Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

“Mr. Hoag, please,” I said.

“Do you have an appointment?” the middle-aged roadblock asked, an apology already etched around his eyes.

“It has to do with this photograph,” I said, handing Angel over into his bone-colored grasp.

“I don’t understand?” he said, looking at the picture and registering something.

“He will,” I assured the salesman.

The first man, whose nameplate read ROGER, moved to negotiate between the desks, making his way toward the back of the aisle. The man behind him sat tall and thin, swathed in brown. He smiled and nodded.

“Nice day,” he said.

One of the things I love about America is that if you are a potential customer almost everyone is nice to you. They might hate your guts and wish you dead, but face-to-face they smile and nod and talk about the weather in a neighborly cadence.

Roger had made his pitch to Tommy and was returning without the photo. He nodded at me and smiled as he approached and then said, “He has a few minutes before his next meeting. He’ll see you now.”

I careered around Roger’s desk and the next and then set my pace for the well-dressed man at the back of the room.

He stood up to a good five eleven and put out a hand that had a double fold of fine white cotton and cuff links at the wrist. Tommy Hoag was light skinned and auburn eyed at a time when freedom for black people depended on how closely we could approximate being white. His Caucasian-like features had served him well. His expression told you that he knew it and that he knew that you knew it too.

“Mr. Hoag?” I asked.

“Pleased to meet you, Mister...?”

“Minton,” I said. “Paris Minton.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Minton.”

I sat, looking around.

On the wall behind his desk hung a framed parchment claiming that Thomas Benton Hoag had earned a bachelor of arts degree from Howard University.

The chair was walnut and the desk was walnut veneer. The black carpet would wear down in six months and the walls might as well have been paper. But Schuyler’s was an institution in Watts.

“Damn,” I said.

“Do I know you, Mr. Minton?”

“No. You might know my cousin, though. Ulysses S. Grant the Fourth.”

His eyes registered yes.

“No,” he said, shaking his head to prove it.

“Useless, that’s what most of us call him, is Angel there’s boyfriend.” I pointed at the photo on his desk.

“She’s a pretty girl,” he said noncommittally.

“She’s more than that, I hear.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Minton?”

“Can you explain the theory of evolution?” I asked.

“Say what?” he asked. I could almost hear the Negro at the end of the sentence.

“You got a college degree, brother. You know that’s more rare for a black man than someone actually born in L.A.”

Tommy smiled. He liked a quick wit.

“I could explain, but that would take too long,” he said. “You’d have to do some background reading, the original texts, you know.”

“I done read The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, ” I said. “I understand the position, but what I always wonder about is what I call the horizon point of the phenomenon.”

I was actually reciting arguments that Ashe had made to me back when she thought I was some kind of genius simply because I owned a bookstore.

Tommy didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, and so before he could embarrass himself I added, “You know, Darwin says that a species evolves. But a species ain’t one thing, it’s millions, maybe more. So outta all the people in the world, are we all at the same place on the evolutionary ladder? Is there just one ladder or a thousand of ’em? Some people smarter than others, some stronger. You got a genius like George Washington Carver and a beast like Adolf Hitler. How are they related? Are they at the same place?”

“That’s what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights say,” Tommy offered weakly.

“True,” I agreed. “But that’s a moral stance, not a scientific one. And the original document only referred to white, Christian, male landowners. Darwin throw a much bigger net than that one there.”

Somebody overhearing our words would have thought that I was going down the wrong road. But that someone wouldn’t have been listening between the lines. In his own estimation Tommy was a superior specimen. He only dealt with white people and was better educated than 99 percent of the Negro race. He would have felt that he could dismiss me unless I intimidated him physically or intellectually.

Tommy could have kicked my ass up and down the block, so I used the only muscle I had.

It worked too.

“Angel Allmont and I used to go out,” Tommy told me. “We saw each other for a couple of months. But I had to let her go. She was pretty and everything, but I need a lighter-skinned girl in the business I do, and she had a wild side.

“And now that I think on it... her new boyfriend might have been called Useless. Something like that.”

“Have you talked to her in the last week or so?” I asked.

“No. She was goin’ out with your cousin and they got tangled up with a flimflam man named Hector. I think that’s what she said his name was.”

“Hector what?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“How you know he was bent?”

“Angel said that they were doing business where they were going to make ten thousand dollars in a month,” Tommy said in a muted voice. “That kinda money don’t evolve from honest labor.”

I smiled at his inside joke.

“You know where I can find her?” I asked.

“Man’s Barn.”

“She moved outta there.”

“Oh,” Tommy said, not really caring. “I don’t know, then. All I can tell ya is that the one time I met your cousin he told me that he played billiards at Jerry Twist’s and that he could get me in there any time I wanted.”

He looked at me.

I returned the stare.

“That all you after, Mr. Minton?”

“I guess so.”

“Any time you need me to tell you more about Darwin, you just drop on by.”

I wondered as I left if he believed that he had lectured me.

Jerry Twist’s was a pool parlor on Slauson, occupying the second floor of a lime-colored two-story building in the center of the block. The bottom floor housed Ha Tsu’s Good News Chinese restaurant.

Good News was unique inasmuch as it was the only Chinese restaurant I’d ever been to that had a bouncer — Harold Crier.

Harold was big and dark. He wore a black eye patch and had hands like catchers’ mitts. Harold was fat, but I’d seen him chase a would-be patron who had slapped him after being refused entrance. The runner was young and sleek, but the forty-something and ponderous Harold ran that boy down after two blocks.

The story goes that Harold met Ha Tsu while trying to rob him late one Monday night. The armed robber made the mistake of getting too close to the restaurateur and before he knew it the smaller man had grabbed Harold’s gun wrist and jabbed him in the eye with a fork from the counter. When Harold woke up, he was in the back room on a cot with a Chinese doctor ministering to him.

Ha Tsu made Loretta’s hatred of white people seem like mild perturbation. Loretta’s anger came from a specific event over a relatively short period of time. But Ha hated whites for the domination of China. He hated white people the way Sitting Bull hated them. He hated them so much that he wouldn’t even turn Harold, an armed robber, over to the cops. He told Harold that he could either die there on that bamboo cot or take a job as the sentry at the front door of Good News.

“You want me to be a guard?” Harold had asked.