Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

He brought the boy over to bleed on our blankets.

“I coulda taken him,” the kid said. He was actually smaller and skinnier than me, pale as a newborn luna moth. “Nigger wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have his friends with ’im.”

“What’s your name, son?” Fearless, not thirty-five himself, asked.

“Loren.”

“Loren, call the man a bastard, a motherfucker, a pussy if you want to, but when you call him a nigger you call me one, and, brother, I am a whole other kinda pain.”

“All I did was ask a man to read somethin’ for me,” Loren said. “I got this paper in my pocket and I don’t have my glasses. It’s from my auntie an’ she hates me so I know somethin’ bad had to happen. This dude Chapman said that he didn’t wanna hear a word outta none’a the white people.”

“Chapman,” I said. “Was that the guy hit you?”

“Naw. Chapman got called in for questioning. That motherfucker was his friend.”

“You got the paper?” I asked the kid.

He reached down into his pants and pulled a small pink envelope out of his drawers.

I took it anyway.

I can’t reproduce the letter here because it was far too long: five pages of tiny chicken scratches written in the grammar of some foreign land. The first page listed the reasons that Belldie, Loren’s aunt, hadn’t written him before. One, which I didn’t read out loud, was that the boy was illiterate. There was also a theft committed, a pregnancy he caused, an incident in church that she didn’t explain, and then there was the boy’s temper and his steadfast refusal to work. After that there came three pages of accolades for Loren’s parents and his brother Jimmy.

It was only on the last page that Belldie, in minute detail, described the collision between his parents’ pickup truck and the Sun Oil truck on the highway near their farm. Jimmy was with them and now they were all with the Lord.

The funeral had been held a week later. The letter was dated six months earlier.

Loren was at our feet dripping tears and blood on the floor.

Damn. Even when I remember that letter I realize how bad some people have it. There was that white boy made a punk by black men in an inescapable cell, holding a letter about the deaths of his folks. A letter written by blood that hated him. It might have been tough being a black man in America, but I wouldn’t have traded shoes with Loren — no, sir.

Toward the end of my reading of Loren’s letter the cell door came open and another prisoner was added to the overcrowded room. When Loren fell to the ground crying, someone shouted, “What?” and I thought I had an inkling of who the new inmate might be.

A big man stormed up to us. He was light colored like granite with brownish lichen growing on it. He was big and muscular.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked Fearless as Fearless rose to the meeting.

“Fearless Jones,” my friend said with no particular sense of pride.

The granite man gave a flinty smile. “I heard’a you. Yeah. I heard’a you. Mothahfuckahs always talkin’ ’bout how bad you are. Huh. My name’s Chapman Grey. I’m a light heavyweight. Do you think you can kick my butt like these punk-ass niggahs think you sumpin’?”

The grammar didn’t quite hold together, but Chapman posed an interesting question. Could Fearless stand up against a professional?

It took me seventeen seconds to find out.

Before Fearless could reply, Chapman hit him with a stiff right jab. He followed that with a right cross that sent my friend falling against the bunk.

That was one second.

Chapman pressed his advantage, coming in on Fearless with a body barrage of six or seven blows.

That took care of seconds two and three.

Fearless pushed against the rock-hard boxer, propelling himself away. The crowd around moved out from the fray. Chapman grinned and strode forward.

By then we were up to second eight.

Chapman hit Fearless in the jaw with a right hook that would have killed me and anyone standing behind me. Fearless was thrown back but not down.

I could hear the guards outside the cell shouting.

By the time Chapman was stalking Fearless again, ten seconds had passed. He threw a straight right, but Fearless stepped to the left and hooked his right arm over Chapman’s. He twisted around once, throwing the boxer off balance, and then hurled Grey into the bars of our cell. Fearless moved forward then, hitting Grey in the diaphragm, the groin, and the throat. He didn’t use all of his strength, but he definitely incapacitated the boxer.

By the seventeenth second, Grey was unconscious on a cot and Fearless was walking back to his corner.

Grey’s question had been answered definitively. In the ring he would have torn Fearless up. But out in the real world he had better watch out.

Loren cried all through the altercation. By the time the guards came, the fight was over. Things settled down, and I sat there thinking how the life I was living would be better in the remembering than it was while it was going on.

Fearless, definitely the nicest and kindest person I knew, would fight at the drop of a hat. If he were a white guy living in the middle-class world, he would have been exactly the same, but there would never be a reason for him to fight. But we were poor and black and so either we fought or we lost ground. That’s all there was to it.

Despite the smell of sweat and urine, despite the blood and tears on my cot, I still felt more secure than I had for many days. While Fearless listened to Loren talk about how much he loved his mother, I lay back and closed my eyes.

The nimbus Sleep sensed my repose and began slowly to drift in my direction.

“Minton, Paris,” someone shouted, and Sleep scurried away to the corner where she resided next to Death and Despair.

“That’s me,” I said, rising from my bunk.

“Come with me,” a man in a suit said. He was accompanied by two large policemen. Each of them took an arm as they led me through the labyrinth of the Seventy-seventh Street precinct.

We came finally to a small door, a really small door. I remember thinking that due to some mistake in planning, this door and the room it led to had to be cut down in size. I could walk through with no difficulty at all, but I was six inches below six feet. The men holding my arms had to duck to get through, their heads nearly grazing the ceiling of the room we entered.

Two fat detectives were waiting in there. One wore a suit that was too green to be a suit and the other wore a suit of spotted gray, though I don’t think the spots were intentional. They were both white men, but that goes without saying; all detectives were white men back then. They were the detectives and I was there to be detected.

“Mr. Minton?” Green Suit asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Have a seat.”

I sat on a wooden stool placed on the other side of the table from the detectives. The men who had brought me there left without being asked.

The game began in earnest then. The goals of this particular sport were different on the opposite sides of the table. For the detectives to win they’d have to get me to admit to certain suppositions that they would posit. For me not to lose I’d have to avoid admission while keeping from being damaged beyond repair in the process.

“Tony Jarman,” Spotty said. It was like a low ante in a high-stakes poker game.

I knew what he wanted me to say, but I squinted and cocked my head to the side. What?

“Don’t fuck with us, Minton,” Green Suit said.

“I don’t know no Jarman, man. What could I tell you?”

“Mad Anthony,” Spotty amended.

“Oh,” I said, but my expression said, Uh-oh, so you know about that?