Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Faith, as she shook the stranger’s hand, believed it. She felt it in her blood even before Maxwell made their introductions.

“Honey,” he said, “this is Alpha Omega Jones.”

Jones gave no sign. He took Faith’s outstretched hand and pumped it until Maxwell frowned with impatience. “My pleasure, Mrs. Maxwell,” Jones said, grinning. Faith searched his face for recognition. Could he recognize her through IT? He winked. She almost fainted.

Maxwell cleared his throat. “Shall we get down to business?” He removed his sports coat and flung it across a rocking chair against the wall. “We can talk over dinner”—turning to Faith, “it’s ready, isn’t it?”

Faith quickly pulled her thoughts together. “It’s on the table. ”

“Ummgh,” Maxwell grunted, pleased but putting on a great show of indifference. Then he led Jones into the dining room. It had a French Provincial feeling — yellow wallpaper with a brown motif, checked curtains, wire mesh in the cupboard doors, and French Provincial pottery, all designed to complement Faith’s complexion. The light there was brighter than elsewhere in the apartment. Or so it seemed to Faith. She had put her best tablecloth, the one rich and green and pleated on its border, on their circular dining-room table. The details of the room stood out for her, and suddenly she felt awkward, as if her arms and legs were lead beams swinging through a room of glass. She moved carefully behind them, silent and staying in her place, recognizing Jones’s back as the image she’d seen in the Thaumaturgic Mirror. He seemed somewhat taller, more muscular than before, with bulging veins that moved under the skin on his forearms and neck like snakes. His clothes were simple — matching blue work shirt and trousers, low-cut leather boots the color of wood bark but a bit the worse for wear, and a brown corduroy jacket which she hung in the front closet. Anyone who dressed so simply, who disregarded his exterior, had to be rich inside, as complex and intricate as an old gold watch.

“As you know, there’s an awful lot riding on this new feature,” Maxwell said. He crossed his thin arms on the table, his head hunched between his shoulders as he played with his spoon. “I’ll need to know as much about your background as I can to write a sidebar for the first column. ”

Jones sat quietly, his big hands folded in his lap. His face was linear and lean-jawed. His hair, dark and moderately trimmed, was thinning on top. Faith watched him, almost able to hear the words forming in his mind before he spoke. “What do you want to know?”

“The Five W’s,” Maxwell said. “Who, What, Where — you know.”

Jones leaned back and cracked his knuckles, then sipped at his coffee cup to wet his lips. “I grew up in Hatten County, Georgia,” he said. “If a man’s from Hatten County, he’ll usually say so right away. If he isn’t,” Jones chuckled, “you shouldn’t embarrass him by asking.”

Maxwell frowned, bending his spoon out of shape, then back again. “Yeah. Right. What brought you to Chicago?”

Sighing, Jones looked at Faith. “Work, mainly.” He drew his lips back over two rows of square teeth. “All the mills and factories back home were layin’ people off. My folks had a stretch of good bottom land handed down through the family since Reconstruction, but hit started goin’ dry in the forties. Pa used to say hit was so bad, if he sold hit to a church, the congregation would have to fertilize the whole place just to raise a prayer. And the creek that run ’cross hit got so parched I once counted ’bout a hundred bullfrogs that never learned how to swim.” Jones laughed and slapped his knee. “Heh, heh, talk ’bout hard times, buddy!”

Faith hid her hands under the table. They were trembling.

“What kind of work did you find?”—Maxwell.

“I couldn’t find a thing. Nothin’! Mind you, I ain’t crazy ’bout work — hit didn’t scare me none. I can lay down beside the biggest chore you ever seen and fall right asleep. Heh heh. But I was hungry — so hungry my stomach musta thought my throat’d been cut. I looked for months.” He glanced at Maxwell, his eyes wide with humor. “Things got so bad at the flophouse where I was stayin’on the West Side that the rats were too weak to run or hide when somebody cut on the lights. And you could bile me for a sea horse if I wouldn’t rather crawl into a nest o’ wildcats, heels foremost, ’fore I did something like go on relief or start beggin’.” Jones started laughing again — it sounded like a hyena imitating a man. Faith smiled, then bit her lip when she saw Maxwell’s incredulous eyes.

“What did they convict you for?” Maxwell demanded irritably.

“Stealin’,” Jones said. “I don’t reckon hit was really stealin’, though. I never took more than what I could use for food, rent, and a new canvas.” As he ate, Jones wagged his fork in the air reflectively, his jaws packed like a beaver’s. “I don’t suppose they would have caught me if hit wasn’t for that. I had hit all figured out — I needed twenty dollars a week to live on, not a penny mo’ nor less. So on Saturdays, if I couldn’t win the money in a game of chance, I’d relieve somebody of exactly that amount. I stopped a guy down on Fullerton Avenue, liberated his wallet, and was in the wind. When I checked the wallet hit had twenty- five dollars in hit. Imagine! So I looked up his address — a Mr. Luther Langford, I believe — and took the five dollars back. ”

“That’s when they caught you?” Faith said.

Jones nodded. “A patrol car pulled up quicker nor a ’gator can chew a pup after I’d dropped that five-dollar bill in the mailbox!”

None of this sat well with Maxwell. He pulled at his left sock, which kept slipping down his leg, and ate carelessly, too quickly and with such huge mouthfuls that meat caught in his throat and made him cough. That upset his breathing. He hurried to the bedroom, found his spare respirator, and returned weakly to the dining room, wiping his eyes. “You aren’t at all sorry for what you did?” he said.

“Sho am,” Jones drawled. “That twenty dollars woulda doubled the ante in the game back at the flophouse if I coulda made hit back in time.”

Maxwell went silent, smoking a strange new product he’d found in a dime store. Asthma Cigarettes. They were filterless, twice the size of regular cigarettes in diameter, and filled with a green tobacco that smelled like hay. He smoked, coughed, but kept going until he’d finished three in a row. Faith opened the window to clear out the room and cleaned off the table as Maxwell and Jones withdrew into the living room. In the kitchen, seated at the table with a fresh martini, she held her breath to catch snatches of dialogue drifting through the hall with Maxwell’s green smoke. Jones’s voice, its tone and timbre, brought back, not with its words but its ring, that lost life in Georgia. It lifted her thoughts back to the time he’d saved her life. She’d be dead, she was certain, if Alpha Omega Jones hadn’t outfoxed Old Man Cragg.

(It was summer, one of those hot, sweltering days when your lips were so dry they cracked from the heat. Jones suggested they steal into Old Man Cragg’s east orchard and carry away a few peaches from his tree. She’d objected violently, because Cragg was second in awesomeness only to Big Todd. Children, he was so mean he gave his kids ten cents each every night if they skipped dinner, stole it from them during the night, and whopped ’em the next morning for losing it. Mean? Why, he was so mean and low down he had to reach up to touch bottom; he was so black his wife, Elsie, had to throw a sheet over his head so the sun could rise. No, you didn’t mess with Cragg. Or his peaches. Faith demurred, but Alpha dragged her off to Cragg’s farm. He rubbed chimney soot over their arms and legs and faces so they could sneak around invisibly at night. Then he shinnied up one of Cragg’s trees and started tossing ripe peaches down into a basket while Faith kept watch. By and by, she felt something behind her.