Fear Itself

39

FEELING AS IF I HAD BEEN TRAMPLED by some prehistoric wooly rhino, I tried to look around. I couldn’t open my eyes all the way, and the light I managed to see was a dingy blue-brown glow. I could barely breathe, feeling as though there was a great stone on my chest. I tried to pry my eyes wider. The world was small and crazy. It was as if maybe a lead blanket had been draped over me and it was slowly pressing the life from my lungs.

Suddenly I came fully awake. I yelled and bucked, rolling the body from on top of me.

Theodore Timmerman, who probably never worked for an insurance company, was lying next to me on his back—wide-eyed and dead. I was on my side thinking about standing up but unable to make the right moves in order to achieve that goal. All I could do was lie there next to a dead man who had come close to killing me. My bones were jelly and my mind was a dull thud. All sensation had fled my body. Only breath remained. Sweet, sweet breath. Breath and death and every once in a while some sound like the house settling or the waterlike whoosh of a car passing down Jefferson.

There were also gurgling sounds emanating from within the corpse that lay mere inches from my ear. The body fluids settling down, headed back for the ground that they rose from. A motor started humming somewhere on the side of the building. A cat yowled and I felt a sharp pain in my left hand.

The fingernail of my ring finger was bleeding, half torn off in the struggle with the big white man. I concentrated on that pain, realizing somehow that if I didn’t I might lose consciousness again or I might even lose my senses completely and lie there until someone found me and called the police, who would then cart me off to prison.

I got up on one elbow, stayed there for what felt like a month, then I rocked up into a sitting position. I was moving fast by then. It took me no longer than five minutes to remember my legs and feet and the possibility of walking.

I stared at the phone for a long time, I have no idea how long, trying to remember Ambrosia’s number and how to dial it. I knew I had tucked it away on a slip of paper someplace but it was beyond me to think of where.

What I did think of was my little cousin Aster, a young girl, not yet five, who died in a flash flood when I was six. She was my best friend, and when my mother took me to her parents’ house to help with the preparations we found them washing the body before putting her in her Sunday dress. I asked could I wash her feet, and I remember her mother, a big West Indian woman, cried and wrapped me in her arms. My mother wouldn’t let me wash Asty’s feet, but that night I dreamt that I washed her soles and between her toes with a real sea sponge and perfumed soap.

Looking down at the phone, with Theodore’s corpse in the periphery, and thinking about dreaming about washing my dead playmate’s feet, I suddenly remembered Ambrosia’s number.

“Hello,” she said without the slightest shred of civility.

“Fearless there?” I asked in a voice that belonged to a dead man.

“Do you know what time it is, Paris Minton? It’s three in the mornin’. First Fearless don’t get in till two and I just fall asleep again, and then —”

“Get him for me, Ambrosia,” I said. “I don’t have time to play.”

Maybe she could hear the stress in my voice. Maybe Fearless had talked to her about me being his closest friend. Whatever it was, she stopped her complaints and a moment later Fearless was on the line.

“What’s up, Paris?”

“I just killed Theodore Timmerman.”

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

He hung up the phone in my ear, leaving me holding on to the receiver and thinking about how Aster would scream and giggle when I tickled her.

“HE’S SURE ENOUGH DEAD,” Fearless was saying. “No doubt about that at all.”

I had pulled up a chair next to the corpse while Fearless examined the body.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said.

I had been saying things like that since Fearless got there. I said I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean to kill him. I asked Fearless why did he have to try and hurt me like that.

“You didn’t kill him,” Fearless said.

“What you talkin’ ’bout, man. I hit and hit and hit and hit, and he fell dead.”

“If anybody killed him,” Fearless said, “I’m the one. I’m the one threw that stone. I’m the one threw him down and tied him up. But Paris, we took him to the hospital. We called to make sure he got a bed. What else could we do? And what was you supposed to do wit’ him stranglin’ you like that? I mean, if there was ever a case of self-defense in Los Angeles, it’s this right here.”

“Yeah I . . . Yeah I . . . guess.”

Fearless put his hand on my neck. I thought he was trying to console me, but then I felt a pinch on a muscle next to the big vertebra. A pain went down my back and up into my head that was beyond any physical hurt I had ever known. I cried out and tried to get away from the hold but Fearless would not let go. It seemed as if he had taken up Timmerman’s job and planned to kill me too.

Finally he released his grip and I fell to the floor writhing. Fearless picked me up and carried me to the bathroom in the back of the store. He turned on the shower I had installed over the bathtub and threw me in, clothes and all.

The water was freezing!

I tried to climb out but Fearless wouldn’t let me. He held on to my arms and legs until I was almost numb with the cold. After long minutes he pulled me out and said, “Dry off and then go upstairs and change, Paris. We got business to take care of here.”

“Man, what the fuck you do that to me for?” I shouted, sputtering with rage.

“You was slippin’, Paris,” he said, giving me a one-shoulder shrug. “Shock, man. You know I been on the front lines. I seen boys experience death for the first time. And here you think you killed that man. We ain’t got time for no sanitarium, so I just put you through the crash course.”

I was so cold that I was shivering. The quavering in my chest and Fearless’s offhanded manner made me laugh. I did that a bit and then stopped for fear that my friend might throw me back in the shower.

It was at that moment that I accepted myself as a killer.