The Dying Ground (30 page)

“Did you see him in there? That mess of a man?” She picked up a pebble and tossed it off to follow the cigarette.

I rubbed my neck where his fingers had been less than ten minutes before. “I saw him.”

“All these years I imagined someone bigger than that. Someone who could still fix all my problems despite what he did.” She didn’t bother to wipe away the new tears.

“How did you find him? Did you always know he was here?” I asked.

“No. Venus kept his secret.” She flashed a smile filled with ice. “Family secrets.” Again the ice. A grin without mirth, a joke I could not understand. “Did you go to Billy’s funeral?” It was an abrupt change of subject, and she held her hand up before I could answer. “Just nod. Don’t talk.”

I nodded.

“Got damn!” She was up like a flash and at the water’s edge. Her feet crunched pebbles and twigs as she paced back and forth. “The funeral was Tuesday?”

I nodded again.

“I wanted to go. I couldn’t.” She wrapped her arms around her middle and doubled over. She stayed that way, bent at the waist and moaning. “Oh, baby, baby.” She sank to the ground and put her head on her knees. The dog moved in to nuzzle her with his nose. She didn’t object to his presence, but he wasn’t providing comfort either. Felicia gave the impression that comfort was something she could never know again.

“As long as I didn’t see you I held out the hope it wasn’t true.” She looked up and I saw her eyes brim with tears. “I didn’t think I could cry anymore. I haven’t stopped crying since I started running.”

I took a tentative step toward her. She didn’t object so I took another. The dog issued a low growl of warning, and I stopped in my tracks. Felicia’s body started to shake but no sound came from her. She sank to the ground and pulled her knees up tightly to her chest. She tucked her head so low that I thought she might fold in on herself.

“Felicia.” I said it as softly as I could.

She moaned in response. “Billy.”

“Flea.” I moved closer, careful to tread lightly. I knelt at her side, the sharp pebbles like slivers of glass in my knee. I was close enough to feel the heat from her body. The dog had inched away to give me room, but I expected him to lunge for my throat if I caused her any more grief.

“Maceo.” My name was a plea. “Maceo.” She sobbed, and I leaned forward. She let herself go and melted into me. I rocked her for I don’t know how long, out in the open with the dog at our side.

“Is he dead, Maceo? Is he dead?”

“Come on, girl.” I tried to raise her up but she was anchored to the ground like dead weight.

“He was looking at me. He was looking right at me when he got killed.” I remembered from my dreams that Billy’s corpse had been slumped on the steering wheel with his head turned toward the passenger seat.

“He tried to protect me. He was still alive when I ran. I couldn’t stay.” She started to heave as if the tears had drained all the moisture from her body. I could feel her muscles tighten against my hand.

“Come back in the house,” I said.

She shook her head. “I have to stay out here. I can’t go inside. I don’t like being walled in.”

“Then let’s move into the shade.”

She made a motion to stand so I helped her to her feet. She leaned heavily on my good arm as we made our way to a tree closer to the property. I sat down with my back against the trunk and pulled her into my arms. She fit easily, though the smell of her hair and the feel of her body made my knees weak.

Once she relaxed against me I gave in to how much I had missed her, to how my life had been driven and overtaken by her disappearance. With Felicia in my arms, Alixe faded away. I couldn’t remember her face, her smell, the reason she interested me in the first place. Felicia had captured a part of my soul that wasn’t available to anyone else, not even family.

Blue told me once, when describing his love for Desiree, that if you’re lucky you get one person who is all yours. It’s too much to ask that you meet this person when you’re young, and greedy to hope that the person feels the same way about you.

The simple fact was that I loved Felicia with everything I had, heart and soul, and she loved Billy the same way. The three of us were a triangle where the points were connected only on one side, but it didn’t matter. My flame for Felicia would burn long after I was dead.

I closed her tighter in my arms. The feel of her skin brought back the nights long ago when she had been mine for just a moment. I didn’t want to let her go.

Ever.

We stayed together under the tree for over an hour, silent, afraid to talk about the most obvious thing between us: Billy. For her it would mean he was gone yet again and for me it would drive home the knowledge that he would always be
there. I welcomed the delusion, but finally the silence became too big.

“Felicia,” I said. “Felicia, tell me what happened.”

She turned all the way around and threw her legs over my knees. We were like tangled crabs, limbs locked together. She leaned forward until her forehead rested on my chest.

“Felicia.” I pushed her backward until we were eye to eye.

“I can’t.” She locked eyes with me.

She seemed to be searching for a promise in my face, but I didn’t know what she wanted. My best guess was that she wanted me to take her burden like a baton. A quick exchange, like in a relay race, and one of us would sprint off into the wind, away from the trouble.

“What happened?” I asked again. “I know about Smokey, but who was with him? Why?”

She sighed loudly. A long exclamation of breath as she released her last bit of hope. Her eyes flickered off into the distance, and I read something else, something quick and fleeting that I didn’t trust. It made my skin crawl with fear, a faint cold fear that there was a lie right behind her eyes.

“Tell me later,” I said, before she could open her mouth.

She nodded, a little too grateful for the reprieve, and I knew my guess had been right.

B
ig Reggie had restored the house to normal, but he was nowhere to be found.

“He disappears like that all the time.” Felicia came down the hallway holding a wrinkled paper bag in her hand. For the first time I noticed that she was much slimmer than the last time I’d seen her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he just gets up and walks out, disappears, comes back drunk and incoherent. Crying.” She grimaced. “He’s pathetic, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“You know enough. You know plenty.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I was arrogant, you know, always thinking that if I just saw him once, talked to him, I could forgive him and it would be okay.”

“You were wrong?”

She nodded. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. You know what happened when I got here? He opened the door, drunk; I could smell it all the way out on the porch. He opened the door, but then he fell over backward and scrambled toward the wall. He kept putting his hands up over his eyes and crying like a baby.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Ophelia.” She saw the confusion in my eyes. “Ophelia is my mother’s name. He thought I was my mother. I guess he’d been waiting all these years until she came back.”

I didn’t say anything. Felicia and I knew she didn’t look anything like her mother.

“Do you know what you would say, Maceo?”

“To what?”

“To your father. What would you say to him if you could speak to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know you think about it.”

“Naw, Felicia, I don’t. My father doesn’t mean anything but bad news to me.”

She didn’t believe me, but I saw my father on a regular basis; that was the problem. He had always been present, and he usually laughed whenever I tried to ask him anything about my mother.

“You know what the worst thing is about seeing him?”

“What?”

“That I can’t take it back. Now I don’t have a safe place to go even in my head. All these years, he’s been the only one I thought could make it all better.”

“He’s just a man.”

“That’s the problem.” She licked at tears that had fallen to her lips. “He’s just a man, and that’s the worst thing he could’ve been. I needed him to be bigger, so I could forgive him.
I didn’t realize that until I saw him. Fifteen years of anger, resentment, all built up to face a simple broken-down old man.”

“Maybe he was always just that.”

“Not in my mind.”

We locked the door behind us, and for all purposes Felicia closed the door, permanently, on the past that included her father. I envied her that. My mother and father and their mistakes would live with me until I died.

We got through lunch, a half-hearted drive through Fresno in search of Big Reggie before coming to rest beneath the California 99 North freeway entrance.

I turned off the engine and looked at Felicia. “You got to tell it, girl.” She pressed her body into the door and avoided my gaze. “Felicia, what happened?”

“What happened to you?” she countered. “I been with you all day, and you never said a word about all those bruises. Look at your arm. Your pitching arm.”

“It’s a sprain.”

“It’s more than that, Maceo. I haven’t been gone so long I forgot what baseball means to you. How did it happen?”

“A fight.”

She sighed loudly. “Maceo, tell me the truth. The more you avoid answering my questions, the more I know this has something to do with Billy and me.”

“Doesn’t matter now.”

“Who else got hurt?” I didn’t answer. “Who else got hurt, Maceo?”

“Cissy. Cissy got hurt, she’s still in the hospital. Unconscious.”

“Who did it?”

“Smokey Baines.”

She sucked in her breath loudly. “Oh, man. Because of Billy?”

“Partly. Mostly because of Holly.”

“Holly?”

“Him and Cissy been together for a while, so Smokey went after her.”

“And you?”

“I was there. We were together.” I paused. “On College and Alcatraz.”

I watched the effect of my words. I waited for the location to sink in. While we where talking she had regained some of her bravado. In between the cracks of despair and hardness, glimpses of the old Felicia peeked through, but she disappeared again as my words sank in.

“College and Alcatraz?” she asked.

“Yeah. I drove there the other night, without thinking. I guess Smokey followed us.”

She whispered, more to herself than to me, “They followed us too.” I kept quiet, knowing the story would come out piece by piece. “They followed us too. They didn’t know I was in the car. I had the seat back. I was tired, so Billy told me to go to sleep.

“Billy had a gun in the car. I went to sit up when I saw him reach for it, but he told me to stay down. I did but I kept my eyes open. I don’t even remember breathing. But then—then he put down the gun, and I relaxed.” She looked at me, desperate. “I mean, he wouldn’t put down the gun unless he felt safe, right? That’s what I thought, otherwise I wouldn’t have closed my eyes. If I had been paying attention.”

The rest of the story was lost in tears. I waited for her to continue. Her grief was real, I could see that, but I couldn’t understand why Billy would put away his gun at the sight of Smokey. They weren’t real enemies, like Smokey and Holly, but
they weren’t friendly. It didn’t make sense to me for Billy to drop his guard that way.

“Come on,” I said. “Just let it go.”

She shook her head. “Maceo, he was right there. Right there next to me. One minute he had his hand on my arm and the next minute I was covered in blood.”

“Why did he put the gun down?”

She hesitated for just a moment. “I don’t know. I go over that in my head all the time. I don’t know. He didn’t hate Smokey, but he didn’t trust him either.”

“Who was with Smoke?”

“I didn’t see. He told me to stay down so I did. I heard a gunshot, and he fell on the steering wheel. I saw his hand reach out. I don’t know if he was trying to push me out of the car or if he was trying to touch me. I don’t know. I ran. He wasn’t even dead yet, but I was scared. Why, Maceo? Why did this happen?”

I didn’t have an answer. In quick flashes I imagined his last actions. I felt the fear that must have gripped him when he realized he was being followed. The feel of the gun, its cold steel providing tangible reassurance. Looking over at Felicia to make sure she was safe and then a quick calculation of the best streets to make a getaway. How far to the freeway? The open highway? And, then, finally, the act that cost him his life. Easing up on the gun, maybe even putting it away after recognizing a familiar face. A friend. It had to be a friend. A friend to put a bullet hole in a set of rules that never worked in the first place.

“Did anybody come after you?”

“No. They only wanted Billy.”

“You keep saying ‘they,’ Felicia. Who was with Smokey?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see but he wasn’t by himself. I heard him talking as he approached the car. I saw his face a second before I ran. He looked surprised to see me. He raised his gun up, though, and the other person knocked it away.”

“So you ran?”

“I ran.”

“Is that why you disappeared?”

“It wasn’t planned. I just ran. Billy made me memorize an escape route in case anything like this ever happened.” She smiled weakly. “I used to hate when he talked about stuff like that. Who was gonna kill Billy? Nobody in the Bay hated him like that. I saw how people reacted to him all the time. The way they reacted to me once we got together.”