Читать книгу Eden Rise - Robert Jeff Norrell - Страница 12

From the airport William drove to Bebe’s home, where we found her chatting with a light-skinned colored man. A little over six feet tall, he wore a black suit, a tight black knit shirt that revealed a muscular torso, and black boots. He had a goatee like some kind of a black beatnik and large gray eyes, partly hooded by drooping eyelids that made him look both suspicious and sleepy. What was this guy doing with my grandmother?

William cleared his throat. “Tom, Betty June, I want you to meet Marvin Whitfield.”

“Tommy,” Bebe said, “Marvin is here to provide you protection.”

The bodyguard. He seemed too cool to have earned the reputation for meanness. He looked more like a musician. I guessed about twenty-five but found out later he was just past thirty. Blacks always look younger to me than they are. There had to be meaner-looking Negroes in Illinois. Now, confronting him, I doubted I needed someone to protect me. I should just lie low for a while. But, of course, no one had asked me if I wanted a bodyguard. Whitfield looked me over as if assessing whether I was worth saving.

Bebe offered us beer. “I’d like a smoke,” Marvin said in a slow, matter-of-fact voice.

He and I moved to Bebe’s front porch where we drank Budweiser, he smoked Kools, and we eyed each other. He took a switchblade from his pants pocket, pared his fingernails, and cut back his cuticles. His slim fingers flicked the parings away. The nails shone with clear polish. I had never seen that on a man. He took a pistol from the back of his waist and placed it on the glass-topped garden table next to the glider where we sat. When he crossed his legs, he exposed another, smaller pistol strapped to his ankle. The porch light was attracting mosquitoes, so I turned it off, and we sat in the darkness. His cigarette competed with a nearby gardenia’s rich, sweet perfume to scent the muggy air. Cicadas were making a racket interrupted only by the periodic call of a whippoorwill.

“Tell me how all this shit got started,” Marvin said, exhaling smoke, not looking at me.

I briefly recounted what had happened at the store and the harassment since then.

“This nigger who got killed . . .”

A reflexive anger flashed. “Don’t refer to him as a nigger. I’m sick of that shit. Jackie Herndon. His name was Jackie Herndon. He was my college friend.”

He regarded me out of the corner of his eye. Finally he broke the tense pause. “This . . . boy, he do anything to piss off the old cracker?”

“Nothing. Just tried to get this girl out of there.”

“Did this bitch start the trouble?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, she sure aggravated it.”

“Were you trying to kill this old man?”

“I was just trying to make him quit shooting at us.”

“Well, you did that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I would have killed him if I was any better shot.”

“We can work on that.”

I asked how people in Eden Rise knew about him. In that same languid voice, he told me his grandmother was originally from Demopolis, about twenty miles from Eden Rise. I knew of the Demopolis Whitfields, but they were all rich and white. Marvin’s ancestors probably were slaves of the white Whitfields. When William called him two days ago, Marvin caught a plane to Birmingham.

We sat in silence for several minutes. Then, in a nonchalant tone, he said, “Since I got out of prison, I been giving protection.”

“Protection to who?”

“Some connected-up people. And the Nation of Islam.”

I was dumbfounded. “You mean like Malcolm X’s Black Muslims?”

“Not for him. For the honorable Elijah Muhammad. They kicked Malcolm out and then some guys killed him.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Saw some of his people in Harlem.”

I felt his full gaze on me for the first time. “What you doing in Harlem?”

“Just visiting with a friend.” My college girlfriend’s father.

“Get yo’ white ass killed in Harlem.”

“I almost got my white ass killed in Alabama.”

He chuckled. “I guess you did. Ain’t no place safe, is it? I guess that fact is good for me, huh?”

“You work for mobsters?”

“Yeah. Drug dealers, pimps, loan sharks, mafia guys. Bad people. Very bad people.” I made out his grin in the dim light. “I ain’t never had to babysit before, though.”

I swallowed his insult, because I was really interested now. I asked why he was in prison, and he replied that he had shot two boys in a gang fight. But he served only two and a half years in prison because he was under eighteen and had a good lawyer that William Addison had found.

“I’m obligated to William. So when he called and said he needed some help, I was going to come immediately.”

“How do you know William?”

“He and my grandmother were good friends. He helped look after me after she died.”

“Your grandmother and William, were they more than friends?” It was hard to imagine William ever was young and had a life outside Bebe’s house.

“My mama, before she died, she told me that William had been in love with Grandmama and she should have married him. But she didn’t love him in that real womanish way.”

“Wonder why she didn’t have it for William?”

“Damn, how old are you, boy, ’bout ten? She had it for somebody else.”

I felt stupid. “Was the other guy your grandfather?”

The pause seemed especially long in the dark. “Sure was,” he said—and nothing else. The evening temperature didn’t drop, but the porch felt suddenly colder. Marvin kept rocking in the glider, smoke curling around his face. I could make out a scowl in the dim light. I decided I didn’t like him, and I didn’t want to have him around. And so I sat there in the black midnight, the buzz of cicadas filling my ears, and cursed my continuing bad fortune.