Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

“You said Jessa didn’t even have a bag or drawers,” Fearless argued. He had a good memory when he wanted to.

“Tiny could have been armed. She could have pulled out his pistol and opened fire.”

Fearless threw up a hand and let it fall. “Yeah,” he admitted.

“It couldn’t have been Useless,” I continued. “He ain’t a natural killer in the first place. He never carries a gun and he would run from a big fool like Bobchek.”

“Yeah, but that just proves my point.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“First you got Ulysses comin’ to your door, sayin’ how he got to run,” Fearless said. “Then the white girl and her boyfriend aftah yo’ ass. Now Ulysses is gone an’ Three Hearts comes, gettin’ you into trouble up to your ears. If that ain’t some kinda bad luck, I don’t know what is.”

It was my turn to laugh. Fearless wasn’t making fun of me. He was reading my life like I’d read a dime novel.

“So what we gonna do about Ulysses?” Fearless asked.

“What can we do?” I replied. “You heard Anthony. Useless is either gone or dead. And with seventy-two thousand dollars in his pocket, he’s way beyond where we gonna find him.”

“The girl could have took the money,” Fearless said.

“Then he’s runnin’ on empty.”

“Come on, Paris. You know we cain’t turn our backs on Hearts. You know you don’t want that evil eye’a hers on yo’ ass.”

I knew it. I knew it.

I knew it too well.

Fearless dropped me off at my place at about six.

There was a cardboard box on the front porch. The flaps were folded together and there was an envelope taped to its side. I unlocked the door and kicked the box inside. I sat on the first chair near the entrance and flipped the box open.

Books. Books in which there were many dog-eared pages. I opened the sealed envelope. It was from my literary girlfriend, Ashe Knowles.

Dear Mr. Minton,

Lately I’ve been taking to underlining those places in books where Negroes are denigrated by white authors, and colored ones too. It seems to me that one day our children or their children might want to know how many lies have been propagated against our people over the years and decades and centuries. You will find in these pages references to our low intelligence, our aberrant sexuality, our criminal nature, and our primitive instincts. In some places these comments are meant as compliments and in others as scientific fact. For a long time I believed that everyone was aware of this terrible state of affairs, but just last Tuesday I asked Miss Harrison, the librarian at the 53rd Street branch, if she knew where such outrageous statements would be catalogued. She told me that she wasn’t even aware of any great preponderance of racist statements in American literature. I gave her fifteen examples in the B’s of authors’ last names and she was amazed. But when I asked her if she would set up a catalogue of these gaffes in her branch she told me that that wouldn’t be any help for anyone.

Mr. Minton, you are a well-read and therefore a well-educated man. I know that you will see the value of these notes. My apartment is just one room and very small, but you have lots of room in your bookstore. I was wondering if you might keep these books for me over the next little while until I can find some institution that might want to store and catalogue my research.

Yours truly,

There were eighteen hardback books in the box. Each one had anywhere from five to fifteen dog-eared pages proving Ashe’s claims. She had a relentless, steel-trap kind of intelligence. And I had to admit there was something to her assertion. There must have been thousands of times that I had come across statements in books that insulted and lied about Negroes in America and abroad. Hegel had done it and Karl Marx too. But without a definitive list of these misdemeanors, how could we complain? Even the librarian had denied the allegation until Ashe showed her proof.

I decided to put the books down in the onetime crypt of Tiny Bobchek.

I was happy to have received that box of books, first because of the fact that no one had stolen them from off my porch. Nobody stole books. These bound and printed stacks of paper were the most precious things in the world, and yet no one would have picked them up. That box could have sat on my porch for a week and those books would have gone unmolested and unread.

The second thing that made me happy was that Ashe had distracted me for an hour or so from the worries that had settled all through my mind.

I thought about Ashe and her bumbling brilliance. She would have done much better for herself if she had gone to college and committed all of the plays of Shakespeare to memory. That way the white professors, deans, and provosts would have seen her as some kind of anomaly who would have fit well in the lower echelons of the university hierarchy. There she could have waited until such time that a catalogue of racist quotes in American and English literature might have been presented on a grand stage.

But Ashe could only see truth — not strategy. She worked as a teacher’s assistant at a private Baptist elementary school down on Eighty-third Street. They paid her twenty-two dollars a week, and she lived somehow, sometimes unable to buy even a pencil.

Again I thought of how I could have loved a woman like that. But loving her, I knew that I should leave her alone.

I wasn’t hungry and so I went up to bed at eight. My jaw was aching and my right arm felt weak. I had pains up and down my right side and a thick copy of Titus Groan on my night table. I wanted to read it, but I was experiencing too many aches to grapple with that hefty tome.

So instead I started thinking.

I knew that I shouldn’t have cut off Fearless’s question about Tiny Bobchek’s death. Tiny’s dying like that was just the kind of trouble that Useless would bring down on you. But Useless wasn’t a killer and he’d gone. I hadn’t even let him through the door, so why would he have come back? And I was sure there wasn’t any connection between Useless and Jessa.

When I’d met her, she talked all the time about how she’d never seen a black man up close. She’d play with my hair and place her white hand against my skin to marvel at the contrast.

And Jessa was a brass tacks kind of girl. I paid her rent and made an exotic entry in her life. If she was working with somebody who was counting money in the thousands, she wouldn’t have had a moment for me.

No. Jessa had nothing to do with Useless and Useless had nothing to do with the murder of Tiny Bobchek.

But where had Jessa gone?

I closed my eyes, but I could tell by the thrumming at the back of my head that sleep would not be coming any time soon.

I had an inspiration then. So I got dressed, went down to my car, and drove over to the blue house in front of Man’s Barn.

It was almost nine, well beyond the time when decent people dropped in on one another. Man might have turned me away, but I had a plan to get by him.

I rang the bell and stood there in my brown jacket and black trousers. I was sporting alligator shoes and a blue pullover shirt that had a one-button collar.

Man wore a white T-shirt and navy blue pants that had a drawstring at the waist.

“What the hell do you want?” he asked me. “Do you know what time it is? My little girl was asleep before you started pushin’ on that bell.”

I twisted my face into a wordless apology. “I didn’t wanna disturb ya, but I thought you’d appreciate me coming here over the alternative.”

“What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Negro?” he said. He grabbed the door as if he were about to slam it in my face.