I wanted to stay there for a week, maybe two, until Useless and Angel and Three Hearts were far away and forgotten. But I knew that Fearless was too responsible for that. He used his one phone call to reach Milo. All he got was the answering service. I wasn’t even going to use my call, but Fearless convinced me to phone Mona and tell her to keep on Milo.
“You need a lawyer,” I said to my friend.
“Why?”
“Carrying a concealed weapon,” I suggested.
“I got a license,” he replied.
“Since when?”
“Since I been bodyguardin’ Milo. He got it for me.”
“Well,” I said, “we might as well get some sleep.”
“You sleep, Paris,” my friend said. “I’ll just sit up top an’ get the lay of the land.”
I wa s s o f a r i n t o that mess with Three Hearts that I was even dreaming about Useless.
“What the hell you want?” I asked my iniquitous cousin.
We were sitting at a picnic table in a small park near Watts.
“Listen to me, Paris,” he whined. “I cain’t he’p it, brother. I love her.”
“So? Love her, then. That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me.”
“You got to find her, man. You got to bring her back.”
Useless was crying. I tried to remember him ever crying before.
“Paris.”
. . . Had he ever cried before? Had he shed tears?
“Wake up, man.”
182
FEAR OF THE DARK
I knew there was a commotion going on before I opened my eyes.
A large black man was saying something in a voice that rasped like a big handsaw on hard wood.
“. . . kick your ass, peckahwood,” he was saying.
There was a smallish white kid in front of him trying to stand up straight and retreat at the same time.
I immediately identified with the kid because I would have been in his position in that confrontation.
“Watch yourself, man,” Fearless whispered to me. “I’m’a go ovah there.”
After that came three Mexicans and two other white guys. No one else in that cell was going to stand up for the white kid. No one else would have stood up for me.
“Kick his ass, Leo,” somebody said.
Leo socked the kid in the face, and I was amazed that the white boy didn’t go down. He leaned over like a reed in a windstorm and he began bleeding from a cut that opened over his eye. But the kid stood back up. Leo grinned. And then Fearless, the Lancelot of South L.A., stood between them. He put up his hands and shook his head, and the fight was over —
just like that.
He brought the boy over to bleed on our blankets.
“I coulda taken him,” the kid said. He was actually smaller and skinnier than me, pale as a newborn luna moth. “Nigger wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have his friends with ’im.”
“What’s your name, son?” Fearless, not thirty-five himself, asked.
“Loren.”
183
Walter Mosley
“Loren, call the man a bastard, a motherfucker, a pussy if you want to, but when you call him a nigger you call me one, and, brother, I am a whole other kinda pain.”
“All I did was ask a man to read somethin’ for me,” Loren said. “I got this paper in my pocket and I don’t have my glasses.
It’s from my auntie an’ she hates me so I know somethin’ bad had to happen. This dude Chapman said that he didn’t wanna hear a word outta none’a the white people.”
“Chapman,” I said. “Was that the guy hit you?”
“Naw. Chapman got called in for questioning. That motherfucker was his friend.”
“You got the paper?” I asked the kid.
He reached down into his pants and pulled a small pink envelope out of his drawers.
