Fear of the Dark

Chapter 3

There we were, lying on the wood floor, naked where it counted. Jessa’s feathery touch was keeping me excited, and her kisses on my shoulder and cheek delivered me from fear.

I would be thirty years old later that year, but in my heart I was still a kid. When a woman laid her hands on me, there was nothing I could do. That’s why I hadn’t as of yet entertained the idea of marriage. My auntie Three Hearts had always told me, “A man shouldn’t say I do until he can say I don’t.”

I was a long way from no in the presence of a woman like Jessa.

She was a good seven years younger than me, not pretty but fetching. White women were another taboo that I liked breaking now and again. But there were other qualities about that girl.

The first thing was that she didn’t feel compelled to talk and didn’t mind listening. She liked masculine company and so never complained about toilet seats, dirty dishes, or the errant eructation. And when she did talk, she knew how to speak to a man.

“How come you haven’t been by to see me, lover?” she said with her head on my chest and her left thigh over both of mine.

“Tiny.”

“Him? Why you worried about him?”

“Because he’s big and the jealous type.”

“Big? He’s not even half of you.”

“Maybe not in the bed. But I’m not talkin’ about love, J. I’m talkin’ about gettin’ my ass kicked — hard.”

Jessa sat up to look down on me. “I’m not gonna tell Tiny about you. I don’t tell him nuthin’. He just came back because he thought I’d take him in. But you know I’m easin’ him out. By next week he’ll be gone and forgotten.”

“I don’t know if we should be seeing each other,” I said. I might have been more convincing if my voice hadn’t gone up an octave.

“Come on, lover,” she said, looking deep into my eyes. “You want this.”

I did. I really did. Even though I knew better, I saw no use in that knowledge. The only reason I learned things was to be in a situation like I was there: lying on the floor in the entranceway of my bookstore, all tangled up with a girl that made my blood boil.

She kissed me.

“I can’t let you go, Paris,” she whispered.

Jessa Brown was from a whole slate of southern states. Her mother had moved around quite a lot. Her family was from the Midwest somewhere, but she never saw them because they called her and her mama trash. She could barely read, but she sang beautifully and had come to Los Angeles with a man named Theodore who had promised to get her an audition.

I didn’t know that much about her, but it was enough to know that she was trouble.

But there I was on that floor, floating in a dream and not even thinking about waking up.

That’s when the front door slammed open, breaking the lock and splintering part of the frame.

Jessa was on her feet in no more than a second. I was on my back, moving backward on all fours, under the shadow of one of the largest white men I had ever seen.

“Tiny!” Jessa shouted, and I remembered, quite clearly, why I stayed away from women like her.

“Kill you, bastard!” came from Tiny’s lips. He had a movie star’s voice, loud and strong.

It was his threatening tone that got me to my feet.

It was my youth and sexual prominence that saved my life.

Tiny was mad but not blind. He did a double take when he saw my diminishing erection. That one moment of hesitation was enough for Jessa. She grabbed a hardwood bookend from one of my shelves and threw herself at the behemoth. I didn’t wait to see how it went.

With my pants in one hand and my drawers in the other, I made it up the staircase in triple time. At the top of the stairs I kept a large oak bookcase that only had towels and sheets on it. This light load was by design. I tipped the bookcase over so that it blocked entrée to the second floor. Then I scooted out the window and onto the tar paper roof.

I plan for calamity. The roof I was on covered the back porch of my house. There were three beams along it that could bear the weight of a man. I knew the route of those beams and went quickly along the center timber and into the apple tree in the yard.

A great bellow came from the house as I stepped onto the top pole of the wire fence that separated my backyard from the alley behind Florence. The volume of that shout made me lose my footing. My bare foot got tangled up in the top mesh, and I fell to the asphalt below.

The fence was only six feet high, but I landed on my right shoulder blade and it hurt like hell. For a moment I lay there feeling as though I could never get up. But then I saw my maple desk chair crashing through the window I had just gone through.

I dropped my underpants and jumped into my jeans as I ran.

I came out on Central in a matter of moments. I couldn’t hear Tiny, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t after me.

There I was in the twilight, wearing only my jeans with no shoes or socks. The pain from the fall was returning. Somewhere on the run I had cut my right foot, so I was limping now and trailing blood behind me on the white sidewalk.

I looked like a hobo. And not only that, I looked like trouble and so I had to figure what establishment I could duck into that wouldn’t eject me into Tiny’s murderous embrace.

“Paris!” a voice called. I nearly fainted.

“Paris, what’s wrong?”

The voice was coming from the street, not the alley. There was a yellowy green Studebaker, maybe ten years old, right there in the left lane. Sir Bradley was sitting behind the wheel.

I heard a shout. It might have been anybody, but I couldn’t take that chance.

“They tryin’ to get me, Sir,” I cried.

“Jump on in, boy. Let’s move.”

I opened his car door and hopped into the backseat. Before the door was closed, Sir hit the gas and we were off across the intersection. I heard a loud thump, turned, and saw Tiny running only a foot or so behind us. Cars were honking in the intersection, and Sir swerved to avoid a collision. Tiny swung his fist and struck the trunk of the Studebaker again.

“Oh, shit!” Sir screamed.

The tires squealed loudly, and we were off down Central, leaving Tiny to swing his fists in the crossroads.

“Wow,” my savior said. “That suckah’s big. What he after you for, Paris?”

“His girlfriend forgot to tell him about me.”

“White girl?”

“Yeah.”

The woman sitting next to him gave a disapproving grunt.

“Hm. That’s what you get runnin’ ’round with them white women,” she said.

“Paris, meet Sasha,” Sir said.

“Pleased to meet ya,” I said while glancing out the back window and putting pressure on the cut on my foot. Now that I was safe from immediate harm, I began to worry about what Tiny would do to my store.

Turning my attention to the front seat, I saw that the woman with Sir was a deep chocolate color, with big eyes and high cheekbones. She was a beauty by any standard — except for the sour twist of her lips.

Sasha was born to be a queen and Sir was just a pawn. He was medium brown, middlebrow, and five eight in street shoes. His forehead was low, but he had a long skull from front to back. His eyes were crafty and his smile ever present. He was a union man from the first day he got a job at the Long Beach docks and he voted Democrat without even a glance at the candidate’s name.

Mrs. Bradley, Sir’s mother, had christened him so that no white person could insult him by refusing to call him Mister. He might have been a peasant by breeding, but there was a natural genuflection in just the mention of his name.

Maybe that’s why the sour-faced beauty had hooked up with him: because saying his name did her honor.

“That boy was out for blood,” Sir said.

“Uh-huh,” I agreed.

Crossing the cut foot over my knee, I began teasing out the splinter of glass.

“You wanna call the cops?” Sir asked.

“A white cop?” Sasha said. “And tell him what? That he been sleepin’ with a white man’s girl and the white man wanna kick him? The police probably hold him down.”

She was more than half right.

“Naw. I don’t wanna go to no cops,” I said. “Take me over to Slauson.”

“Where?” Sir asked.

“Milo Sweet’s new office. Fearless is there playin’ bodyguard for a little while.”

“Fearless Jones?” Sasha asked.

I recognized the longing in her voice. Fearless was coveted by women all over South L.A. and beyond. They liked his power to begin with and then his heart once they got to know him.

“Hear that, Paris?” Sir said. “I’ll let you off on the corner. Either that or I’ll be sleepin’ alone tonight.”