Blonde Faith (16 page)

I held out my hand, palm upward, and she took it with both of hers.

“I had a girlfriend,” I said. “But she was torn. There was a man, an African prince she saw now and again. I left her.”

“Did she love him?”

“Yeah. But, but not like she loved me and our little family.”

“Then why leave her?”

Her question grabbed me like a pair of pliers working on a rusty lug nut. At first I resisted her, but then I gave way.

“Did you ever feel like there was something you wanted?” I asked Blonde Faith. “A way you wanted someone to make love to you? A way you wanted to be touched?”

Faith breathed in deeply. I could feel the grip on my hands tighten ever so slightly.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“That was me and Bonnie. The way we came together was everything I had wished for but never known. In a way, she created my desire and then satisfied it.”

One of Faith’s hands moved up to my wrist. It tickled, but I didn’t want to laugh.

“And then I found out about him and everything was tainted. And even though I loved her more than I ever did anyone else, the fact that she wasn’t all there meant that I was always gonna be unhappy when I looked at her and thought about him.… And then I met you.”

“Me?” Faith moved closer, an effect of gravity as much as anything else.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about shadows negating the darkness in my life. “You gave your love to a man despite his flaws. You gave him a chance and then he betrayed you, but you didn’t, not even one time, say something bad about him. You listened to that man who wanted the loan while he bad-mouthed you and shouted, and you still smiled; you even felt for him.

“That’s what Bonnie taught me. She taught me that you can care for somebody and it isn’t the end of the world. That’s why I loved her.”

“How did you know that Mr. Schwartz was looking for a loan?” Faith asked.

“You were just talking,” I said. “The other guy, the one with the glasses —”

“Mr. Ronin.”

“Yeah. He was looking over forms and stuff and giving his guy a passbook and a checkbook. You were saying no.”

I suppose that insight was reason enough for Faith to kiss me. Her mouth was the texture of a ripe fruit that begged to be eaten. I tried to put my arms around her, but she held them away.

“Craig was always so, so brutal,” she said as she pushed me down on the sofa, kissing me and unbuttoning my shirt.

“You want me to just lie here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. I felt her tug at my zipper and then reach inside.

I realized I was getting older, not because I didn’t respond to her caress but because for the first time in a long time I had the erection of a teenager.

Smelling the sweet peach-scented shampoo in her hair, I said, “I need to take a shower.”

Holding on to my manhood, she guided me to the shower in the bathroom. I reached to take off her clothes, but she shook her head. I understood. She took off the gray dress, revealing one of those bodies you see only in magazines and on movie screens. Her nipples were the size of apricots; she was beyond gravity’s reach.

We didn’t talk for a long time. I stood in the small shower while she hunkered down, washing me with a soft sponge. My erection got harder and harder, but I didn’t feel urgent at all.

“Do you want me to powder you?” she asked after we were dry.

“Can I touch your face?”

I let my fingers travel from her temples to her breasts. She shuddered and wavered.

“Let’s just go to bed,” I suggested.

I LAY BENEATH HER while Faith moved up and down slowly, holding my face so that I would be looking up at her. Every time I got excited, she’d say, “Not yet, Easy. Not yet, baby.”

I don’t even remember the orgasm, just her looking into my eyes, asking me to wait for her.

W
e held hands walking along the beach under a crescent moon. No one could see us clearly, but we were there. Faith Laneer’s concerned observations made me feel safe. There she was under the protection of Christmas Black but at the same time sheltering me.

We had been talking about Jackson Blue for quite a while. Actually, I did most of the talking. I liked telling stories about the cowardly whiz kid, about how most of his life he had done everything wrong.

“He’s a genius, but he’s twisted,” I was saying. “Like if he was a caveman, he’d invent the wheel and then use it to escape from the head Cro-Magnon because he’d been sleepin’ with the boss man’s wife.”

“Is he a good friend?” Faith asked.

“I didn’t used to think so. He’s a liar and a coward, but one day I was telling a story about him and I realized that I cared about him enough to laugh at his faults. That made him a friend.”

Faith hugged my arm, bumping into my side as she did so.

“I like the way your skin smells,” she said. “I want to rub my face against it and breathe you into me.”

As we stood there kissing under the sliver moon, I felt a howl in my soul. There I was, a black man kissing the epitome of northern European beauty, with a gun in one pocket and a short fuse in the other. There was no sex in the world better than that.

We didn’t make love again. I walked her home and stood with her in the doorway, talking about any number of events in our lives. I liked to cook. She used to be a painter before becoming a nun. I’d seen the northern lights over Germany while a cannon battle raged. She married a homosexual named Norman after giving up her vows.

“That way I thought I could maintain my celibacy,” she told me. “But I found myself wanting him in the night. I would come to his door and listen to him and his lovers.…”

After more than an hour, she brushed her lips against mine and went in. I stumbled away in a kind of daze.

I was completely enveloped in darkness now. My family was hidden. I knew the identities of my enemies. Faith had shown me without trying to that there was love for me somewhere if I wanted to take it. My stupor was akin to the feeling you have when waking up from a night of jumbled dreams. At first you wonder if all that nonsense really happened. Was I arrested and sentenced to death? Did I come upon two brutally murdered men in a house that wore a disguise?

I GOT HOME AT MIDNIGHT and found the front door of my house broken in. Even though I knew the kids weren’t there, I rushed inside and turned on the lights.

Nothing had been touched or stolen. The contents of my dresser drawers were orderly; my mail was unopened. All Sansoam’s men wanted was blood.

I tried to remember the moon and Faith’s lips on mine. I tried to dismiss the break-in and what it meant. For a while I worked on the door, reattaching the hinges and clearing away the shattered portions of the jamb.

I sat down in my favorite chair and turned on the TV. From the outside, everything would have looked normal, except for the door sitting crookedly in its frame and the .38 in my hand.

There was a Western on. John Wayne was blustering his way through a story I’d seen a thousand times.

I was thinking that nothing had changed, that Christmas and his henchman would kill the men who had broken in on me. I told myself that all I had to do was go to ground and wait until it was over or the right moment came. But my heart would not listen to my mind. I felt the way I had in World War II when we were preparing to engage the enemy. Death, my death, was a foregone conclusion. I couldn’t think about survival. All I could comprehend was the promise to rain down wrack and ruin upon my enemy.

I wanted a drink. The biting scent of sour mash whiskey seemed to waft into my nostrils. I looked around, thinking that maybe there was a bottle nearby. It was too late for a liquor store to be open, and I didn’t want to go to a bar.

I wanted a drink to settle my raging mind. It would have been like balm against the murders I was contemplating. But then I decided, with my heart, not to go after alcohol. I didn’t want to become calm or numbed. What I wanted was to kill Sammy Sansoam before Christmas got the pleasure.

I was already drunk.

Just the idea that those men, whoever all they were, would break into a house that my children called home shattered every covenant the civilized world lived by.

This thought made me laugh at myself, thinking that I lived in a civilized world where lynchings, segregation based on race, and all the men who died for freedom’s lie were somehow under the umbrella of enlightened concern.

I staggered and laughed my way out to the car. I had rarely been so intoxicated. I had never been that evil.

S
omeone shouted out a desperate plea, but I didn’t understand the question. The words were clear, but I couldn’t make sense of them. I wanted to understand what was being said and who was speaking, but not enough to open my eyes. The shelter of sleep was too delicious.

The mattress under me was ponderous and heavy, like thick mud under a thin layer of straw.

Someone screamed and then laughed.

I opened my eyes in the shadowy room. I could make out a desk piled with papers and a bookshelf that held everything from a Bible to a set of wrenches.

There came more screams and laughter, the thudding of running feet and the smell of something frying. On the other side of that closed door was a whole house full of children about their morning business. Yellowy green shades were pulled down to cover the windows, but there were small holes in the fabric and a strong sun on the other side. Tiny wires of light were suspended above my head, attended by dancing motes of dust.

This was a man’s room, I could tell from the sour smell. And the child’s question had been phrased in Spanish, a language I loved listening to but did not understand.

I thought about sitting up. The various governing bodies in my mind all agreed that this would be a good thing, but there were disputes over the timetable.

Two boys started shouting, and I was reminded of Mouse and Pericles Tarr. Pericles went to a bar every night with Mouse to get away from his noisy household, but Primo, the master of this house, only went out drinking one night a week. Primo loved being with his children, even though he seemed to ignore them most of the time, and at this late date, most of his charges were not sons and daughters but grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and wandering waifs plucked from the street.

That room and the whole house belonged to me. It was the first piece of property that I had ever owned. I hadn’t lived there for nearly twenty years, but I couldn’t bear to let it go. Primo, his wife, Flower, and an endless flow of children they raised lived there rent free because that lot was more my dream than it was real estate.

Pericles Tarr. I wondered why I was thinking about him; this brought to mind Faith Laneer. Making love to her had, at least momentarily, dislodged my depression over Bonnie. Bonnie was still there in my mind. She and I had visited Primo and the Panamanian Flower a dozen times. She, Bonnie, was still the love of my life, but the pall of her leaving, even her upcoming marriage, had blown away.

I remembered being enraged over Sammy Sansoam’s breaking into my house. This also helped to dislocate the sadness.

Finding Mouse meant finding Pericles Tarr.

I sat up with all the ruling bodies of my mind in harmony. I was wearing a pair of cotton trousers and a white T-shirt that had seen better days.

In the hallway I encountered two small children, a girl and a boy. They looked to be five and distantly related. They were picking at each other’s hand-me-down pajamas when the door to Primo’s office opened. The boy’s eyes widened when he saw me. The girl grabbed his top and dragged him toward the kitchen, shouting something frightened in that beautiful tongue.

I followed them into the large kitchen that had once been my domain.

With my permission, Primo had expanded the kitchen to accommodate an oak table that could seat sixteen. The shortish brown emperor of that table was sitting there among the knights and ladies from two to sixteen, eating beans and tortillas with eggs, chorizos, and crumbly white cheese.

“Easy,” Primo said, and the din at breakfast subsided. When the master had a guest, the children knew to keep it down.

“Hey, Primo. Thanks for lettin’ me in last night, man.”

“You looked like you were going to kill somebody, my friend.”

I didn’t respond to his insight. Instead I turned my gaze to the sink, where the scared kids who had seen me come from their guardian’s inviolate den had run to hide behind Flower’s bright blue skirt.

I went to the black-skinned Panamanian and kissed both her cheeks.

A few of the middle children ooed.

Primo leaped from his chair, knocking it to the floor, and said, “What? You are kissing my wife right in front of me?”

He ran at me, and for a moment I shared the fear of his big extended family. But then Primo put his arms around me and hugged me tightly.

I could tell how ragged my feelings were, because the embrace brought air to a gasping emptiness somewhere in me.

The children cheered, and we all ate breakfast together.

Flower never sat down. She made tortillas, wheat and corn, from scratch and kept frying the beans and sausages and eggs while the children downed plate after plate.

I ate heartily and shared jokes with my old friends.

I was in no hurry. It was early, and my new plans needed time to ripen in the desert heat.

AFTER FLOWER HAD hurried the school-age kids off, Primo and I went out on the front porch to sit. It was then that he had his first beer of the day. He offered me one even though he knew I didn’t drink. I would have accepted his offer if I wasn’t afraid of losing the edge of my rage.

“How’s Peter Rhone doin’ at your garage?” I asked my friend.

“I like him there because Mouse comes by now and then with this wonderful tequila he gets from a man he does business with. It’s the best tequila I ever had in my life.”

Raymond had his fingers in many pies by 1967. One thing he did was smuggle goods and people back and forth over the border from time to time. He liked Primo because Primo liked to laugh.