Black Betty (19 page)

“I’m lookin’ for Alamo, cracker,” I said. I had to say it. I wasn’t marching or singing songs about freedom. I didn’t pay dues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the NAACP. I didn’t have any kind of god on my side. But even though the cameras weren’t on me and JFK never heard my name, I had to make my little stand for what’s right. It was a little piece of history that happened right there in that room and that went unrecorded.

The man pushed his right hand down into his front pocket. “Who’s that?”

“Listen, brother. I’m here to meet Alamo,” I said, then I slipped my hand into my own pocket. “It’s hot. I bet you got a knife in your hand down there. But I got a thirty-eight. Now you could do somethin’ an’ your boys back there could back you up. But a gut shot will kill a fat man like you.” I pointed down at his big belly. “That much we know.”

The words came out of me effortlessly as if somebody else was talking for me.

“Easy?”

I looked up to see Alamo Weir come through the small lobby. Every man in that room was on his feet and pointed toward me.

Alamo was small and looked older than he actually was. His skin was wrinkled and discolored and there was a slight limp to his stride. His story about the limp was that he’d got into a fight with some Italian gangsters in San Quentin; he killed the main boss but was left with the gimp for a memento. I didn’t know if it was true or not. Alamo was the kind of crazy criminal who lied, cheated, and killed. You never knew what might be true about him.

“Alamo.” I looked around the room. “Friendly place you live in.”

“Get outta here, Fatty,” Alamo said to the blue-suited man. “Come on, Easy. Let’s go get some fresh air.”

Walking through that crowd made my heart race. Any one of them could have stuck a knife in me. The only thing I had to rely on was their respect for Alamo.

When we got outside he said, “Come on over to Dolores’s,” and led me across the street to a chili dog stand. I bought him four dogs with chili and sweet pickle relish and a cup of black coffee.

“Coffee’s spicier than the chili.” He winked at me.

There was a big plaster bench next to a concrete ledge that overlooked the parking lot next door. That was Alamo’s office.

“What’s the problem, Easy?” he asked between hot dog number two and hot dog number three.

“You know how to break into a place if somebody is trying to keep you out?”

He nodded and talked while he was chewing. “I used to like to break into houses up in Beverly Hills. Got all that top-notch security shit up there. I’d rob their bedrooms while they was sleepin’, then I’d have dinner downstairs and play with the guard dog too. For a while, when I was flush, I did it for fun. You know, break in and take all the light bulbs.

“One time this broad wakes up and comes down. I had my shiv right there in my hand, you know?”

I knew. I’d spent two days in jail with Alamo.

“I was gonna cut her right on the neck but then, I don’t know why, I just started cryin’. Cryin’! You know, I was bawlin’ an’ sayin’ that I was sorry and that I was hungry. And please wouldn’t she forgive me. And you know she comes up and hugs me!” Alamo laughed a laugh that would have done Satan proud. “I fucked that broad so hard that she still calls down here sometimes. Her husband’s some kind of international banker. I been tellin’ her that I could get him in a car accident and she could have my tough old peter twenty-four hours a day.

“You know, I killed a guy once in his car. I didn’t know him—”

“So,” I interrupted. You had to interrupt Alamo because he couldn’t stop talking on his own. “You can break into a place that has security alarms and serious locks?”

“Can do.”

“It’s on Robertson at Pico. Right over a hot dog stand.”

“Chili dogs?”

I nodded and then gave Alamo the exact name and address.

“When you wanna take it?” he asked.

“Soon as I can. Sooner.”

“I’ll call ya tomorrow, or the next day.”

“I’m not gonna be home for a few days. Can I get a message to you?”

“Not up at the hotel. Couple’a guys been askin’ around for me, so they don’t say when I’m there, but you could try a bar called Remo’s on First. They’ll take the message. And I’ll leave word with them and then we can get together and go in there.”

“Don’t tell’em what we’re doin’, though.”

“Don’t worry, Easy, I’m not a virgin.”

He sure wasn’t.

“Well,” I said. “I better be gettin’ on.”

Alamo put his hand on my forearm.

“Don’t be too mad at ’em, Easy.”

“At who?”

“Those boys in there don’t know what it’s like. They ain’t never seen what a white man truly is. They think it’s all TV and
Look
magazine. They don’t know that it’s white men who cut off their balls.”

I liked Alamo. He was insane but he had a clearer view of the world than most do.

“I don’t hate’em,” I said. “I’m scared of them. Scared that they might kill me for breathing air.”

“You damn right about that.”

MY NEXT STOP WAS ODELL’S. The front door of his house was wide open. I almost drove away. Another dead body would have done me in right then.

Two men in tan uniforms came out of the front door and went to the Diamond Ice truck parked out in front of the house. Each one hefted a fifty-pound sack of ice out of the freezer cabin and went back up to the house. Maude came out to hold the door for them.

“Just put ’em down on the kitchen table,” she said.

They went into the house and Maude watched. When she turned back around I was standing there.

The men came back out, went down to the truck, and pulled out two more bags of ice. They hustled past me and Maude as we kept up our stare.

The men made two more trips. Maude and I hadn’t said a word. There was a wad of cash balled up in her fist.

One of the men, a young heavyset boy, came out of the house and went down to the truck. His partner, a small man with sparse gray hair and gold-framed bifocals, stopped in front of me.

“That’ll be twelve-fifty,” he informed me.

“Here you go,” Maude said, handing him her wad of cash.

He counted out thirteen dollars and looked up at Maude. She nodded and he said, “Thank you,” handing over a baby-blue receipt. He went down to the truck and they drove off.

“Havin’ a party?” I asked.

“Icebox busted,” she whispered. “Got almost two hundred pounds of beef we just bought in the tub.”

“I need to see Odell, honey.”

“He ain’t here,” she said.

“Where is he, Maude? I really need to talk with him.”

Maude stood holding the screen door like a shield against me. I didn’t think that she would tell me where he was, but I was willing to wait right there on the doorstep until he returned. Odell was going to talk to me this time—that was true.

Maybe Maude saw that in the way I planted my feet and the certainty in my voice.

“He down over at Martin’s,” she said. “He go over there every day to sit wit’ him.”

THE PROSPECT OF GOING to Martin’s almost kept me from seeking Odell out.

Martin lived on a nice block, Queen Lane. Mostly black professionals lived on that street. Accountants and lawyers mainly but there were a couple of doctors too. Martin had bought the place before arthritis took away his livelihood. He had been a master cabinetmaker. All he needed was a pocketknife and a tree and he could make furniture so beautiful that you’d expect to see it in a castle somewhere.

We used to go to his workshop when we were children and he’d lecture us about life.

“Always own your tools,” he’d say. “Your tools and your house. That way they cain’t take it away from ya. Don’t live on no paycheck and don’t never ask the man for a thing. You got what he want right here in yo’ hands.” He’d hold up a chisel or a pile of freshly smithed square nails. “That way you gonna be a man. A’cause that’s what a man is—it’s what he could
do
. You-all be thinkin’ that bein’ a man got somethin’ to do wit’ women, but that ain’t true. Woman compliment a man but he got to have his own if he wanna be wit’ her. Shit! She wanna big dick what she need t’do is t’get her a horse.”

Martin always made us laugh. He made us feel good about work and about who we were. Standing at his front door I realized that it was Martin who had defined my desire for property and my love of things done by hand.

Pea Williams, his ex-wife, answered the door. She’d been a beautiful woman in her youth but it was all on the outside. When the youthful beauty started to fade she just kind of fell in on herself. Her jaw muscles pulled back and her distaste for life came to the surface.

When she opened the door the sweet and sickly smell of disease wafted out of the house. A smell that poor people have to live with because they can’t afford bed space in a hospital.

“Easy.”

“Pea. I didn’t know you were back.”

“I ain’t. I married Willis Murphy and moved to Seattle. But we come on down when we heard Martin was sick. You know our boys in the army, over in Germany, and they cain’t come back home.”

“That’s good of you, Pea.” I wondered what could have made such a sour and self-pitying woman come all that way to see after a man that she’d abandoned when his hands gave out.

“What you want, Easy?”

“Odell here?”

She didn’t even answer, just turned away and went into the house.

There was a breeze off the ocean that night. The waters must have been loaded with seaweed because you could smell the brine if you breathed deep and stood still. Granite streetlamps lined the street and the barest trace of a mist was rising from the saturated lawns. I stood still for a moment imagining a chill when I was a child. The cold tickled me when I was a boy. I used to wonder if I was crazy for being out in the bayou, laughing at nothing.

“What you want, Easy?” Odell was behind the screen. His hand was on the latch, not to open it but to keep me out.

“I wanna show you something, Odell.”

“What?”

“You got to come out here amongst the niggers if you gonna see it.”

He stared at me for a moment. It’s always a little disconcerting when a flimsy waif of a man looks at you with an iron-hard stare. A powerful man looks like that and you can bet that he’s thinking about swinging. But a thin man might have a gun, an equalizer.

Odell opened the door and stalked out.

“What?”

I pulled up my T-shirt and tore off the bandage Jesus had dressed the wound with. Then I turned to give Odell a good look.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“I got stabbed.”

“How?” he asked. But his voice told me that he already knew the answer.

“Lookin’ for your cousin. Lookin’ for Betty. They wanna kill me for that, Odell. I been beaten and threatened, the police are after me, and now I been stabbed. All that because you sent that man to me. You blame me for Reverend Towne’s dyin’, but you ain’t no better. That knife could have been in my heart.”

“Sit down here, Easy,” Odell said. He put a hand on each of my biceps and guided me until I was seated on the step. I was still weak from the knifing. I put my head down on my knees and closed my eyes.

I heard Odell go back into the house and then I dozed for a few minutes. After a while there was an argument at the door.

“I don’t want him out there on my porch!” I heard Pea say.

“It ain’t yours,” Odell said, trying to bring down her voice with his.

Then the door opened and I felt a cool salve on my wound.

“You should go to a doctor for this, Easy.”

“Goin’ to the doctor might be goin’ to jail right now, Odell.”

He put a bandage on me and pulled my shirt down. I hadn’t had so much mothering since I was seven.

“It’s a clean wound. In the muscle, I think.” Odell sat down beside me. “If it don’t get infected, or the knife wasn’t rusty, then you be okay. But you got to keep cleanin’ it.”

“What about Betty?”

“I’m sorry, Easy. I didn’t mean to get you messed up in this thing. I mean, I thought that you could find Betty for them but I didn’t know everything then.”

“Every what thing?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“This is my life here, Odell.”

“I know, and I’m sorry for that, but there’s things happenin’ here. Things that you don’t know about.”

“You mean like Marlon?”

Odell stiffened a little but he didn’t say anything.

“Odell, I’m in trouble here, man.”

“Easy Rawlins!” It was a voice from the grave.

Odell and I both got up and turned to see poor old Martin standing there.

He was dressed in a white shirt, black trousers, and blunt-toe brown shoes. The collar of his shirt was way too big for his chicken neck and his pants were so loose that they had to be doubled over to tie them onto his hips with the belt. He held himself up with a cane in each hand. And those hands were shaking. He looked right at me but the effort to hold his head up was so great that he had to lower his head now and then to rest.

Odell and I went up to Martin and helped him to the banister at the edge of the porch. Once he was leaning he waved us off.

“I ain’t seen you in years, Easy. Wasn’t it at Jasmine’s weddin’?”

“I think so,” I answered. I’d never known a woman named Jasmine.

“Yeah, you was some boy, Easy. Smart as you could want and baaaaad.”

I laughed. There was nothing to say about his cancer. Cancer meant that he was going to die.

“How’d you get Pea and her husband t’come down here, Marty?” I asked. “As I remember it she said she couldn’t even stand to look at you.”

Martin showed me a perfect set of front teeth. A skull’s grin.

“Tole dem ’bout my in-surance.” He spoke slowly, articulating each word.

“What insurance?”

“Twenty-fi’e hunnert dollars to be paid on the day that I die. Pea’s the beneficiary.”

“Really?”

Martin showed his teeth again and said, “No. But that’s what I told’em. You know the minute they heard I was sick they rush on down. Pea come into my room every mornin’ an’ peer at me… then I open up my eyes and she jump.” Martin laughed. He laughed even though he knew that he was dying.