Black Betty (20 page)

Odell took his old friend’s hand.

With his free hand Martin reached out to me. His cold claw felt as if it were siphoning off my living heat.

“It must be hard,” I said.

“You know the hardest thing, Easy?” His voice was muffled like there was wet cotton down in his throat.

“What’s that?”

He released me and held up his shaking hand.

“I cain’t even raise up a pistol; cain’t even pull the trigger. Odell won’t do it for me. I know he cain’t ’cause they’d put him in jail for it. An’ Pea wouldn’t do it—afraid that they would take her in-surance.”

“Maybe they don’t want to see you die, Marty.”

“They call this livin’?”

“Martin!” Pea was at the door. “You can’t be outside sick as you are. Odell! You should know better than to let him out here.”

She bustled out and fussed around Martin. He let her take over, seemed to enjoy the activity. Martin had lived alone for many years and even though he’d never said anything about Pea leaving him I believe that he was heartbroken over it.

Now he had her jealously guarding over him. The greedy love of his money felt better for him now than no love at all.

Odell and I went down to the cars.

“I need to know what’s goin’ on, Odell.”

He turned to me, his eyes were innocent like a hurt child’s eyes. Odell had to be over sixty years old but he looked younger than I felt.

“I’m sorry, Easy. When this is all over you’ll see that I didn’t have a choice.”

He got into his car and started it up. All I could do was watch him drive away.

I DIDN’T KNOW WHERE TO GO. I was afraid that the police would find my house. I couldn’t stay at John’s because everybody knew that we were friends. I didn’t want to stay with Etta because if Mouse was there, and he got drunk, which he usually did at night, he might shoot me because I didn’t pull those men he wanted to kill out of my pocket.

I drifted toward downtown trying to make sense out of what had happened. While driving I pulled the photograph from Terry T’s bedroom out of the glove compartment and set it up on the dash to ponder it for clues.

It was another picture of Betty. This one was more recent. She was standing arm in arm with a dapper-looking man in the front yard of a little flat-roofed block house. Whoever took the picture must’ve been standing in the middle of the street. You could see the houses on either side. Behind them rose an electrical tower with a big gray flag hanging down in tatters on the other side. It was a photo showing a man with his woman and his house. But Betty and this man looked more like old friends than lovers. Her head was cocked back and she was waving at the camera.

You could see that she was no longer a young woman but even that little snapshot made my heart skip.

I was stopped at a red light when I heard her.

“Hey, mistah. Mistah!”

She wore a black top cut off at the midriff and a black skirt that would have been tight on most women. Her hair was black and hanging down into her olive face.

“You want a friend?” she asked, pushing her head and shoulders into the window on the passenger’s side.

Maybe it was exhaustion but I thought I saw an honest sparkle in her eye.

“How much for the whole night?”

She frowned and then smiled. “Seventy-five dollars.”

She had the face of a teenaged Mexican girl but her eyes gave her away. In her twenties anyway, maybe even thirty.

“You got a room?”

“Another twenty-two if you want a room.”

“Come on then.”

She grinned and rushed into the car all excited and beside herself, acting like a real teenager happy and pleased that I had chosen her. But as soon as we were driving she became serious, looking up and down the block for the police or maybe her pimp. I felt safe with her, as if I finally had someone to ride shotgun while I napped in the saddle.

“If you wanna go to El Lobo,” she said, accenting the last two words with perfect Mexican-Spanish articulation, “it’s a cost twelve dollars more, but they got a air-cooler right in the room. It’s noisy too so they don’t hear nuthin’.”

When we got there it cost twenty dollars extra because the night clerk wanted a tip.

“It’s not me, mister,” the little bald white man said. “But I’m takin’ a chance with a mixed couple.”

“Mixed? Man, that ain’t no white woman.”

He hunched his shoulders and looked at me like I was speaking German.

BEFORE WE WENT IN I handed my date four twenty-dollar bills. She gave me four ones and four quarters in change. Kismet.

The room was small and a full third of it was the air-conditioning unit: a large lead-colored box that had a three-inch hole throwing out a cool breeze. It made two sounds. One was the simple drone of a motor. The other was the sound of a loose chain slamming against the side of a metal wall. I imagined a little slave in there trying to pound his way to freedom.

I turned on the light while the girl/woman took off her clothes. She pulled off the top first. Her breasts were small but she had very large and well-formed brown nipples. Then she pulled down her skirt and kicked it off along with her black heels.

Her pubic hair was black and dense. It was dull from the dampness of sweat. It seemed to make sense that a whore’s sex would be the part of her that perspired.

“You like her?” she asked.

Immediately I had an erection. After all my troubles and here one little suggestion from a nameless whore and I was ready. It was so ridiculous that I began to laugh.

“What’s funny?” She lay back on the bed pulling up her knees and spreading her legs. She did it to cool down but if I wanted to look that was okay too.

“I was just thinkin’ that your little lady there’s been workin’ pretty hard.…”

“I’m clean. I wash after.”

I was in love.

“Listen, honey. You’re beautiful. And I’d rather be with you than any other girl right now. But I need something.”

“What?” She was suddenly suspicious. Maybe I’d come out with some handcuffs or thin cord that I wanted her to get intimate with.

I took off my shirt and sat down with my back to her. “Can you clean this out?”

Odell’s dressing had loosened on my sweaty back. She pulled it away and crooned, “Oh, baby. What happened to you?”

“Cut myself gardenin’.”

She got a towel and a glass of tepid water from the bathroom and then came back and pushed me down on my stomach. For the next hour she laved the wound. Her hair was a heavy mop moving back and forth across my spine.

CARMELA BONITAS came from a small town down in the south of Mexico. Her father, a hardworking and good man, disappeared one day. He went off to look for day labor and never came home.

I started to care about Carmela when she told me about her father. My own father had disappeared. And when a poor man gets lost there’s nobody going to care. If a poor man falls off the boat in a treacherous sea the captain will look out over the swells but he won’t slow down to search. Why should he?

Carmela’s mother had brought her all the way to Ensenada but something happened and her mother died or disappeared. Carmela was nine when she came across the border in the salt barrel of a food distributor’s truck.

“He told me that it was for free but then he fucked me in a warehouse on top of a pile of rock salt,” she said, the childish pout still in her face after all those years. “I gave sailors blow jobs in San Diego until the war was over and then I came up here with a soldier who married me. Bob Ridell.”

Carmela had a son and daughter too. They lived with a woman she paid down in a small California town called Placid. She sent money and visited on Easter and Christmas and the Fourth of July.

At some point I sat up and wrapped my legs and arms around her, from behind. She pressed back against me and laid a hand on either knee. Her thick black mane smelled of our cigarettes.

“What about your husband?”

“I don’t know. I got my papers. But then he started drinking and getting mad. You know, he wanted to hit me. I tried to be good for him but he was just always mad.”

“So you left him?”

She sat forward, away from me. “We used to keep the apartment door wide open, and one night, when he was slapping me, a guy named Ferdinand who lived on our floor tried to stop him, but Bob beat him up and took his clothes and threw him down in the street.”

“Yeah?”

“Ferdinand was so mad that he come right through the door one night and shot Bob in his head.”

“Damn!”

“When the police come I told’em it was a Negro.” She pronounced the word as if it were the Spanish color. “’Cause Bobby shouldn’ta done that to Ferdinand; that was wrong.”

“DO YOU WANNA HURT ME?” Carmela whispered in my ear. I was half asleep after hours of talking. I told her all about my kids and my troubles. She listened and held me. I’ve never spent a better hundred dollars in my life.

“What?”

“You could fuck me in the ass if you want it.”

“Why’d I want that?” I asked. Ashamed of the slight tremble in my voice.

“Because you’re mad, but you’re not like Bobby. You can’t just take it out with meanness. I don’t mind. Men like it to hurt women. But if you know that and he’s a nice man and lets you keep him from hurting you too much, then it’s okay.”

She kissed me in a way that let me know she knew everything that I wanted; even things I didn’t know yet.

“I give it to you,” she snarled.

I felt rock-hard down in the core of my body. I hadn’t felt so powerful since I was young and too stupid to value my strength.

“Uh, no,” I said, holding her back.

“Why not?”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know what fucking time it is!”

I got up and went to the window. There was the same gray light I watched over Saul Lynx’s shoulder.

“I bet it’s about six. If we leave now we could get to Placid by eight. If you called the woman who’s got your kids they could be waiting for you.”

I could have never made a whore smile in bed; I didn’t know enough for that. But Carmela smiled for me then.

MRS. ESCOBAR LET ME USE her phone while she and Carmela and the kids went to the park. I called Remo’s restaurant but nobody answered. So then I went to sleep on the floor of her dining room. After a while I heard the sounds of children stomping and playing through the boards.

It’s difficult to express how safe I felt at that moment. It was the safety of being homeless and nameless and not known, not really, to anyone. I slept on that plank floor better than I had in years. The children’s hard-soled play and the chatter of glad Spanish filled my dreams. It was like being a child who hasn’t yet learned to speak or to understand words. But he knows the sounds of happiness and love. And anything he hears good is his. While I was sleeping there a red banner came into my mind. MERCHANTS LUMBERYARD. I thought about the lumberyard I wanted to start at Freedom’s Plaza. And then I saw Merchants. The front door was boarded up and the banner they’d hung from the electrical tower was in rags.

CARMELA AND THE KIDS and I had lunch in the early afternoon. We ate pork roast and potatoes fried with green chilis and garlic. There was strawberry pie for the ride back and the memory of smiling children who loved me because I had the power to bring their mother, like magic, out of season.

We exchanged numbers and I dropped her on a corner in Hollywood. We kissed.

“I hope I see you again,” I said.

“Call me.”

“I mean, I wasn’t in the best shape this time but I could take it up again sometime soon.”

She looked at me with twenty different replies in her eyes. The roulette of her emotions finally lit on a sad smile.

“Maybe,” she whispered.

I PARKED TWO BLOCKS AWAY and went to an outside phone booth on Hollywood. Somebody answered at Remo’s but Alamo hadn’t called in yet. It was only two o’clock, so I decided to drive down and see my dream.

But before I got back into my car a Ford Galaxy drove by, going east. The white man driving was corpulent, talking loud enough that I could hear him over the head of his passenger—a black-haired woman who had her back to me. She was leaning toward the fat man with one hand on his shoulder—the other hand looked as if it might have been in his lap.

I couldn’t be sure that it was Carmela.

I DROVE DOWN AVALON until coming to the vacant lot. The lot that used to be Merchants Lumberyard. Now it was nothing but hard dirt, grasshoppers, and weeds. Behind that was an electrical tower. You could hear the energy hum through it; you could almost feel the electricity sizzle.

There were still a few shreds of the Merchants flag left. I took out the photograph of Betty and looked for the palm trees that flanked the steel skeleton.

I SPENT THE NEXT COUPLE of hours driving up and down the streets that were parallel to Avalon around the vicinity of the tower. I’d been on every street for twenty blocks and was about to give up. Actually I had given up in my mind. But when I drove down Slauson Avenue on my way back to Avalon I decided to give it one more try.

The little bungalow was only two blocks back from the tower. I’d missed it the first time because someone had put up a small white picket fence around the yard and painted the coal-colored house a bright turquoise.

“YES?” The man who answered the door had on loose yellow slacks and a bright seersucker shirt of a similar hue. His hair was long and straightened, combed back in greasy waves and going gray at the ears.

“Excuse me, mister,” I said. I had over a dozen good lies to use. I was an old lover, an insurance man; I was a neighbor from another block, a friend with news from Marlon.

The man, who I recognized from the photograph, looked at me expectantly.

“My name is Ezekiel Rawlins,” I said. “And I’ve come here looking for Elizabeth Eady.”