Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

  Maude ran to him.

  “Oh, baby,” she said as she knelt down and put her hands on his head.

  I watched my old friends for a while, unwilling to interrupt their sorrow. It was a pain that they’d been holding in for days and it needed a time just to be. Maude cried and Odell looked around for tears that wouldn’t come.

  “Where is he?” I asked again.

  “Down in the bomb shelter.” Odell’s voice was weaker than Martin’s.

  ONE EYE WAS WIDE OPEN while the other one was a glistening slit. His lip was swollen and curled up from where it had been split. A dead man’s snarl to be sure. He wore only a T-shirt. One hand was twisted backwards, pointing at his sad genitals. The other was at his side pushing away some overly friendly dog or errant thought. He lay on three burlap bags that were wet. On his chest and knees two other bags were laid.

  “Ice,” Maude said. “To keep him from goin’ bad down here.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “They beat him, Easy.”

  “Who did?”

  “Some white men. They wanted him to tell’em where Betty was, but he didn’t know. They like to killed him. He played like he was dead and when they left him he stoled one’a their cars and used up his last mortal strength to drive to us.” Maude’s voice had a myth-making tone to it.

  “Where’s the car?” I asked.

  “Odell drove it a couple’a blocks over.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Right after you was here.”

  “Who was it that beat’im?” I asked.

  “He said that it was the police, Easy.” Maude’s eyes opened in the kind of terror that poor people have for the cops.

  “Did you call the doctor?”

  Maude shook her head. Tears welled up in her eyes. “He died right away, Easy. I seen enough dead men to know. We didn’t know what to do, because of the cops, so we took him down here.”

  Odell stood at the door more gaunt than I’d ever seen him while Maude and I talked.

  “Where’s Betty, Maude?”

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t say where she was.”

  “You tell her about this here?” I asked while pointing at the icy corpse.

  “No,” she sobbed. “She was so broke up when she told us about Terry we thought that more bad news would kill her.”

  “What you gonna do with him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He needs a burial. He’s got to be put in the ground,” Odell said.

  “You can’t take him to an undertaker unless you want to tell the cops about him.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I could dig you a hole right down here. We could have a service for him right here.”

  “We’ll see,” Odell said. Then he stumbled back up the basement stairs.

  “Where’s Betty?” I asked Maude. “What’s she runnin’ from?”

  “Will you bury him, Easy?” was her answer.

  “Yeah, yeah, honey. Just keep him cold a couple’a more days until I can get some things worked out.”

  — 29 —

  I WAS UP WITH THE SUN AGAIN. In the morning the fear of the police returned. Policemen are working folks just like anybody else. They’d drop by the house in the early morning and maybe even at midnight but unless they were really upset they’d go home and go to bed in the wee hours.

  I was down to my old house on 116th Street by six.

  THE YARD WAS DIFFERENT. I kept neat little islands of flowers in a sea of thick St. Augustine grass when it was mine. But a family with so many children as Primo had couldn’t maintain a proper lawn. The ruthless feet of innocent children pound everything down into soil. Flower, Primo’s Panamanian wife, had grown a large garden where the children weren’t allowed to play. She had a dozen tomato bushes and rows of three-foot onion stalks that sported brain-shaped waxy bulbs full of seed. Where I had my potato patch she grew beans. Nine-foot giant sunflowers bloomed all along the front of the house.

  The avocado tree was trimmed back a little but it was still there. I could see the platform that Jesus slept in.

  It was no longer my yard but it was still a yard full of life.

  THE FRONT DOOR WAS wide open. Flower was rolling out tortillas on a flat board in her lap. I could smell the bacon, eggs, and potatoes that she’d use to fill the tortillas for the children’s lunch bags. Feather loved the lunches from Flower. She’d told me more than once that she was going to be fat and black like Flower when she grew big.

  Primo wasn’t doing much. He sat in the stuffed chair that he had in the kitchen keeping Flower company. He looked hungover. But he always looked like that in the morning.

  “How’s it going, my friend?” Primo asked.

  “Never good enough. How’s all my people out here?”

  “Kids okay. But that Mofass is sick,” Flower said. “He’s always coughing and spitting.” She made a distasteful face. “You think the kids can get it?”

  “Naw. He’s got lung trouble from smoking those damn cigars.”

  “Daddy!” Feather came running in with Jesus standing behind her.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said. Flower and Primo acted as if they didn’t even notice. As if they were thinking, “Well, he just didn’t talk the first fifteen years of his life. He must not have had anything to say.”

  We caught up, the children and I. Feather wanted to know when she had to come home.

  “We got a big party on Saturday, Daddy. Can you come?” she asked me.

  “Sure, honey.” I really did want to.

  Children paraded in and out of the kitchen for the next hour and a half. Eddie—who was ambidextrous and a heart-breaker at fourteen—came in proudly in his fake leather jacket and Keds tennis shoes. Rafeleta and Helen wore homemade dresses, red lipstick, and brass rings. Cindy stayed all morning. She was only a baby, really, and the one Primo loved best. She and Feather sat on Primo’s knees taking turns kissing his callused hands.

  I think my little girl was actually trying to make me jealous.

  The children consumed gallons of milk and stacks of tortillas. What my little family ate in two weeks was depleted in that one morning.

  “I bet they got a file with your family’s name on it down at Vons market,” I said to Primo.

  “I love to watch them, my friend,” he said while he tickled the girls. “I love it.”

  Mofass was up by eight.

  “Well, yeah, Mr. Rawlins. Mr. Hodge gonna work out fine. He got all kindsa papers wrote up to block Clovis right outta my business. He servin’ them papers on the bank today and he’s sendin’ her family a notice of eviction from my house. Then he gonna close down the office on Crenshaw altogether, and if that don’t finish it we gonna get a writ to keep ’em away from all my properties—even them ones that the white men owns.”

  Mofass looked ten years younger and healthier.

  “You know, I told Mr. Alexander I don’t even need him no more.”

  “You what?”

  “I paid him,” he said in his defense. “I gave him just what he asted for. I don’t think he was worth no two hundred dollars, but…”

  “Mofass, how long we know each other?”

  “Long time. Ten years, more.”

  “Then don’t you think you should know to ask me before you do somethin’ like fire Mouse?”

  “Ain’t nuthin’ wrong wit’ it. I didn’t need’im. Why should I be payin’ the man when I don’t need’im?”

  What could I say? Anything I ever did with Mofass turned out like that. His mind was so small when it came to money that it was actually no mind at all.

  I shook my head and went away from him. I said good-bye to the children and drove on down to John’s place, Targets Bar.

  — 30 —

  JOHN’S BAR DIDN’T open until noon but I would have found him there even if we hadn’t had that appointment. Men like John and me didn’t have lives like the white men on TV had. We didn’t roll out of bed for an eight-hour d
ay job and then come home in the evening for The Honeymooners and a beer.

  We didn’t do one thing at a time.

  We were men who came from poor stock. We had to be cooks and tailors and plumbers and electricians. We had to be our own cops and our own counsel because there wasn’t anything for us down at City Hall.

  We worked until the job was done or until we couldn’t work anymore. And even when we’d done everything we could, that didn’t mean we’d get a paycheck or a vacation. It didn’t mean a damn thing.

  I knocked at the back door. John answered in shirt sleeves and an apron.

  “Hey, John.”

  “Easy.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I got some people I need you t’talk to, but first I got to make the chili for lunch.”

  I followed him into the back room. The kitchen was an afterthought in the bar. It was once just a storage room where John kept his booze. But now the little room had a two-burner stove and a deep lift-top icebox. He had a butcher-block table out in the hall that led to the bar. There was a great pile of chopped onion and green peppers there. John grabbed up the whole mound of the peppers in his two hands and carried them quickly to a big aluminum frying pan that was smoking from overheated peanut oil.

  I stood in the hall while he stirred the sizzling vegetables.

  “Mouse been by here?” I shouted into the smoky cave.

  “Yeah.”

  “He been actin’ a fool?”

  John stopped for a minute and turned to me. “I keep a loaded gun in every room since you called me, Easy. On’y reason I ain’t gone to Joe Teegs is you.”

  You paid, somebody died—that was Joe Teegs.

  “He been askin’ questions ’bout the night they arrested him. An’ he knows that I warned all them boys was here. He know you the one told me.”

  John came back out and returned with a handful of onions to add to his peppers. He took the onions and peppers and dumped them into a ten-gallon pot. After them he poured in three big cans of chopped and stewed tomatoes, a ten-ounce can of powdered chili, some garlic powder, and a heaping tablespoon of cumin. Finally he came out. There were tears flowing from his eyes. I knew that it was the onions and not fear. John had let fear out the back door many years before.

  I had a question to ask John but before I got around to it there came a weak knock at the back door. It wasn’t a regular kind of knock but more like a code; three taps, then two, then three again.

  John went to the door and pulled it open. The three men came in quickly, looking around but managing to keep their heads down at the same time. Two of them wore hats.

  “Easy,” the big one, Melvin Quick, said.

  I shook hands with him and his two friends, Clinton Davis and Malcolm Reeves.

  “Come on into the bar,” John said. He led the way down the hall and then made us wait while he closed the venetian blinds in the bar. I didn’t say anything about it but I wondered what Mouse would have thought if he was sitting outside and saw those blinds close like that.

  John’s was a big room with black-and-white tile on the floors and walls, like they have in the fancy restaurants in New Orleans. There was a Blackstone bar with high stools and round linoleum-topped tables for the lunch and dinner patrons. They used to play music at John’s but he’d calmed down as he got older and wanted to get to bed by midnight.

  John remained standing while I sat with the three fugitives.

  “These boys wanna talk to you, Easy,” John said. “Anybody want somethin’ to drink?”

  “I take a scotch,” cross-eyed and tiny Malcolm said.

  “Rye for me,” Clinton Davis added. Clinton was handsome. He had a razor-thin mustache, half-white features, and skin the color of coffee with two teaspoons of heavy cream mixed in. I once knew a woman named Corrie Day who was always mad at herself because every time Clinton called she’d come over to his house. When I asked her why she just didn’t say no she looked at me like I was crazy. “And turn down somebody look that good?” she asked.

  “We heard about Raymond.” That was Melvin trying to sound brave. I couldn’t help but think how he was the same size as Bruno Ingram. He was a simple day laborer with a face the size of a dinner plate.

  “Yeah?” I asked, not friendly at all. “Then why you all here—in L.A.—together?”

  “We scared about Mouse,” Malcolm chirped.

  “Naw, man, you ain’t scared. You be in Chicago or Mexico if you was scared.”

  “We cain’t run, Easy,” Clinton said. “We got people here.”

  John brought Clinton and Malcolm their drinks on a cork-lined tray.

  “You might have them,” I said. “But let Raymond see your ass and they won’t have you.”

  They were all afraid. Frightened to death. I tried to keep the disgust out of my face. I understood fear. And I knew better than anybody in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I came from a place where to show your fear was like asking for death. It was suicide; a sin.

  “So what you boys want then?” I asked.

  “Well.” Handsome Clinton was the spokesman. Maybe they thought that he could charm me. “We got three hundred dollars. And we thought that you could take it, you know, and pay Raymond and keep what’s left for you.”

  Three hundred dollars was half the year’s rent for any one of those men; it was also Joe Teegs’s price tag. They were telling me that they would spend that money one way or the other. Killing Mouse was a hard proposition, because they knew that I was Mouse’s friend, and even though I wasn’t known as a cold-blooded killer, they knew that I might take it hard if Mouse showed up dead.

  “So you wanna pay me to save you from what Bruno got?”

  They didn’t nod exactly but the assent was all over their faces.

  “I got to know somethin’ first.”

  “What?” Malcolm asked.

  “Which one’a you called in on him? I got the police call at my house, so I know what was said. I just don’t know which one’a you said it.”

  Melvin looked at Malcolm and Clinton studied both of his friends.

  Tears formed up in Melvin’s big eyes. “Ain’t not one’a us stupid enough for that, Mr. Rawlins. You were there. You remember. We was all right here. John called the ambulance and they called the cops.”

  Some people say that they can tell when a man is lying. Those people are fools. You can never trust what somebody tells you is true. Maybe one of those men snuck off to a phone and turned Mouse in. But I couldn’t tell.

  “Where’s the money?” I asked.

  Melvin came out with a thick wad of mainly small bills.

  “Two hunnert eighty-seven dollars,” he said.

  “I thought you said three hundred?”

  “Here.” John, who had gone back to the bar, pressed a button on his cash register and took out a bill. He brought it over to me.

  Taking that twenty-dollar bill was a changing point in my life. Up until that moment I used what talents I had to trade favors with my neighbors and friends. It was rare that I would take cash from one of my peers—especially from a close friend like John.

  I felt myself becoming cut off from the human debt that had been my stock in trade.

  I peeled off seven dollar bills from the wad and handed them to John. His solemn face reflected the weight of that thirteen-dollar transaction.

  I cleared my throat and said, “All right! Listen up! I need a week wit’ you boys close to the ground. Don’t go home. Don’t go to your jobs, your families, your girlfriends, and don’t never come here. Don’t go drivin’ down the street or to no stores where you know people. If you can leave town, then leave; better, get outta state.

  “Mouse will kill you on sight. He will kill you. He won’t yell your name or ask was it you. You cain’t talk to him, deal with him, or make him understand. So put on them hats and get outta here. Call John one week from today. He’ll tell you yea or nay.”

  “But I wanna… ” Malcolm started.
>
  I stopped him by pointing my finger into his cross-eyed stare. “Ain’t nuthin’ for you to say, brother. I told you everything you need to know. Don’t do what I say and you dead. Do it… well, do it and there’s some kinda chance.

  “Now pick up and move out.”

  The men gazed over at John but they found no sympathy there. It wasn’t that we were disgusted with these men. It was just that we were in hard times and the smell of fear made us angry and ready to fight.

  They left quickly after that, thanking me and John by shaking our hands and muttering. Good-looking Clinton didn’t want to let go of my hand. I glanced away from his pleading eyes to ease my shame for him.

  When they had gone I asked John, “When’s the last time you seen Raymond?”

  “Two days.”

  “An’ he’s lookin’ for them, right?”

  John nodded.

  “Then why you get them to come here if you know he gonna be lookin’ here?”

  “This is my place, Easy Rawlins.” He pointed at his heart. “I have anybody I want here and there ain’t nobody gonna tell me no.”

  John turned away and went back through the swinging doors, toward his kitchen.

  I followed him.

  “Did Raymond ask you about some girl named Sooky?” I asked. I’d been thinking about the young people I remembered in my dreams.

  John was pulling a pink paper package of chopped stew meat from the icebox. “Sooky Freeman? Reverend Rowel’s niece?”

  “She got a boyfriend named Alfred?”

  “Used to have. They broke up and she married Theodore Mix.”

  “You see her that night Bruno got shot?”

  John looked me right in the eye. “Why?”

  “I think they mighta been in the alley when Mouse killed Bruno. Maybe they know something.”

  It wasn’t a pleasant thing to face off with John. He was a little older than I but John reminded you of a bison. He was big and strong by nature. His black face was like that of a dour African god sculpted from ironwood.