Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

  “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.

  — 9 —

  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.”

  I used the pause to turn the ignition and take off.

  We’d been driving for a few minutes before either of us spoke again.

  “How you doin’, Raymond?” I asked lamely.

  “How you think? They got me locked up in a pen like a pig wit’ a whole buncha other pigs. Make me wear that shit. Make me eat shit. An’ every motherfuckah there think he could mess wit’ me ’cause I’m little.”

  I imagined the hard lessons brought about by that mistake. Mouse wasn’t a large man. I could have picked him up and thrown him across a room. But he was a killer. If he had any chance to put out your eye or sever a tendon, he did it.

  HE TOLD ME ONCE that a white sheriff in west Texas had taken him in for vagrancy.

  “You hear that shit?” Mouse said. “Vagrancy! I told him I was lookin’ for a job!”

  But the sheriff took Mouse to jail and chained his hands behind his back. That night, when they were alone, the sheriff came into the cell.

  “He was gonna kill me,” Mouse said. “Go upside my head an�
�� get me up an’ hit me again. I knew I had ta do sumpin’, so when he hit me one time I pretend like I’m out.…” Mouse closed his eyes as in a swoon and fell forward on the street corner where he was telling his tale. I grabbed him almost like an embrace and he bit me! Bit me right on the big muscle of my shoulder.

  Mouse threw his arms around my neck and chortled in my ear, “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. That’s just what he did, man. Stooped down a little an’ grab me. It’s what you call a reflex. But I didn’t bite his arm. Uh-uh.” Mouse showed me his big teeth. “I clamped down on his windpipe an’ I didn’t pull back until my teefs was touchin’.”

  Mouse ripped out the sheriff’s throat and then took his keys. I always thought of him stopping at the sink to wash the blood from his mouth and clothes. He didn’t tell me about that, but I knew Mouse better than any brother I could have ever had. He was closer than a friend and he’d saved my life more times than a man should need saving.

  He was the darkness on the other side of the moon.

  * * *

  “I’MA KILL ME somebody, Easy,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I do know that somebody give me up to the cops and that somebody was at John’s bar the night I cut Bruno down. Somebody got to die behind that shit.”

  The police were waiting for Raymond when he got home from killing Bruno Ingram. That’s why he was wearing the same suit. They knew he’d done the killing and were laying for him; he still had the murder gun hooked in his belt. It sure seemed that he was set up. As a matter of fact, if he’d known that I was in that doorway, I was the most likely candidate.

  “How you gonna kill somebody if you don’t know who did it? You don’t, right?”

  “No. But I remember who was there. You and John an’ three other men: Malcolm Reeves, Clinton Davis, and Melvin Quick.” He recited the names as if in a trance.

  “But if you don’t know now how you gonna know?”

  “Either I find out or I’ma kill all three of ’em. But one way or another I’ma get the man who did it.”

  MOUSE’S EX-WIFE, EttaMae, lived in a small white house surrounded by lemon groves, in the city of Compton. It was a tall single-story house that had a latticed skirt of crisscrossed green slats. The yard was big and unruly. Long shaggy grass grew around a rusty old slide left out there to remind Etta of when their son, LaMarque, was still a small child. In the center of the yard stood a half-dead crab-apple tree that was covered with some kind of splotchy blue-and-white fungus. Around the dying tree grew a garden full of eggplant, snap beans, and bushy tomatoes. Etta liked to be surrounded by things that were bountiful, but she didn’t turn away from hard times. When Etta was only a child, barely sixteen, she nursed her bedridden grandmother until the suffering old woman began to hate her.

  EttaMae was standing in the yard when we drove up to her solitary home.

  I never minded seeing EttaMae Harris. She would have been Rodin’s model if he were a black man and lived in the South. She was big and strong like a man but still womanly—very womanly. Her face wasn’t beautiful so much as it was handsome and proud. “Noble” is too weak a word to use to describe her looks and her bearing.

  Mouse and I walked up to the fence. Etta wore a simple cotton dress to do her work around the house.

  “Easy,” she said in greeting to me, but I could tell her full attention was on him.

  “Hey, Etta. House looks good. You painted it?”

  “I’m’onna start payin’ you back for the loan just as soon as I could get ahead on this here mortgage,” she answered.

  I nodded. I didn’t care. One of the reasons that I was broke is that I gave my money away to friends who had less than I did. That’s a poor man’s insurance: Give when you got it and hope that they remember and give back when you’re in need.

  “Hey, Etta,” Mouse said. His grin was a caged laugh.

  “What?”

  I could have been the twin to that dying tree for all they knew. Mouse was standing straighter by the moment, his smile getting deeper. I noticed then, for the first time, that Raymond was aging. You could see it around his eyes, a network of wrinkles that shivered with his grinning.

  Etta didn’t exhibit feelings like he did. But her silence and solemnity showed that she had been thinking about this man for her whole life. He was down in the core of her. Mouse had once told me that he was drawn to Etta because, as he said, “She’s a hungry woman.” I could see the hunger in her.

  I don’t know what might have happened if the door to the house hadn’t come open.

  “LaMarque,” Etta said, not taking her eyes off of Mouse.

  Mouse gave a whoop and let the laugh come out. “LaMarque!”

  I looked up and saw the shy boy, dressed all in farmer’s green, coming down the stair. He had inherited his mother’s big bones and her sepia hue. He was sullen and bowed as he came near to us. But Raymond didn’t notice. He grabbed LaMarque in a rough hug around the neck and said aloud, “I missed you, son. I missed you.”

  Raymond kept his arm around the boy’s neck, almost like he had him in a headlock. He jerked him sideways so that they were both facing me.

  “That’s my boy,” he declared.

  And you could see it when they were side by side. Something in the eyes. In LaMarque it was a kind of softness, a childhood that Mouse never knew.

  Etta touched my arm. “Stay for supper, baby.”

  “Naw, Etta,” I said. “I got a job t’do. Anyway, you three should spend some time.”

  She didn’t argue. I shook LaMarque’s hand. He was twelve then and wanted to be treated like a man.

  I was all the way to the car when Mouse yelled, “Easy!” and ran to me. He came up with a big smile on his face.

  “Thanks, man,” he said. “You know, I got pretty sour in there. They try an’ keep a brother down.”

  I smiled. “Nuthin’, man. We friends, right?”

  “Yeah… sure.” Mouse’s glassy gray eyes went cold even though he was smiling.

  * * *

  “JOHN’S.”

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  “Easy.”

  I’d known John for over twenty-five years, from Texas to L.A.; from speakeasy to legitimate bar.

  “Mouse is out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s lookin’ for the men was in the bar that night. Thinks one’a them put the finger on him. There was three men there,” I said. “Melvin Quick—”

  He cut me off. “I know who was there, Easy.”

  “Well, maybe you should tell’em to lay low awhile.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In the meantime I’ll try to set it right.”

  “Somebody better do somethin’, ’cause I ain’t gonna take no shit outta Mouse.”

  We both knew that Mouse wouldn’t stop just because those men hid from him.

  — 10 —

  THE NEXT MORNING I was on the road to Beverly Hills. Loma Vista Drive was clear and beautiful. I couldn’t even imagine being rich enough to live in any of the mansions I passed. I mean, even if I was white and they would have let me stay up there I didn’t know where so much money could come from. All the houses had more room than anybody needed, with lawns big enough to raise livestock in. As I went on and on the houses got bigger, making the drive seem even more like a ride in Fantasyland.

  When I got to the gate that said “Beverly Estates,” a uniformed guard came out. I stopped and rolled down my window.

  “Can I help you?” the half-bald man with spectacles asked. He didn’t mean it. His job was to keep out those who had no business in the land of the rich. He was a white nigger hired to keep other niggers, both black and white, out.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said slow and easy. “I got to see a woman called…” I hesitated while I went into the glove compartment and pulled out an old grocery list. “Let’s see now, um, uh, yeah, here it is. Sarah Clarice Cain. Lives at number two Meadowbrook Circle.”

  “Let me see t
hat.” The white nigger reached for my list, but I shoved it back into the glove compartment.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Confidential.” I loved using that line on white men.

  “I can’t just let you in just because—”

  “You cain’t stop me,” I interrupted. “This road here is public access. So stand aside.”

  I revved my engine and zoomed past. In the mirror I watched the guard go to his little kiosk. That was okay by me. I didn’t care who knew I was coming.

  THE CAIN MANSION, first seen through bars of wrought iron painted pink, looked like heaven. It was on top of a hill of sloping grasses, dotted now and then with various fruit trees. The structure rose high in the center with giant pillars that looked from the distance to be made of marble.

  “May I help you?” an electronic female voice asked.

  To the side of me at the gate there was a speaker box. My driving up must have set off some kind of alarm.

  “May I help you?” the voice asked again.

  “Um, I’m here to see Sarah Clarice Cain.”

  “What is your business?”

  “I have to talk to her,” I said. And when the robot woman didn’t answer I added, “About Marlon Eady.”

  “What do you…” the voice started to ask. Then, “Come in.”

  The gate rolled to the side and I drove up the long lane to the house. To the right was a tall evergreen hedge that was there to muffle the sound of traffic. To the left was the lawn leading down to a line of Greek statues that couldn’t be seen from outside.