Max Baer and the Star of David (23 page)

“Well before we get to that, I tell you about your wife and what she be to me, so we got no secrets between us,” he said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Now since I been calling you brother from the time we met, we gonna add to that by telling you that I be brother to Joleen too,” he said. “But you know that already, don’t you? Because Joleen, you two being close as any brother and sister I know, and she and me getting acquainted again, talking about how we killed our old selves off, made them into new folks—into born-again critters, like they like to say.”

This was and was not news to me, but I could not, in the moment, understand for how long this had and had not been so.

“I know that,” I said.

“But what you don’t know is that she be good to me and
all
her brothers, the old man too, the way she be to you,” he said. “She tell you all that, right?”

I said nothing.

“Way I see it, you been a blind man a long time before you get the diabetes,” he said. “You been blind all your life, because—”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“The money, man,” he said. “I tell you that before. I want the money. You get me the money however you do, maybe from your bumboy Max, all the loot he gets from movies and shit, and I let you know where to bring it, and I give you the pictures, and then I be on my way, you never see me again, and that’s a promise.”

I could hear Joleen telling me and Max about her brother James, and my only disappointment, I realized, was that I had no container of lye buried nearby. Whereas James had been imaginary, however, Hawkins was real. He was real, I imagined telling Joleen, in the way Abel was real to Cain, and Jacob to Esau, and Isaac to Ishmael, and Joseph to his brothers, and Judas to Jesus. Whether or not he succeeded in doing in Max, the probability that he would continue to shadow me for days, months, or years was a prospect that induced in me a supreme weariness—an overwhelming desire to close my eyes and sleep, and dream, and in my dreams, to tumble into deeper sleep.

“Let me see the pictures,” I said.

He laughed. “You think I some dumb nigger, just give them to you and then you conk me out again, you got another think coming,” he said. “Anyways, even you beat shit out of me, and take these, there’s another envelope I give to somebody, for insurance, like they like to say.”

“You’re Simon, aren’t you,” I said.

“Oh yeah, and you get my apologies for me not being the Simon I was when you was a boy—but I had some hard times, wasn’t like you, her there feeding you every damned day of your life,” he said. “But once I got away, didn’t want nobody to know who I was, so I watched you two and done what you done and got me a name with a new life of my own.”

“And what happened to our father?”

“He died of the diabetes, like I told you,” he said. “Only I helped it along a little bit. Had it coming, stuff he did to us, and bet you agree on that.”

“I do.”

“The thing is, Joleen—I call her that out of respect—she loved it more than any woman I ever know, used to say it made her blind, ain’t that a pisser, given me with my eye, and you with both yours gone soon,” he said. “‘Oh you screwin’ me blind, Simon,’ she’d say to me. ‘You screwin’ me blind’—only what she did with you must have been upside down and inside out, ’cause it make
you
the blind man.”

“Let me see the pictures,” I said.

“Not on your life,” he said.

“Then on yours,” I said, and I faked a left to the stomach, rattled him with a solid right to his blind eye. He was ready too, though, and as he staggered backwards, he clicked a knife open, warned me he was quicker than he looked, that he’d used his little friend before and not to ask about the blood it knew in its lifetime. He could give me an eye like his if I wanted, no extra charge.

“You just get me the money, and we be done,” he said. “’Cause you got a son now, and we wouldn’t want him hurt no ways, and you got a wife who got what I like to call ‘family feeling’ for us all, and don’t know how she go on living, her son have an accident on his way home one night.”

“Get him, Max,” I said then, and when Hawkins turned around and jabbed the air where he thought Max would be, I hit him with a single rabbit punch to the back of his neck that did most of the job I intended it to do.

He lay there, lifeless, though his heart continued to beat. I opened the envelope and there was nothing in it but a sports page from the
San Francisco Examiner
with an article about Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants. I was not surprised. I lifted Hawkins, draped one of his arms over my shoulder, and walked with him to the empty lot as if walking a drunken friend home. When we got to the dumpsters, I laid him on the ground, took out my syringe, lifted his sleeve, filled the syringe with air, found a vein, and injected the air.

He twitched, but only two or three times, and a minute later, I took two steps up the metal rungs on the side of the dumpster that was mostly empty, and heaved him up and over the edge. I walked away, checking out garages until I found a gas can next to a lawnmower. I borrowed the can, went to the dumpster, poured the gasoline in on Hawkins. Then I lit the envelope that had no pictures in it, and dropped it into the dumpster. A few seconds later, the flames whooshed and rose, and I tossed the syringe in, and before the sun rose, I knew—something I would love to have been able to say to Max, because he was a man who appreciated bad jokes as well as good ones—Simon Abraham, good son of the South that he was, would be gone with the wind. And who will miss you? I heard myself ask. Who will care?

When I arrived home, Joleen did not ask me why I was late or where I had been—she rarely did—and she set out dinner for the two of us. She did ask how the event at the YMCA had gone, but I told her it had gone well, and that Max had asked about her and Horace Jr.

“Simon will not bother us anymore,” I said.

“Simon?

“Our brother,” I said.

“Then you know,” she said.

“Oh yes,” I said. “But we had a talk, and I persuaded him to leave San Francisco and never return.”

“You saw to that?”

“I did.”

“Whatever he told you about us, you should take with the proverbial grain of salt.”

“Not a pillar of salt?”

“I am not Lot’s wife—or your wife either, for that matter,” she said.

“True enough,” I said.

“I’ve never been one to look back.”

“Of course.”

“He was a nasty man, like our father,” she said. “He led a pitiable life, and against my better judgment, I felt sorry for him at times—blood is blood, Horace—and I probably should have told you about him years ago.”

“He’s gone now,” I said.

“A ghost become a ghost?” she asked.

“You might say that,” I said.

“Then I thank you for seeing that he will not haunt us anymore,” she said. “You must feel relieved.”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“In truth, I didn’t know what to say when he came calling and made himself known to me, for if he hadn’t made himself known to me, I would not have recognized him,” she said. “What to do, I kept thinking. What to do. But everything that came to mind would, in my mind, have only made things worse. So I did nothing.” She gave me a half smile. “I
am
sorry, Horace, but seeing Max today must have been a joy, and you have been looking quite good of late—remarkably good, in fact. Despite Hawkins, and the diabetes, and living with me and my clouded moods, I have never seen you looking better, and that makes me happy.”

I sensed her meaning. “You don’t mind?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I am pleased you’re happy—and also relieved of certain feelings—responsibilities, yes?—I have carried with me for too many years. And I can think of us again in the way we were before we truly knew one another—when you would sometimes call me your dove.”

I took her hand in mine, and recited a line we knew well. “‘I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh … my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.’”

“Yes,” she said. “And do you know why the lover calls his beloved a dove?”

“Because when doves mate, they mate for life,” I said. “Horace Jr. explained that to me.”

“That is good news,” Joleen said.

“Good news because you and I are
not
doves?”

“Perhaps.”

“But did you ever hear the joke Max would make in one of his routines with Maxie Rosenbloom, about what happens in Mississippi and Louisiana when a couple get divorced?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Tell me—what happens in Mississippi and Louisiana when a couple get divorced?”

“They’re still permitted to remain brother and sister,” I said.

Joleen’s smile vanished. “You have a cruel streak in you too, Horace,” she said. “Unlike Max, however, you have kept it contained for the most part, and it has proven its usefulness on more than one occasion, as it has today. I trust it will continue to serve you well. And I’m grateful that Max had the good sense not to have told this particular joke in my presence. It is of no ultimate concern, of course. He does not know, and never will, am I correct?”

“You are correct.”

“Please,” she said. “Promise me. No matter how or why you are tempted—there is no reason on earth ever to trouble him. Promise me.”

The next morning I went to the Lighthouse, and I told Miss Duncan that Hawkins had asked me to tell her he was leaving town—had already left, in fact—and that though he was grateful to her and the Lighthouse for all they had done for him, he would not be returning. I said he had given me his new address, and I asked her for the envelope he had given her for safekeeping, and told her I would forward it to him.

Her hand trembling, she took a sealed envelope from a drawer in her desk, and gave it to me. I opened the envelope in her presence, and found three grainy photographs of me and Max lying in bed, Max’s head resting on my shoulder, the two of us smiling smiles of contentment. I asked Miss Duncan if there were any other copies of these photos in existence, and she said that to her knowledge there were not, and she crossed her heart and swore to me on her mother’s grave that she had not known what was in the envelope, only that Hawkins had entrusted it to her. I took several of her necklaces in my fist, used them to pull her toward me, and informed her that if she broke her vow I would see to it that she would leave town as Hawkins had. I was, I assured her, a man of my word.

I brought the envelope upstairs to Miss Hémon, and I told her what I had told Joleen—that I had had a talk with Hawkins and had persuaded him to leave town and never return.

“You are more enterprising than I gave you credit for,” she said.

“Did you know about this?” I asked, showing her the envelope.

“Yes, but there’s nothing in there—just an old newspaper.”

“That’s correct,” I said.

She sighed. “Oh Horace, I hear by your voice—too cold, too cold by far—that your affection for me is fading, and I hope you will tell me this is not so.” She leaned against me, her hand light on the small of my back.

“I have nothing
but
affection for you,” I said.

“But as to the expression
of
your affection … ?”

“You and Hawkins were friends in the way we have been friends, is that not so?”

“Does it matter?”

“Under the aspect of eternity, as Horace Jr. might say, nothing matters,” I said. “But to me, yes, it matters.”

“You are a gentle soul, Horace,” she said. “You deserve better than you have received, and I am trying with all my heart to give you what you deserve—what I believe you
need
—and what I know
I
need. I will not dissemble or be coy. You are an extraordinary man, and it is my good fortune that we found one another.”

“Any other man would have loved you as I have, and…” I began.

“And many have—is that what you were about to say?”

I did not reply.

“But yours is not the right way of thinking about it,” she said. “Perhaps with time you will see that, and we can be friends again, for it is you I love and not any other man, and I love you in this time and in this place, and I will miss you terribly if…”

“We will do the best we can,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Most people, most of the time, do
not
do the best they can, it seems to me. Most people disappoint us in the end, as I have disappointed you.”

“That is because of a flaw in my character that is beyond repair,” I said. “Still, I will say what I have been thinking and do not wish to hide—that I have never known, or expected to know, a sweetness with anyone such as the sweetness I have known with you.”

She spoke quickly, as if she had been rehearsing her words: “You made that possible by who you are,” she said. “You have a large capacity for kindness, nor have you let your wounds, such as they are, get in the way of our friendship.” She exhaled. “And now tell me about your friend Max Baer, whom you saw yesterday.”

“He will need me to be near him in the months to come,” I said. “He is not well.”

“And after that?”

“We will see what we will see.”

She kissed me, her lips grazing mine, and then she touched my lips with her fingers, as if she were about to begin reading words there.

“From what you have told me, your friend Max and I are not unlike one another,” she said. “Apparently, we both believe in taking as much pleasure for ourselves in this life as we can, and though we both fear hurting others, we rarely let this fear govern our actions.”

She stepped away, went to her desk. “Will you and Joleen join us for dinner this Friday evening?” she asked. “The children are expecting you and will be disappointed if you do not come. They hope Horace Jr. will come too.”

“We will be there,” I said, surprised to hear the words come from my mouth.

“That pleases me, Mister Littlejohn,” she said. “And even in Hawkins Johnson’s absence, you will continue to come to the Lighthouse so that we may be of service to you, yes?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“I am, again, pleased and, I must admit, happily surprised,” she said. “So I will now tell you something I have thought of telling you for a long time, not by way of explanation or rationalization, I trust, but simply because it is something my mother said frequently when I was growing up that I want you to know.”