Fear of the Dark Read online

  “But Mr. Freud wasn’t in no church,” I said. “He was bein’ a doctor, curing psychosomatic symptoms.”

  “But he couldn’t prove it. He talks to you and explains dreams, but some of what he says has to be wrong and he doesn’t have the tools that could quantify and compare his findings.”

  “So you don’t believe it?” I asked the drab young woman.

  “No. I didn’t say that. But it seems to me that Dr. Freud has opened up a question about how we understand things. He’s discovered something that no chemist or physicist or mathematician can prove or even begin to prove. That’s wonderful.”

  Ashe smiled then and I forgot, for the first time in many days, about Tiny and Jessa and that stand of bitter oaks.

  “I hate to rush you off, Ashe,” I said, “but I just remembered that I have to make a call.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you might have some time.”

  “Sorry.”

  I hurried her out because I knew myself. I’d be in love with her for a day or a week, maybe even a month, but sooner or later we’d crash and burn; she’d walk away from my bookstore and never return with her brilliant insights and goofy smiles.

  I HAD OTHER CUSTOMERS. Two neighborhood boys came by for comic books and copies of National Geographic magazine (hoping for a glimpse of the naked breasts of so-called primitives). A couple of ladies from up the block who bought romance novels dropped in twice.

  One dusky-skinned guy with an island accent of some sort came in looking for a French dictionary.

  “You mean French-English?” I asked the guy.

  “Non,” he said. “I wish to look up words in French.”

  “I don’t got that, man,” I told him. “You should try Cutter’s Books downtown or better yet go to the library.”

  “I like to own my books,” the deadly handsome foreigner said, affecting an aloof air.

  He was almost six feet tall, with skin that was not exactly the color of that of most Negroes you meet. He had a thin mustache and bisected eyes that were both a dark and a darker brown.

  He was looking around the place as if he were searching through the books, but I could tell that he was looking for something else.

  Finally he asked, “Do you have a toilet for your customers?”

  “Hang a right before you walk into the porch,” I said, pointing the way.

  He went in. Made all the appropriate noises and came out again.

  “How do you keep that mustache so perfect?” I asked him. “You know I got this bushy thing here. I’d like something styled like yours, but when I start trimmin’ at it I keep goin’ from side to side tryin’ to keep it even until finally my lip is bare.”

  The foreigner smiled.

  “I go to a barber, of course,” he said. “Burnham’s on Avalon.”

  “You wanna leave me a number?” I asked then.

  “Why?”

  “In case I get a French dictionary.”

  “I’ll go to Cutter’s,” he said. “I need it now.”

  NEAR THE END OF THAT WEEK, Whisper Natly came by. He was wearing a suit that was equal parts dark blue and dark gray, his signature short-brimmed hat, and rubber-soled black shoes.

  “Hey, Paris,” he said. The syllables sounded like a triplet explosion that occurred very far from my store.

  “Whisper. What’s up, my man?”

  “You know a guy named Dorfman?”

  “Yeah. White dude. Helms bakery driver. Delivers bread on this block. He comes in now and then to buy war magazines. I sell ’em for a nickel apiece.”

  “Gambler?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I think so.” I remembered that whenever the burly white man came into my place he always talked about sports and the odds on any and every competition. “He always talked about it.”

  “He run a game?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  Whisper took me in for a moment. I can’t say he flashed his eyes at me because there was no glitter in his gaze. His presence was flat as a pancake, just as his appearance was tamped down and without character.

  “Heard you had some problems the other night,” he said.

  “What you mean?” I asked defensively. I regretted that because it caused Whisper to regard me again.

  “Milo said that some white boy wanted to kick your butt.”

  “Oh. Oh, that. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t nuthin’. Fearless came on by, but he was gone.”

  “Okay, then,” Whisper said. He turned away and walked out of the store, leaving less of a wake than a shark’s fin along the surface of the water.

  MY ONLY OTHER CUSTOMER that week was Cleetus Rome, an elderly white man who had lived in my neighborhood when it was mostly fields and inhabited solely by white people.

  Not only did Cleetus not read, he was illiterate. He had told me as much.

  “My daddy used to tell me why waste time readin’ when you could be swingin’ a hammer,” Cleetus had said when we first met.

  Cleetus couldn’t read, didn’t own a TV set, and wasn’t a gregarious guy at all. He didn’t know his neighbors when they were white and he certainly didn’t know most of them now. But he owned a radio and he listened to the news all day long. Every few days or so he’d come by my store and bring up things he had heard. I understood that he wanted to find out if I knew more about the stories from reading the paper.

  I didn’t mind. He was old and toothless. He smelled something like dust or maybe even loam and he always bought magazines from me that had swimsuit models on the covers.

  That day he asked, “You hear about the body they fount in the strawberry field down near San Pedro?”

  “Say what?” I asked as calmly as a man being stung by a bee.

  “Big ol’ white boy, they say,” Cleetus added. “Farmer’s dog dug him up from under some trees.”

  “I haven’t read about that,” I said.

  “On the news today,” Cleetus said. “Prob’ly be in the paper tomorrow. I heard ’em say down at the gas station that some big ol’ white boy was chasin’ a car right out on Central here the other day.”

  “Really?” I smiled through the nausea.

  “Yeah. Ain’t you heard about it? I mean, I don’t talk to nobody and I heard it.”

  I felt that I was in a dream and that I had been walking down the street naked. One thing for certain, I didn’t need Sigmund Freud to interpret that.

  9

  CLEETUS CAME BY exactly a week after the death of Tiny Bobchek—I had learned his last name from his driver’s license before I burned it along with the wallet in the incinerator in my backyard. I spent the rest of the day trying not to worry about the police asking about the big white guy chasing me down the street.

  Fearless dropped by that evening.

  “You think I need to worry about Sir and Sasha?” I asked my friend.

  “Sasha Bennet?” Fearless asked.

  “I don’t know her last name.”

  “Girl named Sasha Bennet called up to Milo’s the other day and asked for me. She said that she was a friend’a yours and that you said maybe we should all get together sometime.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s her. They the ones saved me from Tiny.”

  “Then you better not think about ’em, Paris. Let it ride. Don’t talk to nobody about problems you worried about. Especially don’t talk to Van about it. You know he only know one way to solve problems.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. I ain’t talkin’ to him. I’m talkin’ to you.”

  “Nobody thinkin’ that the white dude chased you is the one dead out there, man,” Fearless said. “You think it ’cause you know.”

  “Cleetus said it.”

  “But he didn’t think they was the same guy.”

  “I’m just scared, Fearless. What if the cops come around here askin’ ’bout that boy? What if Jessa go to them?”

  Fearless hunched his shoulders.

  “We could run,” he suggested.

  “Run where?”


  “I ’on’t know. New York. We could check out Harlem. I bet you you could start a great bookstore there.”

  “Just pull up stakes and go?” I asked.

  “Why not? You know we always on the edge, brother. You don’t have to do sumpin’ wrong for the cops to get ya and the judge to throw you ovah. All you got to do is be walkin’ down the street at the wrong minute. Shoot, Paris. You always got to be ready to run.”

  He was right. My mind was about to get me in trouble. I had to forget Sir and his wayward girlfriend. I had to forget Tiny in his makeshift grave.

  I nodded and Fearless poured me a shot of peach schnapps.

  “Drink deep and sleep well,” he advised.

  I walked up to my bedroom, slept nine and a half hours, and woke up free from fear. The cops might brace me, but I was innocent in my own heart.

  THE NEXT MORNING I was sitting down to a plate of pinto beans, white rice, and chicken necks that I had simmered in tomato sauce. The whole meal, including the gas it took to cook it, couldn’t have cost more than a dime. I had learned from a lifetime of poverty to live on almost nothing.

  I nearly missed the soft knock at my front door.

  Two days earlier I wouldn’t have answered it.

  I shouldn’t have answered that morning.

  IN MY SECRET MIRROR I spied a middle-aged Negro woman of normal height and slender frame. She was wearing a blue-and-white dress that was loose but stately. She also wore a dark brown hat which brought an extra touch of elegance to her presence.

  I wanted to slip away, to call Fearless and say that I was ready to hightail it to Harlem. I wanted to run, but I had not been raised to turn away from that knock.

  I opened the door and said, “Hi, Aunt Three Hearts. How are you?”

  “Fine, Paris, and you?”

  “Fine. Good. Great.” I took a deep breath. “Come on in.”

  There was a carpetbag on the porch next to her. I hurried out and picked it up, ushering her inside as I did so.

  I carried her bag past the entranceway-reading room, through the aisles of bookshelves, and into my back porch and hot-plate kitchen. That was my social room.

  “Paris,” she said. “I like your store. You live here too, right?”

  “Have a seat, Auntie. What are you doing here? Do you want something to drink? To eat?” Maybe I thought if I overwhelmed her with hospitality I wouldn’t have to give her news about her son.

  “Water, please,” she said.

  I got ice water from a pitcher in the refrigerator and a glass from the high shelf. I poured her drink, staring into the clear liquid, hoping to find a cue in there.

  “Have you seen Ulysses?” she asked after nodding her thanks for the water.

  My voice sank deep into my chest and refused to come out.

  ACCORDING TO LEGEND AND MYTH down in southern Louisiana, there were all kinds of witches and warlocks and people of power. Some could speak to the dead, others had the power to reanimate corpses. A few could look into your future in the hope of steering you out of harm’s way. There were benign practitioners who made charms and amulets that would assist in matters of the heart or when you were looking for employment, and there were those accomplished in casting curses upon your enemies.

  These fallacies governed the lives of many weak-willed and superstitious people who lived out in the country. As a rule I looked down on these people and the so-called witches that took advantage of them. I was a modern man, an educated man who didn’t believe in hocus-pocus or magic spells. But I am a firm believer in the adage that there is a grain of truth in anything you hear. I do believe that there are those who have abilities and influences barred to most mortals.

  Three Hearts Grant was one of these special individuals. She had what is commonly known in Louisiana as the evil eye. People who crossed Three Hearts were bound to come to grief. There was no question about that.

  There was once a white man in Lafayette who accused Useless of stealing molasses from his larder. The boy was only seven, and one could hardly blame him for being attracted to such a treasure. But that white man, Michael Ogleman, chased Useless down with a cane. He struck the boy twice before Three Hearts interposed her body between the cane and her son. Ogleman struck Three Hearts seven times, kicked her once, and then returned home to die of a heart attack three hours later.

  Her boyfriend of some years, Nathan Shaw, stole a jar that contained Three Hearts’s life savings and moved to Lake Charles with Nellie Sweetwater. The lovers were to spend their first night in the Alouette Inn, a colored establishment on the outskirts of town. There was a fire that night that started under Nathan’s room. He and Nellie were the only ones to die.

  Three Hearts’s power extended beyond humanity.

  Once, when she and a twelve-year-old Useless were walking along Gravedigger’s Mesa, they were set upon by a wild dog that was as large and vicious as a wolf. The beast growled and slavered and then cornered the pair at the edge of the elevated plateau. Three Hearts was yelling and waving at the monster, hoping to draw its deadly attention toward her. But the dog, like any other cowardly predator, was after the weakest victim. It was stalking the boy. When finally it leaped, Three Hearts jumped to get in the way, as she had with Michael Ogleman. But the defending mom tripped and knocked Useless down. The dog flew above both of them, went over the side, and broke its neck on a live oak.

  Three Hearts did not believe she had the power, but everyone else, including me, did. These examples that went through my mind when she asked about her son were only a few of the terrible consequences that befell any man, woman, or beast that crossed her.

  “Yes,” I said, forcing the air through my larynx. “He came by about a week or so ago.”

  “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “Ain’t he home?”

  “I went by the last address I had for him, but they said that he moved. I was hoping he might’a told you where he’d moved to or where he’d gone.”

  “Maybe he left L.A.,” I said lamely.

  “Ulysses wouldn’t do something like that without telling me.”

  I don’t like to think of myself as a superstitious man, but when Three Hearts looked into my eyes with her steady, serious gaze, I was as frightened as I had been bunged up with Tiny Bobchek. Haltingly, I told her about her son’s last visit without letting on that I had turned him away. I made it seem as though we’d had drinks and talked about his problems, after which he’d left of his own free will.

  “I had trouble of my own right then, Auntie. There was a girl I was messin’ wit’ and a man after me.”

  Three Hearts stared at me from under the brim of her hat. I didn’t know which eye was the evil one, but I was sure that it was doing its work while I sat there.

  “Come on,” I said, standing up from my chair. “Let’s go find your son. He got to be out there somewhere.”

  That turned Three Hearts’s grim expression into a grateful smile. I could only hope that that smile trumped the evil eye. And for once I was hoping to find Useless and embrace him.

  10

  I HAD A TAN STUDEBAKER at that time. It was old when I got it, but I didn’t care much for style when it came to cars. I hardly drove anywhere except maybe to the supermarket now and then and to libraries when they were getting rid of old books.

  I opened the passenger’s side for Three Hearts and placed her carpetbag in the trunk. There was never any question about my auntie staying with me; she would not do it. A woman her age needed a room or house appropriate for her. There also was no question that I would have to find her a place to stay where she would be comfortable.

  “Why did you come up here?” I asked as we cruised down Central. “I mean, did you have some reason to be worried about Use . . . Ulysses?”

  “Ulysses send me a lettah ’bout a month ago. Said that he had a new girlfriend and a new business and he was expecting to make a lotta money and buy me a house in Lake Charles.”

  “Nuthin’ wrong abou
t that,” I sang, hoping to keep the mood light and uncursed.

  “It’s always bad to have love and money on the same page,” she said sagely. “The more I thought about it, the more I worried that he was gettin’ himself into a mess. And then too it was the name that girl had.”

  “Angel,” I said, remembering Useless’s last words.

  “What’s she like?”

  “I really don’t know, Auntie. He said somethin’ like he wasn’t good enough for her. Somethin’ about bein’ mudfoot, that’s what he said.”

  “Lord.”

  “That means somethin’?”

  “Feet of clay,” my churchgoing, devil-eyed aunt said. “I told him all the time that men had feet of clay. It means that that woman, that Angel, made him wanna overcome his base nature and try to be a real man.”

  “That sounds good, right?”

  “Maybe,” she said in a voice so soft that it might have been Whisper Natly speaking in the next room.

  I KNEW THAT USELESS liked pool; it was the one thing he was good at. So the first place Three Hearts and I went was Rinaldo’s, a half-block-long storefront that sported eleven tables.

  Rinaldo had copper skin and slicked-back hair that did not seem straightened. He was missing one tooth and stood and walked in a hunched-over posture that he blamed on forty years leaning over pool tables.

  Rinaldo was a busy man. He took numbers, delivered messages to some of Watts’s most important gangsters, and sold property, both stolen and otherwise. There was usually a line of people waiting to speak to him. There was that day. I waited my turn and when I got to him he looked at me.

  “Fearless’s friend, right?” he asked.

  “Lookin’ for Useless Grant,” I said as I nodded.

  “Man’s Barn,” Rinaldo said, and I hustled back out to the car where I’d left my auntie.

  MAN’S BARN WAS a barnlike building that sat in Man Dorn’s backyard. It was once some hangar or shed that the black Kansan had acquired along with his little blue house. He had subdivided the building into eight apartments and spent most of his time moving tenants in and malingerers out.