FEAR OF THE DARK
There were eighteen hardback books in the box. Each one had anywhere from five to fifteen dog-eared pages proving Ashe’s claims. She had a relentless, steel-trap kind of intelligence. And I had to admit there was something to her asser-tion. There must have been thousands of times that I had come across statements in books that insulted and lied about Negroes in America and abroad. Hegel had done it and Karl Marx too. But without a definitive list of these misdemeanors, how could we complain? Even the librarian had denied the allegation until Ashe showed her proof.
I decided to put the books down in the onetime crypt of Tiny Bobchek.
93
Walter Mosley
I was happy to have received that box of books, first because of the fact that no one had stolen them from off my porch.
Nobody stole books. These bound and printed stacks of paper were the most precious things in the world, and yet no one would have picked them up. That box could have sat on my porch for a week and those books would have gone unmo-lested and unread.
The second thing that made me happy was that Ashe had distracted me for an hour or so from the worries that had settled all through my mind.
I thought about Ashe and her bumbling brilliance. She would have done much better for herself if she had gone to college and committed all of the plays of Shakespeare to memory. That way the white professors, deans, and provosts would have seen her as some kind of anomaly who would have fit well in the lower echelons of the university hierarchy. There she could have waited until such time that a catalogue of racist quotes in American and English literature might have been presented on a grand stage.
But Ashe could only see truth — not strategy. She worked as a teacher’s assistant at a private Baptist elementary school down on Eighty-third Street. They paid her twenty-two dollars a week, and she lived somehow, sometimes unable to buy even a pencil.
Again I thought of how I could have loved a woman like that. But loving her, I knew that I should leave her alone.
I wa s n ’ t h u n g r y and so I went up to bed at eight. My jaw was aching and my right arm felt weak. I had pains up and down my right side and a thick copy of
FEAR OF THE DARK
night table. I wanted to read it, but I was experiencing too many aches to grapple with that hefty tome.
So instead I started thinking.
I knew that I shouldn’t have cut off Fearless’s question about Tiny Bobchek’s death. Tiny’s dying like that was just the kind of trouble that Useless would bring down on you. But Useless wasn’t a killer and he’d gone. I hadn’t even let him through the door, so why would he have come back? And I was sure there wasn’t any connection between Useless and Jessa.
When I’d met her, she talked all the time about how she’d never seen a black man up close. She’d play with my hair and place her white hand against my skin to marvel at the contrast.
And Jessa was a brass tacks kind of girl. I paid her rent and made an exotic entry in her life. If she was working with somebody who was counting money in the thousands, she wouldn’t have had a moment for me.
No. Jessa had nothing to do with Useless and Useless had nothing to do with the murder of Tiny Bobchek.
But where had Jessa gone?
I closed my eyes, but I could tell by the thrumming at the back of my head that sleep would not be coming any time soon.
I had an inspiration then. So I got dressed, went down to my car, and drove over to the blue house in front of Man’s Barn.
It was almost nine, well beyond the time when decent people dropped in on one another. Man might have turned me away, but I had a plan to get by him.
I rang the bell and stood there in my brown jacket and black trousers. I was sporting alligator shoes and a blue pullover shirt that had a one-button collar.
Man wore a white T-shirt and navy blue pants that had a drawstring at the waist.
95
Walter Mosley
“What the hell do you want?” he asked me. “Do you know what time it is? My little girl was asleep before you started pushin’ on that bell.”
