Fear Itself

Even if the cops happened by and stopped me—it wasn’t breaking and entering to ring somebody’s bell.

The only thing to fear . . . they had said when I was a child.

I walked up to the gate and pushed it open. The rusty hinges let out a long screeching note that could have been heard three blocks away. I froze there, waiting for some punishment to descend. My heart was racing and my fingertips tingled. The chill of the desert night pricked at the sweat on my neck. My bowels rumbled but I still took a step onto the path of round stones that led to the front door.

A thick bundle of mail was jammed into the small box on the front door. The name of the addressee was Rikki Faison. Another name in the ever-growing cast of characters in the Fearless Jones Drama. I didn’t try the knob. At least I’d learned that lesson.

I turned to leave and came face to face with fear itself. It was in the shape of a tall shadow, framed by darkness, with two glittering circles that took the place of eyes about a foot above my head.

Nigger, the eyes said, and then I felt a sharp pain on the left temple.

“NIGGAH TOLD ME that I had to come up wit’ fi’e hunnert dollars if I wanted to see my farm again,” a man said.

I knew him but couldn’t recall his name.

“I will not discuss anything with you if you gonna use language like that,” my mother replied.

“Language like what?” the man protested. “I done told you the niggah done stoled my farm. Went to county court and told them that I owed him money that he knows I’m gonna pay just as soon as the crop come in.”

“I told you already that I will not listen to that kind of language.”

I must have been very young, because my mother and the man she was refusing to talk to were giants. He was dressed in farmer’s clothes and she had on her green Sunday dress with the white edges and seams. I was very upset because both of them were being so obstinate. The farmer was too angry to stop calling his nemesis a nigger, and my mother was too critical to break her rules long enough to understand his rage.

I wanted to talk but my voice was somehow silenced. I tried to think if I was too young to be able to speak, but it seemed to me that I was old enough—the words were in my head. But for some reason they refused to come out of my mouth.

I was so angry that I started hitting myself in the head so that my mother would look at me and both of them would agree on the rules of conversation. But they didn’t notice and so I kept on hitting myself until it began to hurt.

That’s when I woke up. I couldn’t have been hitting myself, because my hands and feet were tied. The reason I couldn’t speak was because of the gag in my mouth. My nose was partially stuffed up, and so I found it extremely difficult to breathe. I tried to spit out the gag but it was tied tight around my head. There were rags stuffed into my mouth. I got so frightened that breathing became even harder. That’s when I started kicking and flailing around. I was in a tight space. There was the smell of gasoline and rubber around me. I was in the trunk of a car. This new bit of knowledge brought on my first-ever attack of claustrophobia. The word went through my mind, its definition and Latin root claustrum, a closed space, but that didn’t keep the level of anxiety from rising to the color of red in my mind. I kicked and bucked and screamed silently.

The trunk came open and a tall man with thick glasses that had round lenses smiled down at me. I was writhing like an earthworm freshly exposed to air. The man grinned. All of his teeth had spaces between them. His lips quivered with amusement at my plight.

“Stuck?” he asked, and I stopped struggling.

He took out a large pistol and pointed it at my head.

“I’m going to untie you and take the gag out. But if you run or raise your voice I’m going to kill you with this here howitzer. You understand?”

I nodded as best I could and he pulled the gag from my mouth.

I gulped in air, realizing that it was the most precious commodity in all the world. Air. More valuable than gold or sex. It was delicious, rich. I lay there almost happy in spite of my predicament.

The white kidnapper had a thick mop of brown hair that seemed to grow only from the top of his head. He wore a blue suit on a long and elegant body that didn’t belong to the big head and ugly face. He dragged me from the trunk and untied me. Then he pushed me so hard that I fell to the floor. He yanked me up and pushed me again, just as hard. I didn’t fall that time because I was ready.

“Get moving, nigger.”

The word brought back my dream.

We were in a cavernlike garage. The thug in the blue suit shoved me toward an external staircase that must have gone up at least two-and-a-half floors. At the top was a door. The goon pressed a jury-rigged button but I heard no ring.

“Louis?” a voice asked from the other side.

“Yeah.”

The door opened inward. A small man was standing there. I say small because he was an inch or two shorter than I.

“You got somebody?” the short man said.

“Come on, Eric. You see him don’t ya? He was sneakin’ around the bitch’s front door. I threw him in the trunk and brought him over. He up?”

“I woke him when you called. He’s in the big room.”

“Lead the way,” Louis said.

Eric rubbed his hands together and led us through a maze of short hallways and across nondescript little rooms. We finally came to a broad corridor with thick burgundy carpeting and gold-and-yellow walls. This led into an antechamber whose only purpose was to bring many different hallways into the presence of a large, unfinished