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.
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.”