Blonde Faith

33

Out of habit I put the pistol into the top drawer of the desk. I had places to go, but even after the colonel was gone I did not rise from the chair. I felt tired, not sleepy but dragged down by life.

Many a time I had visited clinics and hospitals, bedrooms in homes and apartments where dying men and women lay. They had watery eyes and wan expressions, tacky skin and nothing to say. They reclined under sweat-soaked sheets as if they’d just run a mile, but the rest never worked. They could barely whisper or lift a hand.

I’d say Hey, Ricky or Mary or Jeness, repressing the question How you doin’? And they’d smile and mouth my name, try to remember something that we both knew well.

“Hey, Easy,” John Van once said to me, as if he were shouting into a pillow, “you remembah that night Marciano knocked Joe Louis out?”

I nodded ruefully.

“I won twenty dollahs off’a you. I told ya: you don’t play a horse a’cause of its color.”

There was a chair next to the bed and a clock somewhere in the room. There were usually children playing on the floor or in the hall. They rolled around because that’s all they knew, the only way they could bring happiness to a waiting room for death.

I often wondered how those dying people felt when there was no one there to distract them from their passage. What did they think about when sleep came on or the sun went down? Was there a sudden fear when they nodded off or just a malaise like I experienced after talking to that fool colonel?

I felt as if I might fall asleep, that if I fell I might not get up again. I wondered what difference it would make. After all, Oswald shot Kennedy, and hours later LBJ was being sworn in as president.

No one was indispensable.

Feather would go to Bonnie or Jesus, and Easter Dawn had a whole army to look after her. Frenchie would piss on my grave, and I had no close relatives except a daughter somewhere who probably didn’t even know my name. I could just close my eyes and never open them again. That would be it.

“Don’t move a muscle!” a loud voice commanded.

I jumped to my feet, or at least I tried to. My left foot got traction, but the right heel slipped out from under me. I dropped back down in the chair, reached for the pistol in my top drawer, grabbed it, and held it up at an awkward angle. It wasn’t until then that I saw the slovenly, overweight white man in the bad suit looking down on me.

“You gonna shoot me with a stapler, Easy?” Sergeant Melvin Suggs of the LAPD asked.

I used to keep a pistol in a wire mesh net underneath my desk, but as time went on I worried that I might kill someone without looking or that somebody might break into the office and steal my piece. That’s when I moved it to the top drawer with my scissors, stapler, Scotch tape, and paper clips.

Dumb luck is better than no luck at all.

There I sat, stapler in hand, too upset to be humiliated and too scared to put my fake weapon down.

“What’s wrong, Easy?” the white man asked.

“Bonnie’s marrying another man and all I can do is sit here.”

Melvin was of middle height and a little less sure of himself every day. He’d started out with the regular white American’s arrogance and so he was still more certain than I ever would be, but his eyes were opened after the Watts riots and the horror we uncovered together.

It wasn’t fair to call Suggs’s eyes brown. They were taupe colored, like a fawn or a forest mushroom, given to him to make up for the sloth of his life.

He squinted and I sighed, half a mind in my office and the other still in the waiting room for the dying.

I regretted my rash confession to the lawman.

“I’m here about Alexander,” Suggs said, deciding to ignore my words.

That’s why I smiled. “And how are you, Mel?”

He pushed my client’s chair and fell back into it. I could hear the joints strain.

“I’m okay. Met a girl, met her boyfriend, showed him my pistol, and made a small investment in the Johnnie Walker Corporation. You?”

I smiled wider. “I forgot how many blackbirds go in a pie.”

He smiled.

“Alexander,” Suggs said to show me that he could stay on the scent.

“He didn’t kill Pericles Tarr,” I said in a voice not my own. I say not my own because the tone belonged to those men that dropped napalm on Asian men wielding bamboo sticks, whose forefathers preached equality only not for women or niggers or crackers without a pot, who made decisions in their hearts without any consideration for their souls.

Maybe it was my voice.

“Where is he?” Suggs asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, myself again. “I’ve looked everywhere. But listen, Mel. Mouse is not a loan shark, neither is he the kind of man who shoots and runs. We both know what he is and what he isn’t. Mouse did not kill that man.”

“Since when did they make you a judge?”

“The same night they ordained you and yours as executioners,” I said, wondering who spoke through me now.

Suggs paused at that charge. He smiled again.

“I won’t lie to you, Easy,” he said. “They want him this time, his head on a sharpened stick.”

Suggs’s suit was tan and his shirt was either white or light green. Both were soiled, wrinkled, worn to the edge of their threads’ ability to hold on.

“Who?” I asked him.

“Captain Rauchford,” Suggs said, “Seventy-sixth Precinct.”

I turned my face to the wall, taking in this information. Rauchford had rousted me a few times before I was given a PI’s license by the deputy commissioner. He was both an ugly and a prissy man. Every hair in place and the girls still shunned him; every T crossed and he was still passed over for promotion. And like all white men who couldn’t bear the weight of injustice visited upon them, he regurgitated his rage onto others: men like me.

When I turned back, Suggs was rising from his chair, Benedict Arnold to the men in blue. He’d drink a whole bottle that night, hoping maybe he’d find forgiveness on the other side.