Just that I was an okay guy, he said, and that all I wanted was talk. That I was a writer, but not a reporter—just a mystery writer researching something for a story. And, since she was a part-time schoolteacher who could use the money, that there was twenty bucks in it for her.
I told him he was awful free with my money and he said
nothing’s
free, son; then I asked him what time he’d set it for.
Eleven o’clock this morning, he told me, and nobody’d be there but the bartenders, getting ready for the crowd that’d be in to watch the football games on TV. Rita knew one of the bartenders pretty good and he’d given the okay, Jack said.
I thanked him for all the trouble, and he said, well, he wasn’t going to let me go up there myself night before a holiday. Hadn’t I heard what they said about the Filet O’Soul?
The door’s steel was cold on my knuckles as I knocked. I stopped knocking and waited a few moments, was getting ready to knock again when the door opened. The man who answered was tall and lean and wore a black satin long-sleeved shirt with a red patent leather vest and black brushed corduroy pants. Skin coal black, nostrils wide, eyes dark and alert, forehead, cheekbones and chin chiselled, smile white, slow, careful and amused—he looked like a charcoal drawing, and a good one.
“You’d be Mallory,” he said.
I nodded, smiled liberally.
“Rita isn’t here yet,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“You want to come in and wait?”
“Please.”
He opened the door and I stepped in. But would I ever step out again?
The room was a long rectangular box, lined with booths; the lights were up full, but the room was still pretty dim. About halfway down, a guy was sweeping dirt into a dustpan, his uniform identical to the bartender’s, though faded, and matching the floor’s red and black tiles, which were also faded. I watched as the bartender walked to the far left corner of the room to the semicircular bar, which he got back behind, and started polishing glasses. I went over to a booth and sat down. The guy swept his last pile of dirt into his dustpan, and as he carried the filled pan away, he cut the lights, with the only remaining illumination coming from small red bulbs under the abstract prints by each booth and a few lighted plastic booze ads at the
bar and elsewhere. Immediately the place looked better, and was on its way to having “atmosphere”: all that was lacking was smoke and people.
After I’d waited ten minutes, the bartender came over and put a glass of draw beer down in front of me.
“You looked dry,” he smiled.
I thanked him and dug for some change in my coat pocket.
He just smiled and shook his head no, with an odd mixture of friendliness and condescension.
I thanked him again but he was already on his way back to polish glasses behind the bar.
When I was halfway through the beer, the door opened.
She was tall: five-nine at least; a slender young woman, almost thin—though nothing was missing—wearing a purple pantsuit with a turtleneck sweater peeking up over the collar, the sweater a deep purple, the suit a lighter purple. Her skin was the color of milk chocolate. Her face was wide-set, with heavy-lashed big brown eyes; pouting, flower-petal lips; strong, angular cheekbones; and a gentle, almost delicate nose, the kind people go to plastic surgeons to get, though her nostrils had a hint of the proud flare that money can’t buy. Her hair was up, Afro-style, but was straight, and a coal-black contrast to the light brown skin.
She came over and looked at me with the big-lashed eyes not blinking and said, “Mallory?”
I stood. “Yes. Miss Washington?”
“Rita,” she said, and sat down while I was still in midair.
“Mal,” I said, sitting back down.
“Mal,” she said, neutrally, a verbal shrug.
I said, “Thanks for coming, Rita.”
“You mind telling me something?”
“Not at all.”
“Why am I here?”
“You don’t want to be?”
“I’m half an hour late, aren’t I?”
“Listen, if you’re worried this is going to be some kind of come-on...”
“I wasn’t worried about that—not till I came in here and you sat there looking at me with your mouth open.”
I felt the red crawl up out of my neck. “I’m sorry, I didn’t expect...”
“What
did
you expect?”
“Let’s start with what I didn’t expect, which is the best-looking woman I’ve seen in...”
“A coon’s age?” she said. “Save it. This better start sounding like something besides pussy hustle, and quick.”
“Hey, nothing like...”
“I should’ve known what the twenty bucks was for.” She started to get up. “Happy Thanksgiving, turkey. I’ll see you.”
“Wait. No hustle. Please wait.”
She hesitated.
“Just listen to something and let me ask you a couple questions. Take the twenty just for listening.” And I laid two tens on the table.
“Questions about what?”
“Why don’t you listen first?”
“Why don’t you tell me why I should?”
“It concerns a brother of yours.”
“I got lots of brothers.”
“Not that kind of brother.”
“I got a lot of that kind, too. Six of them.” She pushed the two tens on the plastic tabletop away. “None for sale.”
“Is one of your six brothers missing an eye?”
“Why, did you find it? Screw off.” She started up again.
“Wait. Please.”
Again she hesitated, sat back down in the booth. She sat silently for a moment, then brushed the bills aside and said, “Why don’t you just put the twenty away? It gives me a cheap feeling.”
“It’s not enough, you mean?”
“I mean nothing I got is for sale.”
“Listen, I didn’t mean to...”
“My brother likes privacy. If that’s what he wants, that’s okay with Rita, and there isn’t a price on it.”
“Will you do this much? Will you listen to what I have to say and then decide?”
She sighed.
I told it to her, but in a different order than I’d been using; I got out my violin and started with Janet’s end of the story, the kid with heart trouble, the mother beaten and left to die in the burning house, the Colorado Hill “accident” that echoed Senator Norman’s earlier fatal crash, with the part about the one-eyed guy who was maybe her brother in the middle of the story, ending with the encounter I’d had with Phil Taber last night.
“What about your friend’s stepdaddy?” she said, interested in spite of herself. “If he’s the sheriff, you ought to be able to get the straight shit on this Taber dude from him.”
“No way,” I said. “Brennan was out last night, and didn’t answer the message I left for him with John, which was to call me whenever he got in. I went over this morning and he was off somewhere else. Besides, he isn’t likely to cooperate with me, anyway.”
While I’d been talking, a few black guys, ranging in age from twenty-one to thirty-five, had wandered in, taking seats at the bar and settling down to watch the football game on the color TV that sat perched above the mirror behind the counter. A few of them gave me wary looks, but nobody hassled me.
But then Rita asked me to go over and get something for her at the bar, and I went after it, and while I was getting it a thin, tall, bushy-haired black in an Afro-print shirt and gray bell-bottom slacks ambled over to the booth and started chatting with Rita.
I came back with Rita’s drink in hand and caught what he was saying: “... messin’ with the white meat again, Rita baby?”
Rita wasn’t saying anything.
The guy went on. “Still teachin’ in the white man’s school, baby? Still wiping the white man’s nose? Shit, girl, you make me wanna puke.”
I said, “Excuse me.”
He looked at me out of the corner of an eye and he sneered. He was still facing Rita, away from me, but I could tell who the sneer was for. “Who’s the honky, baby? Got him talked into buyin’ your bleach for you, and scrub you down?”
I said, “Suppose you just leave us alone, friend.”
He turned and looked at me. “Don’t give me that friend jive, mutha—”
I said, “Don’t give me that mutha jive, friend.”
I saw it coming and ducked, tossing the drink up into his face and bringing a knee up into his stomach as his arm sailed over me. I stepped out from under him and elbowed his back and he went down on his belly.
I leaned against the booth now, catching my breath, wondering why I hadn’t started to shake yet. I watched him push
up on his hands, get to his feet, and go into a crouch. He was smiling. Not that he’d warmed to me or anything.
I was outclassed, but what the hell. It wouldn’t be the first time I had the crap kicked out of me. Just so I could hang onto my teeth.
But three guys had started over from the bar. They were black, of course, and two of them were very big: six feet-two, one of them was, and fat, and the other was a wiry six-four. The third was short but bulging with muscle.
Now
I started to shake.
They came up slowly behind my crouching friend, flanking him. The tall wiry guy grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. He said, “You wanna leave these folks alone, or wear your butt for a hat?”
Before my friend could answer, the tall fat one grabbed his other shoulder and dragged him back to the bar.
I said, “Thanks” to the remaining two, and they shrugged noncommittally and headed back for the bar.
I turned to Rita who hadn’t said a word through it all.
She said, “You spilled my drink.”
I laughed and shook my head.
She looked at me with the big brown eyes; she blinked once, those lashes damn near fluttering, then said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s go to my place.”
She pulled her white Mustang along the curb in front of Lange’s Sporting Goods, and I edged the Rambler into the space directly behind hers. Though the sidewalks and streets of downtown Rock Island were all but deserted, Rita moved as though she were afraid of being seen: she got out of the Mustang and walked quickly to a doorway that separated the sports shop from its record store neighbor, and she opened the door, stepping inside, and held it open for me. All of this she’d done before I had the keys out of the dash.
I humored her by getting over there and inside with her as fast as possible, and followed her up old wooden steps that weren’t too crazy about being walked on. Then I stood while she worked her key in the door, which had white paint flaking off it like the hall around, and that door too she held open for me and we were inside.
The walls were purple. Deep purple like her sweater. That is, they were three-quarters purple, with the bottom quarter white. The rug was a rich, thick shag, also purple. Light, like her pantsuit.
The apartment was one medium-sized room, with no furniture proper, only things. Things like sizes and shapes and colors of pillows scattered about; a transparent inflatable chair; a homemade desk of cement blocks supporting a slab of dark wood,
with typewriter and papers and books on it; a stool for the desk; a portable TV; a component stereo with stack of albums; a bookcase, also homemade with cement blocks, running the length of and a third up the wall opposite the doorway. The adjacent wall was taken up by the door to the bathroom and to my immediate left as I stood in the entryway was what might be described as a kitchenette-ette: a single cabinet over a small refrigerator and smaller stove, obviously very old, huddling in the corner like two squat midgets. On the other side of the entryway, part of the wall jutted out a foot or so and had on it a rectangular outline which meant the pregnant wall was bearing a Murphy bed. On it were posters of Paul Newman and Malcolm X.
“Some odd couple,” I said, a little wryly, nodding at the posters.
“Not really,” she said, mildly defensive, sitting on the fluffy carpet and leaning catlike against a red pillow. “Paul Newman’s very political, too.”
I glanced around the purple room. “Who’s your interior decorator? Welch’s?”
She smiled. Her teeth were small and white, maybe a bit too small—thank God, an imperfection at last.
“Ghastly, isn’t it?” she said, gesturing with a long-nailed hand. “Well, there’s a reason for this purple pad, outside of that being a pet color of mine. It’s hard to find decent apartments, you know? And the only teaching job I was able to land was part-time English instructor at a junior high, because even though I have my four years of college, I didn’t take enough education courses, and now I’m on temporary teaching certificate, and they’re making me take some classes at Augustana College to pick up the hours I lack. That’s why that twenty bucks of yours looked good to me, incidentally.”
When she didn’t go on, I said, “Just how does that explain your purple passion?”
“Oh. Well, anyway, I wanted something cheap in an apartment to tide me over till I could find and afford a nice place. So I ran across
this
place, and it was horrible—all of it peeling paint like the halls out there—but it was cheap for downtown so I took it anyway and got permission from the landlord to have it debugged and repainted and carpeted. At my expense, of course,
but,
I figured if I made it look nice, in a conventional way, you know, painted it some standard pastel and wall-to-wall carpet, my bastard landlord’d up the rent on me. Ever had that done to you, Mallory? Where you put money into fixing up an apartment and then get your rent hiked on you for your trouble?”
I nodded. “The way this place is now,” I said, “your landlord’s probably afraid you’ll move out and saddle him with this purple elephant.”
She laughed gently and started unbuttoning the top part of her pantsuit. She slipped out of the coat and folded it in half and tossed it over on another big pillow. She straightened her sweater, pulling it down, and I did my best not to look at her breasts as she did, and I failed. She didn’t seem to mind. She patted the pillow next to her and motioned for me to sit down and I did.
“So you’re a mystery writer?”
“Trying to be. Selling a few short stories.”
“That’s really exciting. Where do you...” She stopped, smiled. “I was about to ask you where you get your ideas. Listen, are you in a hurry? Got some big Thanksgiving spread to get back to Port City for?”