“Who’s this cousin?” an unnamed deacon asked.
“Elana Love,” I said. A feeling of triumph snaked down my spine. Let them make the connections, that was the only way out.
“Elana,” another deacon said.
“Yeah,” I said. “She came to me talkin’ ’bout how Grove had stolen her stuff and now her boyfriend out of jail, Leon, was comin’ after them. Now Grove is dead, and I want to know about my cousin. She haven’t called or nuthin’.”
I was trying to keep my breathing from going crazy. I knew that if I showed the panic I felt, they would think I was lying — and if they thought that, they might not let me go.
It seemed like a long time before Bigelow said, “Get the hell outta here.”
They let me go but didn’t stand out of the way. I had to walk around them on the recently watered soggy lawn. But I did so happily.
In the storefront church, the congregation was still mourning the empty coffin. They were drinking wine and eating sandwiches. I half-expected someone else to grab me, to interrogate me, to threaten my life, but no one even noticed. I slipped through the throng, no more remarkable than a shadow.
27
I WAS SWEATING, but it wasn’t hot. My heart was throbbing instead of beating, and my legs couldn’t seem to coordinate to keep a steady stride. When I got in the car my fingers went numb, and I couldn’t seem to hold the key right. It took me four or five tries before I realized that I was trying to fit my new apartment key into the ignition.
I started the car and drove off. Three blocks away I pulled to the curb. There I took in great gulps of air, trying to bring my spirit back into alignment with my body — because that’s how it felt, as if my soul were somehow trying to flee the flesh, as if I had been so close to death so often in the past few days that the ghost was ready to bolt. That’s how it goes with me. I face danger and survive it, acting just fine, but as soon as it’s over and I’m alone, I break down.
There was a World-Wide gas station just up the block. There I found a phone booth.
“Hello,” a woman answered flatly.
“Charlotte?”
“Hold on.”
The phone rumbled from being set down on a hard surface.
“Hello?” a much sweeter voice asked.
“Charlotte?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Paris.”
“Oh, hi,” she said. “I thought that number you gave me was just sumpin’ you thought up when I called it. It sounded like a law office or sumpin’.”
“Can we get some coffee or something?” I asked.
“Yeah. Why’ont you come on ovah?” She gave me her address.
CHARLOTTE’S APARTMENT COMPLEX was a series of big brick-and-plaster affairs on 109. The buildings were long and thin looking, like army barracks, separated by green lawns. She was in building K on the third floor.
The hallway was lit by the setting sun through a window at the far end. The walls were white and pretty except for a mark here and there. You could tell that the place was new. I hoped that it would maintain its beauty, but I had my doubts. The suffering of a people often showed up in their material surroundings. Like a broken heart leaving a forlorn lover a physical mess, the weight of racism and poverty often made colored neighborhoods downtrodden and marred.
Charlotte answered the door. She was wearing a close-fitting but not tight black dress with no hose and no makeup.
“Hi.” She smiled and looked me in the eye, but then she saw something and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Can I come in?”
She stepped back, and I stumbled a little crossing the threshold. There was a low couch with chrome legs and orange vinyl cushions. Beyond that was a glass door that led out onto a tiny landing. The sun was shining in on a large rubber plant in a terra-cotta pot. The living room and kitchen were one. But the couch was placed so that it marked the line between the two.
“This is very modern,” I said, sitting down.
Charlotte beamed with pleasure.
There was a console record player/radio across from the couch. She lifted the reddish brown lid and started the stack of records. I remember the first song was by Ella Fitzgerald, but I forget the tune.
“You want that coffee?” she asked.
“Where’s your roommate?”
“She went to see her sister. I’m’a call her later on.”
Charlotte lit on the couch next to me.
“I didn’t think you’d call,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I’m in trouble,” I said. “ ’Cause I’m in trouble, and I hardly know you to come over here and burden you.”
“I’m from outside Galveston,” she said. “Where you from?”
“Near New Iberia.”
“Where’s that?”
“Louisiana.”
She put a hand on my knee, “You see?”
“See what?”
“We’re both from the South. People from the South is just nicer. We don’t get all cold and push people away when they in need.”
“How long you been here?” I asked.
“Where?” She leaned forward and I slid a little in her direction.
“In L.A.?”
“Two months.”
I kissed her chin right in the middle of that scar. She shuddered and moved her hand up on my erection. She didn’t gasp or make any declaration about my size. That was fine by me. I didn’t want any big expectations. I just wanted someone close and caring.
“Bite it,” she said.
I knew what she meant and nipped her chin and lip.
“Li’l harder, baby,” she said and her hand tightened on my erection to show me how much harder she meant.
I groaned and bit harder.
“Oh, that’s it,” she whispered. “I wanted that ever since you said it. It’s like you caught me, just sayin’ you’d bite my lip.”
She shuddered again, and I grabbed her head with both hands to steady it as I ran my tongue slowly from her chin up across her lip. I spent many minutes on that scar. It drove her wild. She used those moments to take off our clothes and lead us to the bed.
Again it was a new kind of lovemaking for me. Usually there was a game I played with women. They adored my big thing and ignored my skinny chest. I pretended that I was a wild animal, furious and feral in my passion. It led all too quickly to something explosive and not quite real. But with Charlotte it was different. There were some explosions, but at other times there was a settling in. Like when we lay on our sides, me deep inside her, facing each other.
“A man cut me on the face, and when it healed I headed for L.A.,” she said in a strained whisper.
I stroked her cheek in reply.
“Would you do somethin’ like that?” she asked.
“Neither,” I said.
Her face framed the question that a moment of passion would not allow into words.
“Not cut you or run,” I said.
She twisted my ear pretty hard, and I came so violently that I lost consciousness for a while.
I awoke to the smell of coffee, disoriented because I didn’t know where I was. I had to look around the bare room a couple of times before I remembered Charlotte. The floor was finished pine with no rug. The open closet was a door-size indentation with three dresses hanging on wire hangers. The single bed I was on was the only furniture in the room. I realized that the furniture in the living room must belong to the flat-voiced roommate; that Charlotte had nothing; that she was just a refugee from the violence of her recent past.
I tried to get up, but the bed was too comfortable. The pillow had the sweet smell of some kind of hair product, the sheets were clean. My bed back at Fontanelle’s was a six-year-old’s smelly mattress with no sheet on a gritty, pitted floor. I had the urge to get married right then. I could get married to Charlotte, get a job with the city, move out toward Compton — maybe even change my name.
“Paris, you ’wake?” She was standing at the door.
“Uh,” I admitted.
“I got coffee on the deck.”
IT WAS CROWDED on the deck, and the kitchen chairs we used rocked a little on the metal grating that stood for a floor. But the early evening was pretty, and Charlotte’s conversation was just what I needed.
“What kinda trouble you in?” she asked after her second cup of coffee.
“I don’t really know,” I said.
“How could you not know? Is somebody after you?”
“Maybe. They have been. One or two. One of ’em burnt down my little bookstore over on Eighty-nine and Central.”
“You worked there?”
“I owned it,” I said with faded pride.
“I used to go by there. I mean when it wasn’t burned. I always wanted to go in, but I was scared.”
“Scared’a what?”
“I don’t know. Things out here scare me. People don’t act normal. It’s like you gotta know some kinda secret handshake or sumpin’.”
“You come up here to get away from that man cut you,” I said, only partly as a question.
“Not only that,” Charlotte said. “I wanna be a cook too. Not just a cook that make stuff but a chef. I wanna own my own restaurant. You know my mama was the best cook in our whole town, and I learned from her. Back where I come from, you could only cook for a house fulla dirty kids in a backwood shack, or up in some rich white peoples’ houses. I want my own place.”
“You know I got to go soon, Charlotte.”
“Say that again.”
“You know —”
“No, not that, just my name.”
“Charlotte.”
She smiled and got up to kiss me.
“You was just what I needed, baby,” she said.
28
WHEN I GOT TO the hospital it was almost eight. I left Charlotte with the promise to call in a few days; just that little pledge made me feel that I might be alive and free after this mess was over.
The hospital room smelled sour, like a mound of dead skin.
Fearless was sitting at Sol’s bedside speaking in low tones. That made me happy because it meant that Sol was listening and talking.
“They brought me here to die,” a voice to my left said.
I turned to see an ancient white man sitting up in a bed. He was so small that he seemed like an infant allowed to sleep in a grown-up bed. The odor was coming from him.
“What?”
“They brought me here to die,” he said again. “The doctors and the lawyers and Marjorie.”
“Are you sick?” I asked.
He raised a skeletal hand and waved me to his bedside.
I glanced at Fearless, who had stopped talking for a moment to look in the direction of the voices. He saw me and then turned back to continue his conversation with Sol.
“They’re trying to kill me,” the man said after I had moved to his bedside.
“Who is?”
“They all are. They bring me here and stick me with needles and make me take poisons and hope that I die. They aren’t going to operate,” he said indignantly. “I don’t have fever. Here, feel my forehead.”
He was cool as a cucumber, as my mother often said.
“See? I’m not hot or bleeding. Why would they leave me here without my things? Why would they leave me with all these sick people’s germs if they’re not trying to kill me?”
I had no answer. I once heard a sermon in my uncle’s church where the minister claimed that there was no Earth, only Hell and Heaven. Where we were was an upper level of Hell. And when we died, we either tumbled the rest of the way down the mountainside or rose on an angel’s wings. I wasn’t sure about the Heaven part, but life sure was feeling like Hell to me.
“Fearless knows,” the aged gray-headed man said. “Fearless knows.”
I wondered if Fearless had gotten us mixed up in yet another hopeless cause, but then I remembered the troubles we were in were of my doing.
I went to Fearless ready to ask if I had to carry that old man out on my back. But the words died in my throat when I peered over his shoulder.
Sol’s face was shrunken and blue. His teeth glistened between parted lips, and he wasn’t breathing. He hadn’t drawn a breath in some time.
But still Fearless babbled on.
“Fearless.”
No reply.
“Fearless!”
“What? What you want, Paris?”
“Who are you talkin’ to, man? He’s dead.”
“I know that. You think I don’t know a dead man?”
“Then who are you talking to?”
“His soul,” Fearless said. There was a hint of embarrassment in his voice.
“What?”
Fearless put up his hands to silence me. “My momma used to say, a long time ago when I was a boy, that when a man dies, his soul is lost at first ’cause he don’t know he’s dead. It wanders around and could be lost forever. But if he sees you and he knows who you are and he knows that you’re talkin’ to him, then he tries to answer back. But when you don’t answer, he knows that he must be a spirit. Your voice becomes the messenger, and he realizes what has happent an’ he knows to go for Heaven.”
Then, instead of getting up and talking to me about our business, he turned back to Sol and started muttering again. I sat in a chair far away from the tiny man and waited until my watch said eight-thirty, then I went to Fearless again.
“How long you plan to keep this up?” I asked.
“Momma said to do it till dawn.”
“Visitors’ hours end at nine, Fearless. We don’t want the nurse to see you hoverin’ over no corpse.”
Fearless hesitated, then he turned away from his divine mission. “I guess that’s enough. I think he must’a heard me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Now let’s get the fuck outta here.”
“WHEN DID he die?’ I asked Fearless in the parking lot.
“I don’t know. I mean, he was dead when I got there.”
“And the nurse didn’t come in to see him?”
“No. He was dead,” Fearless assured me.
“But how could that be? Aren’t the nurses supposed to check?”
“How should I know?” Fearless said defensively. “Maybe they looked in and saw that he looked peaceful. I don’t know.”
“So he didn’t say nuthin’?” I asked.
“How he gonna say somethin’ if he’s dead, Paris?”
I had no reply, no question to follow up. I wanted Sol to be alive more than anything. He was the only one who really knew about the money everybody was after. And that was the only reason I was still looking for answers. At least with some cash, I could rent another bookstore. But now that he was dead, I knew that it was time to move on.
“You want to go down to Louisiana and visit my mother?” I asked.
“Sure,” Fearless said. “Right after I find who killed Sol and Fanny.”
“The trouble is too deep,” I said. “It’s time for us to split.”
“You go on, Paris. It’s my word on the line here.”
“Your word what? You didn’t promise to find out who killed them.”
“But I promised to protect Fanny, and I didn’t. I bet because she wasn’t comin’ here, that’s why Sol died.”
“Mr. Jones,” I said as a plea.
“You go on, man. You didn’t promise.”
“I was with you, wasn’t I? I got you here. Maybe I even think you’re right, but I’m scared, man, scared to death with all these men fightin’ and killin’.” The truth came out of me without my intention.
Fearless put his steely hand on my shoulder.
“You scared, but you ain’t no coward, Paris. Uh-uh. Matter’a fact, you a hero.”
“What?” I never knew Fearless to try and play anybody, much less me, his best friend.
“Yeah. Hero is just bein’ brave when there’s trouble. An’ bein’ brave
means to face your fears and do it anyway. Shoot. You can’t call me a hero ’cause I ain’t scared’a nuthin’ on God’s blue Earth.”
He got me again. Shamed me into going in on something that I should have left alone.
“You go on home,” I said. “I’m’a go over and see Gella and the fool. I’ll be back later on.”
29
GELLA GREETED ME at the door looking over my shoulder for Fearless. He had that kind of effect on people; that’s why I never wanted him to meet my girlfriends before we were solid.
“He couldn’t come,” I said.
Gella smiled, realizing she had been rude. “Come in, Mr. Minton.”
The tiny house was neat and sweet smelling. I imagined that gawky Gella had spent the whole day cleaning, trying to wipe away the stigma of death.
I remembered that Sol was dead and wondered if she had been notified. I decided to leave it up to the hospital. It wasn’t my job to announce death, and anyway, I wouldn’t want any evidence that I was the first one to know. It struck me as strange that the nursing staff was unaware of Sol’s passing for so long. Being safe was still my motto, regardless of Fearless calling me a hero.
“Please have a seat, Mr. Minton.”
“Paris,” I said while lowering myself onto a brown leather chair.
From the outside the Greenspans’ house looked like a plaster castle painted a dull orange. But inside the layout was the same as Sol and Fanny’s house. One contractor must have built tract homes for miles. Back in my little parish in Louisiana every home was different. We were poor, but at least we were different, I thought. That’s how jealousy works sometimes.
I was jealous of the fine wood furnishings and the long, plush drapes that covered an entire wall. There was a grandfather clock with a brass pendulum that must have weighed half a pound and gold-brown carpeting so thick that you’d think you were standing on an ancient pine forest floor.
Her skinny neck had a gold chain on it, and the diamond of her engagement ring was no chip like the wedding stones you found around where I lived.
For a moment I felt sorry that I didn’t send Fearless. Why shouldn’t he be in that house and have that woman draped on him like that chain when her husband finally decided to come home? Why couldn’t he take her on the couch, and on the floor, while that sap of a husband gawked and whined?
Fearless Jones Page 19
