Black Betty (4 page)

Georgette was sitting on her front porch smiling down at her family of kids. Next to her on a slender black table sat a telephone that led from the house on a long, knotted cord.

Little black boys and girls, a dozen of them, ran ragged in their dusty pen. There was a rubber pool that overflowed with six children and about a cupful of urine-laced, tepid water. Everybody was screaming for joy. That’s what children do—they scream because life is just too much for them but they don’t know it yet.

When I walked into the yard everything went quiet. The kids all stopped and stared at me. Crusty-nosed boys and girls with their short skirts turned up over their underwear. A couple of them were bleeding from fresh scrapes on their knees. All those little bright eyes on me were just waiting to get back to the business of noise. Not one of them looked hungry or tired. And I’m willing to bet that they all would look back to the days of Mrs. Harris’s yard with the greatest pleasure. Running wild with the animals before the hunters started tracking them down.

“Easy,” Georgette called.

I said hello back but I’m sure she didn’t hear me. The children took her greeting to me as a sign that they could go back to calling up the dead.

I made it up to the porch and nodded. There was no extra chair up there so I leaned against a porch beam.

“What you want, honey?” she asked me.

I didn’t really know Georgette. She lived in my old neighborhood, down near Watts. But I had moved away from there, with Jesus and Feather, to West Los Angeles.

I decided on a new neighborhood soon after my wife left me. My old friend Primo and his family took my old house over. And I took my kids to an anonymous place where people didn’t know me; where no one asked painful questions about my wife and daughter; where no one knew enough about me to question my legal guardianship of Jesus and Feather. The only agreement between us was love and mutual need—not the kind of agreement they like in courts.

So I left Watts. At first I’d bought a house in a middle-class black neighborhood. But then my money problems forced me to sell and rent the place on Genesee.

Georgette lived on McKinley between Eightieth and Eighty-first. The nursery school had been her dream ever since she was a little girl in Minnesota.

You had to have a better education than Georgette was ever likely to get to have that kind of school, so she came to L.A. She took in the children of a man I knew and sometimes I’d pick up one of his boys to play with Feather.

Georgette had her dream, but as so often happens, her dream didn’t pay the bills.

The big black telephone barked and Georgette was quick to snatch it up.

“Animals,” she said. Then, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, she shouted, “Leo, get outta that dirt, boy!

“What’s that?” she asked into the phone. Then she wrote something down on a sheet of paper that she kept on a clipboard in her lap, and hung up.

“Yes, Easy?”

I was stumped. It seemed to me almost crazy that I was standing there among all those wild shrieks, next to this placid bookie. It didn’t make any sense. I actually forgot what I was there for.

“Um,” I mumbled. “You, uh, you been doin’ okay?”

“Yes?” Georgette wondered what I wanted.

“I, uh, um, ah,” I faltered, then I laughed and sat down on the stairs like I was one of her charges. “I’m sorry, Georgette. You know, I got outta bed at five and I been all over town since then. I seen people don’t even want me in their house. I been with bad men and gamblers and…” I remembered what I had to ask. “And seein’ all these beautiful babies you got here just didn’t fit.”

Georgette smiled. If you said something about her kids she was happy. California worked for some people.

“I’m lookin’ for a guy called Bluto,” I said. The slant of the sun was coming right down at my eye because there were few trees landscaped in Georgette’s neighborhood.

Georgette shook her head. It didn’t surprise me. Maybe Marlon had gotten tired of throwing his money away.

“What’s his real name?” she asked.

“Marlon,” I said. “Marlon Eady.”

“Oooooh, you mean Ed Sullivan.”

“You know’im?”

“Oh yeah, I know Marlon. We ain’t never called him no Bluto. He had some kinda accident that got the bones in his neck fused. I think he said that it was a cop beatin’ him that did it. They called him No-Neck at first and then, after that show started, they called him Ed Sullivan. He really kinda looked like him. Yeah, baby, he been puttin’ down bets with me since 1946. Mmm-hm. Marlon give the spread mo’ money than any other po’ soul out here.” Georgette looked out over her children as if they were the ones who called in their bets. Who knows? Maybe they would all grow up calling their old nanny to put two dollars on some nag’s nose.

“You know his sister?”

“Betty?” Georgette got wistful. “All I know is that Marlon’s sun rise and set on that girl. You get him talkin’ ’bout his sister an’ he could go on for days.”

“You know her?”

“Uh-uh. Marlon said that she lived at some rich people’s house up in them canyons somewhere. She stayed up there all the time.”

“You know where I could find him?”

“No, baby. He was workin’ doin’ civilian work at the navy yards down in San Diego for a while but he got sick. He had somethin’ wit’ his lungs and the work just got too much. He moved out in the desert. I don’t know where.” But there was a thought brewing at the back of the schoolteacher’s brain. I waited to hear its conclusion.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s right.… Linda! You get up offa Darleen! She done told you she don’t wanna play!” Georgette stared at a little girl who was standing astride her prone playmate.

When the girl moved off, Georgette, still staring hard, said, “Marlon was bettin’ pretty thick wit’ Terry Tyler there for a while not too long ago. Terry used to stay here wit’ me when he was a baby.”

“That’s the boxer Terry T?”

“Mmm-hm. That’s him.”

“You know where I could find Terry?”

“No. Uh-uh. I don’t go to the fights. An’ his parents both done passed away. But you know Marlon was like Terry’s godfather. He used to always be takin’ him around. Half the time he’d come over to my old house to pick him up.”

I didn’t want to move. If Georgette had offered me a glass of milk and a graham cracker I would have toddled off to her living room and napped the afternoon by.

But I was a grown man. No more sweet cookies and sweet dreams for me.

“You take care now,” I said, pulling myself up to a standing position. A small boy wearing tiny little overalls and no shirt stared at me. He was two and a half feet tall and I was a giant. I relished the moment of his gaping awe. I wasn’t going to be that powerful in the world that waited for me.

I DROVE DOWN MANCHESTER to La Cienega, then up La Cienega to Venice Boulevard. When I got to Robertson I went northward. I cruised up past Jesus’s high school toward Airdrome and the small branch of the L.A. library there.

It was a solitary library, barely used on weekdays. Miss Eto was the librarian. She’d been living in the wine country up north when her family was relocated to a concentration camp during World War Two. Her parents both died while detained. Miss Eto came down to work in L.A. after the war. She was a pleasant woman. I’d helped her out once when a man, Charles Emory, kept coming around the library and bothering her.

One day when I was there to pick up Jesus I noticed that she was upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that a man had been bothering her. I don’t think she would have mentioned it except that Emory had just been there and she had the feeling that Jesus was in danger too.

Emory would come around when the library was almost empty and whisper about things he had done to Japanese women and children during the war.

“Why don’t you go to the cops?” I asked her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Never go to the police.”

Maybe that’s why I helped her.

I hung around the library for a few days until Emory came back. He was a short and pudgy white man sporting brand-new jeans, turned up a full six inches at the cuff, and a white shirt. His face was flaccid and mean.

I followed Emory out to a small house on Venice just a little west of National. When I was sure that the house was his I called an acquaintance named Alamo Weir. Alamo was a scrawny, beat-up old white man who had saved my life once when I was in jail on false charges. Because he’d saved me I threw work his way now and again.

As I got to know L.A. over the years I found myself roaming outside my native black community, a community that had been transplanted from southern Texas and Louisiana. When I had to work in the white world, Alamo was the perfect tool. He was crazy and naturally criminal. He would have hated Negroes if it wasn’t for World War One. He felt that all those white generals and politicians had set up the poor white trash the same way black folks were set up.

He was right.

I told Alamo to check Emory out and I spent all of my extra time hanging around the library.

I thought that we were going to have to try to scare Emory. I didn’t like the idea, because that kind of thing can backfire. But as it turned out we had a better bet.

It only took about a week. Emory had been in the army and now he was dealing in stolen arms. He was moving M1 rifles and handguns through his garage.

Alamo bought Emory some drinks at a bar the white man frequented, and before you know it Alamo was buying U.S. issue for seventy-five dollars a weapon. I made a call to a man I didn’t like in Washington, D.C. He gave me twenty-five hundred dollars through his agents in L.A. and I gave him Emory’s address.

It made the papers. Senior Agent Craxton of the FBI announced the predawn raid on the house.

The day before the raid I told Miss Eto that she didn’t have to worry about being bothered anymore. The next morning I showed her the article in the library’s copy of the
Examiner.

“That’s your boy,” I said.

Ever since that day I had a friend in the library. Anything I wanted to know, any little piece of information at all. Miss Eto loved me. She loved me in a way that wasn’t American at all. If I had fallen and broken my back, little Miss Eto would have fed me with a spoon in her own house for fifty years.

“DOES MR. EADY have a phone?” Miss Eto asked me.

“Maybe so, but you know, I kinda doubt it. Marlon always lived close to the bone. It used to be a coin toss if he could pay the rent.”

“How about some job? Who did he work for?”

“That’s what I was thinkin’ too,” I said. “I heard he did civilian work for the navy yards down in San Diego. He quit because of his lungs.”

“You just sit,” she told me. “Read something.”

I tried to make like I could help her but she wouldn’t hear of it. So I sat at one of the long tables and put my head down on folded arms.

For a long time I just sat there, enjoying my eyes being closed. But after a while I fell into a kind of half-sleep. There was Bruno again, laid up in his pine-veneered pressboard coffin; innocent, with all the swagger gone. His face and crossed hands were waxy, like artificial fruit. I stood behind his sisters, five of them, all in black and crying over the only son born to their parents. They swayed back and forth with their knees so weak I was afraid they’d fall.

I couldn’t bear their grief.

The sounds of women crying followed me down into sleep. It was like being lowered into the grave myself. Darker and darker. The crying turned into shouts and suddenly I knew that it was me yelling, “Don’t put me down there with him! Let me up!”

“Mr. Rawlins.” A little mouse was eating at my fingers. “Mr. Rawlins?”

When I opened my eyes I saw Miss Eto pushing a scrap of paper at me.

“I got it.” She was smiling. I smiled too because she had saved me from the dream.

“He lives in Mecca,” she said.

“Where?”

“Mecca. It’s out around Joshua Tree National Monument. I don’t know if he lives in the town. I don’t think so. His address is RFD.”

“How’d you get it?”

“I called the navy in San Diego and told them that our letters come back from down there. I said that we needed to write to him. Then they said that if he quit because of medical problems maybe I could get the information from Washington or from the insurance company they use—Patriot Trust in San Diego.” She smiled. “I knew that with Washington you have to work through the mail. But I talked to a nice lady at Patriot.”

“Mm,” I said like a barroom intellectual. “Thanks, Miss Eto.” I had the strange urge to kiss the tiny woman. Maybe she even leaned toward me a shade. But kissing wasn’t in the program between us. I shook her hand, gave her a quick military nod, and marched out of there.

THERE WAS STILL SPACE in southern California in those days. The desert was an old place inhabited by people who were original Californians. Desert men and women in pickup trucks stopping at diners that had bottomless cups of coffee for a nickel, or at the occasional oasis where piped-in water fed date palms and lush flowering cacti. Railroad tracks ran along the side of the flimsy ribbon of a highway and the trains went so fast that they seemed to come barreling out of nowhere and then, just as fast, they were gone.

Civilization was scant out there. You drove for hours seeing nobody and nothing. The air was thin and the only water for miles around was in the three glass jugs on the seat next to me in the car. I refilled all three in Mecca’s sole gas station.

THE POSTAL CLERK didn’t know where Marlon lived but she said that he got his mail at a general store about forty miles away.

“He told me once,” the jowly white woman said, “that he just had one’a them tar shacks. You mostly got yer tar shacks up to the north. You could just take the road out that way and ask at the crossroads store. That’s where he picks up his mail. I bet they know right where Mr. Eady lives. An’ if’n they don’t you could just suck down sodas and camp out a couple’a days—he’s bound to show up sooner or later.”