Fear of the Dark

Chapter 28

Sometimes jail isn’t such a bad thing. I mean, you’re locked down and treated as a threat and a danger, but if you don’t have anywhere to go and freedom contains threats that incarceration does not, then a free meal, a locked metal door, and a hard cot will do.

Fearless and I were searched and thrown into a big cell that had a maximum capacity of twelve. There were fifteen men already in there when we arrived.

Some guy, I don’t even remember who, said something he thought was dangerous when we walked in.

With a smile Fearless told the man, “Come on ovah here an’ let’s get this ovah wit’.” The man could hear the threat in Fearless’s bored tone. He stayed where he was, and from then on nobody bothered us. Two men even vacated their bunks so that we would have a place to rest our weary bones.

Fearless was a paradox in my life. In that cell he was my savior. Just hearing his few words and seeing the steel in his bearing, men stepped back from him and anyone with him.

But when we were back on the streets, Fearless would drag me into danger no matter which way he went.

That’s why I was happy to be locked up. The bars protected me. The lack of windows meant that nobody could spy on me. I wanted to stay there for a week, maybe two, until Useless and Angel and Three Hearts were far away and forgotten. But I knew that Fearless was too responsible for that. He used his one phone call to reach Milo. All he got was the answering service. I wasn’t even going to use my call, but Fearless convinced me to phone Mona and tell her to keep on Milo.

“You need a lawyer,” I said to my friend.

“Why?”

“Carrying a concealed weapon,” I suggested.

“I got a license,” he replied.

“Since when?”

“Since I been bodyguardin’ Milo. He got it for me.”

“Well,” I said, “we might as well get some sleep.”

“You sleep, Paris,” my friend said. “I’ll just sit up top an’ get the lay of the land.”

I was so far into that mess with Three Hearts that I was even dreaming about Useless.

“What the hell you want?” I asked my iniquitous cousin. We were sitting at a picnic table in a small park near Watts.

“Listen to me, Paris,” he whined. “I cain’t he’p it, brother. I love her.”

“So? Love her, then. That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me.”

“You got to find her, man. You got to bring her back.”

Useless was crying. I tried to remember him ever crying before.

“Paris.”

... Had he ever cried before? Had he shed tears?

“Wake up, man.”

I knew there was a commotion going on before I opened my eyes.

A large black man was saying something in a voice that rasped like a big handsaw on hard wood.

“... kick your ass, peckahwood,” he was saying.

There was a smallish white kid in front of him trying to stand up straight and retreat at the same time.

I immediately identified with the kid because I would have been in his position in that confrontation.

“Watch yourself, man,” Fearless whispered to me. “I’m’a go ovah there.”

Over there. The conflict was coming down two and a half steps from our bunk. Most of the men in the room were black. After that came three Mexicans and two other white guys. No one else in that cell was going to stand up for the white kid. No one else would have stood up for me.

“Kick his ass, Leo,” somebody said.

Leo socked the kid in the face, and I was amazed that the white boy didn’t go down. He leaned over like a reed in a windstorm and he began bleeding from a cut that opened over his eye. But the kid stood back up. Leo grinned. And then Fearless, the Lancelot of South L.A., stood between them. He put up his hands and shook his head, and the fight was over — just like that.

He brought the boy over to bleed on our blankets.

“I coulda taken him,” the kid said. He was actually smaller and skinnier than me, pale as a newborn luna moth. “Nigger wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have his friends with ’im.”

“What’s your name, son?” Fearless, not thirty-five himself, asked.

“Loren.”

“Loren, call the man a bastard, a motherfucker, a pussy if you want to, but when you call him a nigger you call me one, and, brother, I am a whole other kinda pain.”

“All I did was ask a man to read somethin’ for me,” Loren said. “I got this paper in my pocket and I don’t have my glasses. It’s from my auntie an’ she hates me so I know somethin’ bad had to happen. This dude Chapman said that he didn’t wanna hear a word outta none’a the white people.”

“Chapman,” I said. “Was that the guy hit you?”

“Naw. Chapman got called in for questioning. That motherfucker was his friend.”

“You got the paper?” I asked the kid.

He reached down into his pants and pulled a small pink envelope out of his drawers.

I took it anyway.

I can’t reproduce the letter here because it was far too long: five pages of tiny chicken scratches written in the grammar of some foreign land. The first page listed the reasons that Belldie, Loren’s aunt, hadn’t written him before. One, which I didn’t read out loud, was that the boy was illiterate. There was also a theft committed, a pregnancy he caused, an incident in church that she didn’t explain, and then there was the boy’s temper and his steadfast refusal to work. After that there came three pages of accolades for Loren’s parents and his brother Jimmy.

It was only on the last page that Belldie, in minute detail, described the collision between his parents’ pickup truck and the Sun Oil truck on the highway near their farm. Jimmy was with them and now they were all with the Lord.

The funeral had been held a week later. The letter was dated six months earlier.

Loren was at our feet dripping tears and blood on the floor.

Damn. Even when I remember that letter I realize how bad some people have it. There was that white boy made a punk by black men in an inescapable cell, holding a letter about the deaths of his folks. A letter written by blood that hated him. It might have been tough being a black man in America, but I wouldn’t have traded shoes with Loren — no, sir.

Toward the end of my reading of Loren’s letter the cell door came open and another prisoner was added to the overcrowded room. When Loren fell to the ground crying, someone shouted, “What?” and I thought I had an inkling of who the new inmate might be.

A big man stormed up to us. He was light colored like granite with brownish lichen growing on it. He was big and muscular.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked Fearless as Fearless rose to the meeting.

“Fearless Jones,” my friend said with no particular sense of pride.

The granite man gave a flinty smile. “I heard’a you. Yeah. I heard’a you. Mothahfuckahs always talkin’ ’bout how bad you are. Huh. My name’s Chapman Grey. I’m a light heavyweight. Do you think you can kick my butt like these punk-ass niggahs think you sumpin’?”

The grammar didn’t quite hold together, but Chapman posed an interesting question. Could Fearless stand up against a professional?

It took me seventeen seconds to find out.

Before Fearless could reply, Chapman hit him with a stiff right jab. He followed that with a right cross that sent my friend falling against the bunk.

That was one second.

Chapman pressed his advantage, coming in on Fearless with a body barrage of six or seven blows.

That took care of seconds two and three.

Fearless pushed against the rock-hard boxer, propelling himself away. The crowd around moved out from the fray. Chapman grinned and strode forward.

By then we were up to second eight.

Chapman hit Fearless in the jaw with a right hook that would have killed me and anyone standing behind me. Fearless was thrown back but not down.

I could hear the guards outside the cell shouting.

By the time Chapman was stalking Fearless again, ten seconds had passed. He threw a straight right, but Fearless stepped to the left and hooked his right arm over Chapman’s. He twisted around once, throwing the boxer off balance, and then hurled Grey into the bars of our cell. Fearless moved forward then, hitting Grey in the diaphragm, the groin, and the throat. He didn’t use all of his strength, but he definitely incapacitated the boxer.

By the seventeenth second, Grey was unconscious on a cot and Fearless was walking back to his corner.

Grey’s question had been answered definitively. In the ring he would have torn Fearless up. But out in the real world he had better watch out.