Lowell moaned; he buried his head in his trembling hands. “It’s Fitch, Isaac! Lucius Fitch!”
That was hardly the worst of it. A month later Maxwell came to work and found a uniformed policeman standing beside his desk. He stopped in his tracks, dropped his briefcase, and looked at Cummings, Lowell, and Ragsdale. They kept their eyes averted from him, fixed on the sheets of morning copy strewn across their desks.
“What is this?” Maxwell shouted. He fumbled in his coat pocket for his plastic respirator. “What’s going on here?”
The police officer stepped toward him. He had a round face and clear blue eyes. Dressed in blue, he looked somewhat like a robot and sounded like one when he said, “You’ll have to come with me, Mr. Maxwell.”
Maxwell jumped back three feet. “For what?”
The officer unfolded a sheet of official-looking paper. “The complainants state that yesterday you checked out company car number fifteen at nine hundred.” He looked up at Maxwell. “It’s still missing.”
“I never touched any of those cars!” Maxwell shouted. “Fred,” he pleaded to Ragsdale, “is that your complaint?”
Ragsdale looked up with a straight and sad face, then took a sip from the coffee on his desk. It was cold and covered with white scum. “The parking-lot attendant says he saw you take the car yesterday. He said he asked you where you were going, and you told him it was none of his damn business.” Ragsdale looked away. “I’m sorry, Isaac. . . .”
The whole world caved in. The officer took Maxwell’s arm and led him toward the front door. They stopped to let a wiry young black in a pink tank top and blue bellbottoms squeeze between them. Maxwell recognized the boy as the same one who tried to monopolize Faith’s time at the Christmas party. Straightaway he went to the bulletin board where the company car keys hung on rows of silver hooks. Maxwell broke free from the officer’s grip and raced to the board. He snatched the car key from the boy’s hand.
“What car was taken?” he called to Cummings.
“Fifteen.”
“This is it!” Maxwell shouted. He raised the key high in the air like a standard and looked at the confused boy beside him.
“I had to drop off some evening papers uptown,” the boy said, a frayed toothpick stuck in the left corner of his mouth. “It was late so I took the car home with me.”
Maxwell, almost sobbing, hugged the boy like a brother.
He was certain his editors were out to get him, just waiting for him to make some mistake. Faith remembered listening to his complaints at night. She guessed it was her ability to listen that kept their marriage together. That, and “carrying the ball.” She turned off the stove and set the dinner table with their best, and as of yet unpaid-for, silverware. Then she went to her bedroom to sit in front of her mirror for half an hour, struggling with IT until she heard Maxwell’s key turn in the front door.
He called, “We’re here, honey!”
“I’ll be out in a minute.” Faith struggled with the zipper to her dress, checked herself once in her mirror, and stepped into the hallway. She could hear them talking in the front room, Maxwell and the ex-prisoner. Something slowed her steps, bringing her to a halt halfway down the hall. She listened. Alternating with her husband’s voice was that of the other—warmer, slower, somehow more self-assured. It alarmed her, not because it rang resonant with more power than Maxwell’s, or because it belonged to a man who’d spent, she’d heard, his last three years in prison. But because it sounded, strangely enough, of Georgia.
She entered the front room, stopping feet from them as they talked. Maxwell and his guest faced her, the latter stretching out his thick, calloused hand. Maxwell was in his favorite stance, his right hand playing with a loose thread on his jacket. As she reached for that rough hand hung in the air Faith felt her feet sinking through the thick carpet, through the floor, the earth, perhaps, down through its many-colored layers to the white-hot center of the world. Sometimes, children, you’ll get that feeling. You’ll be listening to someone and swear you’ve heard the same words he’s saying sometime before; you’ll be some place where you’ve never been, and swear ’fore God you’ve been there. You’ll catch your breath like Faith did. You’ll blink to clear your eyes. She did that, too. And if you’re like Faith your lips will turn up in a smile, because you’ll know reality is simply a rhythm, repeating itself, flashing the same faces into the world in different ages and different times and always—as far as your life is concerned—returning you, from time to time, to some touchstone from which your heart has tarried but to which it must always return.
Faith, as she shook the stranger’s hand, believed it. She felt it in her blood even before Maxwell made their introductions.
“Honey,” he said, “this is Alpha Omega Jones.”
9
Jones gave no sign. He took Faith’s outstretched hand and pumped it until Maxwell frowned with impatience. “My pleasure, Mrs. Maxwell,” Jones said, grinning. Faith searched his face for recognition. Could he recognize her through IT? He winked. She almost fainted.
Maxwell cleared his throat. “Shall we get down to business?” He removed his sports coat and flung it across a rocking chair against the wall. “We can talk over dinner”—turning to Faith, “it’s ready, isn’t it?”
Faith quickly pulled her thoughts together. “It’s on the table. . . .”
“Ummgh,” Maxwell grunted, pleased but putting on a great show of indifference. Then he led Jones into the dining room. It had a French Provincial feeling—yellow wallpaper with a brown motif, checked curtains, wire mesh in the cupboard doors, and French Provincial pottery, all designed to complement Faith’s complexion. The light there was brighter than elsewhere in the apartment. Or so it seemed to Faith. She had put her best tablecloth, the one rich and green and pleated on its border, on their circular dining-room table. The details of the room stood out for her, and suddenly she felt awkward, as if her arms and legs were lead beams swinging through a room of glass. She moved carefully behind them, silent and staying in her place, recognizing Jones’s back as the image she’d seen in the Thaumaturgic Mirror. He seemed somewhat taller, more muscular than before, with bulging veins that moved under the skin on his forearms and neck like snakes. His clothes were simple—matching blue work shirt and trousers, low-cut leather boots the color of wood bark but a bit the worse for wear, and a brown corduroy jacket which she hung in the front closet. Anyone who dressed so simply, who disregarded his exterior, had to be rich inside, as complex and intricate as an old gold watch.
“As you know, there’s an awful lot riding on this new feature,” Maxwell said. He crossed his thin arms on the table, his head hunched between his shoulders as he played with his spoon. “I’ll need to know as much about your background as I can to write a sidebar for the first column. . . .”
Jones sat quietly, his big hands folded in his lap. His face was linear and lean-jawed. His hair, dark and moderately trimmed, was thinning on top. Faith watched him, almost able to hear the words forming in his mind before he spoke. “What do you want to know?”
“The Five W’s,” Maxwell said. “Who, What, Where—you know.”
Jones leaned back and cracked his knuckles, then sipped at his coffee cup to wet his lips. “I grew up in Hatten County, Georgia,” he said. “If a man’s from Hatten County, he’ll usually say so right away. If he isn’t,” Jones chuckled, “you shouldn’t embarrass him by asking.”
Maxwell frowned, bending his spoon out of shape, then back again. “Yeah. Right. What brought you to Chicago?”
Sighing, Jones looked at Faith. “Work, mainly.” He drew his lips back over two rows of square teeth. “All the mills and factories back home were layin’ people off. My folks had a stretch of good bottom land handed down through the family since Reconstruction, but hit started goin’ dry in the forties. Pa used to say hit was so bad, if he sold hit to a church, the congregation would have to fertilize the whole place just to raise a prayer. And the creek that run ’
cross hit got so parched I once counted ’bout a hundred bullfrogs that never learned how to swim.” Jones laughed and slapped his knee. “Heh, heh, talk ’bout hard times, buddy!”
Faith hid her hands under the table. They were trembling.
“What kind of work did you find?”—Maxwell.
“I couldn’t find a thing. Nothin’! Mind you, I ain’t crazy ’bout work—hit didn’t scare me none. I can lay down beside the biggest chore you ever seen and fall right asleep. Heh heh. But I was hungry—so hungry my stomach musta thought my throat’d been cut. I looked for months.” He glanced at Maxwell, his eyes wide with humor. “Things got so bad at the flophouse where I was stayin’on the West Side that the rats were too weak to run or hide when somebody cut on the lights. And you could bile me for a sea horse if I wouldn’t rather crawl into a nest o’ wildcats, heels foremost, ’fore I did something like go on relief or start beggin’.” Jones started laughing again—it sounded like a hyena imitating a man. Faith smiled, then bit her lip when she saw Maxwell’s incredulous eyes.
“What did they convict you for?” Maxwell demanded irritably.
“Stealin’,” Jones said. “I don’t reckon hit was really stealin’, though. I never took more than what I could use for food, rent, and a new canvas.” As he ate, Jones wagged his fork in the air reflectively, his jaws packed like a beaver’s. “I don’t suppose they would have caught me if hit wasn’t for that. I had hit all figured out—I needed twenty dollars a week to live on, not a penny mo’ nor less. So on Saturdays, if I couldn’t win the money in a game of chance, I’d relieve somebody of exactly that amount. I stopped a guy down on Fullerton Avenue, liberated his wallet, and was in the wind. When I checked the wallet hit had twenty-five dollars in hit. Imagine! So I looked up his address—a Mr. Luther Langford, I believe—and took the five dollars back. . . .”
“That’s when they caught you?” Faith said.
Jones nodded. “A patrol car pulled up quicker nor a ’gator can chew a pup after I’d dropped that five-dollar bill in the mailbox!”
None of this sat well with Maxwell. He pulled at his left sock, which kept slipping down his leg, and ate carelessly, too quickly and with such huge mouthfuls that meat caught in his throat and made him cough. That upset his breathing. He hurried to the bedroom, found his spare respirator, and returned weakly to the dining room, wiping his eyes. “You aren’t at all sorry for what you did?” he said.
“Sho am,” Jones drawled. “That twenty dollars woulda doubled the ante in the game back at the flophouse if I coulda made hit back in time.”
Maxwell went silent, smoking a strange new product he’d found in a dime store. Asthma Cigarettes. They were filterless, twice the size of regular cigarettes in diameter, and filled with a green tobacco that smelled like hay. He smoked, coughed, but kept going until he’d finished three in a row. Faith opened the window to clear out the room and cleaned off the table as Maxwell and Jones withdrew into the living room. In the kitchen, seated at the table with a fresh martini, she held her breath to catch snatches of dialogue drifting through the hall with Maxwell’s green smoke. Jones’s voice, its tone and timbre, brought back, not with its words but its ring, that lost life in Georgia. It lifted her thoughts back to the time he’d saved her life. She’d be dead, she was certain, if Alpha Omega Jones hadn’t outfoxed Old Man Cragg.
(It was summer, one of those hot, sweltering days when your lips were so dry they cracked from the heat. Jones suggested they steal into Old Man Cragg’s east orchard and carry away a few peaches from his tree. She’d objected violently, because Cragg was second in awesomeness only to Big Todd. Children, he was so mean he gave his kids ten cents each every night if they skipped dinner, stole it from them during the night, and whopped ’em the next morning for losing it. Mean? Why, he was so mean and lowdown he had to reach up to touch bottom; he was so black his wife, Elsie, had to throw a sheet over his head so the sun could rise. No, you didn’t mess with Cragg. Or his peaches. Faith demurred, but Alpha dragged her off to Cragg’s farm. He rubbed chimney soot over their arms and legs and faces so they could sneak around invisibly at night. Then he shinnied up one of Cragg’s trees and started tossing ripe peaches down into a basket while Faith kept watch. By and by, she felt something behind her.
A voice, like thunder, exploded. “You children better be baptized, ’cause I got yo’ contracts fo’ West Hell right heah!”
Alpha fell from the tree. He and Faith looked up and saw possibly the biggest man in the world—huge, and so dark lightning bugs flew around his head thinking it was midnight. He reached out to them with hands as big around as wheels on a hay wagon.
“You better not!” Alpha shouted.
“I better what?” Cragg boomed. “Boy, when I’m through, there’ll be six men on either side of you; there won’t be enough marrow in yo’ bones to fill a thimble!”
Faith hid her face. She wanted to eat one of those peaches if this, indeed, was the end. But her throat was solid. It was hard to breathe.
“I’ll take you on,” Alpha said, “but you’ve got to let me pray first—”
Cragg grunted, and rolled up his worksleeves. “Tha’s a good thought—you pray real good.”
Still on his knees, Alpha raised his sooty hands, closed his eyes, and started rapping. “O God, you know I didn’t mean to kill Stackalee and High John the Conqueror and John Henry, and Toledo Slim and Peg-Leg Willy, but they touched me and got a douse of this here terrible disease. You know that I told John Brown and Rip Bailey that this thing I got is terminal, that hit starts yo’ skin to peelin’ like old paint, and you start swellin’ up with horrible boils and hit drives you mad and turns one half of your brain to pure crystal and the other half to water. You know I told them about hit before they touched me, Lord, jes like I’m tellin’ this man Cragg who’s gonna touch me and get hit and die all black and bloated in his bed like alla my relatives did. Don’t blame me, Lord, if he turns to ashes even ’fore Oscar Lee Jackson can get his death wagon out to Cragg’s house, or if his widow-woman and po’ hungry kids come down with hit, too. . . .”
Alpha opened his eyes and stood up. He stretched out his sooty arms and started walking toward Cragg. Who trembled, spun on his heels, and ran like hell. Faith gave Alpha a big sooty kiss, dug into the peaches, and ate herself sick.)
She left the kitchen table and hurried to the front room, where she’d heard the squeak of chair legs against the floor. Maxwell had Jones’s coat, and was walking with him to the front door.
“. . . Next Friday, then?” Maxwell said.
“Sho. We can start any time you like.” Jones saw Faith and stuck out his hand again. “Mrs. Maxwell, that sho nuff was one of the most bodacious and tetotaciously pleasing meals ever to cross my lips.”
“Thank you.” She stepped back dizzily, closing the hand into which Alpha had pressed a folded note. Maxwell said, “I’ll be back soon,” and escorted Jones out the door. Faith, when she was certain they were gone, opened the note: Let me see you tomorrow. He gave the time and place. She hid the note in her brassière and paced the apartment for an hour. Jones was exactly Maxwell’s opposite. Which made him identical to her. That broke Big Todd’s maxim about marriage, but she knew she didn’t care. Not one whit.
At ten, the front door flew open, and Maxwell came in. “It’s not going to work,” he said. He dropped his wig on the diningroom table on his way to the kitchen, then returned with a vodka and tonic. “The man’s all wrong for this column!”
“What?” Faith’s left hand went to her breast where she pressed down the wad of paper in her bra.
Maxwell settled into an armchair and kicked off his shoes. “I said Jones isn’t right for the column. He’s not what I visualized for it. He’s not angry enough—he doesn’t show enough Will Power.” He took a drink, gulped, and glanced up at Faith. “You can tell a man by that. You heard that bullshit he was babbling over dinner, didn’t you? Je-sus!”
Faith sat down on the arm of the chair, looki
ng straight down at Maxwell’s bald head. “He has to be mad?”
“Damn right he’s got to be mad! He’s got to be representative of all the rage a prisoner feels, all the frustration and bitterness.” He pressed his cool glass to his forehead and rolled it from his left temple to his right, closed his eyes, and muttered, “Jones is too at peace with himself and the world. You’d think he’d lived in a fairy tale, or something—not a prison. . . .”
Faith slid off the arm of the chair to sit on a cricket stool in front of him. She rested her head in her hands, looking up. “What’re you going to do?”
Maxwell groaned. “My hands are tied. I’ve got to select the right mouthpiece for the column. Jones is on probation, and he’s broken it already! They’re supposed to report all their earnings, new possessions, change of addresses, and things like that every month the Lord brings. Jones hasn’t even called his parole officer once since he was released.” Maxwell rubbed his eyes sleepily and stood up, stretching his arms. “I’ll bet that they’ll have him back behind bars in two weeks. I’ll bet he hasn’t enough Will Power to stay free a month!” Unbuttoning his shirt, he wagged his head from side to side. “I’ll have to find myself another parolee.”
Faith was on her feet, pulling at her fingers. “We won’t see him again?”
Maxwell turned down the foldaway section of the living-room couch, dropped his trousers in the middle of the floor, and lay down. “I hope not!”
Faith slept not a wink all night. As she lay alone in her bedroom, her mind worked like machinery, a constantly churning instrument that focused upon Alpha Omega Jones, moving around her memories of him like a lilting jazz improvisation, children—inspecting first this side, then that, reviewing him again and again from every possible perspective until her memories, like music, died away. She jumped out of bed when the warm sunlight of morning fell across her face, and fixed Maxwell’s breakfast before he awoke. Maxwell, after stumbling into the bathroom in his sweaty shorts, came into the kitchen wearing his bathrobe, scratching his head.
Faith and the Good Thing Page 17
