Blonde Faith

44

We took my car for the ride out to Pasadena. My heart was erratic; sometimes it was pounding and then it would skip a beat or two. My hands were sweating, and if you had asked me at any moment what I was thinking, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Or I might just have given a list of names and relationships that had foundered at my feet. My mother, and Bonnie, Faith, and my first wife, who had run off with my friend Dupree.

“Easy, you know where this dude Sammy is at?” Mouse asked from the backseat.

I heard the question clearly. I had no idea where Sansoam was, but I couldn’t speak.

I looked over at Christmas. He was staring out the window. I noticed then that there were rain clouds forming. They were far off, over the desert, but they’d be where we were in a few days.

“Easy?”

“Yeah, Ray?”

“You all right, man?”

“I want to drive all the way to the East Coast,” I said. “And then when I get there, I could drive my car into the Atlantic.”

Christmas nodded solemnly, and I felt something squirm in my chest.

“I knew a dude got himself buried in his Caddy,” Mouse said jauntily. “He weighed six hunnert pounds. There was five women cryin’ at his grave too. Some men just lucky, is all.”

That’s when I started to laugh. It was a good laugh, happy. Mouse lived in the world while everyone else tried to pretend that they were somewhere else. He smelled the shit that fertilized the rosebush. He accepted whatever it was that came his way and either put a good face on it or pulled out his gun.

“What color was that Caddy, Ray?” I asked.

“Pink.”

“Pink?” Christmas roared. “Pink? That’s not right. If you have to have a car for a coffin, it should be black.”

“What fo’?” Mouse asked.

“Pink is not a funerary color.”

“What color you need to be to drive into the sea?” Mouse asked.

“Dead,” I said, and we were quiet for most of the rest of the drive to Hope Neverman’s home.

IT WAS A BIG HOUSE the color of thin-sliced smoked Scottish salmon. It felt a little overpowering for three armed black men to converge on her front door. Christmas pressed the button, and church bells sounded in the distance.

The woman who answered was white, definitely Faith’s sister. She was smaller, finer boned, a pretty version of Faith’s beauty.

“Mr. Black,” she said with hardly a tremor.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Hope, but my friends and I need to ask you some questions.”

“Come in. Come in.”

The house had to have been in a magazine somewhere. It was southwestern in style but very modern. To the left was a large library around an oval dining table. To the right there lay a sunken living room with a horseshoe-shaped sofa and dark highly polished wood floors. These rooms were divided by a stairway with no banisters that led up to floors two and three. The stairs rose until they stopped just under the roof.

The back wall was made of sliding glass doors. These led to the backyard and the Olympic-size pool where four children rollicked under the patient gaze of a young, dark-skinned Mexican nanny.

I couldn’t help thinking about Leafa and all her brothers and sisters bunged up in that small house in South Central. It made no sense that both those homes existed in the same world.

Hope was wearing a powder blue one-piece dress made from rough cotton. Her flat shoes were the color of bone, and there was no makeup on her perfectly formed face. She wasn’t yet thirty. She would never be her sister.

She led us to the library, and we all sat at one end of the dining table: an impromptu meeting of the board of some charity or corporation.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Black?” the lesser sister asked.

“Faith told me that she would call me now and then to say that she was all right,” he said. “She called me every other day until yesterday, when she should have called but didn’t. I’m worried about it.”

There was sympathy in Christmas Black’s mien, kindness to back up his lies.

“I don’t understand,” Hope said. “Where could she be?”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Not since the day before yesterday.”

Black laced his powerful hands and placed them on the light ash tabletop.

“Has anybody been here asking about her?”

“Only Major Bryant.”

“Major?” Christmas said.

My heart sank like some far-off balloon dipping below the horizon line.

“Yes. He came here the day before yesterday. He said that they had received her letter and needed to speak to her about what to do about this terrible thing with Craig.”

“What did this Major Bryant look like?” I asked.

“This is Tyrell Samuels,” Christmas said by way of a belated introduction. “He’s been helping me lately.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Samuels.”

I nodded.

For a moment Hope was quiet, waiting for something else pleasant. When she realized that something wasn’t coming, she said, “He was young and tall, on the thin side.”

“Dark complexion?” I asked. “Like he was from Sicily or Greece?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“We’ve met.”

“Did you tell him where Faith lived?” Christmas asked, trying his best not to lose his temper.

“She didn’t tell me where she was exactly,” Hope replied. “I only had a PO box.”

“Did you give the major her PO box?” Christmas asked.

“Of course not. I knew that Faith was in trouble. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Aunt Hope,” a boy shouted, “Carmen won’t let me have some ice cream.”

Even from a distance I could see that Andrew had his mother’s beauty. When he grew up to be a sad man, he would be deadly handsome.

“You can’t eat until after swimming,” Hope said. “You know that.”

He came through the open door, drawn to the strangers in his aunt’s home.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, staring at Christmas.

“Do you know my mama?” the three-year-old asked the ex–government killer.

“Yes,” he said. “Very well.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“She’s very sad, Andy. But pretty soon she’ll be better and back with you again.”

I wondered if Christmas believed in God.

Andy didn’t know how to respond to the words, the man, or his tone, and so he hunched his shoulders, ran out to the pool.

When the boy was gone, I asked, “Do you keep a little phone diary?”

“Of course.” She was a woman of certainty.

“Is Faith’s PO box in that book?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind looking to make sure it’s where you left it?” I asked.

“What are you saying?”

“Please,” Christmas said. “Do as he asks.”

Hope didn’t go far. There was a desk in the corner of the library. She opened it and took out a tiny red diary.

“See,” she said, “it’s here.”

“Look up your sister’s PO box,” Christmas directed.

Hope turned the pages deftly, frowned a little, turned them again.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “The page is missing, torn out.”

She looked up at us.

“Is my sister all right?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Christmas said.

It came to me then that all great soldiers had to believe in a higher power.