Evil Never Sleeps: Tales of Light and Darkness

Evil Never Sleeps

Tales of Light and Darkness

by Robert Fleming

Evil Never Sleeps

Tales of Light and Darkness

by Robert Fleming

Copyright 2019 Robert Fleming. All rights reserved.

Published by Indigo Ink, an imprint of Full Sail Publishing, Chicago, Illinois

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary;

men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

Joseph Conrad

"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before."

Mae West

"The end result excuses any evil or mischief."

Fats Waller

Contents

Foreword

That Only Seems Fair: A Preface

Responding to Her Touch

Beautiful and Terrifying

Irresistible

The Other Cheek

The Astral Visitor Delta Blues

Closing Arguments

Tell No One

It’s Tight Like That

Mr. Robeson at The Moment

Ask Her

Blasphemy

Summer Comes Later

The Wasp

What it Takes to be Human

If it Makes You Happy

A Crisis of Faith

About Robert Fleming

Foreword

Reading a collection of short stories by a master of the form is one of the great literary pleasures, especially when the writer treats his work as a set of variations on a powerful theme yet manages to make each story as unique as a snowflake.

I discovered this as a young reader, devouring mythology, horror comic books, and tales from Arabian Nights. Looking back, I realize the stories I liked most had strong themes, compelling storytelling, and smart, sophisticated writing that stuck a nerve. The authors provided wildly imaginative glimpses into worlds that seemed far removed from my own. And I could not get enough.

Over the years, my taste has evolved. Yes, I love literary short story writing, but my pulse quickens when I am in the arms of a writer who knows the power of theme. Of surprise. Of creating characters and worlds that introduce me to people and places outside my reality or show me something new about myself or those around me while also entertaining me.

A good writer is like a musician, a pied piper of words who leads you, heart and mind, into places you might not have gone otherwise.

A steady bass beat pulses through Robert Fleming’s narratives as he deftly examines the point of our lives and the sometimes sad and uncanny ways in which our fragile hearts, societal norms, and changeable beliefs determine our destinies. His writing demands readers to think about these things, even as they are lulled with stories ranging from funny to horrifying.

Fleming understands groundbreaking writing might be upsetting. He knows great literature is not polite, doesn’t shove uncomfortable things in closets, and doesn’t care about your feelings. It only asks that you feel.

Evil Never Sleeps is a daring, sometimes unsettling portrait of the Black experience throughout history that hits on fundamental truths. Linked by strong themes, this is a story collection done right. Some of the stories might make you flinch, but it is hard to look away. The writing burns with raw, elemental power. The characters are complex and compelling, and the writing is sharp and brave. Fleming’s dark, captivating imagination shines in this wildly diverse collection that is both gripping and timely.

This collection gives readers compact treasures of emotion and realism often wrapped in a deceptive cloak of normalcy. Though Fleming’s stories are worlds unto themselves, each is a grand carnival of the troubling and absurd; the beautiful and the profane blend to form a whole that speaks to the discord and disillusion, hope and triumphs of the Black experience.

Rich with novelistic density, Fleming’s stories make Evil Never Sleeps a full-fledged feast. Observational and piercing, some of Fleming’s stories expose how fraught, and emotionally explosive, our search for connection with other human beings can be. The range of settings, characters, and styles makes for a recurring sense of surprise for the reader.

Evil Never Speaks is a wry, intelligent collection that skillfully navigates the boundary between the demands of faith and the persistence of doubt. In seizing upon the oddities of our shared histories and our enduring, individual searches for meaning, Fleming finds worthy subjects to illuminate at every turn. Soldiers, musicians, traveling preachers, politicians, religious zealots, the famous, and the ordinary all rub shoulders here, each asking you to sit awhile and listen or to walk in their shoes until you understand them.

Plenty of writers have explored racism and the failings of man. However, Fleming, a writer who feels like the novelist equivalent of filmmakers Spike Lee and Robert Altman, has managed to write stories on the subject that feel fresh. His characters often mess up, in both small and spectacular fashion, but their transgressions often prompt our sympathy, thanks to Fleming’s insightful narration. These are tales that make you think, squirm, and sigh with understanding. What more could any reader ask for when immersing themselves in the world of a writer’s mind?

Robert Altman said to play it safe is not to play, and if you don’t have a leg to stand on, you can't put your foot down. Somehow, I am quite sure Robert Fleming would agree.

Zander Vyne, Editor

That Only Seems Fair:

A Preface

Some say the black community does not read short fiction because the form is too much work on the mind. I say that’s bull because nothing grabs my imagination like short fiction. I read everything, from James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man (1965), Alice Walker’s In Love and Trouble (1973), to Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks (1934), and Hal Bennett’s Insanity Runs In My Family (1977).

At first, fictional books of color often captured my attention the most. Then, in junior high school, my Spanish teacher, Wally Mucha, gave me the international-literary bug. He introduced me to writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jorge Amado. My English teacher also passed on a discarded novel by Kobo Abe.

Later, I discovered other Japanese scribes like Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima, and Koji Suzuki. They fed my creative soul as I began to try my hand at writing short fiction like those I admired so much.

When I began writing, like a child following a teacher, I wanted to duplicate the old school classics and the bold, global novels, but times have changed. Now, after years of writing and publishing and a life well-lived, my voice is my own.

Don’t be afraid to separate from the pack, advised my friend and literary mentor John A. Williams, author of the ground-breaking Clifford’s Blues (1999). Tell the story of our people from all angles—culturally, emotionally, historically, and politically. Avoid the familiar and the cliche. Be bold, adventurous, and provocative.

That’s the bar I shoot for, and I hope I’ve delivered here. This is my second collection of short stories. In some cases, I tried to reclaim the spark and funk of old-school literary bloodlines. I played with light surrealism, colored with my grand passions of politics, music, and history.

I’ve included some of the work of my alter ego, Cole Riley. Cole was born of a need to keep a roof over my head and food in the icebox, back in the late 1970s. There are some of his better works here.

As a reporter for a New York daily newspaper, my city editor liked to lecture me on the merits of evil and its role in the book of life. He’d rave about the beauty, serenity, righteousness, and correctness of evil. I didn’t see it that way. I was raised in the church, on old gospel hymns, and Sunday school. Evil was chaos and mayhem, the dark alchemy, and wickedness caused by seemingly random waves from the withered fingers of some hateful white wizard.

But what do I know? What do any of us know? The best I can do is reflect the world back to readers, to expand on troubling issues and their accompanying confusion. There is some crazy stuff out here, and many folks don’t know how to deal with it. Evil is at full strength in our world. And we all know good doesn’t always triumph over evil. Evil often trumps common sense or rational thinking and laughs at what’s right. These stories deal with some of those issues.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing them. I hope they are relevant. However, I’ll write other things, other than the plagues of slavery, Jim Crow, poverty, and the despair that grips our people. There is much more to our community than hopelessness and violence. We are more than drugged, depressed, deranged souls huddled in the Hood, hurting and killing each other, waiting for the Man to break us off a piece of paradise. We are hopeful. We are full of imagination, fantasy, and creativity. We are resourceful and resilient. And we know we must stand up, be courageous, and deal with this thing called evil, whatever comes.

Robert Fleming

New York City

Spring 2019

Responding to Her Touch

The illness of loneliness is upon him again. His lips sting from the mouthpiece of the trumpet, from long sets at the club, from the bruised kisses of a woman who doesn’t belong to him. What is he doing in Paris anyway? He should have kept his black ass in the States instead of wandering around all over the world, instead of seeking something he can’t name. Forty years old, broke, no wife, no kids. A nigger without a portfolio.

He pours himself a shot of cognac, heaves a sigh, and places a Fats Navarro record on the phonograph. A memory of Fat Girl blowing the trumpet so sweetly, so soulfully, sweeps through him as the notes rush and circle the room. Fats on Our Delight.

Stretching out on the bed again, he pushes the empty liquor bottles and crumpled candy wrappers aside to make room for his long legs. There is something about drinking that makes the time go by softly, easily, without the sudden starts and stops that normally accompany the passage of a day. A little scotch, a nip of gin, a splash of bourbon on ice, or a half belly of vin rouge. It all gives his existence a veneer of civilization. Pretties matter a bit. The stocking cap on his shiny conked hair itches.

He thinks of his Congo cutie. Solange. Another man’s woman. He replays her arrival two hours earlier, savoring every moment of the memories. She puts down her purse and without a word, takes off her summer dress. She never wears underwear. She opens her purple thighs wide and pulls back the lips of her sex. He looks down into its scarlet throat. She said she smells the white woman on her man’s penis when she comes home. Her husband, Jacques, is always out catting. She says the white bitches stink. White woman basali na masoko na maimai, she says in her native tongue. He likes his Congo cutie’s scent. His sheets smell of her—strongly female, like ripe tropical fruit. Her luminous face is purple against the pillow as she urges him to shove it inside, to be rough, and starts moving her ass against him like crazy while he reaches under to worry her clit with a finger.

Solange says she wants to feel him at the back of her throat, and he stops pumping into her so he can apply his tongue to her breasts, teasing the nipples to hardness, and then to her sex. She is tight down there, narrow, warmer than her mouth, and moist. She raises her ass to him, and he plunges into her very deep, lost in pleasure, but she stops him before they come. She guides him into position above her head. His legs straddle her as he pushes himself into her pillow mouth. Steady thrusts. A hot liquid flows from her bushy cleft onto her strong thighs. He reaches around to dip his fingers into her gushing honey and brings them to his lips. Then, he works his dick into her, riding her bareback, sweat on her face and breasts, until she howls and bites him on the shoulder.

Jacques doesn’t satisfy me, she murmurs to him in almost-precise English. His thing is too little. But he’s a good man otherwise. His friends hate me. His Little Savage, they call me.

Does Jacques say anything to them about the way they treat you? he asks, lighting a cigarette. He wouldn’t let them get away with that if he were any kind of man.

He is like so many Frenchmen, very arrogant about his culture, art, and aesthetics, she says, reaching for the cigarette. He will not talk sensibly about anything. He talks to me like a child. You see, Cole, I know I’m not respectable in his eyes.

Then why don’t you leave?

She folds her arms and rests her head on them. I don’t know. Maybe I can go to the Sorbonne, take classes, and improve myself. He says he’d pay for it. But that doesn’t change how his women friends look at me. To them, everyone and everything is more civilized than the African. One asked me if I had any pygmies in my family. They watch me all the time when we go to events. They watch me with a hate that is not hidden. They comment rudely on my makeup, my hair, my choice of clothes, and the size of my ass. I have a fat, African ass.

He laughs. But I love your African ass.

The mirror is in her hands, and she watches herself in it, studying her features intently. The white women are prettier, more cultured, yes? Jacques tells me all the time there is one way toward civilization, and that road goes through the world of the whites. If that is true, then that is bad, yes?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, someone said, and I believe that jive. He takes the mirror from her. It’s a shame how their words can brainwash our minds, changing how we look, how we think, what we’re worth.

She spins around in a tight circle, nude, her breast flopping. Two horny French sailors across the way hides behind the curtain in their window, getting an eyeful. Unconcerned about them, she continues her strange inspection of herself. They won’t let me be one of them. They accept me only when I play the pagan, the primitive Congo girl. Turning to face him, she asked suddenly, Cole Riley, why are you here in Paris?

I ask myself that all the time. He takes a puff on the cigarette. America’s a hard place to live if you’re a black man. Jim Crow lets you know it’s for white folks. We can’t vote, must sit in special sections in diners and on buses, can’t do a lot of things whites can do. After the war, after my brother was lynched in his army uniform in Alabama by some rednecks, I came to Paris and never went back. There’s nothing for me there. Not anymore.

She laughs harshly. "The modern civilized man and woman. Jacques fucks my inferiority complex, and I think it’s love. Now, I hate it when he touches me. Come here, Cherie, make love to me again."

Do you come with him in you? He needs some rest.

Never. But with you, sometimes. She gets up, pours some water into the basin, and scrubs her crotch with soap. She kisses his cheeks, says she’ll see him later, and leaves.

In the afternoon, before going to the gig, Cole strolls over to Café Tournon near the Luxembourg Gardens, a center of French life crawling with colored artists and writers. The black bohemian life. He has seen Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, even that Himes fellow. He digs the colored folks here, especially the writers. They stake him a drink now and then. They are all over the place, in the Latin Quarter, the Left Bank, even down among the Arabs in poor Belleville.

Yet, the differences would sometimes get to him. So far away from home, from his roots, and the French could be such shits. He didn’t mind the snooty French intellectuals who felt they had a monopoly on the finer aspects of thought and style. But the others, the critics mainly, held their idea of what was black. Much like Solange said. It was the same way in the States. You couldn’t escape the bull. You could see it in how they looked at the black guys, the writers, and artists, who slept with their women. Somehow, sex took on a different flavor when the colored boy did it.

Some cats slept with ofay chicks as a way of settling old scores, getting back through them for the way the Man had treated them back home. Cole had sampled them, but it wasn’t a taste that stuck. Some cats had two, three, even four of them stashed away, but his taste was queered by the memory of his brother, lynched for making love to a cracker chick who wanted to leave her husband for him. The ofay chick got knocked up by his brother, panicked, and went to her husband and insisted the nigger raped her. A few of the local cracker men had waited for his brother to come home, had dragged him from his Buick, beat the hell out of him, worked on him with a knife, and hung him from a magnolia tree. The message was clear—nigger boys stay away from the pink at all costs.

Paris looked the other way with colored boys and foreign women, but if a Frenchie chick said a colored boy mistreated her, he was gone, kicked out of the country. No amount of pink was worth that. Cole didn’t want to go back to the States. He couldn’t. He’d die there or end up behind bars.

Weary, Cole finds a seat at one of the little bistro tables outside near the Coca-Cola sign. The thin dude who bar tends there sometimes chats him up on current events in broken English while he stands at the red-copper bar inside and remembers the night when they hung out at Haynes, a joint owned by an ex-GI who had also lingered in the City of Lights after World War II. All the jazz cats came through his joint. He went to Haynes for the soul food, especially the jambalaya, but a trip to Café Tournon meant chats on spook culture, hometown memories, and fiery arguments about art and music. That was cool.

Your usual, Monsieur Cole? the bartender asks flatly. He quickly serves the trumpeter two doubles of bourbon.

Cole downs them one after another while watching a clean-shaven black man in a brown suit sitting at another cafe table that is covered with a newspaper, two books, and a notebook. The man stares at the people walking on the street, the passing traffic, and general Parisian madness. Occasionally, a pen moves in his hand on