Fear Itself Read online

  “Would that be Kit’s uncle or yours?”

  “Son is not related to Kit Mitchell.”

  We were still standing in the doorway. Leora’s figure was slight but her bones weren’t thin or fragile. She wore tan shoes that were exactly the same hue as her dress.

  “Can I have a seat?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  We sat across from each other. She put her knees together and let them recline to the side. Her calf was very presentable. She was as composed and elegant as the wife of a diplomat, except for those eyes; they were wild and fearful, watching for the slightest aggression.

  “Fearless tell you about me?” I asked.

  “He said if I needed to get in touch with him that I should come here.”

  “Hot day, huh?” I asked this to put her off some, but it didn’t seem to work, at least not at first.

  “Yes it is,” she said. “But at least it’s dry. It’s the humidity I can’t stand.”

  I smiled and nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” she asked, finally.

  “You like my store?” I replied.

  She stood up and walked down the right aisle. Looking over the shorter center shelf to the books on the wall, she said, “I see you have a lot of the Balzac oeuvre.”

  “Eighty-one of his books,” I said, coming up next to her. “I got them from a woman in Tarzana. She advertised in a book-buyers’ newsletter I subscribe to.”

  “It really is a lovely store.” She looked around a bit more.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Do you have a science section?”

  “Down there, in the far corner.”

  Our eyes locked on each other.

  “I’m very interested in physics.”

  “Really? What kind?”

  “Theoretical. Theoretical physics, theology, and theater. My mother always says that it’s only the first three letters that get to me.” Her laugh was nice.

  “Why’d you lie to Fearless?”

  “It was the only way I could think of to be sure that he’d look for Kit for me.”

  “What do you want with Kit Mitchell?”

  Leora walked back to the front, reclaiming her seat and her composure.

  I followed.

  “Where is Fearless?” she asked.

  “In jail.”

  “What for?” She didn’t even blink.

  “I don’t even know. Do you?”

  This time she didn’t respond.

  “Two cops, Morrain and Rawlway, were after him. So he turned himself in. They were looking for a young man named Bartholomew Perry.” I was wondering if she knew BB too.

  There was a momentary tightening of Leora’s face.

  “Maybe you know what those cops wanted,” I suggested.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you here?”

  “Fearless gave me an address for Kit. I went there but they said that he skipped out without paying the rent.”

  “Really? Did they have any idea where he got to?”

  “No. When a man skips out on the rent he usually doesn’t leave a forwarding address.”

  Even though she had the poise of a woman in her thirties, I figured that Leora was twenty-five at most. Her skin was flawless without the help of makeup and she had hands that could have belonged to a child.

  “So what does Fearless have to do with all that?”

  “I need him, to help me find Kit.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “So’s havin’ the cops on your ass because some girl lied and put you on a trail got you locked up in a six-foot cell.”

  “I’m sorry if I got Mr. Jones in trouble. I didn’t mean to do that. But I have to find Kit Mitchell.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you that.” Leora Hartman stood up. She wanted to walk out but had nowhere else to go. “What did they arrest Mr. Jones for?”

  “Nothing, as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s just questions they need to ask. Like why was he looking for Kit Mitchell.”

  “Kit was doing business with someone. A man named BB,” Leora said.

  “Bartholomew Perry,” I said, nodding and looking for deception.

  “Oh. Is that what it stands for? You already seem to know everything I can tell you.”

  “What I don’t know could fill the Library of Congress.”

  Leora smiled.

  “This BB and Kit have gotten into something and I need to tell them to stop,” she said. “That’s the truth.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I can’t tell you about that, I can’t. Only it’s something they’ve stolen and . . . and beyond that it’s private.”

  “I can’t help you if I don’t know what it is you’re looking for.”

  “I don’t know you, Mr. Minton. I feel bad about your friend, and I want you to understand that I had a reason to lie, an important reason. But I can’t trust you. You can understand that.”

  I understood, but I couldn’t just let it go. Fearless was my friend.

  “Fearless said that Kit had been bragging that he was gonna bring in a whole truckload’a money over some big deal. That was just before he disappeared. Is this thing that him and BB stole worth all that?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Do you know a man named Lawrence Wexler?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Any Wexlers?”

  “No. Why are you asking me these questions? Do you know where Kit Mitchell is?”

  “Why aren’t you asking about where BB is?”

  “I don’t know anything about him but his name. It’s Kit Mitchell who stole . . .” She stopped before revealing the secret.

  “What’s it worth to you if I try and find out?”

  “I don’t have much money, Mr. Minton.”

  “You could’a fooled me. Those fine clothes. Straw bag with what looks like real gold ties on the handle. And the thing cost the most, that classical education. There’s some money somewhere.”

  “On my back and in my head maybe,” she said. “But my wallet is empty.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Mine is too. But I wish you luck.”

  Leora was surprised by my refusal. Her gentle ways and poise had gotten her a long way in life.

  She turned to the door.

  “If you give me a number I’ll tell Fearless you were here. He’s got more free time than I do.”

  “By the time he gets out of jail I will already have found out what I need to know,” she said. “Either that or I’ll be beyond help.”

  15

  AFTER LEORA LEFT the only thing I had to do was wait for Fearless’s call. I didn’t know how long that would be because I had no idea of the particular crime they were investigating. It could have been anything from grand theft to murder.

  I imagined that Fearless was locked in a room with men who asked questions punctuated by fists and blackjacks, but still I wasn’t worried about him. Fearless had lived the life of a soldier since before he joined the armed forces. He was a one-man army who did his duty. And when the enemy had done their worst he would walk away with no anger in his heart because he would have known that he had won in spite of their weapons and torments.

  Fearless rarely bragged about his courage. The things I knew about him had come from long nights of heavy drinking and lots of questions on my part.

  One night he told me about how a gang of men had jumped him and brought him to an old abandoned barn outside of Fayetteville, Louisiana. He was sixteen and they were looking for his auntie’s boyfriend, who, they said, had stolen a man’s watch.

  “‘Turn him ovah, boy,’ the main man told me,” Fearless had said. “‘Turn him ovah or I will mash your face in like a sack’a mud.’

  “‘No sir,’ I tells him,” Fearless said in the words of the sixteen-year-old boy. “‘My Auntie Mar wouldn’t want me puttin’ n
o drunks on her man.’”

  “‘Who you callin’ drunk?’ the main man, his name was Arthur, shout. An’ you know, Paris, I wasn’t even afraid even way back then. I knew I was in trouble. I thought I might be dead. But there was no way to turn. Arthur slapped me hard enough to knock some other boy down. I knew right then I was gonna get hurt. And it made me mad that them men would pick on a child. So I hit Arthur on his nose and then dived down and rolled. I got a hold on a timber and hefted it. I was swinging like Babe Ruth in that small space. Two of the men got knocked out and Arthur and the rest got away.”

  “What they do to your auntie’s boyfriend?”

  “They were so embarrassed by bein’ beat up by a child that they forgot that two-dollar watch and stayed outta my whole family’s way.”

  Fearless wasn’t overly proud of his strength or his courage. They were just things to him. He was like some mythological deity that had come down to earth to learn about mortals. Maybe that’s why I stayed friends with him even though he was always in some kind of trouble. Because being friends with him was like having one of God’s second cousins as a pal.

  ***

  AT SIX I WENT DOWN TO THE CORNER and bought a small bottle of French brandy, a brand they stocked just for me. It cost four ninety-five even way back then, but it was worth it. I didn’t drink hard liquor all that much, but when I did I wanted it to be good. I didn’t want any day-old wine, or scotch that smelled like a doctor’s office.

  I sipped my brandy along with a supper of sliced apples with wedges of cheddar and blue cheese from my ice chest. I had never been to France. And maybe those Frenchmen never heard of drinking brandy with a meal, but that was close enough for me. Maybe I’d never get on a steamship and sail to Europe, and maybe I’d never know the elegance of a fine hotel room on the Seine, but at least I could imagine it in my bookstore. At least I could read about the world and conjure up a feeling of being far away and safe.

  Since I was a child books have been my getaway. Even the few times I’ve spent in jail were made bearable by Conrad, Cooper, and Clemens. I could hear the soft lapping at the banks of the Mississippi or ride the hill-high waves of the South Pacific under a golden moon shining behind long gray clouds. I could pretend to be the great philosopher Aristotle categorizing the world subject by subject, laying out the basis for all knowledge for the next twenty-five hundred years.

  Literature came to my aid even when I had to face the hard reality of racism. Like when the bank turned me down for a small improvement loan.

  “We don’t give improvement loans,” the bank officer Laird Sinclair had told me.

  “But Ben Sideman said that you just gave him a loan to repave the alley at the side of his building,” I said.

  “But he owns a driveway.”

  “I own my store.”

  “You do?” Laird said. He looked down at my folder, maybe for the first time, and added, “But you still owe the balance of your mortgage.”

  “Everybody owes the balance, man,” I said. “But I got eight thousand in equity.”

  Laird smiled and shook his head.

  “It’s more complicated than that, Mr. Minton,” he said. “The bank has to consider many different factors before making a loan decision.”

  “Like what?”

  “For instance. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “There,” he said, as if I had proved a point for him. “A single man is a bad risk.”

  “Ben Sideman ain’t married either,” I said.

  “Mr. Sideman has nothing to do with your application.”

  “I don’t see why. Ben’s got a third mortgage on his place and he don’t have anywhere near the equity I do. He needed to fix his driveway for customers to be able to park. I need to paint my store for it to be more attractive to my customers.”

  “I have another appointment, Mr. Minton,” Laird said.

  I went home and reread thirty of the Simple stories by Langston Hughes as they were chronicled in back issues of the Chicago Defender, which I kept in a trunk in my bedroom. Simple’s view of the world was just what I needed to laugh off the bile that banker filled me with. Jesse B. Semple never accepted the outrageous lies that were foisted upon him, and he didn’t have a pot or a bookstore.

  DRINKING MY BRANDY, THINKING ABOUT MY FRIEND and the banker named Laird, I fell into a doze on my bed.

  In the dream I walked up to a man at a workstation on a vast production line that had thousands of workers busily laboring on either side. The conveyor belt was so long that I couldn’t see an end in either direction.

  “Hello, Paris,” the worker said to me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “My name is,” he said, and then he added something, but I couldn’t hear the name over the roar of the machinery around us.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said,” the worker replied, and then he added something I didn’t understand.

  “What are we supposed to be doing here?” I asked then.

  On the conveyor belt were oddly shaped mechanisms made from all kinds of metals, wood, cloth, and paper. Every mechanism was unique. They were obviously pieces of larger, insane machines. The workers moved the devices as they passed without adding anything or making any substantial change to their structure.

  The nameless worker was looking at the line too. He was smiling.

  “What are we building?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s right. You see, this production line has been growing for the last few years because the war is over and all the veterans need a place to work. It’s so long that it crosses over the river into the next state, goes north for Lord knows how many miles, and then crosses back over and down to here.”

  “Past us again?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So all of these things just go round and round?”

  “No. Uh-uh.”

  “Where do they go, then?”

  “Here and there along the way there’s checkers,” the worker said.

  “Checking for what?”

  “To see if any of the”—he said a word that stood for the gadgets on the conveyor belt, but I couldn’t make it out—“have gone bad. And if they have, then they throw that”—he said the word again—“into the discard bin.”

  “But that’s a waste of time.”

  “For them,” the worker agreed.

  “But not for you because you have a job?” I asked.

  “Well,” the worker said, “that’s part of it. I mean, it’s not much pay but it’s enough for about a half of my expenses. But I live on less, because after the checkers throw out the”—that word again—“I go and pick ’em up and take ’em back to my place.”

  “But what use are they?”

  “None,” he said, “right now. But later on, when they run outta stuff to put on the production line, they gonna have to come to me to buy all them that I took home. That’s when I’m gonna be rich.”

  I started laughing then. I laughed so hard that I fell down on one knee. Workers started turning around to look at me. And even though I was laughing, at the same time I was in mortal fear that I’d lose my job.

  A bell rang. It was a long, monotonous ring that seemed to be an omen of great danger.

  “What’s that?” I asked the nameless worker.

  “Shift change,” he said. “Shift, shift, shift.”

  16

  I ANSWERED THE PHONE as if I had never been asleep.

  “Yes?”

  “That you, Paris?” Fearless asked.

  “What time is it?”

  “Mornin’ sometime, but I don’t know when exactly.”

  I was fully dressed. The empty bottle of brandy was on the stool I used for a night table. I could see the last of the morning stars through the one window set in the middle of my slanted roof.

  “You still in jail?” I asked.

  “Yeah, man.”

&
nbsp; “They still questioning you?”

  “No. They gave up a few hours ago, but they still holdin’ me on a parking ticket fine I never paid. I ain’t got it.”

  I took a deep breath. The fear and laughter of the dream still crowded my chest.

  “Let me find my shoes and I’ll be right down there,” I said. “You at the Seventy-seventh?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Minton. I sure am.”

  I put the phone back in the cradle and sat up. That’s when the brandy made its return. My head started spinning and I had to lie back on the bed. The dizziness subsided, but then the roof began a slow turn to the right. When I closed my eyes I could feel the bed shifting under me.

  Shift. The word echoed in my mind. I remembered the production line and the would-be entrepreneur’s chant.

  The phone rang again. How long had it been since Fearless called?

  “Hello,” I said, the bed moving under me like a river under a lily pad.

  “Paris,” a bail bondsman I knew said.

  “Good mornin’, Mr. Sweet. I was just thinkin’ about you. It wasn’t a kind thought. No sir. It was more like why do you wanna be messin’ with me an’ Fearless and here we supposed to be friends?” The words flowed out of my mouth just like me going down that river.

  “I’m sorry, Paris.”

  I opened my eyes. Now it was my thoughts’ turn to take a spin. Milo never apologized unless he wanted something. Never. If he bumped into you and you stumbled and fell, he’d more likely say, You shoulda got out my way, than to proffer an apology. That’s because Milo had been a lawyer, and all lawyers know that an apology is tantamount to an admission of guilt. And admitting guilt was the only cardinal sin in the lawyer’s bible.

  I made it once more to a sitting position. If I sat sideways, with my head down below my shoulders, the room stopped revolving and merely shook.

  “What is it, Milo?”

  “What is what?” he asked.

  “Don’t fool with me, man. It’s too early and I’m way too hung over to be played with.”

  “I made a mistake, Paris,” Milo said. “I should have shared what I knew about Miss Fine with you.”

  “You scarin’ me, Milo man.”

  “I’m tryin’ to apologize.”