Blonde Faith

18

I took Easter’s shoulder bag with me because it seemed a better idea than leaving it with her or taking out the two bound stacks of thousand-dollar bills inside.

Thousand-dollar bills. Two hundred of them.

Christmas was a soldier and he planned for almost every exigency. He knew that I would have to put Easter in school. He knew better than I did what the school would demand for her admittance. There was a sealed envelope in the satchel that had a list of names and addresses: his lawyer, Thelda Kim; Easter’s doctor, Martin Lewis; a bank officer in Riverside oddly named Bertrand Bill; and his parents. Each name had a phone number and an address beside it. The parents must have been separated. Christmas had told me that almost all the marriages in his family dissolved; something to do with military rigor among professional soldiers.

In his mind Christmas was ready for everything — even what he’d left out of his typewritten catalog proved this.

There was no letter or even a note to me. Not one detail about why he had gone to ground, passing his most precious possession into my hands. This negative space, this silence, was a clear message that I should work with what I was given — and sit tight.

Christmas Black, despite his civilian status, thought of himself as my superior. He was the tactical commander, and I was just a grunt with a stripe or two.

That’s what Christmas thought, but he didn’t know me all that well. I was a dog that got cut from the pack at an early age. I was no man’s soldier, no leader’s peon. The president of the United States stood on two feet and so did I.

AND SO I DROVE out to Venice Beach to look up Glen Thorn on Orchard Lane, the first of the names I’d narrowed down from Gara’s list.

It was a small cottagelike house behind three crab apple trees. There was a porch and a green front door that was solid and locked. I knocked with the butt of my pistol and called out in a raspy voice, hoping that would conceal my identity. No one attacked or answered me.

The window was locked too, but the wood had become rather punky. I just pulled hard, ripping off a piece of the sill with the lock, and climbed in.

I was sure that Glen Thorn was not my man from the state of that one-room hut. The sink was overflowing with dishes, and the floor was cluttered with clothes, fast-food bags and boxes, girlie magazines, and sensationalist rags. BABY WITH TWO HEADS BORN TO SECRET KENNEDY COUSIN. ALIENS CONTROL LADY BIRD’S MIND. BROKENHEARTED LOVER EMASCULATES SELF IN TIJUANA TOILET.

There were no weapons or pictures of him in evidence or secreted away in any drawer or the closet. The war hero I had seen had nothing in common with this mess. Mentally I crossed him off my list, then went through the front door and out to my car.

I WANTED MY QUARRY to be Glen Thorn because Tomas Hight lived all the way out in Bellflower; that was a long drive through enemy territory.

It was very, very white out in Bellflower. Many of the people around those parts had southern accents, and even though I knew racists came in all dialects, I had experienced my worst bigotry accompanied by sneers and southern drawls.

But I was an American citizen and I had a right to drive into danger if I wanted to.

TOMAS HIGHT LIVED in a six-story lavender apartment building on Northern Boulevard, a kind of main drag. There were a lot of people out on his block and almost all of them were very interested in me: white women pushing baby carriages and white men having loud arguments on the corner, white teenagers who when they saw me saw glimmers of something that their parents could never comprehend, and of course the police — the white police.

A cruiser slowed down a little to study my profile but then moved on.

Being alone in the late-morning sun was the only thing that saved me from an immediate rousting. More than one Negro at a time in a white neighborhood in 1967 was an invitation to a rumble or a roust.

I came to the front door of the apartment building, wondering if the series of lies I’d constructed would get me over the hump I’d been riding since the age of eight.

I’d tell Hight that I noticed his medals and looked them up, finding his address. I’d tell him that I’d found Christmas but that the man nearly killed me. I was afraid to go to my office and so I didn’t know how to get in touch with his captain. I’d lull the former MP and then, when he began to trust me, I’d pistol-whip him and get the lowdown on what he was doing.

It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it fit my state of mind and my need for an outlet for all that anger.

A big, powerful-looking white man with long, long dirty blond hair flowing from his head and jaw stood up from the stairs to bar my way into the building.

There were crumbs and naps in his beard. He smelled of sweat and incense oils. The mild vapors of alcohol wafted around him and so did a big, lazy fly.

“Can I help you?” he asked in a Texas drawl that I felt all the way down to the soles of my feet. Then my right testicle began aching, and I knew that the dark side of my mind was preparing to go to war.

“Looking for Tomas,” I said, as if I weren’t preparing to kill this big aberration of the hippie movement.

“And who the fuck are you?”

“Why don’t we ask Tomas?” I said airily.

“You messin’ with me, nigger?”

“If I was to mess with you, brother,” I said in the same light tone, “you would never even know it.”

“Say what?”

I put my right hand in my pocket, trying to imagine that I was Mouse, and said, “Stand the fuck outta my way or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Somewhere inside the machinery of my mind I found the will and the recklessness to kill the man who had commandeered my people’s reformation of his language to threaten me.

His china blue eyes faltered. He was used to being the top dog, but he also knew what I had in my pocket. He knew it and I knew it, and so he moved to the side and went past me down the stairs.

After that performance I knew that I didn’t have much time. I went to the bank of mailboxes, homed in on T HIGHT, and ran up the three flights of stairs to apartment 4C.

The door was an impossible combination of pink and lime, with a lacquered but rusty-looking doorknob. I imagined the long-haired sentry gathering his tribe to teach all my people a lesson through me.

I knocked and, before there was time to answer, knocked again.

There came a sound from down the stairs. I knocked one more time.

Men’s voices, angry men’s voices, were making their way up the stairs.

I tried the doorknob; it wouldn’t budge.

I tried knocking again while looking around for a good defensive position.

I was desperate, but the irony of the situation was not lost on me even then. Here I was after Hight, wanting to bring him down in order to help my friend, but at the same time I was knocking on his door hoping that he might save me from the strangers I could hear saying the word nigger as they mounted the stairs.

Across the way from Hight’s door was an inset doorway with no apartment number on it; a storage room or maybe the super’s hopper. It was only a few inches of protection, but I crossed the way.

My pursuers were half a flight down when I took out my pistol and molded myself into the unmarked doorway.

I was ready to go down protecting myself when a thought came into my mind.

It occurred to me that I was the victim not only of those men but of the conditioning that made me wait for them to come before I acted. I was sure that a group of four or five men was coming up those stairs to cause me serious bodily harm. I was innocent of any crime warranting this attack. Why should I cower in a corner, giving them the upper hand, rather than run down among them, pistol blazing?

I was acting like a guilty man even though I knew I wasn’t. I was being defensive when I should have been on the offense. I had six bullets and all the training I’d ever need.

The decision to slaughter those men came with no fear of law or prison or death.

I was about to run down shooting. The war cry was in my throat.

When the door to 4C came open, my gears changed so fast that I was a little confused. I put the pistol in my pocket before the dark-haired white man came out into the hall. Half a second after that, the long-haired man I had threatened appeared at the top of the stairway.

“There he is.” Long-Hair pointed a gnarly, cigarette-stained finger at me.

There were sounds of rage and indignity issuing from the throats of men I had never met.

“Tomas Hight!” I shouted.

The white man who came from the apartment was tall and well built. His dark brown hair was short but not military. His black eyes studied me briefly and then turned to the five men after me.

“What’s up, Roger?” the man asked my blond, and until then nameless, archenemy.

“Nigger insulted me, threatened me,” Roger replied.

A few of his friends agreed, though they had not witnessed the encounter.

“And you had to get a whole mob for just one nigger?” Hight asked, putting an odd emphasis on the last word.

“He said he was after you,” Roger said, trying to enlist the new player.

“Are you after me?” Tomas Hight asked me.

“I wanted to talk to you about another MP,” I said. “Glen Thorn.”

Tomas squinted as if in pain, then turned to Roger and the suddenly docile pack.

“This man and I have business,” Tomas said. “So get outta here and leave us alone.”

“He’s got a gun,” Roger said in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of his potential revenge.

“Then I probably just saved your life,” Tomas said.

It was true. Even Roger seemed to understand that chasing an armed man into a corner was a stupid thing to do.

“Come on in,” Tomas said to me.

I was glad that he wasn’t the man I was looking for. I was elated that he was the man I’d found.