Fear of the Dark

“I need help.”

“I sell books, not help.”

“It’s about that time with the gold chains, right?” he asked me.

I didn’t even answer.

“That wasn’t my fault, Paris. The cops got a hold’a me and like to beat me half to death. I told ’em that I hid ’em in yo’ sto’.

I told ’em you didn’t know nuthin’ about it.”

I could have asked him why did they arrest me, then? But that would have opened a conversation, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with Useless Grant.

“I need a place to hide out,” he said.

“Not here.”

“We blood, Paris.”

“That might be, but I ain’t bleedin’ for you.”

I thought Useless was going to break down and cry. But then he looked at my face and saw that I wouldn’t let him in if he was having a heart attack. He wasn’t getting across my threshold even if he fell down dead.

“Well, do me one favor, okay?” he said.

I just stared at him.

“Tell Three Hearts that there’s a man named Hector wrote 6

FEAR OF THE DARK

my name on a black slip’a paper. Tell her that I tried to make it work with Angel, but I guess I was mudfoot just like she said.”

I didn’t say a thing. Nothing. Useless was less than that to me. I heard his words and I would repeat them if I ever saw his mother again, but he wasn’t going to make it into my house.

No sir, not in a thousand years.

7

I c l o s e d t h e d o o r on Useless and took a deep breath. I had to send him away, had to. Useless was 2 the kind of trouble that could get a man killed. He had no sense except for the sense of survival. That meant he would deal with thugs or criminals just as if they were upstanding citizens; he’d invite those men into your house and then leave out the back door when trouble started.

The next day he’d call and ask how you were just as if he hadn’t seen his partners come after you with a butcher’s knife.

He’d come to visit you in the hospital and hit you up for a loan even after you explained to him that you couldn’t pay the doctor’s bill.

Useless was trouble from the git-go.

But still I felt guilty.

I loved my auntie Three Hearts. She was the finest individual that you could imagine. She never passed judgment on people without cause and she was loyal. I once had a fever of 105 degrees, and she sat there sponging me down for days while my mother was laid up sick with the same flu. She stayed with us another week, cooking and looking after us while her son, Useless, broke every toy I owned.

8

FEAR OF THE DARK

Three Hearts’s only blind spot was her son. Useless could do nothing wrong in her mind. If he got in trouble it was always somebody else’s fault. If he lied it was for a higher purpose. Her son was a perfect man, and woe be unto those who thought otherwise. She lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was a good thing because that meant I wouldn’t have to face her wrath at my turning her boy away in time of need.

Maybe I would have offered Useless a glass of water but, as I said before, I was already expecting trouble when he came knocking.

Th r e e w e e k s e a r l i e r I had been having dinner at a diner in downtown L.A. It was an Italian- American place at one of the crossroads between the races. There were all kinds of patrons eating there: whites, blacks, Asians, and even one Mexican family.

I liked integrated places. I guess that’s because my time in the Deep South had been defined by segregation. They wouldn’t let me into the library in my hometown. I wasn’t even allowed to urinate where a white man had gone.

I had ordered eggplant parmigiana and was sitting there reading Ulysses by James Joyce. The book was no longer banned in the United States, but there was still a stigma attached to it, and I wanted to see what that was all about.

Between Joyce’s playfulness, the eggplant and Italian bread, and the satisfaction of being able to sit where I was sitting, I was pretty happy.

Also, at the booth across from me there was this skinny young white woman. She had natural, if dirty, blond hair and 9

Walter Mosley

blue eyes that looked like pale quartz. She used her tongue a lot while eating and I was quite enchanted by her wandering gaze.

The meal and Stephen Dedalus went along just fine, and I was completely satisfied. But then a disturbance occurred.

The plump waitress, who wore a tight red uniform, had delivered a check to the blonde’s table, but then she came back with the cook. The cook was dressed all in whites. He had a sailor’s cap, a stained white T-shirt, bleached white trousers, and an apron that was once buff colored but now had faded to a kind of off-white.