Blonde Faith

27

We held hands walking along the beach under a crescent moon. No one could see us clearly, but we were there. Faith Laneer’s concerned observations made me feel safe. There she was under the protection of Christmas Black but at the same time sheltering me.

We had been talking about Jackson Blue for quite a while. Actually, I did most of the talking. I liked telling stories about the cowardly whiz kid, about how most of his life he had done everything wrong.

“He’s a genius, but he’s twisted,” I was saying. “Like if he was a caveman, he’d invent the wheel and then use it to escape from the head Cro-Magnon because he’d been sleepin’ with the boss man’s wife.”

“Is he a good friend?” Faith asked.

“I didn’t used to think so. He’s a liar and a coward, but one day I was telling a story about him and I realized that I cared about him enough to laugh at his faults. That made him a friend.”

Faith hugged my arm, bumping into my side as she did so.

“I like the way your skin smells,” she said. “I want to rub my face against it and breathe you into me.”

As we stood there kissing under the sliver moon, I felt a howl in my soul. There I was, a black man kissing the epitome of northern European beauty, with a gun in one pocket and a short fuse in the other. There was no sex in the world better than that.

We didn’t make love again. I walked her home and stood with her in the doorway, talking about any number of events in our lives. I liked to cook. She used to be a painter before becoming a nun. I’d seen the northern lights over Germany while a cannon battle raged. She married a homosexual named Norman after giving up her vows.

“That way I thought I could maintain my celibacy,” she told me. “But I found myself wanting him in the night. I would come to his door and listen to him and his lovers. . . .”

After more than an hour, she brushed her lips against mine and went in. I stumbled away in a kind of daze.

I was completely enveloped in darkness now. My family was hidden. I knew the identities of my enemies. Faith had shown me without trying to that there was love for me somewhere if I wanted to take it. My stupor was akin to the feeling you have when waking up from a night of jumbled dreams. At first you wonder if all that nonsense really happened. Was I arrested and sentenced to death? Did I come upon two brutally murdered men in a house that wore a disguise?

I GOT HOME AT MIDNIGHT and found the front door of my house broken in. Even though I knew the kids weren’t there, I rushed inside and turned on the lights.

Nothing had been touched or stolen. The contents of my dresser drawers were orderly; my mail was unopened. All Sansoam’s men wanted was blood.

I tried to remember the moon and Faith’s lips on mine. I tried to dismiss the break-in and what it meant. For a while I worked on the door, reattaching the hinges and clearing away the shattered portions of the jamb.

I sat down in my favorite chair and turned on the TV. From the outside, everything would have looked normal, except for the door sitting crookedly in its frame and the .38 in my hand.

There was a Western on. John Wayne was blustering his way through a story I’d seen a thousand times.

I was thinking that nothing had changed, that Christmas and his henchman would kill the men who had broken in on me. I told myself that all I had to do was go to ground and wait until it was over or the right moment came. But my heart would not listen to my mind. I felt the way I had in World War II when we were preparing to engage the enemy. Death, my death, was a foregone conclusion. I couldn’t think about survival. All I could comprehend was the promise to rain down wrack and ruin upon my enemy.

I wanted a drink. The biting scent of sour mash whiskey seemed to waft into my nostrils. I looked around, thinking that maybe there was a bottle nearby. It was too late for a liquor store to be open, and I didn’t want to go to a bar.

I wanted a drink to settle my raging mind. It would have been like balm against the murders I was contemplating. But then I decided, with my heart, not to go after alcohol. I didn’t want to become calm or numbed. What I wanted was to kill Sammy Sansoam before Christmas got the pleasure.

I was already drunk.

Just the idea that those men, whoever all they were, would break into a house that my children called home shattered every covenant the civilized world lived by.

This thought made me laugh at myself, thinking that I lived in a civilized world where lynchings, segregation based on race, and all the men who died for freedom’s lie were somehow under the umbrella of enlightened concern.

I staggered and laughed my way out to the car. I had rarely been so intoxicated. I had never been that evil.