White Butterfly

by Mosley, Walter

  “Can I sit here?” I asked her in a businesslike manner.

  She looked up at me and her eyes laughed. That’s when I fell in love. Her eyes laughed without a smile crossing her lips. Then she looked around the room. There were quite a few empty tables around, because it was late afternoon and the Toucan was still waiting for its crowd.

  “I like this one,” was my answer to her gaze.

  She looked the other way and I sat down.

  Addison put his hand over the hand of the woman at his table. A waiter came up and took my whiskey order.

  Regina didn’t avoid my face but she just looked straight ahead, past me rather than at me.

  “No, Nancy,” Addison said. “I ain’t gonna forget you. I got the tickets right-chere in my pocket.”

  The woman, a chesty specimen in a checkered dress suit, laughed. I thought about Addison’s fiancée. Iona Spigs was a pretty but tight-mouthed girl. She liked a neat house and church-filled Sundays.

  Nancy liked to get her hands dirty. When she leaned over to kiss Addison it was with her smile showing.

  I shook my head and sighed.

  My fake date glanced at me, but no more.

  I sipped my drink.

  Nancy swabbed Addison’s mouth with her tongue.

  I motioned for the waiter to come over. When he stood there before me I asked my wife-to-be, “Would you like something else?”

  She nodded at her empty glass and the waiter went away.

  I sighed again.

  “What would you do?” I asked my glass.

  “What?”

  “What would you do if you had a friend and his daughter was gonna marry that man over there?” I swung my head in Addison’s direction.

  The eyes did their laugh.

  “Is that your friend’s daughter he kissin’?”

  “Not hardly.”

  She laughed for real then. It was a good laugh in a woman. She let her head fall backward and her mouth open wide. Then she bent forward and thrummed the table with her short, unpainted nails.

  I laughed too. Not quite as hard. The waiter brought our drinks.

  “I don’t think you should do nuthin’,” Regina said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “She picked that man. She got a reason that maybe even she don’t know.”

  “But what if he break her heart?”

  “She live with her daddy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “At least she be on her own then. Maybe that’s what she wants.”

  JESUS WAS SITTING at the kitchen table. His hands were out in front of him and there was no food or anything else there. He looked up at me when I tousled his hair.

  “Run on outside now. Go on an’ play, boy. You shouldn’t be inside,” I said.

  I was glad that Regina and Edna were still gone. I had them with me anyway. I enjoyed the feeling of them in the house. On the couch that Edna always jumped from. At the sink where Regina cleaned every night.

  “I’m a poor woman and from a long line of proud poor people,” she told me that night. I’d told Tony Spigs that I couldn’t find anything on Addison.

  Regina wasn’t an inventive lover. She didn’t do tricks or bellow or jibber. But when we came together it was like everything she had was mine. She came on me like waves on the shore. She was constant and strong.

  THERE WAS A FOLDED PIECE OF PAPER on the TV. Under the note lay the nine hundred dollars I’d given her. When I saw the money I knew I was lost.

  Dear Easy:

  It is hard for me to say honey but I found a man that I love. And I am going away with him. You know I have tried but I cannot stay.

  You are wonderful Easy but I need something that we don’t have. I love you. I do love you but I have to go.

  Don’t hate me for taking Edna. She needs her mother.

  Good-bye.

  The dictionary was on the coffee table. She’d looked up the words she couldn’t spell. The tears came and my knees buckled. After a long while I looked up and saw Jesus sitting on his haunches. He was sitting watch over me.

  — 31 —

  I WENT TO THE SAFEWAY MARKET the next morning and bought a gallon of vodka and an equal amount of grapefruit soda. Jesus slipped off to school and I drank. I drank deliberately as if I were working.

  Lift hand to lip and sip, swallow and sip again, put glass on table but don’t let it go. After twenty-one double-sips, refill and start over.

  I slept in the afternoon.

  Jesus came back at about three-thirty. He came banging in the front door and ran across to his room dropping books and clothes as he went. When he came back I grabbed him by the arm and hefted him into the air.

  “What the hell do you think this is, boy, a pigsty?”

  He shied away from me after that. I felt wrong about handling him that way but whenever it bothered me I just drank some more.

  The phone rang at four. Jesus ran in from the front. He stared worriedly after the bell. I kept up the sipping regimen. Double-sip, ring, double-sip, ring. Finally the phone stopped ringing but the liquor still flowed.

  Jesus had warmed two cans of spaghetti for our dinner. I sat at the table but the smell made my stomach lurch. I leaned away from the smell in my chair.

  There was a song playing in my head, “I Cover the Waterfront.” I was humming the lyrics when I looked up and saw Mouse. He appeared as if by magic right there in my dinette.

  “Hey, Easy,” Mouse said.

  Jesus jumped out of his chair and hugged the crazy killerman.

  “Mouse,” I replied. I wasn’t actually seeing double but Mouse’s visage shimmied a little. My voice, and his, carried the slight quality of an echo chamber.

  “Better sit up, man. That’s how Blackfoot Whitey died.”

  “What?”

  “Sittin’ back, drunk in his chair, till he went too far one day an’ busted his neck.”

  “She’s gone, man.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “You do? How’d you find out?”

  There were very few times that Mouse actually looked serious. The only times I had ever seen him somber was when he was getting ready to go out on a criminal job. So his grave stare made me wonder, almost forget my sorrow.

  “It was Dupree,” he said.

  I watched my eyelids flutter. My heart did the same. I tried to think of her in that big man’s arms. I tried to think of her not with me.

  “He been after her at the hospital. You know how he always be bad-mouthin’ California… ”

  “How you know?”

  “Sophie said it. She was mad that a brother of hers could do that to a friend. She told me so I could tell you.”

  Up until that moment Regina was still with me. I still loved her and wanted her back. I planned to follow her first letter and beg for her to come back to me. But the thought of her in Dupree Bouchard’s arms tainted my brain. There was a smell and an ugly color that became a part of everything we had been. I was sick.

  Jesus was at my side with his slender boy’s arm around my neck. He put his face against my cheek.

  “Mind if I mix me one, Easy?” Mouse asked. He was already pouring a drink.

  I nodded and bowed. My wife had left me, had taken my child, had gone off with my friend. There was no song on the radio too stupid for my heart.

  THAT NIGHT IS STILL MIXED UP in my mind. I remember Mouse getting me outside to see his canary-yellow ’57 T-Bird. It was a classic from the day it came off the line.

  He told me that a loan shark fronted him the money; that he couldn’t wait for the reward to buy his new car.

  I remember women’s breasts held barely in check by loose blouses, and how seeing that sight made me sick inside.

  I remember loud music and dancing so hard that my clothes were soaked through with sweat.

  I remember a man with tears in his eyes and a kitchen knife in his hand. He was coming toward me. I moved to put my arm out but then I saw that I had my arm around a woman. She yel
led in my ear, “Derek! Stop!”

  There were other images but most of them were even less coherent. I saw Mouse smiling next to me in the car. He was driving fast and the night wind tore across my face. I was laughing too.

  “OHHHHH, DADDY,” came a woman’s voice. “Uh, uh, uh.”

  Every utterance pounded pain right in the center of my brain. I opened my eyes and saw that a woman was lying against my chest. Her dark face was barely visible under the straightened metallic-gold hair. But I could see that she was sleeping.

  “Oh yeah yeah,” the voice came again. The bed shook and bobbed.

  I looked to my left and saw a woman I had never seen before. Her face could have been ugly or beautiful but I couldn’t tell because it was contorted in the throes of a powerful orgasm. She was on her side with her eyes looking directly into mine but I don’t think I registered for her. Above her left shoulder Mouse was grinning like a hound. His gaze was locked to her profile and his whole body hunched rhythmically while she moaned.

  I sat up, pushing the woman on my chest aside. I climbed to the foot of the bed and walked across the sloppy room toward the door.

  “Oh, yeah,” Mouse called.

  The woman yelled out something too but it didn’t make any sense, like maybe it was a foreign language.

  Outside the door I saw, in the very early morning light, a bathroom.

  Even urinating made me feel sick. I could feel the puckered walls of my stomach with every motion. Even breathing made me salivate.

  There was a box next to the bathroom door. I kicked it slightly upon leaving the toilet. Any contact sent pains rolling through my head. I put my hand to my eyes and the baby started crying. The baby that had been sleeping in the cardboard box on the floor.

  I lifted the child, who was even younger than my own. I kicked open the door to the bedroom and shouted, “Who left this here baby on the flo’?”

  Mouse and his girl were still cupped together, but peacefully. When the other woman heard the baby crying she sprang up to her hands and knees and stared at me.

  She said, “Who?”

  “This baby yours?” I asked, none too kindly.

  She ran at me and took the baby away. “Mothahfuckah!” There was a slight slur to her voice but the hatred was pure.

  “Why you gonna leave a baby on the floor, in the toilet?” I yelled.

  She swung from side to side looking for a place to deposit her child.

  “Bastid!” she yelled. “I kill you!”

  We were both naked and not very far from being drunk.

  “They should take that baby away from you,” I screamed.

  The look on the young mother’s face was indecipherable. Her lips and eyes squirmed and shook, her whole body vibrated, and the baby hollered.

  Mouse came right at me. He had our clothes in his arms. He rammed his body into mine and I fell out of the room. He slammed the door on the two women and threw me my clothes.

  “Put ’em on, Easy.”

  I could still hear the baby crying through the door. I would have never put my child in harm’s way.

  IN THE CAR Mouse drove a few blocks without saying anything. I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to.

  But at Crenshaw he stopped the car at the curb. It was no later than five-thirty and the traffic was still light.

  “Easy, I gotta talk to you, man.”

  I sighed.

  “You cain’t keep up like this, man. All this drinkin’ an’ feelin’ sorry fo’ yo’self. I mean, it’s done, man. The man is dead and the woman is gone.”

  I thought about Bonita Edwards sitting so peacefully by the tree. Mouse pulled out into the street and drove me home.

  I never said a word and he didn’t say anything else.

  I stood out in front of the house for a while before going in.

  Jesus was sleeping on the couch. He had some of Edna’s toys around him on the floor. He used one of her baby pillows for his own head.

  — 32 —

  I LAID IN BED with my eyes open wide. At least that’s how it felt. I must have been dreaming, though, because people were coming in and out of my room, bad-mouthing me. Regina came, and Saunders and Quinten Naylor. Everybody had something to say and I was in no condition to contradict them.

  I watched the windowpane go from day to night.

  There was a large, jagged stone in my lower intestines and my fingers were all numb.

  I slept fitfully through the night. Waking up once to check on Jesus.

  I felt an evil magic in the room. When I looked at the clock it said five-oh-five and the phone rang. It rang and rang.

  By the time I went to the living room to answer it Jesus was already there. He was sitting next to the phone with his hands clasped before his chest as if he might have been in prayer.

  I let it ring two more times before I picked it up.

  I was thinking of all the things I would say to her. At one moment I imagined myself screaming, “Whore!” And in the next moment I was breaking down and taking her back. I felt great power and relief lifting the receiver.

  I picked up the phone and held it to my ear. I wanted her to say the first words. From her words I could decide what to say.

  “Mr. Rawlins?” a man’s voice said. “Hello? Anybody there?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Vernor Garnett. Robin’s father.”

  “What you callin’ me at this time’a mornin’ for?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. We’re just worried, that’s all.”

  Saunders’s death and implication in the murders had already been in the paper and the news. They had said that Saunders was killed in a case of self-defense in a barroom brawl in Oakland. Due to the particularly violent nature of the man and due to excellent police work by Quinten Naylor, the man’s fingerprints were taken and compared to partial prints left at the scene of the murder of Willa Scott. Saunders was the killer. The killings in Oakland went unknown.

  They knew who killed their daughter and they knew that he was dead. Anyway, this man was a prosecuting attorney. What could I know that he couldn’t find out?

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I went down to that hotel where Robin lived. I went to find out about what was happening to her. To find out why.”

  I felt sorry for the man. To think of a man seeing his daughter lower herself to the squalor of Hollywood Row was an awful thought. I felt it even more because I knew then what it was like to lose a child.

  “Mr. Rawlins?”

  “I’m listenin’, Mr. Garnett. I feel for ya, but that still don’t answer why you wanna talk t’me.”

  “Robin had a baby. At least we think she did.”

  “What?”

  “One of the, uh, people who lived there said that she was pregnant.”

  “Did he ask you for money?”

  “I’m not a fool, Rawlins.”

  “That don’t answer my question.”

  “He said that he’d tell us about her for twenty dollars and I told him that I’d hear what he had to say before I gave him a dime.”

  “An’ he said she was with child?”

  “He gave me the name of the hospital she went to. He took her there.”

  “Uh-huh.” I stifled a yawn.

  “We went to the hospital. They hadn’t heard of her, but… ” He hesitated. “…but they had done a test on a Cyndi Starr.”

  “No jive?”

  “It was three months ago. She delivered there. I saw the birth certificate. My granddaughter’s name is Feather Starr.”

  I felt the alcohol evaporating out of my pores. A chill climbed my shoulders, and for the first time that I could remember I was completely sober.

  “You got this certificate?”

  “Right here. Right here in my hand.”

  “Why you call me?”

  “I don’t know what to do, Mr. Rawlins. The police say that they’ll look into it. We went to see that man Voss. But he told us that th
e chances are slim. He said that we should keep up hope but that the chances are slim. Hope for this baby is all that my wife has, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “An’ you think I could help where the police cain’t?”

  “You found us. They say you found the man who killed our daughter.”

  “Cops tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “They tell you to call me?”

  “No. We talked it over. We want to hire you if that’s okay.”

  “Hire me for what?”

  “Find our granddaughter, Mr. Rawlins. She’s all that’s left of Robin.”

  I tried to think about it. But I couldn’t. I just opened my mouth and said something. I decided that whatever came out would be what I should do. “I’ll be by at around ten, Mr. Garnett. I cain’t promise you nuthin’. I cain’t promise you a thing, but I’ll come on by.”

  I WAS AT MOFASS’S OFFICE AT EIGHT. He was eating jelly doughnuts and sweating even though it wasn’t that warm.

  He skipped any pleasantries and asked, “You ready fo’ me to go to that meetin’, Mr. Rawlins?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m ready.”

  “It’s set for three-thirty.”

  “I’ll tell ya what, Mofass.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You go tell them boys that we don’t need’em.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Tell’em I don’t give a shit what they want. If we make somethin’ outta my places then it’s gonna be us to do it.”

  “Mr. Rawlins, I cain’t tell ya what to do with yo’ own property, but… ”

  “That’s right, man. You ain’t got nuthin’ t’say about it. It’s my money and my life.”

  “But I promised’em, Mr. Rawlins. I told’em that I could get the partners t’say yeah. You told me you would.”

  “I never said nuthin’ of the kind.”

  Mofass bit his lower lip, something he hadn’t even done when I’d once held a pistol to his head.