Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

After I’d made it through the headlines I went back inside.

The new bookstore was larger than the last one I had, the one that my neighbor burned down. The room was twenty feet square. I wandered from wall to wall, serenaded by the cacophony of Fearless’s snores while running my fingers over the spines of books.

I had bibles, cookbooks, science fiction paperbacks, and National Geographic magazines. In a special section I had all of the books by black authors that I could find; from Sterling Brown to Phillis Wheatley, from Chester Himes to Langston Hughes, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Booker T. Washington.

I liked touching the stock. It made me feel like I was somebody; not just passing through but having a stake in the world I lived in. People knew me. Customers came to the store and asked my advice on books. They gave me their money and I sold them something of value.

After a while my fingers went across an old copy of Candide. I took it from the shelf and curled up on the sofa again.

I was asleep before finishing the first paragraph.

I DREAMT ABOUT A MAN IN A FARMER’S HAT. The short and stocky farmer was leading me down a long and dark hallway, whispering about money, lots of money. Finally we reached a door.

“Open it up,” the farmer said. “Open it up and you will have all the money you’ll need for the rest of your natural-born days.”

I was trembling, scared to death.

“No,” I said. “No.”

“But you’re right here, Paris,” he said, “next to the gold mine. You don’t even need a key. Just turn the knob and push it open.”

I didn’t want to do it but still my hand reached out. When I grasped the doorknob I thought it would burn me but instead it was chilly. The refreshing coolness washed over my body. Feeling more confident I pushed the door open. Green light flooded the hallway. The room was full of money, piles of it. And on the biggest pile sat Lana Tandy, naked and spread-legged, smiling at me.

“Come on, baby,” she said. “It’s all yours.”

My fears melted away and I ran toward her. The door slammed behind me but I didn’t care. It wasn’t until the money rose up like a wave behind Lana that I realized I was trapped. She screamed as the wave of green slapped against me. I was submerged in millions of dollars, suffocating under the weight of that great wealth.

I struggled wildly against the heavy cash, but it was too much for me. Lana let out a strangled cry. She grabbed me by my shoulders and said, “Paris, help me. Help.” She pounded against my chest, but instead of feeling the concussions of her fists I heard a hollow knocking. Even when we were separated by the crashing waves of money, I could still hear the echo of her knocking against my chest. A tide of bills washed over me and I couldn’t breathe. I struggled and screamed, realizing that I was about to die. When I stroked down with both hands to propel my head toward the surface, I came awake sitting upright on the couch, gulping air and trembling.

Lana was still knocking on my chest. Knocking on my chest?

The sun was shining into the store through a window set high on the wall. Someone was rapping on the front door for the second time that morning and, also for a second time, I was afraid for my life.

4

“PARIS MINTON?” a white man in a brown jacket asked.

His pants were brown too, but they clashed with the hue of his sports coat. He had spaces between his teeth and freckles on his forehead. His black hair looked like it was painted on and his eyes were both too low and too close together. He should have been a short man, with those goofy features, but he was at least six foot four, two inches taller than Fearless.

Something was missing. At first I thought it was something about my visitor, but then I realized that it was a sound. Fearless was no longer snoring.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said.

“My name is Theodore Timmerman. I’m looking for Fearless Jones.”

“Last I heard Fearless was somewhere up near Oxnard, workin’ on a farm.”

Theodore frowned and I realized that I should have asked him why he was nosing around about my friend. I wasn’t fully awake. I tried to cover my mistake by yawning and asking, “What you want him for?”

“Can I come in?” he replied.

“I don’t even know you, man,” I said. “The bookstore don’t open till ten, and I already answered your question.”

“I need to find Fearless Jones. Maybe you have some idea about how I can locate him.”

“No. I mean you might try cruisin’ up and down Central. Fearless is workin’ for a guy sells watermelons off the back of a fleet of Texas trucks around that way. If you see one’a them, they’d prob’ly have an idea of where he is.”

“You don’t have a number?” Timmerman asked.

“He don’t have a phone.”

“Oh.”

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

“Mr. Jones has come into an inheritance,” he said, masking the lie with a foolish grin. “I’m representing the estate.”

“Oh? Who died?”

“That’s confidential, Mr. Minton. Only to be revealed to Mr. Jones himself. But I can tell you that it would be well worth his while to contact me.”

“Maybe if you gave me a way to get in touch with you,” I suggested. “Then if I ran into Fearless I could tell him where to call you.”

The tall white man looked up over my head into the bookstore. For a moment I think he was considering pushing me aside and looking around for himself. At any other time I would have been afraid that he would harm me or my stock. But I knew that Fearless was upstairs and Fearless, at least in my mind, was proof against any danger.

Timmerman pulled out his wallet and shuffled a small stack of cards until he produced one that read,

Theodore T. Timmerman

Mutual Life of Cincinnati

Claims and Investigations

The phone number was local, however. The ink on the bottom line was slightly smeared.

“Is there a finder’s fee if I can get this to Fearless?”

“Yes,” he said. But I could see that the idea was novel to him. “Sure. Two and a half percent.”

“That don’t sound like much.”

“Out of fifty thousand that’s over twelve hundred dollars.”

“Oh,” I said. “Damn. Well, let me ask around and see if I can come up with something.”

Timmerman grinned again. “Can I use your toilet, Mr. Minton?”

“Sorry, but I got a girlfriend in the nude back there. Well, she’s not exactly a girlfriend. I mean, we just met each other last night. There’s not too much privacy and I don’t wanna get her all upset with some big man walkin’ in. You see what I mean.”

We were both liars. Almost everything we’d said to each other was a lie.

He nodded, looked up over my head again. I got the feeling that he wanted to catch a glimpse of a naked black girl.

“Well,” he said, still hesitating, still looking for a way in. “You have my number.”

The big man in the poorly chosen clothes walked away, taking the six wooden stairs of my front porch in two strides.

“Mr. Timmerman.”

“Yes, Mr. Minton.”

“Fearless got a lotta friends. How come you came to me?”

The white man looked at me a moment. He was trying to figure out where I stood in his business.

“Sweet,” he said at last. “Milo Sweet was listed as a contact for Mr. Jones. When I went to him he gave me your name.”

It was time for me to think. Was the bail bondsman holding paper on Fearless? Was that why Fearless was on the run?

No. Fearless wouldn’t lie to me. Not unless it was to protect me, or maybe he was protecting someone else. No. The story was too complex for his style of lying. Fearless’s lies were no longer than a few sentences, sometimes no more than a word or two.

“Good-bye, Mr. Minton,” the man who said he was in insurance said. “Call me the minute you hear from Mr. Jones. Time is money, you know.”

He crossed the street, climbed into a brand-new, maroon-colored Pontiac, and drove off.

“Who was he?” Fearless asked at my back.

I hadn’t heard him come up behind me but that was no surprise. Fearless’s job in World War II was to get behind German lines at night and “neutralize” any military man or operation that he came across.

“I don’t know,” I said. I closed the door and walked back toward the porch. “But he said that Milo gave him my name so that he could ask me about you.”

“Me?”

I went back to the kitchen to fix breakfast, but when I got there I realized that my appetite had gone with Theodore T. Timmerman.

“Did you jump bail, Fearless?”

“No.”

“Does Milo have any reason to be after you?”

Fearless shook his head.

“He said his name was Timmerman, Theodore. You ever heard of him?”

Fearless could exhibit the blankest stare imaginable.

“He said that you inherited some money,” I said. “You got any rich relatives or friends that care for you like that?”

The ex-assassin hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe.”

“Probably not.”

“Why you say that, Paris?”

“He called you Fearless, not Tristan. Seems to me that anybody care enough about you to leave you fifty thousand dollars would at least know your legal name.”

“Fifty thousand. Damn. I hope you wrong, Paris. You know I been lookin’ for fifty thousand dollars my whole life.”

That made me laugh. Fearless joined in. I pulled a box of Shredded Wheat from a shelf on the wall and some milk out of the ice chest that stood in for the refrigerator I planned to buy one day.

After we sat down to breakfast I started asking questions in earnest.

Questions is what I do. I read my first book two weeks after learning the alphabet. It wasn’t that I was smarter than anybody else, but it’s just that I wanted to know anything that was hidden from me. My mother used to offer me candy if I’d be quiet for just ten minutes. But I could never stop asking why this and why that, not until I learned how to read.

Somebody might think that a man who’s always probing— putting his nose where it doesn’t belong, as my mother says—would be somewhat brave. But that couldn’t be further from the truth about me. I’m afraid of rodents and birds, bald tires, fire, and loud noises. Any building I’ve ever been in I know all of the exits. And I’ve been known to jump up out of a sound sleep when hearing a footstep from the floor below.

That’s why I own a bookstore full of books, so that all my questioning can be done quietly and alone. I didn’t want to ask questions about Fearless’s whereabouts or activities. But after that big white man showed up at my door, I needed to know if my friend’s problems were going to spill over onto me.

5

“. . . NO, PARIS,” FEARLESS SAID. “I told you all I know about it. Leora and Son were lookin’ for Kit, and the next thing I know the cops are askin’ around about me.”

“And you haven’t talked to Milo in two months?”

“Maybe three,” he said. “Last time I saw Milo was at The Nest. He was there with a nice-lookin’ woman. I think her last name was Pine.”

“What about Kit?” I asked. “Did you find out anything else about him?”

I had asked it all before, but I’d learned from long experience that Fearless didn’t have a straightforward way of thinking. He never remembered everything all at once. I asked him questions the same way the police questioned a suspect: with the hope of finding what wasn’t there rather than what was.

Fearless rubbed his hand over the top of his head. His ideas, though often deep and insightful, came from a place that he had very little control over. If you asked him, “How did you know that man was going to pull out a knife?” he might utter some nonsense like, “It was the way he lifted his chin when he saw me walk in the room.”