15
AFTER LEORA LEFT the only thing I had to do was wait for Fearless’s call. I didn’t know how long that would be because I had no idea of the particular crime they were investigating. It could have been anything from grand theft to murder.
I imagined that Fearless was locked in a room with men who asked questions punctuated by fists and blackjacks, but still I wasn’t worried about him. Fearless had lived the life of a soldier since before he joined the armed forces. He was a one-man army who did his duty. And when the enemy had done their worst he would walk away with no anger in his heart because he would have known that he had won in spite of their weapons and torments.
Fearless rarely bragged about his courage. The things I knew about him had come from long nights of heavy drinking and lots of questions on my part.
One night he told me about how a gang of men had jumped him and brought him to an old abandoned barn outside of Fayetteville, Louisiana. He was sixteen and they were looking for his auntie’s boyfriend, who, they said, had stolen a man’s watch.
“‘Turn him ovah, boy,’ the main man told me,” Fearless had said. “‘Turn him ovah or I will mash your face in like a sack’a mud.’
“‘No sir,’ I tells him,” Fearless said in the words of the sixteen-year-old boy. “‘My Auntie Mar wouldn’t want me puttin’ no drunks on her man.’”
“‘Who you callin’ drunk?’ the main man, his name was Arthur, shout. An’ you know, Paris, I wasn’t even afraid even way back then. I knew I was in trouble. I thought I might be dead. But there was no way to turn. Arthur slapped me hard enough to knock some other boy down. I knew right then I was gonna get hurt. And it made me mad that them men would pick on a child. So I hit Arthur on his nose and then dived down and rolled. I got a hold on a timber and hefted it. I was swinging like Babe Ruth in that small space. Two of the men got knocked out and Arthur and the rest got away.”
“What they do to your auntie’s boyfriend?”
“They were so embarrassed by bein’ beat up by a child that they forgot that two-dollar watch and stayed outta my whole family’s way.”
Fearless wasn’t overly proud of his strength or his courage. They were just things to him. He was like some mythological deity that had come down to earth to learn about mortals. Maybe that’s why I stayed friends with him even though he was always in some kind of trouble. Because being friends with him was like having one of God’s second cousins as a pal.
***
AT SIX I WENT DOWN TO THE CORNER and bought a small bottle of French brandy, a brand they stocked just for me. It cost four ninety-five even way back then, but it was worth it. I didn’t drink hard liquor all that much, but when I did I wanted it to be good. I didn’t want any day-old wine, or scotch that smelled like a doctor’s office.
I sipped my brandy along with a supper of sliced apples with wedges of cheddar and blue cheese from my ice chest. I had never been to France. And maybe those Frenchmen never heard of drinking brandy with a meal, but that was close enough for me. Maybe I’d never get on a steamship and sail to Europe, and maybe I’d never know the elegance of a fine hotel room on the Seine, but at least I could imagine it in my bookstore. At least I could read about the world and conjure up a feeling of being far away and safe.
Since I was a child books have been my getaway. Even the few times I’ve spent in jail were made bearable by Conrad, Cooper, and Clemens. I could hear the soft lapping at the banks of the Mississippi or ride the hill-high waves of the South Pacific under a golden moon shining behind long gray clouds. I could pretend to be the great philosopher Aristotle categorizing the world subject by subject, laying out the basis for all knowledge for the next twenty-five hundred years.
Literature came to my aid even when I had to face the hard reality of racism. Like when the bank turned me down for a small improvement loan.
“We don’t give improvement loans,” the bank officer Laird Sinclair had told me.
“But Ben Sideman said that you just gave him a loan to repave the alley at the side of his building,” I said.
“But he
“I own my store.”
“You do?” Laird said. He looked down at my folder, maybe for the first time, and added, “But you still owe the balance of your mortgage.”
“Everybody owes the balance, man,” I said. “But I got eight thousand in equity.”
Laird smiled and shook his head.
“It’s more complicated than that, Mr. Minton,” he said. “The bank has to consider many different factors before making a loan decision.”
“Like what?”
“For instance. Are you married?”
“No.”
“There,” he said, as if I had proved a point for him. “A single man is a bad risk.”
“Ben Sideman ain’t married either,” I said.
“Mr. Sideman has nothing to do with your application.”
“I don’t see why. Ben’s got a third mortgage on his place and he don’t have anywhere near the equity I do. He needed to fix his driveway for customers to be able to park. I need to paint my store for it to be more attractive to my customers.”
