Black Betty (18 page)

I ran so hard that my shoes wore through. Then my feet began to bleed and the blood made me slip. “Betrayed by your own blood,” a familiar voice said.

MY EYES OPENED before I came to. They were trying to let out the agony. I sat up and rubbed my head. It was wet. Wet with the brain and blood of Terry T. A number ten cast-iron frying pan lay next to me. A better swing and I would have been dead along with Terry.

That was too much.

The moaning started softly but soon built into a wail. I heard myself shouting out and I knew that I should stop but I couldn’t. There was blood on me. Blood.

When I tried to stand, still racked by tears, a pain grabbed my shoulder. It was deep inside me and I knew I had been stabbed. I tried to grab the knife but I couldn’t reach it.

It was the fear of death in the form of that blade that saved me.

I got up and stumbled into the living room. I was looking for something but I didn’t quite know what. I went through a door and found myself in Terry’s bedroom. He had a single bed with a thin blue-striped mattress on it. On the floor lay a stained pillow with no casing and a woolen blanket.

It was the blanket that I was looking for.

I draped it over my shoulder gently so as not to press against the knife. But even that little bit of pressure on the haft sent a high-pitched scream running down my spine. I had to lean up against a solitary chest of drawers to steady myself.

There was a framed photograph laid flat up there. And even though I was in terrible pain and in fear for my life I noticed that it was the same kind of frame that Marlon had for Betty’s snapshot. I looked at the picture but I couldn’t make out anything. I couldn’t get my mind to focus on the faces there.

So I took the picture and stood up as straight as I could manage. Then I went out to the car trying to seem nonchalant, wrapped up in a blanket in hundred-degree weather.

The heat was nothing to me anymore.

I climbed into the driver’s seat and sat back, jamming the knife a little further in. That sat me up straight.

My hand didn’t want to do what I told it. It took me three tries to turn the ignition.

I had to get ready for a turn a full half block before I reached the corner.

And each block had its own special pitfall. Once I didn’t see two little children playing in the street until it was almost too late. I hit the brake too hard and threw myself forward and then back against the seat. The jolt in my shoulder was so blinding that I had to stop for a while and rest on the steering wheel.

I don’t know what Terry was doing with a wool blanket in the summer heat. I was getting light-headed but I was afraid to pull the blanket off. If one more thing changed I knew I was going to die.

A prowl car followed me for over two miles down Pico Boulevard. I don’t know why they didn’t stop me. I was cruising at about twenty-five, hunched over the wheel like I was making love to the thing.

But somewhere around La Brea they took off. Probably a real crime came in on the radio. I don’t know. But it was just about then that I remembered about bleeding. Maybe I was bleeding too much. I stuck my hand under the blanket and brought it back covered in blood. My blood.

My foot was becoming uneven on the gas pedal. I would speed up and slow down, then speed up again. By the time I got to my block there was a bass sound thrumming in my ears. I turned into the driveway and was easing back toward the garage when suddenly I took a turn to the left. I don’t know why. There’s no turn in my driveway but I turned just as natural as if I did it every time I came home.

Jesus came running out after he heard me plowing into the side wall of the house.

“Go make Feather go to her room,” I said, waving Jesus back into the house. “Go on! And bring me back my green coat.”

God knows why I wanted that coat.

I had to move over to the passenger’s side to get out of the car. By the time I made it to the back door Jesus had returned with the coat. He stood there looking at me, eyes wide. I lumbered past him, still wearing my blanket. I went through the kitchen and then into our TV room, followed by the silent boy.

“Go to the bathroom and get the witch hazel and the alcohol,” I said. “And the gauze and some tape too.”

Slowly, I let myself down into a perch at the edge of the couch while Jesus ran to get the things I needed.

“Daddy?” Feather was there at the edge of the room rubbing her nose and pulling at the hem of her little blue dress. She didn’t run to me because half my face was covered with Terry T’s insides.

“Go up to your room, baby,” I said. My voice was thick and gravelly.

The man she was running away from wasn’t her father. He was a real monster that had invaded her home.

Jesus came in with his arms full. I stood up and let the blanket fall off me.

“Juice, I don’t want you to get upset, but I need something from you.”

He was all attention.

“I’m going to turn around and you’re going to have to help me. Okay?”

He nodded.

I turned around slowly and faced the wall. There was a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation that I’d bought from Woolworth’s hanging there—gilded frame and all. It struck me that hanging that document up there was like an ex-convict displaying his discharge papers.

“Oh God, Daddy.”

Jesus’s hushed cry made me forget the frame. I even ignored the knife in my back long enough to smile at my son calling me Daddy.

“Is it a knife?” I asked him.

“It’s an ice pick,” he answered in perfect articulate English.

“All right, son,” I said lowering myself down to my knees. “I want you to put both hands around it and pull it out the same way it went in. It might hurt me enough that I faint for a minute but that’s okay. You take a wad of that gauze and press it against the wound until you’re sure that it’s stopped bleeding. You understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” And then he did it—all at once and with no hesitation.

“Uhh-ah!” I groaned. There came a bright yellow light, not in my eyes but in the whole upper part of my brain. My body was being sucked upwards and I knew for certain what it was like to die.

But I wasn’t going to die; not until I found Elizabeth Eady and the killer of Terry T.

The yellow light faded and with it my consciousness. I remember Feather calling and me wanting to say “Yes, honey?” but I couldn’t and that simple fact was among the saddest things I’d ever known.

WHEN I CAME TO I was afraid to open my eyes at first. Instead I listened to the sounds around me. The drip of the faucet in the kitchen; the rattle of the window in the Santa Ana wind. I felt a slight breeze that wasn’t hot and a gentle stroke across my face. When I finally opened my eyes I saw Jesus using a washcloth to wipe the blood from my face. He was using a little plastic bowl filled with tepid water. I was laid out on the couch, with him next to me. On the floor at my feet Feather sat with her back to me playing with her doll, Roxanna.

“You be a good girl now, Roxy,” I remember her saying. “Or you don’t get no surprise.”

There was a darkening knot under Jesus’s left eye. I reached out to touch it and he drew back.

“What happened?”

“After the blood stopped I put some alcohol on it and you, you jumped like.” There was a question in his voice, as if he were asking me if I had indeed jumped or was I mad because of something.

“I’m sorry. It musta hurt pretty bad.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was real red in there.”

I took a deep breath and noticed that the breeze was coming from the fan that Jesus had set at the foot of the couch so that it could blow over all three of us.

The green coat was over my feet.

I passed out.

When I came around Jesus was still there next to me. Feather was eating ice cream out of a bowl, just like the bowl Jesus used to wash me, and clutching her doll.

“Honey,” I called out to Feather.

“Uh-huh,” she answered, not looking up.

“Would you like to go on a trip to Uncle Primo’s?”

“Yeah!” She stood right up from the bowl, wrenching Roxanna’s arm. She was ready to go, and I couldn’t blame her. The trouble I had brought into her house was too much for any little girl.

It was too much for me.

“Juice.”

“Y-yes, Daddy?”

“Call Primo and ask him if you and Feather can come out there for a couple of days.”

When Jesus got on the phone I had another surprise. He spoke Spanish! I guess it shouldn’t have been such a shock; he’d lived with Primo’s family from the time I saved him until he was five.

“He said okay.” There was a slight smirk on Jesus’s face. “He said that there’s no room in the house or the garage but me and Julio and Juan-Baptiste can sleep out on the deck in the avocado tree.”

Only children could make fun out of despair.

“You take Feather in the bus, okay?”

“Uh-huh.” It was like he had always talked.

Feather was happy to go until they got out the door. Halfway through the front yard she started crying and running back to the house. Jesus caught her by the arm and picked her up. I watched them going down the street; Feather was hugging Juice and reaching back over his shoulder toward the house.

THERE WAS A BOTTLE of Seagram’s in the kitchen cabinet. It had been a gift from Lucky Horn and I hadn’t had the time to bring it to one of my friends who drank.

I sat the bottle down on the coffee table and put the phone next to it. By now Officer Lewis knew that I wasn’t coming to Clovis’s house. She didn’t know my real address, few people did, but Lewis was a good cop and I knew that he’d find my numbers soon enough.

The first call was to a hotel downtown. But the man I was looking for wasn’t in.

The second was to EttaMae.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Etta. Jewelle get out there okay?”

“That’s some girl you sent me, Easy. LaMarque’s nose open so wide it’s like t’bust.”

“She just a girl.”

“A girl who know where her pussy is.” Etta always spoke her mind. That’s one of the ten thousand reasons I loved her.

“Could you handle it?”

“Hell yeah. I been knowin’ where my pussy is so long it might be gettin’ time to move.”

I knew she was mad at Mouse. Maybe, if it was five years earlier, I would have been fool enough to run after her again.

“Thanks for takin’ her in, Etta. Mofass’ll be happy she got a good woman like you lookin’ after her.”

The next call was to Primo. Jesus and Feather weren’t there yet but Mofass and Mouse were.

“Yessir, Mr. Rawlins,” Mofass wheezed. “He gots three locks on the do’. His file cabinets got combination locks in ’em and they’s alarms on everything, even the windows.

“He a good lawyer too. Said that everything belongs t’me and that we could suck Clovis dry. Kick’em outta that there house an’ close Esquire altogether. He says I could even take what money is her’n ’cause she couldn’t prove that she made it without usin’ my, uh, my capital. Shit, that lawyer could do some business. He gonna serve papers tomorrah at all her banks so that she cain’t take none’a my money out.”

Mouse had a different take on the man. “That’s a tough ole cracker, Easy. He knew what I was the minute I walked in the door. He looked me up and down and leaned forward so’s he could get to his pistol if he had to. He wear a pistol on his belt.

THERE ARE FEW THINGS as beautiful as a glass bottle filled with deep amber whiskey. Liquor shines when the light hits it, reminiscent of precious things like jewels and gold. But whiskey is better than some lifeless bracelet or coronet. Whiskey is a living thing capable of any emotion that you are. It’s love and deep laughter and brotherhood of the type that bonds nations together.

Whiskey is your friend when nobody else comes around. And whiskey is solace that holds you tighter than most lovers can.

I thought all that while looking at my sealed bottle. And I knew for a fact that it was all true.

True the way a lover’s pillow talk is true. True the way a mother’s dreams for her napping infant are true.

But the whiskey mind couldn’t think its way out of the problems I had. So I took Mr. Seagram’s, put him in his box, and placed him up on the shelf where he belonged.

THE ICE-PICK WOUND had stopped bleeding. Still, I should have gone to the doctor, or at least I should have gone to bed. But instead I washed up as best I could and put on clean clothes.

When I backed away from the wall the siding fell down. A small burglar could have snaked into the house through the hole I left him. But the children were safe with Primo. All that was left was a bottle of whiskey and a gilt-framed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. A thief was welcome to either one.

I went to a small residential hotel called the Piper on Grand in downtown L.A. The Piper was a hotel for poor whites. A lot of rural sons and a lot of criminals lived there. It wouldn’t have been a surprise for a black man to get his throat cut just for walking into that place.

All around the lobby shabby men loitered, smoking cigarettes and talking in low tones. A prostitute in a purple satin dress and torn brown stockings came down the stairway just as I entered. She did a double take before sneering at my presence.

“Hey, Joey!” she yelled, her words straight out of Brooklyn.

“Wha’?” A bulbous man came down from behind her. The question left his eyes when he saw me.

I went on up to the front. A gaunt gray-eyed man towered behind the desk. I heard every sound behind my back. The scooting of a chair, the rustling of pockets.

The clerk looked right through me.

“You got an Alamo Weir here?”

No answer. Not even the recognition in his pale eyes that I was there.

“What you want, boy?” The bulbous man was next to me. His two-piece suit was too blue to be a natural fabric. His mottled shirt had the faded stains from many washings.

I could have killed the man. I wanted too. I hated him. I hated his fat cheeks, pink and raw because he’d just shaved. I hated the smell of the cologne on his unwashed body. I hated the little black snaps he had for eyes.