Fear Itself - Walter Mosley

“I imagine so,” I said pleasantly. But inside I was boiling. Fearless had done it to me again. He knew that I planned either to keep the book or to sell it, and he made the decision that either act would have been wrong. He stole the book from me and gave it back to Winifred. I silently swore never to help him again.

“He told me,” she was saying, “that you found the book and turned it over to him so that he could protect it until you gave it to the rightful owner.”

“Well, that’s how it was, I guess. What is it you wanted today?”

“I’ve already made my allowances for Fearless,” she said as if I should have understood. “And now all I have to do is meet your request.”

“I see,” I said. There were prickles now working their way up my spine.

“I have an offer that you may or may not be interested in.”

“And what’s that?”

There was a black-and-yellow garden spider sitting in the middle of her web in the window. She was a behemoth. Near the web a tiger swallowtail butterfly, also yellow and black, fluttered haplessly looking for pollen and a place to lay her eggs. I began to be afraid for the butterfly. I wanted more than anything for her to go the other way.

“I could give you the ten thousand that Fearless said you wanted,” Winifred Fine said. “But —”

I forgot the butterfly then.

“But what?”

“I also have in my possession the same amount of money in a stock that I intended for Son’s education. I’ll get more stocks in the future, and I’d like to hold on to as much cash as possible because I’m about to embark on a new gas station business in Compton.”

“I’ll take the money, ma’am.”

“Are you sure? The stocks might make a great surge and you can always sell them.”

“No ma’am. I’m just a poor shopkeeper. I don’t know about finance. You got the money here?”

“It’s in the briefcase next to your chair.”

I looked down to see a slender alligator skin case on the right side of my chair. When I looked up the spider was wrapping the butterfly and Winifred L. Fine was smiling.

“I see that you’re fixing up around the front of the house,” I said to make a little conversation before running out of the door with my loot.

“As I told you, the front of the house was Rose’s domain. Now that she has left us I have taken over that responsibility.”

Which one was crazier? I wondered.

“Tell Mr. Jones that I met my end of the bargain,” she said.

I nodded and stood, my treasure in tow. I turned to leave and then turned back.

“What was the name of the stock you wanted to give me?”

“International Business Machines,” she said. “They make typewriters.”

I smiled and wandered out of the house, not a rich man, but certainly not poor.

45

“YEAH, PARIS, you know I had to give that lady back her book. It was a family heirloom.”

It was a week later. I had eaten steak every night, wondering what I should say to Fearless when I saw him. He had dropped by after eight carrying a large brown paper shopping bag.

“You had no right to take that book without talking to me first, Fearless. I could have made a hundred thousand dollars on that motherfucker.”

“It wasn’t yours, man.”

“I found it.”

“And you got ten thousand dollars plus the twenty-five hundred was in with the book.”

“Where’s that?”

“In this here bag,” he said.

“What? You turn it into quarters?”

Fearless grinned then, and I knew he had done something else, something that he thought I’d like.

“What I got in here is seventy-two rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film, what they call archival quality.”

“No.”

“Jackson had lent his camera equipment to a white girl he know goes to UCLA. I went over to her place and we took the pictures in her basement.”

If I had been with anyone but Fearless I would have broken down into tears.

“I know how much you love that book, Paris,” he said. “And I know it’s important too. There shouldn’t be just one copy, and Miss Fine’s gonna have to get up off it one day and share it with the world. But until she do at least you got somethin’ to build a darkroom over and then somethin’ to read in the middle’a the night.

“You know it’s not just that money neither. She promised to leave Son and his parents alone and leave Rose to live with Mama. That way everybody’s happy. Everybody, that is, except that poor Mr. Wexler. It’s really a shame about his children.”

FEARLESS HAS ALWAYS COME THROUGH for me. He’s always been a better man than I am and smarter than I am too. I’ve been studying photography lately and spending time in the darkroom at LACC. Pretty soon I’ll have my own copy of the Fine family story. That and ten thousand dollars and all the air I can breathe.