I could neither climb nor crawl with my hurt back.
“I got to go through the house,” I said.
“Go down into the cellar and get that canvas sheet,” Fearless said.
By the time I made it around to the alley, they had Tiny neatly folded into the back corner of a flatbed Ford truck.
Fearless let me sit next to the passenger’s window while Van drove the ’48 Ford truck he’d borrowed from some friend. I was on the alert for police cars, jerking my head around every time a light flashed.
“What’s wrong, Paris?” Van asked after my body went through a fairly pronounced spasm.
“Worried about the cops stoppin’ us. It’s late. They might grab us just for drivin’.”
“That ain’t our problem, man,” the killer said. “It’s their widows and fatherless children got to worry ’bout them.”
The certainty of Cleave’s tone and the depth of Fearless’s silence put me into a different mood altogether. There I was, in a truck with desperate men. I was a desperate man. It was hard to believe that a milquetoast coward like myself could be involved in such a clandestine and dangerous operation. But the reasons were as clear as the quarter moon shining through the windshield.
All three of us were living according to black people’s law. The minute I came upon that white boy’s body I knew that I would be seen as guilty in the eyes of American justice. Not even that — I was guilty. There was no jury that would exonerate me. There was no court of appeals that would hear my cries of innocence.
I wasn’t a brave man like Fearless or a born criminal like Van Cleave, but we all belonged in that truck together. We had been put there by a long and unremitting history. My guilt was my skin, and where that brought me had nothing to do with choice or justice or the whole library of books I had read.
We drove south and a little east of San Pedro. Van was driving us through a fallow strawberry field. It was maybe two in the morning, and we were the only souls within miles.
When we got out Van said to me, “Take off your sweater, Paris.”
“What?”
“Take off that yellah sweater,” he said.
I realized what he was saying. Fearless was still in his dark colors. Van was wearing all black. Only I had on a bright piece of clothing: Sir’s sweater. There I was, afraid that the law might see me, but that sweater was like a lightbulb under that moon.
While I was disrobing, Fearless and Cleave hefted the corpse out of the back of the truck and carried him over the tilled soil into a stand of oaks. There they used two short spades to dig a shallow grave.
Before they put him in, Van went through his pockets and pulled out a slender wallet. He threw the billfold to me, and then they covered Tiny over. There was no money in the wallet, but instead of throwing it down I put it in my pocket.
“See ya later, my friend,” Van said by way of prayer.
Fearless saluted.
Back at my front door at four in the morning, Fearless and I climbed out of Van’s borrowed truck.
“Thanks, Van,” I said, extending a hand.
“One day I’m’a come ask you for a book, now, Paris,” he said.
“What kinda books you read?” I asked.
“No kind. That’s why I’m’a come to you. When I need a book, you the one gonna tell which one I’m after.”
It was the only time in my life that a book request scared me.
Chapter 8
Fearless slept on the couch in my front room that night. The next morning he was off to protect Milo, and I worked on fixing up my bookstore, jumping at every sound.
The first day I straightened, swept, and sorted through my stock. The next day I got out my tools and went to work on the structural damage that Tiny had wrought. I’m not all that good with my hands, but I come from poor stock. I never hired a plumber or carpenter because I didn’t have that kind of wealth. So the door frame looked mismatched and crooked, but it held the door in place. The tar paper roof looked as if it had a black bandage on it, but when it rained eight months later I had nary a leak in my kitchen.
I even knitted together the wire fencing in my backyard.
Fearless dropped by every night after letting Milo off at his hideout. He’d bring peach schnapps, a liquor we both got a taste for from an older Jewish lady who had died on our watch. We’d toast the old woman when we took our first sip.
After a week had gone by, I began to calm down. Whoever it was that had broken into my house either got what he was after or didn’t — either way he didn’t return.
I had eight customers in that time, all of them in the last four days.
My first patron was Ashe Knowles. She was what I called a Lady Poindexter. She was the only person I ever met who had read more than I. She had bought and traded back almost every book I had in stock.
Ashe was an inch or so taller than I, and her coloring was what I call a buttery brown: lighter than your average Negro’s but not by much. She wore glasses and had absolutely no sense of style. Her clothes were old, and she wore brown leather shoes with black laces and white cotton socks. She braided her hair into pigtails every morning, tying them with primary-colored ribbons on the ends.
I was happy that Ashe was such a poor dresser for two reasons. The first was that she liked me. I was one of the few eligible black men she knew who actually read for enjoyment and who could engage her on most topics that she was familiar with. Because of this she often came by and spent long hours talking about arcane subjects like coats of arms in the Middle Ages or the dynasties of Egypt. Ashe had taught herself the rudiments of Latin and Greek, and she liked to play word games, looking for the ancient roots in English words.
Ashe would give me long hungry looks as we conversed, but all I had to do was glance at those ribbons in her hair and I knew that I wasn’t going to make a move.
The second reason I was happy about her appearance was that I suspected that she was beautiful under that dowdy facade.
I didn’t want to get romantically involved with Ashe because she was my best customer and I really liked talking with her.
She was a deep thinker. Sometimes she’d say things to me and it wasn’t until days later that I figured out what she’d meant.
If I became her lover something was bound to go wrong. Pregnancy. Expectations of marriage. Both. I wasn’t ready for a good woman like Ashe, and as long as she dressed the way she did, she couldn’t tempt a fool like me.
“Hello, Mr. Minton,” Ashe said on that Thursday morning. She was wearing a Scotch plaid skirt that came down to the middle of her calves, a dark green sweater that didn’t go with anything that wasn’t a uniform, and pink hair ribbons.
“Ashe. How are you today?”
“I read that book about dreams,” she said.
“The Interpretation?” I asked, referring to Freud’s seminal work.
“It was very interesting,” she allowed. “He wants it to be a science, but it cain’t be, not really.”
“Why not?” I asked. “He’s a doctor.”
“A doctor’s not a doctor when he’s sittin’ in church talkin’ to the preacher,” she said. “When a doctor is talkin’ to a minister, he’s just a man.”
Even though she was looking as homely as a woman three times her age, Ashe made my heart flutter then.
“But Mr. Freud wasn’t in no church,” I said. “He was bein’ a doctor, curing psychosomatic symptoms.”
“But he couldn’t prove it. He talks to you and explains dreams, but some of what he says has to be wrong and he doesn’t have the tools that could quantify and compare his findings.”