Black Betty (5 page)

She wasn’t joking.

On either side of the road there was nothing for as far as I could see. The nothingness ended in lifeless hills. I had both of the windows open and was through my water supply before I was half the way there. The radio said that it was one hundred and sixteen degrees. My light green pants had turned dark green with sweat. The desert is like the worst felon in San Quentin. It’s a senseless killer barren of any sign of intelligence.

But the desert is also beautiful. It’s hard to tell at first sight. It stays in the range of the lighter shades. Buff and yellow and gray like a clear sky a minute after sunset. Most life forms are small and hard out there. Tiny little bugs with long legs to keep them off the hot sod or with giant gaudy red claws to fight off a world far larger than them. Once every four or five years it rains enough for little puddles to form. In the mud hump-backed crustacean shrimp, who had reached the end of their evolutionary trek before the first dinosaurs appeared, hatch from pebble-hard eggs. They mate and die quickly. A week later desert blossoms, so tiny that you have to get on your knees to see them, break out everywhere. They’re bright and strawlike; dry and rough because the desert will suck any moisture right away like some insane god pulling the souls out of his children before they’ve had the chance to live.

I reached the general store and gas station after thirty-seven miles. The weathered wood walls of the structure didn’t stand up straight anymore. Instead they leaned inward around a once flat tin roof that had buckled and now looked like a wave threatening to roll right down the front of the store.

The only sign was a round Coca-Cola poster that, once red, had bleached out into a weak pink color. The gas pump next to the front door looked like something out of a 1930s movie.

I stopped and got out, waiting for the attendant to come running from inside.

Nobody came.

There was no shade on that side of the building. I hoped that there was air conditioning inside the ramshackle house. A fan maybe, or just one of those Coke machines.

I stopped at the door. Maybe this wasn’t even a store at all. The sign and the gas pump were old. There was no other outward indication of a working business. Maybe this was just someone’s house with just a few leftovers from the old store.

I looked out over the horizon. There wasn’t another structure in sight. So I rapped my knuckles on the front door. It was fabricated from many layers of wood. So many layers that I couldn’t get a sure knock. The sound I did make was nothing more than the rustling of kisses in a close hallway at night.

“Yeah,” he said from inside. “Come on in.”

The voice sounded relaxed, so I wasn’t surprised to see the man reclined on a sofa chair in the middle of what looked like a parlor. A refrigerator hummed happily in a corner of the shapeless room. There were open shelves that ran along the uneven walls. On the shelves were dry goods and some bottles and cans. It might have been a store and then again it could have been a careless man’s home. There was an electric fan blowing over him. He wore only boxer shorts, a T-shirt, and a ruffled fisherman’s cap. He was long and skinny but not too tall. When he saw me he got up immediately. At the back of the room was a large podium-like piece of furniture. It wasn’t until he was behind this whitewashed stand that he said, “Can I help you?”

I froze dead in my tracks. I was sure that he had a handgun or worse back there and I didn’t want to make any move to cause him to use it.

“Afternoon,” I said in a voice far too happy for the heat.

“What can I do ya for?” He even smiled at me. I was more afraid of his robin’s-egg eyes than I was of the gun I suspected.

“All I want is about a dozen’a them Cokes you got,” I said, hearing the scared voice of a small homeless boy in my throat. “And some directions.”

“Three to a customer,” he answered. He nodded toward the small box refrigerator. We both knew that he wasn’t going to move.

I walked over to the box and lifted the lid. As nervous as I was, I enjoyed the cold coming out at me. I lingered, taking the Cokes out from between homemade ham sandwiches and an old-time bottle of gin that was stoppered with a cork.

“What kinda directions you need, son?”

He was from the South. If I hadn’t been able to tell by his accent I sure could have from the liberties he took with my age. But I had to remember—I was out in the middle of nowhere, a black spot against a white backdrop. Even if I could have moved quickly enough to keep from being shot, what was the value of killing a white man for belittling me? I’d killed white men before in my life and that hadn’t changed a thing.

But still, I hated him. I even hated the air because it reeked of his sweat.

“Marlon Eady,” I said through tight lips.

“The nigger?” The crooked grin made his leathery gaunt face into a kind of evil crescent.

I’d been out of the South for too long. The hate for this man must have shown from deep down where we all learned as children to keep it hidden.

“Oh.” The sparse beard and mustache bristled around his mock smile like brier thorns. “Don’t get me wrong, son. We all call him that around here—he likes it. They call me Dickhead. Now wouldn’t you druther be called Nigger than Dickhead?”

It was the heat; that’s what made me a fool.

If I had thought about moving he would have had the time to shoot me. But I didn’t think. I ran right at him, turning over the podium and wresting a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from his grip. He fell back against a pegboard and down into a variety of hand drills, screwdrivers, and hammers that hung there.

“What the hell?” Dickhead tried to get up, but I put my foot on his chest and pressed until he gave.

“Stay down, brother,” I said as if I were talking to somebody from my part of town. “And tell me where I can find Mr. Marlon Eady.”

“You in trouble, boy,” Dickhead informed me. And for all that I was on top right then I felt a thrill of fear down through my testicles.

I swung the barrel of the sawed-off toward his head, firing one round at the end of the arc. A hole the size of a shotput appeared in the floor next to Dickhead’s shocked face. He shouted and tried to jump up, clapping his hands over his ears. I flipped the gun around and slammed the heavy butt into his cheekbone. Luckily he had the good sense to fall down and be still, because if he had stayed trying to get up I would have hit him again.

“Stay down!”

Dickhead cringed. Saliva and blood came from his mouth, mucus poured out of his nostrils, and baby tears welled in his eyes. But I didn’t enjoy it. One of the problems with so many oppressed people is that they don’t have the stomach to give what they get. I hurt that simple white man because I was scared of him. If he’d called me boy or nigger one more time I might have started gibbering myself.

“Just tell me where I could find Marlon Eady and I’ll leave you be.” My tongue was reverting back to southern ways. This man had defeated me and didn’t even know it.

All he could do was shiver and nod on the floor.

I went over to the refrigerator and got the bottle of gin. I pulled out the cork and handed it to him.

“Drink it.”

He poured the stuff at his mouth but most of it just dribbled down his face.

“Do it again.”

The second drink was better. He probably thought it was his last. He sobered up a little and sniffed back the snot in his nose.

“Tell me where I could find Marlon Eady.”

“The road don’t have a name,” he whined. “But it’s the third one on your left about six miles back the way you come.”

“Gimme the shells for this thing,” I said. And when the fear came back into his eyes, “I’m just takin’ ’em with me.”

He led me to a small room behind where the podium lay. It was a closet with a shelf that he used for his kitchen. On it sat a toaster, a two-burner hot plate, and a slice of white bread that had curled into a hard chip in the heat. Behind the toaster was a partly full box of twelve-gauge shells.

He handed them to me.

“Why you pull that gun on me, fool?” I was shaking with rage at this man who had come close to making me murder him. I was so mad that I had to take my finger from the live trigger. “You pull a gun on everybody come in your store?”

“I thought you wanted to rob me.”

“Rob you? Rob what?” I yelled.

I swung the barrel over his head in frustration. Dickhead ducked down low.

I took him outside, pushing and shaking him from behind so that he wouldn’t have the time to note my license plate. I made him get on his knees while I took off the rear plate. Behind his store there was an old Studebaker station wagon, painted yellow like a taxi. The key was right in the ignition. I took the key, the distributor cap head, the battery, and the steering wheel and made Dickhead put them all into my trunk. Back in his house I tore the phone out of the wall and brought it out to my car.

“You can’t leave me out here with no car and no way to call,” he wailed.

“I’m gonna go out to where you said Marlon’s place was, and if his house is there I’ll leave your stuff at the turnoff you gave me. Now sit’own an’ wait till I’m gone.”

We were both happy that I didn’t have to kill him.

AS SOON AS THE LITTLE STORE was out of the range of the rearview mirror I thought, “Suppose one of his friends or a customer drives by when he’s trying to get down to the turnoff?” And “What if he had a pistol hidden in there and he lays at the road for me?”

But then I put my fears away. Sure, something like that might happen, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had a shotgun and thirteen cartridges. I was ready to die if that was the way it had to be.

Poor men are always ready to die. We always expect that there’s somebody out there who wants to kill us. That’s why I never questioned that a white man would pull out his gun when he saw a Negro coming. That’s just the way it is in America.

THE THIRD TURNOFF went on for miles. On either side of the road were great stands of cactus that seemed to quiver with the desire to stab. Every once in a while a pile of stones loomed off the road. These piles were up to twenty-five feet high and didn’t seem to follow any logic in the plan of the desert. Just a stack of stones that might have made a halfway decent shelter against the hard sun. But nobody put them there.

Nobody put me there either.

The shack was tar paper and chicken wire tightly wrapped around a box frame that stood away from the ground on stumpy cement blocks. There was one big step up and the door didn’t even have a knob. Instead it sported a brass handle like you’d put on a kitchen cabinet.

First I tried knocking on the plasterboard door, but that didn’t make much more noise than rapping on sponge. The window was too high, so finally I banged on the wall and called out, “Marlon! Marlon Eady!”

No answer. As a matter of fact there wasn’t any sound at all. The afternoon desert was so quiet that I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. Sweat trickled down my chest and legs. My head hurt and I felt light-headed from the heat. Somewhere out behind me was a crazy white man maybe on my trail.

I walked into Marlon’s house cursing myself for a fool.

It was a neat little place. Nothing fancy. The uncured wood floor was clean and well-swept, which is saying something in the desert, where sand and grit find a way in everywhere.

The chairs were wooden crates, the bed was just a mattress on the floor. On a cardboard box next to the bed was a bell-topped alarm clock that had run down at ten-thirteen—no telling whether it was morning or night. There was also a picture of Betty. A more recent portrait in a smart flowery dress sitting in a photographer’s modeling chair. It was in a gilded stand-up oval frame. I put that in my pocket and looked around a little more.

He used a big copper bowl for a sink. No running water at all. I figured that the water had been standing in that bowl for more than two days because of the dozen or so crickets and desert beetles who’d drowned themselves in it.

Across the room from the bed was the only real furniture. A maple-stained cedar chest of drawers that sported a four-foot mirror of real glass on top. Next to that was a metal rack from which hung Marlon’s clothes. He might have fallen on hard times but he still had nice clothes. A dozen suits of every hue. Gabardine, straight wool, sharkskin, and silk. There were only two cotton suits designed for the desert heat. He had seven hats suspended from hooks that were jabbed into the tar-paper wall.

In the chest I found silk handkerchiefs, silk undershirts, and even silk underpants. There was one small drawer with only jewelry in it: ruby cuff links, a gold ring decorated with five diamond chips, a silver money clip with a roll of two-dollar bills (each one with a corner torn off to avoid bad luck) in its clasp, and various overlarge belt buckles as a Texan is liable to have.

There were sweaters and socks and a stack of magazines that exhibited scantily clad black models in blurred black-and-white photographs.

Under these I found a stack of letters, but none of them were from Betty. I was almost sick from the heat in that house. Marlon had probably left because of the heat. It was too hot for anybody out there.

But I didn’t come all that way for nothing.

There was a pair of pants on the floor next to the cardboard box. Work pants. The kind of threadbare trousers you wore around the house. At first I thought that Marlon had left them when he’d dressed up to leave. But his wallet was in the back pocket. He didn’t have much cash. Just eight dollars and three nickels in the change pouch. But he made up for that with a personal check for five thousand dollars made out to him—not the kind of thing I’d leave just lying around.

OUTSIDE AGAIN I went to look around back.

There was a tin outhouse behind the shack. When I pulled open the door a pack of leaping mice came racing out around and between my feet, followed by the foul smell of rotted human waste. The toilet seat was an aluminum funnel that thickened toward the rim so as to provide a seat.