Fear of the Dark

Chapter 11

Man Dorn was on his blue porch, puffing at a short cigar and sitting in the center of a mesh hammock as if it were a chair.

“You movin’ in?” he asked me.

“Ms. Grant’s the tenant,” I told him. “But you can tell me somethin’ if you don’t mind.”

“What’s that?” the no-neck landlord offered.

“Who was Angel and Ulysses hangin’ out with before he went away?”

“Mad Anthony,” Man said with no hesitation.

“That’s it?”

“The only one I knew. People come in and outta there all the time, but I didn’t know their names. Angel didn’t have many girlfriends, and the men who visited Useless wore suits half the time.”

“Ulysses,” Three Hearts corrected.

“Any white men come to see Ulysses?”

“No,” Man said, shaking his head, “never.”

“You know where I can find Anthony?” I asked, all other options being closed.

“He stay at a white door in the alley between Ninety-first and Ninety-second, right off Central to the east side.”

I walked Three Hearts back to my car with the detritus of seventy-two thousand dollars in my pocket and the address of a brutal thug echoing in my ear.

“Maybe we should call the police,” Three Hearts said as we left the curb.

“No,” I said. “No police on this.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Three Hearts turn to regard me. She watched my profile for a moment and then looked away. She knew that I had gleaned some information that might have put her son in jail. She knew it and decided that she didn’t want to know the details.

That was fine by me. I was afraid even to speak the thoughts I was having.

I didn’t like anything about the road we were on: Useless with his rotten luck, his mother and her evil eye. And a woman named Angel in that community didn’t bode well either. All of that was just superstition, though. I could have gone to a good John Wayne movie and put those thoughts out of my mind. But those money wrappers and that list were no wild fancy. That was blackmail and extortion — maybe worse.

The alley between Ninety-first and Ninety-second was a rut-ridden dirt path with tiny islets of asphalt here and there to remind you that it had once been an honest road, paved and straight. But now that alley was a place to buy and sell those things that were not legal. It was a place where a teenage boy could lose his virginity for ten dollars and where the woman who helped him could forget her sins for half that in white powder held by a cellophane fold.

The alley was a place where criminals congregated and plotted doomed liquor store robberies and pie-in-the-sky counterfeiting schemes.

I parked on Ninety-first because any car left in the alley was asking to be stolen.

Three Hearts and I walked timidly at midday down the dark path to Mad Anthony. I wasn’t as afraid as I might have been because I did believe in Three Hearts’s power. But even the thought of standing face-to-face with one of Watts’s genuine gangsters made me quiver.

I had never actually been in the company of Anthony Jarman. I had seen him in side glances at glitzy Watts night spots and coming out of big fancy cars. Once I had seen him sitting in a booth in a gumbo restaurant on Florence. But I knew enough not to stare at a man like that. I wouldn’t have met his gaze any more than I would look a wild animal in the eye.

Fearless knew Anthony, actually referred to him as Tony. But Fearless was almost as much of a legend as Killer Cleave in our neighborhoods. Most people knew that Fearless had been a behind-the-lines assassin in Europe during the big war. No one who crossed him stayed on his feet.

But I had no intention of invoking my friend’s name. Saying that I was there under the protection of Fearless Jones would have been like taking out a pistol and placing it on a table. Everyone knows that once the gun comes out, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.

I laughed when we got to the door, set in a decrepit brick wall at the very center of the block. It was as if Man Dorn had told me a joke when he called that portal white.

It might have once been white. But now it was lined with cracked paint. The cracks were filled with black dirt and soot. The little white that was left had dried gray and green lichen on it like delicate tile work. The doorknob was so rusted that you would have cut your palm trying to turn it.

I knocked. It was like banging on a redwood tree with a bag of mushrooms. I picked up a rock and banged again. This caused some reverberation, but no answer came. I tried a few times more, breathing a little easier after each attempt.

“I don’t think he’s here, Auntie,” I said, not able to keep the relief out of my voice.

“How can we find him?” she asked.

“I think we might have to go to Fearless,” I said.

That got my worried relative to smile.

“That nice Fearless Jones?” she asked.

My mother and Three Hearts had come once to visit me and Useless in L.A. Three Hearts was very taken with Fearless; most women, no matter their age, were.

“You think he’d agree to help us some?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Fearless is my friend and he likes Ulysses.”

This was true. Fearless had a good time with Useless. But, then again, Fearless would have thought that a lion cub was cute or that an eleven-foot crocodile was grandfatherly.

“Well, let’s go and see him, then,” Three Hearts said.

That was fine by me. It had taken all of my courage just to darken Mad Anthony’s door. We turned back and walked toward the civilized world of paved streets and real white doors.

Half the way toward this goal we ran into a roadblock.

He was so wide that you didn’t think that he was as tall as he was.

He must have seen us from some secret lookout and decided to come around from behind.

“What the fuck you niggahs doin’ beatin’ on my do’ wit’ that rock?” Mad Anthony roared.

“We, we, we, we, we,” I said.

“I’m lookin’ for my son,” Three Hearts told him with nary a stammer. “Ulysses S. Grant the Fourth.”

“Useless? That piece’a shit is your son? He need to die. Motherfuckin’ bastid need to have my knife diggin’ all up in his asshole.” And to prove the point, Anthony revealed a ragged blade with his right hand.

Fearless has often told me that between the two of us I was the brave one. “Man like me,” he would say, “man not afraid of heaven or hell, is too stupid to be scared. You cain’t be brave if you don’t know fear.”

I understood his pronouncement on that afternoon. Because you know the minute I saw that knife all I wanted to do was run. I knew I could outrun Anthony. Hell, I could have outrun Jesse Owens right then. My thighs felt like they had motors in them. My feet were pistons waiting to go off.

But I didn’t run because that would have meant leaving my auntie, and that was something I just could not do.

“Where the fuck is he, bitch?” Anthony bellowed. He grabbed her by that loose dress and actually lifted her up off the ground.

“Oh,” Three Hearts shouted, more in surprise than fear, I think.

“S-s-stop,” I managed to stutter. “P-put her down, Anthony. She don’t know where Useless is. She here askin’ you where.”

I know it might sound like a pretty light challenge when I write it down here. But I would like to see how you would respond faced as I was by a man who might just as well have been a hungry tiger lunging at you from the depths of an Indian rain forest.

Anthony pushed Three Hearts against the wall of a dilapidated and condemned building. They were a few feet from me.

It was the perfect moment to run. I could have said that I was looking for help. I could have called for the police.

Tiny Bobchek returned to my mind at that moment. I didn’t know why. Months later, when I was sitting up wide awake in my bed at 3:00 a.m., it came to me that I felt guilty about not being able to do more for him than just take him out in the middle of nowhere, strip him of his identity, and drop him into a shallow grave. I had to do it, but it seemed that I should have done more.

I wasn’t aware of all that in Mad Anthony’s alley. All I knew was that Tiny was in my mind and I was running toward a man who could have beaten me with both arms tied behind his back.

I leaped and struck out while the behemoth raged at my auntie.

Mad Anthony released my auntie, grabbed me, and delivered what might have looked like a halfhearted slap.

I actually bounced upon hitting the ground, first on my left side and then on my stomach. I came to a stop on my back, looking up into a blue, blue sky edged by branches from trees on the eastern side of the alley.

I tried to sit up. For a moment I felt that I’d succeeded, but then I realized it was my will that had risen while the body stayed down.

The sky seemed to be spinning and darkening. A car backfired maybe three blocks away, and then there was a cry for help.

I wondered what it was all about while floating away on a sea of painful darkness.