51
Walter Mosley
He was looking around the place as if he were searching through the books, but I could tell that he was looking for something else.
Finally he asked, “Do you have a toilet for your customers?”
“Hang a right before you walk into the porch,” I said, pointing the way.
He went in. Made all the appropriate noises and came out again.
“How do you keep that mustache so perfect?” I asked him.
“You know I got this bushy thing here. I’d like something styled like yours, but when I start trimmin’ at it I keep goin’
from side to side tryin’ to keep it even until finally my lip is bare.”
The foreigner smiled.
“I go to a barber, of course,” he said. “Burnham’s on Avalon.”
“You wanna leave me a number?” I asked then.
“Why?”
“In case I get a French dictionary.”
“I’ll go to Cutter’s,” he said. “I need it now.”
N e a r t h e e n d o f t h a t w e e k , Whisper Natly came by. He was wearing a suit that was equal parts dark blue and dark gray, his signature short-brimmed hat, and rubber-soled black shoes.
“Hey, Paris,” he said. The syllables sounded like a triplet explosion that occurred very far from my store.
“Whisper. What’s up, my man?”
“You know a guy named Dorfman?”
“Yeah. White dude. Helms bakery driver. Delivers bread 52
FEAR OF THE DARK
on this block. He comes in now and then to buy war magazines. I sell ’em for a nickel apiece.”
“Gambler?”
“Yeah, yeah. I think so.” I remembered that whenever the burly white man came into my place he always talked about sports and the odds on any and every competition. “He always talked about it.”
“He run a game?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
Whisper took me in for a moment. I can’t say he flashed his eyes at me because there was no glitter in his gaze. His presence was flat as a pancake, just as his appearance was tamped down and without character.
“Heard you had some problems the other night,” he said.
“What you mean?” I asked defensively. I regretted that because it caused Whisper to regard me again.
“Milo said that some white boy wanted to kick your butt.”
“Oh. Oh, that. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t nuthin’. Fearless came on by, but he was gone.”
“Okay, then,” Whisper said. He turned away and walked out of the store, leaving less of a wake than a shark’s fin along the surface of the water.
M y o n l y o t h e r c u s t o m e r that week was Cleetus Rome, an elderly white man who had lived in my neighborhood when it was mostly fields and inhabited solely by white people.
Not only did Cleetus not read, he was illiterate. He had told me as much.
“My daddy used to tell me why waste time readin’ when 53
Walter Mosley
you could be swingin’ a hammer,” Cleetus had said when we first met.
Cleetus couldn’t read, didn’t own a TV set, and wasn’t a gregarious guy at all. He didn’t know his neighbors when they were white and he certainly didn’t know most of them now.
But he owned a radio and he listened to the news all day long.
Every few days or so he’d come by my store and bring up things he had heard. I understood that he wanted to find out if I knew more about the stories from reading the paper.
I didn’t mind. He was old and toothless. He smelled something like dust or maybe even loam and he always bought magazines from me that had swimsuit models on the covers.
That day he asked, “You hear about the body they fount in the strawberry field down near San Pedro?”
“Say what?” I asked as calmly as a man being stung by a bee.
“Big ol’ white boy, they say,” Cleetus added. “Farmer’s dog dug him up from under some trees.”
“I haven’t read about that,” I said.
“On the news today,” Cleetus said. “Prob’ly be in the paper tomorrow. I heard ’em say down at the gas station that some big ol’ white boy was chasin’ a car right out on Central here the other day.”
“Really?” I smiled through the nausea.
