“Oh,” Three Hearts shouted, more in surprise than fear, I think.
“S-s-stop,” I managed to stutter. “P-put her down, Anthony. She don’t know where Useless is. She here askin’ you where.”
I know it might sound like a pretty light challenge when I write it down here. But I would like to see how you would respond faced as I was by a man who might just as well have been a hungry tiger lunging at you from the depths of an Indian rain forest.
Anthony pushed Three Hearts against the wall of a dilapidated and condemned building. They were a few feet from me.
It was the perfect moment to run. I could have said that I was looking for help. I could have called for the police.
Tiny Bobchek returned to my mind at that moment. I didn’t know why. Months later, when I was sitting up wide awake in my bed at 3:00 a.m., it came to me that I felt guilty about not being able to do more for him than just take him out in the middle of nowhere, strip him of his identity, and drop him into a shallow grave. I had to do it, but it seemed that I should have done more.
I wasn’t aware of all that in Mad Anthony’s alley. All I knew was that Tiny was in my mind and I was running toward a man who could have beaten me with both arms tied behind his back.
I leaped and struck out while the behemoth raged at my auntie.
Mad Anthony released my auntie, grabbed me, and delivered what might have looked like a halfhearted slap.
I actually bounced upon hitting the ground, first on my left side and then on my stomach. I came to a stop on my back, looking up into a blue, blue sky edged by branches from trees on the eastern side of the alley.
I tried to sit up. For a moment I felt that I’d succeeded, but then I realized it was my will that had risen while the body stayed down.
The sky seemed to be spinning and darkening. A car backfired maybe three blocks away, and then there was a cry for help.
I wondered what it was all about while floating away on a sea of painful darkness.
Chapter 12
I was walking down a Louisiana dirt road not far from the hovel that my mother and I called home. It was a spring day, neither hot nor cold, and there was a lark singing somewhere in the trees to my right. I was trying to remember which was the fastest way to get back to our place.
It occurred to me as I walked that there was no deed to the land that our tar-paper-and-brick home stood upon. We never paid rent. I looked down at my feet, which were bare, and felt a creeping trepidation come over me that we might one day be evicted from our squatters’ claim. But with a shake of my head I sloughed off the fear as a boxer shakes off sweat in the middle rounds. I laughed at myself for being silly.
That’s when I bumped into him.
I looked up and saw a very tall, very thin, very black, and very old man. I knew this man — his name was Brother Bones — but I didn’t know where or when I had made his acquaintance.
He was at least seven feet tall, even hunched over his gnarled cane (which seemed to be crawling with insects).
When I made to go around him, he held up a great spidery hand, barring my passage.
“I cain’t let you up there, brother,” he said in a deep and melodious but still threatening tone. “You will not be going there again.”
I screamed at Mr. Bones. I caterwauled and cried. Inside, I felt no pain or passion, it was just that I knew, or believed I knew, that yelling like an infant would get me through.
When Mr. Bones shook his head at me, I considered running around him. But he seemed to grow larger, blocking any passage with his bony limbs.
Then the apparition stamped his foot upon the dirt road, making a sound like a kettledrum. The vibrations of the drumbeat found a resonance in my chest. The feeling of that tremor became fear in me. I tried to hold it down, but once it began it would not end.
Mr. Bones leaned forward and said, “Boo.”
As I ran back down the way I’d come, his laughter reverberated all around me. I was ashamed that he had bested me, angry that he was keeping me from my home, and determined to turn back around and face him. But I kept running.
As I ran, the bright day turned quickly to night. Soon I was running in pitch-blackness, not even able to see myself, much less the road, when I looked down. I realized that I couldn’t see the road under my feet or my feet on that road, tripped, and went tumbling down into a gully.
I didn’t know how long I was there but after a while I looked around without trying to rise. I was deeply frightened and realized somehow that I was now inside the body of Mr. Bones, that he had taken the whole world into his dark being and I was now his prisoner.
To my right I saw two shining jewels in the darkness. This sight touched a hope that I didn’t even know resided in my breast. Maybe these priceless gems would be my reward for all the calamities I had had to endure.
I found a book of matches in my pocket. The first few were chalky, already burned. Hatred took my heart then, hatred for the fool who had lit those matches without tearing them out.
Then I found a match that was live. I struck it and was momentarily blinded by the flare. When the temporary blindness faded, I saw that the jewels I imagined were actually the dead eyes of Useless.
“He’s just a damn coward,” a woman’s voice said clearly.
The match burned down to my thumb, but the pain of the burn was in my jaw instead of my hand.
I opened my eyes, hurting from my fall from the fence and my roll in the alley. Somehow they both had blended themselves into my dream.
There was a white plaster ceiling above my head. I could see the rust-colored veins of the pipes that ran above it. I smelled whiskey and wanted some. I heard murmurs that I knew were voices that would come clear in a moment.
I raised my head and saw Three Hearts, Mona Gibbs, and Fearless Jones sitting around a fold-up card table, the only table Fearless owned.
Three Hearts was the one talking. She had been the one who had called me a coward, I knew that. But she smiled when she saw that I was awake. It was more than a smile, like a friendly grin.
“So you back with the livin’, huh?” Fearless said. He said the same thing whenever I woke up in his presence.
“I need a cigarette and a shot’a that rotgut you drinkin’,” I said.
Mona got them for me.
Mona was a beautiful young woman. She was Negro and she was brown, but the brown mixed with gray everywhere in her appearance. Her skin was touched by it; her eyes sometimes shone with lunar possibilities. Even her hair seemed to be lightened by the midtone color.
Mona loved Fearless, loved him. She worked as a secretary in city hall and always managed to find an apartment near to where Fearless had moved to. She liked to sit next to him and hold his hand. If they were at a party and he was going home, she’d reach for him and if he took her by the hand, she would go along.
For a time this behavior had unsettled my nearly imperturbable friend. That’s because he was not only a natural-born killer, he was also a romantic. Fearless needed to be hopelessly in love to give his space to a woman. She didn’t have to be pretty or smart or friendly, even. There was some quality he searched for that I never understood. And so when he realized that Mona didn’t have what he needed, he told her so. He said that he didn’t mind spending time with her but they would never have a life together.
Most women, when Fearless told them that, would move on — after a while. But Mona said she didn’t care. She loved Fearless whether he loved her or not. She let him know that she would be there no matter what he did or who he saw. All he had to do was call or ring her bell.
Fearless didn’t have a phone, so she always lived nearby.
While Mona was lighting my cigarette, Three Hearts asked, “Are you okay, baby?”