Black Betty Read Online Free PDF Page B

the feeling that Jesus was in danger too.
    Emory would come around when the library was almost empty and whisper about things he had done to Japanese women and children during the war.
    “Why don’t you go to the cops?” I asked her.
    “Oh, no,” she said. “Never go to the police.”
    Maybe that’s why I helped her.
    I hung around the library for a few days until Emory came back. He was a short and pudgy white man sporting brand-new jeans, turned up a full six inches at the cuff, and a white shirt. His face was flaccid and mean.
    I followed Emory out to a small house on Venice just a little west of National. When I was sure that the house was his I called an acquaintance named Alamo Weir. Alamo was a scrawny, beat-up old white man who had saved my life once when I was in jail on false charges. Because he’d saved me I threw work his way now and again.
    As I got to know L.A. over the years I found myself roaming outside my native black community, a community that had been transplanted from southern Texas and Louisiana. When I had to work in the white world, Alamo was the perfect tool. He was crazy and naturally criminal. He would have hated Negroes if it wasn’t for World War One. He felt that all those white generals and politicians had set up the poor white trash the same way black folks were set up.
    He was right.
    I told Alamo to check Emory out and I spent all of my extra time hanging around the library.
    I thought that we were going to have to try to scare Emory. I didn’t like the idea, because that kind of thing can backfire. But as it turned out we had a better bet.
    It only took about a week. Emory had been in the army and now he was dealing in stolen arms. He was moving M1 rifles and handguns through his garage.
    Alamo bought Emory some drinks at a bar the white man frequented, and before you know it Alamo was buying U.S. issue for seventy-five dollars a weapon. I made a call to a man I didn’t like in Washington, D.C. He gave me twenty-five hundred dollars through his agents in L.A. and I gave him Emory’s address.
    It made the papers. Senior Agent Craxton of the FBI announced the predawn raid on the house.
    The day before the raid I told Miss Eto that she didn’t have to worry about being bothered anymore. The next morning I showed her the article in the library’s copy of the
Examiner.
    “That’s your boy,” I said.
    Ever since that day I had a friend in the library. Anything I wanted to know, any little piece of information at all. Miss Eto loved me. She loved me in a way that wasn’t American at all. If I had fallen and broken my back, little Miss Eto would have fed me with a spoon in her own house for fifty years.
     
     
    “DOES MR. EADY have a phone?” Miss Eto asked me.
    “Maybe so, but you know, I kinda doubt it. Marlon always lived close to the bone. It used to be a coin toss if he could pay the rent.”
    “How about some job? Who did he work for?”
    “That’s what I was thinkin’ too,” I said. “I heard he did civilian work for the navy yards down in San Diego. He quit because of his lungs.”
    “You just sit,” she told me. “Read something.”
    I tried to make like I could help her but she wouldn’t hear of it. So I sat at one of the long tables and put my head down on folded arms.
    For a long time I just sat there, enjoying my eyes being closed. But after a while I fell into a kind of half-sleep. There was Bruno again, laid up in his pine-veneered pressboard coffin; innocent, with all the swagger gone. His face and crossed hands were waxy, like artificial fruit. I stood behind his sisters, five of them, all in black and crying over the only son born to their parents. They swayed back and forth with their knees so weak I was afraid they’d fall.
    I couldn’t bear their grief.
    The sounds of women crying followed me down into sleep. It was like being lowered into the grave myself. Darker and darker. The crying turned into shouts and suddenly I knew that it was me