Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

  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.<
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  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.

  “Terry!” I called.

  He looked over in my direction and waved even though he didn’t recognize me. Bookies know so many people, and they have to be welcoming because it’s the man on the street that pays their salary.

  He crossed over to me with a puzzled look on his face. Terry and I had been in various places, parties and what-have-you, at the same time but we’d never actually met. I knew who he was because he was famous for giving a good show in his first year in the ring.

  “Easy Rawlins,” I said to help him remember what he didn’t know. “What’s happenin’?”

  “Not too much. I’m goin’ to work out.” He cocked his head over at the gym and flexed his biceps almost unconsciously. Like any good boxer he kept his head down.

  Terry was sand-colored, which is not unusual in the black community. Some light-colored people felt that it was their duty to the future generation to marry somebody as light as they were—or lighter. Sometimes the prospective mate not only had to be the right color but had to have a special attribute like “good” hair or eyes-not-brown.

  But there was always something about Terry. Maybe it was his buck teeth or the way he walked. It was as if he had the rhythm of a white man. A stride instead of a stalk in his gait.

  “You wanna make twenty dollars?” I asked the young man.

  His smile showed me three teeth capped in silver and two that were missing.

  “I’m lookin’ for Marlon Eady,” I said.

  Terry swallowed the grin and turned away from me saying, “Ain’t seen’im.”

  “Hold up, man.” I ran up beside Terry, and he stopped.

  “What?”

  “I heard you did his book.”

  “That’s some shit. I hardly even know the niggah.”

  He made to walk off but I stood in front of him. I was close to a foot taller than Terry.

  “I could go up to fifty,” I told him.

  “Get outta my way, man.”

  It was putting my hand on his shoulder; that was my mistake. Terry brought up his left arm to block me and then he threw a quick jab to my head.

  That was okay. I could take a welterweight jab. I reached my arms out around to catch him in a bear hug, but Terry was too fast. He unloaded a half-dozen uppercuts to my middle, two of them landing where Commander Styles had hit me. I was on the ground as fast as I could get there and Terry was running down the street.

  It was sort of funny watching a man run away after beating me to the ground. I laughed while holding my ribs.

  “You okay, mistah?”

  The dignified old man was peering down at me. He didn’t look worried, just a little sad, tired of leaving dead men in his wake.

  — 14 —

  I DIDN’T TAKE the old man’s hand because I didn’t want to owe anybody anything.

  After about a minute or two I pulled myself up into a sort of stooping stance.

  “You okay?” he asked again.

  “What do you want?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Them black mens over dere in that place always be fightin’,” he said. I wasn’t ready to walk yet so I let him go on. “I oughtta call the cops on’em. Always hittin’ an’ hurtin’ an’ bein’ fools. That boy hit you is like that. He one’a them. But he don’t know. No he don’t.”

  “Don’t know what?” I asked.

  “That it’s always a black man out there hittin’ another black man so all the white folks could laugh: ‘Look at that fool.’” The old man made like he was a pointing white man. “‘Beatin’ the blood outta his own brother.’”

  I don’t think I even answered the old man. Nothing more than a nod anyway.

  But I knew he was right.

  SAUL LYNX’S OFFICE was on the boardwalk at Venice Beach.

  I drove down there intent on taking out my anger and my complaints on a white man. Lynx’s office was in a small pink bungalow flanked by a Mexican bodega on one side and an empty lot on the other. It faced over a cracked concrete walkway onto the empty beach and flat gray ocean. Even in the summer Venice was empty. Motorcycle gangs, drug addicts, and wanderers were the only regular inhabitants. It was almost a poor man’s beach back then.

  Nobody answered my knock and the doorknob wouldn’t turn.

  At the back of the lot there was a slab cement wall with maybe fifteen inches between it and Saul’s office. I scraped an elbow making it through the window.

  His office was spare. The desk was just a table with a folding chair. No drawers. The tin trash can was lined with an empty brown paper bag. The floor was swept and newly mopped, clean enough to eat off. No file cabinets, but there was a small oak bureau that had a drawer and cabin
et space. A bottle of red wine and a .38 were in the cabinet. A small stack of papers was all the drawer had to offer. I put the .38 in my pocket and carried the stack of papers to his desk.

  Mr. Lynx was a hunter, had a license for small game in California. He was a veteran and he’d done some kind of work once for Crandall Industries. By the look of the bookkeeping journal he seemed to owe out more money than he was taking in. There wasn’t anything about a lawyer or Elizabeth Eady or the Cains.

  I could tell by his office that Mr. Lynx played his whole life close to the vest. I sat back in his two-dollar chair and rubbed my aching side. For some reason it didn’t surprise me that Saul Lynx decided to come through the door at that very moment.

  Everything he wore was the same except for the tie. This one was sky-blue, the kind of synthetic blue that didn’t go with anything.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  It was almost worth the bloody elbow to see old deadpan Saul shook up like that.

  “Thought I’d drop by an’ tell you what’s happenin’.”

  “Get up from there. You can’t sit there.” He glanced over at the cabinet.

  I got myself up out of the chair, managing not to wince too much.

  “What happened to you?” Saul asked. His whole body was leaning toward that cabinet.

  “Have a seat,” I said, gesturing at the chair.

  There was a moment of indecision. Saul was wondering about the odds of him getting to the pistol before I used my superior size to stop and mutilate him.

  Finally he put his smile back on and went to the chair.

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  “I met your friend.”

  His eyes asked, “who?”

  “Calvin Hodge.”

  Saul shook his head while pursing his lips. No.

  “I met him out at the Cain residence. I had to go through a gate that said ‘Beverly Estates.’”

  “I don’t know what this map lesson has to do with me, Mr. Rawlins.” He sat back, secure again in his undertaker facade. “You want a drink?”