Fear Itself

20

WE DECIDED THAT FEARLESS WOULD GO back to Ambrosia’s house while I did my question thing.

“Yes?” a middle-aged, auburn colored woman asked me at the door. She wore a once-black housedress that had faded to a reddish gray. The hem came down to the middle of her shins. Over the dress she had a white apron that hinted at a powder blue heyday.

“Hello, ma’am,” I said. “I’m looking for the super or the landlord for the rooms.”

“That’s me,” she said. “Victoria Moore. I’m the owner.”

“Well hello, Victoria Moore. Glad to meet ya.” I put on my brightest smile. “My name is Thad Hendricks. I’m just in from the Bay Area and a friend’a mine told me that you had a recent vacancy. I’m down here lookin’ for work while planning my wedding. She’s from down around here, and I thought that I could scout out a job before sinkin’ too much money into rent.”

The woman’s face lit up. Everything I said delighted her: looking for the room, planning to get married, saving a dollar, and applying for jobs. I was the daydream she’d been having two minutes before the doorbell rang.

“Oh, isn’t that wonderful,” she said.

“So do you have a room available, Mrs. Moore?”

“Miss Moore,” she said. “And yes, I do happen to have a vacancy. You know that Kit Mitchell just up and left one morning and never came back. He owed me a week’s rent. I’m down twelve dollars as it is.”

“That’s pretty steep for just a room, isn’t it?” I asked, not wanting to seem overly eager.

“It’s a very large room, Mr. Hendricks,” Miss Moore said. “On the top floor. With a view. And the twelve dollars is for both room and board.”

“Can I see it?”

The landlady was short but so am I. She looked at my face and then down around my feet.

“No bag?”

I reached for my wallet and produced my last five- and ten-dollar bills.

“I left my bag with my fiancée,” I said. “You know I’ll only be staying here a week, and so I’d be happy to add on three dollars to what you usually get. And if you rent the room to me, at least you won’t lose a second week’s rent while looking for a more permanent tenant.”

Miss Moore reached for the money but I held it back.

“Could I see the room first?”

The landlady closed her hand and smiled.

“Of course, Mr. Hendricks. You’re going to fall in love with it I’m sure.”

THE FRONT DOOR LED INTO A LARGE DINING ROOM with a long table that had fourteen mismatched chairs set at placemats with the dishware and cutlery already out.

“We serve coffee, toast, and hard-boiled eggs in the morning, and dinner six nights a week,” Miss Moore informed me as we walked through the dining room and into a long hallway.

Halfway down the hall a door swung open and a large man dressed only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts emerged. He was fat and freckled, lemon-colored and past fifty.

“Miss Moore,” he said in an accent that had to be put on. “I distinctly remember you promising me that I would be told when the tub was ready for my bath.”

“Oh, Mr. Conroy. You aren’t dressed,” she said.

This observation caused the big man to fold his arms over his belly.

“I said,” Miss Moore continued, “that you were next on the list. But you can’t expect me to be watching the tub and then running down here to tell you when it’s ready. I’ve been washing linens all morning. And then there’s dinner I have to prepare.”

The landlady’s gaze drifted to Mr. Conroy’s stomach upon mentioning the meal. He hugged himself even tighter.

“This is Mr. Hendricks, Mr. Conroy. He’s going to be with us for a week.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

I held out my hand but he didn’t take it.

“It’s that wicked girl Charlotta taken my bath,” Conroy said to me. “She will take your bath and pick your pocket if you don’t lock your door.”

“Mr. Conroy, I will not have you bad-mouthing the other tenants.”

“But she —”

“Not another word. Come with me, Mr. Hendricks.”

The stern property owner led me to the end of the hall, where there was a surprisingly wide staircase. We went up three flights and came to a small landing that had only one door. Miss Moore took a brass Sargent key from her apron pocket and worked it on the lock.

It was a beautiful room, having a ten-foot ceiling and picture windows on either side. The bed was maple and stood two feet or more off the floor. The walls were painted a watery coral. Underneath the coat you could see the dim patterns of wallpaper that the painters had been too lazy to strip off. There was a big stuffed chair in one corner and a simple cherry table that could have been used for dining or as a desk in another. It even had a sink against one wall in case I got up in the middle of the night and needed to wash my face.

Through one of the windows I could see the tops of houses all the way to the hills that separated L.A. proper from the valley. There were pine, palm, carob, and a dozen other varieties of trees and wide asphalt roadways with very little traffic on them. There were children playing in the streets and clotheslines heavy with the day’s cleaning in almost every backyard. Here and there an incinerator put out white smoke, and the sky was that deep blue that threatens to suck the breath right out of your lungs.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt that peaceful. I didn’t want to turn around and face the job of lying to the good landlady. My deepest desire was to somehow fly through that window and become a part of everything I saw. I wanted to be those streets and those children’s jump-rope song. I wanted to climb with those pale puffs of smoke into the blue sky and surrender like the white flags they resembled.

“I threw out most’a the clothes and trash he left,” Miss Moore was saying. “You might find something here or there. If it’s trash throw it out, but if it could be sold you should turn it over to me so that I can try and make back the rent he stole.”

I handed over the rent money. This left me with three singles and one two-dollar note—that and three Liberty quarters was all I had in my pockets.

“I won’t be lookin’ too close,” I said. “Just sleepin’ and applying for work, that’s all it’ll be for me this week.”

“The phone is not for tenant use,” Miss Moore said. “Dinner is at seven sharp, and you have to sign up for the bath.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“The big key is for the front door,” she said as she handed over two brass Sargent keys tied together with a dirty bit of string. “You can come in whenever you want but the house goes dark after ten, and you should be quiet when you come in late. I don’t like visitors, so if you want to entertain you have to tell me about it first.”

“No cards and no girlfriends, Miss Moore. It’s the straight and narrow for me.”

She smiled and squeezed my wrist and then left, closing the door behind her. I went back to the window and stayed there for a long time. It was nothing like my rural home in New Iberia, Louisiana, but there was the feeling of home there. I spent so much time in books that the natural world was often a surprise to me. It was a new world filled with people walking and laughing, living lives that didn’t seem to have any part of a larger story.

There was a partly padded folding chair at the cherry table/ desk. I took it over to the east-facing window and sat down. Later I would search the room and question Kit’s fellow tenants. But right then all I wanted was to enjoy that unique moment where I was completely out of my life. No one but Fearless knew where I was.

Fearless had brought me to that placid window. He drove the car, but he was also the reason I came; to find out what Kit Mitchell had been up to and where he had gone.

Anyone who knew me and didn’t know Fearless would have been surprised that I would have put myself in such a potentially dangerous situation. To the world in general I was a law-abiding worrywart. I shied away from drugs and crap games, stolen merchandise and any scheme that might in any way be construed as unlawful. I never bragged (except about my sexual endowment), and the only time I ever acted tough was to shout at caged animals.

But when it came to Fearless I was often forced to become somebody else. For a long time I thought that it was because he had once saved my life in a dark alley in San Francisco. And that certainly did have a big effect on my feelings toward him. But in recent months I had come to realize that something about Fearless compelled me to be different. Partly it was because I felt a deep certainty that no harm could come to me when I was in his presence. I mean, Theodore Timmerman should have killed me on that street, but Fearless stopped him even though it was impossible. But it was more than just a feeling of security. Fearless actually had the ability to make me feel as if I were more of a man when I was in his company. My mind didn’t change, and in my heart I was still a coward, but even though I was quaking I stood my ground more times than not when Fearless called on me.

Possibly his strongest quality was calling out the strength in people around him.

“And I’m gonna need that strength too,” I said to myself, thinking that if Kit Mitchell went off one day and then didn’t come back, the reason was more likely foul play than him running out on the rent.

While I was having these thoughts a soft knocking came at the door.