Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

“Why I wanna go an’ do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, making a big gesture with my hands. “I mean, I thought you was all worried that he might be in the hospital or dead. Maybe if you found out somethin’ from this friend’a his then maybe Miss Moore wouldn’t be so fast to give away his room.”

I could see that Charlotta hadn’t considered looking for Kit herself. She was a fair-weather friend; glad to drink your whiskey and lie in your bed, but not concerned with washing the sheets or ironing your shirt for work the next morning.

“Why you so worried about Kit in the first place?” she asked me. “He ain’t blood to you.”

I had pushed as far as I could without taking Charlotta into my confidence. So I decided to let it go.

“You right, baby,” I said. “Why I wanna be all in some man’s business when I ain’t never even met him, and here I got a beautiful woman lyin’ in my bed?”

I let my fingers trail over her nipples and a ripple of pleasure went down her body.

“Yeah,” she said, urging me on and agreeing with the same word. “Why you wanna be worried about BB when you here with me?”

My heart was already thumping. Charlotta’s fingers were tickling my thigh. But I had to pull away.

“You not talkin’ about Bartholomew Perry?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“Always hang around with white girls? His father sells used cars?”

“That’s him.”

“He owe me fifty dollars,” I declared. “Fifty.”

“Over what?”

“He was out with some white girl, at the Python Club. She wanted champagne for her and her girlfriends, and the niggah just had to act all big and say okay. You know he wanted to get in her drawers so bad you could smell it.”

Charlotta hummed her disapproval at BB’s depravity.

“Anyway,” I said. “He didn’t have the cash, and they don’t take personal checks at the Python because they get stuck with a service charge if it bounce. So I ponied up the forty-two bucks I got paid that afternoon and BB promised to pay me back fifty. That was six months ago at least. You know I called the mothahfuckah but he moved. I went to his father but he told me he didn’t keep up with his son. Fifty dollars.”

I was sinking deeper and deeper into the role I had made for myself. The cursing might have disturbed Charlotta, but she had to believe in who she was talking to.

“I thought you said you was from up north?” Charlotta asked then.

“You thought my name was Thad too,” I said. “I just told Miss Moore that so nobody would know who I am. Them men after me want some money. But you know, if I could get that fifty dollars I might be able to buy me a few more days.”

“I don’t know,” she said suspiciously. “Here you in Kit’s room and you just happen to know his friend . . .”

“I know a lotta peoples,” I said. “And that mothahfuckah BB owe me fifty dollars.”

“How much you owe them men?”

“Three hunnert dollars.”

“How much would you pay if you could get to BB?”

“Pay? Nuthin’. Shit, I need every penny. Even if I turn over the whole thing, it might just only buy me a week as it is.”

“You could give me twenty and take the rest and leave town. The fifty ain’t gonna help anyways, and you only got two dollars in your billfold.”

“If I’ma leave town I’ma need more than thirty-two dollars,” I reasoned. “Bus ticket to San Diego cost eight forty-five. Then I need to pay for a room till I get a job.”

“If you don’t find BB you only got two bucks,” she reminded me.

“You know where he is?”

“Maybe.”

“I could give you fifteen, Charlotta. That’s a lot for just a couple’a words.”

She pretended to consider my offer. I could have talked her down to five bucks, but it was all make-believe anyway. Why not be generous with a payoff that would never come?

“Okay,” she said. “But only ’cause you so sweet. Ooo, look. All that talk about money made you hard again.”

She was right.

“You wanna lie back down a little while?” I asked her.

“No, baby,” she said. She stood up too. “I got to get up early to get to work.”

“What am I gonna do about this?”

“Either take care of it yourself,” she said with a sympathetic smile, “or wait till tomorrow afternoon when I get home with BB’s numbers.”

“You don’t have ’em in your room?”

“Uh-uh. No. But I know somebody prob’ly know where he is.”

She looked down on my hopeless excitement and issued a deep grunt of appreciation. Then she walked out the door, leaving me to the foolishness of manhood.

23

I LAY BACK IN THE BED afterCharlotta left. It had been a good night’s work. Even if it was only loving that young woman, it would have been worth it. She was right, I hadn’t been with a woman in over four months. I didn’t like the clubs because they were too loud, and I couldn’t keep a girlfriend because I didn’t make much money selling books and my favorite pastime was sitting alone and reading. Women lived with me the same way that they’d go on a vacation: after a week or two they were ready to get back to the lives they knew and loved.

The truth was that I had become a man of moderate means after my last adventure with Fearless. I owned my building and had money in the bank, but I never bragged to anyone about it. I loved my little business and I would have been selling books for a nickel profit even if I had to do it off the back of a truck. That being true, I thought that any woman who wanted to be with me had to believe in the man she saw.

Sometimes I went out to a few nightspots with Fearless. Women gathered around him, and so if I was somewhere in the neighborhood there was always the chance that some lonely girl would take me in for the ride home.

But going out with Fearless often turned out to be a dangerous undertaking. There were always rough men in the bars around Watts. Rough men often do things that might be seen as rude or intimidating. And Fearless would not suffer a bully. So what might have been a night of drinking, laughter, and women often ended up as a ride in the back of a police wagon.

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN in the morning, so I decided to search the room while I had the chance. I went through every drawer and looked under the bed. I searched the closets, cabinets, and windowsills, and crawled around on my hands and knees looking for a loose board or nail. I pulled down the window shades, thinking that he might have taped some note somewhere on the roll. I did the best job of searching that any detective would ever execute. And the only thing I could say when I was finished was that Kit Mitchell didn’t hide a thing in his rented room.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER I WAS STILL THINKING of Charlotta’s sweet kisses. I considered easing the pressure by pleasuring myself, but after being with a real woman for the first time in months I didn’t have much heart for it.

It was almost one A.M. when I remembered the bookcase downstairs.

Nobody was awake in the big, rambling house. They were all working people who were up before the sun each morning. And when they worked they worked hard. Even Charlotta had to go off to bed before eleven.

I TURNED ON A SMALL LAMP and pulled a burgundy hassock up to the double shelf.

Most of the books were romances and westerns. There were a few magazines stacked on the bottom shelf, Life and Men at War made up the most of them. A lot of the books were old and smelled of decaying paper. I loved that smell. Ever since I was a child that odor meant excitement and knowledge.

I found one interesting novel written by a man with the unlikely name of Amos Amso. The book was called Night Man . It was the story of a man who conducted his life only at night. He slept in the daytime and kept all of the shades and curtains in his house tightly drawn during the daylight hours. He’d had many jobs. Once he worked for the phone company as an emergency technician, then as an operator. Later he got a job as a cook in a twenty-four-hour restaurant in a downtown San Francisco hotel. Whenever any employer tried to change his position to some hour that bordered on morning or sunset, he’d quit and look for something else. He rarely saw his family or made professional appointments. He hired a man to impersonate him when he had to show up for important meetings that could only be scheduled during the day. When he wasn’t working, he took long walks in the wee hours, noting the furtive and feral life that lived beyond the hell of the sun.