RavenShadow Page 15

  She stopped at the car and left her small purse. She put the billfold with driver’s license on top of the legal pad and squared them, corner to corner. She noticed the stubby receipt from the parking garage on the floor on the passenger side and started to reach for it, then changed her mind. She rotated out, legs together, stood, shut the door, left it unlocked, and without a glance backward marched to the forward loading ramp. It was raised now, and the sea roared into the gap it left.

  She put her hands on the rail that guarded the passengers from the sea, and felt its cold metal. The wind was cold, slapping her face, whipping her hair like a flag. The water will be shockingly cold, but only for an instant. It will happen very, very fast.

  She looked around a last time. She saw no people except for a couple of shadows behind the drivers’ sides of windshields, mere glassy reflections, far, far from her.

  She clambered over the rail awkwardly. The coat was in her way, but she refused to take it off. I have just a miniskirt underneath.

  She held onto the rail behind her with both hands. She looked down into the seawater rushing beneath and made herself see what was going to happen. A falling body. Seized by vicious currents, jerked into the funnel with incredible force. Two propellers, each eight feet across, each grinding tens of thousands revolutions per minute. A collision …

  Beyond? Nothing.

  Her mind drifted up a dream picture. A propeller squirted a darkness out behind….

  She put a slight, quirky smile on her face. She listened to her mind sloshing into darkness.

  Delphine Ryan took one step forward and pitched herself into the sea.

  An Ending

  White people do death dazed. Everything is muffled and hushed. Muffled makes numb. The Ryans walked around numb. You didn’t want to raise your voice. You didn’t want to ask a question or state an opinion. You wanted to act like, well … Out of sympathy you acted a little bit dead.

  The news got to us quickly. A driver jiving to the radio in one of the cars saw her go. Another driver reading a newspaper remembered which car was hers. Billfold with picture ID, credit cards. Since her driver’s license still gave her parents’ North Capitol Hill address, the cops went there first.

  They got to our apartment about noon, a suit calling himself Detective Macy and a uniform. Though I was supposed to be at Kay-Soul, I was fretting about where Delphine was. The cops wouldn’t tell me a damn thing except they were supposed to take me back to the Ryan house. And, “Bring Delphine’s Rolodex.”

  “What’s happened to Delphine? Why are we going over there?”

  In the back seat with no door handle and a wire screen in front of me, feeling like a red man in the control of cops, I got pissed off. I said a couple of things, they said a couple back. When I added a little sting, the suit called Macy turned around and glared at me with malicious triumph. “Look, chief,” he said, “your girlfriend threw herself into the drink. On the Bremerton Ferry. Right into the propellers. Right in.” He snickered. “There won’t be any remains to identify.”

  I cannot tell you how I felt, I cannot tell you. I was like a person deafened by a great explosion, head reeling, surprised by how odd the world suddenly seems, reduced to the perceptions of a toddler, dizzy….

  When I got to the Ryans’, I stumbled inside, no idea what to do. Suddenly I knew. I turned around and confronted Macy, who was just inside the front door making nice to everybody, delicate and wheedling as an undertaker—it didn’t suit him. I stood close, too damn close, towered over him, and rudely threw anger at him with my eyes. “Tell me what happened. How do you know she’s dead?”

  Macy took me into a bedroom and closed the door. “You stupid bastard,” he began. He lost me right there. He explained what the bottom of a ferry looks like, where the propellers are situated, and how water is funneled into them. Water, sticks, candy wrappers, seaweed, fish, and any human beings who happen to be floating by.

  Maybe my anger at Macy numbed me against the truth he told.

  “We need you to come clean,” he said, looking at me sharp. “What was she doing in a cocktail party dress?”

  I glared at him.

  “You said you two stayed home last night. Why the dress? Why was she carrying an evening bag? Why are you lying to me?”

  “I don’t have a goddamn thing to say to you.”

  He practically jumped into my face. “You want to do this downtown? You arrogant enough to give me trouble? Why ain’t you cooperating?”

  I hit him with my biggest radio voice. “Because I don’t know anything, you asshole!”

  When I said that, the damnedest thing happened. Tears sprang to my eyes. I couldn’t hold them back. They snaked down my cheeks.

  He laughed in my face. Laughed big, so close my cheeks felt the breath chuff out of him. He seemed delighted by my tears. Maybe he thought it was a show of weakness.

  I felt humiliated.

  He backed away a little. “When did she leave the apartment?”

  “I don’t know, I was asleep.”

  “Was she gone all night?”

  “I think I saw her when I got up to pee at twelve or one o’clock.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “No idea.”

  “You ever hear of the Starlight Motel?”

  “No.”

  He showed me a stub from the parking garage of a motel with that name. “Why was this in her car?”

  “No idea.”

  “Don’t you know nothing about your own woman?”

  I just looked at him.

  He glared back. He wanted me to think he could get it out of me, he could show he was the tougher guy. I was supposed to forget I was a foot taller and thirty years younger and more fit.

  Suddenly I could stand it no longer. I walked past him. I barged out of that room and through the house and out the front door, acknowledging no one. I sat on the lawn for a long time. Human beings came and went and tried not to look at the crazy man on the grass with his head between his legs. Finally, a woman with a helmet of hair came out and got me.

  This time Poe met me at the front door, said a shushed hello. Some people are diminished in the presence of death. Poe actually looked enlarged, like a bird that fluffs itself up to look bigger in the face of trouble. “Michael is in bed. They gave him a shot.” She didn’t have anything else to say.

  Helmet Hair stashed me in the living room. “Meg and Bess are coming as quickly as they can. Coffee?”

  She turned out to be the wife of one of Michael’s law partners, and she took charge of everything, ordering food and drink, looking after callers, saying the right words, seeing to it that everyone was fed and watered, handling the funeral arrangements, talking to the newspaper. She took the Rolodex and set a secretary to making the sad chain of phone calls, telling all of Delphine’s friends, acquaintances, and relatives that she had left us. “I’ll take care of everything,” she murmured. “You just …”

  The hush alone was enough to kill.

  I sat there for a couple of hours or a couple of days, how would I know? Helmet Hair brought me coffee, introduced me to a few people. Finally Poe sat down next to me, didn’t look into my eyes, and handed me two folded yellow sheets of paper. She looked perfect in a midnight-blue dress, matching waist-length jacket, and black pearl stud earrings. It was as though she was perpetually ready to look right to mourn the death of a daughter. Her hair was slick as if she’d just come from the beauty salon, her makeup impeccable, her dignity and grace at flood stage.

  I wanted to grab her and shake her. Don’t you understand? She’s dead! Chopped up. She turned herself into pieces too small to bait a hook.

  Can’t you see? None of us meant anything to her.

  Oh, sister Poe, you’re her mother. Cut your hair off, slash your arms with a butcher knife, and scream out your grief, the way our old-time mothers did.

  Or maybe it was me that wanted to hack my hair short and ugly and scarify myself. Maybe that would keep me from re
playing in my mind, over and over, the sight of Delphine being sucked into those propellers as a human being and coming out as … something else.

  “Blue, you need to read these.”

  I set my attention more or less on the yellow sheets. The first one started TO BLUE in block letters and continued with some legal rigmarole (“Being of sound mind and body,” etc.). Then it willed to me the cash in her checking account (a few hundred bucks), our household goods and furnishings, the Z car, and her journals. She specifically mentioned the journals. Then, “I’m sorry. Delphine.”

  I vomited right on Poe’s midnight-blue knees.

  She jumped up and fled, hoohooing.

  Helmet Hair directed me toward a bathroom and called for someone to clean up.

  I knew I was being—what’s the fake word?—inappropriate.

  When I got sorted out, Poe came back at me with the yellow sheets. I set the first sheet aside, not reading one word again, and looked at the other one. It was addressed, “Daddy and Poe.” The rest of the sheet was blank. At the bottom was her signature, a pretty, ornamental affair with lots of flourishes. I snorted a little. Addressed to Daddy and Poe, signed at the bottom, blankness in between. Not even “Love, Delphine.” Nothing. Blankness. Blackness.

  “Blue, what does it mean? A blank sheet? Do you have any idea?” Her eyes violated her composure, they were pleading.

  I shook my head. My mind was going into zombie.

  “A blank sheet, Blue. Why? Did she have nothing to say to us?”

  My mind clicked up by rote the words, Nothing or too much. But I just shook my head. I don’t know.

  “Blue, say something. She’s our daughter.”

  It was like the words kicked me in my butt—I was on my feet. “I don’t know, Poe,” I said brutally. “I don’t fucking know.”

  I stomped out of the house. The Z car was sitting in the driveway, and I had a key, but I wasn’t going to touch it. I started walking. In a few minutes I was out of the neighborhood, one of those areas where a man of color can get stopped by cops just for walking the streets, and onto a main road. I flagged a cab, told the driver, “Pioneer Square.” It’s a downtown area where Indians hang out and get drunk on cheap wine. I mean get drunk, not pansy-ass a few drinks and look sober. The area is yuppified, and the yuppies resent us—nobody loves a drunken Indian. But the Indians are not going anywhere. We need a place to get crazy, and Pioneer Square is it.

  I am not gonna spell this out for you. I got blotto. We drank Thunderbird. We made friends, and by sundown I knew these were the best friends I’d ever had. Soulmates, good red soulmates. I don’t remember where I slept that night, and I hate to think. At one point two of us went to a place that advertised cashing paychecks. I had one (good thing there weren’t ATM cards in 1979), and it kept us in drinking money for a another go-round. I stayed drunk. I was giving new meaning to the words, “feeling no pain.” I never forgot, however, what pain I was not feeling, and I told my buddies the story of Delphine, and the story of being forced to go to school, and all the other sad stories that were my life, and sometimes the good stories too.

  I might still be on that bender if Dennis hadn’t showed up the second evening. There he was, in the tweedy suit jacket that was his graduate student uniform. He was just standing in front of me, avoiding my long legs, looking down.

  “Morning, white boy,” says I.

  “It’s late afternoon,” says Dennis. “Blue, you’re needed at the house.”

  “Needed!” I cried. “The hell I am. They killed her and they can mourn her and bury her all by their white-man, tight-assed selves.”

  “Blue,” said Dennis, “there’s been a development.”

  “What is this shit? Who are you, the Chinese Lieutenant Columbo?”

  “You’re needed, Blue.” He reached down a hand and pulled on mine, trying to hoist me to my feet. He wasn’t near big enough, and I was stubborn.

  “Blue, they found out where Delphine was that last night. They need to ask you some questions.” He waited. I didn’t say anything. “And if you want to understand your own life, you want to know.”

  In his car I says, “How’d you find me?”

  He says, “In Seattle everybody knows where to find a drunk Indian.”

  I took it quiet because I deserved it.

  He took me to the apartment first. I went in the bedroom to change clothes. I stretched out to take a short nap. When I woke up, the sun was coming in the window. Dennis whipped up bacon, eggs, and coffee. I ate, and now I was getting half grateful that he’d rescued me. I changed clothes and showered (sanitized myself for the white folks). As we headed out the door, I saw the light on the answering machine flashing red at me, but I didn’t give a damn what it wanted. He drove us to the Ryan house. On the way my thought bubbled up and out. “Did someone kill her? Have they found out she was murdered?” Wild stuff was going through my mind—mind control, hypnosis, Svengali.

  Helmet Hair met us at the door and said, “The funeral is tomorrow. Blue, Poe needs to see you.”

  Inside Li Ming came up and gave me a big hug without words. “Thank you,” I said to her, and then to Dennis, really meaning it, “Thank you.”

  Poe, Meg, Bess, and Lieutenant Detective Macy were needing to see me, it turned out. “Father is under sedation,” Meg began. “In bed.” Still. “Blue, the family has questions, and the police have questions. Reports must be completed. Perhaps it will be easier if the Detective and I do this together. You won’t have to do it twice.” Meg the lawyer.

  “I hear you’ve found something out,” I said. “Where was she?”

  “You answer our questions, then we’ll answer yours,” said Macy.

  I nodded, and kept my eyes down where he couldn’t see what was in them. I wanted to catch Macy in a dark alley one night. But he’s the sort of guy who would always have one up on you—a gun, for instance.

  “Blue, was she depressed?” This was Meg.

  I guess two days helps. Your mind works, even if you’re trying to stay hammered. I muttered out a truth that was new to me. “Yeah. She always struggled with demons. Lately it was worse. She couldn’t sleep. She drank a lot. Really a lot.”

  Poe cried, “Why? She had everything, everything …”

  I glared and spread my arms theatrically. I felt like an asshole. In a white world, though, you use white body language.

  She turned her head into her shoulder, the oddest gesture, like a bird tucking its head under its wing. And she stopped talking.

  “Why was she depressed?” Meg, pushing on.

  I shrugged. “Her demons.”

  “Were the two of you getting along?”

  “Real good, I thought.”

  “Did you fight the night before?”

  “Nope. I went to sleep, she stayed up, like always. In the morning she was gone.”

  “Had she had any bad news?”

  I said it bluntly. “She lost the job she wanted, aide to Congressman Anderson.”

  Meg didn’t even blink.

  “But that wasn’t it,” I added truthfully.

  “What was it, Blue?”

  I just looked at her. She knew the reason. They all did.

  “For God’s sake, tell us,” Bess put in.

  “Was she seeing anyone else?” This was Macy in his grating, insulting voice. His eyes had that look that meant, You look dirty to me. But he probably always had that look, even to his kids.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?” moaned Poe. It was a sax wail, starting high and sliding down.

  I kept my eyes lowered.

  Meg knew when to wait for the witness. They all waited.

  I didn’t know what to tell them. I could try saying that when the going got tough, Delphine had no resources of the spirit. She was raised in a world without God, without gods, without the presence of ancestors, without the awareness that there’s more to the world than what’s physical and visible. A world where there’s nothing but yourself, y
our desires, your strengths, your weaknesses—no spirit to call on for help. And when she got into trouble, that wasn’t enough, not near enough. It never is.

  But these white folks wouldn’t understand that. They sat at the same table as Delphine, and didn’t know they were starving.

  “There’s nothing I can say,” I told them. It was true, far as it went. But there were things I knew. “Nothing I can say.”

  “Come with me,” said Macy.

  We sat on a bed in an unused bedroom, me not wanting to know if it was Delphine’s or a guest room or what. Macy had a tape player and something for me to hear.

  “Pay attention, Chief.”

  I hurled anger at him with my eyes. He should have been offended, but only smirked.

  “This is an interview with one Samuel Johnson. He’s a black man big as you are, plus a hundred pounds of fat. You ain’t gwine enjoy it.”

  The want to hit him flashed into my arm like a jolt of electricity. I suppressed it hard. Ain’t gwine? Who do you think you’re talking to, Little Black Sambo?

  He gave his flat, hard cop look. “Samuel Johnson is the last person Delphine spent any time with. He’s where she was from 2:49 A.M. till 8:12 A.M.” He smiled at my puzzled look. “The parking stub. And some solid police work.”

  He was right, I wasn’t going to like it.

  The tape began with identification of interviewer and interviewee, Macy and Samuel Johnson. When these formalities ended, Macy paused the tape. “Don’t be thinking Johnson killed her. He’s in the clear, he checks out all the way. This is about something else.” He hit PLAY again.

  MACY: What was your relationship with Delphine Ryan?

  Long pause on the tape, and the sound of asthmatic breathing; must have been Johnson’s.

  JOHNSON: She was one of my fucks.