In the white clamshell dust of this unbearably hot afternoon, he was slightly nauseous at the idea of Tangerine's sex life. But he knew she wanted to share her former triumphs, and he'd have to listen. "You must have kept busy—all those horny guys away from home."
"I sure did," she said proudly. "Never met so many uncut virgins in my whole life. Christ, this country in the early forties turned out nothing but virgins, or so it seemed at the time." She brushed under her eye. Was it a tear? "But I loved them all, especially the virgins." Her voice softened. "I was real tender with them."
Tangerine was slipping back, he felt dangerously, throwing a veil over the past, making it sound better than it was. Perhaps that's why he asked pointedly, "Didn't you think you were being used?"
She sat up, one breast practically falling out. It was as if his question had never occurred to her.
He decided to press the point. "By guys who didn't care where they got their rocks off?" After he'd said that, it sounded unnecessarily cruel—and he hadn't meant it that way.
She fell back again, shaking hard like a woman in labor. "Honey, I wanted to be used." Reaching for her moonshine again, she had a voice more blurred than before. "It didn't matter what they had—a foot-long sausage or a three-inch piece of spaghetti. Just as long as they were in pants—that's all that mattered." Through sunken eyes, she looked over to him.
He smiled, knowing she wasn't telling the truth.
"Well," she said, Mpants wasn't the reason. They had to want me. I never turned down a man." She paused. "Unless he was black, of course. God intended birds of a feather to flock together."
From where he was perched on the living room floor, Numie reached out and gently encircled her ankle. "Now don't you go letting your Georgia prejudice come out. After all, I'm related to black folks."
"What on earth do you mean?" Tangerine asked, not knowing whether to take him seriously.
"Remember that Uncle Pete I was telling you about? And Ora of the lumpy cream gravy? Ora told me she was Puerto Rican, but one of the farmers who lived nearby said, 'Boy, your aunt's as Puerto Rican as a native of the Belgian Congo'."
Tangerine was relieved. "That don't make you colored."
He nodded. An awkward moment came. "Let me get another glass," he said, heading for the kitchen. "This peanut butter one's badly chipped."
In the kitchen mice were playing in moldy garbage. "Hell, Tangerine," he called.
She didn't respond.
At the door, he said. 'Why don't you ever clean up this damn mess? You're breeding mice.'
The heat of the room hung like gauze over her. "I've spent my whole life cleaning up after somebody else. I made a vow that in my own home, I'd be just as dirty as I wanted to."
"But the roaches will eat you alive."
Tangerine looked over to the window where bougainvillea was creeping in. She sighed wistfully, almost anticipating a breeze that nevercame. "Who's to say they don't have as much right to live as we do? They were on earth long before we came along."
He turned and went back to the kitchen. The mice darted under the sink. Picking up a dirty glass, he washed it thoroughly.
Back in the living room, Tangerine was getting drunk. The moonshine was powerful stuff. In the hot air, she was puffing like an old bulldog. Folding the material of her dress, then adjusting it, she asked, "Do you think this dress looks good on me?"
He flung her a glance, almost a wild appeal for her not to seek compliments. Leonora had demanded enough to last the day. "It matches your hair perfect."
"Leonora hates the way I dress. I guess what I wear is the only way I have of defying her. But I'm grateful and all. If it wasn't for Leonora, I'd still be a maid."
"I think she reminded us of that just this afternoon." He poured more moonshine from a Mason canning jar. The liquor was tasting better the more he drank. Maybe moonshine was an acquired taste.
The air, so impure and unendurable, seemed to be leading Tangerine into meditation. "Yep," she said, "'I'm her personal masseuse now, but until that promotion I was a maid most of my life. Ever since the depression."
"That shatters my illusion," he said jokingly. "I thought you were the madame of an elegant bordello ... at least."
"I wish it was true," she said. "No, I'm just a damn scrubwoman. Daddy got me going. He couldn't feed me, so he hired me out. I worked as a maid to anybody who was rich."
"Well, you're still with a richie."
"Leonora's a real richie. When I got my start, a family making twenty-five dollars a week was 'rich'. You could imagine what my wages were."
"I couldn't, but I know what it is now. Fifty dollars a week."
"I couldn't even save up enough money for a pair of high heels. I've always loved high heels. They make me feel so thin."
A fly buzzed the room. An echo of the past drifted across. He sat up, jerking his shoulder. My God, he thought. It was the remark about high heels that did it. Tangerine was a white version of Louise, his long-ago black mama. Louise used to endorse high heels for the same reason. "You lived through the last of the Old South, didn't you?"
"Sure did. I can still see myself, trudging along some dirt road somewhere, with myoId cardboard suitcase held together by a piece of rope. No money, nothing—just two or three feedsack dresses and the name of some dumb ass farmer who wanted slave labor in exchange for a roof over my head and something to eat."
"I guess you were lucky back then just to have something to eat."
"I didn't get much, " she said sadly, "although you wouldn't know it to look at me now. Sometimes the families I worked for wouldn't let me eat at the same table with them. Made me eat in the kitchen or else out on the back porch with the coloreds."
"Mama and I always had collard greens. Sometimes we never had anything else, but she'd always manage to stir up collards." He was enjoying this moment of camaraderie with Tangerine, revelling in their communal bond, like part of the same family.
"Fern Cornelia, as they called me back then, never got near the pork chops, though. Sometimes I'd go over the bones after the folks had finished with them. But no one ever left much meat on the bones in those days."
"I've had to eat other people's leftovers. In New York I used to go into restaurants and sit down at tables after diners had gotten up. People were always leaving lots of food on their plates, and I'd finish a few off when I was real hungry—which was a lot of the time."
"Wasn't you chased out?" she asked.
"Plenty of times, but I kept alive."
A sound was heard against the screen door. Tangerine jumped up, waddle-assing across the floor. The wooden boards creaked. Opening the door, she grabbed up the afternoon paper. "I want to show you something," she said. "It's on the editorial page." Through bleary eyes, she thumbed through the paper. "I always know where to find him, even without my glasses on. There."
He glanced at a column with a caricature belonging to one Mike Morgan.
"Little Mike," she said. "He really made it big. A big-time newspaper columnist."
He could smell her stale breath. Backing away slightly, he said, "Never heard of him."
"You never heard of Mike Morgan?" Her surprise was genuine. "I thought everybody who knows how to read has heard of Mike Morgan. You can read, can't you?"
"Sure, I can."
"He was the son of the nicest family I ever worked for. Good folks up in Tallahassee. His daddy was a college professor—mathematics, I think. Always wore a straw hat. His wife was real smart, too. Had a college degree. I'd never met a woman with a college degree in those days. She was sickly, though. Stayed in her room most of the day reading Charles Dickens."
"So one family was good to you?"
"Only one. But it's little Mike I remember the most. I guess I taught him what to do with that little peeker between his legs."
"Child molester." Though he said that for humor, he noticed that Tangerine seemed offended.
So taken back was she, she forgot what she was saying. S
he chose not to comment on that. "He was mighty grateful to me at the time. Wanted to feel my big jugs. Said he loved me. Yes, indeed, he became a real important man." She seemed to be crying.
"If they were so good to you, why did you leave?"
"They fell on bad days and couldn't afford to keep me," she said.
"What became of you?"
"I worked my way south. After the war, I was a maid in some of the finest hotels on Miami Beach. Real good tips, too. Of course, I drank it up or else spent it on some man."
"I never kept a penny I ever made either."
"I thought I'd always be young," she said. "I couldn't believe I'd ever turn forty. Other people, maybe. But not Tangerine Blanchard. I was no longer known as Fern Cornelia."
"Not me," he said. "By the time I was twenty-five, I knew forty was on the way. I know it now for sure. You're supposed to make it by the time you're forty. If that's so, I'd better get busy."
"How many of us make it? When we're young, we all think we're going to be rich one day. Never met a southerner yet who didn't think he was going to be filthy rich."
"Come to think of it," he said, "neither have I."
She was still standing in the middle of the floor, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. "What a silly fool I was—scrubbing shit off other people's toilets, just like your own mama, and dreaming about some rich man in a big car coming along to sweep me off my feet and take me away with him to a big southern plantation with big pillars out front."She brushed the hot air with her flabby hand. "Me, just standing around fanning myself all day long and looking pretty for him."
This was such a farfetched fantasy he felt compelled to match it with one of his own. "I've had my dream, too. Of wanting to meet some rich lady, real good looking, who'd be so turned on by me she'd want me to come and live with her. A nice lady who'd peel oranges for me and massage my feet and let me lie around all day—doing nothing but make love to her."
"You still have a chance," she said sadly. "I don't." Her eyes were glassy.
"You mean you think I'll find my rich lady?"
"You'll find her," she said. "Only it won't be just exactly like you dreamed up."
What did she mean by that?
The fan sputtered, then began a dance of death before petering out. The air was still, broken finally by the sound of .mice in the kitchen.
The afternoon was slowly fading.
Chapter Fourteen
It was an hour before the sun would sink into the Gulf of Mexico. Gulls wheeled in the wind; and herons washed their naked legs and three-toed feet at the edge of the sea.
Taking off all his clothes, Numie plunged into the water. It was warm and soothing to his tired, overheated body.
Back on the cream-white shore, he surveyed the skeletons of two high-rise condominiums—the dream of some entrepreneur who hadn't reckoned with Tortuga's resistance to change. With their blank, gaping windows, the unfinished buildings overlooked a tangle of mangrove.
A sign read, Rentals by Theodore M. Albury. Immediate Occupancy.
On his return, before he crossed the dividing line of Pearl Street, he passed once more the ghostly balconied and porticoed houses of the monied class. Their Victorian towers were sentinels against the night, their wide verandas entwined with bougainvillea.
Numie imagined a green shutter closing quickly as he hurried by, but maybe it was the wind. The faint breezes of evening had started to blow in from the sea.
Suddenly, he stopped. From one of the windows of a gray, wooden-framed house, a skinny arm lolled lopsidedly. Perfectly innocent perhaps, but in this unfamiliar setting everything was mysterious. Was it a boy? Dead? Numie continued on his way.
Instead of taking the familiar route, he impulsively cut down one of the alleys. It was overgrown and forbidding, but it led to light. At the end of the jungle, he emerged into the graveyard of Tortuga.
Without walls, it was a field of tombs built above ground. Long-faded plastic flowers and wreaths adorned many of the mausoleums, some with Grecian pillars and highly ornate, though rusty, wrought-iron fences, and gates. Cracked and broken, the tombs of the poorer folk ominously were like brick ovens. Moss covered everything like fungus.
Wandering aimlessly down the paths, Numie stopped in front of the most elaborately adorned mausoleum. Signs of workmen lay on the ground—empty bags of cement and a wooden trough. Someone had just died.
Symbols of death were rampant. Cherubic angels brooded over the neoclassic monument; and two weeping Niobes in Grecian gowns flanked the entrance. Gothic, lacelike spires rose from the roof, and the fence was surmounted by gargoyles and leafy finials.
Under a lyre in the center were these words:
LEONORA DE LA MER
born, Tortuga, September 13, 1895
died, Tortuga, September 13, 19_
The last two numbers were blank.
Underneath, this brief inscription:
Celebrated international beauty and world's leading couturier.
A ringing of bells brought Numie out of his shock. A group of black boys were chasing a trio of underfed goats across the graveyard, the animals racing over the mounds.
A chill descended. Numie made his way fast from the cemetery, as daylight was fading.
A woman sitting on her front porch brought a resurgence of life. Humming and rocking in her chair, she lulled her baby to sleep as it sucked from one of her pendulous breasts.
"Those mighty fine people out there in that graveyard," she called to Numie.
Startled, he managed to say, "For sure."
"Mighty fine people," she went out. "I used to know a lot of 'em, and I reckon I'll be joining them myself one of these days. Mighty fine. Some of 'em still come around to visit me late at night."
Not knowing what to say, Numie walked on.
The row of little houses facing the cemetery were like cubicles, with shantytown front porches—many with missing or weather-beaten boards. On these porches big black men lounged on gliders or else perched on tattered automobile seats—a kind of social center at evening. Some freely passed bottles of liquor over to their next-door neighbors for a swig.
One house in between, the worst of the lot, was empty. The same sign he'd seen at the skeleton condominium was dug into the ground out front: Rentals by Theodore M. Albury. Immediate Occupancy.
Next door a white-haired black and his wife were reaching with a long stick, trying to shake avocados from the top of the branches.
At a house on the corner another much 'older black man sat rocking on his front porch. Almost bald, with skin like a brown prune, he wore frayed shorts and tattered tennis shoes. He'd erected a crudely lettered sign, "I will give you the best shine in the world for ten cents." A complete ornately decorated shoeshine stand—big enough for two customers—tood on his porch.
"Shine, mister man," he called to Numie.
"No thanks, old-timer," Numie said. "I'm wearing sandals."
"That's the trouble with this island today," the shine man said. "Nobody wears shoes no more."
"What kind of business do you expect down here?" Numie asked. "Why don't you work on main street?"
"I was there for forty years," he answered. "Got too old. The younger ones chased me out. I retired here, thinking I could still keep myoid customers. A few of the loyal ones drifted over, but I guess they've forgotten about me by now. Who knows? They might come again one day, and I'll be sitting right here ready for them."
Numie smiled. "Good luck. Next time I wear shoes, I'll be right over."
"Sure would appreciate the business," the old man said. "Times been kinda rough since I retired." His voice drifted off, and his glassy eyes wandered to the graveyard before him.
The sun had set.
El Chico restaurant beckoned, a gathering place where Cubans and blacks met for chicken and yellow rice with black beans. Magenta, orange, and blue strips of neon cast a false glow.
Inside the place was bustling, nearly all the oilcloth-cove
red chrome chairs filled with hungry, beer-drinking diners. A Cuban mother and her two daughters—all cast from the same mold—were busy tending the eight formica tables. One of the daughters had a gold tooth; the mother, three. Each one wore platform shoes with ankle straps, and each was weighed down with heavily lacquered jet-black hair, piled elaborately on their heads in a high-rise coiffure.
The stocky mother motioned Numie to one of the six mismatched rickety stools at the counter—once the carport of the one-time filling station, but now enclosed by horizontal louvers. Overhead a wooden-bladed fan slowly revolved. The jukebox blasted out the latest Havana music.
"Picadillo and beer," Numie said, giving his order of spicy Cuban chopped meat to one of the busty daughters.
She gave him a sisterly smile before hurrying back to the kitchen. "Papa," she called, "picadillo."
Sipping his beer, Numie swerved to stare into the challenging face of Castor Q. Combes.
"Violet eyes," he said. "This is where I go to eat. You folloWing me?"
"No, Castor, it was pure chance."
The waitress reappeared with Numie's order.
Perching on the stool next to Numie, he told the waitress: "Some Spanish bean soup and stuffed boliche."
"Don't you want your usual frozen banana daiquiri?" the daughter asked.
"You know I always have that." Castor was impatient. "I don't have to ask." After the girl left, he said, "Cubans sure are dumb. I should give my business to a soul food place—don't know why I come here."
"They serve you frozen daiquiris—that's why. Aren't you pretty young for that?"
"My age is none of your business," Castor said. "White people are always messing into black people's business."
The daughter returned, bringing both Castor's soup and his meat course. She went back into the kitchen and emerged with the frozen banana daiquiri. Writing out the tab, she stuck it under Castor's plate.
Arrogantly he removed it and placed it alongside Numie's picadillo. "The white boy's paying."
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