Black Betty (21 page)

His forehead creased into the same pattern of ripples that flowed across his scalp.

“She’s not here,” he said. His voice was a baritone, so resonant that his words could have come from a song.

“I didn’t think so, but could we talk a few minutes?” I glanced past him into the house.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Ezekiel Rawlins,” I said again. “And you?”

“You come to my house and you don’t even know my name?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, mister,” I replied. “But I started lookin’ for Betty just to help out, and now, well, now I’m worried.”

He didn’t want me in his house. But he knew that he was going to have to deal with me. The minute I mentioned Betty I could tell that he wanted to know what I was all about.

“Come on in outta the sun,” he said, pushing open the screen.

“Thank you, Mr.… ?”

“Landry. My name is Felix Landry.”

I liked Mr. Landry’s house. It was a man’s house. Solid furniture of dark woods. And open windows not overtaken by frills or knickknacks. The living room had two brown chairs and a cream-colored sofa with no pillows. The sofa faced a fake fireplace in which sat an open gas-jet heater. There was a large walnut cabinet that held a radio and no TV. The carpet was a blanket from New Mexico and the wall was decorated with crude oil paintings done from photographs of everyday colored life.

“You want something?” he asked. “There’s some ham and a pecan pie.”

“No thanks. Let’s just talk.”

“What you got to say?”

We were both on our feet. It wasn’t like the standoff between me and Ortiz. We were two men worried and uncomfortable about what we had to talk about.

“Can I sit down?” I asked. And then, when we were seated, “It’s like I told you, Mr. Landry. I’m looking for Betty.”

“It’s like I told you, Mr. Rawlins,” he said, shaking his head. “Betty ain’t here. She comes around sometimes but I cain’t predict it.”

“When’s the last time you heard from her?”

“I don’t know. A month?”

“Was she… was she upset about anything?”

“No, no. I mean no more than she ever is when she come down from up there.” Felix stared through his wall up into Beverly Hills.

A spasm suddenly seized my shoulder and I winced.

“You mean up at Sarah Cain’s?” I asked through the pain.

“What’s this all about, Mr. Rawlins? I don’t even know you but you here talkin’ ’bout things that I don’t never say.”

“A man hired me for Sarah Cain to find Betty.”

“Find her? She live with them.”

“Not no more she don’t. She’s gone, and everywhere I look for her I find trouble.”

I couldn’t tell if Felix knew anything. The stern look on his face gave nothing away about what I was saying. But I got the feeling that there was a question he wanted to ask. He was wondering if I was the one to put his question to.

“I can’t help you, man,” he said at last. “I thought that she was still up there with them.”

“Did she like workin’ for the Cains?” I asked him, hoping to gain his trust.

“We don’t talk about that too much. She’d come down here to get away from things, you know?”

“Get away? Was it hard up there for her?”

“Men always give Betty a hard time. They get around her an’ start thinkin’ like they bulls.” Felix sneered. “They don’t wanna know her, they wanna break her down; to take away what makes her so fine.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Her freedom,” he said like I was a fool not to know.

“And you don’t want to take it?”

“No. I love her for what she is.” His words were so honest that I was ashamed for him.

“So you two is just friends?”

“Friends is the best thing you could be with Betty. Friends means that you love her and that you know her. Friends means you don’t own her but you still there.”

“Did Albert Cain think he owned her?”

“He does!” There were bitter tears in this strange man’s eyes.

“Not no more he don’t,” I said in the ironic lilt of my youth. “He’s dead. Been dead for over two weeks.”

Felix swallowed hard and banked his eyes at me.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Pretty sure.”

Felix brought his hands up to the sides of his neck. He rose up and walked toward the front door. A smile mixed in with a hint of fear played across his face. He came back to his chair and sat down for a few seconds but then he had to get up. He went around the room again. Then he pulled a yellow handkerchief from his pocket and spit into it.

“You say dead? That’s the old man Cain?” he asked me. He came to a halt in front of the gas-jet heater.

I nodded.

Felix wrung the handkerchief so hard that I thought he might squeeze the spit out of it. “And did Betty go away before that or after it?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

Felix looked like a glad dog in a Warner Brothers cartoon when he laughed. He howled as if I had just told the funniest joke that he had ever heard.

“Goddam!” he cried, shaking his head with hilarity. “Goddam!”

Felix just stood there, bent over like an old man, squeezing that rag and laughing. It was scary. Scary to see that much hatred in a man. Scary because I had the urge to laugh with him. I bit my tongue to keep a straight face.

After a few minutes Felix got ahold of himself. He pushed out his tongue and licked his lips, then he sat down on the sofa next to me. He brought his knees together and placed his hands on them to prove that he was under control.

“So what can I do for you?” he asked, implying that I had just done him a great favor.

“You got any idea where I could find Betty?”

He shook his head, still smiling.

“No,” he said. “An’ I wouldn’t say anyway, because if Betty wanted to go back to them then she would. But I will tell her that they lookin’—if she gets in touch with me.”

“Why do you hate the Cains so much, Mr. Landry?”

“I don’t hate’em at all. It’s just him.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said. “Because he took Betty an’ broke her. Broke her because she was so strong. He had her by the short hairs for so many years that she didn’t know how to leave even after he got sick.”

“What did he do to her?”

“We never talked about that,” he said. “All I could do was be here for her when she had a day off and he’d let her go. I’d cook up some chicken an’ we’d play Fats Waller and dance right here in this room. I’d push all the furniture back an’ me an’ Betty cut that rug to pieces.”

“She stayed with you?” I asked.

“Where else she gonna go? She didn’t wanna do for nobody. She needed somebody to take care’a her. I’m the only one ever took care’a Betty.” He patted the cushion between us. “I’d sleep right here and give her my bed. You know, I only sleep good when I’m out here on the sofa knowin’ that Betty is safe in my room.”

I wanted to ask, safe from what? But I knew that Felix wasn’t going to answer any real questions. He just liked to talk about Betty. I imagined him all dressed up, walking around his tiny house talking out loud as if she were there. Asking her what she thought about the peach sauce and who her favorite big band was.

“I don’t know where she is, Mr. Rawlins.” Felix broke me out of my vision of his dreams. “But I’ll tell her what you said.”

I DROVE ALL THE WAY out of Los Angeles County, all the way out to Riverside. I went so far that the roads became countrified as the sun went down. I pulled off the road into a vacant field and then I drove about half a mile to a place where Jesus and I sometimes set our nets for crayfish.

There was a stand of bay laurels and a big weeping willow that sat next to the little stream we fished in. The stream was dry at that time of year.

I pulled up under the willow and killed the light. The moon was just a sliver and the crickets were calling loud. There was a bitter scent from the laurels in the warm air.

I was thinking about Felix and his fierce platonic love and about Carmela and her offer of pain to me.

Every thought I had brought me back to Betty.

THREE DAYS AFTER Adray Ply dropped me into the mud I was on Betty’s trail again. I walked half a block behind her and Marlon and whatever other man she was with that night. Sometimes a whole night would go by and I wouldn’t even get to see her up close. But on other nights Betty would call to me, “Boy, come on over here,” and get me to go pick up some cigarettes or a pint. I kept my shirttails tucked in for the first time because of that woman.

I remembered one night just like that one out in Riverside. Betty was out walking with a rude man named Rufus George. He was a redheaded mulatto with big muscles and freckles around his yellow face. They had left Marlon playing dice in an alley and were down among the tenements in lower Fifth Ward sitting on a crate and swigging moonshine from a bottle I got for them. I watched them from across the street passing the bottle and kissing back and forth over the neck. Rufus’s big tongue looked like it was going to choke Betty. Finally she stood up and staggered across the street to me.

“Come here,” she said, her voice as thick as Rufus’s tongue.

I followed her across the street, past the crate that they had been sitting on, to an alleyway between two big buildings that stood high off the ground on stilts made from logs. Rufus was throwing a blanket he had down on the dirt there.

When he turned to us Betty shouted, “Rufus!” but with a little bit of a laugh in her voice. I looked at where she was staring and saw Rufus’s big uncircumcised thing hanging out of his pants. It was a deep reddish brown and more than half erect. It seemed to me like an elephant trunk when the great beast was about to trumpet.

“You keep a watch out for us, honey,” Betty whispered into my ear. Then she moved past me to Rufus. He folded his arms around her and her hands went down between them. Rufus beamed at me.

“You keep your eyes peeled for somebody comin’,” he said. “And don’t you be lookin’ at us neither.”

I always thought of that night as the first time I had sex.

I tried to look away but Betty kept calling out and I just had to make sure she was okay. At first I thought that they were play fighting. But then I saw the way that Rufus would touch Betty and how she would rub up close to him like a cat wanting a stroke. When they got passionate it scared me but I still couldn’t take my eyes away. I split my watch between their lovemaking and the street behind.

They must have been doing it for an hour when Rufus finally got up off of Betty. She cried, “Oh!” and reached for him but Rufus was already beyond reach. He turned around toward me holding that elephant’s trunk. He smiled at me while urinating a heavy splattering stream onto a flat rock. Maybe he was smiling because he thought I was in awe of his thing, but he didn’t know that what I was looking at was Betty lying there behind him. She had her hands down between her thighs and was rocking from side to side. Every once in a while a shiver would run from her knees up into her head.

I could feel every bone in my body.

“I DON’T WANT YOU TO HATE ME, BOY,” Betty was saying to me a little while later at the Cougar’s Tooth Café. I took her there for a plate of sausages and grits with cheese cornbread and turnip greens. I paid for the meal with the twenty-five cents Rufus gave me for keeping watch.

Rufus had said good-bye to Betty after zipping up his pants.

“Where you goin’?” Betty was up on her knees.

“I got to get home, honey,” he said in a deeply satisfied voice.

“What about me?” she demanded.

But Rufus didn’t answer. He flipped me a liberty quarter and walked down to the street under the light of the moon. I couldn’t believe that he was such a fool to walk off from Betty like that.

“I don’t hate you,” I said. “I like you a
whole
lot.”

Betty smiled and took my hand the way I’d seen her take her boyfriends’ hands.

“I know I shouldn’t’a done that with Rufus, but you know sometimes a girl will see somethin’ in a man that just ain’t there. You know what I mean, sugar?”

“Uh-huh.” I would have said yes to a plateful of cow pies.

“You a sweet boy, Easy. And you make Betty feel real good. You see, a man who really don’t like a girl at all will make her feel good so that he could do what me an’ Rufus was doin’. But then, when he finished wit’ his business, he remember that he don’t like you noways an’ he pull up his pants an’ leave you like somethin’ in the toilet.”

Betty was holding my hand so hard that it hurt but I didn’t try to pull away. All I wanted was to be a man with Betty out under that building. I’d stay with her under there until the sun shined, until the cotton grew high, until water ran uphill.

THE DESIRE TO HELP her came back into me the way it had all those years before.

I went to sleep remembering Rufus. A few nights later he came swaggering into Corcheran’s bar looking for Betty. He found her with Marlon and Adray Ply.

Adray cut Rufus so bad that he died from infection a month later.

Betty didn’t cry for him, and neither did I.

I WAS STARTLED AWAKE by a cackle in the early dawn. Two crows were scrabbling in a thin film of dew that had formed on the hood of my car. I’d been sleeping sitting up behind the steering wheel. My left shoulder was stiff and I sent up a silent prayer that infection wouldn’t get me like it got Rufus.

The crows stood so close to each other that their tails were touching. They were staring off in different directions—watching each other’s back.

I wished that I had some kind of brother at arms to rely on. All I ever had was Mouse, and standing side by side with him was like pressing up against a porcupine.

When I roused, one of the crows took off immediately. But the other one cocked his eye at me and looked me up and down. His hard dull eye was the whole history of the natural world taking me in, sizing me up and classifying me a fool.

Even getting out of the car and slamming the door didn’t rid me of my black angel. He just hopped to the side to keep his eye on my disgusting display of human sloth. He called out to his cowardly partner as I relieved myself against the trunk of the tree. He opened his mouth and spread his wings when I struck a match to light my cigarette.