thumb.
“If you’re in this, it’s gonna hurt,” Binder said.
“The way you mashin’ on my hand it hurts right now.”
“It could get worse,” he said and then let me go.
“I don’t know nuthin’ more, man,” I said.
The lieutenant smiled and then gestured, telling me that I could go.
I left the police station, thinking again about the Greyhound Bus Company. This time I thought maybe I’d return to Louisiana. A white man would have to look pretty hard down around the colored parishes of southern swamps to find a little black man like me.
18
THE FIRST THING I did when I got back to the car was to slip Sol’s pistol from under my shirt and shove it beneath the driver’s seat. The Greenspans sat in the backseat on the ride to their home. Morris laid his meaty head against the window, and Gella was wound so tight that she shook slightly, like a palsied old woman. Half the way there Fearless turned around and took her two slender hands into his one big one.
“You gonna make it through this, girl,” he said. “You gonna make it.”
I don’t know how she responded because I was looking in the rearview mirror at Morris to make sure he wasn’t going to start swinging because another man, a black man, was holding his wife by the hand. But Morris didn’t even budge. He was more shattered than my grandfather had been when his wife of sixty-three years had passed.
When we stopped in front of their house Morris stumbled out of his side and fell on the lawn. He got to his feet and strode up to the door like a toddler whose gait changes every three steps. Fearless walked Gella slowly to the door, still holding her by one hand. Morris had worked his key on the lock and blundered in by the time they reached the single stair. Fearless lifted Gella’s chin and kissed her on the lips. When he whispered something, she leaned into him for another osculation and an embrace. He ushered her through the door and closed it behind her.
Back next to me he took the posture of someone waiting for the car to begin moving. I didn’t engage the gears.
“Somethin’ wrong with the car, Paris?”
I didn’t answer.
Fearless turned to me.
“Something wrong?”
“What was that?” I asked.
“What?”
“With that white girl. Jail so hard on you that you got to take a woman right out from under her husband?”
“What?” Fearless complained. “Naw, man. I ain’t interested in that crooked-nosed girl.”
“You could’a fooled me and about half the neighborhood too.”
“She needed a kiss, Paris. That’s all. A kiss and a kind word. She just lost her family, man. That big bum of a husband don’t care. I just kissed her and told her that I was there. That’s all.”
“And if she still felt bad,” I taunted, “you’d take her up in the bed but still that wouldn’t be nuthin’?”
“Maybe. Sometimes you got to give, Paris. Sometimes a man or a woman needs the opposite sex to say, hey it’s okay. But she don’t mean nuthin’ t’me. Neither do that dumb husband. If he was holdin’ her, then she wouldn’t’a needed me to do it.”
I shifted into first and drove off.
Fearless had a smart heart. He had a brave heart too. When he talked to me like he did about Gella, I never understood, not really, a word.
WE MADE IT to the Charles Diner by nine-fifteen. The place was alive. The girls couldn’t help but move their butts, even if it was just in their chairs, when Big Joe Turner was playing on the jukebox, and the men couldn’t help but watch. At the Charles men dressed as differently as the women did. From T-shirts to tuxedos the fashions ranged. The women sat in groups at the small tables in the great round room while solitary men smelling anywhere from Classic Gent to hard-earned sweat came up and made their offers for a little wiggle on the dance floor in back.
“At the table over next to the plastic palm tree,” the bartender told Fearless when he asked if anyone was looking for Tyrell Lockwood.
