor’s shoes made from some rough material.

I smiled at her, and her happy face, for some reason, became somber.

“Do you need me to stay?”

“No, honey,” I said. “But it’s summer, right? I was just wondering what school you had to go to.”