What she did want was to get used right up. Not simply to use up her years and days, but all of herself—her laughter and loving, her dance steps and good times. All of her juice. Juice she felt beginning to dry up, just a little, like the first skim on cooling milk.
She turned her mind back to trying to picture Miz Barker coming down here with something Ray-Ray has asked her to keep for him, to hide for him. Did she know what it was? Was she excited? Blanche walked to the back of the space. Excited. That was a funny word to use about hiding something, but it stayed with her. She imagined Miz Barker in here looking for someplace to hide a videotape. Not big, not small. Where would it fit? Blanche walked slowly among the bits of furniture. She closed her eyes and saw Ray-Ray down here without Miz Barker, looking around for a good hiding place like she’d just done. She opened her eyes, but nothing leapt out at her.
She checked underneath the cushions in the armchair and examined the elephant-foot table. She flopped into the chair and tried to relax. She knew the tape was here. She knew it. She also knew that finding something was often a matter of thinking like the person who hid it.
“All right,” she said to both Miz Barker and Ray-Ray. “You two been buggin’ me and buggin’ me about this business, now give me a hand here.” She sat still and called up her memory of Ray-Ray when he’d came to the Brindle house. He’d been full of himself, no doubt about it. Sure of himself, but righteous, too. He was going to get his revenge on Allister for kicking him out of the family. He also knew that diming on Allister was a good thing to do. Was he scared? Did it occur to him that Skanks One and Two might send somebody to shut him up? If he wasn’t scared, he must have expected trouble. Why else hide the tape? Was he really planning to put Brindle’s business out on the airwaves? She stared at the radio on the shelf.
She found an old table knife, used it as a screwdriver, and removed the back of the radio. And there, where all the tubes and wires should have been, was a black plastic videocassette.
On the way home she peeped around corners and peered over her shoulder so often, she looked like she had a tic. She clutched her bag tightly to her chest and held her pepper spray in her right hand.
Once she got home, she locked the door behind her and even closed the curtains. She was so excited, she dropped the cassette twice before she could get it in the machine. She sat on the floor in front of the machine and took a deep breath. Half a minute into the film she whooped out loud at the sight of a bored-looking blond smearing chocolate syrup on Allister Brindle’s crotch and licking it off in slow motion. Damn! So much for the Mr. Family Values candidate!
The next segment was the one Lacey had told her about—Brindle in a pinafore and knee socks being given a good spanking with a black lacquer-backed hairbrush. Blanche wasn’t amused anymore. There was something tired and desperate about the whole thing. Kinky, maybe, but no more so than men who went out on football and rugby fields to get kicked and gouged for so-called fun. Still, she’d never thought much of Allister Brindle, and she thought even less of him now—not because of the way he liked his sex, but because he was such a lying phony.
The next piece was even less funny: A large German shepherd’s penis was just visible as the dog humped over Brindle’s butt. No wonder Ray-Ray was so pleased with himself. This was definitely a career-busting tape. The dog had more dignity than Brindle. And Donnie! He could have retired with the money he’d have gotten from Brindle for the tape. But it wasn’t until the final segment that she realized just how much Donnie could have gotten.
Allister was naked on a huge bed, his body looking almost rosy next to shiny black sheets. But it wasn’t Allister that made her groan. She moved closer to the screen for a better look. She stopped the tape and replayed the picture of three little faces, their eyes looking off to the left, as though someone there was giving them instructions. The child pinching and twisting Allister’s nipples couldn’t be more than eight years old. None of the little girls had developed breasts yet. Blanche stared at the screen while Allister’s eyes rolled and he squirmed beneath a child’s mouth while his hand…She couldn’t make it upstairs and barely made it to the kitchen sink before vomit flooded her mouth. Children. She couldn’t pull her mind away from them. Whose little girls were they? Where were the people who were supposed to protect them?
She hung over the sink, tears streaming down her face, bile boiling up and out of her as she gagged and groaned. She knew this kind of shit went on in the world. She knew that child molesters looked like salesmen, cops, the man across the street, the candidate for governor. She knew that children were stolen and sold into nightmares. She knew, but she had never seen. And now she could never not see, never not remember the look on those three small faces, each with her own way of looking like she wished she was anyone but who she was, that she was anyplace but where she was, that what would happen next wouldn’t hurt too much, that whoever was standing on the sidelines telling her what to do wouldn’t get mad and make her do these bad things over and over and over again.
Blanche cleaned her mouth and face and then the sink. She remembered the first time she’d seen Allister Brindle. What had he told Sadowski about black people? “They’re not like us. You can never trust them. Different values.” At the time, she’d been insulted that he would make such They statements. Now she was glad he felt he was so different from her. She wanted to be as different from the Allister Brindles of the world as possible. But he wasn’t the only sleaze in this shit pile.
In the living room, the TV screen showed the gray-and-white end-of-tape pattern that looked liked static sounded. She turned off the TV, then rewound the tape. Her hand shook when she took the tape from the machine. Her fingers felt grimy from handling it. She carried the tape up to her room. She held it in her left hand and held that hand behind her—there was nowhere in her room where she dared to lay it down. She lit a candle on her Ancestor altar and thanked them for helping her find the tape. She also thanked them in advance for helping her understand what she needed to do with it, and she wished the awful thing were not in her house.
She went back downstairs. She wouldn’t be able to sleep with it in her room. Would a night in the refrigerator hurt a videotape? No, not near their food! Finally, she put the tape in a plastic bag and took it to the laundry alcove between kitchen and living room. She shoved the tape deep in the clothes hamper. The perfect place for it. And guaranteed no one else in her family was likely to find it in there.
She stood in the shower with too-hot water pouring over her, the little girls’ faces as present as the drops splashing in the tub. She stood there until the water ran cold. When she finally got out, her skin and everything else about her seemed tender. Even her eyes felt raw. But she knew what she needed to do. When she’d dressed, she called Othello and got his answering machine.
“It’s Blanche White. Call me as soon as you can. I got news.”
He called her back in twenty minutes and was at her door an hour after that.
“I know who killed Ray-Ray Brown and Miz Barker. His name is Donnie McFadden. He ain’t old, but he wears kind of old-fashioned clothes,” she told him. “The woman who saw Ray-Ray near the pool said the man with him was an old person ’cause that’s how he was dressed. It was Donnie. I’m sure of it. All that bullshit he gave me about wanting his letters back from Ray-Ray was really to find out if Ray-Ray had things stashed somewhere else besides Miz Inez’s house and Miz Barker’s.” Then she told him about all the other lies Donnie had told.
“Donnie probably tried to talk Ray-Ray into the money-for-tape idea, but Ray-Ray wouldn’t go for it, so Donnie killed him. Donnie thought he knew where Miz Barker had put the tape, only she’d moved it and wouldn’t tell Donnie where it was. That’s why he killed her.”
“It all adds up,” Othello said, “but we don’t want to make no mistake.”
“I thought of that,” Blanche said, and told him how she planned to
get Donnie to tell on himself.
“If you’re right, it could be dangerous.”
“That’s why I called you,” she said, and saw her whole income-tax-return check going to the Ex-Cons. Cheap at the price.
“I’m game if you’re game,” he told her. “What about tomorrow night?”
“Hi,” Taifa mumbled, and stomped upstairs when she came in from school. Blanche decided to wait a while before she tried to find out whether this snit was about something that ought to concern her.
Malik came in and went right to the phone to call Aminata.
“Nothing yet,” he told Blanche when he’d hung up. “But she said Teddy’s sure he can find what we need on his computer. Aminata’s gonna call me.”
Blanche smiled not so much at what Malik said as at the fact that the sound of Aminata’s name no longer made her hackles rise. Progress.
“You really like working on this, don’t you?” Blanche instantly saw his name over a column in the New York Times.
“It’s okay,” he said, adopting the hideout attitude of a teen who senses a career talk coming, but he couldn’t keep the pleasure out of his eyes.
Blanche turned on the radio. “There’s some sliced chicken if you’re hungry.” She enjoyed the surprise on his face when she didn’t do her career talk. She could wait.
Shaquita’s little butt was dragging low when she came home. Blanche called the girl to the kitchen after Malik went off to his room. Blanche knew Shaquita didn’t want to hear the best advice Blanche had to give, so she decided to play it another way.
“You can’t be moping around with a baby in your belly.” Blanche handed her a glass of orange juice. “Baby needs a mother thinking positive thoughts, planning the future, and sending love.”
Tears big as peas rolled down Shaquita’s face. She leaned over in her chair and hugged her body, rocking back and forth. Blanche knelt in front of Shaquita, put her arms around the girl, and held her until she was ready to talk.
“He doesn’t want it. He…”
“You mean Pookie? What did he say?” Blanche held her breath.
“He…He…I asked him if he would come with me to talk to Gran. He said”—she took a deep breath—“he said he wasn’t into being a father. He said I should…”
Sobs cut off Shaquita’s words. Blanche put her arms around her again, in part to hide the smile that was blooming on her face. Thank you, Pookie, Blanche mouthed.
“I thought…I thought this was what he wanted. He kept saying…”
“But you’re the one who has to—”
“But I wanted it, too! I was the one who said it was okay not to use a condom. He didn’t make me.”
“But you wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t wanted you to,” Blanche insisted. “And now he’s changed his mind.” Ancestors bless him, she added to herself.
“What am I going to do, Aunt Blanche? I’m so scared! I just…”
“So was I, Quita. And I was older than you.”
Shaquita stopped crying and raised her head.
“I was eighteen when I got pregnant,” Blanche told her. “Just outta high school. He wasn’t even a boy I particularly liked. I mean, I liked him well enough. He was nice and all, but I didn’t have a real thing for him. I just went out with him ’cause I was mad at Leo, my regular boyfriend.” Blanche stroked Shaquita’s head. “I wanted to be grown. Grown women had sex. So…the next thing I knew, I’d missed my period.” Blanche shook her head and laughed a little. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared since. I knew Mama would kill me, or at least make me wish I was dead. I sure didn’t want to have to marry Sonny Jones. And I was already wondering if I ever wanted to have children at all.”
Shaquita was dry-eyed now and totally caught up in Blanche’s story. “What did you do?” she asked.
Shoulda told her this before, Blanche thought. “Well, I thought about just having it. Just not saying anything to Mama and letting the size of my belly give her the news. Then I stopped thinking about me as Mama’s child and started seeing me as somebody’s mama, having to do everything: go out to work, cook, clean, and take care of my own child at home, just like my own mother did. When was I gonna have fun? Be young? How was I gonna be able to stay home to take care of a baby? What was I gonna use to pay somebody else to watch the baby while I went to work? How was I gonna get to Harlem, USA, like I’d been dreaming about?” All the confused feelings of that time welled up in Blanche. She felt the weight of that never-born baby and the deep sorrow that had lingered for weeks afterward. She wiped the tears from her eyes.
“My cousin Murphy helped me. She was a lot older than me. Mama always called her ‘worldly.’ So I figured she might know what to do. She took me to a friend of hers, a nurse or a midwife. But first Cousin Murphy made me pray for what would not have a chance to become a full baby born to me, made me thank it for giving me my life back. Made me promise to give of myself to some child already in the world. Atonement, she called it. I thought that was really crazy stuff, but I didn’t argue with her; I’da done anything, anything. Now I see she was right. Now…” She thought about the role Taifa and Malik had played in her atonement, and thanked her sister for the opportunity she’d given her. Now, using her experience to try to help Shaquita, she was aware of having found yet another way in which all of her life was connected.
Shaquita squeezed Blanche’s hand. “Did it hurt?”
“A little pinch. I was about as far gone as you. I had cramps and bled some afterward. It wasn’t no picnic. And I felt sad for a while. But at the same time, I was glad I did it. Glad to know that…”
“It was all over.” Shaquita finished the sentence for her.
Blanche stood up. “Now you got to decide, Quita. Whatever you decide, you know I’m in your corner. And so is Cousin Charlotte. But think about it, honey, that’s all I ask. Think about who you are, and what you’ve always said you wanted. Don’t stand in your own way.”
Shaquita rose and kissed Blanche on the cheek. “Thanks, Aunt Blanche,” she said. The phone rang. “I’ll get that!” Shaquita said, and was gone.
“Is that for me?” Malik called out, and thundered down the stairs when Shaquita said it was.
Blanche slumped against the table. Honesty was hard work.
“We got it, Moms!” Malik yelled, and ran into the kitchen. “When Laconia Waterford died, when they got married, and when the corporation was started! Aminata was right, the company wasn’t started until after Laconia Waterford died. He musta forged her signature or something. There’s gonna be a Community Reawakening Project meeting about it on Thursday.”
“Congratulations, honey!” She hugged him and relished the knowledge that Samuelson was finished as the minister of truth and virtue. By the time Aminata and company got done trashing him for poisoning black kids and the state jacked him up for his bogus corporation and lead violations, the Reverend and his Temple might have to do what he’d done in Delaware: get out of Dodge. She let herself feel the full pleasure of that and wished she could add a kick in the balls to go with it. But she did have her own little surprise for him.
Her house and the neighborhood were enjoying middle-of-the-night quiet when Blanche left home carrying a pillowcase with paint, a funnel, a pair of rubber gloves, a small flashlight, and a box of sugar inside. She took her pepper spray from her jacket pocket and carried it in her right hand.
She stood across the street from Samuelson’s house for almost ten minutes in which she wondered what the hell she was doing there. Samuelson’s goons were as ready to push her face in as look at her, and here she was, sneaking around his house. She remembered that old thing about falling off a horse: The best thing to do was to get right back on before the fear of riding set in. Was that what she was trying to do? Keep her courage up by acting like she had some?
The house and the Temple next door were both dark. If
Samuelson’s boys were working security, she didn’t see them. She walked down the driveway. The car was parked in back under a carport. It seemed to crouch there like a monster sleeping beneath a huge umbrella. She half expected the doors to spring open and Samuelson’s boys to jump out and grab her again. She realized she was panting loud enough to be heard downtown. She took a deep breath and told herself to be cool as she moved closer to the car.
She set her pillowcase on the ground and put on her rubber gloves. She figured a car like this probably had an alarm as sensitive as a cat’s whiskers, so she moved with the delicacy of that same cat on the prowl. She opened the lid to the gas tank, unscrewed the cap, and laid it on the ground. She opened the pillowcase, took out the sugar, the ice pick, and the funnel. She took off the protective cork that covered the tip of the ice pick and inserted the tip it into the opening around the gas tank cover. She moved the tip slowly around the gas cover until it popped open—a trick she’d learned from an old Harlem neighbor who’d kept his gas tank full of other people’s gas. When the gas cover popped, she wedged the funnel into the gas tank. The sugar slid into the tank with a low hiss. Blanche smiled.
“And now for today’s sermon,” she whispered. She jumped at the sound of the ball bearings pinging against the sides of the paint can as she shook it up. Still mindful of the car alarm, she held the can high and leaned over the car without touching it. The result was worth the ache in her upper arm. The letters stood out like flames against the car’s dark body. She used the other can of paint to draw arrows leading from the sidewalk down the driveway to the car. She chuckled all the way home at the thought of Samuelson and his Temple members following the arrow trail to the minister’s car, which now proclaimed that god don’t like ugly—a car that even with a new paint job wasn’t going to be worth a teaspoonful of cat piss once that sugar made its way into the engine. He wouldn’t be roughing up any other women in this baby.
Blanche Cleans Up: A Blanche White Mystery (Blanche White Mystery Series Book 3) Page 28
