“. . . kick your ass, peckahwood,” he was saying.
There was a smallish white kid in front of him trying to stand up straight and retreat at the same time.
I immediately identified with the kid because I would have been in his position in that confrontation.
“Watch yourself, man,” Fearless whispered to me. “I’m’a go ovah there.”
Over there. The conflict was coming down two and a half steps from our bunk. Most of the men in the room were black. After that came three Mexicans and two other white guys. No one else in that cell was going to stand up for the white kid. No one else would have stood up for me.
“Kick his ass, Leo,” somebody said.
Leo socked the kid in the face, and I was amazed that the white boy didn’t go down. He leaned over like a reed in a windstorm and he began bleeding from a cut that opened over his eye. But the kid stood back up. Leo grinned. And then Fearless, the Lancelot of South L.A., stood between them. He put up his hands and shook his head, and the fight was over—just like that.
He brought the boy over to bleed on our blankets.
“I coulda taken him,” the kid said. He was actually smaller and skinnier than me, pale as a newborn luna moth. “Nigger wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have his friends with ’im.”
“What’s your name, son?” Fearless, not thirty-five himself, asked.
“Loren.”
“Loren, call the man a bastard, a motherfucker, a pussy if you want to, but when you call him a nigger you call me one, and, brother, I am a whole other kinda pain.”
“All I did was ask a man to read somethin’ for me,” Loren said. “I got this paper in my pocket and I don’t have my glasses. It’s from my auntie an’ she hates me so I know somethin’ bad had to happen. This dude Chapman said that he didn’t wanna hear a word outta none’a the white people.”
“Chapman,” I said. “Was that the guy hit you?”
“Naw. Chapman got called in for questioning. That motherfucker was his friend.”
“You got the paper?” I asked the kid.
He reached down into his pants and pulled a small pink envelope out of his drawers.
I took it anyway.
I can’t reproduce the letter here because it was far too long: five pages of tiny chicken scratches written in the grammar of some foreign land. The first page listed the reasons that Belldie, Loren’s aunt, hadn’t written him before. One, which I didn’t read out loud, was that the boy was illiterate. There was also a theft committed, a pregnancy he caused, an incident in church that she didn’t explain, and then there was the boy’s temper and his steadfast refusal to work. After that there came three pages of accolades for Loren’s parents and his brother Jimmy.
It was only on the last page that Belldie, in minute detail, described the collision between his parents’ pickup truck and the Sun Oil truck on the highway near their farm. Jimmy was with them and now they were all with the Lord.
The funeral had been held a week later. The letter was dated six months earlier.
Loren was at our feet dripping tears and blood on the floor.
Damn. Even when I remember that letter I realize how bad some people have it. There was that white boy made a punk by black men in an inescapable cell, holding a letter about the deaths of his folks. A letter written by blood that hated him. It might have been tough being a black man in America, but I wouldn’t have traded shoes with Loren—no, sir.
Toward the end of my reading of Loren’s letter the cell door came open and another prisoner was added to the overcrowded room. When Loren fell to the ground crying, someone shouted, “What?” and I thought I had an inkling of who the new inmate might be.
A big man stormed up to us. He was light colored like granite with brownish lichen growing on it. He was big and muscular.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked Fearless as Fearless rose to the meeting.
“Fearless Jones,” my friend said with no particular sense of pride.
The granite man gave a flinty smile. “I heard’a you. Yeah. I heard’a you. Mothahfuckahs always talkin’ ’bout how bad you are. Huh. My name’s Chapman Grey. I’m a light heavyweight. Do you think you can kick my butt like these punk-ass niggahs think you sumpin’?”
The grammar didn’t quite hold together, but Chapman posed an interesting question. Could Fearless stand up against a professional?
It took me seventeen seconds to find out.
Before Fearless could reply, Chapman hit him with a stiff right jab. He followed that with a right cross that sent my friend falling against the bunk.
That was one second.
Chapman pressed his advantage, coming in on Fearless with a body barrage of six or seven blows.
That took care of seconds two and three.
Fearless pushed against the rock-hard boxer, propelling himself away. The crowd around moved out from the fray. Chapman grinned and strode forward.
By then we were up to second eight.
Chapman hit Fearless in the jaw with a right hook that would have killed me and anyone standing behind me. Fearless was thrown back but not down.
I could hear the guards outside the cell shouting.
By the time Chapman was stalking Fearless again, ten seconds had passed. He threw a straight right, but Fearless stepped to the left and hooked his right arm over Chapman’s. He twisted around once, throwing the boxer off balance, and then hurled Grey into the bars of our cell. Fearless moved forward then, hitting Grey in the diaphragm, the groin, and the throat. He didn’t use all of his strength, but he definitely incapacitated the boxer.
By the seventeenth second, Grey was unconscious on a cot and Fearless was walking back to his corner.
Grey’s question had been answered definitively. In the ring he would have torn Fearless up. But out in the real world he had better watch out.
29
LOREN CRIED ALL THROUGH the altercation. By the time the guards came, the fight was over. Things settled down, and I sat there thinking how the life I was living would be better in the remembering than it was while it was going on.
Fearless, definitely the nicest and kindest person I knew, would fight at the drop of a hat. If he were a white guy living in the middle-class world, he would have been exactly the same, but there would never be a reason for him to fight. But we were poor and black and so either we fought or we lost ground. That’s all there was to it.
Despite the smell of sweat and urine, despite the blood and tears on my cot, I still felt more secure than I had for many days. While Fearless listened to Loren talk about how much he loved his mother, I lay back and closed my eyes.
The nimbus Sleep sensed my repose and began slowly to drift in my direction.
“Minton, Paris,” someone shouted, and Sleep scurried away to the corner where she resided next to Death and Despair.
“That’s me,” I said, rising from my bunk.
“Come with me,” a man in a suit said. He was accompanied by two large policemen. Each of them took an arm as they led me through the labyrinth of the Seventy-seventh Street precinct.
We came finally to a small door, a really small door. I remember thinking that due to some mistake in planning, this door and the room it led to had to be cut down in size. I could walk through with no difficulty at all, but I was six inches below six feet. The men holding my arms had to duck to get through, their heads nearly grazing the ceiling of the room we entered.
Two fat detectives were waiting in there. One wore a suit that was too green to be a suit and the other wore a suit of spotted gray, though I don’t think the spots were intentional. They were both white men, but that goes without saying; all detectives were white men back then. They were the detectives and I was there to be detected.
“Mr. Minton?” Green Suit asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Have a seat.”
I sat on a wooden stool placed on the other side of the table from the detectives. The men who had brought me there le
ft without being asked.
The game began in earnest then. The goals of this particular sport were different on the opposite sides of the table. For the detectives to win they’d have to get me to admit to certain suppositions that they would posit. For me not to lose I’d have to avoid admission while keeping from being damaged beyond repair in the process.
“Tony Jarman,” Spotty said. It was like a low ante in a high-stakes poker game.
I knew what he wanted me to say, but I squinted and cocked my head to the side. What?
“Don’t fuck with us, Minton,” Green Suit said.
“I don’t know no Jarman, man. What could I tell you?”
“Mad Anthony,” Spotty amended.
“Oh,” I said, but my expression said, Uh-oh, so you know about that?
“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.
30
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.
“So you got taken off to jail an’ that devil girl took off with Hearts?” Nadine asked us.
“We couldn’t help gettin’ arrested,” I said.
“Hm.”
“Does my aunt have your phone number?” I asked then.
“Of course.”
“And she haven’t called?”
“Wouldn’t I tell you if she did?”
“Nadine,” I asked. “Could you stay home from work today?”
“What?” she gasped. You would have thought I’d asked her to take off her clothes and lie out on the bed.
“My aunt may call you,” I said calmly. “She might be in trouble. If you aren’t here when she calls, we might miss the only chance we have to help her.”
“I use my job to pay the rent,” Nadine explained.
“You have sick days.”
“But I’m not sick.”
I’m so used to people who steal and cheat and lie that when I’m faced with someone like Nadine I’m thrown off balance. Nadine would have walked a city mile to return an extra nickel she got in change from a fifty-dollar transaction. Her idea of life was to look back over all the decades of work and play and be able to say that she never did a wrong thing or took advantage of a single soul. She’d turn on Jesus if he broke a commandment, wouldn’t have a choice.
Fear of the Dark Page 15
