Killing Johnny Fry

by Walter Mosley

  “Really?"

  “Of course. Why do you keep asking me that?"

  “I don‘t know. We haven‘t seen much of each other for over a year. Just weekends. Not much sex to speak of."

  “Not much sex? What do you call Friday night and yesterday in the park?"

  “I think it was just because I was scared."

  “Scared of what?"

  “Losing you,” I said, realizing that somehow it was really true. I had already lost her without knowing it and now I was going through the feelings of trepidation leading up to that loss, as if I was playing catch-up with time.

  “ I ‘m not going anywhere,” Jo said. “ I ‘m here for you and I want you here with me."

  “How about tomorrow?” I offered.

  Jo hated spending weekdays with me. Her work so took up her life that she always said that she needed her weekdays alone to garner her resources. I hadn‘t spent a non-holiday weekday with her in over six years.

  “Okay,” she said without hesitation. “What time will you be here?"

  “What time do want me?"

  “Afternoon?"

  “You sure you don‘t have to work?” I asked.

  “I have an appointment but I can change it,” she said. “You‘re what‘s important, L, not some job ."

  I brought my hand to my face and smelled the light, lemony scent of Lucy‘s incense-oil perfume. This served to make me feel guilty. Then I remembered Johnny Fry and I was angry again. That was when I began to understand the connection between emotion and sensuality. It came to me that somewhere between seeing jo and Johnny rutting on that sunlit floor and now, I had come alive. And life hurt.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Three o‘clock. I‘ll be there."

  “You sound like you want to get off."

  “I don‘t want to,” I lied, “but I have to,” and lied again.

  Classical mathematics don‘t work with affairs of the heart. My sleeping with Lucy and flirting with Sasha and Linda Chou didn‘t even out what Joelle had done with Johnny Fry. I could never forgive her based upon those equations. I would never feel that things were harmonious between us.

  I didn‘t want to go to her place, but I wanted her to want me to go. I didn‘t want her to have slept with Johnny, but whenever I saw her and I thought about them together, I wanted to have sex.

  The confusion was too much. I left my house and wandered toward the East side. I made it north to about Houston and then east to West Broadway. There were thousands of people out in the street on that Sunday afternoon. Women wearing next to nothing and men pretending not to gawk. People sold silver jewelry, hand-bound blank books, paintings, pottery, and old records there on the street. I went farther east, past Elizabeth Street, past Chiystie.

  I got tired after a while and stopped to sit on a blue fire hydrant in front of a tiny Peruvian restaurant. The hydrant sat next to a telephone pole. All over the wooden post there were stapled dozens of sheets of paper. People were looking for roommates, apartment shares, rooms. Some were leaving town and selling off their belongings. One woman had lost a male poodle named Boro. A lavender page promised you could lose thirty pounds in thirty days, free of cost. And there were nine white sheets with the photograph of a young black woman xeroxed on them.

  HAVE YOU SEEN ANGELINE? the poster said, and then it gave a phone number and promised a reward of $150. It was the smallness of the reward that made me pay attention to the poster. Angeline must have come from poor folks who could hardly afford to pay a reward. I felt sorry for them and for the girl, even though she might be happier on her own. I was. At least I had been before I met Jo. My first wife, Minda, was a painter. She did portraits on the boardwalk at Coney Island. We got married on a whim and divorced on the rocks. We were nine months into the marriage when she told me that she‘d rather share her bed with broken glass.

  “What do I do wrong?” I asked her.

  “You don‘t do anything.” she said. “You don‘t even fart."

  My second marriage was even shorter. Her name was Yvette and her father was a career soldier. He told me on our wedding day that if I broke his baby‘s heart, he‘d run me down and kill me.

  Remembering Minda‘s complaint, I decided to make a stand against my new wife‘s father. I told him that he should never drink from an open bottle in my presence because if he did, I will have likely put poison in it.

  When Yvette heard what I‘d said, she yelled at me and called me the devil. I said that he had threatened me first.

  “That‘s okay,” Yvette said. “A bride‘s father is supposed to say those kinds of things."

  We went on the honeymoon but never had sex again.

  She took me to court for alimony. The judge laughed, and the annulment was invoked.

  There was an orange sheet underneath three pictures of Angeline.

  The only words I could make out were . . . A FRIEND.

  For quite a while I tried to think of what the other words might say. But no matter what I came up with, I couldn‘t think of what they were selling, looking for, or giving away. Finally I went over to the pole and removed the three pictures and their worries about young Angeline that covered the orange sheet. I didn‘t feel too bad about it. There were six more posters of Angeline on that pole alone, and I had seen others all around the Village.

  The orange Xerox said:

  DIAL A FRIEND

  Everybody needs a friend,

  someone they can talk to,

  someone who will listen without

  judging them. If you are

  lonely and there‘s no one

  to hear your pain then call

  1-888-627-1189. 35c* a minute.

  (This is not a sex line.)

  It seemed to me an original idea. I thought of how many people out in the world needed a friend sometimes and couldn‘t find one. I wondered who it was that they got to man those lines. They obviously used credit cards.

  I tore off the number and put it in my wallet.

  I went into the Peruvian restaurant and ordered seviche. They served it with white bread and butter. The meal was $12 plus taxes and tip.

  After that, I wandered around for hours. While I walked, I passed hundreds of people. Not one of them did I recognize—and no one knew me.

  I didn‘t get to my door until nine that night. I hadn‘t done a thing all day. It was the fourth time in a week I was aware of doing absolutely no work. Before that period, I hadn‘t gone a day without working in years. Before then, I spent some hours every day either looking for work or translating for practice or for a client. But now whole days went by and I did nothing but wallow in misery or follow my dick.

  By the time I got to my building, I was feeling hopeless. I was looking for my key when someone shouted.

  “Mr. Carmel."

  It was Sasha, walking arm in arm with a young man. The man was tall and dressed in a gray suit. His yellow shirttail was hanging out, and his sensual lips were plastered with an inebriated grin.

  “This is my brother Enoch,” Sasha said as they approached.

  “ Hi . “ He put out his left hand for me to shake. That was probably because his right arm was around his sister‘s shoulder and if he let go he would have fallen.

  “Help me bring him upstairs?” Sasha asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Keeping my grip on his left hand, I hefted his arm up and over my shoulder.

  “I love my sister, no matter what anybody says,” Enoch lectured as we went up the slender metal staircase. “She‘s the most beautiful, wonderful, friendly woman. And she‘s built like the old-time movie stars, like a real woman. I love the old-time movies. Wallace Beery and Ronald Coleman; Myrna Loy and Faye Way. That was back when they knew how people felt in their hearts. Isn‘t that right, Sassy?"

  “Sure, Inch. Sure,” his sister said.

  I had the feeling that they went through this scenario many times. A sad and lost younger brother coming to his older sister to cry in his beer over a life he always wanted and
never had.

  He went limp a flight below Sasha‘s door. We had to drag him the rest of the way, his heels knocking at each step.

  I held him up while Sasha turned the key in the lock.

  I dragged him across the threshold into the dark apartment. When she turned on the light, I was surprised.

  Our apartments had exactly the same layout, but all the walls of Sasha‘s place had been removed. There were six pillars in a large room. The bedroom, kitchen, and living room all blended into one. Only the bathroom had a door and walls.

  I dropped Enoch on his back on the futon couch.

  He smiled at Sasha, holding out his arms to her.

  “Kiss,” he said like a small boy talking to his mother.

  She gave him a loud, smacking kiss on the lips and then settled on the floor at his feet to take off his shoes.

  “I can take care of him now,” she told me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  When I went through the door, she called after me, “Remember, we‘re going to have dinner soon."

  I had hoped that she‘d forgotten. I was overwhelmed with women and sexuality by then. But I nodded and waved, then I shut the door.

  Down in my apartment I starting reading a novel that had been on my shelf for years. It was called The Night Man; it was a nonmystical story about a pedestrian vampire—a man who never went out in the light, who loved the darkness and lived in its domain exclusively. He eschewed the sun and everything that daylight brought. It was a tragic love story of prosaic proportions. The main character, Juvenal Nyx, meets a woman who is a being of light. He meets her on a bridge, where she intends to kill herself because of the loss of her child. Her husband blames her for being careless, and she has taken the responsibility even though it is questionable whether or not this self-abnegation is justified.

  It was the first novel I had read in many months. So much of my time had been taken up with translations of manuals, business forms, and legal documents that when I was through working, all I wanted to do was watch TV.

  But not that night.

  I was actually afraid to turn on my television. My obsession with The Myth of Sisypha was sure to make me turn to that DVD sooner or later, and I wanted to cool down, to wean myself off of this painful preoccupation with punitive sex.

  The love story in The Night Man, though a little melodramatic, held my interest for hours. It must have been past one when the knocking came on my door.

  It wasn‘t a regular knock. Three taps and then a bang, then a thud or two, followed by something like the fast rapping of a metal pencil or, more probably, a ring.

  I didn‘t want to answer. I knew who it was—at least, I thought I did. In my mind I felt intimate with the logic that led up to that knock: Sasha‘s brother had fallen asleep, and she was reminded of me because we met at the door. She wanted to come down and fuck me until the sun came up. That‘s what I believed.

  Thinking back on it now, it seems like such an arrogant assumption. I wasn‘t a sex god. Women didn‘t throw themselves at me. I was just a middle-aged guy going through the regular traumas of my generation and species.

  But even though it made no sense, I was absolutely sure that Sasha was on the other side of that door.

  At first I thought that I could pretend that I was asleep or maybe out. I just wouldn‘t answer, and she‘d go away.

  But the deranged knocking continued, and I became a little disgusted with myself. Why shouldn‘t I be able to answer my own door? So what if she wanted to come down and seduce me? I didn‘t have to go along with it. I could tell her that I was back with my girlfriend and sex with her just wasn‘t what I was interested in right then.

  So I went to the door and pulled it open without even asking who it was. Seeing Enoch Bennett standing there was a real surprise. All he wore was his gray suit pants with suspenders hanging down on either side, and one black shoe with no sock underneath, on his left foot.

  His expression was blank at first, but when he looked at me, he began to blubber. He fell forward and I grabbed him, holding on like some boxer finding that his only respite is in the arms of his opponent.

  “What‘s wrong?” I asked him.

  He tried to respond but all that came out were urgent, grief-stricken sounds that meant to be words.

  I helped him to the futon couch and lowered him into a sitting position. He fell on his side immediately, bawling for all he was worth. When I sat down next to him, he grabbed my hands and pressed his face against them.

  As he cried, I began to fear that something terrible had happened upstairs. Sasha had destroyed Enoch‘s life when he was just a boy by forcing their parents apart. Maybe in his drunken stupor he‘d taken his revenge by murdering his sister. Certainly his sadness was something more than normal. And why would he have come down to a total stranger‘s apartment?

  I scanned his hands and wrinkled trousers for blood but saw nothing. There were a few wet spots on his pants but the cloth‘s dark gray hue hid any other color.

  “What happened?” I asked when his tears subsided a bit.

  Breathing in quick, swimmer like inhalations, Enoch sat up.

  “I haven‘t seen Sasha in years,” the young man said, his sensual lips trembling, ready to return to despair. “My therapist told me that it was time to confront her. To, to, to tell her how I feel about . . ."

  “About what?"

  “At first it was okay. She seemed happy to see me. I talked to her about it, and she, and she apologized to me. She said it was because of my mother, how much she had hurt her.

  “It was just like my therapist said. We talked and, and, and then sometimes I would get angry and yell at her and tell her that I hated her sometimes."

  I was sure now that Sasha lay dead upstairs. I wondered when I should call the police. Enoch was a little bigger, probably stronger, and definitely younger than I. I didn‘t want to get into a physical struggle with him.

  It was then that I thought about the half bottle of cognac that I had left.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked, rising as I did so. If I could get him a little drunker, I could use a chair to wedge him in the toilet and then call 911.

  But Enoch grabbed me by the wrist and held on tight.

  “We got drunk in celebration,” he said. “We went barhopping, and then, and then I was upstairs. My fingers were inside her and she was . . . she had her mouth on me. I pushed her away and told her no, not again. But all she did was hold her arms out to me. She didn‘t say a word, but I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that I wanted her more than anything. And I did. I jumped on top of her. And, and, and when I woke up, she was lying there next to me, and room smelled like sex."

  This revelation left me bemused. In my mind, a moment before, a murder had been committed. Now it was simply a case of adult incest; a brother and sister having sex in a secluded room because of too much drink. Maybe some jury somewhere would have found them guilty—given them prison time. Maybe there were countries where they would have been executed for their crime. Maybe I would have reacted to the confession of the bereft youth if the past few days had not been so filled with sex and depravity. But now I felt only relief. Sasha was upstairs sleeping it off, and Enoch was crying on my couch.

  “Have a drink,” I told him. “A drink will make you feel better, and in the morning it‘ll all be further away."

  He began crying again, but when I poured him half a water glass of cognac, he downed it in three gulps. I poured him another. He only made it halfway through before he slumped down unconscious on the futon.

  He wasn‘t lying on his back, so I didn‘t worry that he would die in his sleep. I draped a blanket over his shoulders, went back to my room, turned off the light, and lay down in darkness.

  The sleep I hoped for refused to come. In the gloom I saw forms like huge drifting icebergs all around me. I knew that I was in my own bed and that there was no threat, but still I felt dread. I was jobless, and my lover used me like some life
less mannequin. I‘d had sex with a girl who was a child only a few years before and I was obsessed with a woman on a DVD.

  It was true. I was thinking about Sisypha and her motivations a good part of each day. Why had she tortured her husband with such deep love in her voice and eyes? What lesson did she need him to learn? Why had Sasha seduced her brother? Why had Joelle made me go through the same motions that Johnny Fry had taken with her?

  My limbs began to quiver in the bed. My forearms and feet trembled like small animals shivering in a thunderstorm. At that moment I had no sex. It had been taken from me, and all that was left was the certainty that some kind of tragedy was heading in my direction: my death. Somehow I knew was going to die soon. Someone was going to kill me, or maybe I‘d kill myself.

  The fear of death sat me up in the bed.

  I reached out for the phone, thinking, without thinking, that I‘d call Joelle. She had always helped me when I was afraid. She was very logical and reasonable when I called her with my irrational fears.

  Once there was a white guy who moved into the building across the street from me. From the first day he seemed to be staring at me and I got it in my head that his intentions were murderous. He was some kind of serial killer who hated middle-aged black men who lived in the midst of the white world. I knew it was crazy, but every time I saw him, he‘d give me that evil stare, and my heart thundered and I knew for a fact that he was going to kill me slowly with a knife, a big knife.

  When I finally told Jo about my fears, she came down to my place and sat outside with me until the guy, Felix Longerman, came out of his front door. She went right up to him, engaged him in a brief conversation, and then dragged him across the street to me.

  “This is Felix,” she told me. “He works for Viking, in translations."

  It turned out that some eleven years before, Felix and I had worked on a project together, and every time he saw me, he thought I looked familiar. I hadn‘t recognized him because he‘d had a beard in those days.

  My fears were so silly and yet they felt so real.

  But that night, with the phone in my hand, I knew that Joelle couldn‘t help me. No one could. Brad Mettleman would laugh. Lucy would say that she was in the same position that Jo was.