Read Online White Butterfly by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online

heavyweight. He’d been drunk in a bar on Myrtle Street some years before. He’d wanted another drink but the bartender wanted to go home to his wife. He told Roger that he had to go and Roger said, “After one more drink.” That’s when the six-foot barman made his mistake. He grabbed Roger and Roger socked him, twice. The bartender was dead before he hit the floor. Roger did seven straight years for manslaughter. If the bartender had been a black man Roger wouldn’t have done half that.
    “Easy,” Roger Vaughn said. He was hunched over his table with his big hands around a tumbler full of beer.
    “Roger. You out at last, huh, man?”
    “Not fo’long,” he said, nodding in a way that made him seem wise.
    “You paid your time, man. They cain’t take you back unless you want ’em to.” I pulled a chair up to his lonely table.
    “Motherfucker took my money.”
    Roger was drunk and loose in the tongue. I knew that if I let him talk he would help me all he could. But I might have to hear things I didn’t want to hear to get there. I was half drunk myself, otherwise I’d have bowed out right then.
    “Motherfucker been doin’ my wife. Right there in my own house. She come up to Soledad an’ be smilin’ at me. But all the time she comin’ home to him. She comin’ home t’him.”
    The glass broke in Roger’s grip; more like it just crumbled. Beer, mixed with a little blood, ran over the table. I threw some paper napkins from the dispenser on the spill and handed Roger my handkerchief. He looked at me with a depth of gratitude.
    “Thank you, Easy. You’re a friend, man. A real friend.”
    You could buy a drunk’s friendship with a handful of feathers and a sprinkle of salt.
    “Thanks, Roger,” I said. I patted his rocky shoulder across the table. “I was tryin’ t’find somethin’ out.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You knew Bonita Edwards?”
    “Uh-huh, yeah, I knew’er. You know that was a shame what happened that girl.”
    Blood soaked more and more into my rag.
    “Hold that thing tight, Roger. You bleedin’ pretty good there.”
    He gazed down at his hand and seemed surprised to see the bloody cloth. Then he clenched the hand into a fist and the whole thing disappeared.
    “What you wanna know ’bout Bonnie?”
    “She was a friend’a mines, Roger, so I’m askin’ if anybody seen’er ’round ’fore she got killed.”
    He shook his head slowly, his eyes moved loosely as he did. “Nope,” he said. “An’ you know if I did I’da kilt him jus’ like I’ma kill… ”
    “Did you know what she was doin’ that last week?” I asked, partly because I wanted to know and partly to distract him.
    “I don’t wanna cause you no pain, Easy, but I think she was down on Bethune.”
    I tried to look like I was bothered by this information. When somebody said Bethune they meant a whorehouse run by a white man named Max Howard and his wife, Estelle.
    “Thank you, Roger,” I said, as seriously as I could.
    “Woman tear your heart out, man.” Roger shook his head again. “An’ that’s what I’ma do to Charles Warren. He got my kids callin’ him Daddy. He got my wife callin’ him Daddy too. She be fuckin’ me like it’s all that love an’ stuff. But she goin’ t’see him Friday. I seen it on a note in her purse.”
    It was time for me to go. I should have gone. But instead I said, “Man, you don’t know what it is.”
    Roger’s head moved slowly as he turned his face upward to look at me. The rest of his body was rock-solid and tense.
    He said, “What?”
    “All I’m sayin’ is give’er a chance, man. Maybe it ain’t what you think. I mean, she did come up to Soledad to see ya, right?”
    Roger just stared.
    “Woman wanna leave a man don’t come up t’see him but the first few months,” I continued. “But yo’ wife come up the whole time, right?”
    He wouldn’t nod. We weren’t friends anymore.
    “Think about it, Roger. Talk to her.”
    I got up and backed away