Black Betty (3 page)

“I better get over there after I look for 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.

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.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Forget you!” That was Ortiz. If he and I were ever to find ourselves alone in a room there’d come a dead man soon after.

But Jackson ignored his friend. “This is my bookie box, Easy. Ortiz here used t’work for the phone company ’fore he got sent to jail. He give me some numbers. I give out one’a them numbers for this here box and put it up on the pole. Now my clients got this number and they calls it. All Ortiz gotta do is crawl up on the pole an’ get the tape.”

“What if they get yo’ box? What if it breaks?”

“That shit ain’t gonna break. I made it strong and put rubber in the cracks.”

Jackson was smart enough to be the first man murdered on the moon.

“Ortiz here collect and I do the books. We gots twelve hundred reg’lars and a bankroll that’a choke a mule. An’, man, you should see all the pussy we gets up here.” Jackson held up his hands as if he were amazed by his own story. “I got me a brand-new red Caddy right downstairs.”

“White boys ain’t gonna like that, Jackson.”

“How they gonna find me?”

“On a pickup.”

Jackson’s eyes darted toward Ortiz for a moment. A quick grin crossed his face, and suddenly I knew the whole story. Jackson never built anything that would last. He couldn’t hold down a regular job. He never had a girlfriend for long. So he meets this crazy-in-a-rage man and comes up with a plan to take a thousand dollars a week. When the cops or the white mob catch on they grab Ortiz, maybe even kill him. Ortiz loves little Jackson. Jackson was probably the first man he met who was like him but didn’t try to take something. Take something? Hell! Jackson was making him more money than he knew how to count. He’d die for Mr. Blue without ever giving him up. And then Jackson would move to another hole—not leaving even two dimes to mark his friend’s eyes.

I wanted out of that room. I stood up so fast that Ortiz was taken off guard. He fumbled at his pocket.

“Take it easy, brother,” I said. “I just gotta get outta here. I came ’cause I needed t’find somebody likes to gamble.” As I said it I wondered if I was going to do to Betty what was certain to happen to this scaly fool.

“Who?” Jackson asked.

“His name is Marlon Eady but the street calls him Bluto. Bluto.” I said it twice just to be sure that I wasn’t dreaming.

Jackson got a cagey look about him. “What you want him for?”

“Don’t fuck wit’ me, Jackson,” I said. “Either you know or you don’t. Either you gonna tell me or you ain’t. So let’s get down to it, ’cause I got places to be.”

I was getting tired of Ortiz, all stiff with his hand on his pocket. Jackson was scared. He never liked it when I got mean. He had the coward’s sense of survival.

“Never heard of him,” he said. “But I could look around.”

“Yah,” I said. “Maybe you should.”

YOU COULD TELL by some people’s houses that they came to L.A. to live out their dreams. Home is not a place to dream. At home you had to do like your father did and your mother. Home meant that everybody already knew what you could do and if you did the slightest little thing different they’d laugh you right down into a hole. You lived in that hole. Festered in it. After a while you either accepted your hole or you got out of it.

There were all kinds of ways out. You could get married, get drunk, get next to somebody’s wife. You could take a shotgun and eat it for a midnight snack.

Or you could move to California.

In California they wouldn’t laugh at you, or anybody. In California the sun shone three hundred and more days in the year. In California you could work until you dropped. And when you got up there was another job waiting for you.

In California you could paint the slats of your house like a rainbow and put a smiling face on your front door. You could have a caged rabbit and chickens right out in the yard and big granite animals for children to climb on. You could, like Georgette Harris, put a sign on your wire gate saying LITTLE ANIMALS NURSERY SCHOOL AND DAY CARE. Nobody cared. Nobody asked you, “What makes you a schoolteacher?” They’d just take you at your word. And if the law came down and asked for some papers you’d just move a mile or so further on, hang up the same sign, and collect children like a crow taking in glass.