John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

There was a maid cart outside 109. The door was open. I went in and found Cathy doing the bathroom, Lorette Walker making up the bed.

“ ’Mawnin’, suh,” they said. I sat in the armchair and waited and watched. Brisk work, sidelong downcast glances, a kind of humble knowing arrogance. Two to a room, one of the classic defensive maneuvers of the Negro motel maids across twenty states, where, as an indigenous morning recreational device, they are, when young enough and handsome enough, fair game for paper salesman, touring musician, minor league ballplayer, golf pro, stock car driver, mutual fund salesman.

After all, it is the only situation where white male and black female meet in the context of bedroom, and the quarry cannot exactly go running to the management to complain about a guest. Other defensive devices are the switchblade in the apron pocket, the kitchen knife taped to the inside of the chocolate thigh, the ice pick inside the fold of the uniform blouse. Some, after getting tricked, trapped, overwhelmed by a few shrewd, knowing, determined white men, become part-time hustlers. Others cannot accept or adjust. Classic tragedy is the inevitable unavoidable tumble from some high place, where the victim has no place to turn, toppled by some instrument of indifferent fate. A high place is a relative thing. Pride of any kind is a high place, and any fall can kill.

“I see you didn’t get fired, Cathy,” I said as she came out of the bathroom with the towels.

She cast a swift and wary look at Lorette and then said, “No, suh. Thank you kindly.”

There was a silence. I saw that they had begun to dust areas already dusted and were making other busy movements without improving anything. Lorette Walker, her back to me, said, “I can take off now, and this here girl can finish up.”

“You look finished. You can both take off.”

Lorette straightened and turned to face me, swinging that stupefying bosom around. “You want us both leaving, after I went to all the trouble of telling this here girl she should least-way give you the chance to collect on that favor you did her?”

Cathy stood at semiattention, staring at the wall beyond me, Indian face impassive. She was a big brawny woman, wide through the shoulders and hips, nipped narrow at the waist, with strong dark column of throat, husky shapely legs planted, her body looking deep and powerful through the belly and loins.

“Cathy?” I said.

“Yassa.”

“There’s no point in Mrs. Walker making us both uncomfortable. So why don’t you just take off?”

Cathy looked toward Lorette, eyebrows raised in question. Lorette said something to her in a slurred tone. Cathy scooped up the sheets and towels and with one swift and unreadable glance at me, went out and pulled the door shut. I heard the fading jingle of the service cart as she trundled it away.

Lorette came over and sat on the bottom corner of the bed, facing me, studying me. Small and pretty brown face, coffee with double cream, with no highlights at all on the smooth matte skin, with eyes so dark the pupils and irises merged. She fished cigarettes and matches from her skirt pocket, lit one, crossed slender legs as she exhaled a long plume. There was challenge and appraisal in her stare.

“Black turn you off, man?”

“Not at all. Suspicion does, though. It’s an ugly emotion.”

“And ugly living with it or having to live with it. Maybe you don’t want it from Cathy on account of it would hurt your chance of making it with me, you think.”

“How did you ever guess? I forced poor Cathy to drink that doctored gin, and I arranged to have the nurse killed, just so you and I could meet right here and arrange the whole thing. Take a choice of places, honey. Guatemala City? Paris? Montevideo? Where do I send your ticket?”

She was simultaneously angry and amused. Amusement won. Finally she said, “There’s just one last thing I got to be sure of. Tell me, are you any kind of law at all? Any kind?”

“Not any kind at all, Lorette.”

She shrugged, sighed, and said, “Well, here I go. Out where the nurse lived there’s a white woman in number sixty, pretty close by. She’s got her a Monday-Thursday cleaning woman, half days. Last Monday the cleaning woman got there and found a note from the woman she’d be away a week, don’t come Thursday. The woman works in an office job. The cleaning woman didn’t work Thursday and went there yesterday, Monday, like always. She can tell the woman that lives there isn’t back yet, but somebody has been in there. Friend, maybe. Somebody lay on the bed a time. One person. Left a head mark in the pillow, wrinkled the spread. Something was spilled, and somebody used her mop, pail, things like that, and didn’t put them back exactly the same. Scrubbed up part of the kitchen floor, part of the bathroom floor, and burned up something in the little fireplace those apartments have got, and she said to her it looked like ashes from burning cloth, and she couldn’t find some of her cleaning rags anyplace. Don’t know what good it is to you. Maybe something or nothing.”

“I suppose she cleaned the place as usual and swept out the fireplace?”

“That’s what she did. She told me the name of that woman, but I plain dumb forgot it.”

“Never mind. I can find out.”

“The cleaning woman, she said it’s not far from the kitchen door of that place to the kitchen door of the nurse place. Down the walk and around a corner, behind a fence the whole way, a big high pretty fence with little gates in it to little private yards.”

“Thanks. Did you get anything else?”

“There’s a lot of people in Southtown who plain wouldn’t tell anybody anything, black or white. Or they tell a little and hold back some if they think you want to know bad enough to lay a little bread on them. It isn’t on account of being mean. Somehow there’s never enough money to even get by on. Maybe if...”

I worked my wallet out of my hip pocket and flipped it over onto the bed by her hip. With the half cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, head aslant to keep the smoke out of her eyes, she opened it and thumbed the corners of the bills. “Take what you think you might need.”

“And if I just take it all, man?”

“It would be because you need it.”

Bright animosity again. “Never come into your mind I was cheating you?”

“Mrs. Walker, there’s seven hundred and something in there. I’ve got to go along with the value you put on yourself, and you’ve got to go along with the value I put on myself.”

She stared at me, then shook her head. “You some kind of other thing for sure. Look. I got two hundred. Okay? Bring you change, prob’ly.”

She started to get up, undoubtedly to bring the wallet back to me, but then out of some prideful and defiant impulse, she settled back and flipped it at me. I picked it out of the air about six inches in front of my nose, and slipped it back into the hip pocket. She folded the bills and undid one button of the high-collared uniform blouse and tucked the money down into the invisible, creamy, compacted cleft between those outsized breasts. She re-buttoned and gave herself a little pat.

She made a rueful mouth. “Talk to you so long out in the back, and now I’ve been in here with the door shut too long, and I tell you that everybody working here keeps close track.”

She got up and took the ashtray she had used into the bathroom and brought it back, shining clean, and put it on the bedside table.

“Going to make me some nice problem,” she muttered.

“Problem?”

“Nothing I can’t handle. I’m kind of boss girl, right after Miz Imber. Up to me to keep them all working right. Lot of them may be older, but nobody can match me for mean. Can’t tell them why I spent all this time in here with you alone. So they’re going to slack off on me, thinking that on account of I suddenly start banging white, I lost my place. Oh, they’ll try me for sure. But they’ll find out they’re going to get more mean than they can handle from ol’ Fifty Pound.”