Blonde Faith

41

My heart was still beating fast half an hour later. I pulled into the parking lot of the Ariba Motel but didn’t get out of the car. I just sat there thinking about all of the motels I’d stayed in while homeless, on the run, or stalking someone. I remembered the chemical-sweet odors and the stains on graying sheets, the holes in the plaster, the moans through the walls, and the continual drone of cars going by. Televisions sounded different in a cheap motel. The voices were tinny and without resonance.

After twenty minutes I turned the ignition and drove off.

For a while I toyed with the idea of going back to Tourmaline’s garage apartment. She might have been expecting me. We were both hot after that exchange at her door. All I had to do was knock and take her in my arms. All I had to do was make love to her until the soldiers were all dead and Mouse was back in Etta’s house and until Bonnie married and became a queen.

In those days or weeks of new love with Tourmaline, Pericles would lose Pretty, and Meredith would buy a new home. Leafa would make dozens of meals for her siblings and stroke her mother’s hair. My granddaughter would grow older, and Jesus and Feather and Easter Dawn would have dreams of a life in which I was no longer a factor.

I drove to Tourmaline’s street and parked at the curb. I turned off the headlights and faded into darkness. I wanted to climb out of my seat, but entropy held me in place once again. There was no rising up for me. I was a paraplegic in a blackout after a bombing.

I would have sat behind the wheel of my car the whole night if not for a couple I saw walk by.

They were older lovers, late thirties or beyond. His gut hung out, and she had a big butt. They went arm in arm, fitting perfectly. Invisible in the darkness, I felt as if I were dreaming them.

They stopped not ten feet from me and started caressing. These two had experience with love. They weren’t delicate or tentative. The woman made sounds of deep-throated ecstasy. Their hands moved and so did their heads and torsos. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I’d have thought I was watching the silhouette of a predator subduing and devouring its prey.

After a few minutes they ambled on. I waited for them to get to the end of the block before I turned the ignition.

Tourmaline and I lived in completely different worlds. She was enjoying the dance of bringing a new man into her life, while I was a denizen of the old graveyard, charged with bringing the plague dead to their final rest. She wanted to dance. I was walking on a poorly marked path toward a vat of quicklime.

None of that explained why I aimed my car for Faith Laneer’s apartment. It wasn’t because I was frustrated with the place Tourmaline had brought me. I could have returned to my motel room and fallen asleep on the sheets with no problem. It might have been because Faith was a part of my cracked, melancholic world. She would understand my problems. Maybe I was going there just because I had promised I would.

It was too late to go to Mouse’s house. Whatever he did in the dead of night, he preferred to do it alone.

I wondered, as I neared Faith’s court, if I would be glued to my seat again. I took a deep breath and looked up just in time to see a car driving in the opposite direction, away from the place where Faith lived.

The car might have been some color other than gray, but we were between street lamps. When my headlights flashed on the driver, he was looking to his right, preparing to turn. He wasn’t looking at me. People don’t look at people in LA. They look at cars.

Sammy Sansoam would never know where he’d been fingered.

Sammy turned smoothly and drove east. I wondered for a moment if I should follow him; if I should run him down and shoot him in the head. I could have done it. I wanted to kill him. But I had to play the long shot.

THE LIGHTS WERE OFF, and she didn’t answer my knock. But the door wasn’t locked. I walked into the tiny home in darkness and I wanted it to stay that way. But that bumblebee from Christmas’s house was humming somewhere. I waved my hand and found the chain and pulled.

He’d left her naked and bleeding. She hadn’t been dead, not at first. Maybe she had feigned death. Maybe she’d lost consciousness when he stabbed her . . . again and again.

She’d crawled across the room, oozing her life into the oak floor. She was too weak to yell and so she tried for the phone. Her pale fingers were still curled in the cord. Her life gave out before she could dial.

Naked and dead, Faith Laneer was looking up at me from another, final world, where I was headed but had not yet reached. My breath was coming in short gasps, and the room was shaking ever so slightly. I knelt down next to the onetime Sister of Salvation and touched her hand. It was still warm, still supple.

That was the moment that Sammy Sansoam died.

I hated myself for not killing him back at the intersection. I knew she was dead. I knew she had no chance. The drug trafficker’s purpose in life was making sure that she couldn’t tell on him. Tell on him. We were like children. We hadn’t changed since we were kids hoping that the good ones wouldn’t tattle on the bad.

I went into her bedroom, trying not to think of the brief love we had had there. On her desk was a piece of paper on a green blotter. She had scribbled my name thirty or more times across that solitary sheet. Easy Rawlins, Easy Rawlins, Easy Rawlins, Easy Rawlins . . .

She’d experimented with different lettering and inks and pencils. I took the blotter and paper, turned off the house lights, and fled.