Shameless Hoodwives

by Meesha Mink

  I’m not so sure that he hasn’t.

  “Why don’t I fix you up first?” he asks.

  I try to shake my head, but I smack my lips instead.

  “After all, you need to relax a little bit, right?”

  I am a little tense, I reason with myself. I know I should stop him. I know I should be thinking about the baby inside of me, but instead I find myself wishing that he would hurry up and fix the shit. Within seconds, a spoon, cotton balls, rubber bands, and new syringes litter his beautiful desk, and I’m quickly rollin’ up the sleeve of my dress.

  He swabs the bend in my arm, and my gaze falls back to the picture of Jesus. At the same time, the needle punctures my vein.

  For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

  I sob.

  For God did not send His son to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

  “Even me, Lord?” I whisper as Pastor Meyer lifts up my dress. “Even me, Lord?” When I close my eyes and spread open my legs, I finally hear a voice—an answer.

  Yes, my child. Even you.

  24

  Takiah

  “Dear Lord, I repent of my sins. I ask you to come into my heart and wash me with your blood. You are my Lord and Savior…”

  “What? What are you saying?” Pastor Meyer stops stroking his blubbery butt against my boney frame to peer down at me.

  I’m so high, I don’t even know where we are. I look around, try to concentrate, but my brain just feels like a mushy mess. But I know that for the first time in my life I was talking to God.

  And I was happy.

  Suddenly, I don’t know why I ever doubted he existed. Flashing back through my life, I now know that he has always been there. It was His shoulder I cried on when my mother left me. It was Him who helped me graduate from school and accomplished my first goal of moving out of Bentley Manor. Even when I started making bad choices, He was still there.

  He was the one who’d put me on that bus back to Atlanta without me thinking about calling Grandma Cleo first. And He was here now, claiming victory over the devil on top of me.

  I smile, but Pastor Meyer thinks the smile is for him, and he returns to stroking and wiggling his small penis inside of me.

  I’m in a car, I realize. Eddie’s car. I remember now. He wanted to do it one last time before he took me home, and I was too high to protest, too limp to care. I still lack the strength to push him off or to stop what’s going on. I just want to close my eyes and go back to talking with God.

  Then, like out of some horror movie, a monster appears in the window above me. A scarred brown and pink face twisted into an animal snarl.

  “Kameron,” I say as a weak alarm.

  Pastor Meyer must not have heard me, because in the next second, a cascade of broken glass showers down on us and the passenger door is jerked open.

  “What the—?”

  Kameron grabs the pastor by the back of his expensive suit and yanks him out. “Motherfucker, don’t you know you got to pay to play? I own this bitch.”

  I scramble to get up just as I hear my husband’s fist pound into the fleshy pastor and it’s met with a moan of pain that only intensifies when the second strike hits.

  “Please, God. Stop. I didn’t know,” Eddie is saying as I make my way over to the driver’s side.

  The keys aren’t in the ignition.

  “Where the fuck you think you’re going?”

  I whip my head toward my husband at the open passenger door and finally let out a scream when he dives into the car after me. Jerking on the car handle, I spill out onto the hard pavement. Kameron manages to lock one hand around my left ankle.

  I scream again, kicking for freedom and ignoring the pain of my naked flesh being dragged across the blacktop.

  “C’mon, baby. Don’t be like that. We’ve got some unfinished business we need to discuss.”

  Before he can pull me up farther, I kick out with my right foot and make a solid connection against his slim nose. I hear as well as feel it crack. This time, he roars in pain, but at least he releases his grip on my ankle. I waste no time with my immediate freedom, turning and jetting into the night with nothing but a few orange-hued streetlights illuminating my path.

  I see the rocks, trash, and broken glass littered across the pavement, but I don’t feel them as they scratch, puncture, or stab my bare feet, just as I don’t register the night’s cool breeze against my naked flesh. I have to get away.

  My hearing is another matter.

  The rushing wind sounds like an ocean’s roar, my heart like a ticking bomb, but the city street is eerily silent. Where are all the cars, buses, people?

  I’m waiting for the sound of my husband’s heavy footfalls—expensive mall sneakers slapping the street. But they don’t come. What I hear instead is the roar of a car engine and then the screech of balding tires.

  My stride slows for a second, just long enough for me to glance over my shoulder and see the headlights beam from Kameron’s Buick.

  Terror, like I had never known, seizes my limbs and I stumble. Miraculously, I regain my balance, hike up my knees, and accelerate my speed.

  “Hey, look over there.” A stranger’s voice reaches my ears, and my gaze follows the sound to two figures exiting a convenience store.

  “Help,” I screech.

  But they don’t move, frozen, gawking at the scene unfolding.

  My racing thoughts clear out the rest of the drug-induced fog, and snapshots from my short life start to flash in my head, the pictures speeding up until it’s like watching a movie. Suddenly, all my mistakes and poor choices are so glaringly obvious.

  God had given me so many chances to turn my life around. Wasted chances. A wasted life.

  Grandma Cleo swept through my mind. I’m sorry for the permanent lines of disappointment that I’ve carved in her tired face, but still marvel at the love that she still gave me. And I’m overwhelmed by the love I suddenly feel for her.

  Tears flow down my face when I remember the first time the hospital nurse placed Tanana in my arms. Instead of thanking God for the miracle of ten fingers and ten toes, I’d thought I’d delivered a burden. A complication I didn’t need or want. Now there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t give to have her in my arms again.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” I sob through my tears.

  Behind me, the car’s engine grows louder. Ahead of me, a car turns onto the street. A white car with a track of lights on the hood.

  A police car.

  “Help!”

  Instantly, blue and white lights flash.

  Hope blooms.

  I think of God’s mercy.

  And then I’m hit.

  My legs snap and for a brief second I’m a rag doll in the air before crashing against a windshield. I see Kameron’s horrible twisted and burned face sneer at me through the glass before I flip off the side of the car and land face-first into the street.

  A heartbeat later, I see a glorious light.

  25

  Keisha

  A heart-wrenching scream wakes me minutes after I lay my head against the pillow. I’m out of bed in a flash and racing into my children’s bedroom in a state of panic. But they’re all sitting up in wild-eyed wonderment as well.

  Then I hear it again, and I realize the sound is drifting from the floor. Downstairs?

  Miz Cleo?

  “You guys stay in bed,” I say and rush back out of the room. Within seconds, I grab the house key, lock the apartment, and bolt out into the hall. I’m not the only one spilling out of their apartment with curiosity, but when I reach the first landing, I am surprised to see the police at Miz Cleo’s door.

  Another wail fills the hall, and my eyes dart to the crumpled figure in the door frame and words literally escape me. What do you say when a superhero has fallen?

  Miz Cleo, the strongest and certainly the wisest woman I
know, looks like a broken child curled in the doorway. Her head is sunk low and her large hands cover her face while every limb of her trembles like she’s havin’ an internal earthquake or something. After a quick glance around, I’m not the only one stunned by the sight.

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” one officer says, and they slowly drift away, leavin’ the hall and Miz Cleo to her misery.

  Only then do I notice the smaller Miz Osceola knelt at her friend’s side with a consoling arm draped around her shoulders. I finally unglue my feet from the top of the staircase and fly down the steep stairs to offer some kind of help to a woman who has always looked out for me.

  “Help me get her back inside,” Miz Osceola instructs, and I obey without question. It’s not easy work since Miz Cleo, a heavyset woman, seems to have forgotten how to use her legs or just flat out didn’t want to.

  People in the hallway start to whisper, and the sound is like a swarm of bees buzzing around us.

  Miz Osceola and I grunt and strain, and finally we get Miz Cleo back into her apartment. I give the door a back kick, and I’m grateful the irritating buzzing stops. Still, I wait until we get her to the plastic-covered sofa before I ask, “What happened?”

  Suddenly, a baby’s cry fills the apartment.

  “Oh, Lord, the baby,” Miz Cleo moans, snapping out whatever trance that possessed her seconds before. “I gotta see about the baby.” She bounds up off the sofa and takes off toward the bedrooms.

  I turn my curious gaze back to Miz Osceola’s troubled face. “I know it’s none of my business,” I start.

  Miz Osceola flutters a hand to cut me off. “You may as well know. The whole complex is gonna know by mornin’.” She exhales a deep breath and shakes her head, but I still have to wait a second or two for an explanation.

  “Takiah is dead.”

  I pull a deep breath myself, but I’m not surprised; it’s more of a “Damn.”

  “We just left her a few hours ago,” Osceola says, shaking her head. “Had a beautiful service at the church and…” She doesn’t finish her sentence.

  Our gazes are both locked on the back hallway, waiting for Miz Cleo to reemerge now that the baby’s cries have died down.

  “Overdose?” I whisper, drawing the only conclusion that makes sense.

  Silence and then she whispers, “No.”

  This time I’m pricked by surprise, and I glance back at Miz Osceola’s butter-colored face.

  “Police says she was run over by a car.”

  Now I’m convinced the older lady is talking in a foreign language or, at least, about someone else.

  “Witnesses say she was runnin’ down the street naked, screaming. They found Pastor Meyer in the church parking lot, stabbed.”

  “What?” I need to sit down.

  “He gave a description before he—”

  “No.” I shake my head. It’s been some years since I’ve been in church, but I’m aware of Pastor Meyer and his good work in the community: feeding and clothing the homeless, waging war against the drug lords, and fighting to get prayer back in the schools. Sure I’ve heard wild rumors here and there, especially in my kitchen hair shop, but that was all they were…but why was Takiah and Pastor Meyer together? And why was she naked?

  I swallow my questions and return home after Miz Cleo piled her best friend and her great-grandbaby into the car and headed down to the hospital to identify Takiah’s body.

  By morning, Christmas Eve, Takiah and Pastor Meyer’s drug abuse and illicit affair is headline news.

  “We have to end this.”

  I’ve been fearing the day Shakespeare would say those words, and just as I predicted, I’m heartbroken. “Why?”

  Shakespeare glances over his shoulder and back at me, tangled in his sheets. “Is that a real question?”

  I close my eyes, and take a deep breath, but the tears come all the same. I want to beg and reason with him; however, what reasoning can I use to convince him to keep fucking his brother’s wife? Don’t worry. Smokey will never know? We’ve come too far to stop now? I love you?

  “I’m sorry, Keesh,” he adds pitifully.

  Silently, I sit up from the bed and reach for my rumpled clothes pooled on the floor. I gave Smokey the excuse that Shakespeare and I were wrapping a few last-minute Christmas gifts for the children. Of course, Smokey took the lie without question. And why wouldn’t he?

  I’ve been his ride-or-die chick since high school, and Shakespeare has always been his brother’s keeper. He trusts us.

  The poor fool.

  I start to get dressed.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “What would you like for me to say?” I ask, pretending I don’t hear the hope in my voice. Is he not sure about ending this? Was I wrong that this was just physical between us?

  “I love my brother,” he says, as if I doubted it.

  “I know.” I continue dressing.

  Shakespeare doesn’t budge from his side of the bed. He just sits there with his head low. You’d think he’d just been handed a death sentence.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, feeling a need to comfort him. “Smokey will never know.”

  “Does that make it better or worse?”

  The misery in his eyes tugs at me. He’s definitely taking all of this much harder than I am. For me, my marriage has been over for a long time, and as soon as I finish hair school and get my license, I’m out of Bentley Manor. Come hell or high water.

  The fact of the matter is, I can’t love Smokey to recovery. His last attempt to get clean lasted all of forty-eight hours. I’m tired of the police showing up at my door and staring at that brunette bitch paramedic while I nurse another black eye or broken rib.

  I love Smokey.

  But I love myself more.

  “When are you going to leave him?” Shakespeare asks, as if reading my thoughts.

  I’m silent for a long time and then, “Soon.”

  The way his body deflates, you would think we were the ones divorcing.

  “It’ll kill him, you know?”

  It’s my turn to exhale. “If I stay, it will probably kill me.”

  In truth, the only time I feel alive is when I’m locked in Shakespeare’s arms, each imagining we were getting something other than an orgasm. For me, it was love. Him? I’m still not exactly sure.

  I slip on my festive Christmas sweater without bothering with the complications of a bra. I just cram it and my panties in my purse. The faster I can get out of here, the better. When I rush toward the bedroom door, his next words stop me.

  “I love you, too.”

  Finding his words too incredible to believe, I turn around and face him. The way his eyes dart around the floor, I’m positive I didn’t hear him right.

  “This whole situation is fucked up.” He exhales, exploding to his feet and stalking forward. “After what happened to Devani I thought…” His shoulders droop even lower. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You love me?” I can’t get over that part. Hell, I’m not sure I love myself. Not the way I should.

  Shakespeare nods before our eyes lock.

  “I think you’re just feeling…lonely. We both are.” I can’t believe the words flowing from my mouth, but I do recognize the truth. In the space of a heartbeat, he closes the distance between us, and my knees weaken. I want to make love to him again. One last time. Something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

  “I wish things were different,” he adds, cupping my chin. “I wish you could be mine.”

  I want to scream that I am his; that nothing has to change. But I can’t get myself to say the lie. This is temporary. We are temporary.

  “We still have a couple more hours,” I whisper, walking my hand up his bare chest. “Tomorrow we can go back to being in-laws.”

  Sad acceptance twinkles in his eyes. In a flash, my clothes are back on the floor, and our bodies snap together like pieces of an old puzzle. I don’t know how he does it,
but every inch of me feels loved.

  I wish I could explain how it feels to have his cock stroking me, one glorious inch at a time. I love feeling his muscles quiver around and inside of me. And his kisses…He kisses me like I’m the most delicious thing he has ever tasted.

  God, why does this ever have to end?

  Click.

  Shakespeare and I freeze.

  “Did you hear something?” I ask.

  Shakespeare bounces off the bed, and I quickly gather the cotton sheets around my body and follow him out into the dark apartment. I don’t know what we heard, but I’m halfway expecting to find my husband in the living room with a nine-gauge ready to blow us to hell for betraying him.

  Truth be told, I wouldn’t blame him.

  But there’s no one in the apartment.

  “I guess we’re just hearing things,” Shakespeare says after a thorough search.

  I bob my head in agreement, but I can’t make myself believe it. Someone was in here.

  “I better go,” I say, racing back to the room for my clothes. This time, Shakespeare doesn’t stop me, even though I can feel he wants to.

  Dressed, I walk back into the living room and retrieve my purse and the alibi gifts.

  Shakespeare is sitting before the television; a news reporter rehashes the Pastor Meyer story and adds that the police have arrested thirty-two-year-old Kameron Ray, husband to Takiah, for the two deaths.

  “Domestic violence,” I whisper. “Story of my life.”

  Shakespeare stands.

  “I don’t blame you for wanting to leave,” he says softly. “But you know he loves you, right?”

  My tears gave me no warning, but here they are, streaming down my face while I look up to the man I wished my husband could be. “Yeah. He loves me to death.”

  “C’mon. You know it’s not like that. Smokey would never…I mean, he loves you too much to…”

  I laugh, even though there’s not a damn thing funny.

  “Keesh—”

  “I better go.” I sidestep his grasp and walk right past the best thing that ever happened to me.