Part 12 (1/2)
”Well... if you'll promise not to tire Helen, I think you might be able to talk to her at about four o'clock, if you'll come here to the house.” I said I would. It was at 90 Rose Street, and she told me how to find it. ”It's a little white frame house with yellow trim, on the right, on the second corner, with two big live oak trees in the front yard.”
After I hung up, I phoned the Pike place and Biddy answered.
”Well, h.e.l.lo!” she said. ”Yes, Maurie is doing just fine, thank you. We were just about to have a swim before lunch.”
”I wondered if I could come out and talk to you about something after lunch.”
”Why not? What time is it? Why don't you make it about two thirty or quarter to three? She'll be having her nap then. Will that be okay?”
I said it was just fine. I dressed and had lunch at the motel and then went strolling through the rear areas looking for Lorette. There was a service alley behind the kitchen. When I walked along it, past a neat row of garbage cans, I came to an open door to a linen storage room. I looked in and saw Lorette, still in uniform, sitting on a table laughing and talking and swinging her legs. There were two older black women in there, not in uniform. The rubber-tired maid carts were aligned against the wall near a battered c.o.ke machine and a row of green metal lockers.
She saw me and the talk and laughter stopped. She slid off the old wooden table and came and stood in the doorway, her face impa.s.sive, her eyes down-slanted. ”You want something, sir?”
”To ask you something,” I said, and walked on to a place where the roof overhang shaded a portion of the alley and a flame vine was curling up a post that supported the overhang. She had not followed me. I looked back and she shrugged and came slowly toward me. She put her hands in in her skirt pockets and leaned against the wall. her skirt pockets and leaned against the wall.
”Ask me what?”
”I didn't know if you could talk in front of those other women. I wanted to know how Cathy is.”
”Jes fine.” Her face was blank and she let her mouth hang slightly open. It made her look adenoidally stupid.
”She come out of it okay?”
”She gone on home.”
It was all too familiar and all too frustrating. It is the black armor, a kind of listless vacuity, stubborn as an acre of mules. They go that route or they become all teeth and giggles and forelock. Okay, so they have had more than their share of grief from men of my outward stamp, big and white and muscular, sun-darkened and visibly battered in small personal wars. My outward type had knotted a lot of black skulls, tupped a plenitude of black ewes, burned crosses and people in season. They see just the outward look and they cla.s.sify on that basis. Some of them you can't ever reach in any way, just as you can't teach most women to handle snakes and cherish spiders. But I knew I could reach her because for a little time with me she had been disarmed, had put her guard down, and I had seen behind it a shrewd and understanding mind, a quick and unschooled intelligence.
I had to find my way past that black armor. Funny how it used to be easier. Suspicion used to be on an individual basis. Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.
”What's wrong with you?” I asked her.
”Nothin' wrong.”
”You could talk to me before. Now you've slammed the door.”
”Door? What door, mister? I got to get back to work.”
Suddenly I realized what it might be. ”Lorette, have you slammed the door because you know that this morning I stood out in front of this place talking to a couple of cops?”
There was a sidelong glance, quick, vivid with suspicion, before she dropped her eyes again. ”Don't matter who you talkin' to.”
”Looked like a nice friendly little chat, I suppose.”
”Mister, I got to go to work.”
”That housekeeper here, Mrs. Imber? If she hadn't happened to look into 109 on Sat.u.r.day afternoon and saw me there sacked out, it wouldn't have been any nice friendly conversation with the law. And it wouldn't have happened out in front of this place. It would have been in one of their little rooms, with n.o.body smiling. They would have been trying to nail me for killing that nurse.”
She turned and leaned against the shady wall, arms folded, her face no longer slack with the defensive tactic of improvised imbecility. She wore a thoughtful frown, white teeth biting the fullness of her underlip. ”Then it was that nurse girl with you in the room Friday night, Mr. McGee?”
”That's how I got acquainted with the law, with Stanger and Nudenbarger.”
”The way I know you had a woman with you, Cathy she told me Stanger asked her if when she did the room she saw any sign you'd had a woman in there. That was before you helped her some. No reason to try to save any white from the law anytime. She said you surely had a party. So it was a lucky thing about Miz Imber checking the room, I guess.”
”Yes, indeed.”
Her brown-eyed stare was narrow and suspicious. ”Then, what call have you got to fool around with those two law?”
”I liked the nurse. If I can help find out who killed her, I'd buddy up to a leper or a rattlesnake. It's a personal matter.”
Her eyes softened. ”I guess being with someone you like, being in the bed with them, and they're dead the next day, it could be a sorrowful thing.”
It struck me that this was the first sympathetic and understanding response I'd had from anyone. ”It's a sorrowful thing.”
With a sudden thin smile she said, ”Now, if she was so nice and all, how come she was giving it away to such a mean honk lawyer like that Mr. Holton? Surprised I know? Man, we keep good track of everybody like Holton.”
”What's your beef with him?”
”When he was prosecutor, he got his kicks from busting every black that come to trial, busting him big as he could manage. Ever'time he could send a black to Raiford State Prison, it was a big holiday for him, grinning and struttin' around and shaking hands. The ones like that, they can't get anybody for yard work or housework, at least n.o.body worth a d.a.m.n or a day's pay.”
”She didn't like Holton, Lorette. She was trying to break loose. Being with me was part of the try. Didn't you ever hear of any woman with a hang-up on a sorry man?”
There had been antagonism toward me when she had talked of Holton. I was on Holton's team because of my color. But by telling her how it was between Penny and Rick, I had swung it all back to that familiar lonely confusing country of the human heart, the shared thing rather than the difference.
”It happens. It surely happens,” she said. ”And the other way around too. Well, yes, I heard you was with those two this morning. Lieutenant Stanger, he isn't so bad. Fair as maybe they let him be. But the one called Lew, he likes to whip heads. Don't care whose, long as it's a black skull. Stanger don't stop him, so the day they go down, they both go down like there was no difference at all.”
”I wanted to ask you how Cathy made out. I had no way of knowing how much she drank out of that bottle.”
Her stare was wise, timeless, sardonic. ”Why, now, that big ol' gal is just fine. Big strong healthy gal. On account of you didn't get her fired, she might be real thankful to you. How thankful do you want she should be, man?”
”Dammit, why do you think that's what I've got in mind?”
She laughed, a rich, raw little sound, full of derision. ”Because what the h.e.l.l else could you want from black motel maids? Sweepin' and cleanin' lessons? A walk in the park? A Bible lesson? Those women back in that room, now. I know exactly what they're thinking. They got it all figured that finally, somehow a whitey got to me, and probably tomorrow I switch with Cathy, one of mine for her One-O-nine, because I decided to be motel tail and pick up some extra bread. Those women know there's not another d.a.m.n thing in the world about me or Cathy you could be after. And that's how it is.”
”And that is exactly what you believe about me?”
”Mister, I don't know what what to believe about you, and that's the truth.” to believe about you, and that's the truth.”
”I hunted you up because I wanted to see how Cathy made it. And I wanted to ask a favor.”
”Like what?”
”I've seen a lot of towns like this one. Enough to know that the black community knows everything that happens in the white community. Maids and cooks and yard men make one of the best intelligence apparatuses in the world.”
”Sneaky n.i.g.g.e.rs listening to everything, huh?”
”If I happened to be black, you can d.a.m.n well bet I'd keep track, Mrs. Walker. Just to keep from getting caught in the middle of anything. I would have to be just that much faster on my feet, just to get a job and keep a job. I'd listen and I'd know.”
She tilted her head as she looked up at me. ”You almost know where it is, don't you, man? If you were black, now, wouldn't you be too smart to be a yard man?”