Fear Itself Read online

  “Wait a minute, Fearless,” I said. “If Kit got a room on the top floor of a rooming house, then how could he walk out on his wife and child?”

  “That’s what I went to know from Leora,” he said. “I went over to her apartment and asked why didn’t she know that Kit had another place. But she said all she knew was that Kit had been away at his watermelon farm. So I told her where he had been stayin’.” Fearless hesitated again.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The funny thing was, all she had was a room and a half. And Son wasn’t there with her. She said that she left the boy with her mama, but you know, Paris, there wasn’t even one toy or buildin’ block on the floor. It wasn’t like a child had ever been in that house.”

  “Did you say somethin’ about that?”

  “No. I didn’t even think about it really. Later on I did but right then I was just doin’ what I promised I would. After that I went down to Marmott’s on Central and listened to Lips McGee and Billy Herford until almost midnight. Then I went home. I didn’t think about Leora again until my landlady Mrs. Hughes told me about the cops.”

  “Cops? What cops?”

  “They was askin’ about me and if anybody around there had ever heard of Kit Mitchell. They told her not to tell me they were there, but Mrs. Hughes likes me so she was waitin’ by her door for me to get in.”

  “What do the cops want, Fearless?” I asked, sounding more like a doubting parent than a friend.

  “I don’t know, Paris. But it don’t sound good. I mean, she said that they were in suits, not uniforms, and they called themselves detectives.”

  My mind slipped into gear then.

  “Why’ont you go upstairs and take my bed, man? I’ll sleep down here.”

  “No, Paris. I don’t wanna put you out your bed.”

  “Just do what I say, okay? Go on upstairs. I’m going to want to talk to you more about this thing with the Watermelon Man, but we should wait until we’re both sharp. You get a good night’s sleep and we’ll get into it again in the morning.”

  3

  WITHIN TEN MINUTES I COULD HEAR my friend snoring. He had spent three years on the front lines in Africa and Europe during the war, but he claimed that he slept like a baby every chance he got.

  “Me worryin’ about them big shells and bombs wasn’t gonna help nuthin’,” he’d said one drunken night. “But a good night’s rest meant that I was sharp when I had to be.”

  Many a day I had curled up on the front sofa and slept for hours, but not that early morning. Fearless didn’t know what those cops wanted, but that didn’t matter to him. All he needed was a corner to sleep in, and if in the morning he had to pull up stakes and leave California he’d do that, looking forward to a new life in Seattle or Memphis or Mexico City.

  Fearless was sleeping the sleep of an innocent man but I couldn’t get that chill out of my chest. I wasn’t guilty of any crime, but just being in the house with a man wanted by the police put me in a state of high anxiety.

  At four I turned on the lights, pulled out the dictionary, and looked up random words. Leaf lard was the first one I lit on. That meant lard rendered from the leaf fat of a hog. Leaf fat, I read, was fat that formed in the folds of the kidneys of some animals, especially the pig.

  I liked looking up words in the dictionary. It calmed me, because there was no tension in the definitions. Definitions were neutral: facts, not fury.

  When the sun came up I went down to the corner to buy the L.A. Times from the blind man, Cedric Jarman, who sold papers near the bus stop. I knew that Fearless would sleep late because of the time he got to bed, so I sat on the front porch and read the dreary news.

  Ike was still declaring victory in Korea two years after the war was over. We had halted communism in its tracks, but A-bomb testing continued just in case we had to have a real war with somebody like Russia or Red China. A white woman’s body had been found by a hobo in Griffith Park. She had a German-sounding name. There was some flap over a Miss L.A. beauty contestant, something about a Negro heritage that she didn’t declare with the pageant officials. The president, a Mr. Ben Trestier, said that they weren’t disqualifying her because she was Negro but because she lied. “It is the lie, not the race, that shows she isn’t our kind of queen,” Trestier was quoted.

  “But if she told the truth you wouldn’t have let her compete in the first place,” I said aloud. Then I laughed.

  That’s what we did back in 1955, we laughed when we pierced the skin of lies that tried to disguise racism. I’d be down at the barbershop playing cards in a few days, and we’d discuss the fate of Lana Tandy, the light-haired, fair-skinned Negro who tried to be the beauty queen of L.A. We’d laugh at the pageant and we’d laugh at her for thinking she could make it that far. Mr. Underwood, the retired porter, would get angry then and tell us that we shouldn’t be laughing but protesting like they were doing down south. We’d say, “You’re right, George. You’re right.” And he’d curse and call us fools.

  After I’d made it through the headlines I went back inside.

  The new bookstore was larger than the last one I had, the one that my neighbor burned down. The room was twenty feet square. I wandered from wall to wall, serenaded by the cacophony of Fearless’s snores while running my fingers over the spines of books.

  I had bibles, cookbooks, science fiction paperbacks, and National Geographic magazines. In a special section I had all of the books by black authors that I could find; from Sterling Brown to Phillis Wheatley, from Chester Himes to Langston Hughes, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Booker T. Washington.

  I liked touching the stock. It made me feel like I was somebody; not just passing through but having a stake in the world I lived in. People knew me. Customers came to the store and asked my advice on books. They gave me their money and I sold them something of value.

  After a while my fingers went across an old copy of Candide. I took it from the shelf and curled up on the sofa again.

  I was asleep before finishing the first paragraph.

  I DREAMT ABOUT A MAN IN A FARMER’S HAT. The short and stocky farmer was leading me down a long and dark hallway, whispering about money, lots of money. Finally we reached a door.

  “Open it up,” the farmer said. “Open it up and you will have all the money you’ll need for the rest of your natural-born days.”

  I was trembling, scared to death.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “But you’re right here, Paris,” he said, “next to the gold mine. You don’t even need a key. Just turn the knob and push it open.”

  I didn’t want to do it but still my hand reached out. When I grasped the doorknob I thought it would burn me but instead it was chilly. The refreshing coolness washed over my body. Feeling more confident I pushed the door open. Green light flooded the hallway. The room was full of money, piles of it. And on the biggest pile sat Lana Tandy, naked and spread-legged, smiling at me.

  “Come on, baby,” she said. “It’s all yours.”

  My fears melted away and I ran toward her. The door slammed behind me but I didn’t care. It wasn’t until the money rose up like a wave behind Lana that I realized I was trapped. She screamed as the wave of green slapped against me. I was submerged in millions of dollars, suffocating under the weight of that great wealth.

  I struggled wildly against the heavy cash, but it was too much for me. Lana let out a strangled cry. She grabbed me by my shoulders and said, “Paris, help me. Help.” She pounded against my chest, but instead of feeling the concussions of her fists I heard a hollow knocking. Even when we were separated by the crashing waves of money, I could still hear the echo of her knocking against my chest. A tide of bills washed over me and I couldn’t breathe. I struggled and screamed, realizing that I was about to die. When I stroked down with both hands to propel my head toward the surface, I came awake sitting upright on the couch, gulping air and trembling.

  Lana was still knocking on my chest. Knocking on my chest?

 
; The sun was shining into the store through a window set high on the wall. Someone was rapping on the front door for the second time that morning and, also for a second time, I was afraid for my life.

  4

  “PARIS MINTON?” a white man in a brown jacket asked.

  His pants were brown too, but they clashed with the hue of his sports coat. He had spaces between his teeth and freckles on his forehead. His black hair looked like it was painted on and his eyes were both too low and too close together. He should have been a short man, with those goofy features, but he was at least six foot four, two inches taller than Fearless.

  Something was missing. At first I thought it was something about my visitor, but then I realized that it was a sound. Fearless was no longer snoring.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I said.

  “My name is Theodore Timmerman. I’m looking for Fearless Jones.”

  “Last I heard Fearless was somewhere up near Oxnard, workin’ on a farm.”

  Theodore frowned and I realized that I should have asked him why he was nosing around about my friend. I wasn’t fully awake. I tried to cover my mistake by yawning and asking, “What you want him for?”

  “Can I come in?” he replied.

  “I don’t even know you, man,” I said. “The bookstore don’t open till ten, and I already answered your question.”

  “I need to find Fearless Jones. Maybe you have some idea about how I can locate him.”

  “No. I mean you might try cruisin’ up and down Central. Fearless is workin’ for a guy sells watermelons off the back of a fleet of Texas trucks around that way. If you see one’a them, they’d prob’ly have an idea of where he is.”

  “You don’t have a number?” Timmerman asked.

  “He don’t have a phone.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “Mr. Jones has come into an inheritance,” he said, masking the lie with a foolish grin. “I’m representing the estate.”

  “Oh? Who died?”

  “That’s confidential, Mr. Minton. Only to be revealed to Mr. Jones himself. But I can tell you that it would be well worth his while to contact me.”

  “Maybe if you gave me a way to get in touch with you,” I suggested. “Then if I ran into Fearless I could tell him where to call you.”

  The tall white man looked up over my head into the bookstore. For a moment I think he was considering pushing me aside and looking around for himself. At any other time I would have been afraid that he would harm me or my stock. But I knew that Fearless was upstairs and Fearless, at least in my mind, was proof against any danger.

  Timmerman pulled out his wallet and shuffled a small stack of cards until he produced one that read,

  Theodore T. Timmerman

  Mutual Life of Cincinnati

  Claims and Investigations

  The phone number was local, however. The ink on the bottom line was slightly smeared.

  “Is there a finder’s fee if I can get this to Fearless?”

  “Yes,” he said. But I could see that the idea was novel to him. “Sure. Two and a half percent.”

  “That don’t sound like much.”

  “Out of fifty thousand that’s over twelve hundred dollars.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Damn. Well, let me ask around and see if I can come up with something.”

  Timmerman grinned again. “Can I use your toilet, Mr. Minton?”

  “Sorry, but I got a girlfriend in the nude back there. Well, she’s not exactly a girlfriend. I mean, we just met each other last night. There’s not too much privacy and I don’t wanna get her all upset with some big man walkin’ in. You see what I mean.”

  We were both liars. Almost everything we’d said to each other was a lie.

  He nodded, looked up over my head again. I got the feeling that he wanted to catch a glimpse of a naked black girl.

  “Well,” he said, still hesitating, still looking for a way in. “You have my number.”

  The big man in the poorly chosen clothes walked away, taking the six wooden stairs of my front porch in two strides.

  “Mr. Timmerman.”

  “Yes, Mr. Minton.”

  “Fearless got a lotta friends. How come you came to me?”

  The white man looked at me a moment. He was trying to figure out where I stood in his business.

  “Sweet,” he said at last. “Milo Sweet was listed as a contact for Mr. Jones. When I went to him he gave me your name.”

  It was time for me to think. Was the bail bondsman holding paper on Fearless? Was that why Fearless was on the run?

  No. Fearless wouldn’t lie to me. Not unless it was to protect me, or maybe he was protecting someone else. No. The story was too complex for his style of lying. Fearless’s lies were no longer than a few sentences, sometimes no more than a word or two.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Minton,” the man who said he was in insurance said. “Call me the minute you hear from Mr. Jones. Time is money, you know.”

  He crossed the street, climbed into a brand-new, maroon-colored Pontiac, and drove off.

  “Who was he?” Fearless asked at my back.

  I hadn’t heard him come up behind me but that was no surprise. Fearless’s job in World War II was to get behind German lines at night and “neutralize” any military man or operation that he came across.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I closed the door and walked back toward the porch. “But he said that Milo gave him my name so that he could ask me about you.”

  “Me?”

  I went back to the kitchen to fix breakfast, but when I got there I realized that my appetite had gone with Theodore T. Timmerman.

  “Did you jump bail, Fearless?”

  “No.”

  “Does Milo have any reason to be after you?”

  Fearless shook his head.

  “He said his name was Timmerman, Theodore. You ever heard of him?”

  Fearless could exhibit the blankest stare imaginable.

  “He said that you inherited some money,” I said. “You got any rich relatives or friends that care for you like that?”

  The ex-assassin hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Why you say that, Paris?”

  “He called you Fearless, not Tristan. Seems to me that anybody care enough about you to leave you fifty thousand dollars would at least know your legal name.”

  “Fifty thousand. Damn. I hope you wrong, Paris. You know I been lookin’ for fifty thousand dollars my whole life.”

  That made me laugh. Fearless joined in. I pulled a box of Shredded Wheat from a shelf on the wall and some milk out of the ice chest that stood in for the refrigerator I planned to buy one day.

  After we sat down to breakfast I started asking questions in earnest.

  Questions is what I do. I read my first book two weeks after learning the alphabet. It wasn’t that I was smarter than anybody else, but it’s just that I wanted to know anything that was hidden from me. My mother used to offer me candy if I’d be quiet for just ten minutes. But I could never stop asking why this and why that, not until I learned how to read.

  Somebody might think that a man who’s always probing—putting his nose where it doesn’t belong, as my mother says—would be somewhat brave. But that couldn’t be further from the truth about me. I’m afraid of rodents and birds, bald tires, fire, and loud noises. Any building I’ve ever been in I know all of the exits. And I’ve been known to jump up out of a sound sleep when hearing a footstep from the floor below.

  That’s why I own a bookstore full of books, so that all my questioning can be done quietly and alone. I didn’t want to ask questions about Fearless’s whereabouts or activities. But after that big white man showed up at my door, I needed to know if my friend’s problems were going to spill over onto me.

  5

  “. . . NO, PARIS,” FEARLESS SAID. “I told you all I know about it. Leora and Son were lookin’ for Kit, and
the next thing I know the cops are askin’ around about me.”

  “And you haven’t talked to Milo in two months?”

  “Maybe three,” he said. “Last time I saw Milo was at The Nest. He was there with a nice-lookin’ woman. I think her last name was Pine.”

  “What about Kit?” I asked. “Did you find out anything else about him?”

  I had asked it all before, but I’d learned from long experience that Fearless didn’t have a straightforward way of thinking. He never remembered everything all at once. I asked him questions the same way the police questioned a suspect: with the hope of finding what wasn’t there rather than what was.

  Fearless rubbed his hand over the top of his head. His ideas, though often deep and insightful, came from a place that he had very little control over. If you asked him, “How did you know that man was going to pull out a knife?” he might utter some nonsense like, “It was the way he lifted his chin when he saw me walk in the room.”

  “Somebody said about the Redcap Saloon,” Fearless said.

  “O’Brien’s Bar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who said about it?”

  “It was that man Pete.”

  “Dark-colored guy?” I asked.

  “Naw. Yellah. High yellah at that. Him an’ Kit was friends. At least I seen ’em together more’n once. Pete’s got a hot dog cart over in MacArthur’s Park. I asked him if he’d seen Kit and he said about the Redcap Saloon.”

  “Maybe we better go over there and see what we can see.”

  Fearless grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Paris. We connected at the hip, you an’ me.”

  “Unless they put you up on the gallows, unless that.”

  “It ain’t gonna go that far, Paris. Naw, man. It’s probably just some questions them cops want answerin’. ’Cause you know I ain’t even broke a sweat in over a month.”

  “What about that white man lyin’ an’ lookin’ for you?” I asked.