Black Betty (7 page)

“What can I do for you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I came to see about when we can start movin’ on Freedom’s Plaza. You know my money’s gettin’ kinda low.”

Clovis stared at me like I was a hobo instead of being a member of her investment consortium.

She hailed from Dallas, Texas—not a part of the state I had ever visited—and came to L.A. after the violent death of a man named “Jammer” Jerry Redd. Seems Jerry was trying to force his affections on Clovis’s youngest sister—Antoinette. But he gave up that enterprise when Clovis dissuaded him with a twelve-inch pipe that she carried around in a sack. Jerry died three days later, and even though the judge called it self-defense the Redd clan wanted Clo’s scalp.

Clovis was on a bus to Los Angeles twenty-five minutes after the verdict.

Clovis didn’t have but sixty-five dollars to her name when she came to L.A. in 1955. She took a room on 103rd Street and got a job serving ham hocks and collard greens at a nameless diner that Mofass, my money-hungry real estate agent, and I used to frequent. Clovis was civil to us whenever we ate there but she was especially deferential to Mofass, because he was the boss—at least that was what she thought. I liked to pretend that I worked for Mofass and that he was the landlord. That way I got most of the money and none of the complaints. And people were only nice to me because they liked me. Nobody ever greased me up the way Clovis used to butter Mofass’s cornbread.

Mofass was already sick by then. He had wasted away to a mere two hundred and thirty pounds and his breath came faster than a small dog’s. He’d finally given up cigars but the emphysema still moved through his lungs like thick glue. Even then his breath was high and musical, like the chatter from domesticated dolphins at Pacific Ocean Park.

One day Mofass was complaining that the only home-cooked meals he got came from Clo’s table. At that time he lived in a rented room on Spruce, the opposite direction from Clo’s. But she told him that she’d be happy to drop by with a hot meal now and then.

“Important man like you shouldn’t have to be eatin’ out no cans,” she said, bending so far down across the counter that we could see her stomach down between her breasts. “I could bring you somethin’ hot if you want it.”

Mofass’s fast breathing picked up its pace. I thought he was going to keel over dead right then.

They had a house together in less than three months. Before the year was out, Esquire Realty was formed and Clovis had started drumming up business all over south L.A.

Clovis had a real flair for the real estate business. She put together a group of middle-class workingmen and started them investing in apartment buildings. She and Mofass managed the properties and then Clovis started making deals with wealthier white landowners. She told the white men that she could represent their investments better in the black neighborhoods because she had her ear close to the ground out there and because she had the trust of the tenants.

In three years, Freedom’s Trust, which was the Negro investment group’s name, owned twelve buildings and Esquire Realty represented them all, along with another twenty buildings owned by outside whites.

Esquire still represented me, in a limited way, but Clovis wasn’t happy about it. Even once she’d found that I owned all the property that Mofass had represented she still couldn’t shake the notion of me as a handyman.

“WE CAIN’T MOVE on Freedom’s Plaza,” she said.

“’Scuse me?”

“They done put a freeze on our permit. Cain’t even put a shovel in the ground out there.”

“What about the lawyer?” I asked.

Clovis twisted her lips to the side in a sour kiss. “Ain’t nuthin’ he could do. They got a injunction on the whole place. City says that they wanna build a sewage treatment plant out there.” Clovis’s gaze kept going back to the papers on her desk. She was trying to give me the hint that she was too busy to spend much time discussing a foregone conclusion.

“But they granted us a permit. If they granted us a permit then they got to honor it—right?”

Freedom’s Trust looked like a good idea to me when Clovis started it. Everything she touched turned to cash. So I brought her an idea that got her to smile—even at me.

I owned a large lot of property down in Compton and I had an option to buy even more. Clovis gathered the assets of Freedom’s Trust to buy an adjacent lot and then we all got together a proposal to build a shopping mall called Freedom’s Plaza. There’d be a supermarket, an appliance store, and a dozen smaller shops owned and patronized by black people.

We had the plans drawn up and all the permits we needed. I had gone deeply into debt to do my part, but I knew that you had to spend money in order to make it. Everything had been moving fine up until that morning. It had been a slow process, so I was hurting, but I never imagined that our permit would be disallowed.

“What’s gonna happen to the property if they go through with this?”

“City’ll foreclose for the development and pay us whatever the land is worth.”

“But we’re in debt over the plans and all those fees and taxes,” I said. “The undeveloped price won’t even half cover what we owe.”

“That’s the chance we took, Mr. Rawlins,” Clovis said as if she was talking about a ten-dollar bet laid with Georgette. “We got to pay for the plans and the lawyer—and the management fees.”

“Management fees? You expect me to pay you for losin’ my money? I don’t have no money left.”

“You got them buildin’s, Mr. Rawlins. If you sold off a couple’a them you could pay what you owe an’ still have some money in your pocket.”

“What?” I reached for the edge of the desk, and at that same moment the front door opened. I didn’t need to turn around to know that the heavy footfalls were Tyrone, Clavell, Grover, and Fitts—Clovis’s younger brothers. I knew Renee had gotten on the phone to call them. Whenever Clovis needed their help they were just waiting for the call—all four of them.

“You heard me, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I wanna talk to Mofass about this.” A hum had started at the base of my skull. The heat in that room turned into hatred for them.

“You talk to me, Mr. Rawlins. I’m the one run this here office. I’m the one you gotta talk to.”

I stood straight up out of my chair, knocking it over. Then I turned on my heel, walked straight past those big men and right out of the door.

The hot Santa Ana wind hit my face like a wall. Sweat was coming down my legs by the time I reached the trunk of my ’56 Pontiac. Dickhead’s sawed-off was still there. I broke it open and replaced the spent cartridge. Two blasts would wound everybody in the room, after that they were mine. I reached for the box of ammo in case I needed to reload. It was lying in the corner of the tire well. When I picked it up I saw Feather’s little rubber Tweety-Bird doll jammed underneath. She’d been looking for that doll for two weeks. Three different nights she went to sleep crying because her Tweety was lost and scared somewhere and nobody would feed him. For a second I forgot my anger and felt the flash of joy sure to be on her face when I returned the oil-stained toy.

“Rawlins.” The smug voice was Fitts. He was at the front of the car.

I peeked out over the open trunk and asked, pleasantly, “Yeah?”

“I just wanna tell you that you better be leavin’ Sis alone, man. An’ I ain’t fuckin’ wichya.”

Fitts was young and hale. No matter how much he tried to make his face into a scowl he just looked like a little boy. Smooth skin and round eyes.

I put the gun down and closed the trunk.

“You don’t have to worry ’bout me, man,” I said. “I’m the one who got to worry.”

Fitts didn’t know what to say to that.

I went around the boy-faced man and got into the driver’s seat. Fitts was staring at me through the open window, a look of confusion on his face. He watched me as I pulled away, his brothers coming around, gathering up in a group around him like wolves and dogs do.

The thought of that boy exhausted me. He didn’t have the slightest concept of what was going on in the world around him. He was young and strong and he had brothers to run with and sisters to clean his clothes and serve him.

I could have killed him—for nothing. Somebody would kill him one day. Like Mouse had killed Bruno.

I wanted to kill Clovis too, but there wasn’t any reason for it. She hadn’t done anything. It was me. I had reached out for the white man’s brass ring and got caught up short, that’s all. They taught me when I was a boy to stay in my place. I was a fool for forgetting that lesson, and now all I was doing was paying for that foolishness.

Deep inside I knew that the world wasn’t going to let me be an upright businessman. It was just that I had worked so hard. Since I was a child I worked the daylight hours; sweeping, gardening, delivering. I’d done every kind of low job, and I wanted my success. I wanted it—violently.

But the violence didn’t sit easily in me anymore. Every time I felt it I remembered Bruno and Mouse and how easily we come to die.

Back home in Texas and Louisiana, shootings and stabbings and beatings were commonplace. A man would kill you with his bare hands if he didn’t have the right tools. Women died giving birth, men drowned trying to do logging jobs that no man should have been expected to do. There was syphilis and pneumonia and tuberculosis everywhere you turned.

And then came World War Two. People died by the millions there. They died in their own homes and on lonely winter landscapes. In Europe they built giant factories to kill people in. In Europe they made you dig your own grave before putting a bullet in the back of your head.

In Europe I’d have days where I saw more dead people than I did live ones. In one town, in Poland, I came upon a hole, six by six by six, that was full to overflowing with the corpses of infant children, not one of whom had grown old enough to speak a word.

But through all that time I had hope. Hope that I’d come to a place and time where death would no longer haunt me. It’s not that I thought people would stop dying one day. I knew that death was always coming. But not this senseless kind of death where men killed from boredom or because of a child’s game they played.

When Bruno died I realized that I’d always be surrounded by violence and insanity. I saw it everywhere; in Fitt’s innocent face, in Dickhead’s diseased gaze. It was even in me. That feeling of anger wrapped tight under my skin, in my hands.

And it was getting worse.

THE DRIVE NORTHWARD was a monotonous landscape of one-story houses except for an occasional office building and the palm trees. The sky was dense with smog, gray all around, with a deepening amber color hugging low at the horizon. If I took a deep breath I felt a sharp pain in the pit of my lungs. I welcomed it. I had one more thing to take care of before I could go out and earn Saul Lynx’s money.

L.A. has always been flat and featureless. Anybody could be anywhere out there. The police arrested you for jaywalking or because you didn’t have the brains not to brag after you hit a liquor store for the day’s receipts. But if you wanted to hide from the law, L.A. was the place to do it. There was no logic to the layout of the city. And there were more people every day. Sharecroppers and starlets, migrant Mexicans and insurance salesmen, come to pick over the money tree for a few years before they went back home. But they never went home. The money slipped through their fingers and the easy life weighed them down.

I DROVE OVER to the old bus station on Los Angeles, parked across the street, and killed the motor. It was hot in the car, but that didn’t matter. Actually it felt right being scorched by the sun. I enjoyed it so much that I even lit a cigarette to burn up my insides too.

After the Camel I laid back behind the wheel and closed my eyes for a moment.

NO MATTER WHERE MY MIND wanted to go in that half-doze, my heart wended its way back to that alley behind John’s.

It was quiet with Bruno slumped against the butcher’s door. Blood dripped down his chest and he made a gurgling sound. A bubble of blood kept bulging and receding from his nostril. Blood seeped across the alley toward my bare feet. I didn’t want to get blood on my feet; didn’t want a dead man’s blood on me.

Then there was Mouse again. He walked right in the blood and stooped over to see Bruno up close. He listened to the ragged breath for a moment, then pulled his long pistol out of the front of his pants and leveled it at Bruno’s eye. It was the same way he killed Joppy Shag all those years ago.

The shot exploded and I jumped awake. Across the street the glass doors of the bus station swung open and Raymond “Mouse” Alexander walked out in the same silver suit and gray shoes he wore while killing Bruno Ingram. His shirt was a deep smoky color, his hat was short in the brim. Most men do a jolt up in prison and when they come out they’re behind the times. But not Mouse. His tastes were so impeccable that he would have looked good after fifty years in jail.

The only thing different from the night he laid Bruno down that I could see from across the street was a pencil-thin mustache that Mouse sometimes grew and sometimes cut off.

“Hey!” I waved through the window.

He carried a drab green bag down at his side. It was almost empty. You don’t collect many keepsakes in prison—at least not the kind you can carry around in a bag.

He jumped into the passenger’s seat all excited. “Easy, lemme have your gun.”

“What?”

“Couple’a motherfuckers on that bus wanna get the news. They was laughin’ at me, Easy.”

Any other man, even the craziest killer, I could have talked sense to. I could have said that there were policemen in the station, that they’d throw him back into prison. But not Mouse. He was like an ancient pagan needing to celebrate and anoint his freedom with blood.

“Sorry, man,” I said, thinking about the shotgun in my trunk. “I didn’t bring nuthin’.”

“You go around wit’ no gun?”

“What I need a gun for?”

“S’pose you gotta kill somebody, that’s why.”