still got that trunk with 6 the padlock on it in the back?”
“Yeah,” I said in a deep tone.
“Where’s the key?”
“In my tool drawer. Why?”
“I’m’a put the lock on the front do’ so nobody come in here.”
I heard him walking around for a while after that. He went back and forth a couple of times, and then the house was silent.
The first thing I realized after Fearless was gone was that I didn’t have a book to read. At the best of times that would have been bad news. Reading is how I made it through life. While other children were out getting into trouble, I was in the schoolroom or at the back of the church reading
I could live without almost anyone or anything as long as I had a book to read. A long queue became a luxury if Anna Karen-ina was there to engage me. The doctor’s waiting room became my private den if he kept up with his magazine subscriptions.
Sitting there next to a heap of flesh and bone that once 35
Walter Mosley
made up a man, with no book and no way out, made me jittery, pressed me to the edge of panic.
I tried to go over how I had come to that place. Should I have left Jessa alone? Probably. But she said her boyfriend had left her. Should I never have believed what people told me?
Within five minutes of Fearless’s departure a peculiar ping-ing sound began emanating from the corpse. It had a nautical ring to it. His body juices settling, no doubt, I thought.
I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes, determined to sleep until Fearless returned with his helper. No more than a minute later came another greatly extended bodily note. I turned on the light and wondered if I could push the trapdoor open.
Tiny’s head was on the floor and his middle was bent backward so that his feet were next to his head. I decided that it was this uncomfortable position that made him so musical. Maybe if I straightened him out he might calm down.
With great difficulty because of my hurt back, I pulled on the big man’s legs until he was lying flat on his stomach with one hand underneath him and one behind his neck. I would have straightened him out more, but he had soiled himself and was beginning to smell pretty bad. For a moment I worried that the odor might overwhelm me. I panicked and climbed the ladder, but when I made a tentative shove against the trapdoor I realized that I’d never be able to push my way out.
I kept a tarp down there that I used sometimes when I had to do work around the house. I used this to cover the body and to contain the odors it was emitting.
Then I turned out the light again. The next sound that came from Tiny was like that of a giant toad being pressed underneath him.
36
FEAR OF THE DARK
I turned on the light.
I was caught between my fear of the dark and the terror that light brought.
“You gonna be fine, Paris,” I told myself. “It’s gonna be okay. You didn’t kill this boy. You didn’t ask him to come over here after you, actin’ a fool.”
For a while there I blamed Useless for my problems. Just the fact of him dragging his unlucky hide to my doorstep, I reasoned, had brought this misfortune down on my head.
But I couldn’t blame Useless. He hadn’t even come in my house. Anyway, if my cousin had caused the problem it would have been me stretched out on the floor instead of Tiny.
For some reason that thought made me laugh. The laugh, in turn, made me smile; as long as I had a sense of humor I was on the way to recovery.
That’s when Tiny twitched under his canvas blanket.
It wasn’t a violent motion, more like a twist and a shudder.
But when the man you’re sitting with is supposed to be dead, you don’t want to see any movement whatsoever.
I leaped to my feet, uttered five or six unintelligible syllables, and ran smack into the wall. I hit the ground and then looked around for a weapon to protect myself from the man I was entombed with, the man whose only words to me had been that he intended to take my life.
My forehead was bleeding. My fists were up in front of my eyes. I was panting like a spent dog. Sweat was coming down my face, and I shivered from cold. I had never been so frightened in all my life, and then Tiny shifted under his rough pall again.
This next motion could only calm me. I mean, things couldn’t get any worse. I took a step toward the prostrate figure and nudged him with my toe.
37
Walter Mosley
He didn’t respond.
“Tiny,” I said. “Hey, man, you okay?”
I thanked heaven that he didn’t answer.
It was then that I remembered reading that corpses in morgues and mortuaries often exhibited some characteristics of life. They shifted and farted and made all kinds of sounds and motions. Some bodies had been known to sit upright hours after their demise.
