The Dying Ground (28 page)

“I didn’t like her much but I don’t think she fooled with any of them. Big Reg wadn’t the kind of man you did that to unless you was fool enough to face the consequences, but she liked the attention so she didn’t run ’em off.

“They finally moved out of Mama and Daddy’s house when Big Reg got on as a longshoreman out of Long Beach. He
worked his tail off and bought them a little house. This house here. He gave it to me when he left.

“Every time he came home from a trip she’d be pregnant when he left again: one, two, three. She had all them babies one after another, and it cooled her out for a while. But when Flea was about four years old she up and left. Finally, one of them men of hers had turned her head with Big Reg gone all the time.

“Now, can you imagine that? A good man working his ass off for you and you decide it’s too much trouble to wait on him.” She sniffed. “I always said that girl wadn’t about shit, but I stood by my brother ’cause that’s what family does.

“He lost his job trying to track her down and almost lost this little house, but I started driving buses, and it paid good money. Plus, I did hair out the kitchen for extra cash here and there. We made it. Became a little family: me, Big Reg, and the kids. We kept the house, built up a little savings, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had a fire burning inside about finding that girl and nothing could put it out. Not me, not the kids, not other women. Nothing. He started drinking and leaving on weekends chasing down leads about her. When he’d come back on Sunday nights ain’t no tellin’ where he’d been. Up and down California, even Mexico, but there was no sign of her nowhere and she never called to ask about the kids. Just disappeared, just like that. And while he was gone I maintained things. I couldn’t afford a baby-sitter for Felicia so I took her on my bus routes with me. She’d ride up in the front so I could keep an eye on her.”

Venus pushed away the stray curls that fell across her forehead.

“Everything, every problem one way or another, can be traced to how a man and a woman treat each other. Whether it’s husband and wife, father and daughter, mother and son,
brother and sister, whatever, most problems I’ve come across have been born out of one of them combinations.

“And now I see it happening all over again, and I don’t know what to do to stop it. I wish I did, Lord, I wish I did.”

“Did Big Reg ever find his wife?”

She turned to me again as if she’d just remembered I was there. “What you think I been talking about all this time? Of course he did. It took him two years but he found her up in Fresno in a motel. She wasn’t even with a man, just livin’ by herself, waitressing, like her life and family in Los Angeles didn’t exist.”

“Did he bring her home?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“’cause he killed her.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. If anything, my existence should have taught me there was no end to violence. It circled around like wagons, a noose of wagons. No matter which way I turned, waking or asleep, death was there to greet me.

“You didn’t know?” Venus seemed truly surprised.

“Felicia didn’t talk about it.”

“Figures. She wouldn’t talk about it with me either. Reggie asked a million questions. He wanted to know the how and why of everything, but there wasn’t much I could tell him.

“How was I suppose to know what was in somebody else’s heart? I barely got a handle on mine, and every time I think I do I find some little dark corner I didn’t even know about.”

“And you haven’t heard anything from Felicia?”

“Not since that first call. Her daddy did the same thing. He murdered that woman and disappeared. Ain’t nobody seen Big Reg since he left, and that was in 1974.”

I thought back to 1974, the year when Felicia’s world fell
apart, and remembered it as one of the best ones of my life. The A’s had won the Series yet again with a team made up of storybook characters with names to match—Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter—and Daddy Al and I were front row center at the games and at the victory parades that wound through the streets of Oakland.

“Has he ever tried to contact you?”

“Once or twice.” She looked off through the window.

“But not Felicia?”

“No.”

“Do you think Flea was involved in Billy’s business?”

“His business?” Her voice rose high enough to crack. “What the hell is that suppose to mean? You think Felicia was selling drugs?”

“The alternative is worse.”

“Why’s that?”

“If she wasn’t involved in his business, what would make her stay away so long and not contact anyone? Can you think of anything?”

“No.” But she wouldn’t look me in the eye. We were both thinking the same thing as the new knowledge about her family history sat between us. “But then again, I’m tired of the truth lying to me.”

I dropped my voice another notch. “Do you think Felicia could have killed Billy?”

The phone rang before she could answer. Venus rose heavily from her chair and hurried into the kitchen to answer it. I stood up to take a closer look at the pictures.

Venus was right. Felicia looked nothing like her mother. The woman in the photograph wore an elaborate beehive, horn-rimmed glasses, and a white blouse with a bow at the collar of the same material. She was plain, just as Venus said, with a grim, sour set to her mouth that poisoned the entire photo.

Felicia sat in her mother’s lap, smiling into the camera, a ring of pigtails circling her head.

“Maceo?” I turned to find Venus standing in the doorway. “That was the bus company. I’m a relief driver this month. I got to take a route for somebody who called in sick. I’ll only be gone two or three hours.” She moved quickly to remove a brown-and-tan uniform from her closet. “You be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You need a place to stay tonight? You’re more than welcome to stay here.”

I understood then that Venus thought I planned to stay in town. I decided to play along.

“I hadn’t looked into it yet.”

She smiled. “Just like a man. Well, I got this big old house all to myself. You can stay here.” She squeezed my hand to let me know the deal was sealed. I hadn’t realized it until then, but it was what I’d wanted ever since I left Oakland.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. There’s no reason for you to go spending money when I got all this room.”

“You need me to do anything for you while you’re gone?”

She looked pointedly at my bruised and battered body. “Why don’t you just get some rest. Help yourself to anything you need in the kitchen. I got movies in that case over there, I tape them off cable, and a stereo in the corner. If you get tired, grab any of these blankets and lay yourself down. The boys’ room is straight back at the end of the hall if you want to get some real sleep.”

She went into the back room to change into her uniform. When she came out I saw her test to make sure her room and the room opposite hers were both locked. “Help yourself to anything you need. There’s roast beef in the kitchen. Make a sandwich, eat some potato salad.”

“Thank you.”

She paused at the front door before unlocking the three deadbolts and removing the chain. She mumbled so softly I wasn’t sure she had spoken, but I heard the words. “Maybe you was meant to come here, Maceo.”

Before I could question her about the comment she was on the other side of the door snapping the locks into place. I stood in the center of the living room and watched her go.

I waited until her car cleared the corner. Then I set out to get answers.

I started in the living room.

I shuffled through papers and drawers. I overturned cushions, replaced them neatly, then moved to the next area. I repeated what I’d seen in movies, running my hand under desks looking for bumps in the surface. I emptied drawers and opened the backs of picture frames.

In the kitchen it was much the same, also in the hallway and the sewing room, and then I came to the end of the hall. The room—the boys’ room, from what I gathered from the decorations—was open with the beds neatly made. But the two doors on either side were closed tight and locked.

I went back into the kitchen to get a knife and found an ice pick to help me with the lock. Since the murder, since the search began, I had taken a backseat, following behind Holly, waiting for the dust to settle, clues to come my way, or answers to appear to me in a dream, but my passiveness, the guise I employed to slide quietly through life, had failed me.

The truth was that I asked everyone around me to go out on a limb on my behalf while I stayed safely in the shadows. I wasn’t proud of cowering beneath a garbage bin while Soup Can was pistol-whipped or of my performance during Cissy’s
attack. Living as a little man with a big name, keeping life compact and close to the vest, didn’t work anymore. I knew that.

I dropped to my knees in front of the locked door with the ice pick pointed at the hole in the center of the doorknob. The door would be easy, I knew that; they were similar to the ones at the Dover Street house, but it was hard to angle with my injured shoulder. It took about five minutes of jiggling the lock and gasping from pain before I felt the knob give. I opened the door and walked into what had obviously been Felicia’s room as a young girl.

I had to still myself. I felt dizzy from exertion, and row upon row of Felicia’s smiling face was an assault on the senses. Just like in the living room, Venus had pictures taped to every surface: school photos, Polaroids, snapshots, and a large graduation photo right above the bed.

I went over to the desk and sat down. I opened drawers, again repeating what I’d already done in the other parts of the house, but I found nothing. I didn’t expect to. The room had an air of stillness, like a crypt, as if it had been preserved for someone who would never return. I closed the door behind me and used the same procedure to enter Venus’s room.

The elaborate four-poster canopy bed revealed nothing. Neither did the lace-covered dresser or nightstand. The connecting bathroom with layers of talcum powder on every surface did nothing but make me sneeze. I crawled under the bed and encountered yet more dust, a bag of dirty laundry, and paperbacks with the covers torn off. I gave up, sure that clues to Felicia’s whereabouts existed in the house but not certain where.

My shoulder ached with pain and my stomach growled with hunger so I retreated to the kitchen for an ice pack and
sandwich. I found the roast beef front and center in the refrigerator, potato salad, and a thick slice of lemon cake. I went through the drawers for a second time to find a plastic bag to make an ice pack. I wrapped the plastic-covered ice in a dish towel and sat down to eat.

The roast beef melted in my mouth like butter. I was on my second double-decker before I realized it had been over twenty-four hours since I’d eaten. I mowed through the potato salad and the cake with the ice pack dripping onto my shoulder and chest. When I opened the dish towel I found a hole I hadn’t seen before.

I pulled the wet shirt away from my body and reached into the drawer for another plastic bag. My search was met with a sharp intense pain. I pulled my hand back. A thumbtack protruded from beneath the nail on my index finger.

In the bathroom I shuffled through Venus’s cosmetics drawers, hoping to find a Band-Aid. At the bottom of the last drawer I saw a stray Band-Aid wedged into the crack of the drawer. My only hope was that it wasn’t used. From the looks of Venus’s makeup and jewelry she never threw anything away. I pulled it out and tried to close the drawer but it wouldn’t budge.

I tried again and met the same resistance. I stuck my hand all the way back and felt a piece of paper rolled into a ball. I pulled it free.

It was an envelope, addressed to Venus but otherwise empty. The left edge was torn away. The zip code started with a 9, California, but the last three numbers and the name of the city were missing. The paper was old and felt flimsy in my hand. It was also slick from powder and smudged around the edges with face makeup and lipstick but something made me hold on to it. There was plenty of evidence throughout the house that Venus saved everything whether it was significant or not, but I knew the envelope was key.

I ran my finger beneath a stream of cold water and then pulled the drawer all the way out. I turned it upside down and found a jagged piece of paper stuck in the corner. Bingo. My heart raced. I knew before I flipped it over that it would lead me somewhere.

1198 Allen Lane. Fresno, California.
I picked up the envelope and noticed that it was addressed to Venus at a post office box. There wasn’t a name above the return address, but I knew it was from Big Reggie.

“Maybe you were meant to come here, Maceo.”

Venus had slipped in without me hearing her. In the doorway she sagged against the frame. She looked tired but also relieved. “I left out of here because a part of me is tired of the burden.”

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond. I felt like I’d walked into a trap. I was tense. I half expected her to pull a gun from her pocket, but it wasn’t meant to be dramatic. Venus was a woman who was ready for someone else to carry her load.

A tear rolled down her face as she dropped into a chair in the hallway. “Do you know how hard it is to keep a secret like this? For fifteen years?” An anguished sob escaped her chest. “I watched each one of them babies, one by one, get lost. Felicia held on the longest, but I always knew it was just a matter of time. I tried to tell Reg, again and again, but he’s so stubborn he wouldn’t hear me. This time I didn’t let him talk me out of what I knew was right.”

I found my voice. “You sent Felicia to him?”

“I made it easy for her to find her way.”

I already felt myself in motion, in the car, shooting toward Fresno. “Do you think she’s still there?”

She looked me in the eye. “I honestly don’t know. I’m done, though, I’m done.” She cried some more. “Let her daddy save her. I’ve done all I can.”