Fearless Jones

27

I WAS SWEATING, but it wasn’t hot. My heart was throbbing instead of beating, and my legs couldn’t seem to coordinate to keep a steady stride. When I got in the car my fingers went numb, and I couldn’t seem to hold the key right. It took me four or five tries before I realized that I was trying to fit my new apartment key into the ignition.

I started the car and drove off. Three blocks away I pulled to the curb. There I took in great gulps of air, trying to bring my spirit back into alignment with my body — because that’s how it felt, as if my soul were somehow trying to flee the flesh, as if I had been so close to death so often in the past few days that the ghost was ready to bolt. That’s how it goes with me. I face danger and survive it, acting just fine, but as soon as it’s over and I’m alone, I break down.

There was a World-Wide gas station just up the block. There I found a phone booth.

“Hello,” a woman answered flatly.

“Charlotte?”

“Hold on.”

The phone rumbled from being set down on a hard surface.

“Hello?” a much sweeter voice asked.

“Charlotte?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Paris.”

“Oh, hi,” she said. “I thought that number you gave me was just sumpin’ you thought up when I called it. It sounded like a law office or sumpin’.”

“Can we get some coffee or something?” I asked.

“Yeah. Why’ont you come on ovah?” She gave me her address.

CHARLOTTE’S APARTMENT COMPLEX was a series of big brick-and-plaster affairs on 109. The buildings were long and thin looking, like army barracks, separated by green lawns. She was in building K on the third floor.

The hallway was lit by the setting sun through a window at the far end. The walls were white and pretty except for a mark here and there. You could tell that the place was new. I hoped that it would maintain its beauty, but I had my doubts. The suffering of a people often showed up in their material surroundings. Like a broken heart leaving a forlorn lover a physical mess, the weight of racism and poverty often made colored neighborhoods downtrodden and marred.

Charlotte answered the door. She was wearing a close-fitting but not tight black dress with no hose and no makeup.

“Hi.” She smiled and looked me in the eye, but then she saw something and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Can I come in?”

She stepped back, and I stumbled a little crossing the threshold. There was a low couch with chrome legs and orange vinyl cushions. Beyond that was a glass door that led out onto a tiny landing. The sun was shining in on a large rubber plant in a terra-cotta pot. The living room and kitchen were one. But the couch was placed so that it marked the line between the two.

“This is very modern,” I said, sitting down.

Charlotte beamed with pleasure.

There was a console record player/radio across from the couch. She lifted the reddish brown lid and started the stack of records. I remember the first song was by Ella Fitzgerald, but I forget the tune.

“You want that coffee?” she asked.

“Where’s your roommate?”

“She went to see her sister. I’m’a call her later on.”

Charlotte lit on the couch next to me.

“I didn’t think you’d call,” she said.

“I shouldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I’m in trouble,” I said. “ ’Cause I’m in trouble, and I hardly know you to come over here and burden you.”

“I’m from outside Galveston,” she said. “Where you from?”

“Near New Iberia.”

“Where’s that?”

“Louisiana.”

She put a hand on my knee, “You see?”

“See what?”

“We’re both from the South. People from the South is just nicer. We don’t get all cold and push people away when they in need.”

“How long you been here?” I asked.

“Where?” She leaned forward and I slid a little in her direction.

“In L.A.?”

“Two months.”

I kissed her chin right in the middle of that scar. She shuddered and moved her hand up on my erection. She didn’t gasp or make any declaration about my size. That was fine by me. I didn’t want any big expectations. I just wanted someone close and caring.

“Bite it,” she said.

I knew what she meant and nipped her chin and lip.

“Li’l harder, baby,” she said and her hand tightened on my erection to show me how much harder she meant.

I groaned and bit harder.

“Oh, that’s it,” she whispered. “I wanted that ever since you said it. It’s like you caught me, just sayin’ you’d bite my lip.”

She shuddered again, and I grabbed her head with both hands to steady it as I ran my tongue slowly from her chin up across her lip. I spent many minutes on that scar. It drove her wild. She used those moments to take off our clothes and lead us to the bed.

Again it was a new kind of lovemaking for me. Usually there was a game I played with women. They adored my big thing and ignored my skinny chest. I pretended that I was a wild animal, furious and feral in my passion. It led all too quickly to something explosive and not quite real. But with Charlotte it was different. There were some explosions, but at other times there was a settling in. Like when we lay on our sides, me deep inside her, facing each other.

“A man cut me on the face, and when it healed I headed for L.A.,” she said in a strained whisper.

I stroked her cheek in reply.

“Would you do somethin’ like that?” she asked.

“Neither,” I said.

Her face framed the question that a moment of passion would not allow into words.

“Not cut you or run,” I said.

She twisted my ear pretty hard, and I came so violently that I lost consciousness for a while.

I awoke to the smell of coffee, disoriented because I didn’t know where I was. I had to look around the bare room a couple of times before I remembered Charlotte. The floor was finished pine with no rug. The open closet was a door-size indentation with three dresses hanging on wire hangers. The single bed I was on was the only furniture in the room. I realized that the furniture in the living room must belong to the flat-voiced roommate; that Charlotte had nothing; that she was just a refugee from the violence of her recent past.

I tried to get up, but the bed was too comfortable. The pillow had the sweet smell of some kind of hair product, the sheets were clean. My bed back at Fontanelle’s was a six-year-old’s smelly mattress with no sheet on a gritty, pitted floor. I had the urge to get married right then. I could get married to Charlotte, get a job with the city, move out toward Compton — maybe even change my name.

“Paris, you ’wake?” She was standing at the door.

“Uh,” I admitted.

“I got coffee on the deck.”

IT WAS CROWDED on the deck, and the kitchen chairs we used rocked a little on the metal grating that stood for a floor. But the early evening was pretty, and Charlotte’s conversation was just what I needed.

“What kinda trouble you in?” she asked after her second cup of coffee.

“I don’t really know,” I said.

“How could you not know? Is somebody after you?”

“Maybe. They have been. One or two. One of ’em burnt down my little bookstore over on Eighty-nine and Central.”

“You worked there?”

“I owned it,” I said with faded pride.

“I used to go by there. I mean when it wasn’t burned. I always wanted to go in, but I was scared.”

“Scared’a what?”

“I don’t know. Things out here scare me. People don’t act normal. It’s like you gotta know some kinda secret handshake or sumpin’.”

“You come up here to get away from that man cut you,” I said, only partly as a question.

“Not only that,” Charlotte said. “I wanna be a cook too. Not just a cook that make stuff but a chef. I wanna own my own restaurant. You know my mama was the best cook in our whole town, and I learned from her. Back where I come from, you could only cook for a house fulla dirty kids in a backwood shack, or up in some rich white peoples’ houses. I want my own place.”

“You know I got to go soon, Charlotte.”

“Say that again.”

“You know —”

“No, not that, just my name.”

“Charlotte.”

She smiled and got up to kiss me.

“You was just what I needed, baby,” she said.