Fear of the Dark

Chapter 2

I closed the door on Useless and took a deep breath. I had to send him away, had to. Useless was the kind of trouble that could get a man killed. He had no sense except for the sense of survival. That meant he would deal with thugs or criminals just as if they were upstanding citizens; he’d invite those men into your house and then leave out the back door when trouble started.

The next day he’d call and ask how you were just as if he hadn’t seen his partners come after you with a butcher’s knife. He’d come to visit you in the hospital and hit you up for a loan even after you explained to him that you couldn’t pay the doctor’s bill.

Useless was trouble from the git-go.

But still I felt guilty.

I loved my auntie Three Hearts. She was the finest individual that you could imagine. She never passed judgment on people without cause and she was loyal. I once had a fever of 105 degrees, and she sat there sponging me down for days while my mother was laid up sick with the same flu. She stayed with us another week, cooking and looking after us while her son, Useless, broke every toy I owned.

Three Hearts’s only blind spot was her son. Useless could do nothing wrong in her mind. If he got in trouble it was always somebody else’s fault. If he lied it was for a higher purpose. Her son was a perfect man, and woe be unto those who thought otherwise. She lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was a good thing because that meant I wouldn’t have to face her wrath at my turning her boy away in time of need.

Maybe I would have offered Useless a glass of water but, as I said before, I was already expecting trouble when he came knocking.

Three weeks earlier I had been having dinner at a diner in downtown L.A. It was an Italian-American place at one of the crossroads between the races. There were all kinds of patrons eating there: whites, blacks, Asians, and even one Mexican family.

I liked integrated places. I guess that’s because my time in the Deep South had been defined by segregation. They wouldn’t let me into the library in my hometown. I wasn’t even allowed to urinate where a white man had gone.

I had ordered eggplant parmigiana and was sitting there reading Ulysses by James Joyce. The book was no longer banned in the United States, but there was still a stigma attached to it, and I wanted to see what that was all about.

Between Joyce’s playfulness, the eggplant and Italian bread, and the satisfaction of being able to sit where I was sitting, I was pretty happy.

Also, at the booth across from me there was this skinny young white woman. She had natural, if dirty, blond hair and blue eyes that looked like pale quartz. She used her tongue a lot while eating and I was quite enchanted by her wandering gaze.

The meal and Stephen Dedalus went along just fine, and I was completely satisfied. But then a disturbance occurred.

The plump waitress, who wore a tight red uniform, had delivered a check to the blonde’s table, but then she came back with the cook. The cook was dressed all in whites. He had a sailor’s cap, a stained white T-shirt, bleached white trousers, and an apron that was once buff colored but now had faded to a kind of off-white.

“No, no, miss,” the burly, all-white cook was saying. “This is the dinner menu. The meat loaf is two ninety-nine, not one fifty.”

“It says right here that meat loaf is a dollar fifty cent,” the young woman said, pointing.

“It says lunch from noon to four right here,” the cook, who had a kindly face, insisted.

“You shouldn’t have the lunches on the same menu with the dinners,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t have even eaten here if I thought I had to pay all that.”

“I’m sorry,” the big man said.

The woman took out a small red purse and reached in.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“What now?” the waitress, who was almost as large as the cook, said.

“I must have left my wallet at home.”

“I do not trust you,” the cook said, and I wondered what his native language might have been.

“I’ll just go home and bring it right back,” the woman went on as if she had not heard his words.

“No,” said the man. “You will be staying here and Diane will be calling the police.”

The woman attempted to rise, but the man with the kindly face held up a warning hand.

Diane turned to go toward the counter.

People all over the diner were craning their necks to see what was happening.

“Rita?” I said. I was standing next to the cook with a restraining hand on the waitress’s elbow.

The dirty blonde looked up at me, trying not to seem confused.

“Hey, Rita. It’s me... Paris. Don’t tell me you lost your wallet again. I told you you got to remember to put it in your purse before you leave the house.”

“You know her?” the cook asked.

Instead of answering, I handed him a twenty-dollar bill, the first twenty I’d had a hold of in a few weeks. That’s the reason I had come to the diner, because I was flush and didn’t have to eat pinto beans and rice for once.

“Rita Pigeon,” I said, lying easily. “We work at the Lido Theater. I take tickets in the afternoon, and she’s the nighttime usherette.”

“Bullshit,” Diane, the obese waitress, said.

“Watch you language,” the cook said. “Don’t speak like that around customers.”

“What customers?” Diane spat.

“Come on over and sit with me, Rita,” I said to the blonde. “And could you bring us some coffee with milk?” I asked the waitress.

Diane was going to tell me where I could go, but one gesture from the cook and she was on her way.

“I don’t know what kind funny stuff this is,” the cook said to me, waving the Jackson note. “But I will take your money.”

I remember thinking that there was a great deal more truth to what he said than he meant.

The blonde moved to my booth, and the rest of the patrons returned to eating.

“Jessa,” she said, introducing herself. She held out her hand and I shook it. “Thanks.”

“It was a good scam,” I said. “Three out of four places would have just thrown you out and said not to come back. But you should at least have the two bucks so that the one hardnose won’t send you to jail.”

Jessa was wearing an orange sundress that had little white buttons all the way down the front. The collar had a little dirt on it. Her red purse was scuffed.

“If I had two dollars I would have gotten a burger someplace,” she said, smiling at me. “My boyfriend took off with our money, two weeks behind on the rent.”

She didn’t have to ask where she was going to sleep that night. I might be a coward, but that doesn’t prevent me from being a fool. Watching that girl masticate her meat loaf had wiped any caution from my mind.

I had seen Jessa every third day after paying for her meal. I even went into my sacrosanct bank account and came out with money for her weekly rate on a room down on Grand.

That woman knew how to talk to a man.

But eight days before Useless came knocking, I had gotten information from a guy who worked at the front desk of Jessa’s downtown rooming house.

“Mr. Minton,” Gregory Wallace, the night manager, said, speaking to me as if we were equals. He was a white guy from Idaho. He’d never understood racism. There are many white people like that, even in the South.

“Yeah?”

“You know your friend Jessa had another boyfriend before you,” the skinny young man said.

“Uh-huh.”

“This big mean guy called Tiny.”

Greg had my attention then.

“What about Tiny?” I asked.

“He’s been comin’ around on days that you’re not here. And last night he asked me what the name was of the guy paying her rent.”

Gregory had a pale, crooked face, with permanently bloodshot eyes, but he looked to me like a savior right then.

“Thanks, man.”

I hadn’t gone back to the rooming house for a week. That meant it was time for the rent to be paid and so Jessa would be looking for me. My phone had been off the hook for three days. I’d taken sixty-five dollars from my savings account to give to Jessa if she came by, but I intended to tell her that she needed to leave me alone.

So, Three Hearts notwithstanding, I had to turn Useless away. Because if he was there when Jessa was, I would most certainly come to grief. Useless was like monosodium glutamate for problems; he brought out the evil essence and magnified it.

I had just finished rehearsing my speech to Jessa for the thirteenth time when her gentle knock came on my door.

I pulled the drape back to be sure she was alone, took a deep breath, and then opened up.

She was wearing a tan dress that hugged her slim figure and somehow wrapped around her calves.

“Hi,” she said, letting her head loll to the side.

“Hey.”

“Can I come in?”

No died on my lips as I backed away from the door. She swayed twice and crossed the threshold. She pushed the door closed, and I shivered.

Jessa Brown reached out as if she was about hold my hand, but instead she unzipped my pants and reached down into my shorts with quick and deft fingers.

“That’s what I need,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You know a girl can’t give up a treasure like that.”

I took half a breath and held it.

I am what the genteel folks call well-endowed. Some women like that. It gives them a de facto sense of power, I believe.

I’m small and weak and scared of my own shadow, and so my sexual prowess is one of the only things I have to be proud of in a masculine way. So when a woman looks me in the eye like that and tells me she needs me, I can’t say no.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

“No.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s do it right here on the floor, with your pants down around your ankles and me riding that monster.”