I leaped to my feet, uttered five or six unintelligible syllables, and ran smack into the wall. I hit the ground and then looked around for a weapon to protect myself from the man I was entombed with, the man whose only words to me had been that he intended to take my life.
My forehead was bleeding. My fists were up in front of my eyes. I was panting like a spent dog. Sweat was coming down my face, and I shivered from cold. I had never been so frightened in all my life, and then Tiny shifted under his rough pall again.
This next motion could only calm me. I mean, things couldn’t get any worse. I took a step toward the prostrate figure and nudged him with my toe.
He didn’t respond.
“Tiny,” I said. “Hey, man, you okay?”
I thanked heaven that he didn’t answer.
It was then that I remembered reading that corpses in morgues and mortuaries often exhibited some characteristics of life. They shifted and farted and made all kinds of sounds and motions. Some bodies had been known to sit upright hours after their demise.
Tiny was dead. If the bullet in his brain hadn’t killed him, his broken back from that fall would have finished the job. He wasn’t going to rise up and kill me in that cellar. All I had to do was sit there and wait for Fearless to return and everything would be just fine.
That last thought was the wrong one to have because it aroused a question. When would Fearless return?
Milo went to bed before ten every night. He had a switchboard answering service that connected to him or Loretta on alternating nights in case an important call came in. Fearless would drop Milo off, pick up his helper, and return to get me out of that hole. If everything went well, I figured, he’d get there no later than 11:30.
It was the if everything went well clause of this logic that got stuck in my craw. What if something went wrong? A car accident or the police stopping Fearless and finding his illegal gun. What if there was a shoot-out with Albert Rive and he got the drop on my friends? It could happen. Anybody could die. And Fearless was the only person in the world other than me who knew about the crawl space under the floor.
Even if my back was in perfect condition, I wouldn’t be able to push that heavy bookcase off the trapdoor. If Fearless didn’t make it back in time, I would die.
The cold in my chest was like a new ice age creeping down toward my feet. I was a fool and I was going to die because of it. I sat in the corner, turned out the light, and buried my head in my hands.
A moment later I forgot about all my worries.
I heard a footstep above me. I almost called out, but then I thought that it couldn’t be Fearless because not enough time had passed. And it couldn’t be anyone else who was there by accident because Fearless had padlocked the front door for sure.
Someone had broken in. He was walking around, sending shelves and furniture crashing to the floor. I heard glass shattering and table legs crying across the wood floor. And whereas just a moment ago I was afraid that no one would ever find me in the tomb below my home, now I was scared that whoever it was searching my house would kick the blue carpet, discover the trapdoor, and climb down to kill me.
I felt around Tiny’s pants, locating a fairly large pocketknife. This I unfolded and held in both hands. Maybe I could wound the invader before he knew I was armed.
That was the worst night of my entire life. Everything that happened was a potential threat. No matter what I did, Death was dogging my tail.
AFTER QUITE A WHILE the footsteps and crashing subsided. After ten minutes of silence I turned on the light. The fears then began to pile up like stones in an avalanche. I worried about carnivorous insects burrowing after Tiny and then deciding they’d like to have living flesh too. I wondered how much air there was in the underground room and if I’d have enough to last me until Fearless returned, if he returned.
Then my fears became more complex. I worried that the burglar hadn’t left but gone into hiding. Maybe he was lying in wait for me. Maybe he had come to kill me but bumped off Tiny because the big white fool had come on too strong. Now the killer was waiting in shadows for me, and when Fearless got there he’d be ambushed and I’d die of starvation there under the floor.
The fears heaped up so heavily on my mind that I retreated into a mild catatonia where all I could do was sit and stare.
I was sure that my death was imminent and so for one of the very few times in my fretful existence I knew no fear, only hopelessness.
7
I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE to spend more than a few minutes in a completely dark room since that April Fools’ night 1956. I always have a candle and a match somewhere nearby and one of those pale blue night-lights that parents have for frightened children plugged in the wall of every room in my house.
Blackouts in plays and movie theaters never fail to give me the willies.
After my four or five hours with Tiny and every fear that my mind could manufacture, I promised myself that I would never be such a fool again. It didn’t matter that going down into the temporary tomb probably saved me from whoever had broken in. No. I would rather have faced Death himself than the fear I experienced. I couldn’t turn on the lamp because if someone was lying in wait he might have seen the light through the floor. So I huddled in darkness, my mind a cold sea of dread.
A FOOTSTEP. Another. Then there were the sounds of two men walking boldly across the room.
“Paris,” Fearless called out.
“I’m here,” I said, but my tone said help.
Somebody mumbled something and Fearless said something back. There was a chortle from one of them, but I couldn’t tell which one.
I heard the bookcase move and the trapdoor came open, flooding my abyss with electric light from above.
“Damn,” a man said and snorted. “It sure do smell bad.”
I had reached the ladder and grabbed the rungs, but between the blinding light, my silent terror, and the growing pain in my back, I was unable to climb.
“Come on, Paris,” Fearless said. I looked up and saw his dark and smiling face. “One foot after the other.”
After four steps, Fearless grabbed me by the forearm and lifted me into the light. I landed on my feet and looked around. Everything that had been upright was on the floor: books, bookcases, tables, and chairs. Everything had been tipped over, opened, and turned out. The only things standing upright were me, Fearless, and the man he had brought with him: Van “Killer” Cleave.
Seeing Cleave there grinning at me was almost enough to send me back down into the crypt.
Van Cleave. He was the living legend of Watts. Only an inch taller than I, he was a giant. Dark-skinned and bright-eyed, he was a killer of vast talent. No man, or group of men, crossed him if they were smart. He was a stone-cold killer, the consummate ladies’ man, and the best storyteller anybody knew of.
Back when he first came to L.A. from Georgia, he was stalked by three white gangsters for robbing a department store that was under their protection. The white men were from down South and used to colored people taking their punishment. They came into a crowded bar and called Cleave’s name. Everyone expected him to throw up his table and run, but instead he stood up with his long .45-caliber pistol and casually squeezed off shots.
“Them white men was dead ’fore they knew it was comin’,” Randolph Minor told me the next day.
“Did Killer go back down south?” I asked him.
“No, sir,” Randy, a big man, squeaked. “He went home with Bea Langly. She said that she asked him wasn’t he worried that somebody would tell? An’ he said, ‘They bettah not.’”
And no one did. Killer became a hero overnight. He stood up to three white gangsters and went home with the most beautiful bar girl our city had to offer. After that night he never had to pay for a drink, a haircut, or a meal. Tailors gave him clothes just to say he was their customer. He’d been to prison for another crime. But he survived that too. Van Cleave was as oblivious to danger as was Fearless, but on top of that he was
flamboyant and dangerous—just the kind of man our dark manhood needed to maintain our dignity.
I loved hearing stories about Van, but I wasn’t happy to have him in my house. Even standing there with Fearless I felt in peril.
“Hey, Paris,” Van said easily. “Hear you got a problem.”
I gulped and nodded.
“It smell bad,” he said with a wink.
“What happened here?” Fearless asked me, looking around at the debris.
“Somebody broke in an’ tore up the place,” I said. “I heard ’em.”
“I thought you said that the only trouble you had with that white boy was the girl,” Fearless said.
“It was, man. I swear.”
“Go on, Van,” Fearless said then. “Pull the truck around in the alley and we’ll get everything ready in here.”
Cleave nodded and made his way around the debris to the door. After he was out of the house, I started in on my friend.
“What the fuck you bring him to my house for, Fearless?”
“Because you can’t hardly lift up your arm and we got to take Tiny way out somewhere.”
“But that’s Killer Cleave,” I argued. “You cain’t trust a killer.”
“Yes, you can,” Fearless averred. “He’s the second-most trustworthy man in all Watts. He will nevah talk to a cop. He will nevah turn a brother over. It’s true he will kill you if you cross him, but he won’t evah talk about this night, not to no one. Not evah.”
I knew eighth graders who could think circles around Fearless, but I never met a college grad who owned more truth than he.
FEARLESS HAD BROUGHT a heavy rope. He climbed down into the hole and created a hemp hoist under Tiny’s shoulders. Then he came back to the ramshackle room and pulled the 250 pounds of dead weight up with very little effort as far as I could tell.
I remember thinking that if Fearless and Van had a duel of tug-of-war, my friend would win hands down. But Watts wasn’t some ancient Scottish hamlet. They used guns and knives in my neighborhood, and the killers I was rolling with were duelists extraordinaire.
When we had Tiny laid out on the floor, Cleave returned. He and Fearless hefted the dead man, carrying him through the back porch (which was also my hot-plate kitchen) and out the screen door back there.
I noticed a big hole in the tar paper roof. Tiny had fallen through according to my plan, but the fall hadn’t hurt him. He’d just busted through the screen door and bounded over the fence.
“How do we get him over the fence?” I asked.
Cleave reached into his back pocket and came out with wire cutters. He snipped a hole big enough to pull Tiny through while Fearless climbed over the top. Van positioned the body and Fearless pulled it through. Then Killer climbed over.
I could neither climb nor crawl with my hurt back.
“I got to go through the house,” I said.
“Go down into the cellar and get that canvas sheet,” Fearless said.
By the time I made it around to the alley, they had Tiny neatly folded into the back corner of a flatbed Ford truck.
FEARLESS LET ME SIT next to the passenger’s window while Van drove the ’48 Ford truck he’d borrowed from some friend. I was on the alert for police cars, jerking my head around every time a light flashed.
“What’s wrong, Paris?” Van asked after my body went through a fairly pronounced spasm.
“Worried about the cops stoppin’ us. It’s late. They might grab us just for drivin’.”
“That ain’t our problem, man,” the killer said. “It’s their widows and fatherless children got to worry ’bout them.”
The certainty of Cleave’s tone and the depth of Fearless’s silence put me into a different mood altogether. There I was, in a truck with desperate men. I was a desperate man. It was hard to believe that a milquetoast coward like myself could be involved in such a clandestine and dangerous operation. But the reasons were as clear as the quarter moon shining through the windshield.
All three of us were living according to black people’s law. The minute I came upon that white boy’s body I knew that I would be seen as guilty in the eyes of American justice. Not even that—I was guilty. There was no jury that would exonerate me. There was no court of appeals that would hear my cries of innocence.
I wasn’t a brave man like Fearless or a born criminal like Van Cleave, but we all belonged in that truck together. We had been put there by a long and unremitting history. My guilt was my skin, and where that brought me had nothing to do with choice or justice or the whole library of books I had read.
WE DROVE SOUTH and a little east of San Pedro. Van was driving us through a fallow strawberry field. It was maybe two in the morning, and we were the only souls within miles.
When we got out Van said to me, “Take off your sweater, Paris.”
“What?”
“Take off that yellah sweater,” he said.
I realized what he was saying. Fearless was still in his dark colors. Van was wearing all black. Only I had on a bright piece of clothing: Sir’s sweater. There I was, afraid that the law might see me, but that sweater was like a lightbulb under that moon.
While I was disrobing, Fearless and Cleave hefted the corpse out of the back of the truck and carried him over the tilled soil into a stand of oaks. There they used two short spades to dig a shallow grave.
Before they put him in, Van went through his pockets and pulled out a slender wallet. He threw the billfold to me, and then they covered Tiny over. There was no money in the wallet, but instead of throwing it down I put it in my pocket.
“See ya later, my friend,” Van said by way of prayer.
Fearless saluted.
BACK AT MY FRONT DOOR at four in the morning, Fearless and I climbed out of Van’s borrowed truck.
“Thanks, Van,” I said, extending a hand.
“One day I’m’a come ask you for a book, now, Paris,” he said.
“What kinda books you read?” I asked.
“No kind. That’s why I’m’a come to you. When I need a book, you the one gonna tell which one I’m after.”
It was the only time in my life that a book request scared me.
8
FEARLESS SLEPT ON the couch in my front room that night. The next morning he was off to protect Milo, and I worked on fixing up my bookstore, jumping at every sound.
The first day I straightened, swept, and sorted through my stock. The next day I got out my tools and went to work on the structural damage that Tiny had wrought. I’m not all that good with my hands, but I come from poor stock. I never hired a plumber or carpenter because I didn’t have that kind of wealth. So the door frame looked mismatched and crooked, but it held the door in place. The tar paper roof looked as if it had a black bandage on it, but when it rained eight months later I had nary a leak in my kitchen.
I even knitted together the wire fencing in my backyard.
Fearless dropped by every night after letting Milo off at his hideout. He’d bring peach schnapps, a liquor we both got a taste for from an older Jewish lady who had died on our watch. We’d toast the old woman when we took our first sip.
After a week had gone by, I began to calm down. Whoever it was that had broken into my house either got what he was after or didn’t—either way he didn’t return.
I had eight customers in that time, all of them in the last four days.
My first patron was Ashe Knowles. She was what I called a Lady Poindexter. She was the only person I ever met who had read more than I. She had bought and traded back almost every book I had in stock.
Ashe was an inch or so taller than I, and her coloring was what I call a buttery brown: lighter than your average Negro’s but not by much. She wore glasses and had absolutely no sense of style. Her clothes were old, and she wore brown leather shoes with black laces and white cotton socks. She braided her hair into pigtails every morning, tying them with primary-colored ribbons on the ends.
I was happy that Ashe was such a poor
dresser for two reasons. The first was that she liked me. I was one of the few eligible black men she knew who actually read for enjoyment and who could engage her on most topics that she was familiar with. Because of this she often came by and spent long hours talking about arcane subjects like coats of arms in the Middle Ages or the dynasties of Egypt. Ashe had taught herself the rudiments of Latin and Greek, and she liked to play word games, looking for the ancient roots in English words.
Ashe would give me long hungry looks as we conversed, but all I had to do was glance at those ribbons in her hair and I knew that I wasn’t going to make a move.
The second reason I was happy about her appearance was that I suspected that she was beautiful under that dowdy facade.
I didn’t want to get romantically involved with Ashe because she was my best customer and I really liked talking with her.
She was a deep thinker. Sometimes she’d say things to me and it wasn’t until days later that I figured out what she’d meant.
If I became her lover something was bound to go wrong. Pregnancy. Expectations of marriage. Both. I wasn’t ready for a good woman like Ashe, and as long as she dressed the way she did, she couldn’t tempt a fool like me.
“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Ashe said on that Thursday morning. She was wearing a Scotch plaid skirt that came down to the middle of her calves, a dark green sweater that didn’t go with anything that wasn’t a uniform, and pink hair ribbons.
“Ashe. How are you today?”
“I read that book about dreams,” she said.
“The Interpretation?” I asked, referring to Freud’s seminal work.
“It was very interesting,” she allowed. “He wants it to be a science, but it cain’t be, not really.”
“Why not?” I asked. “He’s a doctor.”
“A doctor’s not a doctor when he’s sittin’ in church talkin’ to the preacher,” she said. “When a doctor is talkin’ to a minister, he’s just a man.”
Even though she was looking as homely as a woman three times her age, Ashe made my heart flutter then.
Fear of the Dark Page 4