Black Betty (15 page)

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“When they broke up, Sarah and Ron, Arthur was only ten. He stopped eating and lost fifteen pounds. The doctors said that he was going to die. They had to put him in a hospital for two months. It was then that Sarah promised never to divorce. It was that promise that kept Arthur alive.”

“Damn. And where is this guy Hawkes?”

“Nowhere. She won’t let him near the house. I think maybe he sends a letter to Arthur now and then but he’s never around.”

“What happened with Ron and Sarah?”

“He was awful. Just as bad as Mr. Cain was. Sarah had one of them on one side and one on the other. They both pulled until she almost broke. But Mr. Cain was the stronger and he made Ron leave.”

“How’d he do that?” I felt Gwendolyn’s chin push against my fingertips.

“He just told him to go—that’s all.”

I pushed her head up a quarter of an inch. “No it’s not,” I said.

“I don’t know. Really. Ron got into trouble and the police arrested him. That was after Sarah’s mother, Cassandra, died. Sarah came home and Ron never came back. We heard that they let him go but he never came back.”

I leaned forward until my face was only inches from hers. “You know why I come up here?” The more she talked white, the more the street came into my voice.

“No.”

“Because
you
called me.” Maybe it was true. “If that white woman woulda called I’da hung up the phone.”

Gwendolyn didn’t answer, so I took the hand that was holding mine and kissed her fingers, kind of sloppy, and then looked into her eyes.

“Kiss me, girl.”

She did, as well as she knew how. It was a dry little peck on my lower lip.

“Now watch,” I said. I pressed my tongue into her mouth. She was shocked at first but then she softened, put her hand to the back of my neck.

She needed serious practice but her heart was in the right place.

After our little lip tussle I leaned back. She took a last kiss from my mouth and then drew up her knees to her chin, between us.

I didn’t know if it was an invitation or a barrier so I asked, “You wanna go down there now?”

While shaking her head, no, she said, “But we have to.”

WE DROVE FOR A LONG WAY through a dark grove of avocado trees, crushing the pulpy fruit and giant seeds that littered our way. The trees had been planted in long rows that ran away from the road at perpendicular angles. In some of the long shadowy corridors men, women, and children, dressed in ghostly white clothes, worked. They were Mexican mainly with a few Negroes and a handful of Japanese. The men were armed with slender wooden poles that had jagged tin cans attached to one end. They’d lift the cans into the trees, snagging the black alligator pears. After they’d gotten a few they’d lower the pole for the women and children to pick from. Then the men would lift their farming spears again while the rest arranged the fruit in large wooden cartons that had been stacked along the way.

Down one tree-lined alley came a large wooden wagon riding on two giant, lopsided wooden wheels. This wagon was drawn by a skeletal white horse. Big men ran behind the rig hefting the boxes of fruit up into the wagon bed.

I stopped the car. “Jesus.”

“What?”

“It’s like I drove out of California, back through the South, and all the way into hell.”

“What are you talking about?” Gwen asked. I decided to call her Gwen after our teenaged kiss. She was really surprised. “This is just an orchard. It’s part of the Cain farm.”

“This is the farm we’re goin’ to?”

“What’s wrong, Mr. Rawlins? Mr. Cain didn’t like all that modern machinery kind of farming that’s coming up now. He liked to think that the food he produced had human sweat attached to it.” There wasn’t a hint of irony in her voice.

“What about them kids?” I pointed past her nose down a twilit lane. “Don’t you think that kids should be in some kinda school?”

Gwen’s eyes pitied me. “They can’t even speak English. How can they go to school?”

“Where you come from, girl?” I wasn’t so much angry as I wanted to cry. “That’s children out there. It’s against the law to have children workin’ like that.”

“They’re just helping their parents out. They’re not getting paid or anything.”

I turned away from the sight and looked out into the road ahead. It’s a good thing I looked before putting my foot on the gas because I could have run them over.

It was a man seated on a magnificent black mare. The horse was well groomed and clean. You could see that she ate well and was exercised daily. There was a white patch at the side of her jaw that looked like foam flailing from her mouth as if she were moving at a fast clip. The white spot matched her bright leather saddle.

The brown man astride her wore blue jeans, a blue shirt, and a back-sloping tan cowboy hat.

“Hi, Rudy!” Gwen yelled. She got out of the car waving and running up to rub the horse’s nose. “Hi, Beauty,” she said to the mare.

“Gwendy, where you been?” Rudy asked. He was peering into the car to get a good look at me, so I decided to climb out and oblige him.

“This is Easy Rawlins, Rudy,” Gwen was saying. “He’s up here to help Sarah find Betty.”

“Pleased t’meetcha,” I said. It was a phrase I reserved for white people and others who might not have sympathy with my dialect.

Rudy just nodded and stared at me. He was a young man, Mexican and a cowboy. I was willing to bet that he had played the kissing game with Gwen out among the avocado trees too; and that he heard the way her voice puckered around my name. I could see by the way he was staring at me that I had managed to make one more enemy in the world.

“We better get goin’,” I said to Gwen.

Gwen gave us both a puzzled stare and then climbed back into the car. I got in myself and inched ahead. Rudy was still there before us. The mare got a little jittery but Rudy held her in place.

So I let the car jump ahead half a foot.

That got Beauty to raise her front hooves but Rudy dug his heels into her side and pulled on the reins until she was back in place.

“Rudy!” Gwen yelled out of the window, waving at the silent cowboy. “Move back! Get away!”

Right at that moment an insect stung me behind the left ear. I growled and threw the car into reverse, gunning the engine as I did. The car flew backwards, throwing dirt and pebbles at the mare’s legs. All of this was too much for the horse and she took off—running twenty feet or so down one of the rows of trees. Before Rudy could get her back around I changed gears and hit the gas, leaving him my dust to navigate in.

“What’s wrong with him?” Gwen shouted while trying to see out of the back window.

After about a mile the avocado trees gave way to lemon groves. More migrant workers were out there plucking and climbing and baking in the sun for pennies an hour.

Another fifteen minutes and the road became paved.

The Cain farm was lovely. Painted gray like the inside of an oyster shell is gray and surrounded by yellow roses that were actually golden.

I parked in the driveway, amazed at the beauty and isolation that money could buy. The road we had taken through the orchards had been a broad semicircle that brought us back to the ocean.

Gwen wouldn’t let me help with her bicycle. She yanked and pulled at the heavy frame until it finally came out. She could have chipped or scratched my paint job but I didn’t say anything.

For some reason I expected her to take me around the back door. There she was half naked in the eyes of most churchgoing black folks, with me, a big and black field Negro up to no good and getting worse. But we went right in the front, Gwen going in first. She banged her tire up against the door and it swung inward.

“I’m here with Mr. Rawlins,” she shouted as soon as we were inside.

She motioned for me to go through an archway on my left. She went the other way, pushing at a door that swung open, revealing a large kitchen. Arthur Hawkes was standing in there. He wore a loose yellow shirt with gray Bermuda shorts and straw sandals. He raised his head and caught a glimpse of me just as the door swung, blocking my view. It swung back and forth once more so I caught another shot of Arthur. He was still looking at me.

Then I was alone in the foyer. There were paintings of ocean waves on the walls. Shimmering oils in heavy oaken frames. Waves at sunset. Waves by the moon. A hapless frigate trying to negotiate hurricane tides in a dark storm at sea.

I still had the salt from Gwen’s lips on my tongue. Outside the sea rushed. I found myself getting aroused. The kiss and that opulence serenaded by the sea pumped desire into my heart suddenly.

My vow to remember the simple things in life—forgotten then.

SARAH CAIN WAS JUST INSIDE the archway door, sitting on a big pink sofa. A bottle of Gilbey’s gin sat on the table.

Scattered around the bottle were crumpled wads of money. Maybe she
had
searched the bottom of her purse.

“Cigarette?” she asked, rising as I came into the room. “I’m sorry but all I’ve got are Luckies.”

She shook the pack at me. “Have a seat, Mr. Rawlins.”

There was a pink chair to go with the sofa.

“Drink?” Her hand, which I now noticed shook a little, drifted toward the gin.

“No thanks.”

“You don’t like liquor? We have wine.”

“No, no. I love liquor. I love wine too, but you just go on and tell me what it is you want.”

There was a big window directly across from the couch that opened onto the broad Pacific. The light coming in gave me a good look at Miss Cain. Her eyes drooped, not from being tired but from sadness—years of it. The smile she put on to entertain me was lost under the weight of those eyes.

“Nice house you got here.” I wanted to say something about the children out in the fields, but the sadness in those eyes stopped me.

“Oh? You like it?”

“Don’t you?”

Sarah Cain looked down at the floor under my feet.

“This is my father’s house, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “It smells of him. Whenever I smell horse manure I think of this house. Horse manure and the smell of men out there picking fruit just so that Albert Cain could say that he ran a working farm.”

“He’s dead now,” I said.

Sarah Cain hoisted the gin bottle, shaking slightly, and poured a squat glass half full.

“What?” she asked as if maybe I had lowered my voice or shifted into another language.

“He’s dead. You don’t have to keep this place for him. You could close it down.”

She gave me the same pitying look that Gwen did.

“No, Mr. Rawlins. This is the one bit of property that’s in my name. Not even the land, but just the trees. I only own the trees. The estate is all caught up in the courts, and so the only money coming to me is through this harvest. That bastard is laughing at me in hell.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s dead and at least you don’t have to be out there in that heat.”

She wasn’t listening to me.

“There was a man once,” she said slowly, reminding me of Feather relating her dream, “who said no to my father. It was a freak fall; rainy and cold. The man, I don’t remember his name, told my father that he and his men wouldn’t work until the weather cleared. He said that the crops weren’t worth pneumonia. And he was right. Our family has owned gold mines and oil wells and cattle ranches bigger than some states since a hundred years. What did he need with some lemons in a basket?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. But I didn’t come way out here to talk about that anyway.”

“He brought men up from Ojai with rifles and they took that man—I think his name was Oscar, yes, Oscar.” A brittleness came into her voice. “They took Oscar off to talk and a little later my father came back and told the other workers that Oscar took some money and left. Nobody believed him but he had all those men with rifles so they went back to work. That’s what he did if you stood up against him. He’d take away your soul and kill it and tell you that it’s all your own fault.”

“Yeah,” I said, mostly to myself. “I know.”

“What? What did you say?”

“I said that I didn’t come up here to talk about that. Gwendolyn said that you wanted to hire me for something.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” she stammered.

We sat for a while then, listening to the waves.

“Mr. Hodge is an awful man and a smelly man,” she said like a small child. “And I never have him in the house except when I have to. He was Father’s lawyer, so I have to put up with him until the will is settled.”

“Well, that smelly man is the one who hired me,” I said. “What’s he want with Betty?”

Gwendolyn came into the room then, wearing a calf-length maroon dress. She moved up behind Sarah and put her hands on the frail woman’s shoulders. They both looked at me like guilty children who believe that adults know what they’re thinking.

“Elizabeth was very close to Father. When he died she left us. I want her to come back.”

“Yeah, well, you wishin’ in yo’ pillow didn’t call the police down on me—it didn’t cart me off to jail.”

“You were arrested?”

“Yeah. And entertained by a man named Styles.”

“Norman Styles?” There was a galaxy’s worth of coldness in her voice.

“We didn’t get to his first name.”

The white woman rubbed her face like a day laborer wiping off the grit from an especially dirty job.

“I will pay you twenty thousand dollars in cash,” Sarah said. “Just as soon as the will gets through probate.”

“Excuse me?”

“Didn’t you hear me? I said I will pay you—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard that part. What I missed was what for.”

“To find Elizabeth and to get us in touch with her. Mr. Hodge told me that he fired you. He said that he could find Elizabeth another way. But I see no reason to leave you out of it. If you can find her I think you should. You seem to know something about her family and friends.”

“No offense, lady.” I reached over and took another cigarette from her pack on the table. “But your money killed Marlon.”