I found a book of matches in my pocket. The first few were chalky, already burned. Hatred took my heart then, hatred for the fool who had lit those matches without tearing them out.
Then I found a match that was live. I struck it and was momentarily blinded by the flare. When the temporary blindness faded, I saw that the jewels I imagined were actually the dead eyes of Useless.
“He’s just a damn coward,” a woman’s voice said clearly.
The match burned down to my thumb, but the pain of the burn was in my jaw instead of my hand.
I opened my eyes, hurting from my fall from the fence and my roll in the alley. Somehow they both had blended themselves into my dream.
There was a white plaster ceiling above my head. I could see the rust-colored veins of the pipes that ran above it. I smelled whiskey and wanted some. I heard murmurs that I knew were voices that would come clear in a moment.
I raised my head and saw Three Hearts, Mona Gibbs, and Fearless Jones sitting around a fold-up card table, the only table Fearless owned.
Three Hearts was the one talking. She had been the one who had called me a coward, I knew that. But she smiled when she saw that I was awake. It was more than a smile, like a friendly grin.
“So you back with the livin’, huh?” Fearless said. He said the same thing whenever I woke up in his presence.
“I need a cigarette and a shot’a that rotgut you drinkin’,” I said.
Mona got them for me.
Mona was a beautiful young woman. She was Negro and she was brown, but the brown mixed with gray everywhere in her appearance. Her skin was touched by it; her eyes sometimes shone with lunar possibilities. Even her hair seemed to be lightened by the midtone color.
Mona loved Fearless, loved him. She worked as a secretary in city hall and always managed to find an apartment near to where Fearless had moved to. She liked to sit next to him and hold his hand. If they were at a party and he was going home, she’d reach for him and if he took her by the hand, she would go along.
For a time this behavior had unsettled my nearly imperturbable friend. That’s because he was not only a natural-born killer, he was also a romantic. Fearless needed to be hopelessly in love to give his space to a woman. She didn’t have to be pretty or smart or friendly, even. There was some quality he searched for that I never understood. And so when he realized that Mona didn’t have what he needed, he told her so. He said that he didn’t mind spending time with her but they would never have a life together.
Most women, when Fearless told them that, would move on—after a while. But Mona said she didn’t care. She loved Fearless whether he loved her or not. She let him know that she would be there no matter what he did or who he saw. All he had to do was call or ring her bell.
Fearless didn’t have a phone, so she always lived nearby.
While Mona was lighting my cigarette, Three Hearts asked, “Are you okay, baby?”
I was still angry that she had called me a coward when I had tried my best to save her, so I didn’t respond right off.
“First he struck Paris with his hand,” Three Hearts said to Mona and Fearless. “And then he kicked him.”
I remembered the kick as a bounce.
“He was lookin’ around the ground for somethin’ to hit Paris with,” Three Hearts was saying, “when I took out my Colt forty-five. You know a woman always got to have somethin’ in her purse for protection. He’s lucky I was so mad. Made my aim go wide.”
I remembered the shot. It was a car on another block—I thought.
“An’ he run like a coward,” Three Hearts said. “Just a damn coward.”
Fearless gave out a deep belly laugh. Gray-hued Mona brought up both of her hands to cover her beautiful smile.
“He a fool not be afraid’a you, Hearts. Damn. Forty-five. This mama right here don’t play.” He laughed some more.
“How did we get outta the alley and ovah here?” I asked.
Mona was handing me my whiskey.
“I remembered that you and Fearless used to work for Milo Sweet,” Three Hearts said. “I dragged you to the side of a house in that damn alley and went to a phone booth and called.”
I slugged back the whiskey and Mona poured me another. One of the nice things about her one-sided love for Fearless was that it seemed to spill over on me some. She looked at me with the same friendly eyes that he did.
“I put Milo and Loretta away and then come over to dust you off,” Fearless said.
“Damn,” I said. “Gotdamn.”
“What you wanna do, Paris?” Fearless asked me.
“I don’t know, man.”
I looked from him to Three Hearts and back again. What I wanted didn’t matter. There was no way out.
I drank my whiskey.
Mona refilled my glass. The aches in my body began to recede.
“Let’s walk on down to Mona’s place,” Fearless said. “I need to make a call.”
Because Fearless never had a phone, Mona was also his phone booth.
13
MONA’S APARTMENT WAS no larger than Fearless’s studio, but she had a royal blue sofa, nice chairs, and a fine oak table that supported a small TV set in a pink plastic frame.
Some people felt sorry for Mona. They thought that she should find a good man who wanted to be with her. But I wasn’t so sure. Fearless didn’t love Mona in the way that she wanted, but he’d accompany her to any restaurant or church event she needed an arm for, he kept her car running and her plumbing flowing, and he never got mad when she had a weekend away with some temporary boyfriend. When Mona’s cousin Natalie died, Fearless stayed with her for two weeks, making coffee in the morning and tea every night.
I’d look at his relationship with her and think that if I could have a woman who treated me the way Fearless did Mona, I’d be in heaven. Of course that’s a selfish attitude, but I don’t know. If Mona had a child and died, I’m pretty sure that Fearless would have taken that baby in. That’s the kind of selfishness the world could use more of.
FEARLESS SAT DOWN on Mona’s upholstered chair, hung his left leg over the arm, and started making phone calls. While he was doing that, Three Hearts, Mona, and I sat around the polished table and drank iced tea that our hostess served.
“Thanks for savin’ my butt, Auntie,” I said.
“You were so cute out there, baby,” she replied. “You should’a seen ’im, Mona. He jump in the air and screamed like a little boy. An’ then he hit that awful man in the shoulder.”
Mona grinned and touched my shoulder with her gray-brown hand. Her fingernails had silver polish on them.
“You know he did his best,” Mona said.
It was the closest I was going to get to being complimented for my manhood, so I took the backhanded accolade in the spirit in which it was meant. Poor people back in those days didn’t know how to give false tribute. They said it how they saw it or they didn’t say a thing.
“Yeah,” Fearless said into the phone. “Yeah. Ovah at Wisterly’s be fine. See you in half a hour. See you then.” He looked up at us and said, “Let’s go.”
That meant me and Three Hearts.
Mona gave Fearless a long heartfelt kiss at the door. He looked down into her eyes and she swelled up like a piece of ripening fruit. I remember thinking that there was more love in that tender good-bye than in many lifelong marriages I’d witnessed. Three Hearts was so moved by the spectacle that she sighed.
FEARLESS WAS DRIVING Milo’s red Caddy. Three Hearts got in the backseat and we cruised over toward Florence and Central. There was a big restaurant there owned by a white family called Wisterly. It was a broken-down little diner when Cleetus Rome’s family first moved to town, but it had grown and flourished with the influx of the colored population. That’s because black people needed fancy spots to call our own and most of the upscale places still managed to freeze us out.
Wisterly’s had a big dining room for dinner and special functions, but they also had a diner for the
daytime with seven booths against a window that looked out on the street.
We got to the restaurant at a quarter past three. When we’d made it halfway down the aisle of booths I spied big ugly Anthony ensconced at the corner table. I hadn’t asked Fearless who we were going to see. I suppose that’s because I was still rather stunned from the beating I’d taken. But I hadn’t suspected that we’d be meeting with Anthony. I’d thought that Fearless was looking for some other line on Useless.
Anthony had a big white bandage over his left ear. When he saw me he tried to get to his feet. But by that time we were at the booth. Fearless struck out with a right cross that traveled all of seven inches. You could hear the impact in the next room. Anthony fell hard on his butt and groaned in spite of himself.
“Good for him,” Aunt Three Hearts muttered.
Fearless gestured for her and me to sit on the bench across from Anthony while he took a seat next to the big tough. Anthony was rubbing his jaw, trying not to cry—or at least so it seemed to me.
“Why you mess wit’ my friends?” Fearless asked as if he were a father talking to a wayward son.
“Tryin’ t’find Useless.”
“Ulysses,” Three Hearts said.
“Ulysses,” Fearless repeated.
“Ulysses,” Mad Anthony agreed. And then he said, “That bitch shot me in the ear.”
Fearless grabbed Anthony’s shirt and shook him back and forth, letting him know to use proper language around a lady.
I could see Anthony’s jaw swelling.
“What you lookin’ for Hearts’s boy for?” Fearless asked, explaining the rules in doing so. Because once my friend identified Useless as the son of someone he knew by name, Anthony understood that he’d have to kill Fearless to cross that line.
“Use . . . Ulysses brought me to a man named, uh, String, Stringly . . . sumpin’ like that.”
“A white man?” I asked.
When Anthony frowned at me my heart did a flip of fear.
“If you hear a question outta Paris’s mouth,” Fearless said, “then that’s me talkin’.”
The frown evaporated and Anthony said, “Yeah. White dude.”
“What about him?” I asked as respectfully as I could.
“He paid me to go with him an’ rough up this white dude called Drummund. Paul Drummund. I did the shit and then Use . . . Ulysses cut out.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Two weeks, a little more.”
“Where did you meet this friend’a Ulysses’?” I asked then.
“At a house down around Fairfax. I don’t think it was his house. At least he wasn’t livin’ there.”
“When did you first meet this white guy?”
“How the hell should I ’member that?” he said belligerently.
“Try hard,” Fearless advised.
“I dunno. Three mont’s. Sumpin’ like that.”
Anthony winced then and put a hand against his jaw.
“So you met him a long time before he had you beat on Drummund,” I speculated.
“Yeah,” Anthony said. “Yeah. String-whatevah had me put a scare into a dude named Katz too. That was aftah I first met ’im. He paid me a hunnert dollars for that.”
“Did you say anything to these people when you beat them?” I asked.
“I cain’t talk like that in front of a lady,” Anthony demurred.
I could have reminded him of the language he had used in front of Three Hearts in the alley earlier that day, but I felt sorry for him.
“What I meant was did Stringly have any message that he wanted you to give them?” I asked.
“Yeah, uh-huh. He told me to say that they went down this road on they own an’ they wasn’t goin’ back. He said to tell ’em that if they paid, the pain would go away.”
“What did you do to them?” I asked. I don’t know why. It wasn’t relevant to what we were looking for, but Anthony fascinated me when he was no longer a threat.
“Broke some fingers an’ knocked out a couple’a teeth.”
“For a hundred dollars.”
“I’d kick yo’ skinny ass for nuthin’,” he replied, unable to keep the sneer off his lopsided face.
Fearless placed a hand on Anthony’s forearm. It was a light touch, but Anthony flinched.
A sharp pain made Anthony bring both hands gingerly to his jaw.
“Anything else you want?” he cried.
“What was Ulysses into with this Stringly dude?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, man,” I said, selecting my words delicately. “Everybody knows that U-man liked to talk. He wouldn’t just bring you somewhere and not say somethin’ ’bout what he was up to.”
“He said that him an’ Stringly was tight,” Anthony said, straining at the memory. “He said that they had a scam goin’ gonna make ’em rich. That’s it.”
“He didn’t say nuthin’ ’bout what they was doin’?” I asked.
“Naw. Just that, just that white people was thieves too, it’s just that they never got caught ’cause they stole big.”
“That doesn’t prove a thing,” Three Hearts said with deadly conviction.
“That all, Paris?” Fearless asked me.
I nodded.
Fearless put a hand on Anthony’s shoulder.
“You bettah get to the hospital, Tony,” he said. “That jaw you got there is broke pretty bad.”
Mad Anthony stood away from the booth and staggered toward the door.
14
“WHAT WAS ALL THAT STUFF about U-man and what Ulysses like t’talk?” Three Hearts asked me when the big man was gone.
I knew she would take umbrage at any hint of an accusation toward her son.
“I was just tryin’ to get him to remember, Auntie,” I said. “You know sometimes you just have to say the first thing come in your head when you talkin’ to a rough man like that.”
“But why did you say what you said?”
I swear I saw her left eye flashing.
“Hearts,” Fearless said in an impossibly reasonable voice. Impossible for me, that is. My heart was fluttering like a sheet in a Santa Ana wind at that moment.
“What?” she said to my friend.
“You know Ulysses,” he said. “You know what he do. If you didn’t you wouldn’t’a got on a bus and gone hundreds of miles ovah a lettah where he said he was doin’ good.”
“My son is a good man,” she said.
“I’m not sayin’ he ain’t,” Fearless said. “But you know that he was doin’ somethin’ wit’ Tony there. An’ you can see what Tony is like.”
“But Ulysses did not order him to beat up anyone,” she said.
“I don’t know about any’a that. All I know is that Paris here is tryin’ to help you, an’ you givin’ him grief.”
When Three Hearts looked Fearless in the eye, he gazed back with a sanguine expression on his handsome face. It was like the meeting of two heads of warring tribes. Anyone seeing them would have known that something very important hung in the balance.
“He’s my only child, Fearless,” she said at last. Tears sprouted from her eyes.
Fearless put his big hand across the table and held both of hers therein. Her forehead lowered to the knot of fingers and the tears flowed freely.
“An’ Paris an’ me wanna help, baby,” Fearless said, “but a lotta people gonna be callin’ your boy Useless and U-man and all kinds’a things. An’ you know Paris here smart as they come. He cain’t be answerin’ to you every time he have to ask somethin’.”
She raised her head to look at her momentary father. She nodded and freed her hands from his loving grip.
“I know,” she said.
She turned to me and smiled, her eyes lowered.
“You wanna go stay at Paris’s while we look?” Fearless asked.
There was a moment where Three Hearts seemed to be considering Fearless’s ill-conceived offer.
“No. I better not,
” she said after what felt like a very long minute.
I exhaled, hoping that they didn’t register the sigh.
“Where you wanna go, then?” Fearless asked.
“Ovah to Nadine’s, I guess,” she said.
Nadine Grant was Useless’s father’s sister. She had moved to L.A. with her first husband, but he had died in a warehouse fire and Nadine had married his brother Otem. Otem got pneumonia and passed six months after the wedding. After that Nadine, who was a very handsome woman, got engaged to a man from Tennessee called Morley. Morley had a college education and two houses. The problem was that his real name was Henderson and he’d murdered a man in southern Louisiana in the late twenties. He’d run to Tennessee, changed his name and his way of life. But when he got engaged to Nadine, one of her cousins recognized Henderson and told a relative of the murdered man. Morley/Henderson was extradited to Louisiana, tried, convicted, and hanged.
After that, Nadine swore off men. She lived in a nice house on Sixty-third Street, where she had a front yard that sported dozens of different kinds of flowers. Nadine worked as a librarian in Compton, and so I saw her from time to time when I’d drop by to pick up books she was discarding at the end of the summer and fall seasons.
“HI, FEARLESS,” Nadine said after greeting Three Hearts when we appeared at her door.
Nadine never seemed to recognize me when we met away from her library. She’d always give me a quizzical look and then fail to place my face.
“Ms. Grant,” Fearless said in greeting.
The women gabbled at the front door for a minute or two, then I cleared my throat.
“Oh,” Three Hearts said. “Honey, would you mind if I stayed here with you for a couple’a days? Ulysses has gone missin’ and my nephew here has agreed to go look for him.”
“Missin’?” the black widow exclaimed. “I hope he ain’t in no trouble.”
“I don’t think it’s nuthin’ serious,” Three Hearts said, rather unconvincingly. “But I wanna stay around until Paris find him.”
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