Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

The only two things that I was proud of consistently were that I could eat anything and never gain an ounce and that I’m extremely well endowed in the sexual organ sort of way. My manhood was questionable as far as courage or strength, but once in the bed I could out-joust the best of them.

I once thought that all I had to be was slender and sexually imposing and women would love me for that alone. But I realized as time went on that women, though they were often excited by my size, got used to it pretty quickly and were willing to leave me for what I thought were lesser men.

I guess I was thinking about Fearless. He was with a woman right then, and there I was eating a chili burger at four-thirty in the morning.

Sal Grimaldi, the night manager of John-John’s, liked to play chess. He pulled out his small wooden board and sat across from me in the courtyard space that they covered with canvas on a cold night like that. He said that I looked tired and maybe he could beat me.

He couldn’t. Grimaldi was a white guy from outside of Barre, Vermont. He always loved telling me that he had never even seen a Negro until after his twenty-first birthday.

“I mean,” he said more than once, “I knew you guys existed in theory, but seeing a real black man shocked the shit out of me the first time.”

I believed him. Over the years I had come to realize that people who had no experience with each other rarely hated with the vehemence that I had experienced from some southerners. Sal didn’t have any preconceptions about blacks. Because of that he was critical in ways that other people weren’t. He loved to talk to me about how he didn’t understand why Negroes didn’t make more out of themselves.

“I mean, why don’t you guys just go to school and buy the businesses and take over your own communities like the Catholics and the Jews?” he’d ask.

He didn’t believe that racism existed except in the southern fraternities. He was a nice guy, but just like the libraries of the North and South, he had very little information about me.

I BEAT SAL seven games straight. It took until just after nine. He stayed to play out the last game when the breakfast man came in. He wasn’t perturbed at losing to a Negro, and so I felt friendly toward him. Sometimes it’s just a little something that makes a man feel good.

I was exhausted, but I never liked to sleep in the daytime. And even if I’d wanted to take a nap, the only options for a bed I had were the backseat of Layla’s car or the upstairs bedroom at Fanny Tannenbaum’s house. Both of those choices had serious disadvantages. If the police found me curled up in the backseat of a car I didn’t own, they could take me to jail for vagrancy or worse. Fanny’s was no safer; Leon Douglas or at least one of his friends had already been there once.

I went over to a small shoeshine-and-magazine stand on Florence. I hung around there a couple of hours reading Jet magazine and shooting the breeze with a few other men like me, men who were between here and there. For a couple of hours I loitered, joking with those young men. I was free of bookstores and killers and ladies so beautiful that they could make you bleed. It was another world, where there were good laughs and no immediate danger, where nothing was different from yesterday and tomorrow promised the same.

15

WHEN I PULLED UP in front of the Greenspan house it was almost eleven o’clock. My intention was to take Fanny back home and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. I was so tired that I wasn’t even afraid of running into Leon Douglas.

Gella came to the door all awkward and timid, ready to run.

“Mr. Minton?” she said.

“I came by for Fanny,” I told the girl. She wore a medium gray dress cut from coarse material with dark gray buttons up the middle. The sagging hem came down to her shins. It was a dowdy dress without style or promise. I couldn’t understand who would make such an ugly piece of clothing, who would sell it, much less walk into some store and decide that this was the rag they wanted to hang on their shoulders.

“She went home early this morning,” Gella said, half grinning, half looking away.

“She walk?”

“Morris drove her when he went to work.” She couldn’t help but smile and puff up a little when saying her lard-bottomed husband’s name. “I’m going over there now myself. We’re going to visit Uncle Sol.”

“I’ll follow you,” I said. “Maybe Fearless is over there too.”

“He wasn’t when I called.”

“When was that?”

“About seven-fifteen. I called to make sure that everything was okay.”

Fanny’s husband was just out of prison and in the hospital with knife wounds inflicted by a criminal who was still on the loose — and her niece calls to ask is everything okay. I could see why that old woman turned to Fearless and me for help.

GELLA PARKED in the driveway, and I pulled up to the curb. By the time I got to the front door, she’d had enough time to ring the bell and knock.

“Nice day,” I said while we waited for Fanny to answer.

“What? Oh yes. Yes it is nice.” She pressed the doorbell again.

I could hear the three short notes, then the long tone — then an even longer silence. Gella looked at me, and I tried to look unconcerned.

“She probably in the bathtub or something,” I said.

“Aunt Hedva never bathes in the daytime,” Gella pronounced with all the weight of a hanging judge.

I took out the key Fanny had given me and used it in the lock. When I pushed the door open the girl ran in.

“Hedva! Fanny!” She ran up the stairs in great galloping bounds.

I wandered into the den. For some reason I expected her to be there.

Her foot, half in a blue canvas shoe, was visible from around the cushioned chair.

“She’s here,” I said loudly enough for Gella to hear.

I didn’t move. Gella’s heavy feet hurried quickly to the stairs and down. When she got to my side she froze.

The wail from Fanny’s niece was enough to break anybody’s heart. She threw the chair aside and fell in a heap next to the corpse. There was no question about Fanny being dead. Her small face was a dark blue, and her tongue protruded. She looked like some demented soul from an old Bosch painting.

I moved backward and lowered myself toward the chair. But the chair wasn’t where I remembered it, so I fell to the floor. It didn’t bother me to sit there, flat on my ass.

As I said before, I’ve been around hard times, but the death of that tiny woman who had taken me in without the slightest hesitation hit me hard. It was like I was groggy or something. I crawled over to Gella and put my hands on her shoulders. She rose and we held each other, her for a shoulder to cry on and me so I didn’t fall again.

“What can we do?” she wailed.

“Cops,” I said. “Call ’em.”

She went to use the phone in the kitchen while I remained, silent witness to an old woman’s death. From various windows sunlight poured into the rooms. Blobs of light and hard-lined shadows were everywhere. Birds were singing. Cars going up and down the street made the sounds of rushing wind. There was a mambo band playing on a radio somewhere down the block. I wouldn’t have heard any of it if it weren’t for the silence imposed by death.

Gella came back into the room. When she saw Fanny she fell to her knees again.

“There’s nothing we can do until they get here,” I told her. “Why?” she asked me.

I was looking at her, trying to think if there was an answer in the world to fit that question. My mouth opened and I was about to say something, but I had no idea what.