Black Betty (11 page)

“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I got too much already to do.”

“That’s why the next man they bring in here will be killed. Because you have things to do.”

“Listen, honey,” I said in my deepest voice. I took her hand but she tugged it away from me.

“Get your hand off of me.”

“Okay. Hey. That man up there is a stone killer. You can’t stop him with a writ and lawsuit.”

“I’m not afraid of any man,” Faye Rabinowitz said. She was rubbing her hand as if to wipe off the residue I had left there.

“I know you aren’t,” I said. And then, “I was gonna call you even if I hadn’t gotten arrested.”

“Why?”

“I want to find out how it was the cops got on to Mouse.”

“Why?”

“Because if I don’t figure somethin’ out quick, Raymond gonna be callin’ soon and even you won’t be able to help him out.”

She gave me a quizzical look. Not friendly but opened up enough for me to talk.

“I need to find out about how the cops knew to go to his house that night. He thinks that it was the people in the bar that told. I wanna prove that it wasn’t them.”

“I don’t work with the prosecutor’s office. They won’t tell me anything.”

“The case is over. There gotta be somebody down there who’d talk to you.”

Her stare was mean. A lawyer’s loveless gaze combined with the stare of a woman who had no use for a man. She took a small address book and a golden mechanical pencil from her purse.

“What’s your number?” she asked.

I told her.

“Call me in a couple of days if you haven’t heard from me yet.”

WHEN CONNOR EMPTIED out my pouch of belongings I found that the check was missing. I didn’t say anything about it, though. I was afraid that Faye would keep me there arguing until Styles showed up.

And Styles wanted to kill me. That was my working hypothesis.

THE HORNS WERE happy to see me. They wanted to keep Feather and Jesus overnight but when I looked in on the children I could see by their furrowed foreheads that they were having bad dreams, so I got them up and walked them in their underwear and blankets back to our house.

We had hot chocolate and bread and jam. At least Jesus and I did. Feather sat down on my lap, and after crying and showing me a three-day-old bruise on her knee, she fell fast asleep.

“Don’t worry, Juice,” I said to my son. “Everything’s fine.”

He gave me the thumbs-up.

WE WERE LATE getting off to school. Feather just couldn’t seem to get her clothes together and Jesus was no help for once. But by ten I’d dropped them both off and was on my way down to Avalon Boulevard, to a hole in the wall called Herford’s gym.

On the way a hot wind blew into my face through the open window. It was strong and oppressive and made me think of hot days in the south. And that made me think about Betty. This wasn’t the first time I had braved troubles for her.

AFTER THAT KISS she gave me on the street I was always dogging her. I’d wait out in front of the flophouse Marlon lived in, because you never knew where Betty might be sleeping but Marlon almost always made it back home to his bed. Betty would show up at Marlon’s around sunset and sit out in the hall on the first floor drinking and laughing with the men who lived there. It was summer and she always wore loose blouses so that she could fan her bosom more easily.

I hung around the front steps with the dogs and their fleas waiting to follow her wherever she went. I knew that she saw me but she hardly ever showed it, until one day, when she and Marlon were going down LeRoy Street. They stopped in front of a barber shop and then they both went in. I loitered around half the way down the street throwing stones into a muddy puddle and waiting to see where we’d go next.

“Hey, boy!”

My heart jumped so hard that it actually hurt.

“Yes, ma’am?” I shouted.

“Shh! Don’t be shoutin’.”

I ran up to her prepared to tell her that she was the prettiest woman that I’d ever seen.

“You know where Duncan’s place is?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, again too loud.

“Hush, boy! I ain’t deaf. I want you to go over there and find Adray Ply and tell him that Betty could see him at twelve if he come over to Paulette’s. You got that?”

I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice.

“Okay then,” Betty said. “You tell him that I said that he should give you a nickel.”

Duncan’s place was an old blacksmith’s barn that went bust. I don’t think that Duncan owned it or even paid rent; he just made a gin joint there because there was no one to tell him no.

It was an unsavory place. There were few chairs in Duncan’s. The men either stood around or they sat on the floor and leaned up against the wall. Only men went in there, and all they did was drink. The smell was so sour and the language was so coarse in there that I started shaking the minute I walked through the open doors. There were men all around talking and vomiting and drinking. Two men were flailing away at a third man with their fists, and I tripped over a man who was either sleeping or dead in the middle of the floor.

“What you want here, boy?”
Duncan, the one-eyed barman, hollered. His left eye had been gouged in a fight early in his evil life. The lids were sucked into the socket around a tiny black hole. The skin around that eye was badly scarred, but he never wore a patch because that hideous wound and his brusque manner were enough to dissuade many a tough customer.

“M-m-m-m-mister, M-m-m-mister Adray Ply,” I stammered.

“What?”

I couldn’t say another word. But I didn’t have to because a tall man in a close-fitting charcoal suit came up behind Duncan.

The panther-looking man hissed, “You lookin’ fo’me?”

“M-m-m-mister Ply?”

“That’s right,” he whispered.

The din around us seemed to recede.

Adray looked over his shoulder as if he were worried that people wanted to know his business. He grabbed me by the arm and pushed me out of the door. His grip hurt but I was happy to get out of that hell.

Outside he set me on a high step that led to a kind of utility door to Duncan’s.

“What you want wit’ me, boy?” His hoarse whisper scared me more than Duncan’s eye.

“Black Betty say that she could meet you at Paulette’s at twelve if you want.” It was everything I could do to keep the tears out of my voice.

The smile that went across Adray’s face was a purely evil thing. He forgot me and turned back toward Duncan’s.

I was so scared that I could feel my insides trembling, but still, a nickel would buy a head-cheese sandwich on half a French bread.

“Mr. Ply, Betty said that you should gimme a nickel!” I knew it was a mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

Ply turned and squinted at me. He put his oily brown face right up to mine. “You think I’m a fool, boy?”

I gave up on my mouth.

He grabbed me by the shirt with one hand and flashed out his silvery switchblade with the other. Then he lifted me up off of the stair.

“You think I’m a fool?” he rasped again. The men hanging out in front of Duncan’s stood around, idly waiting for my demise.

I was nothing but scared.

He dropped me into a muddy puddle and I was up in a second and down the street so fast that I didn’t even hear the laughter that I knew was bound to come.

I ran, hard and fast, all the way to the place I lived at that time. It was a little nest that I built in the back of a white family’s barn outside of the ward. I crawled up into my hay bed and swore that I’d never go anywhere near Black Betty again.

And I was true to my vow—for at least three days.

THERE WAS A LOCK on the front door of Herford’s gym but it was just a sham. Any burglar could have gone through it in less time than a regular person needed to work a key. Herford’s had been broken into by countless thieves who had found that there was nothing worth stealing. They’d break into all the lockers and dump Clip’s papers out of his drawers.

Papa Clip, who ran the gym, got tired of people breaking in and brought in a killer dog named Charlotte, after Clip’s ex-mother-in-law. He put a tiny little typewritten note on the door that read, DOG, BEWARE. After getting Charlotte, Clip didn’t even lock the door before going home. If you went in there off hours and climbed up the rickety stairway to the big workout room, you had Charlotte to contend with. “And Charlotte the dog,” Clip would say, “is almost mean as Charlotte the woman.”

Before I got up to the second floor I could smell the place. It was the combination of liniment, men’s sweat, and a canine odor that was strong enough to hunt by.

There were maybe a dozen men working out around the room. Everyone was bare-chested except Clip and his father, Reynolds. Clip had on an old purple sweatshirt and denim jeans. He was a short bowlegged specimen who walked, it seemed, by swiveling his pelvis. Reynolds, who was at least eighty, wore a three-button cream-colored suit with a bright yellow-and-red ascot tied around his throat.

“Hey, Papa!” I yelled. And I was sorry the moment I had, because there came a deep growl and suddenly from a big refrigerator box in the corner a hundred and sixty pounds of teeth came hurtling at me.

I froze to the spot. The dog had already leapt, her open mouth aimed for my throat, when Papa yelled, “Charlotte!” I felt the breeze as the dog allowed herself to rush past me. She landed growling and sniffing around my heels. I don’t know where Papa found that mongrel. It was some kind of cross between a St. Bernard and a mastiff. On all fours her head came up to my diaphragm. She was snarling with her ragged red maw open wide.

“Charlotte! Git!” Clip came over swinging a rolled-up magazine at the dog’s snout. All the evil flowed right out of her and she slouched back to her box whimpering.

“That fuckin’ dog gonna kill somebody one day,” the old man said, coming up behind Clip.

“I got my sign,” Clip replied. “Law says you gotta have a sign you wanna keep a watchdog.”

I wanted to tell him what he could do with that sign, but I kept it to myself.

“I’d like to see you say that to some judge.” Reynolds Carpenter had run the gym before Clip did. Now he just hung around, living out his retirement.

“Hey, Clip, Mr. Carpenter,” I said.

“Easy,” Clip said. “What could we do you for?”

“I’m lookin’ for Terry T. He still work out here?”

“If that’s what you call it.” Clip was disgusted. “If he come here and jump rope three days a week he think he ready t’be back in the ring. Shit! He lucky I don’t th’ow his damn butt outta here. I swear if some good boxers showed up an’ needed his locker I’d kiss him good-bye.”

“He still makin’ book?”

“Yeah,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds was a gambler.

Most days, no matter what I was working on, I would have stopped and talked awhile. That’s what made me different from the cops and from other people, black and white, trying to find out something down in black L.A. The people down there were country folks and they liked it when you stopped for a few minutes or so.

But I couldn’t spare the time that day. I wanted to find Betty—and Marlon if he was alive. I wanted to end the whole thing and get back to where crazy animals, human and inhuman, weren’t chafing to take a piece out of my hide.

“Okay then,” I said to father and son. “I’ll catch ya later.”

“T might make a showup t’day,” Reynolds said.

“Says who?” Clip asked.

“Ain’t no race t’day. Ain’t you ever noticed that T come in when he ain’t got a race t’cover?”

“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no races or no gamblin’. I’m in the fights, that’s what I do,” Clip said.

“Yeah,” Reynolds said and then he ran the pad of his thumb under his nose. All three of us knew that gesture meant a thrown fight.

There wasn’t a manager or trainer or boxer who hadn’t been close to gambling. Clip managed Joppy Shag the night he threw a fight to Tim “the Killer” O’Leary. Joppy was well past a shot at the title—the only thing he was selling was his self-respect. Joppy had told me that he and Clip took home thirty-five hundred dollars that night. He used that money to buy his bar.

I didn’t hold it against Clip. At least when Joppy worked with him he took home a paycheck.

When we worked together Joppy ended up dead.

“What time he come in?” I asked.

“When it suit’im.” Clip stared at his father while Reynolds examined his nails.

I left them like that. All around them men were throwing punches, feinting, doing sit-ups; all of them preparing for a war that they’d fight in the ring instead of on the street.

THERE WAS A LITTLE GROCERY STORE down at the corner. I braved the morning heat and got an
L.A. Examiner
and a Nehi grape soda down there. Then I sat down on a bus-stop bench across the street from Herford’s.

All I was wearing was a pair of light cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to the middle of my chest. The sky was so clear that it was hardly even blue. The sun shone down on me more relentlessly than Commander Styles.

Late morning in the summer is a time for old people. It’s the heat that gets them out. No matter how hot it is the old men dress up like Reynolds and go out looking for some corner to congregate on. The women are out to the store for margarine and collard greens.

One old man was walking down the block with the most dignified limp I’d ever seen. He strutted like he had some kind of knowledge denied to us younger fools. He was probably just proud that he’d lived so long. Because behind every poor old man there’s a line of death. Siblings and children, lovers and wives. There’s disease and no doctor. There’s war, and war eats poor men like an aardvark licking up ants.

When I looked away from the old man I saw Terry T coming down the block. He was short and stocky, welterweight size. I’d seen him fight on a few starter cards. His fists were like hammers, insistent and right on the head. But he ignored the body, and that’s something a boxer should never do.