Blonde Faith

42

I staggered out of the house and headed down toward the ocean. It was the same walk I’d taken with Faith after we’d made love. I ripped up the evidence of her schoolgirl crush and dropped it in a trash can half a mile away, then I trudged through the sand while the waves hissed and shushed.

Faith Laneer had been a heroine in a world that didn’t know it. She stood up for children and weak men and for what was right. And I mourned her.

Part of me sneered at this weakness. What difference did one dead white woman make? I’d seen thousands of dead, murdered, tortured souls. I saw the concentration camps in Europe and fought side by side with boys who died carrying America on their shoulders through Africa and Italy, France and the Fatherland. I’d choked, stabbed, beaten, shot, and drowned men in my day. I’d seen black men castrated, lynched, burned, and stomped to death, and all I could do was watch — or turn away. I’d seen the flu go through little hamlets like plague, killing children by the dozens. I’d seen car crashes that had strewn mothers and their babies across the highway. I had watched while men and women drank themselves to death, laughing and dancing all the way to the grave.

Faith’s death was no worse, not really. She’d died afraid and helpless, but most of us go that way. She was young, but she’d known love. She was beautiful, but that would have faded . . . probably.

The problem was that this was the last straw for me. It had started when I woke up one morning and my father told me that my mother had died in the night. And it ended here, with Faith Laneer murdered while I was dancing and kissing and sitting in my car.

The air was cold and I welcomed the discomfort. There were no lights near the water and so the night embraced me.

I wasn’t thinking clearly. I knew that but didn’t mind it.

“Life doesn’t make sense, it just make a mess of things,” Lehman Brown used to say. He lived in the room next to mine in a residence hotel in Fifth Ward, Houston, before I went off to war.

There was no right and wrong out there by the water, only my desire for revenge.

I would kill Sammy Sansoam to pay for every death that cut at me. I’d hack that shit-eating grin off his face.

“Hey, buddy,” a man hailed.

I couldn’t see him at first. I looked around, but the source of the voice eluded me. Then I saw him standing off to the right. A small white man wrapped in a blanket formed of dark and light colors.

“You lost?” he asked me.

“Yes, I am.”

“Come on over to my lean-to and we’ll talk about it,” he said.

I’d been staggering and stumbling, moving down the sand, gesturing like a tragic prince delivering his soliloquy near the end of a Shakespearean tragedy. This man was drawn to me like a white moth to a suicide Buddhist aflame on a street in Saigon.

I followed him to a place where he’d set up a huge three-sided cardboard box held in place by two public metal trash cans.

“Sit,” he said.

The box was big enough for two. The inside of his temporary home caught the roar of the ocean and amplified it. The chill sank into my shoulders and I began to shiver.

“Here you go,” the little man said. He was proffering a newly opened quart bottle of red wine.

I stared at my benefactor. His skin was worn by the sun and the wind. His eyes glittered, but in the weak light of the moon I could not tell their coloring. He was older than I or at least looked to be. The wine and weather may have wrinkled him some, added years to his organs and bones. He smiled at me, and I took the bottle and drank deeply.

I did not hesitate. I wasn’t worried about falling off the wagon after years of sober migration. I only smacked my lips and handed it back.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jones.”

“Just Jones?”

“No. Jones,” he said with a grin.

“Easy.”

“What’s wrong, Easy?” Jones asked me.

I looked at the man again. There was something open and encouraging about his face. That added to the spreading warmth and goodwill of the wine almost tripped me. Faith Laneer’s death wanted to come out of my mouth. It wanted to beg for her life, to represent her to some higher authority. I wanted to confess to my failure to protect her.

I wanted my mother.

“How much of that wine you got, Jones?”

“Four bottles. But I need to save ’em. I’m what they call wine rich but coin poor.”

I lay on my back in the cold sand and dug a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. I handed the currency to him and he gave me two of his bottles.

We downed my two quarts and then started on his, drinking far into the night. I spent the time avoiding what I wanted to say, what I needed to say. I talked about Raymond without mentioning his name, and Etta and Jackson and Jesus and my mother.

Jones told me that he’d never got living the straight life right.

“Oh, I could get a job all right,” he said. “Go to work a week, maybe two. But then I’d sleep in late one day, get chewed out by the boss, get drunk that night, and miss a whole day or two. Once I met this girl and went up with her to Portland. I was in love until one day I woke up and realized I didn’t know who she was. I guess I lost track of time, ’cause when I got back home there was somebody else livin’ in my apartment. I just couldn’t stay straight no matter what I did. I went to church. They sent me to a psychiatrist. She gave me these drugs.”

“Did that help?” I asked, just to stay on the ride.

“I kept a job for three months, but every day I woke up and looked in the mirror wonderin’ who it was in there.”

Jones just wanted to talk.

When we got near the end of the last bottle of wine, I could really feel it. My fingertips and lips were numb, and the sound of the waves managed, at least partially, to cover the memory of Faith’s death mask.

When a strip of orange appeared over the city, I got down on my side and closed my eyes. I can’t remember if Jones was still talking. Once he started he just kept on going, telling his whole life, skipping backward and forward. He talked about his mother in North Dakota and then his grandmother in Miami. He had a son, I seem to remember . . . Noah. But like everything else in Jones’s life, the boy got lost on the way to the next tale.