Blonde Faith (17 page)

“At first I told Pete,” Primo continued, “that he should move away from that house. I told him that Raymond was a bad hombre and that sometimes he killed people for no reason. But you know, the riots changed everything for good and bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pete works hard and he makes good money for the job, but he gives it all to EttaMae and he lives on the porch. I ask him why he does this to himself.”

“And what does he say?” I asked.

“He says that he’s making up for all the bad things his people have done. I told him that he was loco, that he didn’t owe me or Mouse or Etta anything.”

“Yeah? And what he say to that?”

“That he did owe us because nobody ever made him do what he was doing. He said that because it was his choice to serve her family, that proved he was guilty.”

I had rarely talked to Rhone since clearing him of the murder of his black lover Nola Payne. But hearing his claim, I understood that he wasn’t just another crazy white man. He was nuts, no doubt about that, but the madness was brought about by his sensitivity to sin. I might have spent some hours discussing this oddity with Primo or Gara or even Jackson Blue, but I had other problems to solve.

I told Primo the story about Mouse and Pericles, including a description of the Tarr household, which so reflected his own.

“It’s funny, Easy,” Primo said. “For a man like me, children are a treasure. You raise them like crops and they pay off or die. You love them as Christ loves them, and they love you like God. I feel like this because I am from another country, where my people have a place. Maybe we’re poor, but we are part of the earth.

“But your man Pericles is not like me. Every new child makes him afraid of what will happen. I see it in my own children. In the United States, we are not of the earth but the street. Pericles has known this, but his wife is fertile and he is just a man.”

“You know Perry?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Mouse and him bought a dark blue Pontiac from me three weeks ago.”

“Together?”

“They came together.”

“Really?”

A whole new train of thought opened for me. I would have left that very moment if Primo had not put his hand on my arm.

“I am moving from your house, my friend.”

“Back to Mexico for a while?”

“East LA, where the Mexicans live.”

“You lonely for your amigos?”

“The boys fight all the time with black children now. Especially our grandchildren who look Mexican. It’s the riots. Now all the peoples hate each other.”

Pericles flitted out of my mind as if I had never heard his name. My home was passing from me. I felt that loss deeply.

“You know my lawyer, Tina Monroe?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Go to her next week. I’ll sign a paper selling you this house for a hundred dollars. Sell it and buy you a place wherever you goin’.”

We stared at each other awhile. I could tell that it meant a lot to him, my gift.

“It’s just ’cause I need a place to go now and again,” I added. “I look at it like rent for the future.”

I
kept a suit in the closet in Primo’s den. That was Flower’s idea.

“You come in the middle of the night, beat up or sweating hard,” she’d said. “Keep some clothes here.”

“I don’t want to be an imposition on your household, Flow,” I’d said at the time.

We were holding hands while Primo sat in a chair in the middle of the lawn, drinking beer.

“It is God’s house,” she said.

AS I DONNED my light brown two-piece, I thought about what she had said. I wasn’t a believer. I didn’t go to church or get chills when the Gospel was quoted. But I did believe that that house was beyond anyone’s control. It was to me a piece of history, a memory to be thankful for.

IT WAS IN that grateful state of mind that I arrived at Portman’s Department Store, about nine-fifteen. Pericles Tarr must have left some shred of his trail at his last place of employment.

They called themselves a department store, but all they sold was furniture. There was a ground floor that displayed cheap goods and a basement filled with junk. The merchandise on the first floor consisted of two maple dining tables with somewhat matching chairs, a red sofa, a dusty reclining chair, and various stools made for the recreation room that everyone wanted but no one built.

Nobody was buying tables and chairs at that time of morning, so the manager was sitting behind his desk at the back of the sparsely stocked room.

This desk was the nicest piece on display. It was dark hardwood with hints of maroon and blond at various places: signs of life under the oppression, or protection of night.

The Negro salesman was made from loose fat held together by skin the color of yellow cream fresh from the cow. His face was flabby; it had once been happy in his twenties and early thirties, but now, midway into the fourth decade, his smile expressed mild discontent.

The plastic nameplate at the edge of his desk told me to call him Larry.

Larry did not stand to greet me. I suppose I didn’t look like a good prospect.

“How much for the desk?” I asked.

“Not for sale,” he replied, giving me his slightly nauseated smirk.

“Pericles here?” I inquired, looking around and wondering when was the last time anyone had swept.

“Who?”

“Pericles Tarr. He sold me a dinette set that I’m not happy wit’.” I contracted the last word to let him know that I was a fool.

Larry stuck out his generous lower lip and barely shook his big, close-cropped head.

“No. He sound like somebody from Mother Goose or somethin’. I’d remember a name like that.”

That was all Larry had to give. If I wanted more I had to ante up.

“You know the other salesmen?”

“Only me. Eight-forty-five a.m. to seven-fifteen p.m., Monday through Saturday except Easter week and Christmas.”

“And how long have you worked here?”

After looking at his watch he said, “Three weeks, two days, and thirty-seven minutes.”

I gave him a weak smile measured to equal his and nodded.

He nodded back, and we parted company forever.

MOST OF THE CHILDREN at the Tarr household had gone off to school when I got there a little after ten. Leafa answered the door. Seeing her made me happy. I suppose that showed in my face, because she smiled brightly and held her arms up to me. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to hold her in the crook of my arm.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked.

“Mama’s sad,” she replied. There was no need for further explanation.

I walked into the house, holding Leafa. The child and I had bonded. I loved her, had become her protector. There was no sense to this feeling between us, just trying to be human in a world that idolized the kingdom of the ants.

Her head against my chest, Leafa pointed to a door in the right corner of the jumbled living room. Through there I found Meredith sitting in a straight-back chair, her head buried in her hands, flanked by two cribs and three toddlers.

With the subtlest shift of weight, Leafa told me that she needed to get down on the floor to make sure her ugly little brothers and sisters didn’t do something terrible. I put her down and kissed her cheek.

“Mrs. Tarr,” I said, still squatting.

When she lifted her head, I could see that she’d aged a good six months since our last meet two days ago.

“Yes?”

“I’m so sorry, ma’am, but if you can bear it, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

She stared at me, not comprehending simple English. Beyond her, Leafa was herding the giggling tots into a corner.

I reached out my hand, and Meredith took it. I led her out of the baby room, through the devastation of the living room, and into the kitchen, where I cleared debris from two red chairs and bade her sit. I made instant coffee while she gazed at the floor.

It occurred to me that Meredith probably hadn’t asked Leafa to stay home. The child just saw her responsibility and took it the way Feather had done with Easter Dawn.

“You take milk and sugar in your coffee?” I asked.

“Milk.”

There were only a few drops left at the bottom of the half-gallon carton.

I gave her the coffee and sat facing her.

“I’ve found out a lot about Alexander and your husband in the past couple days,” I said. “I know that they were seen at a bar together and that they picked up a car at a garage in South LA.”

“The police was here,” she said.

“What they say?”

“If I had heard anything from Ray Alexander.”

“He’s back in town?” I asked.

“I guess he is. They thought he might’a called me on account’a I called the police. They said he was a dangerous man and I should move somewhere where he don’t know where I am ’cause he might want revenge. But how can I move all these kids? Where could I take them?”

It was a good question. I found it hard to imagine one woman giving birth ten times.

“How can he hurt me worse than he already has?” she wailed.

I took her hands. The skin was rough and callused, ashen and tight with muscle.

“I need to talk to Perry’s friends,” I said softly. “Do you know any of them?”

“His friends?” she asked.

I nodded and squeezed her hands.

“What good is friends when you ain’t got nuthin’ and they never call?”

“They might know something, Mrs. Tarr. He might have said something about where he was hanging out.”

“They put a eviction notice on my door,” she said. “Where Perry’s friends gonna be when I’m out on the street with twelve kids? Where the police gonna be when I’m diggin’ through trash cans tryin’ t’feed my babies?” She looked at me then. “Where you gonna be when that’s happenin’? I’ll tell you where, asleep in your bed while we livin’ with the rats.”

Being poor and being black were not the same things in America, not exactly. But there were many truths that all black people and poor persons of every color had in common. One of the most important particulars in our lives was the understanding of the parable of the Gordian knot. You had to be able to cut through that which bound you. Maybe that was leaving a woman behind or breaking into a bank under cover of darkness; maybe it was bowing your head and saying “Yessir” when a man had just called your wife a whore and your children dogs. Maybe you spent your whole life like some John Henry banging away at a boulder that would never give.

I took a hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and pressed it into Meredith’s hand. I could have cajoled her, called a social worker, talked until I was blue in the face. But the knot was the rent and the sword was that hundred-dollar bill.

“What’s this?” she asked, lucid at last.

“It’s what you need, right?”

Leafa was standing in the doorway behind her mother. I was happy that she had witnessed our exchange.

“Mama?” Leafa said.

“Is somebody hurt?” Meredith asked, still watching me.

“No.”

“Can you take care of it?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Then go away, baby. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Leafa backed out of the room as Meredith sat up straight.

“Why you givin’ this to me?” she asked suspiciously.

“My client is paying,” I said truthfully. “I need to know who Perry’s friends are, and you need the rent. I’ll put you down in my books as an informant.”

It was a logic that she had never encountered before. Nothing in her life had ever had monetary value, just cost or sweat.

“I give you the names of three worthless niggahs and I can keep this here money?”

“The money is yours,” I said. “I just gave it to you. Now I’m asking for those names.”

Leafa appeared again at the doorway. This time she remained silent.

“That don’t make no sense,” Meredith said. She was angry.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s what they call irrational. But you see, Mrs. Tarr, we, all human beings, just think we’re rational when really we never do anything that makes sense. What sense does it make to throw a poor woman and her kids into the street? What sense does it make for a man to hate me for my accent or my skin color? What sense war or TV shows, guns or Pericles’ dying?”

I got to her with that. Her life, my life, President Johnson’s life in the White House, none of it made any sense. We were all crazy, pretending that our lives were sane.

T
here was a small park down in the center of Watts next to a giant sculpture called the Watts Towers. The gaudy towers were built by a man named Rodia over a period of thirty-three years. He built them from refuse and simple material. It was a whimsical place in a very grim part of town.

The park had a few trees and picnic tables on grass worn thin by hundreds of children’s tramping feet. Meredith Tarr had told me that Timor Reed and Blix Redford were there almost every day, “Drinkin’ gin and wastin’ time.” Pericles would go to visit Tim and Blix once a week or so to share their rotgut and play checkers.

I got there just before noon. There was loud music coming from one house across the street, two teenage lovers playing hooky in order to study the facts of life, and two men of uncertain age sitting across from each other at a redwood picnic table, leaning over a folding paper checkerboard. The board was held together by once clear, now yellowing adhesive tape. About half of the pieces were light-colored stones with crayon X’s, either red or black, scrawled on top.

Looking at those men and that board, I felt as if I were witnessing the devolution of a culture. The decrepit park, the shabby clothes Blix and Timor wore, even Otis Redding moaning about the dock of the bay on tinny but loud speakers, spoke of a world that was grinding to a halt.

“Mr. Reed. Mr. Redford,” I said to the men.

They looked up at me like two soldiers from vastly disparate battlefields who had died simultaneously and were now sitting in Limbo awaiting the verdict of Valhalla.