Read Online Black Betty by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Walter Mosley
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators, Literary Criticism, Mystery Fiction, American, Los Angeles (Calif.), African American, Rawlins; Easy (Fictitious character), Private investigators - California - Los Angeles, African American men, African American men - California - Los Angeles
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slightest concept of what was going on in the world around him. He was young and strong and he had brothers to run with and sisters to clean his clothes and serve him.
I could have killed him—for nothing. Somebody would kill him one day. Like Mouse had killed Bruno.
I wanted to kill Clovis too, but there wasn’t any reason for it. She hadn’t done anything. It was me. I had reached out for the white man’s brass ring and got caught up short, that’s all. They taught me when I was a boy to stay in my place. I was a fool for forgetting that lesson, and now all I was doing was paying for that foolishness.
Deep inside I knew that the world wasn’t going to let me be an upright businessman. It was just that I had worked so hard. Since I was a child I worked the daylight hours; sweeping, gardening, delivering. I’d done every kind of low job, and I wanted my success. I wanted it—violently.
But the violence didn’t sit easily in me anymore. Every time I felt it I remembered Bruno and Mouse and how easily we come to die.
Back home in Texas and Louisiana, shootings and stabbings and beatings were commonplace. A man would kill you with his bare hands if he didn’t have the right tools. Women died giving birth, men drowned trying to do logging jobs that no man should have been expected to do. There was syphilis and pneumonia and tuberculosis everywhere you turned.
And then came World War Two. People died by the millions there. They died in their own homes and on lonely winter landscapes. In Europe they built giant factories to kill people in. In Europe they made you dig your own grave before putting a bullet in the back of your head.
In Europe I’d have days where I saw more dead people than I did live ones. In one town, in Poland, I came upon a hole, six by six by six, that was full to overflowing with the corpses of infant children, not one of whom had grown old enough to speak a word.
But through all that time I had hope. Hope that I’d come to a place and time where death would no longer haunt me. It’s not that I thought people would stop dying one day. I knew that death was always coming. But not this senseless kind of death where men killed from boredom or because of a child’s game they played.
When Bruno died I realized that I’d always be surrounded by violence and insanity. I saw it everywhere; in Fitt’s innocent face, in Dickhead’s diseased gaze. It was even in me. That feeling of anger wrapped tight under my skin, in my hands.
And it was getting worse.
— 9 —
THE DRIVE NORTHWARD was a monotonous landscape of one-story houses except for an occasional office building and the palm trees. The sky was dense with smog, gray all around, with a deepening amber color hugging low at the horizon. If I took a deep breath I felt a sharp pain in the pit of my lungs. I welcomed it. I had one more thing to take care of before I could go out and earn Saul Lynx’s money.
L.A. has always been flat and featureless. Anybody could be anywhere out there. The police arrested you for jaywalking or because you didn’t have the brains not to brag after you hit a liquor store for the day’s receipts. But if you wanted to hide from the law, L.A. was the place to do it. There was no logic to the layout of the city. And there were more people every day. Sharecroppers and starlets, migrant Mexicans and insurance salesmen, come to pick over the money tree for a few years before they went back home. But they never went home. The money slipped through their fingers and the easy life weighed them down.
I DROVE OVER to the old bus station on Los Angeles, parked across the street, and killed the motor. It was hot in the car, but that didn’t matter. Actually it felt right being scorched by the sun. I enjoyed it so much that I even lit a cigarette to burn up my insides too.
After the Camel I laid back behind the wheel and closed my eyes for a moment.
NO MATTER WHERE MY MIND wanted to
I could have killed him—for nothing. Somebody would kill him one day. Like Mouse had killed Bruno.
I wanted to kill Clovis too, but there wasn’t any reason for it. She hadn’t done anything. It was me. I had reached out for the white man’s brass ring and got caught up short, that’s all. They taught me when I was a boy to stay in my place. I was a fool for forgetting that lesson, and now all I was doing was paying for that foolishness.
Deep inside I knew that the world wasn’t going to let me be an upright businessman. It was just that I had worked so hard. Since I was a child I worked the daylight hours; sweeping, gardening, delivering. I’d done every kind of low job, and I wanted my success. I wanted it—violently.
But the violence didn’t sit easily in me anymore. Every time I felt it I remembered Bruno and Mouse and how easily we come to die.
Back home in Texas and Louisiana, shootings and stabbings and beatings were commonplace. A man would kill you with his bare hands if he didn’t have the right tools. Women died giving birth, men drowned trying to do logging jobs that no man should have been expected to do. There was syphilis and pneumonia and tuberculosis everywhere you turned.
And then came World War Two. People died by the millions there. They died in their own homes and on lonely winter landscapes. In Europe they built giant factories to kill people in. In Europe they made you dig your own grave before putting a bullet in the back of your head.
In Europe I’d have days where I saw more dead people than I did live ones. In one town, in Poland, I came upon a hole, six by six by six, that was full to overflowing with the corpses of infant children, not one of whom had grown old enough to speak a word.
But through all that time I had hope. Hope that I’d come to a place and time where death would no longer haunt me. It’s not that I thought people would stop dying one day. I knew that death was always coming. But not this senseless kind of death where men killed from boredom or because of a child’s game they played.
When Bruno died I realized that I’d always be surrounded by violence and insanity. I saw it everywhere; in Fitt’s innocent face, in Dickhead’s diseased gaze. It was even in me. That feeling of anger wrapped tight under my skin, in my hands.
And it was getting worse.
— 9 —
THE DRIVE NORTHWARD was a monotonous landscape of one-story houses except for an occasional office building and the palm trees. The sky was dense with smog, gray all around, with a deepening amber color hugging low at the horizon. If I took a deep breath I felt a sharp pain in the pit of my lungs. I welcomed it. I had one more thing to take care of before I could go out and earn Saul Lynx’s money.
L.A. has always been flat and featureless. Anybody could be anywhere out there. The police arrested you for jaywalking or because you didn’t have the brains not to brag after you hit a liquor store for the day’s receipts. But if you wanted to hide from the law, L.A. was the place to do it. There was no logic to the layout of the city. And there were more people every day. Sharecroppers and starlets, migrant Mexicans and insurance salesmen, come to pick over the money tree for a few years before they went back home. But they never went home. The money slipped through their fingers and the easy life weighed them down.
I DROVE OVER to the old bus station on Los Angeles, parked across the street, and killed the motor. It was hot in the car, but that didn’t matter. Actually it felt right being scorched by the sun. I enjoyed it so much that I even lit a cigarette to burn up my insides too.
After the Camel I laid back behind the wheel and closed my eyes for a moment.
NO MATTER WHERE MY MIND wanted to
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