Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

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.

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.