Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley

clutching those hands to his chest when we moved to meet them.
    “I’m so sorry,” the elder woman said. “I saw what they did to you. I’m sorry.”
    “We’re sorry about your husband, ma’am,” Fearless said gallantly.
    “You the one who looked at me in the lineup?” I asked.
    “Both of you,” she said. “They kept trying to make me say that you were the ones who attacked Sol. One of them was tall like
     you,” she said, looking at Fearless, “but he had a bigger face and dead eyes, and he wore a cowboy hat.”
    “A cowboy hat?” I said, thinking about the horns in my side mirror.
    The old woman nodded. “When I said no, they told me that you would never be able to hurt me again. I was afraid that they
     were going to kill you.”
    “Are you all right?” the younger woman asked. Her homely face made her concern seem that much more sincere.
    “We have to go,” the man said, putting his discomfort into words.
    “No, Morris,” the older woman said. “I have to talk to these men.”
    “You don’t know them, Aunt Hedva. The police said that this one just got out of jail.”
    “Didn’t my Sol just get out of prison?” the diminutive woman asked.
    “That was different,” Morris said. “You don’t know them. Why were they even at your house?”
    “We were makin’ the rounds,” I said. “Askin’ some’a the older white folks if they needed a gardener, and we stayed to try
     and save his life.”
    The younger woman said, “Hedva told us that these men helped Sol.”
    “Be quiet, Gella,” Morris ordered. “For all you know they could all have been working together.”
    The sloppy man looked at us then and flinched, not, I thought,because he was ashamed of treating us like we were invisible but instead because he realized that we really could have been
     in on it with the man who stabbed his uncle.
    Morris didn’t seem to fit with the women. He was right there, and scared. They were someplace else altogether, like characters
     from a romantic novel who found themselves in a fast-paced crime story.
    It’s not that the two women were cut from the same cloth. No. Gella and her aunt were as much opposites as people of the same
     race can be. The younger woman was tall and lean. Her ears and nose were large and so were her lips. Every movement she made
     was executed in two operations. If she reached out to touch her aunt’s shoulder, her hand would make it half the way, stop,
     and then go the final distance. If she spoke, first she’d lift her head and open her mouth, then she’d lower her chin and
     do it all over, ending with whatever she had to say.
    The older woman was short and round with small features. She had beadlike eyes and almost no lips. Her motions were quick
     and accurate. I had misjudged her earlier in the day. It was the shock of seeing her husband bleeding that had made her scared
     and confused.
    “We have to go now,” Morris said to the women.
    It was almost as if Fearless and I weren’t there on the corner. As if our dark skins somehow blended with the dusk and whisked
     us away.
    “These men did not hurt us,” Hedva said, still involved in the earlier argument. “What they say is true. They saved Solly’s
     life.”
    “Saved his life?” I said. “The cops told us that he was dead.”
    “No.” Hedva shook her head. “Not dead. He’s in the hospital. They can’t wake him up, but he’s still alive.”
    “Which one of you is Fanny?” Fearless asked.
    “I am,” Hedva said. “That’s what they called me when I was a child.”
    Fearless nodded, staring straight into the older woman’s face. She was his charge now. Fearless would never forget that Sol,
     lying bleeding on the floor, had instructed him to protect Fanny from being robbed.
    “Well, I’m glad it turned out all right.” What I wanted was to break up our little powwow and get on with the business at
     hand. Sol wasn’t dead, but he could still die. I wasn’t dead either but, the way my