Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt that peaceful. I didn’t want to turn around and face the job of lying to the good landlady. My deepest desire was to somehow fly through that window and become a part of everything I saw. I wanted to be those streets and those children’s jump-rope song. I wanted to climb with those pale puffs of smoke into the blue sky and surrender like the white flags they resembled.

“I threw out most’a the clothes and trash he left,” Miss Moore was saying. “You might find something here or there. If it’s trash throw it out, but if it could be sold you should turn it over to me so that I can try and make back the rent he stole.”

I handed over the rent money. This left me with three singles and one two-dollar note—that and three Liberty quarters was all I had in my pockets.

“I won’t be lookin’ too close,” I said. “Just sleepin’ and applying for work, that’s all it’ll be for me this week.”

“The phone is not for tenant use,” Miss Moore said. “Dinner is at seven sharp, and you have to sign up for the bath.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“The big key is for the front door,” she said as she handed over two brass Sargent keys tied together with a dirty bit of string. “You can come in whenever you want but the house goes dark after ten, and you should be quiet when you come in late. I don’t like visitors, so if you want to entertain you have to tell me about it first.”

“No cards and no girlfriends, Miss Moore. It’s the straight and narrow for me.”

She smiled and squeezed my wrist and then left, closing the door behind her. I went back to the window and stayed there for a long time. It was nothing like my rural home in New Iberia, Louisiana, but there was the feeling of home there. I spent so much time in books that the natural world was often a surprise to me. It was a new world filled with people walking and laughing, living lives that didn’t seem to have any part of a larger story.

There was a partly padded folding chair at the cherry table/ desk. I took it over to the east-facing window and sat down. Later I would search the room and question Kit’s fellow tenants. But right then all I wanted was to enjoy that unique moment where I was completely out of my life. No one but Fearless knew where I was.

Fearless had brought me to that placid window. He drove the car, but he was also the reason I came; to find out what Kit Mitchell had been up to and where he had gone.

Anyone who knew me and didn’t know Fearless would have been surprised that I would have put myself in such a potentially dangerous situation. To the world in general I was a law-abiding worrywart. I shied away from drugs and crap games, stolen merchandise and any scheme that might in any way be construed as unlawful. I never bragged (except about my sexual endowment), and the only time I ever acted tough was to shout at caged animals.

But when it came to Fearless I was often forced to become somebody else. For a long time I thought that it was because he had once saved my life in a dark alley in San Francisco. And that certainly did have a big effect on my feelings toward him. But in recent months I had come to realize that something about Fearless compelled me to be different. Partly it was because I felt a deep certainty that no harm could come to me when I was in his presence. I mean, Theodore Timmerman should have killed me on that street, but Fearless stopped him even though it was impossible. But it was more than just a feeling of security. Fearless actually had the ability to make me feel as if I were more of a man when I was in his company. My mind didn’t change, and in my heart I was still a coward, but even though I was quaking I stood my ground more times than not when Fearless called on me.

Possibly his strongest quality was calling out the strength in people around him.

“And I’m gonna need that strength too,” I said to myself, thinking that if Kit Mitchell went off one day and then didn’t come back, the reason was more likely foul play than him running out on the rent.

While I was having these thoughts a soft knocking came at the door.

21

MY HEART SKIPPED AND I STOOD UP from the chair. I opened the window and looked out to see if there was a way down to the street from the roof. There was a drainpipe at the end of a sloping tar paper flange. I weighed under one-thirty, so if anybody ever worked up there, then I could certainly scurry across.

For a moment I considered running but then I took a deep breath. It was probably just Miss Moore coming to tell me about dinner or to make sure that I hadn’t found anything valuable between the mattresses or from some ledge that she was too short to examine.

“Kit?” a woman’s small voice called.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Who is that?” she replied.

For a moment I forgot my alias, so instead I opened the door.

The woman and her voice had very little in common. She was large and curvaceous, with dark olive skin.

“Who are you?” she asked with a hint of disdain.

“Thad,” I said, remembering as I spoke. “Thad Hendricks. I took over the room since the last man didn’t come back.”

“That bitch,” the woman hissed. “Kit might be dead or in some hospital somewhere, and all she care about is her twelve dollars.”

“Is that who used to be in here?” I asked. “I thought it was a man named Mitchell.”

“That’s Kit’s last name,” the young woman replied. Then she smiled. A smile on her face was like the morning sun’s first rays on a mountainside. One moment she was dark and uninviting and the next she was a breathtaking beauty.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Charlotta.”

“I heard about you,” I said.

“From who?”

“Fella named Conroy. Said you stole his bathwater.”

“That fat fool. Somebody need to shut him up. Always complainin’ ’bout everybody, spreadin’ lies an’ stuff. What else he tell you about me?”

“Just about the bathwater,” I said, “and that you picked his pocket or somethin’ like that.”

“Them high-yellah niggahs run around thinkin’ their shit don’t stink and everybody wants what they got. You know the only thing in his pockets is past-due bills and a busted watch. Now who would wanna take that?”

“What’s your last name, Charlotta?” I asked.

“Netters. I’m from the Tennessee Netters. Where you from, Mr. Hendricks?”

Charlotta’s words were merely a question, but her tone and expression, even the way she stood, held the offer of something that kindled a spark way down in the pit of my stomach.

“I’m a Louisiana boy,” I said. “Down where the peppers burn out your mouth and the gators grab children right offa their swings.”

“I love hot food,” she said, with a lingering emphasis on the word love.

I reached out with a single finger, touching her forearm ever so slightly.

“And I love spicy women,” I said.

Charlotta speculated on the sensitivity of my touch.

“You wanna go down and get some dinner?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “But I think I might need my strength.”

We walked side by side down the stairs and through the hallway. She bumped up against me now and then, not by mistake. When we got to the dining room all the seats but two were taken, and they were not together. I went to a chair between an older woman and a young man, while Charlotta made her way to a seat on the opposite side. She caught my eye now and then, smiling and pushing out her already protruding lips.

Miss Moore sat at the head of the table while a young girl of thirteen or fourteen brought out the food on large serving trays. People were talking amongst themselves softly. The room was filled with the aroma of buttermilk biscuits that had been brought out and placed along the center of the table in three baskets. Miss Moore hardly had to raise her voice to get their attention.