Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

A voice, like thunder, exploded. “You children better be baptized, ’cause I got yo’ contracts fo’ West Hell right heah!”

Alpha fell from the tree. He and Faith looked up and saw possibly the biggest man in the world — huge, and so dark lightning bugs flew around his head thinking it was midnight. He reached out to them with hands as big around as wheels on a hay wagon.

“You better not!” Alpha shouted.

“I better what ?” Cragg boomed. “Boy, when I’m through, there’ll be six men on either side of you; there won’t be enough marrow in yo’ bones to fill a thimble!”

Faith hid her face. She wanted to eat one of those peaches if this, indeed, was the end. But her throat was solid. It was hard to breathe.

“I’ll take you on,” Alpha said, “but you’ve got to let me pray first—”

Cragg grunted, and rolled up his worksleeves. “Tha’s a good thought — you pray real good.”

Still on his knees, Alpha raised his sooty hands, closed his eyes, and started rapping. “O God, you know I didn’t mean to kill Stackalee and High John the Conqueror and John Henry, and Toledo Slim and Peg-Leg Willy, but they touched me and got a douse of this here terrible disease. You know that I told John Brown and Rip Bailey that this thing I got is terminal, that hit starts yo’ skin to peelin’ like old paint, and you start swellin’ up with horrible boils and hit drives you mad and turns one half of your brain to pure crystal and the other half to water. You know I told them about hit before they touched me, Lord, jes like I’m tellin’ this man Cragg who’s gonna touch me and get hit and die all black and bloated in his bed like alla my relatives did. Don’t blame me, Lord, if he turns to ashes even ’fore Oscar Lee Jackson can get his death wagon out to Cragg’s house, or if his widow-woman and po’ hungry kids come down with hit, too. ”

Alpha opened his eyes and stood up. He stretched out his sooty arms and started walking toward Cragg. Who trembled, spun on his heels, and ran like hell. Faith gave Alpha a big sooty kiss, dug into the peaches, and ate herself sick.)

She left the kitchen table and hurried to the front room, where she’d heard the squeak of chair legs against the floor. Maxwell had Jones’s coat, and was walking with him to the front door.

“. Next Friday, then?” Maxwell said.

“Sho. We can start any time you like.” Jones saw Faith and stuck out his hand again. “Mrs. Maxwell, that sho nuff was one of the most bodacious and tetotaciously pleasing meals ever to cross my lips.”

“Thank you.” She stepped back dizzily, closing the hand into which Alpha had pressed a folded note. Maxwell said, “I’ll be back soon,” and escorted Jones out the door. Faith, when she was certain they were gone, opened the note: Let me see you tomorrow. He gave the time and place. She hid the note in her brassière and paced the apartment for an hour. Jones was exactly Maxwell’s opposite. Which made him identical to her. That broke Big Todd’s maxim about marriage, but she knew she didn’t care. Not one whit.

At ten, the front door flew open, and Maxwell came in. “It’s not going to work,” he said. He dropped his wig on the diningroom table on his way to the kitchen, then returned with a vodka and tonic. “The man’s all wrong for this column!”

“What?” Faith’s left hand went to her breast where she pressed down the wad of paper in her bra.

Maxwell settled into an armchair and kicked off his shoes. “I said Jones isn’t right for the column. He’s not what I visualized for it. He’s not angry enough — he doesn’t show enough Will Power.” He took a drink, gulped, and glanced up at Faith. “You can tell a man by that. You heard that bullshit he was babbling over dinner, didn’t you? Je- sus !”

Faith sat down on the arm of the chair, looking straight down at Maxwell’s bald head. “He has to be mad?”

“Damn right he’s got to be mad! He’s got to be representative of all the rage a prisoner feels, all the frustration and bitterness.” He pressed his cool glass to his forehead and rolled it from his left temple to his right, closed his eyes, and muttered, “Jones is too at peace with himself and the world. You’d think he’d lived in a fairy tale, or something — not a prison. ”

Faith slid off the arm of the chair to sit on a cricket stool in front of him. She rested her head in her hands, looking up. “What’re you going to do?”

Maxwell groaned. “ My hands are tied. I’ve got to select the right mouthpiece for the column. Jones is on probation, and he’s broken it already! They’re supposed to report all their earnings, new possessions, change of addresses, and things like that every month the Lord brings. Jones hasn’t even called his parole officer once since he was released.” Maxwell rubbed his eyes sleepily and stood up, stretching his arms. “I’ll bet that they’ll have him back behind bars in two weeks. I’ll bet he hasn’t enough Will Power to stay free a month!” Unbuttoning his shirt, he wagged his head from side to side. “I’ll have to find myself another parolee.”

Faith was on her feet, pulling at her fingers. “We won’t see him again?”

Maxwell turned down the foldaway section of the living-room couch, dropped his trousers in the middle of the floor, and lay down. “I hope not!”

Faith slept not a wink all night. As she lay alone in her bedroom, her mind worked like machinery, a constantly churning instrument that focused upon Alpha Omega Jones, moving around her memories of him like a lilting jazz improvisation, children — inspecting first this side, then that, reviewing him again and again from every possible perspective until her memories, like music, died away. She jumped out of bed when the warm sunlight of morning fell across her face, and fixed Maxwell’s breakfast before he awoke. Maxwell, after stumbling into the bathroom in his sweaty shorts, came into the kitchen wearing his bathrobe, scratching his head.

“Damn,” he whistled. “How come you’re so happy this morning? What’d I do?”

She laughed. It was true; she hadn’t been so happy in months. Her sleepless night had not left a mark on her beyond the pillow wrinkles now fading from the right side of her face. Too, there was lint from the bed linen in her hair. But she was wide awake, her irises the size of saucers. A healthy, ruddy coloring like that caused by sexual excitement spread across her cheeks. She moved about the kitchen so lightly on her feet that Maxwell was overcome. He grabbed her and kissed her neck.

“Am I still your good thing?” he asked, his voice hoarse before his first cup of coffee.

“Uh huh.”

“And maybe,” he offered timidly, “maybe we can still make it, eh?”

“Yes — maybe,” Faith said, and she broke away from him to turn on the burner beneath a frying pan of bacon. Maxwell ate quickly, not quite awake, and — it was true — he looked somewhat wolfish at the table. His eyes were pink, his skin still blotched from sleep. He dressed and kissed her at the door. When he was gone, Faith took a quick cold shower, dressed, and started for the elevator. She stopped there, then hurried back to the apartment, where she pricked her left forefinger with a sewing needle and used the needle to write Jones’s full name backward in blood on the reverse side of his note. To add to her allurement she rubbed a film of rice powder along her breasts.

She rode the subway to his address in the lower sixties, reciting Psalms 45 and 46 to herself until she arrived. His neighborhood made her nauseous. Old brownstones with shattered windows, shattered doors, and shattered steps leaned forward as if about to fall into the street; clouds of yellow smoke rolled through the air from a chemical factory on the corner and settled on the cobblestones of the street as fine powder. She saw the heads of rats pushing through small piles of garbage in an alley, an old man still asleep under a blanket of newspapers— The Sentry —on the corner near a liquor store, and abandoned cars all along the curb. Down the street, whirling in a circle like a dervish, was a mad dog chasing its short tail, white foam like meerschaum filling up its mouth. Faith checked the address on her note again, anxious, smudging the paper with moisture from her fingers. Then she saw it clearly: the scene in the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror — this had been it. She crossed the street to a basement apartment on the corner, descended the steps, and knocked on an unpainted door, then waited, remembering that, in truth, there was no way to know with certainty if love and all she longed to believe about Alpha were real. Gestures told you nothing, nor did notes pressed into your palm by an old lover from home. It struck her that she’d been silly and was about to be made a fool. At the second she started to turn, to forget this affair entirely, the door opened, and Jones stood before her in a pair of baggy gray pants and a wrinkled shirt open to his navel. He smiled. Features on a manikin. She parted her lips to speak, then simply licked them, unable to move as she wanted, unable to toss her arms around his neck. How do you know he loves you? Faith swallowed, a bit loud. She struggled for a moment, deep inside her head, then threw her arms around him. She listened, her ear to his chest, to his heart, and felt everything would be all right. She was certain. That was all.