Fear Itself - Walter Mosley

“That don’t sound like much.”

“Out of fifty thousand that’s over twelve hundred dollars.”

“Oh,” I said. “Damn. Well, let me ask around and see if I can come up with something.”

Timmerman grinned again. “Can I use your toilet, Mr. Minton?”

“Sorry, but I got a girlfriend in the nude back there. Well, she’s not exactly a girlfriend. I mean, we just met each other last night. There’s not too much privacy and I don’t wanna get her all upset with some big man walkin’ in. You see what I mean.”

We were both liars. Almost everything we’d said to each other was a lie.

He nodded, looked up over my head again. I got the feeling that he wanted to catch a glimpse of a naked black girl.

“Well,” he said, still hesitating, still looking for a way in. “You have my number.”

The big man in the poorly chosen clothes walked away, taking the six wooden stairs of my front porch in two strides.

“Mr. Timmerman.”

“Yes, Mr. Minton.”

“Fearless got a lotta friends. How come you came to me?”

The white man looked at me a moment. He was trying to figure out where I stood in his business.

“Sweet,” he said at last. “Milo Sweet was listed as a contact for Mr. Jones. When I went to him he gave me your name.”

It was time for me to think. Was the bail bondsman holding paper on Fearless? Was that why Fearless was on the run?

No. Fearless wouldn’t lie to me. Not unless it was to protect me, or maybe he was protecting someone else. No. The story was too complex for his style of lying. Fearless’s lies were no longer than a few sentences, sometimes no more than a word or two.

“Good-bye, Mr. Minton,” the man who said he was in insurance said. “Call me the minute you hear from Mr. Jones. Time is money, you know.”

He crossed the street, climbed into a brand-new, maroon-colored Pontiac, and drove off.

“Who was he?” Fearless asked at my back.

I hadn’t heard him come up behind me but that was no surprise. Fearless’s job in World War II was to get behind German lines at night and “neutralize” any military man or operation that he came across.

“I don’t know,” I said. I closed the door and walked back toward the porch. “But he said that Milo gave him my name so that he could ask me about you.”

“Me?”

I went back to the kitchen to fix breakfast, but when I got there I realized that my appetite had gone with Theodore T. Timmerman.

“Did you jump bail, Fearless?”

“No.”

“Does Milo have any reason to be after you?”

Fearless shook his head.

“He said his name was Timmerman, Theodore. You ever heard of him?”

Fearless could exhibit the blankest stare imaginable.

“He said that you inherited some money,” I said. “You got any rich relatives or friends that care for you like that?”

The ex-assassin hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe.”

“Probably not.”

“Why you say that, Paris?”

“He called you Fearless, not Tristan. Seems to me that anybody care enough about you to leave you fifty thousand dollars would at least know your legal name.”

“Fifty thousand. Damn. I hope you wrong, Paris. You know I been lookin’ for fifty thousand dollars my whole life.”

That made me laugh. Fearless joined in. I pulled a box of Shredded Wheat from a shelf on the wall and some milk out of the ice chest that stood in for the refrigerator I planned to buy one day.

After we sat down to breakfast I started asking questions in earnest.

Questions is what I do. I read my first book two weeks after learning the alphabet. It wasn’t that I was smarter than anybody else, but it’s just that I wanted to know anything that was hidden from me. My mother used to offer me candy if I’d be quiet for just ten minutes. But I could never stop asking why this and why that, not until I learned how to read.

Somebody might think that a man who’s always probing—putting his nose where it doesn’t belong, as my mother says—would be somewhat brave. But that couldn’t be further from the truth about me. I’m afraid of rodents and birds, bald tires, fire, and loud noises. Any building I’ve ever been in I know all of the exits. And I’ve been known to jump up out of a sound sleep when hearing a footstep from the floor below.

That’s why I own a bookstore full of books, so that all my questioning can be done quietly and alone. I didn’t want to ask questions about Fearless’s whereabouts or activities. But after that big white man showed up at my door, I needed to know if my friend’s problems were going to spill over onto me.

5

“. . . NO, PARIS,” FEARLESS SAID. “I told you all I know about it. Leora and Son were lookin’ for Kit, and the next thing I know the cops are askin’ around about me.”

“And you haven’t talked to Milo in two months?”

“Maybe three,” he said. “Last time I saw Milo was at The Nest. He was there with a nice-lookin’ woman. I think her last name was Pine.”

“What about Kit?” I asked. “Did you find out anything else about him?”

I had asked it all before, but I’d learned from long experience that Fearless didn’t have a straightforward way of thinking. He never remembered everything all at once. I asked him questions the same way the police questioned a suspect: with the hope of finding what wasn’t there rather than what was.

Fearless rubbed his hand over the top of his head. His ideas, though often deep and insightful, came from a place that he had very little control over. If you asked him, “How did you know that man was going to pull out a knife?” he might utter some nonsense like, “It was the way he lifted his chin when he saw me walk in the room.”

“Somebody said about the Redcap Saloon,” Fearless said.

“O’Brien’s Bar?”

“Yeah.”

“Who said about it?”

“It was that man Pete.”

“Dark-colored guy?” I asked.

“Naw. Yellah. High yellah at that. Him an’ Kit was friends. At least I seen ’em together more’n once. Pete’s got a hot dog cart over in MacArthur’s Park. I asked him if he’d seen Kit and he said about the Redcap Saloon.”

“Maybe we better go over there and see what we can see.”

Fearless grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Paris. We connected at the hip, you an’ me.”

“Unless they put you up on the gallows, unless that.”

“It ain’t gonna go that far, Paris. Naw, man. It’s probably just some questions them cops want answerin’. ’Cause you know I ain’t even broke a sweat in over a month.”

“What about that white man lyin’ an’ lookin’ for you?” I asked.

“Who knows? Maybe he don’t have nuthin’ to do with it.”

“Anyway,” I said. “Let’s be careful. You go out and climb the back fence. I’ll pick you up in five.”

Fearless just nodded. He went out the screen door, which I latched behind him.

***

MY FORD WAS A SICKLY BROWN COLOR that might have gone well with Theodore Timmerman’s suit. But that was all right, because the poor paint job helped cut down on the price. It was a used 1948 model and only cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. It ran well and gas was cheap, so transportation was no problem at all. I pulled around Mace and drove up the alley between Seventy-first Place and Florence. Fearless was nowhere to be seen as I approached, but when I got to the back of my place he jumped out, opened the passenger’s door, and hopped into the seat like an eel gliding into a resting place between stones.

After a few blocks Fearless said, “It’s nice to be ridin’ again. You know it took me so long to get to your place last night ’cause I had to walk.”

“You don’t even have bus fare?”

“Not right now, Paris. You know the day Kit skipped out was my payday.”

“I can’t believe it. Don’t you have a bank account?”

“What for? I make money and I spend it.”

“But you don’t have anything.”

“I got as much as any other man, more than many.”

If anybody ever wrote a book about our friendship they would have called it The Businessman and the Anarchist. Fearless lived from day to day and here to there. His life in California was the dream that so many others had been shattered by. One night he slept on the beach, snoring by moonlight, and then he’d spend a week lying in some pretty girl’s bed. If he had to work he could swing a twelve-pound hammer all day long. And if work was scarce he’d catch a dozen sand dabs from a borrowed canoe, come over to my house, and trade that succulent entrée for a few nights on my front room sofa.

O’BRIEN’S WAS UP ON COCKBARROW, a few blocks from the train station. The entrance was no wider than a doorway, and the sign could have been for a professional office rather than a bar. But once you got past the short hall you entered a large room built around the remnants of a large brick oven that had once been used to make bread for Martinson’s Bakery in the twenties.

The oven had been twelve feet in diameter. Hampton James, the bar’s owner, cut the bricks down to waist level and installed a circular mahogany bar around the inside. On busy days he had as many as four bartenders working back to back, serving the colored employees of the railroads.

O’Brien’s was the place that colored train professionals patronized. All porters, waiters, restroom attendants, and redcaps went there when the shift was finished or when a layover began. There were a dozen cots in a back room where, for three bucks, a porter could get a nap before heading off on the next outbound train.

There were no windows in the walls but the roof was one big skylight, and so the room was exceptionally sunny. Hampton used the exhaust fans left over from the bakery to keep the place at a reasonable temperature. And he had a red piano on a wide dais for one jazzman or another to keep the mood cool.

Hampton was the only bartender working at that time of morning. A solitary customer sat at the bar. That patron was dressed in a porter’s uniform, drinking coffee.

“Hampton,” I said as Fearless and I approached.

He winced, straining to find my name, and then said, “Paris, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What you boys drinkin’?”

“That coffee smells good.”

If it had been later Hampton would have told us to go to a diner. But he was just getting warmed up at eight-thirty. We could have ordered ice water and he wouldn’t have cared.

“Regular?” he asked.

Regular in California meant sugar and milk, so I said, “Black.”

“Nuthin’ for me,” Fearless added.

“You’re Fearless Jones, right?” Hampton James asked.

“Yes sir.”

Hampton was a nearly perfect specimen of manhood. He was five eleven with maple-brown skin. He was wide in the shoulder, with only ten pounds more than he needed on his frame. He had a small scar under his left eye and eyebrows that even a vain woman wouldn’t have touched up. His lips were generous and sculpted. And his oiled hair was combed back in perfect waves in the way that Hindu Indians draw hair on their deities.

“I saw you get in a fight one night down on Hooper,” Hampton said to Fearless. “Down at the Dawson’s Market.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you remember?” Hampton asked.

“Did I win it?”

“Oh yeah. Yes you did. It was a big dude named Stern but you put him down and they had to carry him off.”

“I don’t remember any fights but the ones I lost,” Fearless said in a rare show of pride.

“How many you remember?”

“None comes to mind.”

Hampton had a sharp laugh, like the chatter of a dozen angry wrens. I laid down two dimes for my twelve-cent coffee. He pocketed them, keeping the change for his tip.

“What you boys want?” Hampton asked. He was looking at me.

“Why you think we want anything other than coffee?” I asked him.

“No Negroes drop in here for coffee, brother. An’ even if they did, it’s cause they work for the trains. Any civilian knows about my door would come at night or on his way to someplace else.”

“We could be on the road somewhere,” I speculated.

Hampton looked at my clothes, which were only made for working, and shook his head.

“Dressed like that,” he said. “And with not even a valise between you. I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “You right. The reason we’ve come is that Fearless here owes me twenty dollars.”

“So?”

“He don’t have it, but he told me that his friend Kit owed him for a week’s work he did out in Oxnard. Kit was supposed to pay him Wednesday last but he never showed up.”

Hampton’s only imperfect features were his eyes. They weren’t set deep into his head like most people’s. They were right out there competing with his nose for facial real estate. As a result even I could easily read the hesitation when it entered his gaze.

“What’s all that got to do with me?”

“Light-colored man name of Pete,” I said. “You know, he has a hot dog cart downtown. He said that he’d seen Kit in here more than once.”

“Kit who?”

“Mitchell,” Fearless said. “Kit Mitchell. Sometimes they call him Mitch. One’a his front teeth is capped in silver.”

It was always good to ask questions when in the company of Fearless Jones. Women liked answering him because of his raw power and sleek appearance. Men stopped at the power. They didn’t know that a man as dangerous as Fearless would never bully his way through life. All they knew was that if they had that kind of strength and skill they’d never take no for an answer again.

“I don’t know really anything,” Hampton James said. “I mean, Kit ain’t been in here since he started that watermelon business. But I heard from one of the bar girls that he took her up to a room he had at the Bernard Arms over on Fountain.”

“Sounds like a white place,” I said.

“Yeah,” the bar owner said. “That’s why she was talkin’ about it. She said that he went in an’ asked for Hercules and they showed him up to a penthouse apartment that was all nice with a stocked bar and everything.”

“Hercules?”

“That’s what she said.”

The bartender glanced at the porter and moved in that direction. He seemed worried. Looking at him, that all but perfect sampling of humanity sidling away fearfully, gave me my third chill of the day. It was as if he were scuttling away from some danger that was coming up from behind me. The feeling was so strong that I turned around.

There sat Fearless Jones, staring up innocently at the skylight.

6

MY EYES WERE WATERING and I couldn’t stop yawning by the time Fearless and I got to Ambrosia Childress’s house. We went to the front door together because I needed her phone number to stay in touch with my friend.

She answered in a bathrobe that was open just enough to snap me out of my lethargy. She had deep chocolate skin, dark red lips, and bright brown eyes. When she looked at Fearless her lips parted.