Blonde Faith (6 page)

“Write down the names,” Gara said.

I scribbled the names on the top leaf of a pad of paper sitting on the table between her grand inquisitor’s chair and my supplicant’s stool.

“You wait here,” she said. “I’ll look ’em up.”

AT ANY OTHER TIME I would have picked a book off one of the shelving carts and started reading. I’m a reader. As a rule I love books, but not that day. The only things I was interested in then breathed and bled or cried.

I sat there trying to come up with a plan for approaching General Thaddeus King. I couldn’t get to him on a military base, and even Gara’s precise records wouldn’t have a home address. That meant I had to use the phone. I’d have to find his number somewhere and call him.

But what would I say? That I knew about the scam he and Miles were up to? An approach like that might work on a street punk but not a soldier, certainly not a general. No. A general in this army had seen combat. He’d faced death and done things that would sicken any normal man.

And who was I to say that King knew anything about Miles’s criminal activities? Maybe I should tell King about Miles and see what he’d have to say about that.

But for subtle investigation, I’d have to meet him eye to eye. He wouldn’t give up his heart over the phone like some teenage girl.

Love over the phone was the wrong avenue of conjecture. It brought Bonnie to mind, curled up in the living-room chair, talking on the phone and laughing. Her voice got very deep when she laughed. Her head tilted back, and that long brown throat offered itself to me.

That image shattered any ability I had to resist the hurt. All I could do was stare at the buff-colored wall of the librarians’ lounge. I imagined my mind as that inarticulate, meaningless flat plane. It was a kind of temporary intellectual suicide.

“Was that a trick question?” Gara asked as she entered the room.

I looked up, and the mirth in her eyes died.

“What’s wrong with you, baby?”

“I…”

Gara pulled a chair up next to me and took my hands in hers. Gara had never touched me in all the time we’d been acquainted. She was a proper woman who didn’t want to give the wrong impression.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a problem at home. It’s all right. Nobody’s sick. Nobody’s dying.”

I took a deep breath and pulled away. “What you talkin’ about a trick?”

“There ain’t no General, Colonel, or Major Thaddeus King anywhere in the army, and the only Clarence Miles is a master sergeant in Berlin.”

“Can I smoke in here?” I asked.

“No, but I’ll allow it anyway. You look like you need somethin’.”

The inhalation of cancer-causing smoke felt like the first breath I’d taken in a long time. It reminded me of what a man, I’d forgotten his name, that was friends with my maternal grandfather used to say: “We born dyin’, boy,” he’d opine. “If it wasn’t for death, we’d nevah draw a breath.”

Everything Miles had said was a lie. What he’d said but not what I’d seen. They’d come armed and in force. They all had at least been in the military. They were killers and soldiers inasmuch as they were willing to put their lives, and others’ lives, on the line.

I
always had a pretty good memory in times of stress. When I felt that my life was threatened or someone I loved was in danger, I began to pay very close attention to detail. It was like that when the liar Captain Miles and his men came in on me. Many of those details, including the decorated MP’s medals, had stuck in my mind.

One medal had red and yellow stripes with a bronze leaf across it and an ornate bronze circle dangling underneath; another had a yellow background with green and yellow stripes on it with a medal like a coin; the last ribbon was green, yellow, red, yellow, and green, holding up a bright red star.

Gara let me go into the small military library after seeing my haunted expression. She probably thought I was upset because someone I loved was dying or near death. If I had told her about Bonnie, she would probably have laughed and sent me packing. A broken heart was no reason to put her job in jeopardy.

The medals on my soldier’s chest were all earned in Vietnam: the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross, the Vietnam Service Medal, and a medal given specifically for wounds.

I wrote down the names and came out to the lounge to see Gara once again in her big green chair. She’d finished Salinger’s masterpiece and moved on to some fat tome. She was drinking from a sixteen-ounce soda bottle, smirking at the text.

“I have a need,” I said, all the sadness and remorse gone from my face and my voice.

“We all do,” she replied, continuing her reading and drinking.

“I need to know what soldiers have received these three medals in the last five years.”

I placed the list on the table next to her.

“Here at the library we lead the horse to water, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “We don’t get down on our knees and drink for him.”

I placed one of Miles’s hundred-dollar bills on top of the list. That was just another example of my emotional distress. If I had been in a normal state, I would have put a twenty down. Twenty dollars was enough for what I was asking. But there was something poetic, something that resonated with justice, about paying for my information with the very money the liar had given me.

Gara put down her sparkling sugar water and her book. Then she took up the hundred-dollar bill and the short list.

“I’ll have it by three o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “If it’s earlier than that, I’ll call you.”

I smiled and made a mock salute.

I was about to leave when she asked, “How’s the kids?”

“Fine. Great. Jesus and his girl had a baby.”

“They gettin’ married?”

“We’ll see.”

“How’s Bonnie?”

“We’ll see,” I said again.

I headed for the door before she could question my answers.

THE LITTLE YELLOW DOG must have been chasing gophers in the backyard, because he wasn’t barking as I came up on the porch. Frenchie knew the sound of my car. Bonnie had told me that she knew I was coming from a block away just because of his angry bark.

But that day I made it all the way to the front door undetected. The door was open and so only the screen separated me from the sounds of the house. I could hear Essie crying a few rooms away and Feather speaking in French. Her time in Switzerland in the clinic and then later with Bonnie and Jesus had taught Feather to converse easily in that tongue. But the only person she spoke French to on the phone was Bonnie. Now that my daughter was becoming a woman, they chattered like girlfriends.

I reached for the door handle and stopped. Feather laughed out loud and said something that was both a question and an exultation. I spoke some French, Creole mostly from my childhood in Louisiana, but the fast-paced Parisian that Bonnie had taught Feather was too much for me.

I pulled the screen door open but didn’t walk right in.

“He’s here,” Feather said in a voice she tried to muffle. “I gotta go.”

She’d hung up by the time I came in.

“Daddy!” she cried, and ran up to hug me.

I held her harder than I should have. But I needed to hold on to someone who loved me.

“Hi, baby.”

Feather leaned back and looked into my eyes. She knew that I’d heard her. She wanted to help me feel better.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“Hi, Dad,” Jesus said.

He was standing at the door to the kitchen wearing a brown apron and yellow rubber gloves.

“Hey, boy.”

“Hello, Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said. She was standing by Jesus’s leg, flour on her hands and cheeks.

“You guys cookin’, huh?” I said.

“I’m making pound cake,” the little doll said. “And Juice is washing the dishes and helping.”

“You want to help me with lunch?” I asked her.

The child’s black eyes glittered and her mouth opened into a perfect circle. Domesticity was her bastion of power in her father’s house. He never made a decision about household matters without first consulting her. And Easter almost always had the last word.

I HAD OXTAILS in the refrigerator. We dredged them in flour and seared them in lard with green peppers, diced onions, and minced garlic. While they simmered, we took out the pound cake, set rice boiling, and chopped up some brussels sprouts, which we sautéed in butter and then laced with soy sauce.

While we did all this cooking, the child and I discussed our adventures.

Feather was spending another day at home taking care of her. They had gone to the art museum, then read Feather’s history book and done her lessons for school. I realized that I had to enroll Easter in school or Feather’s education would suffer.

I tried not to think about how Bonnie would have taken care of all that when she was there.

Bonnie had made the house run smoothly, even when she was away on international flights for Air France. She hired people and had friends do chores that made my life easier.

How could I have thrown that concern away?

“Did you find my father?” Easter asked, and I was drawn back into the world.

“Gettin’ close. How long did you live in that house across the street from the big tire?”

“I don’t know… a week, maybe.”

“Hm. I found some people who might know where he is,” I said. “They’re supposed to call me tomorrow morning with what they know.”

“Who did you talk to?” she asked.

“A man named Captain Miles. Black guy in the army. Have you ever met him?”

Easter was standing on a chair next to me at the stove. It was her job to drop in the vegetables while I stirred them in the hot butter.

She thought for a moment and then shook her head.

“No. No Captain Miles has ever been to our house. Not when I was awake.”

“Do people come over in the night when you’re asleep?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever seen any of them? I mean, maybe you woke up and looked downstairs.”

“No,” she said very seriously. “That would be spying and spying is bad. But…”

“Yeah?”

“But one time that lady with yellow hair came at night, and she was still there in the morning.”

“What was she like?”

“Very sad.” Easter nodded to assure me of what she was saying.

“About what?”

“Her husband was in trouble. His friends were mad at him and they were mad at her too.”

“Did she say anything else about those men?”

“No. Can we have strawberries on our pound cake?”

“I’ll send Jesus to the store to get some.”

Our conversation went back and forth about cooking and the people her father knew. There wasn’t much useful to me. But when E.D. was making the rice, I remembered the bar of soap wrapped in paper.

“Mr. Fishy,” she cried, unwrapping the bar. “I thought I lost you.”

“I found it at the place across the street from the big tire.”

“Was my daddy there?” Easter Dawn asked.

“No. No, he wasn’t. But I wondered… Did you drive down to LA in your father’s Jeep?”

“No. The lady had a green car. Daddy drove that.”

“And did she let him keep it?”

“No. He borrowed a blue car from a friend of his, but then he said he was going to buy a red truck with a camper on it from that funny man.”

“What funny man?”

“The one on the TV who has the animals and the pretty girls around him all the time.”

M
el Marvel’s Used Cars was an institution in Compton. Every car on his lot was good as new; at least that’s what his late-night TV ads said. He was a rotund white Texan who kept himself surrounded by pretty white girls in bathing suits, smiling for the cameras. Very often he had caged lions and trained elephants on the lot. Marvel was a con man who knew that most people wanted to be fooled.

A few years before, I’d bought a car from one of Mel’s salesmen, Charles Mung. It was a sky blue Falcon. My Ford was in the shop for a couple of weeks, and I thought I’d drive the Falcon around until mine was fixed. Then I’d give it to Jesus.

The trouble was that a back tire broke off on the way home from Compton. It popped right off the axle and rolled down the street.

I hired a tow truck and brought the car back to the lot.

Charles Mung was a tall white guy with freckles and cornflower blue eyes.

“Tire broke right off,” I told him under a blazing sun on the five-acre lot. It was only three hours into my thirty-day guarantee.

“We don’t cover accidents,” he replied as he turned to walk away.

I grabbed his arm, and three very big men came out of nowhere. They crowded me, freeing the salesman from my grip as they did so.

“You owe me four hundred dollars,” I said over an ugly car thug’s shoulder.

“Show Mr. Rawlins off the lot, will you, Thunder?” Mung replied.

They didn’t hurt me. Just deposited me on the curb.

“Come back here again,” Thunder, a polar bear of a man, told me, “and me and my friends will break all your fingers.”

It’s funny the things that stay with you. I was so humiliated by that treatment that all the way home on the bus I planned my revenge. I was going to get my gun and go back there. If they didn’t return my money, I was going to kill Mung and Thunder.

I was in the bedroom loading my third pistol when Mouse called.

“What’s wrong, man?” he asked after I’d only said hello.

I told him my problem and my intentions.

“Hold tight, Easy,” he said to me. “I got friends down there. Why’on’t you let me call ’em first?”

“They humiliated me, Ray. I ain’t gonna stand for that.”

“Do me a favor, Easy,” he said. “Let me call my friend first. If it don’t work, I’ll go down there with ya.”

I agreed, and later on, after Feather and Jesus got home from school, I came to my senses. I was about to go on a killing spree over four hundred dollars and four fools.

I made dinner and put the kids to bed.

I was sitting in the living room, watching the ten o’clock news, when there was a knock on my door. It was Charles Mung. He wore a thick white bandage that completely covered his left eye, and his right hand was swollen, obviously the source of great pain.