As bad as I felt, I was still able to beat Brown. That gave me hope. Maybe fear gave me clarity.
“Another game?” Brown asked.
“You good, man,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
Brown stuck his tongue in his cheek and smiled. The grin stopped at his mouth, his eyes bearing no relation to mirth. That’s how it was for so many displaced southern, and even midwestern, Negroes in those days. Coming to California, they had to dig out from under nearly a century of white oppression. Everybody, black and white, was a potential enemy. People that had been mired so deeply in poverty that that’s all they could ever expect. And so when faced with hope, many became distant and watchful. Even when relaxing, people like Brown were on guard, ready for any threat.
“MR. HENDRICKS,” CHARLOTTA CALLED AT MY BACK.
I was halfway down the hall, headed for my room. You know I had to be shaken by that news report to have forgotten her in the sitting room.
“Hey.”
“Did you forget our drink?”
“No, baby,” I said. “I just didn’t want to give people the wrong idea. I mean, what would it look like if I just walked up to you and said let’s go upstairs?”
Charlotta was slightly taller than I and a few pounds heavier. She pressed me up against the wall and kissed me, hard. She knew how to kiss. The worry was still in my head but all the details fell away. When she stepped back to see my reaction, she had a smile on her face. I took a stutter step to keep on my feet.
“I like bein’ treated like a lady,” she said.
We kissed down the hall and up the wide stairway. It took me three minutes to unlock the door because Charlotta had worked her hand down the front of my pants. When she found what she was searching for her eyes opened wide.
“Is that real?” she asked me.
“Does it feel real?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it is.”
There are only three things that I’ve ever had pride in: my intelligence, my bookstore, and my sexual endowment.
Charlotta and I barely made it to the bed. Once there, we hardly let go of each other.
Somewhere in the middle of our passion I realized how much I needed the release. It wasn’t lovemaking, but that was all right. I needed to be pushed around in a situation where I could push back. She didn’t need to love me but just what I was doing—how hard and how long.
“Again,” she whispered for the third time.
“You got to gimme a couple’a minutes, girl,” I said. “Just a couple.”
Charlotta smiled at me. She held both physical love and victory in her mien. It was a battle I didn’t mind losing.
I got up and lit two cigarettes, placing one of them between her lips. Then I lay down, putting my head on her thigh. We smoked for a while in the afterglow of our passion.
“You used to come up here when Kit had this room, huh?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.
“What you mean by that?” She flexed the hard muscle of her leg.
“Nuthin’ really,” I said. “I mean, it’s just that when I opened that door and looked at you, I thought that whoever it was you were comin’ to see was a lucky man.”
“Oh.” Charlotta’s leg relaxed. “You don’t have to be jealous, Paris.”
“Wha, what did you call me?”
“That’s what your driver’s license says your name is.”
I had only gone to the toilet once since we’d been together. I couldn’t have been out of the room for more than a few minutes.
“Yeah, well, you know, honey. Sometimes a man needs to be a little on the sly. I know I told Miss Moore I was marrying somebody, but really I’m tryin’ to get away from some guys wanna do me harm.”
“I knew it,” Charlotta said.
“How you gonna know all that?” I asked just to put her a little on the defensive.
“I didn’t know about no men or nuthin’, but I could tell by the way you loved me that you wasn’t engaged.”
“How?”
“A man gettin’ married don’t have it stored up like you do, baby. I done had men just got outta jail less hungry than you.”
“Where you think Kit went?” I asked. She probably thought that I was changing the topic because of being embarrassed by the way she had mastered me sexually.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He told me that he might be gone one night. He promised to take me to the show by Friday, but he never came back. You like the movies, Paris?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, Thad.” She kissed me.
“What did he do for a living?”
“Who?”
“The man who lived here.”
“Why you wanna know?”
“It’s just this feelin’ I got ever since comin’ up in here,” I said, and then I shivered.
“What kinda feelin’?”
“Somethin’ bad,” I said. “I get like that sometimes. Once, when my uncle Victor was up in Jackson, Mississippi, I woke up in a sweat callin’ out his name, and then a week later we found out that he had been killed that very night in a juke joint around there.”
I figured that either Charlotta would think I was crazy or her superstitious side would come out—either way she’d stop being suspicious about my questions.
“You know I got a bad feelin’ about Kit too,” she said. “Before he left he told me that he was about to make a whole lotta money. So much that we could go to the show seven nights a week. He said that he was gonna buy a proper farm and hire people to do all the work for him.”
“He was gonna make money on a farm?” I asked.
“No, stupid. He was gonna buy the farm with all the money he made.”
“What money?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But you better be sure that no poor niggah livin’ in a roomin’ house gonna make money like that the honest way.”
“Were you scared to be with him?” I asked. “I mean, knowin’ he was maybe stealin’.”
“I didn’t know nuthin’,” she said in a rehearsed sort of way. “Nuthin’ for sure. And anyway, he didn’t have the money yet. He only said that he was about to get it.”
Damn, I said to myself. Then to Charlotta: “You let white people get in your business and you know it’s a fifty-fifty chance that you ever make it back home again.”
“What you mean about white people?”
“I never heard’a this Kit friend’a yours,” I said. “And maybe if he says a lotta money he really just means the twenty-fi’e cent it cost to get into a movie house. But if he was talkin’ about real money, then you know it’s got to be a white man somewhere in it. White peoples got all the money and they hang it in front’a our eyes just like I used to hold a sugar beet out ahead of my mama’s mule.”
“Maybe you do have some premonition in you, Thad,” Charlotta said.
I was glad that she used my made-up name, but at the same time I realized that she was bound to let my secret out before the week was over.
“You know,” she continued, “Kit said that him and this friend’a his knew some white man that was gonna give ’em the money.”
“I knew it,” I said. “That’s the way it always is. White man come an’ tell a whole lotta lies, and then the next thing you know your house is up for sale and you lookin’ for a hole to hide in.”
“If you lucky,” Charlotta agreed.
“Did you call his friend?” I asked.
“Say what?”
“Did you call Kit’s friend? The one who was in business with him with the white man.”
“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.
Finally the main character, who was also called Amos, came across a woman who was attempting to throw herself off of the Golden Gate Bridge in the early hours of the morning. He saved her and talked to her. He convinced her that her life was worth living. Her name was Crystal Limmer and she was a painter, a watercolorist.
That was about the first hundred and fifty pages of the book. I’m a fast reader, but I never finish a book if I don’t see a reason for it. Mr. Amso’s book would either have the hero being pulled out of darkness by this bright gem of a woman or he would lose himself to a gloom he’d never known before finding love. Either way I wasn’t interested, so I put the book back on the shelf.
At least I tried to return it. The books had been packed so tightly that Night Man no longer fit in the space I took it from. I pride myself in organizing space on bookshelves, so I took out a few other books in order to accommodate the full complement.
I removed three Zane Grey westerns. But before I could do anything else, I noticed that there was something behind the first row of books. The shelves were quite a bit deeper than I thought. They were actually set deep into the wall. There was a good six inches of space behind the first row of books.
There was another book back there. A thick book with a hard leather cover that had an embossed design but no writing on it. It was thicker than a bible and the pages were not made of paper but of animal skin. The cover and back were wood with cow’s leather stretched over it. And each page was scrawled on with handwriting from various hands in differing kinds and colors of ink.
The first line of the first page read:
I am Gheeza Manli daughter of Menzi and Allatou born into slavery in the year of the devil seventeen hundred and two . . .
Much of what Gheeza wrote was difficult to make out, while many sections were completely impossible for me to read. She wrote in extraordinarily small script. Her entries went on for about forty pages, telling something of her impossible tale and interrupting that story now and then to tell of births, deaths, and smaller or larger crimes committed against her or that she committed against her masters. Gheeza had a daughter named Asha. Asha took over the duty of maintaining the entries on page forty-two.
Fear Itself Page 12
