Fearless wasn’t overly proud of his strength or his courage. They were just things to him. He was like some mythological deity that had come down to earth to learn about mortals. Maybe that’s why I stayed friends with him even though he was always in some kind of trouble. Because being friends with him was like having one of God’s second cousins as a pal.
***
AT SIX I WENT DOWN TO THE CORNER and bought a small bottle of French brandy, a brand they stocked just for me. It cost four ninety-five even way back then, but it was worth it. I didn’t drink hard liquor all that much, but when I did I wanted it to be good. I didn’t want any day-old wine, or scotch that smelled like a doctor’s office.
I sipped my brandy along with a supper of sliced apples with wedges of cheddar and blue cheese from my ice chest. I had never been to France. And maybe those Frenchmen never heard of drinking brandy with a meal, but that was close enough for me. Maybe I’d never get on a steamship and sail to Europe, and maybe I’d never know the elegance of a fine hotel room on the Seine, but at least I could imagine it in my bookstore. At least I could read about the world and conjure up a feeling of being far away and safe.
Since I was a child books have been my getaway. Even the few times I’ve spent in jail were made bearable by Conrad, Cooper, and Clemens. I could hear the soft lapping at the banks of the Mississippi or ride the hill-high waves of the South Pacific under a golden moon shining behind long gray clouds. I could pretend to be the great philosopher Aristotle categorizing the world subject by subject, laying out the basis for all knowledge for the next twenty-five hundred years.
Literature came to my aid even when I had to face the hard reality of racism. Like when the bank turned me down for a small improvement loan.
“We don’t give improvement loans,” the bank officer Laird Sinclair had told me.
“But Ben Sideman said that you just gave him a loan to repave the alley at the side of his building,” I said.
“But he owns a driveway.”
“I own my store.”
“You do?” Laird said. He looked down at my folder, maybe for the first time, and added, “But you still owe the balance of your mortgage.”
“Everybody owes the balance, man,” I said. “But I got eight thousand in equity.”
Laird smiled and shook his head.
“It’s more complicated than that, Mr. Minton,” he said. “The bank has to consider many different factors before making a loan decision.”
“Like what?”
“For instance. Are you married?”
“No.”
“There,” he said, as if I had proved a point for him. “A single man is a bad risk.”
“Ben Sideman ain’t married either,” I said.
“Mr. Sideman has nothing to do with your application.”
“I don’t see why. Ben’s got a third mortgage on his place and he don’t have anywhere near the equity I do. He needed to fix his driveway for customers to be able to park. I need to paint my store for it to be more attractive to my customers.”
“I have another appointment, Mr. Minton,” Laird said.
I went home and reread thirty of the Simple stories by Langston Hughes as they were chronicled in back issues of the Chicago Defender, which I kept in a trunk in my bedroom. Simple’s view of the world was just what I needed to laugh off the bile that banker filled me with. Jesse B. Semple never accepted the outrageous lies that were foisted upon him, and he didn’t have a pot or a bookstore.
DRINKING MY BRANDY, THINKING ABOUT MY FRIEND and the banker named Laird, I fell into a doze on my bed.
In the dream I walked up to a man at a workstation on a vast production line that had thousands of workers busily laboring on either side. The conveyor belt was so long that I couldn’t see an end in either direction.
“Hello, Paris,” the worker said to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“My name is,” he said, and then he added something, but I couldn’t hear the name over the roar of the machinery around us.
“What did you say?”
“I said,” the worker replied, and then he added something I didn’t understand.
“What are we supposed to be doing here?” I asked then.
On the conveyor belt were oddly shaped mechanisms made from all kinds of metals, wood, cloth, and paper. Every mechanism was unique. They were obviously pieces of larger, insane machines. The workers moved the devices as they passed without adding anything or making any substantial change to their structure.
The nameless worker was looking at the line too. He was smiling.
“What are we building?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“That’s right. You see, this production line has been growing for the last few years because the war is over and all the veterans need a place to work. It’s so long that it crosses over the river into the next state, goes north for Lord knows how many miles, and then crosses back over and down to here.”
“Past us again?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“So all of these things just go round and round?”
“No. Uh-uh.”
“Where do they go, then?”
“Here and there along the way there’s checkers,” the worker said.
“Checking for what?”
“To see if any of the”—he said a word that stood for the gadgets on the conveyor belt, but I couldn’t make it out—“have gone bad. And if they have, then they throw that”—he said the word again—“into the discard bin.”
“But that’s a waste of time.”
“For them,” the worker agreed.
“But not for you because you have a job?” I asked.
“Well,” the worker said, “that’s part of it. I mean, it’s not much pay but it’s enough for about a half of my expenses. But I live on less, because after the checkers throw out the”—that word again—“I go and pick ’em up and take ’em back to my place.”
“But what use are they?”
“None,” he said, “right now. But later on, when they run outta stuff to put on the production line, they gonna have to come to me to buy all them that I took home. That’s when I’m gonna be rich.”
I started laughing then. I laughed so hard that I fell down on one knee. Workers started turning around to look at me. And even though I was laughing, at the same time I was in mortal fear that I’d lose my job.
A bell rang. It was a long, monotonous ring that seemed to be an omen of great danger.
“What’s that?” I asked the nameless worker.
“Shift change,” he said. “Shift, shift, shift.”
16
I ANSWERED THE PHONE as if I had never been asleep.
“Yes?”
“That you, Paris?” Fearless asked.
“What time is it?”
“Mornin’ sometime, but I don’t know when exactly.”
I was fully dressed. The empty bottle of brandy was on the stool I used for a night table. I could see the last of the morning stars through the one window set in the middle of my slanted roof.
“You still in jail?” I asked.
“Yeah, man.”
“They still questioning you?”
“No. They gave up a few hours ago, but they still holdin’ me on a parking ticket fine I never paid. I ain’t got it.”
I took a deep breath. The fear and laughter of the dream still crowded my chest.
“Let me find my shoes and I’ll be right down there,” I said. “You at the Seventy-seventh?”
“Yes sir, Mr. Minton. I sure am.”
I put the phone back in the cradle and sat up. That’s when the brandy made its return. My head started spinning and I had to lie back on the bed. The dizziness subsided, but then the roof began a slow turn to the right. When I closed my eyes I could feel the bed shifting under me.
Shift. The word echoed in my mind. I remembered the production line and the would-be entrepreneur’s chant.
The phone rang again. How long had it been since Fearless called?
“Hello,” I said, the bed moving under me like a river under a lily pad.
“Paris,” a bail bondsman I knew said.
“Good mornin’, Mr. Sweet. I was just thinkin’ about you. It wasn’t a kind thought. No sir. It was more like why do you wanna be messin’ with me an’ Fearless and here we supposed to be friends?” The words flowed out of my mouth just like me going down that river.
“I’m sorry, Paris.”
I opened my eyes. Now it was my thoughts’ turn to take a spin. Milo never apologized unless he wanted something. Never. If he bumped into you and you stumbled and fell, he’d more likely say, You shoulda got out my way, than to proffer an apology. That’s because Milo had been a lawyer, and all lawyers know that an apology is tantamount to an admission of guilt. And admitting guilt was the only cardinal sin in the lawyer’s bible.
I made it once more to a sitting position. If I sat sideways, with my head down below my shoulders, the room stopped revolving and merely shook.
“What is it, Milo?”
“What is what?” he asked.
“Don’t fool with me, man. It’s too early and I’m way too hung over to be played with.”
“I made a mistake, Paris,” Milo said. “I should have shared what I knew about Miss Fine with you.”
“You scarin’ me, Milo man.”
“I’m tryin’ to apologize.”
“Spit it out, brother,” I said. “I got to go get Fearless out of jail.”
“What’s he in jail for?”
“What all people are in jail for—not havin’ the money it takes to keep from gettin’ there in the first place.”
“Will you come to the office after you get him?”
“What for?”
“I got a phone call last night that disturbed me,” he said.
“From who?”
“Just come on over, Paris. I’ll pay you.”
“All right,” I said.
It wasn’t the money he offered but the fact that he offered it that made me acquiesce to his request. If Milo offered to put up cash, the situation had to be dire indeed.
I hung up the phone and propelled myself into a standing position. I found that the trick here was also in the shoulders; if I kept shifting them I could stay upright.
I wanted to go back to bed, to take off my clothes, and put my head under the covers. But I knew that was a fool’s move. Things were happening without my knowledge or control, and people knew where I lived. Two people named Wexler were dead, and lawyers were calling me before banking hours to admit their guilt.
I went to the stairs even though I believed there was a good chance I’d stumble on tangled feet and break my neck for the effort.
IT WASN’T YET SIX O’CLOCK. Fearless was oblivious of the time. They’d probably questioned him all night. They might have beaten him. He called so early because time for him was just one long day. Milo called because he was scared. He’d probably been up all night fretting over the grief that only greed can bring on a man.
Thinking about Milo brought up a question. How was it that he had involved himself in a problem that Fearless stumbled into on his own? What did Milo have to do with Kit Mitchell? I took a sip of reheated coffee, hoping that the answer was in my sober mind.
There came a knock on the door.
The chill reentered my intestines. The last four times someone had come to my front door my problems had gotten worse. A dog would have stayed away from that trouble after the first time. A stupid dog would have waited for the second bane to start avoiding distress.
I was fully dressed and shod, so I stepped quietly through the screen door at the back of my house. I tiptoed down the wood stairs, hopped the fence into the alley, and ran like a six-year-old.
I didn’t slow down for three blocks.
Maybe it was childish to run away from my own home but, I reasoned, who but Trouble could be knocking at my door that early in the morning? Like I said before, I’m a small man. I’ve been chased, caught, and beaten by big-boned women.
“Runnin’ ain’t a bad thing, baby,” my mother used to tell me. “When you’re dead you’ll wish you had the legs for it.”
THE SUN WASN’T UP and there was still a chill in the desert air. There’s a system of alleyways in L.A. that make the streets in some southern towns look like country paths. The alley behind my building was wide and well paved, and it went on for twelve city blocks. There were no rats or cats, not even much trash strewn about. Just one long strip of asphalt with a ribbon of concrete down the middle, a permanent divider line.
After my initial sprint I slowed to a walk. A few streets down from there and I even began to feel safe. Whoever it was at my house had probably gone away. And even if they broke in, there was nothing to steal but books. (One of the books on my bedroom shelf had been hollowed out. That’s where I put Miss Fine’s five-dollar bills.) For a moment I worried about the fate of my last bookstore. The store owner next door burned me down to get the lot. That had been the worst experience of my life. After a little time fretting I stopped worrying about it. Lightning couldn’t strike twice, not even on my unlucky head.
17
“WHAT YOU SAY THAT NAME WAS AGAIN?” the desk sergeant at the Seventy-seventh Street Precinct asked.
I had walked there. It wasn’t very far, and being a pedestrian made me feel secure. My enemies, if they were out looking for me, would drive past a man on foot without a second glance.
“Tristan Jones,” I said to the sergeant.
“Um, let me see here,” the portly, bespectacled white man said as he thumbed through an oversized logbook on his side of the counter. “Oh I see. He owes a big fine, a very big fine.”
The sergeant closed the book and reached for the phone. He picked up the receiver, dialed a number, and waited for someone to answer.
“Hello, Jerry?” the sergeant said. “Yeah, it’s Rick. What you think about that Barbette, huh? Damn, I didn’t think she’d really do it but Frank said that she’s wild. . . . Uh-huh. . . . Yeah.”
I scratched my ear and waited patiently. Being a cop wasn’t a business. He didn’t have to make sure the customer was happy. If he wanted to say hello to the jailer before getting my friend, that was his prerogative.
The story he told was long and one-sided because I couldn’t hear the parts that the man on the other end of the line added. The gist of it was that this woman, Barbette, had made a wager that she would accompany a group of them to one of their friends’ apartment buck naked. She came in and visited with them just as if she were fully clothed. She hadn’t gotten embarrassed until a guy came over with his girlfriend.
“Can you imagine that?” Sergeant Rick said. “She didn’t mind us seein’ her titties and bush but another woman made her shy.”
I must have shifted or something, because Rick noticed me again.
“Hold on, Jerry,” he said into the phone, and then, “Can I help you?” he asked as if we had never met.
