Fear of the Dark

Ashe was an inch or so taller than I, and her coloring was what I call a buttery brown: lighter than your average Negro’s but not by much. She wore glasses and had absolutely no sense of style. Her clothes were old, and she wore brown leather shoes with black laces and white cotton socks. She braided her hair into pigtails every morning, tying them with primary-colored ribbons on the ends.

I was happy that Ashe was such a poor dresser for two reasons. The first was that she liked me. I was one of the few eligible black men she knew who actually read for enjoyment and who could engage her on most topics that she was familiar with.

Because of this she often came by and spent long hours talking about arcane subjects like coats of arms in the Middle Ages or the dynasties of Egypt. Ashe had taught herself the rudiments of Latin and Greek, and she liked to play word games, looking for the ancient roots in English words.

Ashe would give me long hungry looks as we conversed, but all I had to do was glance at those ribbons in her hair and I knew that I wasn’t going to make a move.

The second reason I was happy about her appearance was that I suspected that she was beautiful under that dowdy facade.

I didn’t want to get romantically involved with Ashe because she was my best customer and I really liked talking with her.

49

Walter Mosley

She was a deep thinker. Sometimes she’d say things to me and it wasn’t until days later that I figured out what she’d meant.

If I became her lover something was bound to go wrong.

Pregnancy. Expectations of marriage. Both. I wasn’t ready for a good woman like Ashe, and as long as she dressed the way she did, she couldn’t tempt a fool like me.

“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Ashe said on that Thursday morning.

She was wearing a Scotch plaid skirt that came down to the middle of her calves, a dark green sweater that didn’t go with anything that wasn’t a uniform, and pink hair ribbons.

“Ashe. How are you today?”

“I read that book about dreams,” she said.

“The Interpretation? ” I asked, referring to Freud’s seminal work.

“It was very interesting,” she allowed. “He wants it to be a science, but it cain’t be, not really.”

“Why not?” I asked. “He’s a doctor.”

“A doctor’s not a doctor when he’s sittin’ in church talkin’

to the preacher,” she said. “When a doctor is talkin’ to a minister, he’s just a man.”

Even though she was looking as homely as a woman three times her age, Ashe made my heart flutter then.

“But Mr. Freud wasn’t in no church,” I said. “He was bein’

a doctor, curing psychosomatic symptoms.”

“But he couldn’t prove it. He talks to you and explains dreams, but some of what he says has to be wrong and he doesn’t have the tools that could quantify and compare his findings.”

“So you don’t believe it?” I asked the drab young woman.

“No. I didn’t say that. But it seems to me that Dr. Freud has opened up a question about how we understand things. He’s 50

FEAR OF THE DARK

discovered something that no chemist or physicist or mathe-matician can prove or even begin to prove. That’s wonderful.”

Ashe smiled then and I forgot, for the first time in many days, about Tiny and Jessa and that stand of bitter oaks.

“I hate to rush you off, Ashe,” I said, “but I just remembered that I have to make a call.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you might have some time.”

“Sorry.”

I hurried her out because I knew myself. I’d be in love with her for a day or a week, maybe even a month, but sooner or later we’d crash and burn; she’d walk away from my bookstore and never return with her brilliant insights and goofy smiles.

I h a d o t h e r c u s t o m e r s . Two neighborhood boys came by for comic books and copies of National Geographic magazine (hoping for a glimpse of the naked breasts of so-called primitives). A couple of ladies from up the block who bought romance novels dropped in twice.

One dusky-skinned guy with an island accent of some sort came in looking for a French dictionary.

“You mean French-English?” I asked the guy.

“Non, ” he said. “I wish to look up words in French.”

“I don’t got that, man,” I told him. “You should try Cutter’s Books downtown or better yet go to the library.”

“I like to own my books,” the deadly handsome foreigner said, affecting an aloof air.

He was almost six feet tall, with skin that was not exactly the color of that of most Negroes you meet. He had a thin mustache and bisected eyes that were both a dark and a darker brown.