Fear of the Dark

Chapter 8

Fearless slept on the couch in my front room that night. The next morning he was off to protect Milo, and I worked on fixing up my bookstore, jumping at every sound.

The first day I straightened, swept, and sorted through my stock. The next day I got out my tools and went to work on the structural damage that Tiny had wrought. I’m not all that good with my hands, but I come from poor stock. I never hired a plumber or carpenter because I didn’t have that kind of wealth. So the door frame looked mismatched and crooked, but it held the door in place. The tar paper roof looked as if it had a black bandage on it, but when it rained eight months later I had nary a leak in my kitchen.

I even knitted together the wire fencing in my backyard.

Fearless dropped by every night after letting Milo off at his hideout. He’d bring peach schnapps, a liquor we both got a taste for from an older Jewish lady who had died on our watch. We’d toast the old woman when we took our first sip.

After a week had gone by, I began to calm down. Whoever it was that had broken into my house either got what he was after or didn’t — either way he didn’t return.

I had eight customers in that time, all of them in the last four days.

My first patron was Ashe Knowles. She was what I called a Lady Poindexter. She was the only person I ever met who had read more than I. She had bought and traded back almost every book I had in stock.

Ashe was an inch or so taller than I, and her coloring was what I call a buttery brown: lighter than your average Negro’s but not by much. She wore glasses and had absolutely no sense of style. Her clothes were old, and she wore brown leather shoes with black laces and white cotton socks. She braided her hair into pigtails every morning, tying them with primary-colored ribbons on the ends.

I was happy that Ashe was such a poor dresser for two reasons. The first was that she liked me. I was one of the few eligible black men she knew who actually read for enjoyment and who could engage her on most topics that she was familiar with. Because of this she often came by and spent long hours talking about arcane subjects like coats of arms in the Middle Ages or the dynasties of Egypt. Ashe had taught herself the rudiments of Latin and Greek, and she liked to play word games, looking for the ancient roots in English words.

Ashe would give me long hungry looks as we conversed, but all I had to do was glance at those ribbons in her hair and I knew that I wasn’t going to make a move.

The second reason I was happy about her appearance was that I suspected that she was beautiful under that dowdy facade.

I didn’t want to get romantically involved with Ashe because she was my best customer and I really liked talking with her.

She was a deep thinker. Sometimes she’d say things to me and it wasn’t until days later that I figured out what she’d meant.

If I became her lover something was bound to go wrong. Pregnancy. Expectations of marriage. Both. I wasn’t ready for a good woman like Ashe, and as long as she dressed the way she did, she couldn’t tempt a fool like me.

“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Ashe said on that Thursday morning. She was wearing a Scotch plaid skirt that came down to the middle of her calves, a dark green sweater that didn’t go with anything that wasn’t a uniform, and pink hair ribbons.

“Ashe. How are you today?”

“I read that book about dreams,” she said.

“The Interpretation?” I asked, referring to Freud’s seminal work.

“It was very interesting,” she allowed. “He wants it to be a science, but it cain’t be, not really.”

“Why not?” I asked. “He’s a doctor.”

“A doctor’s not a doctor when he’s sittin’ in church talkin’ to the preacher,” she said. “When a doctor is talkin’ to a minister, he’s just a man.”

Even though she was looking as homely as a woman three times her age, Ashe made my heart flutter then.

“But Mr. Freud wasn’t in no church,” I said. “He was bein’ a doctor, curing psychosomatic symptoms.”

“But he couldn’t prove it. He talks to you and explains dreams, but some of what he says has to be wrong and he doesn’t have the tools that could quantify and compare his findings.”

“So you don’t believe it?” I asked the drab young woman.

“No. I didn’t say that. But it seems to me that Dr. Freud has opened up a question about how we understand things. He’s discovered something that no chemist or physicist or mathematician can prove or even begin to prove. That’s wonderful.”

Ashe smiled then and I forgot, for the first time in many days, about Tiny and Jessa and that stand of bitter oaks.

“I hate to rush you off, Ashe,” I said, “but I just remembered that I have to make a call.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you might have some time.”

“Sorry.”

I hurried her out because I knew myself. I’d be in love with her for a day or a week, maybe even a month, but sooner or later we’d crash and burn; she’d walk away from my bookstore and never return with her brilliant insights and goofy smiles.

I had other customers. Two neighborhood boys came by for comic books and copies of National Geographic magazine (hoping for a glimpse of the naked breasts of so-called primitives). A couple of ladies from up the block who bought romance novels dropped in twice.

One dusky-skinned guy with an island accent of some sort came in looking for a French dictionary.

“You mean French-English?” I asked the guy.

“Non,” he said. “I wish to look up words in French.”

“I don’t got that, man,” I told him. “You should try Cutter’s Books downtown or better yet go to the library.”

“I like to own my books,” the deadly handsome foreigner said, affecting an aloof air.

He was almost six feet tall, with skin that was not exactly the color of that of most Negroes you meet. He had a thin mustache and bisected eyes that were both a dark and a darker brown.

He was looking around the place as if he were searching through the books, but I could tell that he was looking for something else.

Finally he asked, “Do you have a toilet for your customers?”

“Hang a right before you walk into the porch,” I said, pointing the way.

He went in. Made all the appropriate noises and came out again.

“How do you keep that mustache so perfect?” I asked him. “You know I got this bushy thing here. I’d like something styled like yours, but when I start trimmin’ at it I keep goin’ from side to side tryin’ to keep it even until finally my lip is bare.”

The foreigner smiled.

“I go to a barber, of course,” he said. “Burnham’s on Avalon.”

“You wanna leave me a number?” I asked then.

“Why?”

“In case I get a French dictionary.”

“I’ll go to Cutter’s,” he said. “I need it now.”

Near the end of that week, Whisper Natly came by. He was wearing a suit that was equal parts dark blue and dark gray, his signature short-brimmed hat, and rubber-soled black shoes.

“Hey, Paris,” he said. The syllables sounded like a triplet explosion that occurred very far from my store.

“Whisper. What’s up, my man?”

“You know a guy named Dorfman?”

“Yeah. White dude. Helms bakery driver. Delivers bread on this block. He comes in now and then to buy war magazines. I sell ’em for a nickel apiece.”

“Gambler?”

“Yeah, yeah. I think so.” I remembered that whenever the burly white man came into my place he always talked about sports and the odds on any and every competition. “He always talked about it.”

“He run a game?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

Whisper took me in for a moment. I can’t say he flashed his eyes at me because there was no glitter in his gaze. His presence was flat as a pancake, just as his appearance was tamped down and without character.

“Heard you had some problems the other night,” he said.

“What you mean?” I asked defensively. I regretted that because it caused Whisper to regard me again.

“Milo said that some white boy wanted to kick your butt.”

“Oh. Oh, that. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t nuthin’. Fearless came on by, but he was gone.”

“Okay, then,” Whisper said. He turned away and walked out of the store, leaving less of a wake than a shark’s fin along the surface of the water.

My only other customer that week was Cleetus Rome, an elderly white man who had lived in my neighborhood when it was mostly fields and inhabited solely by white people.

Not only did Cleetus not read, he was illiterate. He had told me as much.

“My daddy used to tell me why waste time readin’ when you could be swingin’ a hammer,” Cleetus had said when we first met.

Cleetus couldn’t read, didn’t own a TV set, and wasn’t a gregarious guy at all. He didn’t know his neighbors when they were white and he certainly didn’t know most of them now. But he owned a radio and he listened to the news all day long. Every few days or so he’d come by my store and bring up things he had heard. I understood that he wanted to find out if I knew more about the stories from reading the paper.

I didn’t mind. He was old and toothless. He smelled something like dust or maybe even loam and he always bought magazines from me that had swimsuit models on the covers.

That day he asked, “You hear about the body they fount in the strawberry field down near San Pedro?”

“Say what?” I asked as calmly as a man being stung by a bee.

“Big ol’ white boy, they say,” Cleetus added. “Farmer’s dog dug him up from under some trees.”

“I haven’t read about that,” I said.

“On the news today,” Cleetus said. “Prob’ly be in the paper tomorrow. I heard ’em say down at the gas station that some big ol’ white boy was chasin’ a car right out on Central here the other day.”

“Really?” I smiled through the nausea.

“Yeah. Ain’t you heard about it? I mean, I don’t talk to nobody and I heard it.”

I felt that I was in a dream and that I had been walking down the street naked. One thing for certain, I didn’t need Sigmund Freud to interpret that.