“Cain’t complain. I’m eatin’ good an’ stayin’ outta jail.
How’s Fearless?”
Almost everyone who knew me did so by way of Fearless. I didn’t mind.
“He’s fine. Doin’ a li’l stint wit’ Milo Sweet.”
“Yeah,” Harold said. “I hear that Albert Rive been lookin’
for Milo.”
“Where you hear that?”
“Whisper. He come around lookin’ for Al.”
“What about my cousin — Useless Grant?”
“Useless your cousin, man? Damn. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“What you mean by that?” I asked.
“I guess it could come in handy bein’ related to a snake. I 114
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mean, maybe the snake tell ya where all the other snakes be hidin’.”
We both laughed.
“But have you seen ’im?” I asked.
“Not for two, three weeks, I haven’t. No, sir. I don’t work Tuesday, Wednesday, though. Maybe he come by then.”
O n t h e i n s i d e H a T s u ’ s looked more like a rundown fishing boat than a dining room. There were ceramic lobsters, shrimp, and other shellfish placed everywhere: on counters, on the walls, hanging in clusters from ropes over and next to each booth. There were dark-colored glass floats hanging by the dozen in fishnets, and the booths were of unfinished wood with peeling sea-green fake-leather cushions for seats.
The counter was nice. Formica and chrome. The cracked green linoleum was clean and without splinters.
“Hi, Paris,” Mum, a young Chinese woman, said. She was related to Ha Tsu somehow and worked as a waitress every day of the week.
Ha was behind the counter. I liked the middle-aged Chinese partly because he was one of the few men I knew who was shorter than I. He liked me because he believed I had a sense of humor.
“Paris,” he hailed. “How you doing?”
“Not bad, Ha. What’s goin’ on around here?”
“Color people study revolution,” he said, cocking an eye at unseen spies.
“They should be studyin’ their ABCs,” I said.
Ha laughed and slapped my forearm.
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“You right about that, bruddah,” he agreed. “But you know I hear ’em talkin’. They not happy. Soon the world know.”
“Maybe I better stock up on
“Put your money in gold,” he advised, and I wondered about the treasure he must have buried somewhere.
“What’s good today?” I asked the warlord of Watts.
“Chicken with walnuts, snow peas, and my extra-fancy white rice. Each grain inch long.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You like it.”
Ha went away to let me consider the next part of our talk.
Most people thought that I was harmless at best. I read books and stayed in most of the time. I didn’t have any kind of reputation except in the sex category, and even there I was no Fearless Jones. Women would leave their date to be with Fearless.
As I said, most people didn’t pay me any attention. Not so with Ha Tsu. His eyes were nearly shut all the time, but he saw everything. He heard everything too. When I came nosing around he realized that my questions and actions had purpose.
He had heard the stories about people I looked for.
Don’t get me wrong. On the whole I was innocuous. But now and then I did work for Milo and helped Fearless when he got into a jam. And when I did, and Ha Tsu saw me, he knew that I had something going on.
I didn’t want be out in the streets looking for Useless. I didn’t want to find thousands of stolen dollars or moldering bodies. But there I was.
Ha brought my afternoon repast. It was delicious. He 116
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poured us both cups of fragrant jasmine tea and sat with me, as there were few other patrons at that hour.
