Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

“Yeah,” Green Suit said. “Oh.”

I put up my hands, trying to halt the train coming at me. I went right into my explanation because in the game we were playing it was in my best interest to get it over quickly. The longer they played, the better chance they had to win.

“Let me explain,” I said.

I told them about Three Hearts but not about Useless’s visit. I told them that I was looking for Useless but not about his business or his confederates. I told them that Man from Man’s Barn had told me that Useless knew Mad Anthony and that Anthony had kicked my butt for talking to him. I added that Fearless broke Anthony’s jaw because that was just the kind of friend he was.

After all that, I smiled, thinking that my points added up to an even number.

“Why are you looking for Mr. Grant again?” Spotty asked.

“His mother thinks that the woman he’s with is not right for him. She came up to see him and tell him so, but he had moved and she didn’t know where he was.”

“What’s the girlfriend’s name?” Green Suit asked.

“Debbie, I think. Don’t know the last name.”

“What she look like?”

I shook my head. In that game there was a point deducted for every word someone on my side spoke.

Green Suit walked around the table so that he could hit me if I tried that shit again. I let my eyes get big, very big.

“Hey, hey, man,” I said. “I don’t know nuthin’ about her. I never met her.”

Green Suit was uncertain. He believed that me and my kind were stupid but wily. That was trouble for him because he never knew when to slap my face or shake his head in disgust.

He hit me hard enough to knock me off the stool, then he shook his head. Doing both was against the rules even in our freewheeling game.

“Get back on the chair,” Spotty said. He had a red face and Saint Bernard-like jowls.

“That’s not what I wanna hear,” Green Suit told me.

“Man, I was just lookin’ for Useless. That’s all.”

“Where is Grant?” Green Suit asked.

“He moved to Man’s Barn and then he disappeared.”

“What did Useless have to do with Mad Anthony?” Spotty asked.

“He gambled a lot. Played snooker for up to a dollar a ball,” I said. “I thought that Anthony might be bankrollin’ him.”

“And you say this Fearless broke his jaw?”

“Yeah. But that was just a fight in a café. Anthony left after that an’ everything was peaceful.”

Green Suit laughed at my choice of words, and I knew that Anthony was dead.

Having received just one slap made me a nonloser. Someday I’d tell my grandchildren about that evening in jail. By that time there’d be racism on Mars and jails for black men up there.

They took Fearless in for questioning after me. He wouldn’t tell them anything either. And Fearless was the kind of man that policemen didn’t batter around needlessly. They could tell right off that he’d die before saying something he didn’t want to say, and despite popular belief, the police needed good reason to beat a man to death under interrogation.

Finally I got to sleep. By then I was used to the sour smell of the cell. Chapman Grey asked for a doctor. They took him away and he never returned. I didn’t miss him.

I don’t know what time it was when I woke up, but it felt like early morning. There was no window, so I couldn’t tell for sure.

I bummed a cigarette off an old guy named Joshua who was in there for stabbing his wife. He didn’t understand why they had arrested him.

“Me an’ Gladys be fightin’ all the time,” he told me. “Damn, she shot me one time in ’forty-eight. The police asked me if I was okay an’ that was that.”

Soon after he said this, I found myself thinking about Jamaica again.

An hour or so later a policeman called out, “Minton and Jones.”

We were brought to a processing room where all of our property, including Fearless’s .45, was returned.

When we walked out into the waiting room, I expected to see Milo or at least Loretta, and maybe Whisper. But instead, Jerry Twist, the African frog, was squatting on the bench.

“Fearless,” he said, breaking convention with familiarity, “Paris.”

“What are you doin’ here, Jerry?” I asked.

“That all the thanks I get for goin’ yo’ bail?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked again.

“Let’s go outside,” the master stickman suggested.

It was the best idea. He might have had something to say that one wouldn’t want the police to overhear. But I was loath to go out of that jailhouse.

On the street it was maybe 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. Cars were cruising past. Twist led us to a big blue Chrysler parked across the street.

“Where you want me to drive ya?” he asked.

Fearless gave him an address three blocks down from Nadine and we drove away.

“What’s it like on the inside’a that jail?” Twist asked me as we went down Central. “You know I have never been arrested in my life.”

Only the best and worst of men could make that claim.

“How did you come to bail us out of jail, Mr. Twist?” I asked again.

“Answer up this time, Jerry,” Fearless added.

He gave a slight shrug and said, “Ulysses called me and asked me to do it.”

“Ulysses?” That was both of us.

“Yeah. He called and said that he saw his mama an’ them an’ they told him that you was arrested. I called cop houses till I fount you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Ulysses axed me to, that’s why. I done told you all that I’m doin’ business wit’ him.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He called from a phone booth, said that he was with his mama an’ that girl, that Angel.” Jerry smiled at the thought of her. There was something obscene about a man that ugly lusting after a goddess.

He made a turn on a block three numbers lower than Nadine’s.

“You could stop anywhere around here,” Fearless said.

“I’ll take you to the do’, man,” our driver offered.

“Here’s fine.”

“Whatevah you say.” Jerry pulled to the curb, and I jumped out, followed by Fearless.

I put my head in the window before he could drive away.

“You know about that cabin Useless stay in around Angeles National Forest?” I asked.

“Sure do.”

“You know where it’s at?”

“Red house on Bear Pond Lane,” he said without straining his memory. “Got a airplane wind vane on top. It’s off Route Seventeen. The exit have a sign for fresh honeycomb underneath it. You take that exit, make a right, and go till you see Bear Pond Lane. Turn there an’ go a mile or two. You’ll see it.”

When he drove off I actually had a chill.

“What was that all about?” I asked Fearless.

“I don’t know,” Fearless replied. “It was like a wild hyena had run ya down and then he lick yo’ hand instead’a rippin’ a steak outta yo’ thigh.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was a liquor store at the corner. Fearless and I went in to buy orange soda, potato chips, and devil’s food cupcakes. We were starving. After eating our junk food meal at the bus stop bench we strolled on down to Nadine’s.

She hadn’t left for work yet. As a matter of fact, she was still dressed in her housecoat. The robe was mostly white with some pink and green sewn in. It looked more like an overgrown pot holder than anything else.

“Hi,” she said to us at the door. “I wondered when you were going to bring her home.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Hearts, of course.”

“She ain’t here?”

“She was with you.”

We came in and sat around a small dining table.

Nadine was the kind of woman who overdid everything. Where there should have been one chair she’d put three; where a three-foot table would fit nicely she’d place a table five feet in diameter. There were seven prints of paintings hung from the wall and little doodads all over the place.