Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

TWENTY TWO

  When Charity smiled it seemed that the world about her did just the same. Plants would rustle, dried leaves would flicker about and dance under light drifts of air and the clouds would part just so the sun would be able to catch the slightest glimpse long enough to etch her shadow on the concreted pallet below.

  Joao thought about this as they walked through the entry to the whore house as around them, faces lit up like New Year’s Eve with all smiling and fanning about her as they walked past the cashier.

  Charity offered a faint wave before they walked down the darkening hallway. The music built into a deafening roar when it was that they rounded a dark, stained and sticky corner into a large bar with small tables spread about a large room with a rickety stage at one end which rocked to and fro and on it, naked women, crawling like heated felines along the stage towards drunken and drug addled men who sat silent and pervasive in their seats, fondling themselves in the darkness and preferring to save the last of their pennies for one more drink rather than shuttling them into a girl’s panties for her to do to them, what could just as easily be done by themselves.

  Joao was shocked. He didn’t like this place. He didn’t like seeing women doing these kinds of things. It made him feel like he was doing them wrong just by being there. He felt excited, but like with The Seductress, it felt sinful.

  “We should go,” said Joao.

  Charity smiled.

  She knew he was nervous so she held his hand. This is no way made Joao’s plight any less formidable; feeling her warm soft hand squeezing his, feeling the light touch of her thigh brushing against his, feeling the tips of her shoulder scratch against his, while watching four women kissing and masturbating each other on a stage while in the background; bleeding in his ears, Johnny Cash was singing about the coming apocalypse.

  “He won’t be here, not in a place like this,” said Joao.

  “There he is,” said Charity, pointing and smiling with her free hand.

  Joao covered his eyes, lowering his stare to the floor while they crossed the floor passing the front of the stage. He felt hands sweeping down on him, but he kept his focus trained on his feet and bid his thoughts of his gargantuan mother to prohibit his curious distraction from settling on those strange naked women.

  At the corner of the bar, drunken and slouched over the table with his face buried in warm ale was The Bishop. His pants were undone and either falling down or having been caught after trying to be pulled up. His face was buried in a pool of alcohol, but he was still breathing. They could see by the little bubbles that built in the warm ale every time his fat belly heaved inwards and spilled back out onto his legs, past the point where his belt would normally be.

  “Sir,” said Joao.

  He didn’t respond.

  Charity lifted up one of his hands and let it go. It slapped hard against the table and still, he didn’t move or respond. Not even a groan.

  “We’ll have to carry him,” said Charity.

  Joao nodded and kneeled down with Charity to prop his father on his shoulder and drag him out of the club. He kept his head tied to his feet so as not to disrespect the naked women on the stage. Just because they were there, it didn’t mean he had to look and it didn’t mean they wanted him to look.

  It was just their bitter struggle.

  Still, Joao snuck one quick glimpse as they hobbled past the stage, shuffling his eyes upwards and quickly putting them back to the floor.

  “I saw that,” said Charity smiling.

  Joao felt embarrassed.

  They got The Bishop out of the club and back onto the street where the cold air coming from the late afternoon breeze and the sounds of buses’ horns and racing cars and shouting pedestrians and coughing and pointing old women, roused The Bishop into a semi-conscious slur, saying something that neither Joao nor Charity could understand before venturing back into unconsciousness and eventually, being dragged back up the hill and inside the church where he was laid like a sick animal, in a ball on his bed.

  “What do we do?” asked Joao.

  “He’s home. Just let him rest it off. He should be fine. I’ve seen worse” said Charity.

  “But Mother is going to call. She wants to speak to him. If she doesn’t, she’ll be real angry. If she knows he is like this and at those kinds of places with those kinds of women….”

  “Do you think I’m a bad person Joao?” Charity asked.

  Joao forgot about his mother for a second.

  “No, of course not. You are very kind, really kind and you do lots of good things like what you do with the lottery tickets, that’s really kind. Bad people don’t do things like that. Imagine if those people won” he said, wishing he could say that she was beautiful, so beautiful that when he saw her, all of the things he thought he could imagine himself saying abandoned him and all he knew of the words were that they were kind and adoring.

  He wanted to tell her that he loved her.

  “He’s not waking up any time soon. Here, this will do” she said, taking the phone cable and tearing it from the wall.

  Joao said nothing. She could do anything and he would play the ever agreeing participant.

  “You’re lucky Joao,” she said. “You have a family.”

  Joao thought about all the times he was teased and hit by his siblings and the emotional disparagement of his mother and that ignorant, slapping heel of his father and he felt lucky as she had said, though he thought luck to be something that no man would ever wish upon, the picking of the wrong hand.

  “Where’s your family?” Joao asked.

  “I never really had one, not a mum and dad like you have. I mean, yours may not be perfect, but at least you know who they are. You can find em in a bar and drag em home. You got someone to be angry at. Someone to yell at. Someone to apologise to. That’s something, even if it’s all you have” she said.

  “I guess. But I don’t really hate them. I mean, they are mean, you know? I guess all families are like that. I don’t really have any friends to ask” he said.

  “And what am I?” she asked angrily.

  Joao wanted to say I love you; so very much.

  It seemed so appropriate, so right but he couldn’t. Her face was so pretty and her heart and care were so enlightening and though she gave him the will to accomplish anything, she took from him the courage to say the words that he wanted and that he needed to say.

  “You’re my friend. I mean like…”

  Joao couldn’t finish his words. His face turned redder than a tomato, painted with frustration and abashment.

  “I’m just teasing,” said Charity pulling on his hand.

  “But do you really have no family?” asked Joao.

  Charity looked sullen. She looked rare and unnamed.

  “I don’t really like to talk about something that is not. Know what I mean? It’s like, if I don’t remember who they are, maybe that’s a good thing. If I forgot like maybe I knew them when I was real young, but if I forgot, I think maybe I forgot for a reason. There’s a lot of bad people out there. I guess it’s good not knowing if I was made by one of them or not” she said.

  “Well who do you have?” asked Joao.

  “Well, I got you now, don’t I?” she said squeezing herself against his arm.

  Maybe now would be appropriate although Joao said nothing and missed another moment, so maybe not.

  “I went by the café and you weren’t there. Fatts said he saw you run like the devil was on your tail. What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I wanna work there anymore,” he said.

  “That’s a shame. You’re real popular” she said.

  “I think I just wanna help The Bishop. You know, help him here with the church. Maybe if I wasn’t making coffee for all those people, I could have been here helping The Bishop, bringing people to the church” he said.

  “Joao, you’re helping those people. You don’t just make coffee, you make… I don’t know… reflections. God, your
coffee is like a drug” she said.

  “I know. And that’s what I mean. What if the good I think I’m doing is actually hurting these people? They come back, at first smiling but then real desperate, real angry. I don’t think they’re meant to see their soul or god would have given em a mirror. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said, looking down at the extent of her body.

  “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  “I don’t think I’ve done it yet,” she said.

  The two were quiet for a while, for a series of awkward moments.

  “I like you, Joao. But I’ve done some stuff and I think if I told you, you wouldn’t like me no more,” she said.

  Now is more than appropriate.

  Just say it you, idiot.

  Tell her you love her.

  Don’t say nothing.

  Damnit just say you love her you fucking imbecile.

  Say it.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” he said, fighting over the proper words.

  (Idiot)

  “You’re a good friend Joao, thank you,” she said, wrapping her arms around him and resting her head against his chest, weeping lightly as she felt the tips of his giving hands, press nervously against her back.

  Joao held her until long after she had given into to her exhaustion and fallen asleep, gently pulling at and stroking her hair, twisting it like strands of spaghetti around his finger.

  He laid her down gently on his mattress and undressed her without any predatory appetite, folding her clothes neatly on a chair beside the bed before tucking her into the blankets, clasping his eyes out of shameful respect.

  As he pulled the blankets over her sleeping body with his eyes stapled shut, he couldn’t have seen the long line of bruises that ran all twistingly down her arm, all black and purple and yellow and brown and he wouldn’t have seen the scrapes and cuts and etches and scratches on and around her knees and he surely wouldn’t have felt or seen what had been done between her thighs and as she rolled over onto her side; with his eyes still shut and his senses aborted, he most certainly didn’t see the small tattoo on her back; just above the line where pink, frilly, lace panties touched her soft skin.

  “I don’t feel useless when I am with you. You’re the only thing that matters. I’m glad I found you. I love you Charity” he whispered to her unconscious ear before lying himself on the floor, below her fallen breath.