Black Betty Read online

  Feather’s cry started low like the wail of an air-raid siren. I picked her up out of the chair and hugged her.

  “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s just so damn hot that I get mad sometimes when I shouldn’t.”

  Her chin was still trembling. Jesus had another jelly bread on the table and he cleaned up the mess while I put Feather back into her chair.

  “Daddy got a hot head,” Feather said. Then she laughed.

  I put together the lunch bags while the kids got on their shoes.

  “I got to do something this mornin’, Juice.” Juice was the nickname the kids had given Jesus at school. Nobody except the Mexican kids felt comfortable calling somebody after the Lord.

  “I want you to take Feather to school.”

  “Nooooo!” Feather cried. She loved to ride in my car.

  Jesus nodded and looked as if he were about to say yes. But I knew that that was just another dream.

  Hope is the harshest kind of dreaming.

  I roughed up my son’s hair and went into my room to dress for the day.

  THE HOUSE WAS THE SAME. Large picture windows on either side of the front door. An old dog was sitting lazily on the front step. The last time I had been at Odell’s house that dog was a puppy. Bougainvillea was planted along the fence and there were succulent shrubs instead of grass for lawn. Odell Jones didn’t like to cut grass, so he never had it. There were tangelo trees rising up from the shrubs, laden with fully formed fruit. The house had a deep stone porch with timbers for pillars.

  The door was open and the screen shut. I could see the back of Odell’s head as he was seated in a chair turned away from the door.

  I knocked and said, “Hello? Odell? It’s me—Easy.”

  Odell didn’t move, at least not at first. After maybe thirty seconds he turned the page of his newspaper and continued reading.

  “Easy?” a voice came from behind me.

  Maude, Odell’s wife, had been working in the garden somewhere out of sight. She wore a pink sun visor and carried a dirty trowel. Her mouth was smiling but her big eyes showed concern.

  “Hi, Maude. I was knockin’.”

  “Odell in there but he can’t hear too good lately,” she lied. We both knew that he could hear me. It was just that Odell had cut his friendship off from me years ago after he’d done me a favor once.

  I had wanted to get to somebody through Reverend Towne, the minister of First African Baptist Church. Odell made the introduction and Towne wound up dead—his pants down around his ankles and the corpse of one of his parishioners on her knees at his feet. Odell blamed me and I never argued with him. It was a tough life that we lived and I couldn’t deny my own complicity with the pain.

  “What can I do for you, Easy?”

  “Why you send that man to my house?” I asked simply.

  “What man?”

  “Com’on, Maudria, don’t play me.”

  Odell’s wife had a large body with only tiny shoulders to hang it on. When she hunched those shoulders she looked a little like an overfed pink-eyed frog. “I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout, Easy.”

  “Then I’m gonna stay knockin’ at this here door till Odell tells me.” I made like I was going to turn, but, as large as she was, Maude beat me to the door.

  “Let him alone now, Easy. You know it hurts him enough that he cain’t talk to you.” She took me by the arm and pulled me down the front steps.

  “I ain’t never said he couldn’t.”

  “I don’t know what come between you two, Odell won’t talk about it. But I told him that whatever it was happened, you two was friends and friends don’t do like that.”

  I’d given up on talking to my old friend. At least before that morning.

  “If he don’t wanna talk, then why he send that man to me?”

  “I told you, Easy. We didn’t send no man.”

  “Yes you did,” I said loud enough to be heard in the house.

  I held out the picture Lynx had given me. “This picture was taken on Elba Thomas’s front porch and Elba was Odell’s girlfriend back then. And we both know that Betty’s Odell’s cousin.”

  Maude clasped her hands and begged without words.

  “Maudria.” Odell was at the screen. He stared straight at his wife and addressed her as if she were alone. “You come on in here and get my breakfast ready,” he said. He was wearing a house robe on a Thursday morning. It dawned on me that he must have retired.

  He turned his back and walked away into the house. Maude was drawn to him but I grabbed her arm.

  “Talk to me, Maude, or I will be here all day long.”

  “I don’t know hardly a thing,” she said. And then, when I didn’t let go, “This man Mr. Lynx come over yesterday and says that he’s lookin’ for Elizabeth.”

  “So she does live up here?”

  Maude nodded. “Marlon had TB and they said that the California climate would help. They come up before the war, before we did. But we hardly ever seen ’em. She worked for this rich white woman and didn’t ever even tell Odell who she was or where she lived. If it wasn’t for Marlon comin’ by ’bout two weeks ago we woulda thought she was dead.”

  “What did Marlon come for?”

  “He said that he was going to go away soon. That if Betty asked we should tell her that it was sudden but that he was okay and he’d get in touch.”

  “Why couldn’t he tell her that himself?”

  “I don’t know.” Ignorance was a virtue where Maude was weaned.

  “What else did Marlon have to say?”

  “Nuthin’. We just had some lemonade and talked. He said that he retired like ’Dell did.”

  “Retired from what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What did Lynx want?”

  “He said that Betty had left her job but that her boss wanted her back. He said that he’d pay fifty dollars for any information we had. ’Dell let him have that picture but he told him we didn’t know where she was. Then that man Lynx said that was too bad because she would probably lose some kinda retirement from the rich family and how she was gettin’ older an’ that could hurt. Huh! He don’t have to tell us about that. We could use that fifty dollars.

  “That’s when we said about you, Easy. I said that you knew Betty when you was a boy an’ that you might be able t’find her because I heard you do that kinda thing sometimes. Odell give him your address. He had it from those Christmas cards you sent.” Maude paused for the memory of my ten-cent cards. “It’s nice ’bout how you was thinkin’a us, Easy. You know Odell always looked at your cards.”

  We were quiet for a few seconds then, thinking about a friendship gone by.

  “Mr. Lynx said he wouldn’t tell where he got your address and then he said thank you very much.”

  Maude was the kind of woman who took manners seriously.

  “How did Lynx know to come to you?”

  “Betty had give the people she work for our address—in case of emergency.”

  “Where did Marlon go when he left here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, making her impression of a frog again. “He was real nervous and jittery. He wanted Odell to lend him some money, but we just retired now,” she apologized. “’Dell ain’t sick but he’s weak-like. If I didn’t go out and clean houses part-time we couldn’t even make the tax on this house.”

  “So you say Marlon was sick?”

  “Yes he is, but he ain’t bad as Martin.”

  Just the mention of Martin’s name hurt me. I had stayed away from him partly because I knew that he and Odell were good friends. Seeing Odell ignore me and Martin dying at the same time was too much for me to imagine.

  “I heard about that,” I said. “How’s Martin doin’?”

  “He hackin’ an’ coughin’ an’ he got a pain in his back so bad he ain’t slep’ in nine weeks. Doctor says that it’s cancer but you know them doctors wrong half the time.”

  “I better get over there after I look f
or Betty,” I said. “You know how I could find Marlon?”

  “No, baby.” She was looking back up at the door.

  “He had a nickname, right?” I snapped my fingers trying to remember.

  For the first time Maude showed me a friendly smile. “Bluto. They used to call him Bluto.”

  “From the Popeye cartoon?”

  “Uh-uh. I mean, yeah, that was the name, but Marlon got it because he used to wear them old alligator shoes he got from this white guy he did some work for. Marlon won a bet and got them shoes but the white man was so mad that he had to give’em up that he dyed’em blue before he let Marlon have’em.” She even laughed! “But you know them was forty-dollar shoes and Marlon wore’em anyways. So they called him Blue Toes after that.”

  We both laughed and smiled. Where I had been holding Maude’s wrist she twisted and took my hand.

  “Don’t you let nuthin’ happen to Elizabeth now, Easy. Odell won’t say it but I know he wants you to find her.”

  “What could happen?”

  Maude stared dumbly up at me. Over her head I saw Odell standing silently at the door.

  — 3 —

  ONE THING I KNEW ABOUT Marlon Eady was that he loved to gamble. Horses, numbers, or cards—it didn’t make any difference to him. So I went out looking for him where people laid down bets.

  There was a Safeway supermarket and a Thrifty’s drugstore over off of Florence. Their parking lots were back to back. Not much business at ten in the morning. Two busboys were hustling wire grocery carts off of a truck that picked up strays around the neighborhood. The driver was seated sideways behind the wheel with his bear-sized legs and woolly head hanging out of the open door.

  “Yeah,” he was saying to the hardworking young men. “That yellah house on Sixty-second had fi’e wagons right up front. No tellin’ what she got out behind. I told Mr. Moul that we better get some law out over to there or she gonna have his whole fleet.”

  The older man wore gray cotton pants and a stretch T-shirt of the same material and hue; a kind of makeshift uniform. I’d never seen him before. He looked old enough to be retired.

  Retired. Back in 1961 that meant you worked “part-time” forty hours a week and paid your own insurance.

  “I thought maybe you boys wanna show some initiative and go on out there with me,” the bearish man was saying. “Shit! We come up wit’ some extra carts an’ Mr. Moul prob’ly give us a bonus.”

  “Three’a these is Von’s,” one of the young men said. He was light-colored and tall, muscular in his shoulders like a football player. “We gotta take ’em back there.”

  “Back?” The old man shook his head. His blubbery black cheeks were lightened by gray stubble. “Shit! I ain’t goin’ back nowhere. Let ’em go’n get they own carts. Shit! I wouldn’t even spend a dime callin’ nobody for no carts.”

  “Drop it, DJ,” the other busboy said. His name was Spider. He was as dark as the old man but cut from a cat instead of a bear. His grin came off easy. I’m sure his father would have been upset to see Spider smoking a cigarette. Yes, Mr. Hoag would have come after his son, with a gun if he had to, to make sure that his boy grew up to be a right man.

  But Mr. Hoag was in state prison for shooting his wife’s lover, Sam Fixx, who was also said to be Spider’s real father.

  “Easy,” Spider hailed. “How you doin’?”

  The young man waved and grinned. He loafed over to where I was. The truck driver turned around quickly and revved his engine. After all, I might know the boss. The other busboy went into the store.

  “Hey, Spider.” I shook out a cigarette from my pack even though the boy was already smoking.

  He took the offering and asked, “What’s up?”

  “You still takin’ down numbers for Willie?”

  Spider put the cigarette behind his ear and took a tiny diary from his shirt pocket.

  “No, no,” I said, looking around. Spider was seventeen. He wasn’t worried about jail. “I wanna know if you know somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A man, older guy around fifty. His name is Marlon Eady but we used to call him Bluto.”

  That brought a grin to Spider’s face. “Like the cartoon?”

  “You know him?”

  “Naw, Easy. Ain’t never had no cartoons buy no numbers. Uh-uh.”

  The football player came out of the store followed by a tall white man in a bright blue suit. Probably the store manager.

  “See ya later, Spider,” I said. “You take care now.”

  He leaned over with his hand out, already a politician of the street. “I gots it covered.”

  If Spider was my son I would have slapped that cigarette and that grin away. I would have made him stand up straight instead of slouching like some gangster or pimp. But I didn’t have the right to criticize. Spider was the natural product of the streets I lived in. He made up his own manhood and I had to respect that.

  JACKSON BLUE’S APARTMENT was on the second floor of the Eighty-eight Building. There were only two floors. It was a long white stucco building that had walls you could scrape through with a tin spoon. I walked up the single flight of stairs and down the slender balcony to his door. I knocked loud and hard, don’t ask me why, just mean I guess.

  Jackson Blue had a brilliant mind; he might have been a genius, but he was cowardly and blustery to the core. If he could have put it into a jar, Jackson would have sold his soul for tonight’s dinner or, even better, for fifteen minutes with a whore.

  If there is a God he was drinking or mad the night he put Jackson together. Scrawny, lying, and afraid of his own footsteps, Jackson was one of the many friends who would never abandon me—he had nowhere else to go.

  I was still banging on the door when it swung inward quickly.

  “What the fuck you think you poundin’ on, motherfucker?” The same God who made Jackson Blue took a crocodile to make the man I was facing. He was every bit as tall as me, over six foot in cotton socks, and bumpy. He had rough skin that shifted hue now and then over his corded bare chest. His muscles weren’t big but his shoulders dropped in a boxer’s stance and the damage that time had done to his face hadn’t wiped the bitter dare from his lips.

  “Jackson Blue here?” I gave just as mean as I got. One of the things the street teaches you is that if you bend over you’re bound to get kicked.

  “Who axin’?”

  His eyes were swamp-colored. I could smell the ancient decay on his troglodyte breath.

  “’Sup, Ease?” Jackson came from behind my new friend. “You meet Ortiz?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Come on in.” Little Jackson pushed at the man called Ortiz, and to my surprise the croc gave five inches. Enough for me to get into the dark apartment and still keep my dignity.

  The darkened room was foul with cigarettes, coffee, stale food, and the odor of two men who’ve been locked up in a cell for a month. Both of them were bare-chested with only loose trousers on. The band of Ortiz’s boxer shorts rode out over his belt. He was watching me and I was trying to show that I didn’t care.

  But I did care. When I crossed the door into this man’s domain my life was in danger. Jackson’s new friend was a deadly force. I imagined that he ran a fever as a rule, and as he burned, he wanted everything else to wither with him.

  “What you want, Easy?” Jackson was smiling and comfortable, more comfortable than I had ever seen him. He seated himself without offering me a chair. Ortiz slammed the door and then slumped up against the wall for his seat.

  I’d heard that Jackson had gone into the bookie game. He got sent away to the county jail for selling stolen batteries out of the trunk of his car. On his release he went right into the horses. It surprised me, because there were some big men who didn’t want competition with the game they already ran.

  “Been a while, Blue,” I said.

  “What the fuck you want, man?” That was Ortiz acting up. He pushed himself away from the wall and put his
right hand into his pocket.

  “Relax,” Jackson said in his high whiny voice. “Easy here is my friend. He all right.” Jackson’s grin showed a sense of power that all cowardly men yearn for. After a whole lifetime of running scared they can hardly wait to show off their strength when they get it.

  “I thought you was a bookie,” I said. “I guess I was wrong about that.”

  “Why you say that?”

  “Well here you are, right?” I pointed at him in his chair. “I don’t hear no phones ringin’.”

  Ortiz thought that was funny enough to get a cough. When he took the hand out of his pocket I realized that I hadn’t been breathing.

  “They ringin’ though, Easy,” Jackson boasted. “They ringin’!”

  I looked around the rank-smelling room. My gaze stopped at the TV tray in the center of the squat coffee table. There I saw a brass plate piled high with marijuana and a carton of stale onion rings showered in ashes. The decor didn’t fit with the diamond ring on Jackson’s pinky finger or the mink coat lying on the floor beside the couch.

  “Don’t look like no penthouse, Jackson.”

  “Cain’t let’em know what you up to, Easy. I learnt that from you, brother. But we got it, man. We got it all right.”

  “Got what?”

  Jackson went toward a door on the other side of Ortiz, but before he could get there his friend grabbed him by the arm.

  “What you doin’?” the crocodile asked.

  Jackson shook off the grip like a brave man and said, “It’s okay. Easy family, man.”

  Jackson left for only a moment and then returned with a wooden box that was a dark reddish brown, made from telephone-pole wood. The box was a foot high and wide, and maybe three-quarters of that in depth. On one long side of the box there was a latch to secure a little door. Inside was a telephone receiver connected to a bunch of tiny blue and red electric wires, a dry-cell battery, and one of those new transistorized tape recorders that they made in Japan. The whole thing looked professional, well made. Jackson’s life was always a sloppy mess, but his work, when he cared to do it, was a dream.