Blanche Cleans Up

by Barbara Neely

  Blanche looked down at Lucinda’s three-inch bright-red-with-rhinestones nails and remembered an article she’d read about the germs under fingernails. Of course, it would be interesting to see Lucinda work in those things, but not worth the risk, she decided.

  “I’ll just have one of those orange drinks, thanks.”

  Lucinda brought Blanche the bottled drink and a straw. She put out her cigarette and leaned against the counter.

  Blanche jumped in before Lucinda could start a conversation about something else.

  “Lucinda, remember when I saw you in Connolly’s the other day? When I was with Donnie and you said something about him being an artist, or something like…”

  Lucinda grimaced. “Quick-change artist,” she said. “But I didn’t mean nothing by it, Blanche. It’s none of my business who you…”

  “Lucinda! Just tell me what you meant. He ain’t a friend.”

  A woman and a little girl came in and took a table. Lucinda went off to wait on them. Like Blanche, they only wanted drinks.

  “Tell me what you meant,” Blanche said when Lucinda came back. “Do you know him?”

  Lucinda chuckled. “I useta work at Plug’s before it closed. You know what I’m talkin’ about?”

  Blanche didn’t.

  “It was a bar. It wasn’t a gay bar. Lotta neighborhood people hung there, especially in the daytime. But a lot of gays hung out there at night. Not the kind who shake they ass and say ‘I’m gay, get over it,’ and not the kind who was pretendin’ to be straight. I mean the ones that act like regular people, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  Blanche didn’t want to get into a thing about “regular people,” but she wasn’t going to agree with her either. “Go on,” she said.

  “Well, you know what it’s like tendin’ bar; people talk to you like listenin’s what you get paid to do. When they ain’t talkin’ to you, they talk in front of you like you can’t hear.”

  “So, you know anything about him?”

  Lucinda gave her a stop-interrupting look.

  “Anyway, Donnie useta hang in there and meet dates there.”

  “So? What was so quick-change about that?”

  Lucinda widened her eyes and crossed her arms. “A big change. From his wife and kiddies out in Taunton to Miss Thang in the bar. Is that quick-change enough for you?”

  Blanche frowned, trying to make sense of what Lucinda was saying. Lucinda gave her an exasperated look.

  “Donnie useta come in and meet gay guys and go out with them, but his wife probably ain’t hip to it.”

  “Donnie’s wife?! You mean Donnie has a wife?”

  “Sure. My girlfriend lives right around the corner from him. She went to school with Donnie’s wife. Their kids go to the same school. She came to meet me at Plug’s one night and almost shit when she saw Donnie there.”

  “A wife,” Blanche said, trying to get used to the idea that the man she’d thought was gay, who’d told her he was gay and in love with another gay man had a wife and…

  “Did you say kids?!” She sounded as shocked as she was.

  “Yep. Three or four, I think.” Lucinda looked amused. “Donnie ain’t the only one, you know. A lotta the so-called ‘straight’ men who hung out at Plug’s were married or had girlfriends.” She laughed and shook her head. “They all acted like people were stupid. Donnie and those other married dudes would come in, buy a drink for one of the fags, sit with him, and chitchat. Then the straight guy would leave by the front door. Five minutes later, the gay guy would leave by the back door. In fifteen minutes to a half an hour, one or both of them would be back. And I ain’t talking turning tricks, here. I’m talking boys just like to have fun,” she chortled. She went off to collect from the woman and child.

  Blanche was stunned. Only a few days ago she’d had to rearrange her thinking to include Ray-Ray and Donnie as lovers. Now Lucinda was adding another branch to that family.

  “Well, maybe his wife does know,” Blanche said when Lucinda came back. “I mean, if he’s bisexual, maybe she is, too, or…”

  “Girl! Get real! How many black women you know agreeing to that share-and-share-alike shit? Anyway, if that was the deal, my girlfriend wouldn’t have been so shocked to see Donnie in Plug’s doing his guy thing.”

  Blanche thought of Leo’s brother George, who’d done time for armed robbery. She remembered him talking about guys who were straight on the street but had male lovers in jail. Blanche had always thought George was one of those men, although he’d never admitted it. Did men like that consider themselves bi? Or gay? Not from the way George talked. Or Lucinda.

  Lucinda checked her nails. “Yeah, girl, the bartenders used to talk about it all the time. We used to joke about somebody needing to call Donnie’s and those other dudes’ wives to make sure those suckers were using condoms at home.”

  “Did Ray-Ray Brown hang out at Plug’s?”

  “You sure know your Donnie. Ray-Ray was all up in that boy’s face. I useta wonder if there was something more than a quickie goin’ on between those two. I think if Ray-Ray had had his way, there woulda been. He died, you know.” Lucinda leaned on the counter. “Donnie ain’t bad-lookin’,” she said, “but I never could see what Ray-Ray saw in him. I always got a real weird vibe from Donnie.”

  Blanche leaned toward her. “Weird how, exactly?”

  Lucinda hunched her shoulders. “The nigga’s just strange!”

  “You don’t mean because of the gay sex thing, do you?”

  “No, no. This didn’t have nothin’ to do with sex. This is about…I don’t know, but I never heard him talk about anything but money: how much he needed, what he’d do with it if he had it, why he didn’t have it, what he was gonna do to get some. If he came in while people were talking about the rain, he’d turn the conversation to the cost of umbrellas and raincoats. Always money. It ain’t natural.

  “Why you so interested in him, anyway?” Lucinda asked.

  “It’s kinda complicated,” Blanche said, and scolded herself for not having a ready answer to a question she should have expected. “Donnie’s messing around with a friend of a friend, and I was just curious about what he might…it’s kinda, you know, personal.”

  Lucinda gave her a skeptical look. “Whatever,” she said in a way that told Blanche she’d gotten her last bit of information from this source.

  Blanche paid Lucinda for her drink and hurried home. She was stepping fast but hardly quick enough to keep up with the thoughts tumbling around in her mind like laundry in the dryer. She felt her ideas about what had happened to Ray-Ray and Miz Barker shuffling like cards in a hustler’s hands. She unlocked the door and went right to the phone. She called Information for Taunton. There was one Roberta MacFadden and one McFadden, initials D. A. Blanche punched in D. A.’s number.

  “Mrs. McFadden?” she said to the woman who answered the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  Blanche could hear children very nearby. One of them was crying.

  “Mrs. Donnie McFadden?”

  “Yeah? Who’s this? Leave your brother alone, Donnella!”

  “This is Mary Green for Boston City Hall, Mrs. McFadden. I just need to verify your husband’s address. He does still live with you at…”

  “Darnell! Get down from there. Now! Of course he lives—who did you say this was?”

  “Can I reach Mr. McFadden at his place of employment at…” Blanche scrambled around in her purse for the piece of paper Donnie had given her, and read the number.

  “Well, yes, but…Awright now, I’m warning both of you!”

  “Thank you.” Blanche hung up.

  So there it was. Donnie was still living with his wife. He’d made Blanche think he had a place of his own. Of course, that could still be true. Yeah, if he owned the company where he worked. He’d lied to her about having his own place and about getting a place with Ray-Ray. He’d lied to her about being gay. She was both pissed and embarrassed about that. Like any good scam artist, h
e couldn’t have done it without her help, without her believing that he had to be gay because he moved his hands and body and used his voice in ways the movies and other bullshit artists said were signs of being gay. She couldn’t blame a damn bit of that on Donnie. From what Lucinda had said, he was probably lying to himself, too.

  He’d lied to her about everything and she’d believed him. Why? Looking back, she couldn’t find any good reasons. When he’d told her he didn’t know Miz Barker or Marc, why hadn’t she known then that she was being suckered? She was like a person who got hit by a truck because she looked the wrong way on a one-way street. Although Samuelson and Brindle had given her plenty of reasons to look their way, Donnie had given her a couple, too. Still, that business about being afraid of Ray-Ray’s killer was a stroke of evil genius—one for which she fully intended to find some way to pay him back.

  But if money-hungry Donnie had the tape, he’d have been in touch with Brindle, trying to turn that tape into cash. At least as late as yesterday, that hadn’t happened—which probably meant Donnie didn’t have it. Did he know where it was? Or was he waiting for her to find it for him? Of course, she could be wrong about Miz Barker having the tape. Marc could have had it, but all she’d heard him say was that he knew what was on the tape. He never actually said he had it. Donnie must have thought he knew where it was, or he wouldn’t have killed Ray-Ray and Miz Barker before he laid hands on it. Ray-Ray had probably given Miz Barker the tape in the store while Donnie was watching. But then, crafty as usual, she’d moved the tape and started watching her back.

  Blanche put on her old Keds and changed into her housecleaning pants and sweatshirt. She threw on a jacket, grabbed her handbag and flashlight, and made sure her pepper spray was in her jacket pocket. Minutes later, she was back in Miz Barker’s bomb shelter.

  She ignored the boxes she’d already searched, and lifted the covers off the items on the shelves: an old electric toaster, the kind with fold-down doors on either side; an upright black manual typewriter with a cutout front; a curling iron and straightening comb in their own little heater.

  Like a retirement home, she thought. Nothing broken, everything past its time. She imagined the items talking together, reminding one another of the lives they’d lived when they’d been the star of the kitchen or the latest gadget on the market, of how people had gathered round, eager for what they had to offer.

  Time. Everything and everybody had only a thin slice and that was all. When your time was up, you got put on the shelf in the basement. She didn’t want to go there, to wind up in a nursing home with a bunch of discarded souls trying to outdo one another with stories from the past.

  There was a cathedral radio like the one her grandmother had owned. She fiddled with its knob. Granny had never liked for Blanche to touch that precious box. She looked more closely at the little window where the tuning dial once glowed, all dingy now, like the window in an old lady’s apartment. She also didn’t want to live alone in some Blanche-smelling room talking to herself and a couple of cats. She didn’t want to live with Taifa or Malik and feel herself becoming somebody’s child. But she didn’t want to die before she was eligible for any of that either.

  What she did want was to get used right up. Not simply to use up her years and days, but all of herself—her laughter and loving, her dance steps and good times. All of her juice. Juice she felt beginning to dry up, just a little, like the first skim on cooling milk.

  She turned her mind back to trying to picture Miz Barker coming down here with something Ray-Ray has asked her to keep for him, to hide for him. Did she know what it was? Was she excited? Blanche walked to the back of the space. Excited. That was a funny word to use about hiding something, but it stayed with her. She imagined Miz Barker in here looking for someplace to hide a videotape. Not big, not small. Where would it fit? Blanche walked slowly among the bits of furniture. She closed her eyes and saw Ray-Ray down here without Miz Barker, looking around for a good hiding place like she’d just done. She opened her eyes, but nothing leapt out at her.

  She checked underneath the cushions in the armchair and examined the elephant-foot table. She flopped into the chair and tried to relax. She knew the tape was here. She knew it. She also knew that finding something was often a matter of thinking like the person who hid it.

  “All right,” she said to both Miz Barker and Ray-Ray. “You two been buggin’ me and buggin’ me about this business, now give me a hand here.” She sat still and called up her memory of Ray-Ray when he’d came to the Brindle house. He’d been full of himself, no doubt about it. Sure of himself, but righteous, too. He was going to get his revenge on Allister for kicking him out of the family. He also knew that diming on Allister was a good thing to do. Was he scared? Did it occur to him that Skanks One and Two might send somebody to shut him up? If he wasn’t scared, he must have expected trouble. Why else hide the tape? Was he really planning to put Brindle’s business out on the airwaves? She stared at the radio on the shelf.

  She found an old table knife, used it as a screwdriver, and removed the back of the radio. And there, where all the tubes and wires should have been, was a black plastic videocassette.

  On the way home she peeped around corners and peered over her shoulder so often, she looked like she had a tic. She clutched her bag tightly to her chest and held her pepper spray in her right hand.

  Once she got home, she locked the door behind her and even closed the curtains. She was so excited, she dropped the cassette twice before she could get it in the machine. She sat on the floor in front of the machine and took a deep breath. Half a minute into the film she whooped out loud at the sight of a bored-looking blond smearing chocolate syrup on Allister Brindle’s crotch and licking it off in slow motion. Damn! So much for the Mr. Family Values candidate!

  The next segment was the one Lacey had told her about—Brindle in a pinafore and knee socks being given a good spanking with a black lacquer-backed hairbrush. Blanche wasn’t amused anymore. There was something tired and desperate about the whole thing. Kinky, maybe, but no more so than men who went out on football and rugby fields to get kicked and gouged for so-called fun. Still, she’d never thought much of Allister Brindle, and she thought even less of him now—not because of the way he liked his sex, but because he was such a lying phony.

  The next piece was even less funny: A large German shepherd’s penis was just visible as the dog humped over Brindle’s butt. No wonder Ray-Ray was so pleased with himself. This was definitely a career-busting tape. The dog had more dignity than Brindle. And Donnie! He could have retired with the money he’d have gotten from Brindle for the tape. But it wasn’t until the final segment that she realized just how much Donnie could have gotten.

  Allister was naked on a huge bed, his body looking almost rosy next to shiny black sheets. But it wasn’t Allister that made her groan. She moved closer to the screen for a better look. She stopped the tape and replayed the picture of three little faces, their eyes looking off to the left, as though someone there was giving them instructions. The child pinching and twisting Allister’s nipples couldn’t be more than eight years old. None of the little girls had developed breasts yet. Blanche stared at the screen while Allister’s eyes rolled and he squirmed beneath a child’s mouth while his hand…She couldn’t make it upstairs and barely made it to the kitchen sink before vomit flooded her mouth. Children. She couldn’t pull her mind away from them. Whose little girls were they? Where were the people who were supposed to protect them?

  She hung over the sink, tears streaming down her face, bile boiling up and out of her as she gagged and groaned. She knew this kind of shit went on in the world. She knew that child molesters looked like salesmen, cops, the man across the street, the candidate for governor. She knew that children were stolen and sold into nightmares. She knew, but she had never seen. And now she could never not see, never not remember the look on those three small faces, each with her own way of looking like she wished she was anyone but who she w
as, that she was anyplace but where she was, that what would happen next wouldn’t hurt too much, that whoever was standing on the sidelines telling her what to do wouldn’t get mad and make her do these bad things over and over and over again.

  Blanche cleaned her mouth and face and then the sink. She remembered the first time she’d seen Allister Brindle. What had he told Sadowski about black people? “They’re not like us. You can never trust them. Different values.” At the time, she’d been insulted that he would make such They statements. Now she was glad he felt he was so different from her. She wanted to be as different from the Allister Brindles of the world as possible. But he wasn’t the only sleaze in this shit pile.

  In the living room, the TV screen showed the gray-and-white end-of-tape pattern that looked liked static sounded. She turned off the TV, then rewound the tape. Her hand shook when she took the tape from the machine. Her fingers felt grimy from handling it. She carried the tape up to her room. She held it in her left hand and held that hand behind her—there was nowhere in her room where she dared to lay it down. She lit a candle on her Ancestor altar and thanked them for helping her find the tape. She also thanked them in advance for helping her understand what she needed to do with it, and she wished the awful thing were not in her house.

  She went back downstairs. She wouldn’t be able to sleep with it in her room. Would a night in the refrigerator hurt a videotape? No, not near their food! Finally, she put the tape in a plastic bag and took it to the laundry alcove between kitchen and living room. She shoved the tape deep in the clothes hamper. The perfect place for it. And guaranteed no one else in her family was likely to find it in there.

  She stood in the shower with too-hot water pouring over her, the little girls’ faces as present as the drops splashing in the tub. She stood there until the water ran cold. When she finally got out, her skin and everything else about her seemed tender. Even her eyes felt raw. But she knew what she needed to do. When she’d dressed, she called Othello and got his answering machine.