question about my auntie staying with me; she would not do it. A woman her age needed a room or house appropriate for her. There also was no question that I would have to find her a place to stay where she would be comfortable.
“Why did you come up here?” I asked as we cruised down Central. “I mean, did you have some reason to be worried about Use . . . Ulysses?”
“Ulysses send me a lettah ’bout a month ago. Said that he had a new girlfriend and a new business and he was expecting to make a lotta money and buy me a house in Lake Charles.”
“Nuthin’ wrong about that,” I sang, hoping to keep the mood light and uncursed.
“It’s always bad to have love and money on the same page,”
she said sagely. “The more I thought about it, the more I worried 61
Walter Mosley
that he was gettin’ himself into a mess. And then too it was the name that girl had.”
“Angel,” I said, remembering Useless’s last words.
“What’s she like?”
“I really don’t know, Auntie. He said somethin’ like he wasn’t good enough for her. Somethin’ about bein’ mudfoot, that’s what he said.”
“Lord.”
“That means somethin’?”
“Feet of clay,” my churchgoing, devil-eyed aunt said. “I told him all the time that men had feet of clay. It means that that woman, that Angel, made him wanna overcome his base nature and try to be a real man.”
“That sounds good, right?”
“Maybe,” she said in a voice so soft that it might have been Whisper Natly speaking in the next room.
I k n e w t h a t U s e l e s s liked pool; it was the one thing he was good at. So the first place Three Hearts and I went was Rinaldo’s, a half-block-long storefront that sported eleven tables.
Rinaldo had copper skin and slicked-back hair that did not seem straightened. He was missing one tooth and stood and walked in a hunched-over posture that he blamed on forty years leaning over pool tables.
Rinaldo was a busy man. He took numbers, delivered messages to some of Watts’s most important gangsters, and sold property, both stolen and otherwise. There was usually a line of people waiting to speak to him. There was that day. I waited my turn and when I got to him he looked at me.
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FEAR OF THE DARK
“Fearless’s friend, right?” he asked.
“Lookin’ for Useless Grant,” I said as I nodded.
“Man’s Barn,” Rinaldo said, and I hustled back out to the car where I’d left my auntie.
M a n ’ s B a r n wa s a barnlike building that sat in Man Dorn’s backyard. It was once some hangar or shed that the black Kansan had acquired along with his little blue house. He had subdivided the building into eight apartments and spent most of his time moving tenants in and malingerers out.
Los Angeles was a nomadic city in the fifties. Rent was cheap, and jobs were so plentiful that people were willing to pull up stakes and go for the promise of a neighborhood swimming pool or a change of employer.
Man was a short guy with brick brown skin. He wasn’t much older than I, but he seemed to be so, with his bald dome and beefy body. His hands were fat with muscle and his neck was a third the length it should have been. He wore overalls and a faded gray T-shirt. Whatever it was his wife loved him for, he didn’t display it on the outside.
“Yeah, yeah,” Man was saying to Three Hearts and me. “Useless got the back right corner apartment.” He was leading us down the driveway to the building everybody called Man’s Barn.
“Ulysses,” Three Hearts said, correcting him.
“Oh, sorry. It’s just that everybody calls him Useless,” Man said.
“I don’t,” she informed him, “and I’m his mother.”
“Well,” Man said, “he ain’t paid his rent in two weeks, so maybe you wanna take his things with you, you bein’ his mama an’ all.”
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“How much does he owe?” Three Hearts asked.
“Forty-three dollars and fi’ty cent,” Man said.
Three Hearts carried a brown cloth bag for a purse. She reached in with one hand and rummaged around for a minute or so. She came out with a wad of bills and two quarters. Man counted the bills and seemed satisfied.
“Now it’s your place,” he said. He handed me a brass key.
“Did he live alone?” I asked before Man could walk away.
“He had a girl . . .” The landlord had to smile. “. . . called herself Angel, and I do believe she was that. She went away a few days before the last time I saw him.”
“How would you know that?” I asked.
“One day a tall man came and helped her put her suitcase in his car.”
