Fear Itself

22

BROWN KNEW HIS CHESS. He beat me the first game because I underestimated him, gazing around the room and trying to overhear conversations as we played.

That game was fast, us taking no more than thirty seconds for each move. But I got serious in the second go-round. I took my time at strategic moments and outmaneuvered him so that he had to give up when half the men were still in play.

He won the third game. It was rare that anyone beat me twice in a night.

Brown had worker’s hands and a hard look when he concentrated. At first glance I thought he was in his twenties, but then I could see where he was at least ten years older than that.

“Where you from, Brown?”

“Illinois originally,” he said. “But they tell me I was born in Mississippi.”

“Jackson?”

“Greenwood.”

“Delta boy.”

“I got the blues in my spit,” he agreed.

“How long you been in L.A.?”

“Two years. Most’a that time I lived down at Redondo Beach, workin’ on this mackerel fishin’ boat they got down there.”

“How come you left?”

“When I realized that I was gettin’ seasick on dry land, I knew it was time to leave fishin’ behind.” He had a nice, friendly laugh. “So I moved here to Miss Moore’s just a few days ago and got a job cleanin’ tuxedos and silk dresses.”

Charlotta had returned from the store and was sitting next to Brenda Frail. They were working on a quilt together.

Deciding to play with Brown turned out to be a mistake because of my pride. We traded wins back and forth for two hours, until the late news came on.

Good evening, this is Bob Benning with KTLA news. The police were summoned to a grisly scene late this afternoon at the Bernard Arms Residence Hotel on Fountain. The body of Lance Wexler was found by police, who had been trying to get in touch with Mr. Wexler for the past three days. There was no sign of a break-in. Just two days ago Wexler’s sister was found dead in Griffith Park. She was also the victim of foul play. When asked about a connection between the two crimes, Captain Howard North told reporters that the police were looking into every detail of both homicides. . . . Maestro Wexler, oil distributor and real estate developer, offered a reward of ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his children’s killers. . . .

My heart was thundering by the end of the report. I wondered if the randy porter Warren had put together the delivery Negro at the back door and the death of his tenant. I worried that I might have left a fingerprint or maybe my wallet fell out on the toilet floor. I actually reached for my billfold to make sure that I still had it.

As bad as I felt, I was still able to beat Brown. That gave me hope. Maybe fear gave me clarity.

“Another game?” Brown asked.

“You good, man,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

Brown stuck his tongue in his cheek and smiled. The grin stopped at his mouth, his eyes bearing no relation to mirth. That’s how it was for so many displaced southern, and even midwestern, Negroes in those days. Coming to California, they had to dig out from under nearly a century of white oppression. Everybody, black and white, was a potential enemy. People that had been mired so deeply in poverty that that’s all they could ever expect. And so when faced with hope, many became distant and watchful. Even when relaxing, people like Brown were on guard, ready for any threat.

“MR. HENDRICKS,” CHARLOTTA CALLED AT MY BACK.

I was halfway down the hall, headed for my room. You know I had to be shaken by that news report to have forgotten her in the sitting room.

“Hey.”

“Did you forget our drink?”

“No, baby,” I said. “I just didn’t want to give people the wrong idea. I mean, what would it look like if I just walked up to you and said let’s go upstairs?”

Charlotta was slightly taller than I and a few pounds heavier. She pressed me up against the wall and kissed me, hard. She knew how to kiss. The worry was still in my head but all the details fell away. When she stepped back to see my reaction, she had a smile on her face. I took a stutter step to keep on my feet.

“I like bein’ treated like a lady,” she said.

We kissed down the hall and up the wide stairway. It took me three minutes to unlock the door because Charlotta had worked her hand down the front of my pants. When she found what she was searching for her eyes opened wide.

“Is that real?” she asked me.

“Does it feel real?”

“Yeah.”

“Then it is.”

There are only three things that I’ve ever had pride in: my intelligence, my bookstore, and my sexual endowment.

Charlotta and I barely made it to the bed. Once there, we hardly let go of each other.

Somewhere in the middle of our passion I realized how much I needed the release. It wasn’t lovemaking, but that was all right. I needed to be pushed around in a situation where I could push back. She didn’t need to love me but just what I was doing—how hard and how long.

“Again,” she whispered for the third time.

“You got to gimme a couple’a minutes, girl,” I said. “Just a couple.”

Charlotta smiled at me. She held both physical love and victory in her mien. It was a battle I didn’t mind losing.

I got up and lit two cigarettes, placing one of them between her lips. Then I lay down, putting my head on her thigh. We smoked for a while in the afterglow of our passion.

“You used to come up here when Kit had this room, huh?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.

“What you mean by that?” She flexed the hard muscle of her leg.

“Nuthin’ really,” I said. “I mean, it’s just that when I opened that door and looked at you, I thought that whoever it was you were comin’ to see was a lucky man.”

“Oh.” Charlotta’s leg relaxed. “You don’t have to be jealous, Paris.”

“Wha, what did you call me?”

“That’s what your driver’s license says your name is.”

I had only gone to the toilet once since we’d been together. I couldn’t have been out of the room for more than a few minutes.

“Yeah, well, you know, honey. Sometimes a man needs to be a little on the sly. I know I told Miss Moore I was marrying somebody, but really I’m tryin’ to get away from some guys wanna do me harm.”

“I knew it,” Charlotta said.

“How you gonna know all that?” I asked just to put her a little on the defensive.

“I didn’t know about no men or nuthin’, but I could tell by the way you loved me that you wasn’t engaged.”

“How?”

“A man gettin’ married don’t have it stored up like you do, baby. I done had men just got outta jail less hungry than you.”

“Where you think Kit went?” I asked. She probably thought that I was changing the topic because of being embarrassed by the way she had mastered me sexually.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He told me that he might be gone one night. He promised to take me to the show by Friday, but he never came back. You like the movies, Paris?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, Thad.” She kissed me.

“What did he do for a living?”

“Who?”

“The man who lived here.”

“Why you wanna know?”

“It’s just this feelin’ I got ever since comin’ up in here,” I said, and then I shivered.

“What kinda feelin’?”

“Somethin’ bad,” I said. “I get like that sometimes. Once, when my uncle Victor was up in Jackson, Mississippi, I woke up in a sweat callin’ out his name, and then a week later we found out that he had been killed that very night in a juke joint around there.”

I figured that either Charlotta would think I was crazy or her superstitious side would come out—either way she’d stop being suspicious about my questions.

“You know I got a bad feelin’ about Kit too,” she said. “Before he left he told me that he was about to make a whole lotta money. So much that we could go to the show seven nights a week. He said that he was gonna buy a proper farm and hire people to do all the work for him.”

“He was gonna make money on a farm?” I asked.

“No, stupid. He was gonna buy the farm with all the money he made.”

“What money?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But you better be sure that no poor niggah livin’ in a roomin’ house gonna make money like that the honest way.”

“Were you scared to be with him?” I asked. “I mean, knowin’ he was maybe stealin’.”

“I didn’t know nuthin’,” she said in a rehearsed sort of way. “Nuthin’ for sure. And anyway, he didn’t have the money yet. He only said that he was about to get it.”

Damn, I said to myself. Then to Charlotta: “You let white people get in your business and you know it’s a fifty-fifty chance that you ever make it back home again.”

“What you mean about white people?”

“I never heard’a this Kit friend’a yours,” I said. “And maybe if he says a lotta money he really just means the twenty-fi’e cent it cost to get into a movie house. But if he was talkin’ about real money, then you know it’s got to be a white man somewhere in it. White peoples got all the money and they hang it in front’a our eyes just like I used to hold a sugar beet out ahead of my mama’s mule.”

“Maybe you do have some premonition in you, Thad,” Charlotta said.

I was glad that she used my made-up name, but at the same time I realized that she was bound to let my secret out before the week was over.

“You know,” she continued, “Kit said that him and this friend’a his knew some white man that was gonna give ’em the money.”

“I knew it,” I said. “That’s the way it always is. White man come an’ tell a whole lotta lies, and then the next thing you know your house is up for sale and you lookin’ for a hole to hide in.”

“If you lucky,” Charlotta agreed.

“Did you call his friend?” I asked.

“Say what?”

“Did you call Kit’s friend? The one who was in business with him with the white man.”

“Why I wanna go an’ do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, making a big gesture with my hands. “I mean, I thought you was all worried that he might be in the hospital or dead. Maybe if you found out somethin’ from this friend’a his then maybe Miss Moore wouldn’t be so fast to give away his room.”

I could see that Charlotta hadn’t considered looking for Kit herself. She was a fair-weather friend; glad to drink your whiskey and lie in your bed, but not concerned with washing the sheets or ironing your shirt for work the next morning.

“Why you so worried about Kit in the first place?” she asked me. “He ain’t blood to you.”

I had pushed as far as I could without taking Charlotta into my confidence. So I decided to let it go.

“You right, baby,” I said. “Why I wanna be all in some man’s business when I ain’t never even met him, and here I got a beautiful woman lyin’ in my bed?”

I let my fingers trail over her nipples and a ripple of pleasure went down her body.

“Yeah,” she said, urging me on and agreeing with the same word. “Why you wanna be worried about BB when you here with me?”

My heart was already thumping. Charlotta’s fingers were tickling my thigh. But I had to pull away.

“You not talkin’ about Bartholomew Perry?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“Always hang around with white girls? His father sells used cars?”

“That’s him.”

“He owe me fifty dollars,” I declared. “Fifty.”

“Over what?”

“He was out with some white girl, at the Python Club. She wanted champagne for her and her girlfriends, and the niggah just had to act all big and say okay. You know he wanted to get in her drawers so bad you could smell it.”

Charlotta hummed her disapproval at BB’s depravity.

“Anyway,” I said. “He didn’t have the cash, and they don’t take personal checks at the Python because they get stuck with a service charge if it bounce. So I ponied up the forty-two bucks I got paid that afternoon and BB promised to pay me back fifty. That was six months ago at least. You know I called the mothahfuckah but he moved. I went to his father but he told me he didn’t keep up with his son. Fifty dollars.”

I was sinking deeper and deeper into the role I had made for myself. The cursing might have disturbed Charlotta, but she had to believe in who she was talking to.

“I thought you said you was from up north?” Charlotta asked then.

“You thought my name was Thad too,” I said. “I just told Miss Moore that so nobody would know who I am. Them men after me want some money. But you know, if I could get that fifty dollars I might be able to buy me a few more days.”

“I don’t know,” she said suspiciously. “Here you in Kit’s room and you just happen to know his friend . . .”

“I know a lotta peoples,” I said. “And that mothahfuckah BB owe me fifty dollars.”

“How much you owe them men?”

“Three hunnert dollars.”

“How much would you pay if you could get to BB?”

“Pay? Nuthin’. Shit, I need every penny. Even if I turn over the whole thing, it might just only buy me a week as it is.”

“You could give me twenty and take the rest and leave town. The fifty ain’t gonna help anyways, and you only got two dollars in your billfold.”

“If I’ma leave town I’ma need more than thirty-two dollars,” I reasoned. “Bus ticket to San Diego cost eight forty-five. Then I need to pay for a room till I get a job.”

“If you don’t find BB you only got two bucks,” she reminded me.

“You know where he is?”

“Maybe.”

“I could give you fifteen, Charlotta. That’s a lot for just a couple’a words.”

She pretended to consider my offer. I could have talked her down to five bucks, but it was all make-believe anyway. Why not be generous with a payoff that would never come?

“Okay,” she said. “But only ’cause you so sweet. Ooo, look. All that talk about money made you hard again.”

She was right.

“You wanna lie back down a little while?” I asked her.

“No, baby,” she said. She stood up too. “I got to get up early to get to work.”

“What am I gonna do about this?”

“Either take care of it yourself,” she said with a sympathetic smile, “or wait till tomorrow afternoon when I get home with BB’s numbers.”

“You don’t have ’em in your room?”

“Uh-uh. No. But I know somebody prob’ly know where he is.”

She looked down on my hopeless excitement and issued a deep grunt of appreciation. Then she walked out the door, leaving me to the foolishness of manhood.