Blonde Faith

40

By the time I’d made it back to the Ariba, Meredith and Pericles Tarr were out of my mind. I turned on the news and lit up a cigarette, kicked off my shoes, and sat there while Jerry Dunphy lectured me on a wide range of unconnected stories. A boy had been kidnapped and then released for a quarter million in ransom. The confessions of two captured American pilots shown on a North Vietnamese film release were denied by American lip-readers. The Oscars might be postponed due to a strike. And Governor Ronald Reagan was slashing jobs in California’s mental-health system. There were no black people in the news that night; no Mexicans or Indians or Africans either. But eleven students in Germany were arrested for a plot to assassinate Hubert H. Humphrey.

None of what I saw meant anything to me. I didn’t believe or disbelieve. Watching the news was just a way to pass the time. If I were a child, I would have been watching cartoons.

After a while I turned down the volume on the TV, picked up the phone, and dialed.

“Hello?” Peter Rhone said in his sad and cultured tenor.

“Hey, Pete,” I said.

“Mr. Rawlins. You want EttaMae?”

“Yeah. But first tell me somethin’.”

“What’s that?”

“Did you tell Etta about that blue Pontiac that Raymond and Pericles bought from Primo?”

“No. No, I did not.”

“Why?”

“Because Ray asked me not to, and I usually do what he asks.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“Just a minute, Mr. Rawlins, I’ll get EttaMae.”

I sat there watching Jerry Dunphy’s boyish face. He was smiling now, giving out good news, I guess.

“Hello,” Etta said in my ear.

“Pericles Tarr is alive,” I said. “I can go to the police with that, and his wife will back it up.”

Etta gave me twenty or so seconds of silence. The kind of quiet a woman gives when she wants you to know you’ve gotten to her.

“Thank you, Easy. Thank you, baby,” she said. “I don’t know what I would’a did if they took him from me again.”

“We both know that nobody’s ever gonna take Ray again,” I said. “Anyway, I did what I did because he’s my friend.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s another question, Etta. I don’t know yet.”

When people have known each other as long as we had, they speak in silences and unspoken questions. Etta knew that I could intrude only so far into Raymond’s life. The same was true for her. We’d saved him from a murder rap. She’d have to console herself with that and wait for his return.

“I’ll call you later, Etta,” I said. “When I get on top of a few things here.”

“Sumpin’ wrong, Easy?” she asked.

“No, baby, not at all. Why you ask?”

“You sound funny. Like a man drivin’ his usual way home and he comes up to a dead end.”

I wondered what daytime TV show had given her those words. Etta had never read a book, but she studied the TV like it was the Library of Congress.

“Light’s just red,” I told her. “Bye.”

I hung up too quickly, or maybe I meant for her to understand that she was right. Communication gets sophisticated when you grow older. Sometimes it’s impossible even to know what you’re saying.

I PICKED UP TOURMALINE a block away from where she worked. She wanted to keep her bookkeeping job through the summer, and Brad Knowles certainly would have fired her if he ever saw us together.

From Compton we went to a club on the south side of downtown LA. It was called Bradlee’s and it was a place to dance. The building was a unique structure, a great octagonal edifice housing a single room that was one hundred feet across. In the middle of that room was a raised dais where a big band of black men, with one black woman vocalist, performed. From swing to rock and roll, they played music that made you want to move your feet.

I was not a dancer, never had been, never would be, but Tourmaline had enough rhythm for both of us that night. All I had to do was look at her or feel her move and listen to the music. I wasn’t Fred Astaire, but my missteps only served to make my date laugh.

She was wearing a black skirt that was short and tight and a blouse covered with silvery plastic scales. Her eyes were aglitter and her body moved sinuously, insinuating all those things that young boys suspect.

At ten I bought her a beer so she’d give my forty-seven-year-old feet and hips a break.

“You could be a good dancer if you worked at it a little,” she told me.

“I could be a physicist if I went to college for eight years too.”

“But physics isn’t as fun as the boogaloo.”

“I don’t know about that. I think of a pirouette when I look up at the stars. You know the universe is a ballet that never stops.”

“I like you, Porterhouse,” Tourmaline said. She put a hand on my arm and leaned over to kiss me. Her mouth was cold and wet from the beer, but her tongue was warm.

I closed my eyes like a schoolgirl, and when I opened them she was still there, still smiling.

The dance was wonderful and frightening. There were hundreds of people of all colors and ages around us. They were twirling and hopping, dipping down low and moving their shoulders in deft interpretation. I was there with them, but at the same time I felt that I was capering toward a precipice, about to fall off into the darkness. The only way I could stay alive was to keep on dancing. I worried that my legs would give out and my feet would stumble. . . .

WHEN I WALKED Tourmaline to her apartment door, she turned to me and held out a hand, palm up. It was a question to which I had an answer. I pulled the hand to me and kissed her now warm lips. She molded her body to mine as she had done on the dance floor and made a sound of deep satisfaction.

We kissed for a very long time there outside her front door. It took me five minutes to get down to her neck and another ten before I lifted her skirt so that I could hold her behind. When half an hour had gone by, Tourmaline shoved her hand down the front of my pants. It struck me that I had lost quite a bit of weight since buying that suit. When her hand gripped my erection, I went still and stiff all over.

“I got you,” she whispered.

“I need you,” I replied.

She kissed me, gave me a squeeze, and asked, “For what?”

“Huh?”

“What you need me for?”

“For my life,” I said, and she began to stroke me softly, maddeningly.

“The next time you come over we’re gonna start up right here,” she said. “Right here where we stop tonight.”

I groaned in disappointment, which made Tourmaline grin and pull harder for a moment before taking her hand from my pants.

“Go home and take a cold shower, Mr. Detective,” she said. “When you come back to me I expect somethin’ good.”