Read Online Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Walter Mosley
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SAW Gara she brought to mind deities. She was in that green chair again, fat as Buddha and wise as Ganesh. There was no gender to her divinity, no mortality to her time here on Earth.
“I got somethin’ for you here, Easy,” she said, indicating a buff-colored folder on the table.
There were eight sheets of paper inside. The first listed seven names, neatly typed in the top left-hand corner, single-spaced.
Bruce Richard Morton
William T. Heatherton
Glen Albert Thorn
Xian Lo
Tomas Hight
Charles Maxwell Bob
François Lamieux
After that, each page gave all the information that Gara had been able to find on the various heroes.
I scanned the pages. There were lots of abbreviations and acronyms. I didn’t understand most of them, but that didn’t bother me.
“No photos?” I asked.
Gara frowned and sucked a tooth.
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think so.”
“Don’t show those papers to anybody, Easy. And burn ’em up when you’re through.”
“Either I’ll burn them or they’ll burn me.”
ON THE WAY HOME I stopped by the Pugg, Harmon, and Dart Insurance building. It was the newest and tallest glass-and-steel skyscraper to grace the downtown LA skyline. On the top floor was Brentan’s, one of LA’s finest restaurants.
As I headed for the red elevator whose sole purpose was to bring fine diners to Brentan’s, a guard in a tan short-sleeved shirt and black pants approached me. The pale-faced, slender-armed guard had a holster on his left hip. The leather pouch contained what looked to be a .25-caliber pistol.
Most white people at that time wouldn’t have given that guard a second thought. I, on the other hand, saw him as potentially life threatening.
“Sorry,” he said. “No one goes up without a reservation.”
He was a small white man with eyes of no certain color and bones that would have worked for a hummingbird.
“This is nineteen sixty-seven,” I reminded him.
The guard didn’t understand what I meant; his perplexed expression told me that.
“What I mean,” I said, “is that in this day and age even Negroes can have reservations at nice places. You can’t just look at a man and tell by his suntan whether or not he has a right to be somewhere.”
My tone was light, which made the words even more threatening.
“Um,” he said in a voice that hovered somewhere between scratchy alto and tentative tenor. “I mean, yes, the restaurant is closed.”
“You mean to say that the restaurant is not open for business. It isn’t closed. I have an appointment with Hans Green in seven minutes. That’s because the restaurant employees are working.”
I smiled into the crooked little face that represented every rejection, expulsion, and exclusion I had ever experienced.
Most of my days went like that. Maybe 15 or 20 percent of the white people I met tried to get a leg up over me. It wasn’t the majority of folks — but it sure felt like it.
I pressed the button on the elevator while the guard stood there behind me, trying to figure a way around my reasoning. The bell rang and the doors slid open. I got in and the guard joined me.
I didn’t say a word to him and neither did he speak to me. We rode up those twenty-three floors silently wasting our energies over a feud that should have been done with a hundred years before.
When the doors came open, the guard scuttled around me, making a beeline for the podium where a young woman was writing in a big reservations log. She was white, with long blond hair and a horsey face. Her high heels made her taller than the guard; her teal gown put her in a completely different class from him.
The guard talked quickly, and I took my time approaching them. When I finally got there, she was saying, “I’ll go speak to Mr. Green.”
The guard smirked at me, and again I wondered at all the minutes and hours and days that I’d spent on meaningless encounters like this one.
I wanted to say to the little white man, “Listen, brother,
“I got somethin’ for you here, Easy,” she said, indicating a buff-colored folder on the table.
There were eight sheets of paper inside. The first listed seven names, neatly typed in the top left-hand corner, single-spaced.
Bruce Richard Morton
William T. Heatherton
Glen Albert Thorn
Xian Lo
Tomas Hight
Charles Maxwell Bob
François Lamieux
After that, each page gave all the information that Gara had been able to find on the various heroes.
I scanned the pages. There were lots of abbreviations and acronyms. I didn’t understand most of them, but that didn’t bother me.
“No photos?” I asked.
Gara frowned and sucked a tooth.
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think so.”
“Don’t show those papers to anybody, Easy. And burn ’em up when you’re through.”
“Either I’ll burn them or they’ll burn me.”
ON THE WAY HOME I stopped by the Pugg, Harmon, and Dart Insurance building. It was the newest and tallest glass-and-steel skyscraper to grace the downtown LA skyline. On the top floor was Brentan’s, one of LA’s finest restaurants.
As I headed for the red elevator whose sole purpose was to bring fine diners to Brentan’s, a guard in a tan short-sleeved shirt and black pants approached me. The pale-faced, slender-armed guard had a holster on his left hip. The leather pouch contained what looked to be a .25-caliber pistol.
Most white people at that time wouldn’t have given that guard a second thought. I, on the other hand, saw him as potentially life threatening.
“Sorry,” he said. “No one goes up without a reservation.”
He was a small white man with eyes of no certain color and bones that would have worked for a hummingbird.
“This is nineteen sixty-seven,” I reminded him.
The guard didn’t understand what I meant; his perplexed expression told me that.
“What I mean,” I said, “is that in this day and age even Negroes can have reservations at nice places. You can’t just look at a man and tell by his suntan whether or not he has a right to be somewhere.”
My tone was light, which made the words even more threatening.
“Um,” he said in a voice that hovered somewhere between scratchy alto and tentative tenor. “I mean, yes, the restaurant is closed.”
“You mean to say that the restaurant is not open for business. It isn’t closed. I have an appointment with Hans Green in seven minutes. That’s because the restaurant employees are working.”
I smiled into the crooked little face that represented every rejection, expulsion, and exclusion I had ever experienced.
Most of my days went like that. Maybe 15 or 20 percent of the white people I met tried to get a leg up over me. It wasn’t the majority of folks — but it sure felt like it.
I pressed the button on the elevator while the guard stood there behind me, trying to figure a way around my reasoning. The bell rang and the doors slid open. I got in and the guard joined me.
I didn’t say a word to him and neither did he speak to me. We rode up those twenty-three floors silently wasting our energies over a feud that should have been done with a hundred years before.
When the doors came open, the guard scuttled around me, making a beeline for the podium where a young woman was writing in a big reservations log. She was white, with long blond hair and a horsey face. Her high heels made her taller than the guard; her teal gown put her in a completely different class from him.
The guard talked quickly, and I took my time approaching them. When I finally got there, she was saying, “I’ll go speak to Mr. Green.”
The guard smirked at me, and again I wondered at all the minutes and hours and days that I’d spent on meaningless encounters like this one.
I wanted to say to the little white man, “Listen, brother,
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