South Central Noir

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.