White Butterfly (13 page)

“You tell Quinten Naylor that?”

“Sure did,” I said. Then, “Hey, honey, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you tell Gabby Lee t’stay a couple’a days with Edna and Jesus?”

“Why?”

“Then we could go up to Frisco for two nights.”

“Uh… not tomorrow, baby,” she said, looking for other words. “I can’t right now.”

“Is it ’cause you want that money for your auntie?”

“No, it ain’t that. I got a letter from my uncle Andrew. He said that her husband came up with what they needed anyway.”

“Then what is it?”

“Do you love me, Easy?”

I felt the afternoon sun burning on my face. It was like a red-hot slap that lingers long after you’ve been hit.

“Sure… I mean, yeah, of course I do.”

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe you just think you do.”

“Don’t do this, Regina. Don’t play with me.”

“I ain’t playin’ with you. It’s just a feelin’ I got, that’s all.”

“What feelin’?” I was sitting down but I might just as well have been on my knees.

“You don’t talk to me. I mean, you don’t say nuthin’.”

“What am I doin’ right now? Ain’t this talk?”

“What’s my auntie’s name?”

“What?”

“You know that today is the first time you ever asked me to do anything for you, Easy? You never talk to me about what you be doin’. I mean, you say you work for Mofass but I don’t have no idea where you are most the time.”

“So now I gotta sign in with you?”

“You was readin’ a book the other day,” she said, ignoring my question.

“Yeah… ”

“I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what your mother’s name was or who your friends are, not really.”

“You don’t wanna know them,” I said. I laughed a little and shook my head.

“But I do wanna know. How can you know a man if you don’t know his friends?”

“They ain’t really friends, Gina. They more like business partners,” I said. “I ain’t got what you call any real friends left. My mother is dead and there ain’t no more to say about that.”

I turned on Ninety-sixth Street and parked. “… and I love you.”

I don’t know how I expected her to take that. She sat as far away from me as she could, with her back against the door. She shook her fine head and said, “I know you feel about me, but I don’t know if it’s love.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sometimes you look at me the same way a dog be lookin’ after raw meat. I get scared’a the way you look at me, scared’a what you might do.”

“Like what?”

“Like the other night.”

I didn’t know what to say then. I thought about what she called rape. I didn’t think that it was like some of these men do to women, how they grab them off the street and brutalize them. But I knew that if she was unwilling then I made her against that will. I was wrong but I didn’t have the heart to admit it.

My silence infuriated her.

“Do you wanna fuck me right here?” she spat.

“Com’on, baby. Don’t talk like that.”

“Oh? I ain’t s’posed t’say it? I’m just s’posed to shut my mouf while you fuck me raw?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You sorry? Is that what you have to say? You want to apologize for raping me?”

I was facing her. I flung backward with my elbow and shattered the glass in the door. There was a sharp pain in my upper arm; I was glad for the distraction.

“What the hell you think you doin’, Easy?” Regina screamed. There was fear in her voice.

“We gotta slow this down, Gina. We gotta stop before we go someplace we cain’t get down from.” My voice was small and careful.

I started the car and drove off again. She gazed ahead. I looked out too, looked out for anything that would take my mind away from the anger in that car.

The thing I struck on was the palm trees. Their silhouettes rose above the landscape like impossibly tall and skinny girls. Their hair a mess, their posture stooped. I tried to imagine what they might be thinking but failed.

“You gotta talk to me,” Regina said. “You gotta hear me too.”

“What do you want me to say?”

She looked out the window but I don’t think she was seeing anything. “I raised thirteen hungry brothers and served my father eggs to go with his whiskey in the morning.”

“I know that.”

“NO YOU DON’T!”

I’d never heard her shout like that.

“I said, no you don’t,” Regina said again. I could hear the breath ripping from her nostrils. “I mean, you know it happened but you don’t know what it is to have fourteen men leanin’ on you and cryin’ to you. Beggin’ you all the time for everything, everything you got. Your last nickel, your Saturday night. An’ they never once asked about me. They come in hungry or beat up or drunk and needin’ me t’make it right.”

I pulled up in front of our house. When I moved my left arm to open the door there came the sound of broken glass settling.

“But they was better than you,” Regina said. “At least they needed me for somethin’. I mean, maybe you want some pussy. Maybe you even wanna make me crazy and make me come. But if I do that and fall in love with you, all you gonna do is walk outta the house in the mornin’ goin’ who knows where.”

“Everybody goes to work, baby.”

“You don’t understand. I want to be part of something. I ain’t just some girl to suck your dick an’ have your babies.”

When Marla talked like that I got excited. But hearing it from my wife made me want to tear off her head. I held my temper, though. I knew I deserved her abuse.

She stared dead ahead and I kept silent, watching the clock on the dashboard. After four minutes had gone by I said, “I got that money if you need it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I’ll bring you down to the places I work at and show you what I do.”

“Yeah… ” she said, waiting for more.

“We could throw a party and invite the people I know.”

She turned fifteen degrees and softened just a little. It was then that I caught the scent of fried okra. They had served fried okra at the wake for my mother. I was barely seven years old and I hated the minister’s eyes.

I hadn’t eaten fried okra in twenty-nine years, but I smelled it sometimes. Usually when I was feeling strong emotions about a woman who was almost within my reach, just beyond touch.

“I do love you, Easy.” It hurt her to say it.

The glass fell out onto the ground when I got out of the car. I had to brush the shards away in order to close the door again.

“You’re bleeding,” Regina said.

The blood had run down my arm, making a red seam all the way down to the tip of my baby finger.

GABBY WAS WATCHING the evening news from the couch and Edna was examining the frills of a small pillow under the big woman’s head.

“Give us a minute, Lee,” Regina said. Then she led me to the bathroom, where she made me take off my shirt.

“There’s glass in this.” Her probing fingers made me jump. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when you mash on it,” I whimpered.

When she cleaned out the cut the blood flowed more easily.

I watched Regina’s face in the cabinet mirror as she wrapped the bandage around my upper arm. The pain was welcome. So was her touching me.

We made dinner together and played with the children. Jesus showed us his quizzes. A D in spelling but an A in math. Edna tore back and forth across the floor and screeched. Nobody talked much.

AT ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mr. Rawlins?”

“Who’s this?” I answered.

“My name is Vernor Garnett. You nearly gave my wife a heart attack today.”

“How did you get this number, Mr. Garnett?”

“I work downtown, Rawlins. I can get just about anything I want.”

“Okay, sir. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on your wife. But I’ve been working with the police on this thing and I felt I needed to find out some things.”

“The police say that you were to be helping them with problems in the colored community. You had no business at my house.”

“Your daughter was in my community, Mr. Garnett. She worked down here.”

“You leave my family alone, Rawlins. You keep out of my life. Do you understand that?”

“Yessir. Right away, sir.”

I cradled the phone and it started ringing in my hand. It was too fast to be Garnett calling back so I was civil.

“Yes?”

“What’s wrong with you, Rawlins?”

“Who is this?” I asked for the second time in as many minutes.

“This is Andrew Voss. Who gave you permission to go into that family’s house and to leave evidence with them?”

“I guess you don’t wanna work wit’ me, right?”

“I want you out of this thing completely. All the way out!”

I hung up the phone again. Then I left it off the hook until about eleven, when we went to bed.

I GOT UP at one to change the bandage. It was too tight, but I didn’t want Regina to feel that I didn’t appreciate her work.

I bathed the cut in witch hazel and wrapped it loosely with gauze and tape. I was just finishing up when the telephone rang.

It only rang once.

Regina was waiting for me in the hall.

“One’a your girlfriends,” she informed me.

I followed her back into the bedroom and picked the receiver up off my pillow.

“Hello?”

“Thank God it’s you, Easy. They got Raymond in jail.”

“Who is this?” I asked for the third time.

“Minnie Fry.”

That was Raymond “Mouse” Alexander’s most-the-time girlfriend.

“Okay, Minnie. Now calm down. Who got Mouse?”

“The po-lice do!”

“Is he dead?”

“They holdin’ him. He want me to call you first off.”

“Down here at the Seventy-seventh?”

“Um-huh. You gotta go down there right now.”

“It’s almost two… ”

“You gotta go right now, Easy! That’s what Raymond said.”

Mouse had faced loaded guns for me more than once. He had been my friend since we were young men, and even though Raymond was always close to mayhem, I knew he was the closest to family that I had outside of my wife and kids.

“All right,” I sighed. “I’ll go down there.”

“You gonna go right now?” Minnie asked.

“I said all right, didn’t I?”

“Okay. But you gotta go now.”

We went back and forth like that three or four times before I could get her off the phone.

I got my clothes from the closet.

“My dressing wasn’t good enough for you?” Regina asked as I put on my pants.

“A little tight is all. I just changed it.”

“Where you goin’ now?”

“Down to the police station.”

“You gonna get drunk and fuck that girl down there?”

“That was Minnie Fry on the phone, babe. That’s Mouse’s girl. She said that Mouse was in jail.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

“He’s my friend, Regina. An’ I could get him out.”

“You cain’t wait till mornin’?”

“He wouldn’t wait for me.”

Regina sucked her tooth and went back to bed. I leaned over her, to kiss her before I left, but she wasn’t interested.

THE NIGHT SERGEANT didn’t believe that I worked for Quinten Naylor. But he didn’t mind making an early-morning call to his superior officer either. So I waited while he tried to get through.

It was a quiet night at the station.

An old man nodded in and out of sleep on the long wooden bench where we both sat. He was a white wino, not uncommon in our neighborhood. His coat had once been brown but now it was worn to gray at places. He smelled of sweat and that made me like him. Across from us sat a middle-aged black woman. She was weeping into a blue handkerchief. Her cheeks and nose were bright black plums. I never knew why either one of them was there. I’ve spent my whole life passing by little tragedies like that and ignoring them.

“Mr. Rawlins,” the desk sergeant called.

“Yeah?”

“Lieutenant Naylor said to let you see the man. Just fill this out and I’ll get somebody to bring you back.” He held out a clipboard with a mimeographed sheet of paper on it.

I put down my name and address and relationship with the incarcerated. I put down my social security number and my telephone number and the reason for my visit. I signed at the bottom and returned the clipboard to the sergeant.

He didn’t even read it, just folded the page into quarters and pushed it down a slot behind him. Then he picked up the phone and pushed a button on the desk.

“Come on out here, Rivers,” was all he said into the receiver.

A moment later a small white man in a short-sleeved khaki police shirt came out of a door behind the sergeant’s desk. The man had a gaunt and pitted face. He was probably in his mid-thirties but he could have been sixty with a ravaged face like that.

“This the guy?”

The sergeant nodded.

“Come on,” the ravaged man said. “I’m in a goddamned rush.”

First he took me down a long gray-plaster hall. We came to a white wooden door that the policeman had a key for. Just beyond that door was another one, an iron door with evil-looking bolts all around it. He had a key for this door too. Then we were in another hall made of steel-grated floors, walls, and ceilings.

We came to a big room made all out of metal and glass. There was a table in the middle of the floor with a chair on either side. The table and chairs were all bolted to the floor.

I heard the gruff voice of one man talking and the pathetic sobs of another man.

“Sit down. Wait here,” the little policeman said. Then he went through a door on the other side.

“I ain’t tellin’ you again!” It was the gruff voice.

In answer a man moaned. Then there was a loud crash and more crying. I heard the voice again but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

The noise was coming from behind an iron door to my right.

The door behind me opened and Mouse, manacled hand and foot, shuffled in, followed by the warder.

It made me sick at heart to see Raymond like that. He was the only black man I’d ever known who had never been chained, in his mind, by the white man. Mouse was brash and wild and free. He might have been insane, but any Negro who dared to believe in his own freedom in America had to be mad. The sight of his incarceration made me shudder inside.