Fear of the Dark fjm-3

by Walter Mosley

  While I was giving it to him, Three Hearts said, “You really should watch your liquor, Paris.”

  “Watch my liquor? Watch my liquor? What I should do is watch my front do’.”

  “Paris,” Fearless warned.

  “That’s right. If I watched the do’, then Useless wouldn’t 175

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  come up and hide stolen property in my toilet. You wouldn’t come up gettin’ me so deep in trouble that I cain’t even think about nuthin’ else. I’m drinkin’ so I don’t have to run down the street yellin’ like a madman done lost his mind.”

  I stared at Three Hearts in the backseat. She looked away in disgust. Her disdain made me so angry that I was about to rant some more, but Fearless put his foot on the accelerator, and somehow the gravity pushing me against the seat dis-placed the anger too. I felt a wave of pleasant intoxication and leaned back against the door.

  For a long time I stared at Angel’s profile. It certainly was perfect. Daughter, wife, lover, mother — she could have been everything and anything to man, woman, or child. There was haughtiness and a waiting smile, knowledge that you could never have, and simple conversation. She was the woman who was the power behind the king and the widow that survived him.

  I hated Angel Allmont, but it wasn’t because of my cousin. I didn’t care about Useless. He could die and never be found.

  Three Hearts could light a candle every night for him until the candleholder overflowed with wax and her wood shanty burned to the ground — I didn’t care about them. No. I hated Angel Allmont because looking at her made me feel small.

  “So what else?” I said in a voice that was too loud for the small space of the car.

  “Excuse me?” Angel said. She wasn’t even looking at me, but she knew what I was asking and to whom my question was addressed.

  “You know,” I said. “What else did Sterling know about those white men?”

  For a long moment I thought that Angel was not going to look at me. But then she turned and gave me the full treatment.

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  “I support my mother, Mr. Minton,” she said. “Her and her sister, my five-year-old son, and a man who once saved me from a rapist.”

  Three Hearts put a hand on Angel’s shoulder.

  “That ain’t what I asked you,” I said, wondering at the man that lay inside me.

  “They were men who . . . enjoyed black women,” she said at last. “They hungered for dark flesh.”

  “Your flesh?”

  “Paris,” Fearless said again.

  “Yes, Mr. Minton, my flesh.”

  “Did you use to go with them up to this here cabin?”

  “There. Hotel rooms, beach houses, rectory couches, and back-alley slums.” There was distaste on her lips but not shame, not humiliation.

  “So you seduced them?” I asked, as if my tongue were a scalpel and her dignity a malignant tumor that had to be excised.

  “If you had been there you would see it differently,” Angel said in an even voice. “Their blood was boiling from the minute they saw me. Ullie told me that this was how we could save my family. I would have done a lot worse for them.”

  She’d beaten me. Three Hearts was now holding the girl’s hands. Fearless sat there, his posture in the stoic demeanor of respect.

  I turned my back against the door. I was falling into a stu-por. Soon sleep would come and take me, just as one day Death would come knocking on my door.

  •

  •

  •

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  “ Pa r i s , ” F e a r l e s s s a i d , and I opened my eyes.

  “What?”

  “Cops.”

  I turned and looked out the back window. The flashing blue and red lights caused a chemical reaction in my brain. I don’t know the names of the particular ingredients, but three seconds after I was awakened I was also as sober as a judge.

  “I’m pullin’ ovah,” Fearless said. “Get ready.”

  My sobriety turned into a microscopic lens then. Fearless saying to get ready meant that he was prepared to go to war.

  “Fearless,” I said as he pulled to the curb.

  “What?”

  “We don’t need to fight here.”

  “We got to get to Ulysses, man. These cops in the way.”

  The squad car pulled up behind us. They shone a bright white light from their car into ours.

  “There’s no reason to hurt anybody, Fearless. We’ll get out of this.”

  A young white man was coming up to the driver’s window.

  He was wearing a policeman’s uniform and trained to enforce a certain kind of law; he was arrogant and sure of himself, but he didn’t know that if I didn’t talk just right he was about to be killed.

  “I got it, Fearless. I got it, man.”

  The tension went out of my friend.

  The police hadn’t made it to the door yet. Fearless was rolling down his window in expectation. But my mind was back down the road we had just traveled. Three Hearts had thought she knew Angel from the first moment she laid eyes on her. She could see something in her the way I saw things in Fearless. Maybe, I thought, maybe Hearts knew something I 178

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  did not; maybe Angel was not misnamed; maybe I was just blind to her, as many and most were to my friend.

  “Step out of the car,” a voice said. There was no “please” at the end of his request.

  U n d e r t h e h i g h b e a m s of their car we stood with our hands on the roof of mine. The women were on one side, while Fearless and I faced them.

  “Paris Minton?” one white cop asked my friend.

  “I’m Minton,” I said.

  While the other cop frisked Fearless, my inquisitor patted me down with one hand.

  “We’re going to have to bring you down to the station,” the cop was telling me.

  “Gun,” the cop searching Fearless said.

  “Paris,” Fearless said to me.

  “You shut up,” his cop complained.

  “Don’t worry, Fearless,” I said. “We’ll pull out of this.”

  “Okay,” he said, as my cop snapped the first manacle of the handcuffs on me.

  Three Hearts had left her gun-laden purse in the car and was holding her wallet in her hand. The police checked out the ladies’ IDs and told them that they had to bring Fearless and me down to the station for questioning.

  “What for?” Three Hearts asked.

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” one of them said. “We had his license plate number and name in our hot file. We’re just following orders.”

  •

  •

  •

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  Th e y p r e s s e d F e a r l e s s a n d m e into the backseat of their prowl car. I remember, as our captors pulled from the curb, seeing Three Hearts in the front passenger’s seat and Angel behind the wheel of my junk heap. I wondered, as we drove off one way and the women headed in another, if I would see both of them alive again.

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  S o m e t i m e s ja i l i s n ’ t such a bad thing.

  I mean, you’re locked down and treated as a 28 threat and a danger, but if you don’t have anywhere to go and freedom contains threats that incarceration does not, then a free meal, a locked metal door, and a hard cot will do.

  Fearless and I were searched and thrown into a big cell that had a maximum capacity of twelve. There were fifteen men already in there when we arrived.

  Some guy, I don’t even remember who, said something he thought was dangerous when we walked in.

  With a smile Fearless told the man, “Come on ovah here an’

  let’s get this ovah wit’.” The man could hear the threat in Fearless’s bored tone. He stayed where he was, and from then on nobody bothered us. Two men even vacated their bunks so that we would have a place to rest our weary bones.

  Fearless was a para
dox in my life. In that cell he was my savior. Just hearing his few words and seeing the steel in his bearing, men stepped back from him and anyone with him.

  But when we were back on the streets, Fearless would drag me into danger no matter which way he went.

  That’s why I was happy to be locked up. The bars protected 181

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  me. The lack of windows meant that nobody could spy on me.

  I wanted to stay there for a week, maybe two, until Useless and Angel and Three Hearts were far away and forgotten. But I knew that Fearless was too responsible for that. He used his one phone call to reach Milo. All he got was the answering service. I wasn’t even going to use my call, but Fearless convinced me to phone Mona and tell her to keep on Milo.

  “You need a lawyer,” I said to my friend.

  “Why?”

  “Carrying a concealed weapon,” I suggested.

  “I got a license,” he replied.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I been bodyguardin’ Milo. He got it for me.”

  “Well,” I said, “we might as well get some sleep.”

  “You sleep, Paris,” my friend said. “I’ll just sit up top an’ get the lay of the land.”

  I wa s s o f a r i n t o that mess with Three Hearts that I was even dreaming about Useless.

  “What the hell you want?” I asked my iniquitous cousin.

  We were sitting at a picnic table in a small park near Watts.

  “Listen to me, Paris,” he whined. “I cain’t he’p it, brother. I love her.”

  “So? Love her, then. That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me.”

  “You got to find her, man. You got to bring her back.”

  Useless was crying. I tried to remember him ever crying before.

  “Paris.”

  . . . Had he ever cried before? Had he shed tears?

  “Wake up, man.”

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  I knew there was a commotion going on before I opened my eyes.

  A large black man was saying something in a voice that rasped like a big handsaw on hard wood.

  “. . . kick your ass, peckahwood,” he was saying.

  There was a smallish white kid in front of him trying to stand up straight and retreat at the same time.

  I immediately identified with the kid because I would have been in his position in that confrontation.

  “Watch yourself, man,” Fearless whispered to me. “I’m’a go ovah there.”

  Over there. The conflict was coming down two and a half steps from our bunk. Most of the men in the room were black.

  After that came three Mexicans and two other white guys. No one else in that cell was going to stand up for the white kid. No one else would have stood up for me.

  “Kick his ass, Leo,” somebody said.

  Leo socked the kid in the face, and I was amazed that the white boy didn’t go down. He leaned over like a reed in a windstorm and he began bleeding from a cut that opened over his eye. But the kid stood back up. Leo grinned. And then Fearless, the Lancelot of South L.A., stood between them. He put up his hands and shook his head, and the fight was over —

  just like that.

  He brought the boy over to bleed on our blankets.

  “I coulda taken him,” the kid said. He was actually smaller and skinnier than me, pale as a newborn luna moth. “Nigger wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have his friends with ’im.”

  “What’s your name, son?” Fearless, not thirty-five himself, asked.

  “Loren.”

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  “Loren, call the man a bastard, a motherfucker, a pussy if you want to, but when you call him a nigger you call me one, and, brother, I am a whole other kinda pain.”

  “All I did was ask a man to read somethin’ for me,” Loren said. “I got this paper in my pocket and I don’t have my glasses.

  It’s from my auntie an’ she hates me so I know somethin’ bad had to happen. This dude Chapman said that he didn’t wanna hear a word outta none’a the white people.”

  “Chapman,” I said. “Was that the guy hit you?”

  “Naw. Chapman got called in for questioning. That motherfucker was his friend.”

  “You got the paper?” I asked the kid.

  He reached down into his pants and pulled a small pink envelope out of his drawers.

  I took it anyway.

  I can’t reproduce the letter here because it was far too long: five pages of tiny chicken scratches written in the grammar of some foreign land. The first page listed the reasons that Belldie, Loren’s aunt, hadn’t written him before. One, which I didn’t read out loud, was that the boy was illiterate. There was also a theft committed, a pregnancy he caused, an incident in church that she didn’t explain, and then there was the boy’s temper and his steadfast refusal to work. After that there came three pages of accolades for Loren’s parents and his brother Jimmy.

  It was only on the last page that Belldie, in minute detail, described the collision between his parents’ pickup truck and the Sun Oil truck on the highway near their farm. Jimmy was with them and now they were all with the Lord.

  The funeral had been held a week later. The letter was dated six months earlier.

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  Loren was at our feet dripping tears and blood on the floor.

  Damn. Even when I remember that letter I realize how bad some people have it. There was that white boy made a punk by black men in an inescapable cell, holding a letter about the deaths of his folks. A letter written by blood that hated him. It might have been tough being a black man in America, but I wouldn’t have traded shoes with Loren — no, sir.

  Toward the end of my reading of Loren’s letter the cell door came open and another prisoner was added to the over-crowded room. When Loren fell to the ground crying, someone shouted, “What?” and I thought I had an inkling of who the new inmate might be.

  A big man stormed up to us. He was light colored like granite with brownish lichen growing on it. He was big and muscular.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked Fearless as Fearless rose to the meeting.

  “Fearless Jones,” my friend said with no particular sense of pride.

  The granite man gave a flinty smile. “I heard’a you. Yeah. I heard’a you. Mothahfuckahs always talkin’ ’bout how bad you are. Huh. My name’s Chapman Grey. I’m a light heavyweight.

  Do you think you can kick my butt like these punk-ass niggahs think you sumpin’?”

  The grammar didn’t quite hold together, but Chapman posed an interesting question. Could Fearless stand up against a professional?

  It took me seventeen seconds to find out.

  Before Fearless could reply, Chapman hit him with a stiff right jab. He followed that with a right cross that sent my friend falling against the bunk.

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  That was one second.

  Chapman pressed his advantage, coming in on Fearless with a body barrage of six or seven blows.

  That took care of seconds two and three.

  Fearless pushed against the rock-hard boxer, propelling himself away. The crowd around moved out from the fray.

  Chapman grinned and strode forward.

  By then we were up to second eight.

  Chapman hit Fearless in the jaw with a right hook that would have killed me and anyone standing behind me. Fearless was thrown back but not down.

  I could hear the guards outside the cell shouting.

  By the time Chapman was stalking Fearless again, ten seconds had passed. He threw a straight right, but Fearless stepped to the left and hooked his right arm over Chapman’s.

  He twisted around once, throwing the boxer off balance, and then hurled Grey into the bars of our cell. Fearless moved forward then, hitting Grey in the diaphragm, the groin, and the throat. He didn’t use all of his strength, but he definitely inca-pacitated the boxe
r.

  By the seventeenth second, Grey was unconscious on a cot and Fearless was walking back to his corner.

  Grey’s question had been answered definitively. In the ring he would have torn Fearless up. But out in the real world he had better watch out.

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  L o r e n c r i e d a l l t h r o u g h the alterca-tion. By the time the guards came, the fight was 29 over. Things settled down, and I sat there thinking how the life I was living would be better in the remembering than it was while it was going on.

  Fearless, definitely the nicest and kindest person I knew, would fight at the drop of a hat. If he were a white guy living in the middle-class world, he would have been exactly the same, but there would never be a reason for him to fight. But we were poor and black and so either we fought or we lost ground. That’s all there was to it.

  Despite the smell of sweat and urine, despite the blood and tears on my cot, I still felt more secure than I had for many days. While Fearless listened to Loren talk about how much he loved his mother, I lay back and closed my eyes.

  The nimbus Sleep sensed my repose and began slowly to drift in my direction.

  “Minton, Paris,” someone shouted, and Sleep scurried away to the corner where she resided next to Death and Despair.

  “That’s me,” I said, rising from my bunk.

  “Come with me,” a man in a suit said. He was accompanied 187

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  by two large policemen. Each of them took an arm as they led me through the labyrinth of the Seventy-seventh Street precinct.

  We came finally to a small door, a really small door. I remember thinking that due to some mistake in planning, this door and the room it led to had to be cut down in size. I could walk through with no difficulty at all, but I was six inches below six feet. The men holding my arms had to duck to get through, their heads nearly grazing the ceiling of the room we entered.

  Two fat detectives were waiting in there. One wore a suit that was too green to be a suit and the other wore a suit of spot-ted gray, though I don’t think the spots were intentional. They were both white men, but that goes without saying; all detectives were white men back then. They were the detectives and I was there to be detected.