Mrs. Horn was standing next to the wall of leaves in the backyard. She was very excited, almost jumping up and down, batting a finger against her lips so that I wouldn’t make a mistake and break out into a rendition of “What’d I Say?”
Solemnly Lucky brushed his bony wife aside. Then he carefully parted the wall of ferns and gestured with his head for me to look through the hole.
As tired as I was, I had to smile when I gazed out into my own yard. It was an open plot of grass surrounded by bushes that sported large mottled red-and-yellow roses. It was a picture-perfect yard in my opinion, but that’s not what made me smile. Jesus and Feather were there. They both had on swimming trunks and were reclining on a big cardboard box that they’d flattened for a sun blanket. Near them the green water hose sputtered, the nozzle turned closed with the water still on. Whenever I was late and Feather started to get scared that I’d never come home again, Juice would do something like let her play in the water.
Juice had his hands behind his head with his eyes closed. Feather copied his pose but I couldn’t tell about her eyes, because she wore a pair of Snow White black-lensed glasses we’d brought home from Disneyland.
I made up my mind to be a better father to them. What was I doing way out in the desert dueling with some strange white man? I was all they had, and here I was squandering my time on needless danger when they were so beautiful right there in our own paradise.
I made to turn away. I was going to go home and hug those children, call Mr. L-Y-N-X, send him his money, and go out looking for a regular job that would have me living right.
But before I could turn, Lucky held out a hand for me to keep on watching. And as if he had magic in his hands, it happened.
“How high is the sun up in the sky, Juice?” Feather asked. And when the mute boy didn’t respond she insisted, “Huh?”
“I don’t know. But it’s real high, all right. I bet you wouldn’t want to fall down from way up there.”
“No sir!” Feather shook her head so hard that the little sunglasses went askew on her head. She was so beautiful that I almost forgot that Jesus had talked.
Jesus reached over and tickled Feather under her arm. She squealed and squirmed. “Stop! Stop!”
“I got you!” He laughed with her. “I got you!”
It was the only time I ever cried from being happy. I staggered away from the wall, and Lucky caught me around the chest, afraid that I might fall I guess. And maybe I would have fallen. I could have let go of myself, because I didn’t believe in the laws of nature right then. Gravity might have let me loose, let me soar up over my house.
“He talked,” April whispered in my ear.
And I didn’t feel like she was some kind of fool telling me what I already knew. She could have said it a thousand times.
I WENT INTO THE HOUSE after that and started dinner. I wanted to run right out into the yard and ask Jesus to say something, but I controlled myself. About ten minutes later Feather came in shouting, “Daddy! Daddy home, Juice!”
She came running in the back door and right into my leg, hugging me and grinning with the kind of love only children can feel. I tousled her light walnut hair and thought for a moment about the daughter that I had somewhere down in Mississippi. The daughter I’d lost.
My wife Regina took Edna, our only daughter, and went down to Mississippi. Sometimes I thought of how Edna was calling my onetime friend Dupree Bouchard her daddy. When I thought about it too long I began to understand how some men say that they were driven to murder.
Jesus came in a minute after Feather. He looked at me, and my heart skipped with anticipation. Then he walked over to us and hugged me. He looked up into my eyes and smiled the same silent greeting he’d given me for years.
“Hold on!” I shouted and turned away to the stove as if my oil were burning in the skillet. Maybe I should have let him see me cry—but men didn’t cry where I survived childhood.
I made hamburgers and an avocado salad with tomatoes, onion, and minced garlic for dinner. The kids ate up every bite and sent me back to the kitchen to make more.
Feather told me all about her day at school. How she got mad at some little boy for not liking her and how they saw big hairy elephants in a book and then they made one.
Jesus nodded, smiled, and hunched his shoulders to answer my questions. He’d won the meet that Hamilton High had against Dorsey; was the only runner from Hami to take first place.
I spent many long and tense hours talking to the boy’s vice principal about Juice before he got into running. Other boys would make fun of him because he was Mexican and silent and small. But in spite of his size, Jesus was completely fearless. He’d never stop fighting until his opponent quit. And he wasn’t afraid to bleed or face more than one in a fight.
They wanted to put him in a correctional high school, but I said no. I was prepared to keep him home rather than let them make him into some kind of delinquent.
But then Coach Mark had him run the mile one day—and that was it for correctional school. Hamilton had a star, and they made sure the other boys left him alone.
He was my son. A son of preference. We weren’t blood, but he wanted to live with me and I wanted to have him—how many fathers and sons can say that?
But still I was hurt that he wouldn’t talk to me.
“FEATHER?”
“Huh?” she answered. Jesus had already gone up to bed, tired from his long-distance race.
Feather and I were on the couch in the TV den watching Dobie Gillis. She loved Maynard G. Krebs, and I liked how the father was such a cheapskate about what went on in his store. He knew that no matter how much somebody wants to make something in this world there’s always somebody else who wants to take it away.
“Why won’t Juice talk to me?” I asked.
“He talk to you, Daddy. He just don’t say something.”
“But why won’t he say something?”
“Because,” she said. And then Maynard came on the screen. Somebody said the word “work” and he was having a conniption fit. I had to wait for a commercial until I could ask her again.
“So, Feather?”
“Um?”
“Why won’t Juice talk to me?”
“Because he don’t like you to talk to, Daddy,” she said as simply and easily as you please. “But that’s okay because he love you too.”
“But I’m sad that he won’t say anything to me.” Somewhere I knew that I had crossed a line, that I was asking my little girl to be older than she was. But I wanted so much for Jesus to talk to me. He’d been abused as a child, as a baby, and I didn’t want the evil to have won and taken his words from me.
Feather put her hand over my thumb, causing me to look down at her.
“That’s okay, Daddy,” she said. “But he can’t right now.”
I heard my own words from her lips. Then she stood up and put her arms around my head and held me like I had held her a thousand times when she was crying and sad.
“It’s time for bed,” I told her, just to get some kind of control back in my life.
ON THE COFFEE TABLE in front of me lay an old photograph and a newer one, a bus schedule, a bloody molar tooth, and a check for five thousand dollars written out by Sarah Clarice Cain of Beverly Hills. According to the date on the check she had written it two and a half weeks before.
I didn’t have to do a thing. I didn’t have any contracts with anyone. I hadn’t been convicted of any crime.
That’s when Martin Smith came back to me. His peanut head and his big hands that seemed to have too much flesh around the fingers. If it hadn’t been for Martin and Odell I would have died when I was a boy. They had taken me into their homes and fed me when there was nothing but cold and hunger outside.
I knew that I had to go visit Martin before he died. I did have to do that.
So I decided to go see Martin—right after I took care of the things on my table.
— 8 —
I AWOKE IN A
COLD SWEAT. Bruno had been laid up against the butcher’s door with his eyes open. He wanted me to help him but I couldn’t; I couldn’t leave the shelter of the doorway. He was muttering my name under his ragged breath. His dying was more important than any other death I’d known. But I couldn’t go out there and face Mouse though. I couldn’t.
I DROPPED FEATHER OFF at her school on Burnside and then headed south. I was upset about my dream and the job I had to perform in the late morning, so I decided to take care of some business first. I thought that if I could get some money I wouldn’t have to find the owner of that tooth.
Down near Crenshaw and Santa Barbara I came to a little prefabricated building that had a large sign set up on the roof. The sign was twelve feet high and forty feet across, as if designed for a much larger building. It had a big yellow background covered with giant red letters that spelled out ESQUIRE REALTY INC.
The inner office was no more than a room with four tan metal desks on a concrete floor. The desks were arranged in a diamond—one at the center of each wall. Renee Stewart sat at the desk that faced the front door. Her sister, Clovis MacDonald, was seated at the back of the office.
“Can I help you?” Renee asked as if she had never met me before in her life.
Her hair was arranged in bright gold curls and her skin was black as skin could get, but her lips and nose were strangely Caucasian. Renee was skinny and unhappy. Her red nails needed a touch-up and her dark blue dress might have given you the impression that she was naked if you saw her from afar.
“I wanna talk to Clovis.”
Clovis was within earshot, but Renee jumped up and said, “I’ll see if she’s available.”
Renee had no butt to speak of, though she moved like she did. She switched-walked to Clovis’s desk and rested both hands there, indicating that if she had to do one more thing she might just pass out from exhaustion.
“Somebody to see you,” I heard her say. She pointed behind to indicate what she meant.
Then she came back to her own desk, sat down, and looked up at me. “You can go on in,” she said as she picked up the telephone and started to dial.
Clovis didn’t stand to greet me. She didn’t even reach out a hand across the desk in common courtesy.
“Mr. Rawlins,” she said.
“Clo,” I replied. “You plannin’ t’put some walls in here?”
“Huh?”
“Well, you got Renee actin’ like she cain’t even see you. I figure you practicin’ for some walls.”
Clovis didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Her life had been too hard for laughs. She was a short, stout woman whose skin was the color of burnished bronze. Her blunt face jutted out from her head, making her appear like a boxer after he’s delivered a chopping blow, expecting his foe to crumple any moment. Her eyebrows were dense and mannish. The thick shelf over her eyes was furrowed as if she were angry down into her bones.
“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 al
l 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.
Black Betty Page 5