Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

“Can I help you?” the older woman asked. “Something to make up for what they did?”

“No thank you, ma’am,” Fearless said out of reflex. “But can we do anything for you?”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Tannenbaum,” I interjected, “but my friend here and me don’t have anything to help with. We don’t even have our car. If you and your family could give us a ride back to your place, at least we could get that.”

“Of course,” Fanny assured me.

“There’s no room,” Morris, the bowling pin, said. “I have boxes in the backseat.”

“You can put them in the trunk.” Fanny waved her hand dismissively. I’d’ve bet it wasn’t the first time she treated him like that.

“No,” Morris said sternly. It might have been the first time that Morris stood up on his hind legs. Fanny’s small eyes widened an eighth of an inch.

“I, I have a spare in the trunk,” Morris said. “There’s no room.”

“I can take them,” the younger woman said. “I drove my car from home.”

“I forbid it!” Morris shrieked.

He took a step toward her. She shrank back a half step. Morris grabbed her by the arm, and Fearless tensed up. I was afraid we’d be right back in jail, but Fanny saved the day.

“Get your hands off of her,” she commanded.

Morris clenched his fist hard for a moment, then he let his wife go. He locked eyes with me. I could see his rage at being forced into line by a woman. He muttered something and then stalked off down the alley.

“I’M GELLA, the younger woman said on the way to the car. “Hedva’s niece.”

“Paris Minton,” I said. “And this here is Fearless Jones. Thanks for takin’ us.”

Gella smiled and looked away. She was shy and near ugly, but there was something fetching about her awkwardness, something that made your hands feel that they wanted to reach out to make sure she wouldn’t fall or get lost.

Gella drove an assembly-line prewar Ford. It was painted black and didn’t even have a radio installed. A spare machine, it was spotless and unadorned. Fearless and I sat in the backseat, while Fanny and her niece rode up front in silence. It was only a short ride, ten or eleven minutes. On the way we passed many white and turquoise and blue little houses, all sporting neat lawns and white cement driveways. It was around six o’clock, dinnertime for working people. Through many windows and open doors, you could see brown-skinned and some white-skinned people eating at family tables.

A few men were standing out in front watering the grass, or maybe lugging a trash can. Any man that saw us drive by stopped what he was doing and looked. That’s because Los Angeles was still a small town back then, and most residents were from the country somewhere. They treated their surroundings as familiar and friendly, and they wanted to know who was driving on their street.

There I was swallowing the slow trickle of blood from the cuts inside my mouth, being driven through a blue-collar paradise. I had the irrational notion that I could just ask that gawky white woman to stop the car and I could open the door and walk out into a peaceful life, leaving the trouble I was in behind. But before I could speak up, we were pulling into the Tannenbaum driveway. Layla’s pink car was still parked at the curb. Fearless was there next to me, pressing his swollen jaw. There was no escape.

When we were all out of the Ford, Fearless went up to Fanny and shook her hand.

“I promised your husband that I wouldn’t let anybody rob you, Mrs. Tannenbaum,” he said. “So if you need me…”

Fanny looked up at Fearless with an expression that many women had for him. There was trust and hope and even faith in that gaze. Gella and I exchanged worried glances.

“Have you eaten?” Fanny asked us.

“Why no, ma’am,” Fearless said.

“Hedva,” said Gella.

“What, dear?”

“I have to go home.”

“Go on then, I’ll call you.”

“But…” Gella let the word hang in the air, obviously meaning that Fearless and I were the reason she could not leave.

I didn’t blame her. Her uncle had been stabbed, she had just been to the police station, her husband was angry and scared enough to have raised his hand to her. And then there we were with our disheveled clothes and bloody faces, looking like thugs.

“Go home to your husband,” Fanny said flatly. “I’m fine.”

“But…” Gella said again.

Fanny raised her voice and fired words in a language I did not understand. The meaning was harsh though — that was evident by the lowering of the younger woman’s gaze.

“I’m sorry, Auntie,” the girl said. She looked at us and hunched her shoulders in an apologetic sort of way. Then she went to her car and got in.

As the engine turned over, Fanny said, “Come in, gentlemen.”

We followed her through the front door we’d been to earlier that day. This time we were ushered in with a smile.

Fanny was five feet tall, tops. Her husband had maybe an inch on her. The house reflected their height with its low ceilings and small chairs. The rooms were tiny, even for me.

She sat Fearless and me down at a round table in an alcove off of the kitchen. The meal came quickly and in courses. We had cabbage stuffed with ground beef, potato dumplings that she called knishes, chicken soup with rice, and chopped chicken livers on white bread. It was all delicious. For me, a man who had faced death twice in the last two days, it was a king’s feast.

After she made sure that we were eating, Fanny made a call. She wasn’t on the phone very long, and when she got off she was weepy and sad.

“That the hospital?” Fearless asked.

Fanny nodded and took a chair.

“Is he okay?”

“He came awake for a little while,” Fanny replied. “They said that he’s sleeping now and shouldn’t have company. Not even me. Not even me.”

“I’ll go down there and wait with you if you want,” Fearless said. “We could just sit outside and wait. If you’re close family, they’ll let you wait all night.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll sleep tonight and go in the morning. But thank you.”

It was kind of quiet after that. Fearless got up and served himself more soup, and I played with my fork, wishing I had a home to go to.

“Your niece didn’t want to leave you alone with us,” I said just to make some noise.

“You’re not white and not Jewish. She’s heard all kinds of stories, and she’s a suggestible girl. But she has a good heart.”

“But maybe she’s right,” I said. “You don’t know us. Don’t you think it’s strange that two black men show up at your door after another black man tries to murder your husband?”

“Stop tryin’ t’scare her, man,” Fearless told me.

“No,” Fanny said. “No, it’s all right. I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Minton. You helped Sol even though I was screaming and yelling. You did too, Mr. Jones. If I would have come on a bleeding man and somebody yelled at me, I would have run away. You went to jail. They beat you. I’m not afraid of you. It would make more sense if you were afraid of me.”

“Why we gonna be afraid of a pretty young girl like you, Fanny?” Fearless asked with a grin.

“Because all I had to do was nod my head and you would be murderers in jail.”

That pulled Fearless up short a second, but then he smiled again.

“Well, I ain’t ascared’a you, and you don’t need to be ascared’a us,” he said. “We wouldn’t hurt nobody like you. It’s like I said, I’m gonna make it my business that nobody else messes with you.”

“How you plan to do that, man?” I said, fed up with how silly they both were. She shouldn’t have been taking strangers into her home, and Fearless was nuts to want to protect somebody he didn’t even know.

Fearless gave me his sour look. For someone else that look could have meant trouble, but it was nothing to me.

“You got a wallet with no money in it,” I continued, “a borrowed car that’s low on gas even when the tank is full, you don’t have an apartment, and my place is burnt to the ground. You an’ me lucky to keep anybody from messin’ with us.”

“Oh my,” Fanny declared.

“It don’t matter about a house, Paris. I’ll find us some place to stay. And I don’t need no money to stand up to some coward wanna be messin’ wit’ old folks. If I have to, I’ll pitch a tent right here in the front yard and take a shovel for my bayonet.”

“Grass salad and earthworm steak, is that what you gonna eat?” I taunted.

“Excuse me,” Fanny Tannenbaum said in a small voice.

Fearless and I both turned our heads toward her. It was an odd thing to realize that we had begun to ignore her the same way that her nephew-in-law had ignored us earlier, the same way that white people had been ignoring us our entire lives.

“Yes, Fanny?” Fearless said.

“You gentlemen can stay here for a few days if you wish.”

I was stunned by that. I had done some traveling in my life. Fearless had been on three continents and then some, but neither one of us had ever experienced that kind of generosity. White people didn’t open their doors to questionable young black men. Hell, there weren’t many black folks I knew that would be so brave, or foolish.

“It’s the least I can do,” Fanny said. “You saved Solly’s life and… and…” — she hesitated and then drew a deep breath — “… and I am afraid to stay here alone.”

“You got your niece and nephew a couple’a blocks away,” I said. I was surprised that she offered us a place to stay, but that didn’t mean I wanted to take her up on the offer.

“That putz couldn’t save himself from walking down a hill,” she said disdainfully.

It wasn’t that funny, but Fearless laughed loud and long.

“What’s that you say, Fanny?” he crooned. “He can’t walk wit’out fallin’ down?”

The old lady started laughing too. She laughed so hard that she doubled over in the chair with her head on her knees. She forced herself to stand, still laughing, and went to a cupboard where she located a pint bottle of peach schnapps. She poured all three of us generous shots in squat glasses. The liquor was strong, and good. We finished off the first pint and put a serious dent in a second.

I was smiling with them after a while, feeling pretty good. So when Fearless said, “Sure, Fanny, we’ll stay here with you,” I didn’t see anything wrong with it. After all, we were already there, and it was after nine; we didn’t have a home to go to, and I still had some questions to ask about Elana Love.

I made a little nod and said, “Well, if we got to go, we might as well be eatin’ good and feelin’ high.”

FEARLESS GOT IT into his head to wash the dishes. Fanny offered to help, but he said that he missed simple chores after his twelve weeks in jail. He’d already explained to her that he’d gotten into an altercation with three mechanics that tried to cheat him. I thought that that would turn the sweet old lady against us, but instead she said, “My Sol was in jail. It’s a bad place where many good men go.”

SHE AND I RETIRED to the sitting room while Fearless hummed and played in the soapy water. Sol had a glass box filled with English Ovals, an imported cigarette. I smoked a few of these while we talked.

“I take it you don’t like Gella’s old man,” I said.

She made a quizzical face that suddenly became bright. “Oh,” she said, “you mean the putz.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a coarse man,” Fanny said. “Not rude or foul-mouthed but unfinished, without manners, like a pig farmer or a policeman.”