Fear of the Dark

Chapter 27

I had unlocked the doors of my Studebaker for the women to climb in back. I was about to get in the driver’s seat when Fearless said, “Uh, Paris?”

“Yeah?”

“You bettah let me drive, man.”

“Why?”

“’Cause you drunk.”

I looked at him and took in a deep breath.

“I am not.”

Fearless put one finger against my chest and shoved with barely any force. I would have been on the ground if the car wasn’t behind me.

How many whiskies had I downed? I couldn’t remember.

I fell into the driver’s seat and crawled to the other side. Fearless got in and put his hand out for the key.

While I was giving it to him, Three Hearts said, “You really should watch your liquor, Paris.”

“Watch my liquor? Watch my liquor? What I should do is watch my front do’.”

“Paris,” Fearless warned.

“That’s right. If I watched the do’, then Useless wouldn’t come up and hide stolen property in my toilet. You wouldn’t come up gettin’ me so deep in trouble that I cain’t even think about nuthin’ else. I’m drinkin’ so I don’t have to run down the street yellin’ like a madman done lost his mind.”

I stared at Three Hearts in the backseat. She looked away in disgust. Her disdain made me so angry that I was about to rant some more, but Fearless put his foot on the accelerator, and somehow the gravity pushing me against the seat displaced the anger too. I felt a wave of pleasant intoxication and leaned back against the door.

For a long time I stared at Angel’s profile. It certainly was perfect. Daughter, wife, lover, mother — she could have been everything and anything to man, woman, or child. There was haughtiness and a waiting smile, knowledge that you could never have, and simple conversation. She was the woman who was the power behind the king and the widow that survived him.

I hated Angel Allmont, but it wasn’t because of my cousin. I didn’t care about Useless. He could die and never be found. Three Hearts could light a candle every night for him until the candleholder overflowed with wax and her wood shanty burned to the ground — I didn’t care about them. No. I hated Angel Allmont because looking at her made me feel small.

“So what else?” I said in a voice that was too loud for the small space of the car.

“Excuse me?” Angel said. She wasn’t even looking at me, but she knew what I was asking and to whom my question was addressed.

“You know,” I said. “What else did Sterling know about those white men?”

For a long moment I thought that Angel was not going to look at me. But then she turned and gave me the full treatment.

“I support my mother, Mr. Minton,” she said. “Her and her sister, my five-year-old son, and a man who once saved me from a rapist.”

Three Hearts put a hand on Angel’s shoulder.

“That ain’t what I asked you,” I said, wondering at the man that lay inside me.

“They were men who... enjoyed black women,” she said at last. “They hungered for dark flesh.”

“Your flesh?”

“Paris,” Fearless said again.

“Yes, Mr. Minton, my flesh.”

“Did you use to go with them up to this here cabin?”

“There. Hotel rooms, beach houses, rectory couches, and back-alley slums.” There was distaste on her lips but not shame, not humiliation.

“So you seduced them?” I asked, as if my tongue were a scalpel and her dignity a malignant tumor that had to be excised.

“If you had been there you would see it differently,” Angel said in an even voice. “Their blood was boiling from the minute they saw me. Ullie told me that this was how we could save my family. I would have done a lot worse for them.”

She’d beaten me. Three Hearts was now holding the girl’s hands. Fearless sat there, his posture in the stoic demeanor of respect.

I turned my back against the door. I was falling into a stupor. Soon sleep would come and take me, just as one day Death would come knocking on my door.

“Paris,” Fearless said, and I opened my eyes.

“What?”

“Cops.”

I turned and looked out the back window. The flashing blue and red lights caused a chemical reaction in my brain. I don’t know the names of the particular ingredients, but three seconds after I was awakened I was also as sober as a judge.

“I’m pullin’ ovah,” Fearless said. “Get ready.”

My sobriety turned into a microscopic lens then. Fearless saying to get ready meant that he was prepared to go to war.

“Fearless,” I said as he pulled to the curb.

“What?”

“We don’t need to fight here.”

“We got to get to Ulysses, man. These cops in the way.”

The squad car pulled up behind us. They shone a bright white light from their car into ours.

“There’s no reason to hurt anybody, Fearless. We’ll get out of this.”

A young white man was coming up to the driver’s window. He was wearing a policeman’s uniform and trained to enforce a certain kind of law; he was arrogant and sure of himself, but he didn’t know that if I didn’t talk just right he was about to be killed.

“I got it, Fearless. I got it, man.”

The tension went out of my friend.

The police hadn’t made it to the door yet. Fearless was rolling down his window in expectation. But my mind was back down the road we had just traveled. Three Hearts had thought she knew Angel from the first moment she laid eyes on her. She could see something in her the way I saw things in Fearless. Maybe, I thought, maybe Hearts knew something I did not; maybe Angel was not misnamed; maybe I was just blind to her, as many and most were to my friend.

“Step out of the car,” a voice said. There was no “please” at the end of his request.

Under the high beams of their car we stood with our hands on the roof of mine. The women were on one side, while Fearless and I faced them.

“Paris Minton?” one white cop asked my friend.

“I’m Minton,” I said.

While the other cop frisked Fearless, my inquisitor patted me down with one hand.

“We’re going to have to bring you down to the station,” the cop was telling me.

“Gun,” the cop searching Fearless said.

“Paris,” Fearless said to me.

“You shut up,” his cop complained.

“Don’t worry, Fearless,” I said. “We’ll pull out of this.”

“Okay,” he said, as my cop snapped the first manacle of the handcuffs on me.

Three Hearts had left her gun-laden purse in the car and was holding her wallet in her hand. The police checked out the ladies’ IDs and told them that they had to bring Fearless and me down to the station for questioning.

“What for?” Three Hearts asked.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” one of them said. “We had his license plate number and name in our hot file. We’re just following orders.”

They pressed Fearless and me into the backseat of their prowl car. I remember, as our captors pulled from the curb, seeing Three Hearts in the front passenger’s seat and Angel behind the wheel of my junk heap. I wondered, as we drove off one way and the women headed in another, if I would see both of them alive again.