What was that line from the baseball movie? If you build it, they will come.
The tourists could buy Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor and Attica Locke and Steven Barnes and Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison too. They just had to learn. Someone could stay behind and teach them. Then mail orders, which were picking up since he hired someone to update the store’s website, could take care of the rest.
Maybe that was what the haint was trying to tell him. Make the store his.
Darryl was so excited that he climbed inside the window display to start ripping down the posters and signs he had put up to try to catch the newcomers’ eyes. More than he remembered, actually — an entire side of the display, including the prime corner. Gillian Flynn was dope, but why was she in the window at Sankofa when she could be celebrated anywhere?
Darryl didn’t hear the commotion until it was practically in his ear, the shout of a woman who sounded like Big Hat with the sun-broiled nose. “Maybe he went that way?” More of a question than a comment, and Darryl heard stampeding feet from around the corner.
When his attention slipped, his foot followed. He landed against the plate glass hard enough to make him think he might fall through and be shredded. But only a small shard of glass in the center fell out, a sparkling diamond in fading sunlight, and the spiderweb of cracks seemed to cradle him as he tried to straighten himself up.
The white security guard was amped up on imagination and anger when he turned the corner, his gun already aimed, looking for something to shoot. Darryl winced as soon as he saw him, expecting a gunfire blast. But it didn’t come at first.
The security guard squinted against the window’s glaring dusk light to glance inside the window at the New York Times best sellers still scattered across the floor. He noted the CLOSED sign on the door. Then his eyes came back to the man who’d broken the glass — still standing inside the store window. Darryl saw him decide what to do.
“Freeze!” the security guard yelled, because he’d seen it on TV so often, but he didn’t wait for Darryl to freeze. Didn’t seem to care that Darryl’s only motion was raising his hands.
Just before the gunshot — the first one — Darryl noticed a figure reflected in the glass, too far away to be him — and yet, it was him. The same eyes he’d seen from behind his desk now stared at him up close with an expression that seemed to say: Do you get it now, brother?
Grandmama had always said he had a touch of the psychic. He’d had a feeling about this security guard from the moment he saw him. And he still hadn’t read the signs.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned—” Darryl started to say.
Then the bullets came. One. Two. Three.
“He works there!” a woman’s voice screamed from somewhere far away.
Before the brief flash of pain turned to a silent soup, Darryl had time to vow that he would haunt the fuck out of whatever they built where Sankofa used to be.
Just you wait.
I Am Yojimbo
by Naomi Hirahara
Kokusai Theatre
On the last day of the Kokusai Theatre on Crenshaw, Eric Montgomery’s boss, Sab, told him that he could keep anything in the lost and found.
“Go to town,” Sab said. His back had become bent over the years, as if two decades in a dark theater had shriveled his body.
“Okay, boss.” Eric tried to sound grateful but he knew what was in that lost and found box. Actually, calling Sab “boss” was being too generous because Eric wasn’t technically paid. He was fourteen and, according to child labor laws, needed a parent to sign off on a work permit. And no one in his family was going to approve of him working at a Japanese movie house in the neighborhood. If he was going to spend his extra time there, that was his choice and not theirs.
“It’s a sickness,” his mother, Jessie, said to her husband, Hal. She adjusted the cat’s-eye glasses that brushed against the curls of her relaxed hair in an attempt to look like Phylicia Rashad. Why would her youngest son be so obsessed with Japan?
“What, you think that you’re part Oriental or something?” Hal had spent two years fighting in Vietnam. He had seen things that he would never share with his family.
Hal was the one, ironically, who had taken Eric and his older brothers to the Kokusai to watch a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s classic The Seven Samurai.
Eric, who was sitting next to his father and middle brother, had been mesmerized by the black-and-white images of the kimono-clad warriors brandishing swords. A small Japanese town populated by old people was being overrun with thugs. It was up to a ragtag group of samurai, including a man who posed as a warrior but wasn’t officially one. That character was played by actor Toshiro Mifune, whom Eric later saw multiple times after “working” with Sab at the Kokusai. His favorite Mifune movie was Yojimbo, in which the Japanese star played a masterless samurai and bodyguard for hire.
It was at a screening of Yojimbo that Eric thought he saw his father’s favorite Laker, Kareem, and mentioned it later at the dinner table.
“You crazy,” the middle brother said.
“Are you sure it wasn’t Mel Ware?” the oldest brother asked. Mel was the local star athlete at Dorsey High School.
“I know the difference between Kareem and Mel,” Eric snapped back.
“Oh, you know Eric and his night vision,” the middle one said.
“Whooo, whooo, whooo,” both brothers let out owl noises, and laughed at Eric’s expense. It was easy to do, the youngest one separated from the other two by an entire war. He was odd; he didn’t fit in with other boys. He didn’t play basketball or football and instead of taping posters of rap stars or athletes on his side of his bedroom, he put up images of Bruce Lee and Mifune.
Eric wanted to go to the local Japanese-language school on Jefferson and 12th Avenue near Saki Liquor. Every Saturday, he saw young Japanese Americans being dropped off and picked up in Toyota Corollas and Honda Accords from places probably miles away from the Crenshaw area. He didn’t care if he would be the only Black kid in those bare classrooms. All he cared about was learning the code, the Bushido code that would set him free.
He heard a little about Bushido from Charlie, a Japanese man originally from a place called Terminal Island. He was a gardener who drove a beat-up brown Chevrolet pickup truck. He installed metal pipes in its bed to hold his tools — a gas-powered blower, rakes, edger, and an extra coil of green hose. Charlie had weather-beaten skin as dark as his truck and tufts of severe hair resembling the steel wool Eric’s mother used to clean dirty pans.
Charlie was Sab’s friend and he didn’t care about child labor laws, either. On Saturday mornings, he’d occasionally pick up Eric to accompany him to do an uncomplicated but vigorous job like collecting hedge clippings on an estate in Leimert Park.
“Bushido is like, you never shame your family. Your name is everything. You show honor until death,” Charlie said one Saturday before he pulled the cord to start his blower.
A week before the closure of the Kokusai, Charlie treated him to a bowl of won ton saimin at Holiday Bowl, a landmark building that reminded Eric of a large boat gliding along Crenshaw Boulevard. The huge orange neon sign, BOWL, towered over the structure, the neighborhood’s replacement for the sun.