Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  “No need to get all motherly, Taifa. I like him well enough, so far, but who knows what’ll happen? Next time I talk to you I might have forgotten his name.” But don’t bet any money on it, she added to herself.

  They talked a few more minutes about Taifa’s room and job, the Miz Alice, their respective eating habits of late, and Taifa’s shopping plans.

  “Don’t forget, you’re supposed to be saving for school.”

  “I know, but one of the girls here has a car. We might go to an outlet mall. You know I can always find a bargain! Speaking of cheap, when’s Peanut Head get done crawling through the muck?”

  “Your brother’s not cheap, he’s just careful. He leaves Outward Bound for camp day after tomorrow.”

  “From one mud puddle to another. It’s creepy. Just thinking about sleeping in the woods and stuff makes me feel all slimy!”

  Blanche had no idea where Taifa’s nature squeamishness came from. Malik and everybody else in the family was happy to play in the dirt. Mama said Taifa’s prissy ways came from the Waterses, her hincty grandparents on her father’s side. Blanche had never cared for them either, but she doubted they were to blame for Taifa’s stuck-up attitude since the Waterses had all but lost touch with Taifa and Malik.

  When Taifa hung up, Blanche felt sure that, if Malik could be reached, Taifa would be calling him right now to tell him about Mama Blanche’s new man. She grabbed her handbag and headed up Mulberry Street toward downtown and the drugstore.

  When the word got out that the Sheriff intended to arrest Bobby Larsen for Maybelle’s murder, relief floated over Farleigh like a rose-scented cloud that even seeped into the drugstore. The whole town seemed ready to get beyond this particular madness.

  “Y’all come back now, heah?” the blue-haired white woman whose family owned the drugstore told Blanche as she left with the jar of Vaseline she’d forgotten to get the day before. On the last occasion, this same woman had stared at her as though she were positive Blanche was the mother of the wild-eyed black buck who’d killed poor sweet Maybelle. Now Blanche rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth at the woman, just as she’d done the day before. She stopped by the Miz Alice to pick up a pie before she went to see Miz Minnie.

  NINE

  WORKING THE NET

  Blanche helloed her way down Miz Minnie’s street, smiling and nodding at her neighbors. Miz Minnie was the community’s most reliable source of information. She knew practically everyone in black Farleigh and most of the old-line white folks who had money enough to hire help. There was something about the woman that made people want to talk, even though they didn’t know they wanted to, and to tell her things they certainly had no intention of mentioning. This meant she knew everybody’s business. She’d been known occasionally to use that information to convince husbands that their wives would indeed leave if they had one more drink or fling or hit of that pipe; to cajole children into staying in school to spite the lives they were forced to live at home; to push those who could to take their lives in their own hands and move on to bigger and better.

  Blanche half expected to find Miz Minnie’s old wooden-slat house boarded up or fallen down, and the old woman living with one of her kids. But there was the house and there was Miz Minnie sitting on her porch in what looked like the same old rocking chair, wearing, if not the same, then certainly a very similar grease-stained housedress and a pair of too-large men’s bedroom slippers. Her blue head-scarf was tied so tightly it gave Blanche a headache just looking at it. Miz Minnie was rocking slowly, watching her neighbors doing their gardening and car-washing rituals as though they were her personal home-entertainment unit. Her porch sat right on the ground, gray and weather-beaten but brimming with pansies and daffodils in every conceivable type of container from coffee can to bedpan.

  “Afternoon, Miz Minnie.”

  “Afternoon to you, daughter. I heard you was back in town.”

  “I sure am glad to see you, Miz Minnie. I bought you a apple pie, I know you got a fondness for them.”

  “Why, thank you kindly, daughter. Put it in there on the table if you don’t mind. I’ll have me some later. You want some? There’s ice tea in there. Bring us a glass.”

  Blanche did as she was told, tiptoeing through Miz Minnie’s shotgun house as though she were afraid she might disturb its dark and aged nearness. She found glasses and the iced tea and poured them each a glass. She didn’t bother to look for sugar. She knew Miz Minnie’s tea would already be well sweetened. She carried the tea outside.

  Old thing’s about the color of beef jerky, Blanche thought, looking at Miz Minnie, and likely just as tough. How old is she? Way older than Mama. Older than old. Her husband died when I was just a kid and he was ancient then. Unless she was a child bride, she must be…

  “Ninety-six,” Miz Minnie said, and cackled over Blanche’s expression.

  “Ain’t no magic to it, daughter. Person lookin’ like they tryin’ to count the wrinkles on your face is most like wonderin’ how old you is.” She lifted a tin can from beside her chair and spit a long slim stream of tobacco juice into it.

  “I’m looking for information about somebody,” Blanche told her when they’d passed the time of day.

  “Why you lookin’?”

  Blanche had been expecting this question, but she’d thought Miz Minnie would want to know who first. No sense lying to Miz Minnie; she could sniff out a lie better than a cat could smell mice.

  “It’s somebody who did me harm.”

  Miz Minnie rocked for a bit. “That’s reason enough. Who he is?”

  “Why you say ‘he’?”

  Miz Minnie looked at her and snorted. “You got your list?” A snaggletoothed, tobacco-stained grin lit up Miz Minnie’s face at Blanche’s stupefied look, although Blanche shouldn’t have been surprised. Everybody agreed Miz Minnie usually knew what you wanted before you asked. That was part of what made her so easy to talk to.

  Blanche unfolded her list of the jobs of people around David Palmer: maid, cook, bartender, barber, banker, shoeshine man, tailor, mail carrier, laundry person, and gardener—all in close contact with him and/or his belongings, although it was unlikely he noticed most of them—unless they were young women.

  “Palmer, yes.” Miz Minnie nodded her head. “Now, Mary Lou Pachette useta work for his people. In the kitchen. She passed, and Dorothy Dotson took over the cookin’. Ain’t no sense talking to her, ’less you wants him to know you askin’. She what you call a house nigger.” Miz Minnie aimed another jet of tobacco juice at her can. “Whole family’s thataway. Daughter works there, too, so you ain’t gon git nothin’ outa they house people.”

  Damn! Blanche lowered her head to hide the tears prickling her eyes. As she became more menopausal, tears seemed to be her first response to everything. Of course she was disappointed. The people who worked in the Palmer household were the first people she’d wanted to talk to. She sighed and wrote down the names attached to some of the other positions. Miz Minnie also gave her the names of some other folks who might be helpful. Blanche then sat politely listening to the old woman talk about the weather and how Farleigh was changing.

  “I sure do thank you for your help, Miz Minnie,” Blanche said when she thought it was about time to leave.

  “Glad to do it, daughter. Man ain’t got no right to put his hands on a woman don’t ask him to.”

  “I never said he touched me.”

  Miz Minnie shifted her jawful of snuff from one side of her mouth to the other. She raised one butt cheek and tugged at her cotton dress.

  “ ’Course you did, child. Lookit how you sittin’ there.”

  Blanche looked down at her arms, held close to her sides; her legs, crossed at knee and ankle and pulled in under her. She was leaning forward in her chair, almost rolling herself into a ball, into a woman with all her tender, most often wounded parts protected.

 
Miz Minnie leaned over and patted Blanche’s arm. “It’s all right, daughter. Everything you doin you s’posed to be doin. This your time to step up for yourself.”

  “What you mean, Miz Minnie?”

  “You know what I mean, daughter. If you don’t you will. You will.”

  Blanche left Miz Minnie’s feeling as though she’d just been sworn in to her own army. She was over her disappointment about the Palmer help. There were plenty of other ears and eyes working around him that could help her. When she got home, she found a heavy cream-colored envelope slipped under her front door. Twenty twenties wrapped in a plain sheet of white paper. Thank you, Archibald. She put the money away and took out her notebook again. Who should she call first? She decided on two people she knew and one she didn’t.

  First she called Miz Minnie’s great-niece who Miz Minnie had told her was married to the Bueles boy, who was cousin to Jack Moses, whose sister-in-law was Mary Lee—a bright, St. Augustine’s College–educated young woman. She was a senior clerk at Farleigh National Bank. Miz Minnie’s niece gave Blanche Mary Lee’s phone number.

  Blanche hesitated before she punched it in. This was her first call, the first time she was willingly bringing some part of David Palmer into her life. It felt strange, risky. Yet necessary. If she could get Mary Lee’s help…

  No one answered, but at least she’d made the call. A start. She tried Curtis Martin next. Miz Minnie said he was one of the trainers and masseurs over at Silver’s Gym in Chapel Hill, where boys like Palmer pumped iron and such. Curtis had been a year ahead of Blanche in high school.

  “Sure, Blanche!” Curtis said when she called and asked if he remembered her. “Leo’s girl, right? I was on the football team and the wrestling team with him, remember?”

  “Miz Minnie gave me your number,” Blanche said, in a hurry to move away from talk of Leo. She wondered how long it would take folks to stop linking her name with Leo’s now that he’d married someone else.

  “I want to talk to you about somebody I think uses the gym,” she said. “It won’t take long, and I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Damn! I’m on my way to work, but what about Saturday? I’m off on Saturday. Come on by. Anytime.” He gave her his address before he hung up.

  Blanche was hungry, but she felt like she was on a roll. She picked up the phone again and called Mr. Bennie. He shined shoes at Magnon and Kramer’s, where better-off white men had their hair cut. As a girl, Blanche ran errands for him and his wife. At the mention of money, Mr. Bennie told her to come by as soon as she could.

  Mr. Bennie was in his garden, turning dirt with a trowel, when Blanche got to his house. He reminded her of an unfolding extension ladder as he rose to greet her.

  “How you, Mr. Bennie?”

  “I’m fair to middlin’. What about your mama, how she?”

  “She fine, Mr. Bennie. Just fine. I don’t want to keep you…” Blanche explained what she was after.

  “Oh yeah. Been knowing that boy ’fore he was born. I could tell you aplenty.”

  Blanche took a folded twenty from her pocket. “Why, thank you, Mr. Bennie. I sure appreciate you talking to me.” She slipped the money into his hand.

  “Something real sad about that boy,” Mr. Bennie told her. “Didn’t useta be like that. I remember him from a child, happy as a puppy, even as a teenager. Now he like a person with a hole in the middle.”

  “You think maybe he’s got some kind of trouble? A woman, maybe? I heard…”

  “He’s what you call a dutiful son. Don’t run across youngsters like him. Nowadays, children go off, don’t think about they old people, whether they’s sick, or needs anything.”

  Blanche remembered Mr. Bennie had a daughter and a son who’d left town before she did. It sounded like they might not have been back since.

  “…volunteer fireman, too. Saved them two little girls trapped in that house couple years back. He respectful to me. Always.”

  Blanche forced herself to listen to Mr. Bennie compliment Palmer. After all, nobody was totally bad. Hadn’t the slavers and overseers who’d whipped and raped little African children and their mothers brought flowers to their own wives and bounced their own babies on their knees? Loving their children and their wives didn’t make men like Palmer any less terrible, it made them bigger monsters.

  “ ’Course, ain’t nobody perfect,” Mr. Bennie said.

  Blanche crossed her fingers behind her back.

  Mr. Bennie shook his head from side to side. “Ain’t fittin’ for a man rich as him to be so tightfisted when it comes to tips.”

  Blanche swallowed her disappointment and relaxed her hands. “You ever hear anything about the rest of his family?”

  “That oldest girl, she’s down Florida way, you know. Ran off, with old man Gibson, I think it was. They say the youngest one’s ’bout to marry somebody too dumb to even know how much money he got. Imagine that.”

  “Thanks for talking to me, Mr. Bennie.” Blanche was glad she’d only given him twenty dollars. Even if it wasn’t her money, she wasn’t prepared to pay much for nothing, although she’d be glad to give him more if he’d tell her something worthwhile. She decided to try one last time:

  “So you ain’t never heard anything about David Palmer having trouble over a woman, or money, or anything like that?”

  Mr. Bennie slipped the twenty in his pocket. “Don’t do to be gossiping about people. I don’t hold with it!”

  Blanche glared at him. Old hypocrite. She forced her mouth into a smiling pose.

  “It sure does my heart good to know a honest man like you who can’t be bought is in the world. Y’all take care, now, Mr. Bennie.”

  She’d gotten the opposite of what she’d wanted, but maybe she hadn’t yet talked to the right people: women.

  Disappointment made her restless, so she continued walking around town, into comfortable old neighborhoods where no blacks lived. She wasn’t concerned about appearing suspicious. Most of the people who worked on these streets looked like her.

  If she had it in mind to go by the Palmer place, she wasn’t aware of it until she was half a block away. The huge white house with its gigantic columns seemed to step out onto the pavement and bar her way. She considered walking in another direction, then remembered what she’d told Ardell about how Palmer wasn’t going to keep her from anything. A big black car pulled up to the house. The driver got out and stood on the pavement by the car. The front door of the Palmer place opened. Blanche braced herself for the sight of her enemy but, instead of hurrying away, crossed the street and slowed down.

  Old man Palmer came out first. Stout, sparse steel-gray hair and a suit to match. He wasn’t particularly tall, but seemed to float above the short, plump woman with rounded shoulders who followed him and was likely his wife. David Palmer came next. Blanche flinched and squinted her eyes, blurring his image. She knew all too well what he looked like. Karen came last, walking as though she needed a push from behind. The old man turned his head and said something to the others. He reminded Blanche of the kind of king-of-the-walk rooster that shows up in comic strips. Only there wasn’t anything comical about him and his brood. Yes, he was all puffed up and poked out, and, yes, his family hung back like they wanted to be in position to kiss his behind, but they also looked ready to be dumped on at any moment. Blanche remembered what Archibald had said and pictured David Palmer being slapped by his father in public. Old man Palmer surveyed the street with an air of ownership, then nodded to the driver waiting by the car. The other three kept their eyes down. Ashamed to be seen with him? Or maybe he didn’t allow them to look up. Blanche could almost see misery puddling around the four of them like muddy water staining their expensive shoes. She watched the car drive down the street and turn the corner and felt suddenly full of smiles: it did her heart good to see David Palmer under someone’s heel.

  TEN

/>   THE GIG FROM HELL

  Blanche couldn’t imagine what had happened to the lemon curd. She’d packed it in three large plastic containers and set them at the far end of the loading table in Ardell’s kitchen, along with the cream and butter that needed to be put in the cooler in the van. She searched the cooler for the third time. The cream and butter were in there; the lemon curd that was to be drizzled over the apple tart made with almond pastry crust and almond cream was not. Ardell went through all the other food. Clarice looked on the shelves in the van and other places the lemon curd had no business being, like in the boxes of plates and cocktail forks. She didn’t find it either. By the time they accepted that the lemon curd was really missing, it was too late to go back for it.

  They were trying to decide what to do about it when Zeke showed up smelling as boozy as closing time at Miz Mackey’s blind pig. He stumbled across the room and hiccupped.

  “Don’t jump all over me!” he barked at Ardell. “I know I’m late, I know it!”

  Ardell looked up at him. She didn’t speak or blink or even seem to be breathing. Blanche watched Zeke’s little bit of fight-pecker go limp and soft under Ardell’s stare. Blanche had never yet seen a man, or more than a few women, who could stand up under that glare of Ardell’s.

  “Get the bar set up, then start laying out the cutlery,” Ardell told him.

  Zeke looked so beaten Blanche might have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been making more work for everybody.

  Blanche loaded a tray with arugula salads for Clarice to take to the front of the house. Was that a toothpick in one of the salads? Sweet Ancestors! It was. Were there any more? There was another one. And…“Oh shit!” How the hell did they get in there? It didn’t matter now. “Ardell! We got a problem here.”

  Fortunately, the waiters and waitresses arrived just then, and Ardell set half of them to work going through each salad to make sure there was no surprise ingredient in the rest of them. The other half were sent out front to begin serving the canapés. Blanche opened a bottle of the Beaumes de Venise dessert wine. Muscat sauce would do just fine. She separated egg yolks into a large mixing bowl and tucked the bowl against her hip while she whisked the eggs with sugar until the mixture was light and pale, then whisked in some of the muscat. She put the bowl over a pot of simmering water and whisked till it thickened, then transferred the bowl to a pot of ice cubes and water, whisking until it cooled. She’d add the whipped cream and lemon juice just before serving. She began breaking and separating eggs for a second batch.