by Mary Monroe
“Uh-huh,” I muttered. I looked at her for a moment and saw that same look I saw on her face the day she attacked Lena in the locker room. The devil.
“For real? Who?”
“Mr. Boatwright rapes me.” I was amazed at how easy the words seemed to slide out of my mouth.
“Mr. Boatwright? That one-legged old man who always sits in the back of the church and falls asleep? A man like that can’t—”
“He can and he did. He’s been doing it to me since I was seven,” I said flatly.
Rhoda gave me an incredulous look, then her eyes shifted from side to side for a few seconds. She shook her head. “That nice old man?”
“He’s not a nice old man, he’s a dirty old man,” I insisted.
“The man’s got a peg leg. And—I don’t believe you!” Rhoda stood up and stood over me with her arms folded.
“Why not?” I wailed. “Why would I lie about something like this?” I stood up and got so close up in her face I could smell her hot breath. Our eyes locked. She was the first to look away.
“Why—he must be a hundred and three years old!” Rhoda managed, returning to the bed.
Sitting back down next to her, I said, “Old men can still do it.”
Rhoda let out a long sigh and looked toward the wall in stunned disbelief, then she looked at me.
“I know I’m ugly and boys don’t fight over me, but girls like me still get raped, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said firmly.
“I wasn’t thinkin’ anything like that. I know anybody can get raped, even guys. It’s just that…well, I can’t believe a man like Mr. Boatwright is the type.” Though we all went to the same church, Rhoda had never met Mr. Boatwright because she always slipped out of church early if she came at all or he was tied up talking to the preacher or somebody else. “Why do you let him do it?”
“He…he makes me.” I shrugged.
Rhoda blinked hard, then narrowed her eyes to look at me better. The disbelief in her eyes had intensified. “And you don’t tell on him?”
“He’s got a gun. He puts it up against my head and tells me how he is going to shoot my brains out and stuff like that.”
“What about his peg leg? Doesn’t it get in the way?”
“Sometimes we take it off, sometimes it falls off.”
Again, Rhoda stared at me incredulously with her eyebrows raised. “Do you think he would really do somethin’ crazy? Do you really think he would shoot you?”
“I don’t want to find out,” I replied.
Rhoda let out her breath and touched my hand. “Well, he can’t keep doin’ what he’s doin’ to you!” I opened my mouth to speak, but she stopped me before I could get a word out. “I know what we can do.” She held up her hand and gave me a critical look. “We can tell a teacher. Miss Tripp, the music teacher. Last year a white girl told Miss Tripp about her daddy molestin’ her, and Miss Tripp called the po’lice.” Rhoda was excited, almost hysterical. All on my account.
“What happened to the white girl?”
“Miss Tripp adopted her. The girl’s whole family was a wreck. White trash to the bone. They didn’t even care about what the daddy was doin’. Come to find out, one of the girl’s brothers was doin’ it to her, too! My God,” Rhoda hollered. “It was even in the newspaper. That nasty daddy of hers went to jail, where he belonged.”
“I can’t get my name in the paper. A scandal like that would kill my mama. Anyway, so many people like Mr. Boatwright somebody would bail him out and he’d come after me before they could really punish him. I don’t even know if they would. I can’t prove a thing. It would be my word against his.” I shook my head so hard it hurt. “No. I sure can’t tell anybody but you. He said he would kill me. Knowing him, I bet he would make it look like an accident.” We remained silent for about two minutes. I could hear both our hearts pounding. “If…if an accident happens to me, have the police investigate,” I choked out. “Tell them everything I told you about Mr. Boatwright. Hear?”
“That motherfucker!” Rhoda brought her dainty fist down so hard on her nightstand it almost fell over.
“And if I do die, tell my mama I didn’t tempt him like he said I did. He peeped through the keyhole in my bedroom door and tempted himself.”
“Damn.” Rhoda sighed heavily and turned off the TV. “What are we goin’ to do about him?”
We? I trembled. I smiled. “I don’t know.”
“I guess I could get Jock to beat him up.” Rhoda sighed. “Or Uncle Johnny. I just couldn’t tell them why. Hmmmm.”
“If you told them why, and they told Mr. Boatwright why they were beating him, he would only take it out on me. He already thinks Jock’s messing around with me. He might even shoot Jock, and I would have to live with that.”
“How long are you goin’ to keep lettin’ him mess with you?”
“He is old. Maybe he’ll die soon.”
“Not soon enough.” Rhoda gave me a curious look. It was a look I would never forget for the rest of my life. It was like she was looking through me instead of at me. It scared me and made me feel safe at the same time. “Let’s go to your house,” she told me.
“What for?”
“Because I want to see this hound from hell up close, and I want him to see me.”
CHAPTER 18
“Mr. Boatwright! I’m home,” I hollered. I walked through the hallway toward the living room of my house with Rhoda so close behind she was stepping on my heels. “He must be asleep,” I explained. “He sleeps like a dead man.”
We found him stretched out on his back on the sofa in the living room sound asleep, snoring like a buzz saw. There were five empty beer bottles and three of his pill bottles on the coffee table next to his dog-eared Bible. It was fairly cold in the house, but there were beads of perspiration all over his batty face.
“Chicken skin,” Rhoda whispered with her eyes bugged out.
“The only things missing are a horn and a tail,” I said seriously.
“I’ve never seen him up this close before. I never would have guessed that he was this spooky. You…fuck him?” Rhoda exclaimed.
I nodded.
“Yech!”
“And I have to kiss him, too,” I moaned. “Sometime I have to kiss him before I leave for school.”
“Your kids are gonna be born with hooves!” Rhoda replied. “Eiyeeee! His hands look like bear claws,” Rhoda growled, and looked at me. Then she reached over like she was going to pinch his gnarled hands.
“Don’t do that!” I slapped her hand.
“Wake him up,” she ordered.
“NO!
“I just want to see his eyes. I want to know how in the world can you not tell your mama?”
“I told you. He said he would shoot me dead.”
“She-yit!”
We looked at Mr. Boatwright’s chest rise and fall with each breath. Rhoda stabbed his chest with her finger as if to make sure he was real.
“Maybe somethin’ bad’ll happen to him,” she whispered.
Mr. Boatwright groaned and turned over like he was about to wake up. We jumped back a few steps and waited. He kept snoring. Now he was clicking his teeth.
We moved quietly to the kitchen and sat down at the table. I was feeling too bad about Kennedy and my own predicament to be embarrassed about Rhoda seeing our cheap, tacky furniture. She didn’t seem to notice the dog-eared, paper place mats on our kitchen table.
“I know one thing that might take care of him. Prayer. Uncle Johnny says prayer can move mountains. It got him out of prison. We can pray for somethin’ to happen to nasty old Mr. Boatwright,” Rhoda whispered.
“We can’t ask God to make something bad happen to somebody,” I insisted, shaking my head.
“We’ll pray for somethin’ like a stroke or a heart attack or paralysis or somethin’, not somebody shootin’ him or poisonin’ him…” Rhoda’s voice trailed off. I thought her plan sounded pretty stupid and far-fetched.
“We can’t
ask God for things like that. Maybe something a little more subtle. Like impotence.” I was glad nobody was listening to our rambling conversation.
“Well…yeah,” Rhoda shrugged. “OK. Heart attacks and strokes are pretty extreme. There must be somethin’ else God can do to him that’ll make him let you alone. Ooh! I know.” Rhoda jumped up, waving her arms, looking like she was about to fly. “My dead brother couldn’t have gotten that po’liceman’s daughter pregnant. Her or any other girl.”
“Why not?” I narrowed my eyes to see Rhoda’s face better.
“He had one of those dick problems men get and had some kind of surgery.”
“Did they cut his dick off?”
“No, but he couldn’t get a hard-on. He couldn’t do anythin’. Cut Buttwright’s dick off—now that’s what I would like to do. Cut off this old man’s dick with a dull knife. Then that dickless motherfucker would be tame as a duck, huh?” As dainty and petite as Rhoda was, it was hard to believe that she could turn into such a pit bull so easily.
“Exactly what kind of surgery did your brother have? What all was wrong for him to have to go through that?”
“I never could figure it out. Nobody would tell me. But I used to hear the doctors talkin’ to Daddy and Muh’Dear. They told them he would be lucky to pee with his thin’ let alone do you-know-what.”
“Fuck?
“Fuck.” Rhoda nodded, making a face like it was the most disgusting thing in the world. As far as I was concerned, it was. “We could pray for that same affliction to happen to this old man here,” Rhoda said excitedly. “Whatever it was. That or somethin’ worse.”
“What’s worse to a man than him not being able to fuck?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll think of somethin’,” Rhoda promised.
CHAPTER 19
Every year on New Year’s Eve Reverend Snipes gave a late-evening service called Watchtower, open to anybody who wanted to attend. During this service people were asked to stand up and tell everybody what a good or bad year they had had and what they wanted God to do for them in the New Year. On New Year’s Day everybody who wanted to increase their chances of having a good New Year ate black-eyed peas. Mr. Boatwright attended this service every year, and every New Year’s Day he cooked a huge pot of black-eyed peas that usually took us three or four days to finish.
No matter who Muh’Dear happened to be working for, every New Year’s Eve, she had to work. This year it was the judge. He was combining a poker party with a New Year’s Eve party.
Mr. Boatwright was planning to attend Reverend Snipes’s Watchtower until Uncle Johnny came to the house around 10 P.M. that December 31, 1963. He almost knocked me down trying to get in our front door so fast. Mr. Boatwright was on our living-room couch waiting for a cab. He was wearing the one suit he owned that I hated the most, that white fleecy thing he had on the first time I met him, and he had on that same black fedora. He always wore this suit to funerals, weddings, and the special church events.
“Oh, the judge is entertainin’ in style this evenin’, Boatwright! The stakes’ll be high, the drinks’ll be plentiful, and all you eat!” Uncle Johnny hollered, strutting into our living room wearing a seersucker suit and already smelling like a distillery. I followed him into the living room. He stopped in the middle of the floor in front of Mr. Boatwright, trying to talk him into accompanying him to the judge’s house.
I planned to go to bed as soon as Mr. Boatwright left. The only reason I was still up was I didn’t want to give him any excuse to come to my room, not that he needed one. He didn’t have to come to my room to get what he wanted from me. He often tackled me in the living room and wrestled me to the floor or the couch and did whatever he wanted. It made me sick when I thought of Muh’Dear sitting on the same couch where I got violated on a regular basis.
As much as Mr. Boatwright trashed Uncle Johnny behind his back, oddly they had become running buddies. Their main connection was Judge Lawson’s poker parties. Uncle Johnny didn’t have a car of his own or even a license. He had to rely on public transportation or wait for somebody with the time and patience to drive him wherever he wanted to go.
Mr. Nelson had purchased a blue ’61 Ford for Jock a few weeks earlier. According to Rhoda the agreement was, Jock was to let Uncle Johnny drive the car, too, when and if he got his license back, other relatives when they visited, and once Rhoda turned sixteen and learned to drive she could use the car. On several occasions Uncle Johnny had Mr. Boatwright drive him around. Mr. Boatwright was only too glad to do it. He and Johnny were usually headed in the same direction anyway, the bars and Judge Lawson’s poker parties, so the arrangement worked out well for both of them. If Uncle Johnny wanted to go to the New Year’s Eve poker party, he had to find somebody to do the driving. Once, out of desperation because Mr. Boatwright was in bed with the flu, Uncle Johnny asked Scary Mary to drive him to Judge Lawson’s house. First she got mad, and then she laughed. “Do I look like a damn chauffeur?” she hollered.
“Oh, I don’t think I can make it tonight, Johnny,” Mr. Boatwright told him, holding up both hands. I went into the kitchen, but I could still hear Uncle Johnny trying to talk Mr. Boatwright into going to the party. Ten minutes into his visit I heard Uncle Johnny say something about some cabaret dancers the judge had invited to entertain his guests. The next thing I knew Mr. Boatwright was running out of the door ahead of Uncle Johnny. I watched out the window and waited until I saw them speed off, then I went to bed.
Rhoda always spent her New Year’s Eves enjoying a quiet evening with her family. I had been invited, but family gatherings like that depressed me. As far as I was concerned, my family tree had only two branches left on it, my mama and me. I really envied the kids who not only had parents living with them but grandparents, numerous siblings, and an assortment of miscellanous relatives like cousins and aunts and uncles in their lives. Pee Wee had attended his family reunion in Erie, Pennsylvania, the summer before, and he had returned with pictures of a family that had over two hundred members! He and Caleb were from Erie and talked about it from time to time. “If I ever leave Richland, it’d be to go back to Erie,” Pee Wee told me. Not only did I not have a family to visit, I didn’t even have a hometown I could go back to anymore. My Aunt Berneice had recently left Florida and moved to New Jersey, and I still didn’t know of any other relatives.
I was actually glad when the holiday ended and we returned to school. By the end of January everything was back to normal, and people had stopped talking about Kennedy, Oswald, Jack Ruby.
For the next few months all we talked about was a new band from England called the Beatles. Rhoda was one of the few Black girls with Beatle albums. Pee Wee was the only Black boy we knew that had enough nerve to admit he liked the Beatles. He was even brave enough to wear a Beatle wig. But the wig was not attractive on him at all. It was too big, so it sat on his head at a lopsided angle with the bangs more on the side than in the front. It looked as bad as, if not worse, than the wig Scary Mary wore. He looked pretty gross, but Rhoda and I didn’t have the heart to tell him. He was happy. He wore the wig to school a few times but stopped when he got tired of kids snatching it off. Now, he just wore it on weekends and after school.
I spent as much time at Rhoda’s house as I could even though Mr. Boatwright tried to sabotage that.
“Brother Boatwright feels that you spendin’ too much time at that Rhoda’s house. Wearin’ all that makeup, she just beggin’ to get herself raped,” Muh’Dear told me in the kitchen one Sunday night after church.
Scary Mary was sitting at the kitchen table with us decked out in a pair of gold-nylon stretch pants with stirrups and a black turtleneck sweater with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She had put on about fifty pounds over the years and had no business squeezing into a pair of stretch pants. She was kicked-back, with a can of beer in her hand and her bare feet on the table. She winked at me and surprised me when she came to my defense.
She made a sweeping gesture with her hand in
Muh’Dear’s direction. “Oh, Gussie Mae, lighten up. Rhoda’s a little angel. When one of my girls up and got herself killed walkin’ out in front of that bus, Rhoda helped her daddy dress the body. As dainty as that pretty little girl is, she stood there and manicured Sandra’s nails and gave her a egg facial. Now, who would have thought to give a dead woman one more facial?” Scary Mary said firmly. She put her feet on the floor, finished her beer, and let out a great sigh. “I wouldn’t have.”
“That was nice of Rhoda,” Muh’Dear admitted. She was darning a pair of Mr. Boatwright’s socks. Her can of beer sat in front of her next to her sewing-paraphernalia basket.
“Me, I wish I was as lucky with my girl as you is with yours. Your girl, she is near perfect. No matter how old Mott get, she goin’ to have a baby’s brain just like her daddy, my seventh husband. She’ll have to be looked after like a baby ’til the day she die. I got a itchin’ to take in a foster daughter, and I want her to be just like Annette.”
“You’re adopting a daughter?” I gasped. I had removed the long drab black shift I had worn to church and had slid into the bright yellow housecoat Judge Lawson had given to me.
“Not adopt, foster. Sometime in the distant future after I get off probation. The girl can keep a eye on Mott and keep my house clean,” Scary Mary announced with a quick nod. She paused long enough to finish her beer. “I ain’t got time to do that kind of stuff. I’m a busy woman.”
“What about all those nasty men?” I asked with my eyes stretched as wide as I could stretch them. With her background and her record, I could not imagine anybody giving Scary Mary a foster child.
“What nasty men?”
“Uh…the ones that come to your house all the time.” I glanced at Muh’Dear, and she was giving me a mean look. “Um…never mind.”
“Like I said, I want my foster daughter to be just like Annette,” Scary Mary insisted. She snatched another beer out of a bag on the table in front of her.
I smiled broadly. Despite what Mr. Boatwright told me Scary Mary had said about me being funny, she was OK in my book.