Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

Why was in my chest, but he refused to make himself known.

Mum sat next to me and gave me a kiss. It wasn’t as passionate as Loretta’s had been, but it was nice. We did that for a while: kiss and then sip fine liquor from the big glasses, then kiss some more. My hands wanted to feel her orange fabric, but she kept them down.

After our third drink she lifted me by the elbows and brought me to another room. It was a bathroom with a huge freestanding, high-collared tub. It was filled with water. She tested it with a bare foot up to the ankle and then turned on the hot.

“I’m going to undress you,” she told me. “Just let me do it. Don’t help or touch me.”

I didn’t.

The water was hot and the liquor did exactly what it was supposed to. I was very excited sexually, but I would have been happy going to sleep while Mum cleaned me with a sea sponge scrubber.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. Somewhere between here and there a thought came to me in the form of a question: Why would Hector LaTiara want a French dictionary?

But even that didn’t disturb me.

When I opened my eyes Mum had disrobed and was stepping into the tub with me.

“You’re a nice man, Paris,” Mum said. She had one arm behind my head and the other across my chest. We were in her big bed, enveloped in silk and soft, soft cotton. I was clean and completely satisfied.

“What a man wants to hear is that he’s big and strong and almost scary,” I replied, though I was thinking about a door that had opened in my mind.

Mum giggled.

“I’m stronger than you are,” she said.

“We’ll never find out now, will we?”

“Why were you at Jerry’s with Fearless Jones?” she asked then, and I wondered again why she had lured me over.

“Lookin’ for my cousin Useless.”

“Useless Grant is your cousin?”

“Everybody says that in the same way,” I said. “And I know why. Useless is a motherfucker. Have you seen him?”

“Every once in a while he talks to Ha Tsu. They like to laugh together.”

“They do business together?”

“I don’t know Ha’s business. I’m just a waitress.” She was getting nervous.

“And I’m just a bookseller,” I said. “What can you do?”

“You sell books?” Mum seemed shocked.

“Yeah. Why?”

She jumped up and pulled back the red fabric at the head of the bed. There were eight bookshelves filled with hardbound Chinese texts. I perused them. Most were complete ciphers to me. But on the bottom shelf I saw the names Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Spinoza, and Hegel printed over Chinese cuneiforms.

“I like some’a these guys,” I said. “But I prefer the older generation. Herodotus, Homer, and Sophocles.”

“You have read them?”

“Sure.”

“I used to study ancient thinkers. My father sent me to New York to study. But then the Japs came and killed my family. They destroyed everything and made my country crazy. I came here and Ha Tsu took me in.”

I put my arms around her, and after a while she fell into a deep sleep. I was soon to follow, but before I nodded off I thought about the man looking for the French dictionary, the man who was after Useless.

My dreams were darker than Jerry Twist’s office.

If Hector LaTiara had been to my store, he was probably there looking for Useless — that was the thought going through my mind when I was almost awake, lying there between floral-scented sheets. And if Hector had been to my place once, he might have been there twice, even three times. He might have been armed and he might have run into Tiny Bobchek.

But what did any of that have to do with smoked bacon?

I hated Useless, hated him in that way you can only despise a family member. All of a sudden I was worried that the Bobchek murder could be tied to me in some way. If the police could somehow identify the corpse, they might tie him to Useless and then Useless to me. The next thing I knew, somebody who knew more than I did would be confessing to the crime, incriminating me, and getting a reduced sentence as he did so.

I would have liked to pour orange juice and hot butter all over him.

“Paris,” the breeze whispered.

I should have agreed with Fearless the night before. We should have gone to Hector’s house. It was too late to go to the police. They wouldn’t understand us taking Tiny to the strawberry field. Killer Cleave wouldn’t understand me telling them about it.

“Breakfast,” the gentle wind sighed.

I opened my eyes to see Mum kneeling before me, naked and proffering a silver tray holding bacon and eggs, orange juice, and coffee.

My waking dream had put a pall on the day, but I smiled for Mum and kissed her gently.

“This what you call a Chinese breakfast?” I asked the young woman.

“No. But you’re not what I call a Chinese girl’s boyfriend either,” she replied.

We ate and talked about her family. I asked where they had come from in China and why were so many people killed.

Mum told me that her clan hailed from central China originally. She blamed the Japanese for their demise. She hated that people with a virulence that rivaled the worst white racists I had met in the South. While she spoke I thought of Loretta. I wondered if Mum would have hated my Japanese friend.

Then I wondered about the people I hated because of their skin color or whatever. It seemed rather arbitrary to me — unnecessary, or maybe not that, maybe it was necessary to hate someone, just capricious who it was that you hated.

After breakfast I put on my clothes. At the door Mum hugged me and we kissed. She peered deeply into my eyes then.

“You cannot be my boyfriend,” she said very seriously.

“You’re very beautiful,” I replied with a smile.

“But—”

“So I’m happy for what I got here,” I said. “It’s like a dream in here. And now when I come to Good News I know I can talk to you about philosophy over hot and sour.”

Mum’s eyes widened, and maybe there was a gleam of disappointment there. She might have been thinking that I took it so well maybe I could have been a good secret lover. Or maybe she wanted me to be a little brokenhearted after that night of perfect love.

Either way, she kissed me again and, unknowingly, sent me off to war.

Sex with a woman is always a two-edged sword for me. The last woman I had been with, Jessa, was the source of all kinds of trouble. I was still deep in that morass, my clothes newly perfumed with Mum’s exotic scents, when I decided that it would be okay for me to go to the address on Saturn where Hector LaTiara lived.

There were many forces that brought me to his block. There was the manhood I felt from the act of love with Mum. There was the urgency I felt about the murder that had happened in my home. And there was the feeling of invisibility I had at times.

I didn’t expect to confront Hector. I just wanted to get the lay of the land before Fearless and I went up against the French-assed nigger.

I got in my car and sat there for a while. I thought about the assumptions I had made and the mistakes that attended those assumptions.

Very often I blamed Fearless for my problems. He’d get into trouble trying to do right in a world where everything was wrong. When he felt that he needed to think his way out of a problem, he always came to me. And if I got involved, trouble came down in a deluge.

Sometimes I wouldn’t answer Fearless’s calls. Sometimes I would refuse him bail money.

But now here I was, in trouble deep, and I didn’t question whether or not Fearless would be there the moment I needed him. I can’t say that I felt guilty about my infidelity, but I did see the truth of it. If Fearless wasn’t in my life, I’d already be in jail over Tiny Bobchek’s murder. And if not for my friend, knowing anything about Hector LaTiara wouldn’t have done me one lick of good.