Blonde Faith (23 page)

I
rented a room at a motel called Ariba on Centinela. I didn’t know if the military men had enough grunts left to stake out my house, but safe was definitely better than sorry. Not that sorry had left me unscathed. I lamented almost everything, even those things that I hadn’t and couldn’t have done.

I lay down on the bed with the pillowcase containing thirty thousand dollars at my side. I never once thought of keeping the money. It wasn’t mine, and I would have paid for that theft. One day I’d meet Leafa after she’d lived in the street for ten years. I’d see the pain in her eyes, and whatever money I’d stolen would be gone.

After thirty minutes of trying to sleep, I reached into the bag and pulled out Pericles’ letter. The envelope was made from cheap gray paper. It had been sealed and also taped. I used my razor-sharp pocketknife to sever the seam. The Dear Meredith letter was written on white paper of a higher quality than the envelope.

Dear Meredith:
I’m so sorry honey to tell you like this but I just couldn’t face you now. I’m going away. I can’t take it any more. I sit up in the house every night listening to them kids making sounds like wild animals and you in the bed next to me like Sonny Liston done knocked you dead.
It was the last straw when Hanley threw up on my newspaper and then Lola cried because she couldn’t read the funnies. Ten minutes later they were both laughing and I wanted to kill them. Then you says that I needed to get a new job to pay for all that. It came into my head right then like God talking to Moses. I needed something new all right. And I’m doing that.
Don’t get me wrong baby — this hurts. I came by the house just two days ago. I watched you guys from the alley across the street. I saw Leafa out there in a nice new green raincoat. She helping Lana learn how to ride a two-wheeler, and you were sitting there watching them. I almost went to you but then the whole brood came out of that house like pestilence and I ran away.
I am giving you this money. This $30,000.00. You can pay rent and feed the kids for a few years with that, maybe more. I will send more money when I can get it.
I am sorry baby.
Pericles Tarr

I read the letter three times, wondering what Meredith would think when she read it. It was the truth, but how could she know that? Pericles’ leaving her had nothing to do with Pretty Smart. He just couldn’t take it anymore. It was a house filled with noise and ugliness that only a mother could love. It’s a wonder that she didn’t understand what her man was going through. But then I thought, what would understanding have done for her? He would still have left. She would still have been set adrift with a dozen kids in a paper boat.

But none of that was my concern. I’d bring Meredith her money, and she would make it into their life preserver.

We all just make up life as we go along. At some point Pericles must have loved Meredith. He wanted a big family, or at least he wanted what she wanted and believed that she understood the consequences. And when the life he’d made turned out not to be the life he was making, Perry made up Pretty, robbed a payroll in Washington state, and bought two tickets for New York.

It was all make-believe, their lives and mine.

I PULLED UP in front of the Tarr home a little after four-thirty. The front door was open, and there were children ripping and running in and out of the house. There were more than twenty kids crying out loud and going crazy. The Tarr children had friends whose parents would never let them run wild like that.

I stepped over two wrestling eight-year-old boys to get past the threshold. In the kitchen I found Leafa making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for smaller kids who needed fuel for their disasters.

When the perfect child saw me, she smiled. She had her father’s nose.

“She’s in the back room, Mr. Rawlins,” Leafa shouted, pointing with the jelly knife.

I went past the line of preschoolers to a closed door that I opened without knocking.

Meredith was there in a straight-back chair, sitting at an odd, distinctly unfeminine angle and staring at the wall.

“Mrs. Tarr.”

No response.

“Mrs. Tarr,” I said again, moving closer to her corner.

She turned her frozen gaze to me and frowned slightly.

“Have you fount his body?” she asked.

I handed her the pillowcase and the page Pericles had penned. She put the bag on her lap and unfolded the note.

Either she was a slow reader or Meredith Tarr read Perry’s last words to her many times over. I stood there because there was no other chair in that malleable room. After a long time, Meredith took up the pillowcase and looked inside. After that she turned her attention to me.

“What does this mean?”

“I found Perry in a house in Compton,” I said. “He was leaving for New York and said that he was going to send you this money. I told him you were just about to get evicted and offered to deliver it.”

“Did you read his letter?” she asked, ignoring my subtle lies.

“No.”

“It says he don’t love me no mo’.”

I had no reply.

“Was he with a woman, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Not that I could see. There was a woman in the house, but she was very definitely with another man.”

“What am I supposed to do now?”

I had been thinking about that question on the ride over.

“First I need to know something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Do you believe that Perry wrote this note?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you think that I wrote it and that I brought you this money to hush you up?”

“Because Leafa just got that raincoat from the Anders across the street four days ago, but that ain’t all.”

“What else?”

“Hanley didn’t vomit on that newspaper, Henry did.” She smiled. “Perry was always confusin’ Hanley with Henry. He had to be alive to write this note. And it sounds just like him and this is his writin’.

“Why didn’t you just steal this money, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Because of Leafa,” I said.

“Leafa?”

“She’s a special child, Mrs. Tarr. She deserves better than she has.”

“She does.” Tears rolled down Meredith Tarr’s face, but she didn’t sob or moan.

“Mrs. Tarr.”

“Yes, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I’m going to give you some advice. So please listen.”

Meredith Tarr’s destroyed eyes became clear and focused.

“Do you have a good friend or a sister somewhere?”

“Melinda. She my half sister from Arkansas.”

“Call her. Have her come and live with you to help with these kids. If not her then someone else. Take the money and get a safe-deposit box. Don’t let anybody know you got this money, not even your half sister. I’m gonna have a friend call you, a woman named Jewelle. She will help you buy a house for ten thousand dollars or less. Buy the house and use the money you got left to pay for your sister and these kids. Rest up for a while and then get you a job. Perry told me that he’ll get in touch and send you more money when you need it.

“Are you listening to me?”

She nodded in a sentient manner.

“Where’d he get this money, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I don’t know and I didn’t ask.”

Meredith nodded again, this time sternly.

We went over my advice four or five times. I drilled it into her and I believe that she listened. When I was sure that she at least understood the way to go about taking care of all that cash, I headed for the door. I was half the way out of the back room when Meredith shouted, “Bastard!”

I turned to see if she was talking to me, but Meredith was staring at the wall again. Her healing had finally begun.

B
y the time I’d made it back to the Ariba, Meredith and Pericles Tarr were out of my mind. I turned on the news and lit up a cigarette, kicked off my shoes, and sat there while Jerry Dunphy lectured me on a wide range of unconnected stories. A boy had been kidnapped and then released for a quarter million in ransom. The confessions of two captured American pilots shown on a North Vietnamese film release were denied by American lip-readers. The Oscars might be postponed due to a strike. And Governor Ronald Reagan was slashing jobs in California’s mental-health system. There were no black people in the news that night; no Mexicans or Indians or Africans either. But eleven students in Germany were arrested for a plot to assassinate Hubert H. Humphrey.

None of what I saw meant anything to me. I didn’t believe or disbelieve. Watching the news was just a way to pass the time. If I were a child, I would have been watching cartoons.

After a while I turned down the volume on the TV, picked up the phone, and dialed.

“Hello?” Peter Rhone said in his sad and cultured tenor.

“Hey, Pete,” I said.

“Mr. Rawlins. You want EttaMae?”

“Yeah. But first tell me somethin’.”

“What’s that?”

“Did you tell Etta about that blue Pontiac that Raymond and Pericles bought from Primo?”

“No. No, I did not.”

“Why?”

“Because Ray asked me not to, and I usually do what he asks.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“Just a minute, Mr. Rawlins, I’ll get EttaMae.”

I sat there watching Jerry Dunphy’s boyish face. He was smiling now, giving out good news, I guess.

“Hello,” Etta said in my ear.

“Pericles Tarr is alive,” I said. “I can go to the police with that, and his wife will back it up.”

Etta gave me twenty or so seconds of silence. The kind of quiet a woman gives when she wants you to know you’ve gotten to her.

“Thank you, Easy. Thank you, baby,” she said. “I don’t know what I would’a did if they took him from me again.”

“We both know that nobody’s ever gonna take Ray again,” I said. “Anyway, I did what I did because he’s my friend.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s another question, Etta. I don’t know yet.”

When people have known each other as long as we had, they speak in silences and unspoken questions. Etta knew that I could intrude only so far into Raymond’s life. The same was true for her. We’d saved him from a murder rap. She’d have to console herself with that and wait for his return.

“I’ll call you later, Etta,” I said. “When I get on top of a few things here.”

“Sumpin’ wrong, Easy?” she asked.

“No, baby, not at all. Why you ask?”

“You sound funny. Like a man drivin’ his usual way home and he comes up to a dead end.”

I wondered what daytime TV show had given her those words. Etta had never read a book, but she studied the TV like it was the Library of Congress.

“Light’s just red,” I told her. “Bye.”

I hung up too quickly, or maybe I meant for her to understand that she was right. Communication gets sophisticated when you grow older. Sometimes it’s impossible even to know what you’re saying.

I PICKED UP TOURMALINE a block away from where she worked. She wanted to keep her bookkeeping job through the summer, and Brad Knowles certainly would have fired her if he ever saw us together.

From Compton we went to a club on the south side of downtown LA. It was called Bradlee’s and it was a place to dance. The building was a unique structure, a great octagonal edifice housing a single room that was one hundred feet across. In the middle of that room was a raised dais where a big band of black men, with one black woman vocalist, performed. From swing to rock and roll, they played music that made you want to move your feet.

I was not a dancer, never had been, never would be, but Tourmaline had enough rhythm for both of us that night. All I had to do was look at her or feel her move and listen to the music. I wasn’t Fred Astaire, but my missteps only served to make my date laugh.

She was wearing a black skirt that was short and tight and a blouse covered with silvery plastic scales. Her eyes were aglitter and her body moved sinuously, insinuating all those things that young boys suspect.

At ten I bought her a beer so she’d give my forty-seven-year-old feet and hips a break.

“You could be a good dancer if you worked at it a little,” she told me.

“I could be a physicist if I went to college for eight years too.”

“But physics isn’t as fun as the boogaloo.”

“I don’t know about that. I think of a pirouette when I look up at the stars. You know the universe is a ballet that never stops.”

“I like you, Porterhouse,” Tourmaline said. She put a hand on my arm and leaned over to kiss me. Her mouth was cold and wet from the beer, but her tongue was warm.

I closed my eyes like a schoolgirl, and when I opened them she was still there, still smiling.

The dance was wonderful and frightening. There were hundreds of people of all colors and ages around us. They were twirling and hopping, dipping down low and moving their shoulders in deft interpretation. I was there with them, but at the same time I felt that I was capering toward a precipice, about to fall off into the darkness. The only way I could stay alive was to keep on dancing. I worried that my legs would give out and my feet would stumble.…

WHEN I WALKED Tourmaline to her apartment door, she turned to me and held out a hand, palm up. It was a question to which I had an answer. I pulled the hand to me and kissed her now warm lips. She molded her body to mine as she had done on the dance floor and made a sound of deep satisfaction.

We kissed for a very long time there outside her front door. It took me five minutes to get down to her neck and another ten before I lifted her skirt so that I could hold her behind. When half an hour had gone by, Tourmaline shoved her hand down the front of my pants. It struck me that I had lost quite a bit of weight since buying that suit. When her hand gripped my erection, I went still and stiff all over.

“I got you,” she whispered.

“I need you,” I replied.

She kissed me, gave me a squeeze, and asked, “For what?”

“Huh?”

“What you need me for?”

“For my life,” I said, and she began to stroke me softly, maddeningly.