White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  I waved at Zeppo and he shimmied at me, grimacing and winking. I tried to catch Rafael’s eye but he was intent on the two rubes he’d snagged. Rafael was a short Negro, more gray in hue than he was brown. He was missing the greater portion of his front teeth and his left eye was dead in its socket. Rubes would look at Rafael and know that they could outsmart him. And maybe they thought they wouldn’t have to pay even if they lost; Rafael didn’t look like he could whip a poodle.

  But Rafael Gordon carried a cork-hafted black iron fishing knife in his sleeve, and he always had a few feet of tempered steel chain in his pocket.

  “Just show me where the red ball lands,” he sang. “Just show me the red ball and two dollars. Double your money and howl tonight.” He moved the fake walnut shells from side to side, lifting them at various times to show what was, and what wasn’t.

  A big man I’d never seen before pointed at a shell. I turned away and walked toward my home.

  I was thinking about the dead party girl; about how she was killed with no reason except maybe how she looked or who she looked like. I shuddered at the memory of how natural she appeared. When a woman forgets that she’s supposed to be pretty and on display she looks like that murdered girl did; just somebody who’s tired and needs to rest.

  That got me thinking about Regina and what she looked like. There was no comparison, of course. Regina was royal in her bearing. She never wore cheap shiny clothes or costume jewelry. When she danced it was not in that herky-jerky way that most young women moved. Regina’s dancing was fluid and graceful like a fish in water or a bird on air.

  The memory of that dead girl hung around me. I made it down to my front gate and looked to see that Regina and Edna were okay in the living room, I could see them through the window, then I got into my car and headed out to Hooper Street. Mofass had his real estate office on Hooper at that time. It was on the second floor of a two-story building. I owned the building, though nobody but Mofass knew that. The bottom floor was rented to a Negro bookstore that specialized in inspirational literature. Chester and Edwina Remy rented the place. Like all the tenants in my seven buildings, the Remys paid their rent to Mofass. He gave it to me sometime after that.

  I knew Mofass would be in, because he worked late seven nights a week. All he ever did was work and smoke cigars.

  The staircase that led to Mofass’s door was exposed to the outside. It groaned and sagged as I made my way. Before I ever got to the door I could hear Mofass coughing.

  I came in to find him crumpled over his maple desk, making a sound like an engine that won’t turn over.

  “I told ya to stop that smoking, Mofass. That cigar gonna kill you.”

  Mofass lifted his head. His jowly face made him resemble a bulldog. His pathetic gesture made him look even more canine. Tears from all that coughing fell from his rheumy eyes. He held the cigar out in front of his face and stared at it in terror. Then he smashed the black stogie in a clear glass ashtray and pushed himself upright in his swivel chair.

  He stifled a cough and clenched his fists.

  “How you doin’?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he whispered, and then he gagged on a cough.

  I took the chair he had for clients and waited for any business he might have had to discuss. We’d known each other for many years. Maybe that’s why I had two minds about Mofass’s illness. On one hand I was always sorry to see a man in misery. But then again, Mofass was a coward who had betrayed me once. The only reason I hadn’t killed him was that I hadn’t proven to be a better man.

  “What’s goin’ on?” I asked.

  “Ain’t nuthin’ happenin’ but the rent.”

  We both smiled at that.

  “I guess that’s okay,” I said.

  Mofass held up his hand for me to be quiet and took a porcelain jar from his desk. He unscrewed it, held it to his nose and mouth, and took a deep breath. The smell of camphor and menthol stung my nose.

  “You hear ’bout the latest girl?” Mofass asked, his voice back from death’s door.

  “No, uh-uh.”

  “They found her on a Hundred and Tenth. Out near you. They said that there was nearly twenty cops out there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Good-time girls. Ain’t havin’ such a good time no more,” he said. “Crazy man killin’ young things. It’s a shame.”

  Mofass pulled a cigar from his vest pocket. He was about to bite off the tip when he saw me staring. He put the death stick back and said, “Gonna be trouble fo’us.”

  “Trouble how?”

  “Lotsa yo’ young tenants these girls, man. Single girls or deserted ones. They got a baby and a job, and on Friday night they go out with they friends lookin’ fo’a man.”

  “So what? You think whoever doin’ this gonna kill all our renters?”

  “Naw, naw. I ain’t all that stupid. I might not got no college under my belt like you but I could see what’s in front’a my nose just as good as the next man.”

  “An’ what is that?”

  “Georgette Wykers and Marie Purdue told me that they movin’ in together—for’ p’otection. They said that they could take care of their kids better an’ be safe too. Course they only be payin’ half the rent.”

  “So? What could I do about that?”

  Mofass smiled. Grinned. I could see all the way back to his last, gold-capped molar. When Mofass showed that kind of pleasure it meant that he had been successful where money was concerned.

  “You don’t need to do nuthin’, Mr. Rawlins. I told’em that the rules didn’t ’low no doublin’ up. Then I told Georgette that if she moved in with Marie, then Marie could th’ow her out ’cause Georgette’s name wouldn’t be on the contract.”

  If Mofass made money on the day he died he would die a happy man.

  “Don’t bother with it, man,” I said. “Let them girls do what they want. You know they’s a thousand people comin’ out here ev’ry day. Somebody move out an’ somebody else just move in.”

  Mofass shook his head sadly and slow. He couldn’t take a deep breath but he felt sorry for me. How could I be so stupid and not bleed the whole world for a dollar and some change?

  “You got anything else t’say, Mofass?”

  “Them white men called again today.”

  A representative of a company called DeCampo Associates had been calling Mofass about some property I owned in Compton. They’d offered to buy it twice; the last time for more than twice what the land was worth.

  “I don’t wanna hear about it. If they want that property it must be worth more than they wanna pay.”

  I walked over to the window, because I didn’t want to argue about it again. Mofass thought that I should sell the land because there was a quick profit. He was good in business from day to day, but Mofass didn’t know how to plan for the future.

  “They got another deal now,” he said. “You wanna say no to a hundred thousand dollars?”

  Out the window I saw a little boy pulling a blue wagon past a streetlamp. He had thick soda bottles in the wagon. Six or seven of them. At most that was fourteen cents, enough for three candy bars, just about. The boy was brown with bare feet and short pants and a striped T-shirt. He was deep in thought as he pulled that wagon. Maybe he was thinking about his spelling lesson from last week. Maybe he wondered at the right way to spell kangaroo. But I suspected that that boy was wondering how to get the one cent he needed to buy a third candy bar.

  “A hundred thousand?”

  “They wanna meet with you,” Mofass rasped.

  I heard him lighting a match and turned just in time to see him take his first drag.

  “What is it they want from us, William?” Mofass’s real name was William Wharton.

  Mofass, taking on a conspiratorial tone, said, “The county gonna develop Willoughby Place into a main road, a four-lane avenue.”

  I owned nine acres on one side of Willoughby. It came as part of a deal I made to find an old Japanese gardener’s lost proper
ty.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “These men will lend you the money for development. Hundred thousand dollars and they take you for a partner.”

  “Cain’t wait t’give me money, huh?”

  “All you gotta do is give me the okay, Mr. Rawlins, an’ I’ll tell’em that the board done voted.”

  Whenever anybody wanted to do business with me they did it through Mofass. He represented the corporation I’d formed to do business. The board was a committee of one.

  I had to laugh to myself. Here I was a woodchopper’s son. A Negro and an orphan and from the South too. There was never a chance in hell that I’d ever see five thousand dollars but here I was being courted by white real estate men.

  “Set up a meeting with them,” I said. “I want to get a look at these men. But don’t get yo’ greedy hopes up, Willy, prob’ly won’t nuthin’ come from it.”

  Mofass grinned, breathing in smoke through his teeth.

  — 4 —

  IT WAS A WARM EVENING. I parked down toward the end of my block. Zeppo and Rafael were gone. The cardboard box that Rafael had used for his table was flattened on the sidewalk. A dollop of blood festooned by a cracked tooth adorned the curb. Somebody had learned a bitter lesson in Rafael Gordon’s school of sleight-of-hand.

  The drying blood made me think of the dead party girl again.

  I still needed to be alone after all that had happened. So I decided to have a shot before I went back to my wife.

  On the inside the Avalon was about the size of a walled-up display window. There was a bar and six stools—that’s it. Rita Coe served bottled beer and drinks mixed with water or ice.

  There was only one customer, a big man facing the wall and hunkered down over a pay phone at the end of the bar.

  “What you doin’ here, Easy Rawlins?” Rita was hard and small with beady eyes and thin lips.

  “Whiskey was what I had in mind.”

  “I thought you didn’t drink in no bar so close to your house?”

  “Well, I will today.”

  “Why not?” the big man asked the phone. “I’m ready.”

  Rita poured my scotch into a bullet glass.

  “How’s Regina and the baby?” Rita asked.

  “Fine, both fine.”

  She nodded and looked down at my hands. “You hear about them girls been gettin’ killed?”

  “Nuthin’ but, seems like.”

  “You know, I’m scared to walk out to my car when I close up at night.”

  “You close up alone?” I asked her. But before she could answer the big man hung up the phone so hard that it gave out a brief ring of complaint.

  Dupree Bouchard stood up and turned toward us—all six feet five inches of him. He saw me and then looked around as if he were searching for a back door. But the only door was the one I’d come through.

  Dupree and I had been friends when we were younger men. One night he drank too much and passed out—leaving me and his girlfriend, Coretta, with nothing to hold but each other.

  Maybe he heard our hushed cries through his alcoholic stupor. Or maybe he blamed me for her murder the next day.

  “Hey, Dupree. How’s Champion treatin’ you?”

  We’d both worked at Champion Aircraft ten years earlier. Dupree was a master machinist.

  “They ain’t no good up there, Easy. Every time you turn around they got another rule to hold you up. And if you a niggah, they got two rules.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “That’s true. Everywhere you go it’s the same.”

  “It’s better back down home. At least down South a colored brother won’t stab you in the back.” He looked me in the eye when he said that. Dupree could never prove that I had done anything with or to Coretta. He just knew that I was with them one night and then she was gone from him forever.

  “I don’t know, Dupree,” I said. “There hasn’t been all that many lynchings up here in L.A. County.”

  “You wanna drink, Dupree?” Rita asked.

  The big man sat down, two stools away from me, and nodded to her.

  “How’s your wife?” I asked to get him talking about something brighter.

  “She’s okay. I work at Temple Hospital now,” he said.

  “Really? My wife works there. Regina.”

  “What she look like?”

  “Dark-complected. Pretty and kind of slim. She works in the maternity ward.”

  “What time she work?”

  “Eight to five usually.”

  “Then I prob’ly ain’t even seen’er. I only been there two months and I’m on the graveyard shift. They got me doin’ laundry in the basement.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Love it.”

  Dupree took the drink that Rita brought and downed it in one swallow. He slapped two quarters on the bar and said, “I gotta go.”

  He went past me and out the door, silent and sullen. I remembered how loud he had laughed that last night with Coretta and me. His laugh was like thunder in those days.

  I wished I could take back what had happened to my friend, my part in his lifelong despair. I wished it but wishes don’t count for much in flesh and blood.

  “Andre Lavender,” I said to Rita.

  “Say what?”

  “Andre. You know him?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Gimme some paper.”

  I wrote Andre’s name and phone number and said, “Call him and say that I’d like him to come by and see you to your car at night.”

  “He work for you?”

  “I did him a favor once. Now he could help you.”

  “Do I gotta pay him?”

  “Shot of whiskey do him just fine.”

  I pushed my glass closer to her and she filled it again.

  JESUS WAS DOING CARTWHEELS across the lawn in the porch light. Little Edna kept herself upright by holding the bars of her crib. She laughed and sputtered at her mute brother. I came in the gate and picked up a football that was nestled in among the dahlia bushes along the fence. I whistled, then threw the ball just when Jesus turned to see me. He caught the football, held it in one hand, and waved to Edna as if he were beckoning her with the other. She rattled her baby bars, bounced on the balls of her feet, and yelled as loud as she could, “Akach yeeee!”

  Jesus kicked the ball so hard that it crashed against the far link fence. The jangling of steel was a kind of music for city children.

  “What’s goin’ on out here?” Regina was framed for a moment by the gray haze of the screen door. She came out on the porch and stood in front of our little girl as if protecting her. Edna let out a howl. She couldn’t see Jesus and the yard past her mother’s skirts.

  “Aw, com’on, honey. She’s okay,” I said as I mounted the three stairs to the porch.

  “He could miss a kick out there an’ tear her head off!”

  Edna let herself fall hard on her diapered bottom. Jesus climbed up into the avocado tree.

  “You got to be more careful, Easy,” my wife of two years said.

  “Eathy,” echoed Edna.

  I found it hard to answer, because it was always hard for me to think when looking at Regina. Her skin was the color of waxed ebony and her large almond-shaped eyes were a half an inch too far apart. She was tall and slender but, for all that she was beautiful, it was something else that got to me. Her face had no imperfection that I could see. No blemish or wrinkle. Never a pimple or mole or some stray hair that might have grown out of the side of her jaw. Her eyes would close now and then but never blink as normal people do. Regina was perfect in every way. She knew how to walk and how to sit down. But she was never flustered by a lewd comment or shocked by poverty.

  I fell in love with Regina Riles each time I looked at her. I fell in love with her before we ever exchanged words.

  “I thought it was okay, honey.” I reached for her unconsciously and she moved away, a graceful dancer.

  “Listen, Easy. Jesus don�
�t know how to think about what’s right for Edna. You got to do that for him.”

  “He knows more than you think, baby. He’s been around little children more than most women have. And he understands even if he doesn’t talk.”

  Regina shook her head. “He got problems, Easy. You sayin’ that he’s okay don’t make it so.”

  Jesus climbed down out of the tree and went to the side of the house to get into his room.

  “I don’t know what you mean, honey,” I said. “Everybody got problems. How you handle your problems means what kinda man you gonna be.”

  “He ain’t no man. Jesus is just a little boy. I don’t know what kind of trouble he’s had but I do know that it’s too much for him, that’s why he can’t talk.”

  I let it drop there. I could never bring myself to tell her the real story. About how I rescued the boy from a missing woman’s house after he had been bought and abused by an evil man. How could I explain that the man who mistreated Jesus had been murdered and I knew who’d done it, but kept quiet?

  Regina hoisted Edna into her arms. The baby screamed. I wanted to grab them both and hug them so hard that all this upset would squeeze out.

  Talking to Regina was painful for me sometimes. She was so sure about what was right and what wasn’t. She could get me stirred up inside. So much so that sometimes I didn’t know if I was feeling rage or love.

  I waited outside for a moment after they went in, looking at my house. There were so many secrets I carried and so many broken lives I’d shared. Regina and Edna had no part of that, and I swore to myself that they never would.

  I went in finally, feeling like a shadow, stalking himself into light.

  — 5 —

  YOU BEEN DRINKIN’,” Regina said when I walked through the door. I didn’t think she could smell it and I hadn’t had enough to stagger. Regina just knew me. I liked that; it made my heart kind of wild.