Black Betty (16 page)

“He’s dead?”

“I ain’t seen a body, but you could bet he’s dead all right. Dead and dryin’ somewhere out in the desert.”

Gwendolyn started crying. Sarah got up and hugged the girl. It was a hug full of love and care. It made me feel lonely for my children.

“You go sit, honey,” Sarah whispered to the sobbing girl.

Almost unable to walk, the maid made it to a chair.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

“Yes, Miss Cain?”

“You have a choice, sir.”

“Always got that, ma’am. Even when you die you got some kinda choice.”

“Well, maybe that’s true, but you’ll die in the end, there’s no choice about that.”

I couldn’t argue.

“I don’t know why you keep talking about a check. I didn’t write any check to Marlon—” She stopped in midsentence and cocked her head to the side like a wary bird who’s just heard a thump in the air. “But… Betty’s in trouble. And you’re involved in it already.”

“Excuse me, Miss Cain, but I’m not involved in anything. The only reason I came here…”

“Yes yes yes yes yes,” she said, nodding away my words. “I know that you’re not involved in anything that’s… that’s happened. But somebody might be thinking like that. After all, we’re talking about some very important people here.”

“So you sayin’ that people like Betty and me couldn’t hardly expect a fair deal when it comes to people like you and your father?”

“I’m just saying that I’d be willing to help if you’d be willing to…”

“Be your nigger,” I said.

Sarah Cain recoiled as if I had struck her. “No!” she declared. “No! I don’t feel like that! I never…”

“You did too. Yes you did. You offer me enough money to make most people sweat and then you show me how I’m so little that I better mind. Well, that might work wit’ yo’ people out there.” I pointed behind me with my thumb to indicate the fields. “But it don’t mean shit to me. Now I’m gonna get up and leave. I don’t want your money and I’m not gonna do your work. That’s it.”

“But, Mr. Rawlins…”

“No.” I shook my head and got up and went. I managed not to run. In spite of what I said, I
was
scared; scared to death of that white woman offering me help and offering me money.

I took a deep breath in the air outside. It relaxed me. I needed some relaxing after turning down twenty thousand dollars.

“Mr. Rawlins?” Gwendolyn had scooped up the crumpled money and followed me out to the porch.

“What do you want?”

“We need your help,” she said, handing the money at me like a bunch of crushed flowers.

“You need help all right. This is 1961, honey. You shouldn’t be working for some woman calling you a nigger.”

“She’s never said that. Never.”

“Maybe not in so many words, but when a white woman start tellin’ you how important she is an’ how much trouble you might be in… that’s her callin’ you a niggah.” There was a maniac in my voice. It felt like he was going to jump right out of my throat and strangle somebody. “And if she said it to me then she said it to you too.”

“She was just making a point,” Gwendolyn said—a great scholar of white folks. “She meant that you’d be in trouble with no way out because you’re Negro.”

“To begin with, we’re both Negro, me
and
you. And the second thing is, she was threatenin’ me with the fact that I couldn’t contradict her in any court. If she says so then I’m gone—and she’s gonna say so unless I slip on my chains and do what she want.”

Somehow a discourse on racial politics seemed out of place at the sea. Gwendolyn was about to break down again. My arms went around her of their own accord.

“Please,” she cried. “Please help us.”

“Us? What do you have to do with it? What do you owe that woman?”

She pushed away from my embrace and looked at me.

“Sarah took care of me since I was young,” she said.

“Now why she wanna do that?”

“She knew my mother, but, but my mother died. Sarah and Betty are the only family I ever had. And now Betty’s scared and she needs help.” Gwendolyn dropped the money and said, “Take it.”

She inhaled an enormous sob.

I stood there gawking for a few moments, disgusted by money and the way rich people think that they can buy you. Then the practical man bent down to gather up the cash before the sea breeze could blow it away.

Gwen stood there sniffing and shaking but she let a smile break through when I picked up the cash.

“You’ll help?”

“Maybe. But you know, I hardly see how I could help you. I mean, I don’t know where Betty is and I don’t know anybody that does. Somethin’s goin’ on here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why would she just disappear like that?”

“I don’t know,” Gwen pleaded.

“You don’t know nuthin’ could help me find her?”

“She has a boyfriend,” Gwen said hopefully.

“Uh-huh. Who’s that?”

“His name is Felix. Felix Landry.”

“You tell Hodge that?”

“Yes we did.”

“What else you tell him?”

“That Odell Jones was her cousin.”

“You tell him about Marlon?”

Gwen’s eyes knitted. “N… no.”

“Why not?”

“I… I really don’t know.”

“There’s got to be some reason.”

“Is he really dead, Mr. Rawlins?” She touched my forearm.

“Yeah, he’s dead all right. I cain’t prove it but I know it’s true.”

“He used to come stay with Betty when I was a little girl,” Gwen said. “He did card tricks and made us laugh.”

“Us?”

“He had a little nephew named Terry who’d come up and play with me. But he was too rough and one day they stopped coming.”

“How long have you lived up here?”

“As long as I can remember.”

“Do you know who your mother is?”

“I don’t have one,” she said clearly as a child might say to put away her nightmares.

She leaned heavily against the door and went into the house without another word.

I was glad for the solitude.

ARTHUR WAS WAITING down by my car.

“Mr. Rawlins.” He didn’t put out a hand or smile.

“What?”

“What did my mother want from you?”

“Why don’t you go and ask her?”

The pale boy tried to get serious with me. His eyes furrowed and his shoulders rose like hackles. He was a rooster flaring at a junkyard dog.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into here. This is family business…”

“Excuse me.” I moved to go past him.

But before I could get by he swung, landing a perfect right hook to my nose.

I seized that boy by the front of his yellow shirt and lifted him up off his feet.

“Whoa!” he shouted, mistaking me for a horse.

My fist ached to hurt him but I just let go. He staggered on the brink of falling, so I gave him a little shove and he sat down hard.

I grabbed him by the back of his shirt with one hand and opened the car door with the other. As I pushed him I said, “Get in!”

He slouched sullenly in his seat but didn’t move as I turned the ignition.

“Does this road lead down to the highway?” I asked.

Arthur stared dead ahead and caught up on his practice breathing.

I headed down the paved road, the opposite direction from the one I had come.

We drove in forced silence for the next few minutes. I’d driven all the way to a big wooden fence that was painted lavender. As soon as we were through it I stopped.

“So where you wanna go?” I asked him.

“You’re the one driving,” he answered: a petulant girl on a soured date.

“I’m gettin’ tired of takin’ this shit offa you people.” I could see the Pacific Coast Highway down below.

“If you are, then why don’t you just leave us alone? Nobody wants your help anyway.”

“Your mother wants my help. She wants me to find Elizabeth Eady.”

Arthur put his fists up against his forehead and pressed as hard as he could. He did that for a while and then he stomped both feet on the floor.

“What’s wrong, son?” I asked him with a tenderness that I actually felt at the moment.

“Leave us alone, Mr. Rawlins,” he answered. “Let Aunt Betty just go away. If you keep on pulling at it everything’ll come apart.”

Aunt Betty.

“Tell me why Hodge would be looking for your father.” After tenderness, a slap.

“What?”

“I found the name Ron Hawkes on a paper in Saul Lynx’s trash. Saul Lynx is the detective Hodge, and your mother, hired to find Betty.”

Arthur sat up straight when I mentioned his father’s name. Maybe it was all the emotion he had around that man. Maybe.

We sat awhile longer. The only sounds were the far-off murmur of the waves and the gurglings of Arthur’s stomach.

“Tell me about it,” I said at last. Soft again. That boy meant no more to me than a dragonfly impaled on a silver pin.

Arthur turned half toward me. I could see that the whole truth was there, just behind his eyes. I was so close, almost there.

But then I leaned a little too far and whatever truth there was scurried back into the crevices and folds in his brain.

“I’m going to get out here,” he said. He gave me a look as if to ask if I were going to let him go.

It would have been easier if I had been a man like Styles. I knew pressure points that would have had young Arthur screaming out to the wide ocean. I could have torn the truth from him. His white mother could threaten me but she didn’t know the threat that I posed; she didn’t see the crushing hurt in my hands.

But I wasn’t Styles.

Arthur got out of the car and stumbled back up the road we had come down on. I got out too and was about to hail the young man. Maybe I’d offer him a ride back home. Maybe if I got them all in one room I could ask some good questions.

But before I could call out I saw a black horse racing down the hill. I had maybe forty-five seconds to make up my mind whether to stay and fight with the cowboy or to drive off.

I got in behind the wheel and waited until Rudy was almost on me. Then I hit the gas and fishtailed down the road, yelling and laughing as I slowly took the lead and left him to the stories I would tell friends, in the years to come.

I CALLED PRIMO when I got in. “Hello,” Primo said into my ear.

“You got my boy, Mr. Garcias?”

“He’s here, Easy. How are you, my friend?”

“If I don’t get killed I might be rich.”

Primo’s laugh sounded like two hands being rubbed together in greedy expectation. Mofass was coughing in the background.

“Let me talk to the man,” I said.

Mofass hacked a little, then he wheezed, “Mr. Rawlins?”

“William.”

“I wanna thank you for takin’ care of JJ. You know Clovis woulda et that girl up.”

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “That Jewelle is tough.”

“She is that.” I could hear something like a father’s pride in Mofass’s tone.

“I want you to do something for me, William.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re gonna need a lawyer to advise you on how to get Clovis outta your hair.”

“I don’t need no gott-damned lawyer! Shit, I just go out there and tell them peoples I’m back and that
I
get the rent now and
I
sign the papers. Shit! Fuckin’ lawyer steal yo’ money an’ then sue you for cryin’ ’bout it.” Talk about lawyers was the only thing that could get Mofass to curse.

“I’m payin’ for it, Mo. You got to ask that man how to get your house back and how to put an injunction on Clovis so that she can’t come around your property without getting arrested. A good lawyer could threaten her with criminal charges.”

“Why I need a lawyer when I got Mr. Alexander with me? Nobody gonna fuck with Mr. Alexander.”

“Think, man. Think. Clovis’s brood don’t know Raymond. And by the time they find out what he is he will have killed three of ’em.”

“So what? I don’t care if he kill’em all!”

“Okay. All right. Have it your way, Mofass, but you know if Raymond kill somebody while he’s workin’ for you then you gonna get charged too.”

Through Mofass’s silence I could hear Primo’s youngest running and screaming around the house. Primo and Flower had twelve natural children and three strays. The oldest was twenty-five with six kids of her own. The youngest was two.

“Who is this lawyer?” Mofass asked.

“His name is Hodge, Calvin Hodge. He got an office on Robertson.” I gave him the address off the paper I found in Saul Lynx’s trash. “Tell him your problem. See what he’s got to say.”

“I could trust him?”

“No. You can’t trust this man worth a damn.”

“Then why in hell I’m goin’ there?”

“You’re goin’ there because I said to, that’s why. Now listen up. Don’t say my name to the man. Just ask him to help you. Tell him what your problem is but don’t say my name. And after he talks to you, call me up and tell me everything he said. Every word of it. And keep your eyes open, William. I wanna know if he’s got a safe and if there’s chains on the door. I wanna know what floor he’s on and everything else.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Rawlins, this don’t sound right.”

“You want me to put you back there with Clovis? ’Cause you know I didn’t never have to take you out of there. You been knowin’ all this time that she was cheatin’ me an’ you didn’t call until you got wind’a this husband she got.”

“I’m sick, man. I needed her. What could I do?”

“You could do what I ask you to.”

“Sure, sure, Mr. Rawlins. Anything you say.”

“Raymond will be by in the mornin’. You take him wit’ you over to Hodge. Just tell the man your problem. Give him some money if he wants it.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want no trouble.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow to find out what you saw,” I said. Then I hung up.

I called Mouse next.

“…now remember, Raymond,” I told him. “I don’t want no trouble.”

“Sometimes trouble just finds you, Easy.”

“Listen, Ray. I need to know the layout of this man’s office. He knows who I am, so don’t let Mofass say my name.”

“When this gonna be through, Easy?” he asked.

“Couple’a days. Maybe three.”