Blonde Faith

45

How we gonna hit Sammy?” Mouse asked from the back. He was sitting forward, both hands on the long seat, more like an excited child than a cold-blooded killer.

I didn’t know what to say. Bunting had fooled me, his youthful bravado covering up the lies. He had pumped me for information while I dismissed him for a fool. I needed a superior officer at that moment.

“Let it go,” Christmas said.

I heard the words, understood their meaning, but I found myself trying to decipher exactly how they spelled death for Sammy Sansoam and his friends. Was Christmas planning to go it alone? Was he so enraged that he wanted to kill the whole squad the way he’d murdered everyone in Easter Dawn’s little village?

“What you mean, Chris?” Mouse asked.

“I mean what I said. Let it go.”

“You mean you don’t wanna kill him?” Mouse pressed.

Christmas didn’t answer. Just looked ahead. He was wearing a cream-colored cowboy shirt with pocket flaps that snapped down. The flaps bore complex dark brown embroidery. His pants were brown, with sharp creases that he’d probably ironed that morning. He was a forever soldier — in uniform and under orders for life.

I glanced up into the rearview mirror to see Mouse with rare confusion on his face. He respected Christmas just as much as I did and was mystified by his refusal to seek revenge. They had killed two men together only days before. This was a war and now was the time for battle.

I wanted to understand too, but it wasn’t going to be a simple equation. The tone in Black’s voice, the set of his jaw, said that he wasn’t going to give. This was his operation and now it was over. Mouse and I, as far as he was concerned, were short-term conscripts who had no say whatsoever.

He didn’t know that Faith and I had become lovers, and my instincts told me that informing him would be a tactical error, maybe a fatal one.

Let it go, he’d said. Three words — the code sequence for a secret weapon or the go-ahead for an invasion. The term had a religious, even a psychological meaning for me. I could have been the acolyte of some warrior religion and Christmas my priest. I had come to him seeking balm for the rage inside me, and he had waved me away with the slightest gesture.

Let it go, he’d said. Bonnie and Faith and any other interruption in the war of life.

“You gonna tell me what you mean, let it go, Christmas Black?” Raymond asked.

If anything, the soldier’s jaw set harder. The air in the car went still.

You could count the number of men on one hand that Mouse would allow to ignore him. Christmas took up two of those digits, one for resolve and the other for muscle. Raymond wasn’t afraid of Black’s prowess. He wasn’t afraid of anything. But he knew that there would be no settlement without a treaty and Christmas was in no mood for a powwow.

I was driving the car, but at the same time I was a child again, running through the tall weeds of summer behind the chalky wings of cabbage butterflies. There was no greater pleasure when I was a boy than to be stealthy enough to catch the little creatures. One of the only strong memories I had of my mother was her explaining why catching them was wrong.

“Chile, when you catch ’em, you rub off the fairy dust, and they lose they magics an’ dies,” she’d said in a voice whose tone I could no longer recall.

Even in the car forty-two years from that hot day, the tears welled in my eyes. My mother had been everything to me. Big, black, gentler than even the butterflies, she knew the sugars I liked and the colors I wanted; she made things better even before they went wrong.

I had been thinking about butterflies because I could tell that Christmas’s three words indicated that he was in pain over the decision. His resolute silence underscored that suffering. I was thinking that I had to sneak up on him as I had on those bugs.

But my mother had used the same words.

“Look, Mama,” I had cried.

“Let it go, baby,” she had said.

It was a small step from my mother to Faith Laneer. Even though both of them would also have told me to let it go, this only served to negate the soldier’s command.

“What about Faith?” I whispered.

Mouse’s eyes in the mirror shifted from the passenger’s side to me. He smiled.

Christmas looked at me too. It was the one question he could not ignore. That’s not saying he had to answer. But the look was a capitulation in itself.

“They told me that I was going to be a general one day,” Christmas said in a thick tone. “They said I’d be in the White House, whispering in the president’s ear.”

I glanced in his direction and then back at the road.

He rolled down his window, and the stillness turned into a windstorm.

“I was trained as a soldier from the day I was born,” he continued. “I was raised on strategy and starvation, generalship and hard labor. When I give a command, crackers and niggers jump. They don’t ask me why and they don’t question.”

I knew all that from the way Christmas walked, the way he stood erect.

I sniffed at the air, and he grunted in reply.

“You know why Germany lost the war?” he asked.

“Because they were fighting on two fronts,” I said.

“America was fighting on two fronts. And we had real enemies: the Japanese and the Germans.”

I’d never looked at it that way.

“No,” Christmas said. “Germany lost because they fought for pride and not for logic.”

“What’s that mean?” Mouse asked. He liked talking about war.

“Hitler believed in his mission above the materials and the men at hand. He didn’t take into account the deficits of his own armies and therefore paid the price.”

“Hitler was crazy,” I said.

“War is crazy,” Christmas countered. “If you’re a general, you have to be insane. But that doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of your position. When you lose, you lose. That’s all there is to it. If I send you and Raymond out to take a tower, but before you get there they blow the tower up, then you failed . . . we failed.”

“And Faith Laneer is the tower,” I said.

He did not reply.

“So she dies for nuthin’?”

“She died for what she believed in,” he said. “She died being who she is.”

I knew then that they had been lovers somewhere along the way. Maybe a week ago, maybe five years. For some reason this made me love her more. She had lived within the madness of Christmas Black.

“What about her son?” I asked.

“What about my daughter?” he replied.