Blonde Faith

8

On the drive away from Christmas Black’s pied-à-terre, his killing ground, I wondered about my new friend. He wasn’t like most black people I knew. His family had been members of the American military since before there was a United States. Many of his ancestors had lived through slavery without being slaves. For all I knew, some of them might have owned slaves. They had all studied the arts of war and violence, had passed down that knowledge in a great hand-bound book that Christmas had relinquished to his first cousin Hannibal Orr after he, Christmas, decided that the America his forebears fought for had lost its way.

Christmas and Hannibal’s family was more American than most white people’s. They had been at every important moment in America’s tumultuous attempt at creating democracy. They had been at every victory and every massacre, their heads wreathed in glory and their hands drenched with blood.

I would have gone home and looked for Hannibal to take Easter Dawn off my hands if I believed that Christmas had gone completely crazy and was on a killing spree. But Clarence Miles, and that buzzless bumblebee, told a different story. Christmas was in trouble, and I owed him.

When I was wounded by a sadistic assassin named after a Roman statesman, Christmas and Easter had nursed me back to health. They had saved my life, and even though my life wasn’t worth very much to me at that moment, a debt was still a debt.

All I had to do was wait until the next morning at nine and I could string Clarence a little further along. But the long span of hours between this morning and the next was too much for me.

Thinking about Bonnie’s departure was like staring into the sun. I needed to get my mind off her, to distract myself. Bonnie was in the seat next to me, on the street walking to some store. She was smiling at me when I got mad over some small mistake I’d made.

“Life goes on,” she’d told me at least once a week.

Not anymore.

Life had stopped for me just as surely as it had for that foolish soldier who had dared to invade Christmas Black’s personal, portable sovereignty.

THE DIN COMING from behind the pink, dented, and smudged front door was reminiscent of a riot. No, not a riot, a war. And it wasn’t just the broken wagons, splintered wood, and scorched-earth lawn, but a full-pitched battle being waged inside the home. I could have sworn that there was machine gun fire, airplanes dive-bombing, a whole army on the march behind that portal.

I pressed the doorbell and knocked loudly, but I could not imagine that anyone would hear me over the racket that emanated from that small domicile. For some reason my intelligence failed in the presence of such tumult. I didn’t know how I could make them hear me. Anyway, who would want such a ruckus to turn its attention to him?

I was ready to walk away when the front door opened. The sentry was a slack-shouldered, bone-thin brown woman with half-straightened hair. She wore a dress that had faded to such a degree that the pattern on its bluish fabric had become indistinct. The repeated images might have been fleeing birds, dying flowers, or once solid and specific forms driven to madness by the dozen leaping, screaming, fighting, and very, very ugly children that inhabited the Tarr household.

“Yes?” the poor woman whined. Her shoulders sagged so far down that she most resembled a building that was in the process of collapse.

“Mrs. Tarr?”

For some reason the sound of my voice brought complete silence to the war-torn household.

The beady-eyed brood of unsightly children peered at me as if I was to be their next target, one war over and another about to begin.

I felt the beginnings of panic in my diaphragm. There were at least two sets of unattractive twins in the litter. Not one was under two or over the age of eleven.

“Yes,” the careworn medium-brown woman said. “I’m Meredith Tarr.”

I felt sorry for her. A dozen children and a husband murdered. As low as I was, I couldn’t imagine being in Meredith’s place. Just the thought of that many hearts beating under my roof at night, looking to me for health and succor, love, was beyond my comprehension.

The silence extended into a long moment, thirteen pairs of hungry eyes boring into me.

“My name is Easy Rawlins,” I said. “I’m a private detective hired to find out what has become of your husband.”

Too many syllables for her mottled brown brood. One child screamed and the rest followed her into chaos.

“Who hired you?” she asked. Her voice was strained and tired, but still she had to yell if she wanted to be heard.

“A woman named Ginny Tooms,” I said to keep my fabrications simple. “She’s one of Raymond Alexander’s cousins and is absolutely sure that he didn’t kill Pericles.”

“No, Mr. Rawlins,” Meredith Tarr assured me. “Ray Alexander done killed Perry. I know that for a fact.”

It was hard for me to plumb the depths of this haggard woman’s heart. Maybe she was exhibiting hatred for my friend. But she was so exhausted that there was little meat left on her bone of contention.

From the chaos of children a small eight- or nine-year-old emerged. This girl, though as ugly as her brothers and sisters, had a different look about her. Her yellow dress was unsoiled and her hair was combed. She wore red shoes of cheap but shiny leather.

The child moved close to her mother, watching her.

There’s a bright spot in every shadow, my aunt Rinn used to say.

“What’s your name?” I yelled at the girl.

She took her mother’s hand and said, “Leafa.”

Leafa was Meredith Tarr’s little islet of light.

“I don’t know who did what,” I said to Meredith. “I don’t owe Alexander a thing. All I know is I got paid three hundred dollars to spend a week lookin’ to find your husband. If he’s dead like you say, I intend to prove it. If he’s alive —”

“He ain’t,” Meredith said, interrupting my lie.

“If he is, I will prove that too. All I need is to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”

My certainty set up against Meredith’s conviction that her husband was dead brought the sagging woman to tears. At first no one but Leafa and I noticed. The child hugged her mother’s thigh and I put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s my fault,” she sobbed. “It’s my fault. I kept on complainin’ that there wasn’t enough money to feed and clothe all these kids we got. He had two jobs and got another one on weekends. He was hardly evah home, he worked so hard. And then he borrowed money from that man they named aftah a rodent.”

“Did Pericles tell you that?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to. Raymond Alexander came here to this house to give it to him,” Meredith said as if she were a preacher quoting from the Bible. “He sat in this very livin’ room.”

I looked at the couch, which six children had set up as the Alamo or Custer’s last stand. They were shooting and jumping and cutting one another’s throats.

“Ray Alexander sat there?”

“In the presence of his own chirren, Perry took the blood money from that evil man. He said he was gonna start a doughnut cart out in front of the Goodyear gate, but the man he gave his money to cheated him and he didn’t have nuthin’ to pay back his debt.”

“Raymond Alexander came to your house and handed over a loan to Pericles Tarr?” I asked, just to be sure that I heard her right.

“I swear by God,” she said, raising her left hand because her right was held by Leafa.

“What happened when Perry couldn’t pay?”

“He told me that Mouse told him that he had three weeks to come up with the money or he would have to work off the debt. For about two months he spent every night doin’ bad things for the loan shark. And then he come home one night and say that if somethin’ happened to him, he had paid for our security with his life.”

By this time all of the children had gathered around their mother, blubbering along with her. Everyone but Leafa was crying. The good child kept her calm for the whole family. In my eyes, her ugliness was transforming into beauty.

“Perry loved us, Mr. Rawlins!” Meredith wailed. “He loved his kids and this house. He haven’t called or written in eight days. I know he’s dead. And I know who killed him too.”

On cue the little Tarr tribe stopped crying, their eyes now holding a glare of hatred for their father’s killer.

“Where did he work?” I asked, straining a little from a dry throat.

“Down at Portman’s Department Store on Central. He was a salesman there.”

I nodded and tried to smile but failed. Then I thanked Meredith and turned away. The door closed behind me and I took a few steps toward the street. I was surprised when a small hand grabbed my baby finger.

It was Leafa. She pulled on my hand and I crouched down to hear what she had to say.

“My daddy’s too smart to be dead, mister. One time he was in a war and the Koreans ambushed him an’ his friends. An’ aftah that they came down to make sure that they was all dead. But my daddy took his friend’s blood and put it on his head, and when the endemy soldiers come to look at him they didn’t shoot him ’cause they thought he was already dead.”

“So you don’t think that this man Ray killed him?” I asked.

She shook her head solemnly, and I found it hard to imagine that such intelligence could be wrong.