“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 19
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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.”
20
S i r l e n t m e a b e a t - u p yellow sweater so that I wasn’t bare chested walking down Slauson.
4 When he and Sasha let me out on the darkening corner, I was almost shaking. I was feeling the exhilaration of survival and mortal fear at my close call. I was proud of myself for my letter-perfect escape, knowing all the while that I was a fool to be in a situation that could bring me so close to pain.
M i l o S w e e t ’ s b a i l b o n d office was upstairs from the haberdashers Kleinsman and Lowe. They specialized in old-world hats that they exported throughout Europe and the Ori-ent. At one time they had used the third floor for the managing office, but when they decided to move the nerve center of their operation downtown, they let the space to Milo Sweet and his jack-of-all-trades assistant, Loretta Kuroko.
I climbed the outside staircase to the third floor and knocked.
After a few moments Loretta opened the door and smiled for me.
That day she was wearing a green ensemble. The jacket was silk and so was her skirt. The black blouse might have 21
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been cotton, and the hand-carved jade rose that hung from her neck was exquisite.
Loretta was ten years my senior but looked younger than me. She was beautiful and smarter than her boss. But Loretta revered Milo Sweet, and I do believe that she was the only person in the world he would have laid down his life for.
She had long dark hair rolled up into a bun at the back of her head and eyes that looked at you from some other epoch, when there were no cars or jitterbugs, no white people at all, and when men, once they made up their mind to fight, would not give up until they had bled their last drop.
“Hello, Paris,” she said.
I felt something then. It was the feeling I’d had as a child when I returned home after a long day away. My mother would be there waiting for me, and I felt a joy that I had not expected to feel. Loretta’s greeting was a
