Blonde Faith er-11

by Walter Mosley

  “HOW’D YOU GET that girl to let you in the house?” I asked Jackson as we were driving away.

  I had put Meredith’s nest egg in the trunk.

  “Jean-Paul’s shoes what did it,” Jackson said with a grin.

  “Shoes?”

  “Martin Lane,” Jean-Paul added.

  “Who?”

  “These shoes cost twelve hundred dollars,” the insurance kingpin informed me.

  “So?”

  “Pretty asked me if I was wearing Martin Lanes,” he said. “It seems that she keeps up with the fashion.”

  “That was the icebreaker, Easy,” Jackson bragged. “She was fallin’ all ovah herself to get us in there an’ figure out why my man here got them shoes. She and him goin’ out on his yacht for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Perry told me that they were flyin’ to New York on Monday,” I countered.

  “She didn’t tell us nuthin’ about that. I guess she gonna be spendin’ Sunday night packin’ or sumpin’,” Jackson said. “You know Perry don’t know Martin Lane from John Henry.”

  At least I broke into her house, I thought. At least she will feel some discomfort.

  I WAS ANGRY AT PRETTY for being like me. She was showing her man the door because she couldn’t control her compulsions. She wanted to be near real wealth and was willing to give up whatever it was Perry had to offer for a ride on a yacht.

  I was upset by her betrayal, but wasn’t Pericles the same? He’d run from a wife and a house full of children. He was just getting what he deserved. None of us were innocent. Why shouldn’t Pretty go for the brass ring?

  Jean-Paul and Jackson were talking about how sexy Pretty was when I started considering Mouse.

  I knew his address, but still I had to tread cautiously. He’d done the robbery already; that job was over. So why was he still so scarce? The only answer was that he’d gotten into some other business upon his return. And whatever that business was, it was probably dangerous. I was Raymond’s best friend, but he didn’t want me sticking my nose in his affairs.

  “. . . right, Easy?” Jackson was asking.

  “What?”

  “Ain’t it true what I said to Jean-Paul? That most white men in America don’t know how beautiful a black woman is.”

  I could almost see Mouse turning toward me in anger. I felt the thrill of fear right there in the car.

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “Why is that, Easy?” Villard asked.

  I resented him using my name without knowing why. He was a nice enough guy. He was a philanderer and a murderer and maybe a trafficker in slaves, but none of that had anything to do with me.

  “Because they know what would happen if they let themselves love our women,” I said from some unconscious, resentful, frightened place.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they loved our women, then they would become our men,” I said. “And once that happened, they’d lose their advantage. Their children would be dark skinned. Their history would be our history, and their crimes would be shown for what they are.”

  Jean-Paul frowned, truly contemplative for the first time since I’d met him. I gazed up in the rearview mirror and saw that Jackson was looking at my reflection in a rare show of intellectual respect.

  I drifted back into thinking about my problems.

  How was I going to give the money to Meredith Tarr? She didn’t look all that stable from where I sat. She might, given the right (or maybe wrong) circumstances, start blaming me for killing her husband. She wouldn’t have to look too deeply to find out that Ray and I were friends. Maybe I was part of a plot to pay her off.

  I decided that I’d have to read the letter.

  There’s never a scarcity of problems for people like me. As soon as I’d come to a conclusion about Meredith’s money, I started thinking about Bonnie’s wedding. It came up in my mind stealthily, as if I had already allowed it into my consciousness without any resistance.

  I had spent the night with Faith. I was on my way to a relationship with Tourmaline. The kids had accepted Bonnie’s marriage.

  “You ever been in love?” I asked the gabbling men.

  “You know I love Jewelle more than my whole family,” Jackson said. “You know that.”

  “What if you found out that she was seein’ another man on the side?”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Jackson averred.

  “Course she would, man,” I said. “When she was livin’ with Mofass she got you that house on Ozone. She was out there with you two nights a week.”

  “That was different.”

  “I don’t see how,” I claimed. “She loved Mofass more than a baby love her mama. And he died for her.”

  We were in my roomy Ford, but it felt as if I were alone, communicating with men in other worlds. Jackson was in my mirror like an image on a small TV. I could see him responding to my statements. I could tell by his distant gaze that Jackson had not considered the depth of Mofass’s love. It was possible, very possible that the old man had loved Jewelle more deeply than Jackson ever could.

  Jean-Paul was sitting next to me, wondering about the gravity of the conversation. He was right there, but to me he was no more than a cartoon. He lived in a world that I could never fit into. I lived in a world where he didn’t belong no matter what kind of shoes he wore.

  “But,” Villard said, “if a man can love more than one woman, why cannot women love more than one man?”

  “You really believe that?” I asked the cartoon.

  “I do not want to smell him,” Jean-Paul said. “I do not want him fathering my children. But love, it is like the weather. It is wonderful or it is terrible and then it changes. But you can never change it.”

  I was in a vulnerable emotional state at that time. That’s the only reason Jean-Paul’s words seemed so deep. He was telling me something that I already knew but that I never really believed.

  “You tryin’ to say sumpin’ ’bout Jewelle?” Jackson asked.

  “Naw, man,” I said. “Bonnie’s marrying Joguye Cham.”

  “The prince?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  “Oh, yes, very well. We have conducted business with him over the years. Investments and some insurance.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He comes from a long line of headmen of his people. He was educated at Oxford and was active in revolutionary movements. He’s a . . . what you say . . . a good guy.”

  A good guy. He was more than that. He saved my daughter’s life and then took my lover in payment.

  39

  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 wante
d 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.

  40

  By 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.