Blonde Faith

3

I hadn’t imbibed any alcohol whatsoever in years. But since Bonnie left I thought about sour mash whiskey every day. I was sitting in the living room in front of a dark TV, thinking about drinking, when the phone rang.

Another symptom of my loneliness was that my heart thrilled with fear every time someone called or knocked on the door. I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it, but still I worried about what I could say.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Rawlins?” a girl asked.

“Yes.”

“Is something wrong? You sound funny.”

“Who is this?”

“Chevette.”

It hadn’t been a full day since I’d almost murdered a man over the woman-child, and already I had to reach for her in my memory.

“Hi. Something wrong? Is pig man botherin’ you?”

“No,” she said. “My daddy told me that I should call and say thank you. I would have anyway, though. He says that we gonna move to Philadelphia to live with my uncle. He says that way we can have a new start back there.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” I said with poorly manufactured enthusiasm.

Chevette sighed.

I got lost in that sigh.

Chevette saw me as her savior. First I took her away from her pimp and then I allowed her to see her father in a way he could never show himself.

I got lost trying to imagine how I could see myself as that child saw me: a hero filled with power and certainty. I would have given anything to be the man she had called.

“If you have any problems, just tell me,” that man said to Chevette.

The front door swung open, and Jesus came in with Benita Flagg and Essie.

“Okay, Mr. Rawlins,” Chevette said. “My daddy wanna say hi.”

I waved at my little broken family.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yeah, Martel. She sounds good.”

“I’m movin’ us all out to Pennsylvania,” he said. “Brother says there’s good work at the train yards out there.”

“That sounds great. Chevette could use a new start; maybe you and your wife could too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martel said, treading water.

“Is there something else?” I asked.

Essie started crying then.

“You, um, you said that, uh, that the three hundred dollars was for the week you was gonna spend lookin’ for Chevy.”

“Yeah?” I said with the question in my voice, but I knew what was coming next.

“Well, it only took a day, not even that.”

“So?”

“I figure that’s about fifty dollars a day, excludin’ Sunday,” Martel argued. “You could get another job to make up the difference.”

“Is Chevette still there?” I asked.

“Yeh. Why?”

“I tell you what, Martel. I’ll give you two hundred and fifty dollars if Chevy could come spend the next five days with me.”

“Say what?”

I hung up then. Martel couldn’t help it. He was a workingman and had the logic of the paycheck wedged in his soul. I’d saved his daughter from a life of prostitution, but that didn’t mean I’d earned his three hundred dollars. He’d go to his grave feeling that he’d been cheated by me.

“Hey, boy,” I said, rising to meet my son.

“Dad.”

He hugged me and I kissed his forehead. Benita got in on it, kissing my cheek while Essie wailed in her arms.

I took the baby in my hands and heaved her around in a circle. She looked at my face in wonder, reached up to my scratchy cheek, and then smiled.

For a moment I felt nothing but love for that infant. She had Benita’s medium-brown skin and Juice’s straight black hair. There wasn’t one drop of my blood in her veins, but she was my granddaughter. It was because of my love for her that I had been ready to kill Porky.

Looking at her trusting face, I thought of the child that my first wife took away with her to Texas. That shadow of loss brought on the memory of Bonnie, and I handed Essie back to her mother.

“Are you okay, Mr. Rawlins?” Benny asked me.

Hadn’t she just asked me that? No.

“Fine, baby.”

“You need us tonight, Dad?” Jesus asked. He knew that I was hurting and so tried to save me from Benita’s concern. He was always saving me — ever since I first brought him home from the streets.

“No. I found who I was looking for. But you guys could stay anyway. I’ll sleep in your room, Juice.”

Jesus knew that I wanted him to stay, to keep my house filled with movement and sound. He nodded ever so slightly and looked into my eyes.

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe it was that he could watch TV or sleep in a big bed. But the way I felt then, I was sure that he could see right through me. That he knew I was way off course, lost in my own home, my own skin.

“Juice!” Feather and Easter Dawn shouted.

They ran in to hug the boy who took them on boat rides and taught them how to catch crabs in a net. All the commotion caused Essie to cry again, and Benita brought out her bottle.

I drifted into the kitchen and started dinner. Before long I had three pots and the oven going. Fried chicken with leftover macaroni and cheese, and cauliflower with a white sauce spiced by Tabasco. Easter and Feather joined me after a while and made a Bisquick peach crisp under my supervision.

The whole dinner took forty-seven minutes from start to the table. While the pastry cooled on the sink, Feather and Easter Dawn helped me serve the meal.

Dinner was boisterous. Every now and then Easter got a little sad, but Jesus sat next to her and told her little jokes that made her grin.

EVERYONE BUT ME was in bed by nine.

I sat in front of the dark TV, thinking about whiskey and how good it once tasted.

After a while I forced myself to consider the Vietnamese child who had been taken from her war-torn homeland, whose parents (and all their relatives and everyone they knew) had been murdered by the man who had adopted her — Christmas Black.

The professional soldier’s patriotism had soured when he realized what America’s war had cost him. He was a killer on a par with Mouse. But Christmas was also a man of honor. This made him more dangerous and unpredictable than the homicidal friend of my youth.

If Christmas had left E.D. with me, then he must have been at war somewhere. What he wanted was for me to look after his little girl, but he wasn’t my client. Easter had asked me to assure her that her father was okay. The only way I could do that was to go out and find him.

After that, or maybe blended up in it, I would have to find Mouse and see what was what in those murder allegations. Raymond had once spent five years in the can for manslaughter. He had made it known that he would never go into prison again. That meant if the cops found him first, a goodly number of them were likely to get killed. Even if Etta hadn’t hired me, I’d still try to save the lives that Mouse would take — that was one of my self-appointed duties in life.