Blonde Faith

26

Once I was in my car again, I felt a moment of exhilaration. My children were safe, my family protected from the assassins of Christmas Black’s world.

Also, I was shocked out of the melancholy that had settled in on me. I remembered what it was to be a man living in the cracks: a slave, nigger, jigaboo, coon, spade, spear-chucker, darky, boy. Walking down the streets of white gentility, I was always a target. And a target couldn’t afford roots or a broken heart. A target couldn’t fire back on the men who used him for sport.

All a man like me could do was to wait for the sun to go down, move through darkness, and hope.

The validity of this litany of the past was fading, but it had not gone away. It was true — I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools.

It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge. And if that truth was an old friend and the common basis for all your people all the way back to your origins, then at least you found yourself on familiar ground; at least you couldn’t be blindsided, ambushed, or fooled. They could try and kill me, but I’d see them coming. They might see me too, but I would see them first.

I WASN’T EVEN THINKING about Faith Laneer, but there I was parked in front of her courtyard apartment complex. It was logical that I came to her. She was the closest link to Christmas and the men he had somehow fooled into thinking that they were stalking him.

The sun was just a red glow on the horizon, and I sat in my car with no particular thoughts in mind. Bonnie would pass through now and then, but I had left her in the light of day, where people made lives like marble statues that couldn’t be moved.

I was a shadow and the sun was going down. In this transition I remembered a book that Gara, Jackson Blue, and I had read passages from some while before, Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Hegel, a German philosopher who had no respect for Africa. Gara and I had found the dense prose hard going, but Jackson took to it like a vulture clawing through the guts of a dead elephant. He explained how Hegel saw a thing and its opposite as connected and that this connection was what caused progress.

“It’s like turnin’ into a skid, Easy,” Jackson Blue had said. “You slidin’ right and turn in the same direction. Logic tell ya that you gonna go even farther over, but the truth is, you straighten right out.”

The darkness was my negative freedom. While everyone else feared and avoided night, I saw it as my liberation. I lived a life opposite from Hegel’s bright light of truth, and so, I realized, he, my enemy, and I agreed on the path that set us at each other’s throats.

SHE OPENED THE DOOR without asking who it was. The charcoal-colored dress was shapeless, but her figure would not be denied.

“Mr. Rawlins,” she said, the catch in her voice telling me that she had been alone for too many days and needed the company of a man who would buy her strawberry shortcake to sweeten her bitter lot. “Come in.”

The living room was small, but the window faced the vastness of the Pacific.

“All I have is water,” she told me.

“Want me to take you shopping?” I offered.

“Let’s sit for a while,” she said.

The small sofa was coral colored, built for two and a half people. She sat at one end and I at the other, but we were still close.

“Have you found Chris?” she asked.

“No. I got worried about my family, though, and moved them out of my house.”

“You’re married?”

“No. I adopted some kids. One’a them has a girlfriend, and now they have a kid. And then there’s Easter Dawn.”

“You’re like me, Mr. Rawlins,” Faith said.

“How’s that?”

“You have a little orphanage that you care for and love.”

I held out my hand, palm upward, and she took it with both of hers.

“I had a girlfriend,” I said. “But she was torn. There was a man, an African prince she saw now and again. I left her.”

“Did she love him?”

“Yeah. But, but not like she loved me and our little family.”

“Then why leave her?”

Her question grabbed me like a pair of pliers working on a rusty lug nut. At first I resisted her, but then I gave way.

“Did you ever feel like there was something you wanted?” I asked Blonde Faith. “A way you wanted someone to make love to you? A way you wanted to be touched?”

Faith breathed in deeply. I could feel the grip on my hands tighten ever so slightly.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“That was me and Bonnie. The way we came together was everything I had wished for but never known. In a way, she created my desire and then satisfied it.”

One of Faith’s hands moved up to my wrist. It tickled, but I didn’t want to laugh.

“And then I found out about him and everything was tainted. And even though I loved her more than I ever did anyone else, the fact that she wasn’t all there meant that I was always gonna be unhappy when I looked at her and thought about him. . . . And then I met you.”

“Me?” Faith moved closer, an effect of gravity as much as anything else.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about shadows negating the darkness in my life. “You gave your love to a man despite his flaws. You gave him a chance and then he betrayed you, but you didn’t, not even one time, say something bad about him. You listened to that man who wanted the loan while he bad-mouthed you and shouted, and you still smiled; you even felt for him.

“That’s what Bonnie taught me. She taught me that you can care for somebody and it isn’t the end of the world. That’s why I loved her.”

“How did you know that Mr. Schwartz was looking for a loan?” Faith asked.

“You were just talking,” I said. “The other guy, the one with the glasses —”

“Mr. Ronin.”

“Yeah. He was looking over forms and stuff and giving his guy a passbook and a checkbook. You were saying no.”

I suppose that insight was reason enough for Faith to kiss me. Her mouth was the texture of a ripe fruit that begged to be eaten. I tried to put my arms around her, but she held them away.

“Craig was always so, so brutal,” she said as she pushed me down on the sofa, kissing me and unbuttoning my shirt.

“You want me to just lie here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. I felt her tug at my zipper and then reach inside.

I realized I was getting older, not because I didn’t respond to her caress but because for the first time in a long time I had the erection of a teenager.

Smelling the sweet peach-scented shampoo in her hair, I said, “I need to take a shower.”

Holding on to my manhood, she guided me to the shower in the bathroom. I reached to take off her clothes, but she shook her head. I understood. She took off the gray dress, revealing one of those bodies you see only in magazines and on movie screens. Her nipples were the size of apricots; she was beyond gravity’s reach.

We didn’t talk for a long time. I stood in the small shower while she hunkered down, washing me with a soft sponge. My erection got harder and harder, but I didn’t feel urgent at all.

“Do you want me to powder you?” she asked after we were dry.

“Can I touch your face?”

I let my fingers travel from her temples to her breasts. She shuddered and wavered.

“Let’s just go to bed,” I suggested.

I LAY BENEATH HER while Faith moved up and down slowly, holding my face so that I would be looking up at her. Every time I got excited, she’d say, “Not yet, Easy. Not yet, baby.”

I don’t even remember the orgasm, just her looking into my eyes, asking me to wait for her.