Blonde Faith

24

I drove a long way with nothing but the notion of the Blonde Faith in my mind. She’d been blindsided by the power of her own commitment to life. Not only did she know what was right, she did something about it. And now her charity had betrayed her; her own husband had given her up to assassins.

I understood at last why Christmas had brought Easter to me. He also believed that the military men could get at Faith despite police protection. He was going after the men on his own, and judging by the body count, he was doing a good job.

I had solved the mystery. I knew the players, their reasons, and the danger they posed. The right choice now was to go home and be with my family. But the idea of home was like a coffin to me. Jesus and Benita would take care of the children, and I’d continue my investigations for no good reason except that it kept up my momentum.

But even at that fevered point in my life, I wasn’t so foolish as to believe that I could continue on my way without backup.

So I found myself driving to Watts and through Watts on the way to Compton, an ever-growing Negro enclave.

I kept going until I hit a street named Tucker and took that until a dead-end stand of overgrown avocados stopped me.

I parked half on asphalt and half on hard soil, got out, and pressed my way through dense leaves and thorny bushes until I came to a door that seemed more like a portal to another world than an entrance to a house. You couldn’t even see the home behind it, just trees and leaves, the dirt beneath your feet, and the hint of sky above.

Mama Jo, Lynne Hua had said.

It was like the house that Mama Jo had lived in in the swamplands outside of Pariah, Texas. I never knew how she found such a place in Southern California. It seemed as if she had conjured it out of her own knotty desires.

I was about to knock when the door came open. Tall and black-skinned, ageless, handsome, and bristling with power, Mama Jo smiled upon me. I suspected that she had some kind of alarm system like Christmas Black employed, but it could have been that she really was a witch who could sense when those she loved or danger approached.

“I been waitin’ for ya, Easy,” she said.

I wondered as to her meaning. Waiting for what of me?

We had made love once, more than two decades before, when I was nineteen and she was around forty. She was maybe an inch shorter; that and a few gray hairs were all that marked the passage of years.

“Jo.”

She put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into her witch’s den. The floor was swept earth. The walls were shelves lined with glass and crockery containing herbs and dried animal parts. The fireplace was actually a hearth where a small pig was roasting on a spit. Above the fireplace was a shelf that held the skulls of twelve armadillos, six on either side of a human skull, the keepsake that Jo kept of her son’s father — both named Domaque.

“How’s Dom?” I asked as I sat on the wooden bench at her big ebony wood table.

“On a commune up north.”

“A commune?”

“Uh-huh. City of the Sun, they calls it,” Jo said as she poured me some of the tea that was always abrew at the side of the fire. “He met this little girl at a picnic in Griffith Park, and she asked him to go live with her there up near Big Sur. Nice place. The kids there tryin’ to get all the craziness outta their bones.” Jo shook her head and smiled at the thought of such an impossible task.

“How long did he know this girl?” I tasted the dark brew. Mama Jo’s teas were medicinal and strong. Almost immediately I could feel my muscles releasing.

“No more than a day, but I believe that she asked him to come with her even before she bedded him.”

“That’s kinda quick, ain’t it, Jo?” I said, relishing the flush of the herbs raging through my system.

“Love don’t work on the clock, baby,” she said, looking into my eyes.

I turned my head away and took a deep draft.

Jo sat beside me on the bench. Her breath wafted across my forearms, and I regretted having come.

Jo might have been a witch; I didn’t know. She was certainly a botanist and a physician and possessed of deep insight into human nature, my nature.

Ever since asking Bonnie to leave, I had avoided Jo. I knew that she saw right through the pain brought on by my own stupidity.

“Have you seen her?” Jo asked.

“No. She called, though. She’s marrying that prince of hers.”

“The man you drove her to.”

“Yeah . . . right.”

Jo was looking at me while I stared at the hard yellow earth she walked upon. Her feet were bare and the flames from the fireplace threw odd-colored waves of light around the room.

“You know you got to go to her, baby,” Jo said after many long minutes of silence.

“Yeah,” I said again. “I know.”

“Man cain’t be a man without a woman and chirren to love him,” she said. “You got to take her up or let her go.”

A loud screech tore through the room. I leaped to my feet, and Blackie, Jo’s pet raven, spread his wings in alarm. The ebony bird had been so still in his dark corner I hadn’t noticed him.

My heart was beating fast, and I was tired, very tired.

“Do you ever make love potions, Jo?” I asked the witch.

“You don’t need a love charm, Easy. You got more love than you know how to handle now.”

I slumped down on the bench, placing my elbows on my knees. Jo put her hand to the back of my neck the way she had when we made love so long ago.

“It’s like wakin’ up in a shallow grave, baby,” she whispered. “There’s dirt in your mouth, and you so cold that you cain’t even feel it. You wanna go back to sleep, but you know that can only bring death.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“What you doin’, child.”

I laughed. “What I’m doin’ is runnin’ full throttle without sense or worry,” I said.

“You always know what’s right, Easy,” she said softly. “Always. If you runnin’, then there’s a reason for it, even if you don’t know what that reason is.”

A sweet, frightening shock went through my mind like a live wire cut loose from its stem. Suddenly I had my bearings. I knew where I was — and I wasn’t at all happy to be there.

“I’m lookin’ for Ray, Jo,” I said, no longer sad or heartbroken or unsure.

“You two always lookin’ for each other,” she said sagely. “I don’t know where he’s at right now. He come by a couple’a weeks ago sayin’ that he was gonna be gone awhile — on business.”

We both knew what that meant: Somewhere some bank or armored car or payroll was going to be robbed, or maybe there was a soul destined to die.

“If he gets in touch with you, call me,” I said, standing up and feeling strong.

Jo rose with me and kissed me gently on the lips. This made me smile, grin even.

“You mostly see the truth,” she said. “But sometimes you like a man stranded on a island, lookin’ across a wide stretch’a ocean at a faraway shore.”