Fear of the Dark Page 6

  Los Angeles was a nomadic city in the fifties. Rent was cheap, and jobs were so plentiful that people were willing to pull up stakes and go for the promise of a neighborhood swimming pool or a change of employer.

  Man was a short guy with brick brown skin. He wasn’t much older than I, but he seemed to be so, with his bald dome and beefy body. His hands were fat with muscle and his neck was a third the length it should have been. He wore overalls and a faded gray T-shirt. Whatever it was his wife loved him for, he didn’t display it on the outside.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Man was saying to Three Hearts and me. “Useless got the back right corner apartment.” He was leading us down the driveway to the building everybody called Man’s Barn.

  “Ulysses,” Three Hearts said, correcting him.

  “Oh, sorry. It’s just that everybody calls him Useless,” Man said.

  “I don’t,” she informed him, “and I’m his mother.”

  “Well,” Man said, “he ain’t paid his rent in two weeks, so maybe you wanna take his things with you, you bein’ his mama an’ all.”

  “How much does he owe?” Three Hearts asked.

  “Forty-three dollars and fi’ty cent,” Man said.

  Three Hearts carried a brown cloth bag for a purse. She reached in with one hand and rummaged around for a minute or so. She came out with a wad of bills and two quarters. Man counted the bills and seemed satisfied.

  “Now it’s your place,” he said. He handed me a brass key.

  “Did he live alone?” I asked before Man could walk away.

  “He had a girl . . .” The landlord had to smile. “. . . called herself Angel, and I do believe she was that. She went away a few days before the last time I saw him.”

  “How would you know that?” I asked.

  “One day a tall man came and helped her put her suitcase in his car.”

  “What did Ulysses have to say about that?”

  “He wasn’t around as far as I could see.”

  Man Dorn left me wondering what kind of trouble Useless had gotten himself into.

  I opened the front door and we entered the slender hall of the made-up apartment building. The ceiling was low and there were only three weak lightbulbs to make the natural darkness into gloom.

  The floor was concrete and the walls were unpainted plaster.

  The doors were constructed from pine. Not one of them looked new. One actually had a hole punched into it; another the tenant had started to paint green but then run out of paint and finished the job with dull brown primer.

  Useless’s door was okay except for a few dozen pinholes in the upper half. I supposed Three Hearts’s son and the Angel left each other love notes—for a while.

  I worked the key in the lock and ushered my aunt in. There was a light switch to the left of the door. When I flicked it, soft white light bathed the room.

  Useless’s apartment surprised me. Over all the years I’d known him he had been slovenly at best. His sink would be filled with dishes. The floor was his closet.

  But this room was neat as a pin. The ceiling was very high, maybe eighteen feet, and there was a window maybe ten feet from the floor. The table had matching chairs. A rainbow-colored throw rug sat at the foot of the small bed, and paintings of flowers hung on three of four walls.

  “My God,” Three Hearts breathed. “He must have been in love to let her change his home like this here.”

  She went over to a bureau and opened the drawers one at a time. I didn’t know what she was looking for and I didn’t care.

  I knew that men kept their secrets in the trash. And so I looked under the sink, pulled out a blue rubber bin, and placed a kitchen chair before the shaft of sun coming in from the window.

  There were napkins and white cardboard tubs from some Chinese takeaway restaurant. Under that were envelopes addressed to U. S. Grant, most of them bills, all of them unopened.

  Under that layer were a number of tiny white and green slips of paper with “$1,000” printed on each one.

  Three Hearts settled on a stool next to the bed. She had a journal or diary in her hand and was turning the pages more quickly than she should have been able to read.

  The denomination for the wrappers was probably twenties. I counted seventy-two slips while Three Hearts perused the diary.

  Seventy-two thousand dollars. Useless was either in Honolulu or dead. This last thought didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t want Three Hearts to think that I might have saved her boy when he was in dire need.

  I didn’t feel guilty about whatever had happened to my errant cousin, far from it. There was no way that he could have garnered that much money legally, and we all knew what the price was for stealing from white people.

  I knew that the money came from whites because they were the only ones who had that kind of cash. That is except for religious leaders and black gangsters, and even Useless wasn’t fool enough to mess with them.

  I rummaged around in the garbage until I came up with a typewritten list on a sheet of white paper. There were thirteen entries on the list: banks, insurance companies, large white churches, and financial management firms.

  Useless and I were first cousins; we were of the same blood. I wondered how someone so closely related to me could have been such a fool as to leave a trail like that in his trash.

  I stuffed my pockets full with the damning evidence.

  I called across the room, “What you got there, Auntie?”

  She slapped the book shut and said, “Nuthin’, baby.”

  “Not nuthin’. It’s a book.”

  “It’s private.”

  “Angel’s diary?” I asked.

  “Just because you’re smart does not mean you have good sense,” my aunt told me. “These is private papers, and I intend to return them to her.”

  “Will they help us find Ulysses?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure? You haven’t read the whole thing.”

  “Have you found anything in the trash?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  With that, Three Hearts Grant stood up and marched toward the door. I followed her, wondering if her evil eye was powerful enough to protect me from the people that worked for the companies on Useless’s list.

  11

  MAN DORN WAS ON his blue porch, puffing at a short cigar and sitting in the center of a mesh hammock as if it were a chair.

  “You movin’ in?” he asked me.

  “Ms. Grant’s the tenant,” I told him. “But you can tell me somethin’ if you don’t mind.”

  “What’s that?” the no-neck landlord offered.

  “Who was Angel and Ulysses hangin’ out with before he went away?”

  “Mad Anthony,” Man said with no hesitation.

  “That’s it?”

  “The only one I knew. People come in and outta there all the time, but I didn’t know their names. Angel didn’t have many girlfriends, and the men who visited Useless wore suits half the time.”

  “Ulysses,” Three Hearts corrected.

  “Any white men come to see Ulysses?”

  “No,” Man said, shaking his head, “never.”

  “You know where I can find Anthony?” I asked, all other options being closed.

  “He stay at a white door in the alley between Ninety-first and Ninety-second, right off Central to the east side.”

  I walked Three Hearts back to my car with the detritus of seventy-two thousand dollars in my pocket and the address of a brutal thug echoing in my ear.

  “Maybe we should call the police,” Three Hearts said as we left the curb.

  “No,” I said. “No police on this.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Three Hearts turn to regard me. She watched my profile for a moment and then looked away. She knew that I had gleaned some information that might have put her son in jail. She knew it and decided that she didn’t want to know the details.

  That was fine
by me. I was afraid even to speak the thoughts I was having.

  I didn’t like anything about the road we were on: Useless with his rotten luck, his mother and her evil eye. And a woman named Angel in that community didn’t bode well either. All of that was just superstition, though. I could have gone to a good John Wayne movie and put those thoughts out of my mind. But those money wrappers and that list were no wild fancy. That was blackmail and extortion—maybe worse.

  THE ALLEY BETWEEN NINETY-FIRST and Ninety-second was a rut-ridden dirt path with tiny islets of asphalt here and there to remind you that it had once been an honest road, paved and straight. But now that alley was a place to buy and sell those things that were not legal. It was a place where a teenage boy could lose his virginity for ten dollars and where the woman who helped him could forget her sins for half that in white powder held by a cellophane fold.

  The alley was a place where criminals congregated and plotted doomed liquor store robberies and pie-in-the-sky counterfeiting schemes.

  I parked on Ninety-first because any car left in the alley was asking to be stolen.

  Three Hearts and I walked timidly at midday down the dark path to Mad Anthony. I wasn’t as afraid as I might have been because I did believe in Three Hearts’s power. But even the thought of standing face-to-face with one of Watts’s genuine gangsters made me quiver.

  I had never actually been in the company of Anthony Jarman. I had seen him in side glances at glitzy Watts night spots and coming out of big fancy cars. Once I had seen him sitting in a booth in a gumbo restaurant on Florence. But I knew enough not to stare at a man like that. I wouldn’t have met his gaze any more than I would look a wild animal in the eye.

  Fearless knew Anthony, actually referred to him as Tony. But Fearless was almost as much of a legend as Killer Cleave in our neighborhoods. Most people knew that Fearless had been a behind-the-lines assassin in Europe during the big war. No one who crossed him stayed on his feet.

  But I had no intention of invoking my friend’s name. Saying that I was there under the protection of Fearless Jones would have been like taking out a pistol and placing it on a table. Everyone knows that once the gun comes out, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.

  I laughed when we got to the door, set in a decrepit brick wall at the very center of the block. It was as if Man Dorn had told me a joke when he called that portal white.

  It might have once been white. But now it was lined with cracked paint. The cracks were filled with black dirt and soot. The little white that was left had dried gray and green lichen on it like delicate tile work. The doorknob was so rusted that you would have cut your palm trying to turn it.

  I knocked. It was like banging on a redwood tree with a bag of mushrooms. I picked up a rock and banged again. This caused some reverberation, but no answer came. I tried a few times more, breathing a little easier after each attempt.

  “I don’t think he’s here, Auntie,” I said, not able to keep the relief out of my voice.

  “How can we find him?” she asked.

  “I think we might have to go to Fearless,” I said.

  That got my worried relative to smile.

  “That nice Fearless Jones?” she asked.

  My mother and Three Hearts had come once to visit me and Useless in L.A. Three Hearts was very taken with Fearless; most women, no matter their age, were.

  “You think he’d agree to help us some?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Fearless is my friend and he likes Ulysses.”

  This was true. Fearless had a good time with Useless. But, then again, Fearless would have thought that a lion cub was cute or that an eleven-foot crocodile was grandfatherly.

  “Well, let’s go and see him, then,” Three Hearts said.

  That was fine by me. It had taken all of my courage just to darken Mad Anthony’s door. We turned back and walked toward the civilized world of paved streets and real white doors.

  Half the way toward this goal we ran into a roadblock.

  He was so wide that you didn’t think that he was as tall as he was.

  He must have seen us from some secret lookout and decided to come around from behind.

  “What the fuck you niggahs doin’ beatin’ on my do’ wit’ that rock?” Mad Anthony roared.

  “We, we, we, we, we,” I said.

  “I’m lookin’ for my son,” Three Hearts told him with nary a stammer. “Ulysses S. Grant the Fourth.”

  “Useless? That piece’a shit is your son? He need to die. Motherfuckin’ bastid need to have my knife diggin’ all up in his asshole.” And to prove the point, Anthony revealed a ragged blade with his right hand.

  Fearless has often told me that between the two of us I was the brave one. “Man like me,” he would say, “man not afraid of heaven or hell, is too stupid to be scared. You cain’t be brave if you don’t know fear.”

  I understood his pronouncement on that afternoon. Because you know the minute I saw that knife all I wanted to do was run. I knew I could outrun Anthony. Hell, I could have outrun Jesse Owens right then. My thighs felt like they had motors in them. My feet were pistons waiting to go off.

  But I didn’t run because that would have meant leaving my auntie, and that was something I just could not do.

  “Where the fuck is he, bitch?” Anthony bellowed. He grabbed her by that loose dress and actually lifted her up off the ground.

  “Oh,” Three Hearts shouted, more in surprise than fear, I think.

  “S-s-stop,” I managed to stutter. “P-put her down, Anthony. She don’t know where Useless is. She here askin’ you where.”

  I know it might sound like a pretty light challenge when I write it down here. But I would like to see how you would respond faced as I was by a man who might just as well have been a hungry tiger lunging at you from the depths of an Indian rain forest.

  Anthony pushed Three Hearts against the wall of a dilapidated and condemned building. They were a few feet from me.

  It was the perfect moment to run. I could have said that I was looking for help. I could have called for the police.

  Tiny Bobchek returned to my mind at that moment. I didn’t know why. Months later, when I was sitting up wide awake in my bed at 3:00 a.m., it came to me that I felt guilty about not being able to do more for him than just take him out in the middle of nowhere, strip him of his identity, and drop him into a shallow grave. I had to do it, but it seemed that I should have done more.

  I wasn’t aware of all that in Mad Anthony’s alley. All I knew was that Tiny was in my mind and I was running toward a man who could have beaten me with both arms tied behind his back.

  I leaped and struck out while the behemoth raged at my auntie.

  Mad Anthony released my auntie, grabbed me, and delivered what might have looked like a halfhearted slap.

  I actually bounced upon hitting the ground, first on my left side and then on my stomach. I came to a stop on my back, looking up into a blue, blue sky edged by branches from trees on the eastern side of the alley.

  I tried to sit up. For a moment I felt that I’d succeeded, but then I realized it was my will that had risen while the body stayed down.

  The sky seemed to be spinning and darkening. A car backfired maybe three blocks away, and then there was a cry for help.

  I wondered what it was all about while floating away on a sea of painful darkness.

  12

  I WAS WALKING DOWN a Louisiana dirt road not far from the hovel that my mother and I called home. It was a spring day, neither hot nor cold, and there was a lark singing somewhere in the trees to my right. I was trying to remember which was the fastest way to get back to our place.

  It occurred to me as I walked that there was no deed to the land that our tar-paper-and-brick home stood upon. We never paid rent. I looked down at my feet, which were bare, and felt a creeping trepidation come over me that we might one day be evicted from our squatters’ claim. But with a shake of my head I sloughed off the fear as a boxer shakes off
sweat in the middle rounds. I laughed at myself for being silly.

  That’s when I bumped into him.

  I looked up and saw a very tall, very thin, very black, and very old man. I knew this man—his name was Brother Bones—but I didn’t know where or when I had made his acquaintance.

  He was at least seven feet tall, even hunched over his gnarled cane (which seemed to be crawling with insects).

  When I made to go around him, he held up a great spidery hand, barring my passage.

  “I cain’t let you up there, brother,” he said in a deep and melodious but still threatening tone. “You will not be going there again.”

  I screamed at Mr. Bones. I caterwauled and cried. Inside, I felt no pain or passion, it was just that I knew, or believed I knew, that yelling like an infant would get me through.

  When Mr. Bones shook his head at me, I considered running around him. But he seemed to grow larger, blocking any passage with his bony limbs.

  Then the apparition stamped his foot upon the dirt road, making a sound like a kettledrum. The vibrations of the drumbeat found a resonance in my chest. The feeling of that tremor became fear in me. I tried to hold it down, but once it began it would not end.

  Mr. Bones leaned forward and said, “Boo.”

  As I ran back down the way I’d come, his laughter reverberated all around me. I was ashamed that he had bested me, angry that he was keeping me from my home, and determined to turn back around and face him. But I kept running.

  As I ran, the bright day turned quickly to night. Soon I was running in pitch-blackness, not even able to see myself, much less the road, when I looked down. I realized that I couldn’t see the road under my feet or my feet on that road, tripped, and went tumbling down into a gully.

  I didn’t know how long I was there but after a while I looked around without trying to rise. I was deeply frightened and realized somehow that I was now inside the body of Mr. Bones, that he had taken the whole world into his dark being and I was now his prisoner.

  To my right I saw two shining jewels in the darkness. This sight touched a hope that I didn’t even know resided in my breast. Maybe these priceless gems would be my reward for all the calamities I had had to endure.