Black Betty by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page B

backyard. Every once in a while he’d turn to me and put his finger to his lips.
    Instead of a fence separating our properties there were planted all kinds of trees and shrubbery. Jacaranda, kumquat, magnolia, and trimmed bamboo made our borderline. Ferns and honeysuckle closed up any gaps that might allow you to see from one yard to the other. I kept my side of the yard cut back and trim. I liked the sun shining down on us. But Lucky let the trees hang over the driveway so that you had the feeling that you were entering a jungle path, some dark tunnel into another time.
    Mrs. Horn was standing next to the wall of leaves in the backyard. She was very excited, almost jumping up and down, batting a finger against her lips so that I wouldn’t make a mistake and break out into a rendition of “What’d I Say?”
    Solemnly Lucky brushed his bony wife aside. Then he carefully parted the wall of ferns and gestured with his head for me to look through the hole.
    As tired as I was, I had to smile when I gazed out into my own yard. It was an open plot of grass surrounded by bushes that sported large mottled red-and-yellow roses. It was a picture-perfect yard in my opinion, but that’s not what made me smile. Jesus and Feather were there. They both had on swimming trunks and were reclining on a big cardboard box that they’d flattened for a sun blanket. Near them the green water hose sputtered, the nozzle turned closed with the water still on. Whenever I was late and Feather started to get scared that I’d never come home again, Juice would do something like let her play in the water.
    Juice had his hands behind his head with his eyes closed. Feather copied his pose but I couldn’t tell about her eyes, because she wore a pair of Snow White black-lensed glasses we’d brought home from Disneyland.
    I made up my mind to be a better father to them. What was I doing way out in the desert dueling with some strange white man? I was all they had, and here I was squandering my time on needless danger when they were so beautiful right there in our own paradise.
    I made to turn away. I was going to go home and hug those children, call Mr. L-Y-N-X, send him his money, and go out looking for a regular job that would have me living right.
    But before I could turn, Lucky held out a hand for me to keep on watching. And as if he had magic in his hands, it happened.
    “How high is the sun up in the sky, Juice?” Feather asked. And when the mute boy didn’t respond she insisted, “Huh?”
    “I don’t know. But it’s real high, all right. I bet you wouldn’t want to fall down from way up there.”
    “No sir!” Feather shook her head so hard that the little sunglasses went askew on her head. She was so beautiful that I almost forgot that Jesus had talked.
    Jesus reached over and tickled Feather under her arm. She squealed and squirmed. “Stop! Stop!”
    “I got you!” He laughed with her. “I got you!”
    It was the only time I ever cried from being happy. I staggered away from the wall, and Lucky caught me around the chest, afraid that I might fall I guess. And maybe I would have fallen. I could have let go of myself, because I didn’t believe in the laws of nature right then. Gravity might have let me loose, let me soar up over my house.
    “He talked,” April whispered in my ear.
    And I didn’t feel like she was some kind of fool telling me what I already knew. She could have said it a thousand times.
     
     
    I WENT INTO THE HOUSE after that and started dinner. I wanted to run right out into the yard and ask Jesus to say something, but I controlled myself. About ten minutes later Feather came in shouting, “Daddy! Daddy home, Juice!”
    She came running in the back door and right into my leg, hugging me and grinning with the kind of love only children can feel. I tousled her light walnut hair and thought for a moment about the daughter that I had somewhere down in Mississippi. The daughter I’d lost.
    My wife Regina took Edna,