I stared at the phone for a long time, I have no idea how long, trying to remember Ambrosia’s number and how to dial it. I knew I had tucked it away on a slip of paper someplace but it was beyond me to think of where.
What I did think of was my little cousin Aster, a young girl, not yet five, who died in a flash flood when I was six. She was my best friend, and when my mother took me to her parents’ house to help with the preparations we found them washing the body before putting her in her Sunday dress. I asked could I wash her feet, and I remember her mother, a big West Indian woman, cried and wrapped me in her arms. My mother wouldn’t let me wash Asty’s feet, but that night I dreamt that I washed her soles and between her toes with a real sea sponge and perfumed soap.
Looking down at the phone, with Theodore’s corpse in the periphery, and thinking about dreaming about washing my dead playmate’s feet, I suddenly remembered Ambrosia’s number.
“Hello,” she said without the slightest shred of civility.
“Fearless there?” I asked in a voice that belonged to a dead man.
“Do you know what time it is, Paris Minton? It’s three in the mornin’. First Fearless don’t get in till two and I just fall asleep again, and then —”
“Get him for me, Ambrosia,” I said. “I don’t have time to play.”
Maybe she could hear the stress in my voice. Maybe Fearless had talked to her about me being his closest friend. Whatever it was, she stopped her complaints and a moment later Fearless was on the line.
“What’s up, Paris?”
“I just killed Theodore Timmerman.”
“I’ll be right there,” he said.
He hung up the phone in my ear, leaving me holding on to the receiver and thinking about how Aster would scream and giggle when I tickled her.
“HE’S SURE ENOUGH DEAD,” Fearless was saying. “No doubt about that at all.”
I had pulled up a chair next to the corpse while Fearless examined the body.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said.
I had been saying things like that since Fearless got there. I said I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean to kill him. I asked Fearless why did he have to try and hurt me like that.
“You didn’t kill him,” Fearless said.
“What you talkin’ ’bout, man. I hit and hit and hit and hit, and he fell dead.”
“If anybody killed him,” Fearless said, “I’m the one. I’m the one threw that stone. I’m the one threw him down and tied him up. But Paris, we took him to the hospital. We called to make sure he got a bed. What else could we do? And what was you supposed to do wit’ him stranglin’ you like that? I mean, if there was ever a case of self- defense in Los Angeles, it’s this right here.”
“Yeah I . . . Yeah I . . . guess.”
Fearless put his hand on my neck. I thought he was trying to console me, but then I felt a pinch on a muscle next to the big vertebra. A pain went down my back and up into my head that was beyond any physical hurt I had ever known. I cried out and tried to get away from the hold but Fearless would not let go. It seemed as if he had taken up Timmerman’s job and planned to kill me too.
Finally he released his grip and I fell to the floor writhing. Fearless picked me up and carried me to the bathroom in the back of the store. He turned on the shower I had installed over the bathtub and threw me in, clothes and all.
The water was freezing!
I tried to climb out but Fearless wouldn’t let me. He held on to my arms and legs until I was almost numb with the cold. After long minutes he pulled me out and said, “Dry off and then go upstairs and change, Paris. We got business to take care of here.”
“Man, what the fuck you do that to me for?” I shouted, sputtering with rage.
“You was slippin’, Paris,” he said, giving me a one-shoulder shrug. “Shock, man. You know I been on the front lines. I seen boys experience death for the first time. And here you think you killed that man. We ain’t got time for no sanitarium, so I just put you through the crash course.”
I was so cold that I was shivering. The quavering in my chest and Fearless’s offhanded manner made me laugh. I did that a bit and then stopped for fear that my friend might throw me back in the shower.
It was at that moment that I accepted myself as a killer.
40
I CHANGED CLOTHES QUICKLY, not thinking about the dead white man downstairs at all. Fearless had been busy too. He’d found two old blankets and some rope and trussed the body up so that now it looked like an oversized, unfinished doll.
“Here, Paris, let me take care of that finger.”
While he bandaged up my torn nail he kept talking. “I emptied his pockets. It’s all on the table in your kitchen. Now I’m gonna take him out somewhere and get rid of him.”
“Don’t you think we should call the cops?” I asked.
Fearless just shook his head.
“I, I’ll go with you, though,” I offered.
