Fear Itself

15

AFTER LEORA LEFT the only thing I had to do was wait for Fearless’s call. I didn’t know how long that would be because I had no idea of the particular crime they were investigating. It could have been anything from grand theft to murder.

I imagined that Fearless was locked in a room with men who asked questions punctuated by fists and blackjacks, but still I wasn’t worried about him. Fearless had lived the life of a soldier since before he joined the armed forces. He was a one-man army who did his duty. And when the enemy had done their worst he would walk away with no anger in his heart because he would have known that he had won in spite of their weapons and torments.

Fearless rarely bragged about his courage. The things I knew about him had come from long nights of heavy drinking and lots of questions on my part.

One night he told me about how a gang of men had jumped him and brought him to an old abandoned barn outside of Fayetteville, Louisiana. He was sixteen and they were looking for his auntie’s boyfriend, who, they said, had stolen a man’s watch.

“‘Turn him ovah, boy,’ the main man told me,” Fearless had said. “‘Turn him ovah or I will mash your face in like a sack’a mud.’

“‘No sir,’ I tells him,” Fearless said in the words of the sixteen-year-old boy. “‘My Auntie Mar wouldn’t want me puttin’ no drunks on her man.’”

“‘Who you callin’ drunk?’ the main man, his name was Arthur, shout. An’ you know, Paris, I wasn’t even afraid even way back then. I knew I was in trouble. I thought I might be dead. But there was no way to turn. Arthur slapped me hard enough to knock some other boy down. I knew right then I was gonna get hurt. And it made me mad that them men would pick on a child. So I hit Arthur on his nose and then dived down and rolled. I got a hold on a timber and hefted it. I was swinging like Babe Ruth in that small space. Two of the men got knocked out and Arthur and the rest got away.”

“What they do to your auntie’s boyfriend?”

“They were so embarrassed by bein’ beat up by a child that they forgot that two-dollar watch and stayed outta my whole family’s way.”

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.”