Fear Itself

3

WITHIN TEN MINUTES I COULD HEAR my friend snoring. He had spent three years on the front lines in Africa and Europe during the war, but he claimed that he slept like a baby every chance he got.

“Me worryin’ about them big shells and bombs wasn’t gonna help nuthin’,” he’d said one drunken night. “But a good night’s rest meant that I was sharp when I had to be.”

Many a day I had curled up on the front sofa and slept for hours, but not that early morning. Fearless didn’t know what those cops wanted, but that didn’t matter to him. All he needed was a corner to sleep in, and if in the morning he had to pull up stakes and leave California he’d do that, looking forward to a new life in Seattle or Memphis or Mexico City.

Fearless was sleeping the sleep of an innocent man but I couldn’t get that chill out of my chest. I wasn’t guilty of any crime, but just being in the house with a man wanted by the police put me in a state of high anxiety.

At four I turned on the lights, pulled out the dictionary, and looked up random words. Leaf lard was the first one I lit on. That meant lard rendered from the leaf fat of a hog. Leaf fat, I read, was fat that formed in the folds of the kidneys of some animals, especially the pig.

I liked looking up words in the dictionary. It calmed me, because there was no tension in the definitions. Definitions were neutral: facts, not fury.

When the sun came up I went down to the corner to buy the L.A. Times from the blind man, Cedric Jarman, who sold papers near the bus stop. I knew that Fearless would sleep late because of the time he got to bed, so I sat on the front porch and read the dreary news.

Ike was still declaring victory in Korea two years after the war was over. We had halted communism in its tracks, but A-bomb testing continued just in case we had to have a real war with somebody like Russia or Red China. A white woman’s body had been found by a hobo in Griffith Park. She had a German-sounding name. There was some flap over a Miss L.A. beauty contestant, something about a Negro heritage that she didn’t declare with the pageant officials. The president, a Mr. Ben Trestier, said that they weren’t disqualifying her because she was Negro but because she lied. “It is the lie, not the race, that shows she isn’t our kind of queen,” Trestier was quoted.

“But if she told the truth you wouldn’t have let her compete in the first place,” I said aloud. Then I laughed.

That’s what we did back in 1955, we laughed when we pierced the skin of lies that tried to disguise racism. I’d be down at the barbershop playing cards in a few days, and we’d discuss the fate of Lana Tandy, the light-haired, fair-skinned Negro who tried to be the beauty queen of L.A. We’d laugh at the pageant and we’d laugh at her for thinking she could make it that far. Mr. Underwood, the retired porter, would get angry then and tell us that we shouldn’t be laughing but protesting like they were doing down south. We’d say, “You’re right, George. You’re right.” And he’d curse and call us fools.

After I’d made it through the headlines I went back inside.

The new bookstore was larger than the last one I had, the one that my neighbor burned down. The room was twenty feet square. I wandered from wall to wall, serenaded by the cacophony of Fearless’s snores while running my fingers over the spines of books.

I had bibles, cookbooks, science fiction paperbacks, and National Geographic magazines. In a special section I had all of the books by black authors that I could find; from Sterling Brown to Phillis Wheatley, from Chester Himes to Langston Hughes, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Booker T. Washington.

I liked touching the stock. It made me feel like I was somebody; not just passing through but having a stake in the world I lived in. People knew me. Customers came to the store and asked my advice on books. They gave me their money and I sold them something of value.

After a while my fingers went across an old copy of Candide. I took it from the shelf and curled up on the sofa again.

I was asleep before finishing the first paragraph.

I DREAMT ABOUT A MAN IN A FARMER’S HAT. The short and stocky farmer was leading me down a long and dark hallway, whispering about money, lots of money. Finally we reached a door.

“Open it up,” the farmer said. “Open it up and you will have all the money you’ll need for the rest of your natural-born days.”

I was trembling, scared to death.

“No,” I said. “No.”

“But you’re right here, Paris,” he said, “next to the gold mine. You don’t even need a key. Just turn the knob and push it open.”

I didn’t want to do it but still my hand reached out. When I grasped the doorknob I thought it would burn me but instead it was chilly. The refreshing coolness washed over my body. Feeling more confident I pushed the door open. Green light flooded the hallway. The room was full of money, piles of it. And on the biggest pile sat Lana Tandy, naked and spread-legged, smiling at me.

“Come on, baby,” she said. “It’s all yours.”

My fears melted away and I ran toward her. The door slammed behind me but I didn’t care. It wasn’t until the money rose up like a wave behind Lana that I realized I was trapped. She screamed as the wave of green slapped against me. I was submerged in millions of dollars, suffocating under the weight of that great wealth.

I struggled wildly against the heavy cash, but it was too much for me. Lana let out a strangled cry. She grabbed me by my shoulders and said, “Paris, help me. Help.” She pounded against my chest, but instead of feeling the concussions of her fists I heard a hollow knocking. Even when we were separated by the crashing waves of money, I could still hear the echo of her knocking against my chest. A tide of bills washed over me and I couldn’t breathe. I struggled and screamed, realizing that I was about to die. When I stroked down with both hands to propel my head toward the surface, I came awake sitting upright on the couch, gulping air and trembling.

Lana was still knocking on my chest. Knocking on my chest?

The sun was shining into the store through a window set high on the wall. Someone was rapping on the front door for the second time that morning and, also for a second time, I was afraid for my life.