Blonde Faith

19

Tomas Hight lived in a one-room studio. The walls were pale fuchsia and the furniture mostly forest green and dark wood. There was no bed in evidence, so I figured that the couch folded out. A yellow hard hat sat upright on the oak table with two newspapers under it.

Hight wore a white T-shirt and black jeans. He was barefoot and my hero.

“You have a gun?” he asked me.

I handed him my PI’s license.

He scanned it, handed it back, and asked again, “You have a gun?”

I nodded. “But I didn’t come here looking for trouble.”

It’s worth the time to explain the complexity of my feelings at that moment. Tomas Hight was the quintessential white man, the white man that all other white men wanted to be. He was tall and good-looking, strong and restrained but willing to act. He had saved my butt from a beating or the gas chamber and even brought me into his home, such as it was, even though I may have been armed, dangerous, and depraved. I felt gratitude toward him while at the same time feeling that he was everything that stood in the way of my freedom, my manhood, and my people’s ultimate deliverance. If these conflicting sentiments were meteorological, they would have conjured a tornado in that small apartment.

Added to my already ambivalent feelings was the deep desire in me to respect and admire this man, not because of who Tomas Hight was or what he had done but because he was the hero of all the movies, books, TV shows, newspapers, classes, and elections I had witnessed in my forty-seven years. I had been conditioned to esteem this man and I hated that fact. At the same time, the man standing before me had actually done me a great service without coercion. I owed him respect and admiration. It was a bitter debt.

My two minds slammed against each other, and I was stunned. This, and the adrenaline from my recent near-death experience, explains my candor in the conversation we shared.

“What do I have to do with Glen Thorn?” Tomas Hight asked.

“Can I sit?”

He gestured at the couch and took an oak chair from under his all-purpose table.

I sat down, hoping that taking the strain off my legs would clear my thinking, but it didn’t.

“Glen Thorn?” Hight prodded.

“I’ve been hired to find a man named Christmas Black,” I said. “He was a Green Beret, a major, but left the armed services for political reasons. I was looking for him when three soldiers, or men dressed like soldiers, blindsided me and tried to force me to find Black for them.”

“One of these men was Thorn?”

“I think so.”

“You say that they were pretending to be soldiers?” Hight said. “Why would you question the uniform?”

If he hadn’t just saved me, I could have given him a whole list of unrelated reasons, but instead I said, “When they said I had to look for Black for them, I said that I charge three hundred dollars for a week’s work —”

“Three hundred!”

“Detectives don’t work every week, but the bills still want paying,” I said. “Anyway, they paid right up, gave me three crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills.”

Hight was smart too. He nodded, showing me that he knew that no soldier, not even a general, rolled out that denomination.

“How did you get to me?” he asked.

I explained about the medals and the library.

“You really are a detective,” he said with admiration in his tone.

I didn’t want his approbation, and yet at the same time it was the most important thing in the world to me.

“Did you serve with Thorn?” I asked, to keep from shooting either Hight or myself.

Hight leaned back in his chair, scowling at me. Something was going on in him, something that had been simmering long before I ever came to his door.

“I worked with a unit of MPs that guarded a warehouse where we stored shipments of supplies coming in from the States and elsewhere. We were guards, you know. We made sure that the black marketeers didn’t get their hands on our goods.”

Where I was at odds with myself over everything, Tomas Hight was absolutely sure of his purpose and his place in the world. He had been doing the right thing in Vietnam, even if Vietnam was wrong. He had done the right thing in the hall, even if I turned out not to be worthy of his actions.

“Thorn work with you?” I asked.

I noticed that there was a small picture frame standing on the coffee table. It was an old pewter frame with the photograph of a five- or six-year-old boy standing up straight and smiling. He stood in front of a pink cinder-block wall. The sun was in his eyes, but he still smiled.

“He was a malingerer,” Hight said with the barest hint of a snarl. “Always disappearing. He was seen removing a bag from a large crate of crockery that came in from Austin one day, and they arrested him for smuggling.”

“What was in the bag?”

“I don’t know,” the Hero said. “The CO confiscated it.”

“What happened to Thorn?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. They transferred him to another unit, and he was stateside in six weeks. I heard he even got an honorable discharge. Can you believe that?”

“I’ve been believin’ nuthin’ but that for four hundred years,” I said.

“What?”

I stood up on steady legs. I knew something more about my employers, and I, even though he didn’t understand me, had shared a common confusion with Tomas Hight.

The boy in the picture looked just like Hight, only smaller. His son? His brother? Him? Why not a girlfriend or parent?

“Where are you going?” he asked me.

“Down to my car.”

“I was just getting ready to go to work. I’ll walk down with you.”

I realized then that I couldn’t escape the kindness of Tomas Hight. He was going down the stairs alongside me with a hard hat under his arm because he knew that Roger and his friends might be waiting down there. He gave me his protection without a thought to race or even if I deserved it. He would have protected a malingerer on the same principle.

At my car, we shook hands.

“Be careful around Thorn,” he advised. “A couple of his friends in the MPs were killed right after he left. And it wasn’t Charlie that did it either.”