Blonde Faith

46

We parked in an unpaved open lot on the outskirts of downtown. I switched the ignition off and pulled up the parking brake, but before opening the door I turned to address my deadly passengers.

“You men need to stay here and wait,” I said.

“What for, Ease?” Mouse asked, while Christmas just stared out the window.

“The cops want you dead, Ray.”

Reading the subtle emotional changes in my best friend’s face was a lifelong study. His eyes could shift from pleasantries to murderous intent with barely a twitch. Right then a steeliness crept into his gray eyes and the corners of his mouth.

“What cops?”

“I don’t know,” I lied, hoping that Mouse couldn’t read me as well as I could him. “Suggs told me about it. They think that because you murdered Perry your career should come to an end.”

“That don’t mean I got to hide in no car.”

“Ray, hear me, man,” I said, softly and clear. “I got it covered. I know what I’m doin’. Just stay in the car and do what I say for a few days and it’ll blow over. You know Etta be mad if I let you get killed . . . again.”

It was the joke that clinched it.

On the day that JFK was assassinated, Raymond Alexander had agreed to accompany me on a minor errand. Things got out of control and Ray wound up shot, almost dead. Mama Jo brought him back to life with her Louisiana magics, and I promised myself that I would never again be the cause of his death.

“Okay, brah,” Mouse said. “I’m tired anyway.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

“HELLO, Jewelle speaking.”

“Hey, honey. How’s my family?” I said into the pay phone, thinking, wistfully wishing actually, that some five years before, I had married Jewelle and now I’d just be calling to say hi. That would have been a whole different life, but she’d be mine and we’d love each other and the children we’d no doubt have had. Jackson and Mofass would have been mad, but I’d be happy and Bonnie could do whatever she wanted to.

“What’s wrong, Easy?” she asked.

Maybe the desire showed up in my voice.

“It’s not easy bein’ me,” I said.

She giggled and asked, “Do you have a pen?”

I took out the yellow number two I used for notes and calculating bullet trajectories, and Jewelle rattled off an address on Crest King, a street that began and ended in Bel-Air.

“What’s this?” I asked her.

“Our place is too small for your whole family, so I decided to put them in a house I own up there.”

“You own a house in Bel-Air?”

“Yeah. One’a Jean-Paul’s friends owned it, but he needed some quick money, so I liquidated a few lots and paid him in cash. I figured that you or Mouse or Jackson would need it one day, and in the meantime I’d hold on to it ’cause you know the prices are bound to rise.”

“And what are the neighbors up there gonna think when they see a whole houseful of Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Negroes.”

“That’s no problem, Mr. Rawlins,” she said fetchingly. “You’ll see.”

CHRISTMAS WAS QUIET the rest of the ride. He was a soldier in defeat. There was no revenge or retaliation that would relieve him. He’d been crushed by the enemy after having won every battle. No condemnation could be worse; no tribunal could recommend a stiffer punishment than what he already felt.

“How you find me, Easy?” Mouse asked as we cruised down Sunset Boulevard past the strip.

“I asked Pericles nicely.”

“How you find him?”

“I told his wife that I was hired by Etta to prove you innocent,” I began. Ten minutes later we were at the address Jewelle had given me, and I was just finishing my tale.

Mouse was laughing about Jean-Paul and Pretty Smart, and Christmas languished in hell.

The address was on a big iron door in a great stone wall. You couldn’t see over the barricade except for a few trees that towered on the other side.

I had to get out of the car to press the button on the intercom system.

“ ’Allo?” Feather said with a put-on French accent.

“It’s me, baby.”

“Daddy!” she yelled. “Drive on up to the house.”

She must have activated some mechanism, because slowly the iron gate moved inward, revealing a curving asphalt road that wound through the arboretum used as a yard.

I got back in the car and drove. You couldn’t even see the house until we’d taken three turns along the way. Then we could see the place in the distance.

One man’s house is another man’s mansion, I’m told. We were all the other men in my car driving up to that place. It was four stories, constructed from blond wood and thick glass. There was a stand of bushy pines around the place and a fountain in front. The fountain was a sculpture of naked women and men dancing in a circle around a gushing spout of water that could have been coming out of a great blue whale.

“Where are we?” Christmas asked.

“Hell if I know.”

The front door to the house was red with an alternating black and yellow frame. It was ten feet high at least and twice as wide as a normal door. It flew open as we were getting out of the car, and all my family and Christmas’s family too came running toward us.

“Daddy!” shouted Feather and Easter Dawn.

After them came Jesus in swimming trunks and Benita with Essie in her arms. Between all those legs the little yellow dog came snarling and barking, the hair standing up on his back and his eyes actually glittering with hatred.

As I hugged my daughter, I took in my friends. Mouse shook hands with Jesus and congratulated him on his child. He tried to kiss Benita on the cheek, but she turned away. Christmas picked E.D. up over his head, almost threw her, and she laughed with hilarity that she had not shown in my presence.

“Daddy,” Feather said, leaning away, her fingers laced behind my neck, “I’m so sorry.”

“About what?”

“About hurting you.”

I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say to her that I could not be hurt, that I was her father and beyond the pain and tears that are so important to children. I wanted to, but I could not. Because I knew that if I tried to refute her claim, she would see the pain in my heart.

“Why don’t you show me the house, baby,” I said.