Blonde Faith (26 page)

He didn’t know that Faith and I had become lovers, and my instincts told me that informing him would be a tactical error, maybe a fatal one.

Let it go,
he’d said. Three words — the code sequence for a secret weapon or the go-ahead for an invasion. The term had a religious, even a psychological meaning for me. I could have been the acolyte of some warrior religion and Christmas my priest. I had come to him seeking balm for the rage inside me, and he had waved me away with the slightest gesture.

Let it go,
he’d said. Bonnie and Faith and any other interruption in the war of life.

“You gonna tell me what you mean, let it go, Christmas Black?” Raymond asked.

If anything, the soldier’s jaw set harder. The air in the car went still.

You could count the number of men on one hand that Mouse would allow to ignore him. Christmas took up two of those digits, one for resolve and the other for muscle. Raymond wasn’t afraid of Black’s prowess. He wasn’t afraid of anything. But he knew that there would be no settlement without a treaty and Christmas was in no mood for a powwow.

I was driving the car, but at the same time I was a child again, running through the tall weeds of summer behind the chalky wings of cabbage butterflies. There was no greater pleasure when I was a boy than to be stealthy enough to catch the little creatures. One of the only strong memories I had of my mother was her explaining why catching them was wrong.

“Chile, when you catch ’em, you rub off the fairy dust, and they lose they magics an’ dies,” she’d said in a voice whose tone I could no longer recall.

Even in the car forty-two years from that hot day, the tears welled in my eyes. My mother had been everything to me. Big, black, gentler than even the butterflies, she knew the sugars I liked and the colors I wanted; she made things better even before they went wrong.

I had been thinking about butterflies because I could tell that Christmas’s three words indicated that he was in pain over the decision. His resolute silence underscored that suffering. I was thinking that I had to sneak up on him as I had on those bugs.

But my mother had used the same words.

“Look, Mama,” I had cried.

“Let it go, baby,” she had said.

It was a small step from my mother to Faith Laneer. Even though both of them would also have told me to let it go, this only served to negate the soldier’s command.

“What about Faith?” I whispered.

Mouse’s eyes in the mirror shifted from the passenger’s side to me. He smiled.

Christmas looked at me too. It was the one question he could not ignore. That’s not saying he had to answer. But the look was a capitulation in itself.

“They told me that I was going to be a general one day,” Christmas said in a thick tone. “They said I’d be in the White House, whispering in the president’s ear.”

I glanced in his direction and then back at the road.

He rolled down his window, and the stillness turned into a windstorm.

“I was trained as a soldier from the day I was born,” he continued. “I was raised on strategy and starvation, generalship and hard labor. When I give a command, crackers and niggers jump. They don’t ask me why and they don’t question.”

I knew all that from the way Christmas walked, the way he stood erect.

I sniffed at the air, and he grunted in reply.

“You know why Germany lost the war?” he asked.

“Because they were fighting on two fronts,” I said.

“America was fighting on two fronts. And we had real enemies: the Japanese
and
the Germans.”

I’d never looked at it that way.

“No,” Christmas said. “Germany lost because they fought for pride and not for logic.”

“What’s that mean?” Mouse asked. He liked talking about war.

“Hitler believed in his mission above the materials and the men at hand. He didn’t take into account the deficits of his own armies and therefore paid the price.”

“Hitler was crazy,” I said.

“War is crazy,” Christmas countered. “If you’re a general, you have to be insane. But that doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of your position. When you lose, you lose. That’s all there is to it. If I send you and Raymond out to take a tower, but before you get there they blow the tower up, then you failed… we failed.”

“And Faith Laneer is the tower,” I said.

He did not reply.

“So she dies for nuthin’?”

“She died for what she believed in,” he said. “She died being who she is.”

I knew then that they had been lovers somewhere along the way. Maybe a week ago, maybe five years. For some reason this made me love her more. She had lived within the madness of Christmas Black.

“What about her son?” I asked.

“What about my daughter?” he replied.

W
e parked in an unpaved open lot on the outskirts of downtown. I switched the ignition off and pulled up the parking brake, but before opening the door I turned to address my deadly passengers.

“You men need to stay here and wait,” I said.

“What for, Ease?” Mouse asked, while Christmas just stared out the window.

“The cops want you dead, Ray.”

Reading the subtle emotional changes in my best friend’s face was a lifelong study. His eyes could shift from pleasantries to murderous intent with barely a twitch. Right then a steeliness crept into his gray eyes and the corners of his mouth.

“What cops?”

“I don’t know,” I lied, hoping that Mouse couldn’t read me as well as I could him. “Suggs told me about it. They think that because you murdered Perry your career should come to an end.”

“That don’t mean I got to hide in no car.”

“Ray, hear me, man,” I said, softly and clear. “I got it covered. I know what I’m doin’. Just stay in the car and do what I say for a few days and it’ll blow over. You know Etta be mad if I let you get killed… again.”

It was the joke that clinched it.

On the day that JFK was assassinated, Raymond Alexander had agreed to accompany me on a minor errand. Things got out of control and Ray wound up shot, almost dead. Mama Jo brought him back to life with her Louisiana magics, and I promised myself that I would never again be the cause of his death.

“Okay, brah,” Mouse said. “I’m tired anyway.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

“HELLO, Jewelle speaking.”

“Hey, honey. How’s my family?” I said into the pay phone, thinking, wistfully wishing actually, that some five years before, I had married Jewelle and now I’d just be calling to say hi. That would have been a whole different life, but she’d be mine and we’d love each other and the children we’d no doubt have had. Jackson and Mofass would have been mad, but I’d be happy and Bonnie could do whatever she wanted to.

“What’s wrong, Easy?” she asked.

Maybe the desire showed up in my voice.

“It’s not easy bein’ me,” I said.

She giggled and asked, “Do you have a pen?”

I took out the yellow number two I used for notes and calculating bullet trajectories, and Jewelle rattled off an address on Crest King, a street that began and ended in Bel-Air.

“What’s this?” I asked her.

“Our place is too small for your whole family, so I decided to put them in a house I own up there.”

“You own a house in Bel-Air?”

“Yeah. One’a Jean-Paul’s friends owned it, but he needed some quick money, so I liquidated a few lots and paid him in cash. I figured that you or Mouse or Jackson would need it one day, and in the meantime I’d hold on to it ’cause you know the prices are bound to rise.”

“And what are the neighbors up there gonna think when they see a whole houseful of Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Negroes.”

“That’s no problem, Mr. Rawlins,” she said fetchingly. “You’ll see.”

CHRISTMAS WAS QUIET the rest of the ride. He was a soldier in defeat. There was no revenge or retaliation that would relieve him. He’d been crushed by the enemy after having won every battle. No condemnation could be worse; no tribunal could recommend a stiffer punishment than what he already felt.

“How you find me, Easy?” Mouse asked as we cruised down Sunset Boulevard past the strip.

“I asked Pericles nicely.”

“How you find him?”

“I told his wife that I was hired by Etta to prove you innocent,” I began. Ten minutes later we were at the address Jewelle had given me, and I was just finishing my tale.

Mouse was laughing about Jean-Paul and Pretty Smart, and Christmas languished in hell.

The address was on a big iron door in a great stone wall. You couldn’t see over the barricade except for a few trees that towered on the other side.

I had to get out of the car to press the button on the intercom system.

“ ’Allo?” Feather said with a put-on French accent.

“It’s me, baby.”

“Daddy!” she yelled. “Drive on up to the house.”

She must have activated some mechanism, because slowly the iron gate moved inward, revealing a curving asphalt road that wound through the arboretum used as a yard.

I got back in the car and drove. You couldn’t even see the house until we’d taken three turns along the way. Then we could see the place in the distance.

One man’s house is another man’s mansion, I’m told. We were all the other men in my car driving up to that place. It was four stories, constructed from blond wood and thick glass. There was a stand of bushy pines around the place and a fountain in front. The fountain was a sculpture of naked women and men dancing in a circle around a gushing spout of water that could have been coming out of a great blue whale.

“Where are we?” Christmas asked.

“Hell if I know.”

The front door to the house was red with an alternating black and yellow frame. It was ten feet high at least and twice as wide as a normal door. It flew open as we were getting out of the car, and all my family and Christmas’s family too came running toward us.

“Daddy!” shouted Feather and Easter Dawn.

After them came Jesus in swimming trunks and Benita with Essie in her arms. Between all those legs the little yellow dog came snarling and barking, the hair standing up on his back and his eyes actually glittering with hatred.

As I hugged my daughter, I took in my friends. Mouse shook hands with Jesus and congratulated him on his child. He tried to kiss Benita on the cheek, but she turned away. Christmas picked E.D. up over his head, almost threw her, and she laughed with hilarity that she had not shown in my presence.

“Daddy,” Feather said, leaning away, her fingers laced behind my neck, “I’m so sorry.”

“About what?”

“About hurting you.”

I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say to her that I could not be hurt, that I was her father and beyond the pain and tears that are so important to children. I wanted to, but I could not. Because I knew that if I tried to refute her claim, she would see the pain in my heart.

“Why don’t you show me the house, baby,” I said.

A
nd this is the backyard,” Feather said with feigned nonchalance.

We had already seen what E.D. had dubbed the Big Room with its long, long table and rough-hewn, heavy oak chairs. We’d seen the library with its hundreds of books, the kitchen that had four stoves and a freestanding wood-burning oven, the roof garden, eight of the twelve bedrooms, including the master bedroom, and five or six other rooms whose purposes were not immediately apparent.

I was amazed along with my friends, but in my heart there was a war going on. I’d think of Bonnie, of walking with her from the house to the tree garden. The pain of that impossibility brought back to mind my name written thirty times by a woman who was killed as she was falling in love.

“Goddamn,” Mouse exclaimed. “Will you look at that pool? It’s like a goddamned lake.”

To accent Mouse’s claim, Jesus ran forward and jumped in, followed by Feather even though she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The pool led to a lawn and the lawn ended at a cliff overlooking a valley. In the distance you could see the Pacific Ocean.

I wondered what kind of deal Jewelle had made to come up with a place like that. She was always looking around, buying up lots of land on the cheap in hopes of future projects. A lot that prevented the construction of a downtown skyscraper might have been worth this hidden mansion.

Easter took Christmas to her room to show him what it looked like. Benita went to the other side of the pool to watch her lover and his sister while at the same time avoiding any contact with Raymond.

“She hates me, huh, Easy?” Mouse said.

“Sure do.”

“Well… I guess she got good reason.”

We were sitting on a pink-and-gray marble bench that was anchored in the concrete. He was wearing a blue-and-purple Hawaiian shirt and white pants.

“You should go stay with Lynne Hua for a while, Ray.”

“Fuck that. Cops want me, they better be ready to lose a few’a they own.”

“Just two days, man,” I said.

“I thought you wanted me to help you kill this Sammy dude.”

“I do and you will.”

Ray grinned his friendliest and deadliest smile.

“You askin’ me this for a favor?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You been to see Lynne?”

The question threw me, but I didn’t show it.

“Yeah. Lookin’ for you.”

“That all?”

“Ray, how long you known me, man?”

He snorted and took out a cigarette.

I got up and wandered into the California dream house, looking for a phone.

“HELLO,” she said quickly, expectantly on the first ring.

I froze. The paralysis started in my gut but traveled swiftly to my fingertips and tongue. I had every intention of speaking, of saying
hello
like any ordinary person would do. I wanted to say
hey,
but I couldn’t even breathe.

“Hello?” Bonnie Shay asked again. “Who’s there?”

One of the reasons I couldn’t speak was that my mind was ahead of my vocal cords. I was in the middle of telling her about Sammy Sansoam and poor Faith Laneer, but I had yet to open my mouth.