Black Betty by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page A

models in blurred black-and-white photographs.
    Under these I found a stack of letters, but none of them were from Betty. I was almost sick from the heat in that house. Marlon had probably left because of the heat. It was too hot for anybody out there.
    But I didn’t come all that way for nothing.
    There was a pair of pants on the floor next to the cardboard box. Work pants. The kind of threadbare trousers you wore around the house. At first I thought that Marlon had left them when he’d dressed up to leave. But his wallet was in the back pocket. He didn’t have much cash. Just eight dollars and three nickels in the change pouch. But he made up for that with a personal check for five thousand dollars made out to him—not the kind of thing I’d leave just lying around.
     
* * *
     
    OUTSIDE AGAIN I went to look around back.
    There was a tin outhouse behind the shack. When I pulled open the door a pack of leaping mice came racing out around and between my feet, followed by the foul smell of rotted human waste. The toilet seat was an aluminum funnel that thickened toward the rim so as to provide a seat.
    I had no desire to sit there. Not only did a terrible smell come out from the hole but the commode was fouled with dark black drippings that had flowed both in and out of the bowl.
    I noticed that the black dollops were all over the room, dried by the sun beaming down into the roofless toilet. In one corner, behind the funnel, was a thick glop of the stuff festooned with a white boil.
    I sank to my knees then. If someone had seen me I would have told them that it was to get a closer look at that white pustule. But the truth was closer to the fact that I had just realized the depth of my troubles.
    With my pocketknife and handkerchief I teased the tooth out of its cake of dry blood. A full molar with long, hungry-looking roots. It could have been used for a dentist’s display. It was so perfect that you would have thought it was plastic. But who would put a plastic tooth in a pool of blood under their toilet?
     
     
    NOBODY WAS WAITING for me at the turnoff. I stopped there long enough to put Dickhead’s auto parts and phone out in the road. I kept the sawed-off along with a few of Marlon’s personal items: his letters, his wallet, and a magazine with the blurred photographs of naked black women.
     
     
     

— 7 —
     
     
    IT WAS LATE BY THE TIME I’d made it back home. Almost seven. The sun was throwing its last long shadows across the city. I pulled up into the driveway but before I got past the front lawn a man ran out in front of the car. I hit the brake and cursed.
    He was a tall white man with long black hair generously streaked in gray. He had a thick black mustache that was a triplet brother to the hair over each of his eyes.
    Roger “Lucky” Horn was a retired air force officer. He’d run the PX at Norton Air Force Base for fourteen years. Before that he flew supplies in behind enemy lines to the partisans for most of World War Two.
    Lucky was from California originally. His wife, April, and he had been high school sweethearts in Santa Barbara. They married a week before Black Friday and the beginning of the Great Depression.
    Lucky had deep-set eyes that were dark and dull; impenetrable, like a religious zealot’s. I never heard him bad-mouth anybody and he held an open invitation for me and the kids to go with them to their church on Olympic Boulevard any Sunday. April baked sweets for Feather and Jesus at least once a week, and her back door was always open for a bruised knee or for lemonade and a few moments’ rest.
    When I was away the Horns looked out for the kids. They were real people and so I rarely thought about them being white.
    “Don’t go back there, Easy,” he said in my window.
    “Why not?”
    “Come on over in my backyard and I’ll show you.”
    I didn’t want to go anywhere, but we were friends and neighbors. So I followed the stooped ex-pilot down the long driveway to his