I felt around Tiny’s pants, locating a fairly large pocketknife. This I unfolded and held in both hands. Maybe I could wound the invader before he knew I was armed.
That was the worst night of my entire life. Everything that happened was a potential threat. No matter what I did, Death was dogging my tail.
After quite a while the footsteps and crashing subsided. After ten minutes of silence I turned on the light. The fears then began to pile up like stones in an avalanche. I worried about carnivorous insects burrowing after Tiny and then deciding they’d like to have living flesh too. I wondered how much air there was in the underground room and if I’d have enough to last me until Fearless returned, if he returned.
Then my fears became more complex. I worried that the burglar hadn’t left but gone into hiding. Maybe he was lying in wait for me. Maybe he had come to kill me but bumped off Tiny because the big white fool had come on too strong. Now the killer was waiting in shadows for me, and when Fearless got there he’d be ambushed and I’d die of starvation there under the floor.
The fears heaped up so heavily on my mind that I retreated into a mild catatonia where all I could do was sit and stare.
I was sure that my death was imminent and so for one of the very few times in my fretful existence I knew no fear, only hopelessness.
Chapter 7
I have not been able to spend more than a few minutes in a completely dark room since that April Fools’ night 1956. I always have a candle and a match somewhere nearby and one of those pale blue night-lights that parents have for frightened children plugged in the wall of every room in my house.
Blackouts in plays and movie theaters never fail to give me the willies.
After my four or five hours with Tiny and every fear that my mind could manufacture, I promised myself that I would never be such a fool again. It didn’t matter that going down into the temporary tomb probably saved me from whoever had broken in. No. I would rather have faced Death himself than the fear I experienced. I couldn’t turn on the lamp because if someone was lying in wait he might have seen the light through the floor. So I huddled in darkness, my mind a cold sea of dread.
A footstep. Another. Then there were the sounds of two men walking boldly across the room.
“Paris,” Fearless called out.
“I’m here,” I said, but my tone said help.
Somebody mumbled something and Fearless said something back. There was a chortle from one of them, but I couldn’t tell which one.
I heard the bookcase move and the trapdoor came open, flooding my abyss with electric light from above.
“Damn,” a man said and snorted. “It sure do smell bad.”
I had reached the ladder and grabbed the rungs, but between the blinding light, my silent terror, and the growing pain in my back, I was unable to climb.
“Come on, Paris,” Fearless said. I looked up and saw his dark and smiling face. “One foot after the other.”
After four steps, Fearless grabbed me by the forearm and lifted me into the light. I landed on my feet and looked around. Everything that had been upright was on the floor: books, bookcases, tables, and chairs. Everything had been tipped over, opened, and turned out. The only things standing upright were me, Fearless, and the man he had brought with him: Van “Killer” Cleave.
Seeing Cleave there grinning at me was almost enough to send me back down into the crypt.
Van Cleave. He was the living legend of Watts. Only an inch taller than I, he was a giant. Dark-skinned and bright-eyed, he was a killer of vast talent. No man, or group of men, crossed him if they were smart. He was a stone-cold killer, the consummate ladies’ man, and the best storyteller anybody knew of.
Back when he first came to L.A. from Georgia, he was stalked by three white gangsters for robbing a department store that was under their protection. The white men were from down South and used to colored people taking their punishment. They came into a crowded bar and called Cleave’s name. Everyone expected him to throw up his table and run, but instead he stood up with his long .45-caliber pistol and casually squeezed off shots.
“Them white men was dead ’fore they knew it was comin’,” Randolph Minor told me the next day.
“Did Killer go back down south?” I asked him.
“No, sir,” Randy, a big man, squeaked. “He went home with Bea Langly. She said that she asked him wasn’t he worried that somebody would tell? An’ he said, ‘They bettah not.’”
And no one did. Killer became a hero overnight. He stood up to three white gangsters and went home with the most beautiful bar girl our city had to offer. After that night he never had to pay for a drink, a haircut, or a meal. Tailors gave him clothes just to say he was their customer. He’d been to prison for another crime. But he survived that too. Van Cleave was as oblivious to danger as was Fearless, but on top of that he was flamboyant and dangerous — just the kind of man our dark manhood needed to maintain our dignity.
I loved hearing stories about Van, but I wasn’t happy to have him in my house. Even standing there with Fearless I felt in peril.
“Hey, Paris,” Van said easily. “Hear you got a problem.”
I gulped and nodded.
“It smell bad,” he said with a wink.
“What happened here?” Fearless asked me, looking around at the debris.
“Somebody broke in an’ tore up the place,” I said. “I heard ’em.”
“I thought you said that the only trouble you had with that white boy was the girl,” Fearless said.
“It was, man. I swear.”
“Go on, Van,” Fearless said then. “Pull the truck around in the alley and we’ll get everything ready in here.”
Cleave nodded and made his way around the debris to the door. After he was out of the house, I started in on my friend.
“What the fuck you bring him to my house for, Fearless?”
“Because you can’t hardly lift up your arm and we got to take Tiny way out somewhere.”
“But that’s Killer Cleave,” I argued. “You cain’t trust a killer.”
“Yes, you can,” Fearless averred. “He’s the second-most trustworthy man in all Watts. He will nevah talk to a cop. He will nevah turn a brother over. It’s true he will kill you if you cross him, but he won’t evah talk about this night, not to no one. Not evah.”
I knew eighth graders who could think circles around Fearless, but I never met a college grad who owned more truth than he.
Fearless had brought a heavy rope. He climbed down into the hole and created a hemp hoist under Tiny’s shoulders. Then he came back to the ramshackle room and pulled the 250 pounds of dead weight up with very little effort as far as I could tell.
I remember thinking that if Fearless and Van had a duel of tug-of-war, my friend would win hands down. But Watts wasn’t some ancient Scottish hamlet. They used guns and knives in my neighborhood, and the killers I was rolling with were duelists extraordinaire.
When we had Tiny laid out on the floor, Cleave returned. He and Fearless hefted the dead man, carrying him through the back porch (which was also my hot-plate kitchen) and out the screen door back there.
I noticed a big hole in the tar paper roof. Tiny had fallen through according to my plan, but the fall hadn’t hurt him. He’d just busted through the screen door and bounded over the fence.
“How do we get him over the fence?” I asked.
Cleave reached into his back pocket and came out with wire cutters. He snipped a hole big enough to pull Tiny through while Fearless climbed over the top. Van positioned the body and Fearless pulled it through. Then Killer climbed over.