Fear Itself

45

“YEAH, PARIS, you know I had to give that lady back her book. It was a family heirloom.”

It was a week later. I had eaten steak every night, wondering what I should say to Fearless when I saw him. He had dropped by after eight carrying a large brown paper shopping bag.

“You had no right to take that book without talking to me first, Fearless. I could have made a hundred thousand dollars on that motherfucker.”

“It wasn’t yours, man.”

“I found it.”

“And you got ten thousand dollars plus the twenty-five hundred was in with the book.”

“Where’s that?”

“In this here bag,” he said.

“What? You turn it into quarters?”

Fearless grinned then, and I knew he had done something else, something that he thought I’d like.

“What I got in here is seventy-two rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film, what they call archival quality.”

“No.”

“Jackson had lent his camera equipment to a white girl he know goes to UCLA. I went over to her place and we took the pictures in her basement.”

If I had been with anyone but Fearless I would have broken down into tears.

“I know how much you love that book, Paris,” he said. “And I know it’s important too. There shouldn’t be just one copy, and Miss Fine’s gonna have to get up off it one day and share it with the world. But until she do at least you got somethin’ to build a darkroom over and then somethin’ to read in the middle’a the night.

“You know it’s not just that money neither. She promised to leave Son and his parents alone and leave Rose to live with Mama. That way everybody’s happy. Everybody, that is, except that poor Mr. Wexler. It’s really a shame about his children.”

FEARLESS HAS ALWAYS COME THROUGH for me. He’s always been a better man than I am and smarter than I am too. I’ve been studying photography lately and spending time in the darkroom at LACC. Pretty soon I’ll have my own copy of the Fine family story. That and ten thousand dollars and all the air I can breathe.