“It hurts.”
“Not as much as what you did to that woman, dragging her through the woods—”
“I didn’t—”
“Shut up. If you want me to forgive you. Then shut up.”
He complied. She struck him several times more, and then they made love.
In the morning, he awoke before she did, found eggs, vegetables and tofu in the refrigerator and prepared a breakfast for the two of them. As he cooked, he remembered that the lovemaking had been aggressive, rough. At the end of it, exhausted he had slept well and awoke energetic and happy, cleansed of some taint he didn’t realize he had. He whistled while he cooked. When she arose, they pushed up the Murphy bed, moved the coffee table to the middle of the floor, sat on pillows and ate. She said she liked the breakfast and was impressed that he was a cook by training. She told him that he could easily find work in one of the city’s better restaurants. She, herself, worked as a waitress in a diner near Korea Town. He told her he didn’t need a job, that the Navy paid him for his disability. He sent a little home to his mother in Atlanta. Then she invited him to stay and help her with the rent and with her poetry, but only on the condition that he remembered who was boss.
“You mean, I’ll pay half the rent, but you’ll run the show.”
“I mean, you will pay all the rent, and I’ll run the show.”
He considered. The rent was not expensive and he had enjoyed the sex, not just the coitus, but the fantasy, the roughness of her. When she had put her foot on his neck and pushed his face against the gritty floorboards, he imagined Bertrand’s wife’s face dragged through the leaf-rot. Something connected. His mind raced to name what he had felt: Pleasure, yes. Pain, yes. But also he felt malleable, reshaped by her, as if her shouting and whacking, pinching and twisting, squeezed impurities out of him. “You are still fixin’ to beat me all the time?”
“When I want to. If I want to. Any way I want to.”
He laughed to himself, scrambled eggs in mouth and nodded. “Okay. I’ll stay.”
After he settled in, they wrote “Give me my money,” a poem about reparations. Again, they were sitting on the floor in front of the big window, drinking wine and smoking marijuana. She was telling him about the Black Panther Party which had recently formed across the bay in Oakland. She was considering joining it, but looking at the news flyer, she was beginning to think it would require too much of her time, taking away time from her poetry. “My calling,” she reminded him, “is to revolutionize through the word. People need the word as much as they need bread and houses.”
She sounded grand and poetic to him, like the portrayal of a poet in a movie.
“I told you,” she said, “don’t you laugh at me. I will hurt you. I will kill you if I have to.” By now, Lonnie saw little threat in her declarations, but he apologized. “Now, now, sweetie, can you forgive me?”
“Why should I? You white people always want to be forgiven, but you don’t want to do anything for it. I forgive you today, tomorrow you’ll be backstabbing me. You promised us African people forty acres and a mule and we got Jim Crow. White men are devils, just like the brother said. There is only one thing you understand and that is power.”
“I ain’t got no power.”
“You got more than you think. Your power is in your skin, my brother.”
He looked at his forearm, pale with red splotches from grease burns and the scratches she had given him. “Power? Aza, I grew up poor. Poorer than you. My daddy did his best to get along with colored people—I mean, black people.” To say ‘black’ seemed strange to him, but he knew it was what she preferred. “We never had any forty acres and a mule neither.”
“Neither were you a slave.”
“Neither were you.”
“But I come from enslaved people.”
He was quiet for a moment, having no answer. He drank a bit from the strawberry-flavored wine. He had tasted good wine in the officer’s mess and decided then, that he would buy a bottle of good wine for them. “My people were just farmers—”
“They farmed the Indians’ land.”
“Yes. I guess.”
“Stolen land.”
“We didn’t steal it. It was stolen from us, in the end. He thought about Wayne, and struggled to hold back tears. “Goddamn it.” His nose closed up. “My daddy was a hardworking man. A smart man, too. He was a good man, Aza. He never hurt anybody—except a boy—a soldier he killed in the war, and that tore him up.” Lonnie wondered if he had been to a war like his father if he would be a stronger man than he was, then he would go back to Talmaedge County and face Venable and Jacks.
Aza stroked the back of his hand and then fitted her hand inside of his. “Ok, pet, I believe you. You didn’t do anything. You are not to blame for anything.”
“And my daddy neither.”
“And your daddy neither.”
“And my momma. She ain’t done a thing. She’s working herself to death in a factory in Atlanta.”
Aza took her hand away. “Then who? Who’s to blame? If every white son of a bitch says ‘I am innocent; I never did a thing.’ Then who do you blame?”
He looked at her round face, tense at the jaws. She was not a beautiful woman, he decided, but not plain either. She reminded him of some of the village girls in Okinawa. No one was to blame, he wanted to say. No one and everyone, too. There were no innocents among them; they were all complicit in each other’s grief. “I can’t say. Certain people, I guess. The same people who do everything in the world.”
“Whoever. We have to kill them.”
He thought for a flash about killing Venable and Jacks. He was a good shot and he would shoot them. Killing them would make him feel like he had done something. Something for Bertrand. Something for his mother and for himself. “I would like to. But that wouldn’t be right. That would just be revenge. There’s got to be more to it than revenge.”
She seemed taken aback. “Oh shit, Lonnie. Nobody’s really going to kill anybody. A poem can’t kill anybody. It’s all a metaphor for what we want.”
He used his cigarette lighter to relight the joint. “What do you want? I don’t know what I want—I want to do the right thing.”
“And what is the right thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“And that’s why you will never do it.” She turned away from him, took up the pad and pen, began to chant and write:
I want my money, I want my land, I want my mule
I want it now.
To buy me some herb, a big ass Caddy,
A ticket to Mother Africa.
“I want my money, and I want it now.”
She stopped chanting while she scribbled down the new verse. Then she took deep breath and let out a shout.
I want my money, and I want it now.
She glanced at Lonnie, her eyes squinted and a smile at the corner of her mouth. He moved restlessly, clenching his buttocks against the wood floor.
“What about me? Don’t I get my money, too?”
“You are pathetic.” Aza shook her head. “A pathetic poor-ass cracker.”
She rolled her eyes. “Lord, if I have to have a white man, why couldn’t he be one of those rich motherfuckers. Some kind of banking tycoon?”
“’Cause you ain’t with me for my money.” He winked and placed his palm on his thigh next to his groin.
She pursed her lips and leaned toward him. “Then for what, whitey? You ain’t got nothing else I’m interested in.”
“Are you sure?” He let his voice drop.
She picked up her pad and composed two more verses while he watched. She chanted out the poems, her eyes focused on the ceiling or out of the window looking across the street at the opposite building. Though they were only a short ways from the Coit Tower, a landmark, the narrow street blocked their view. After a chant, she wrote on the pad. He liked the way her breasts bounced when she shook the pen to get the ink to flow. He liked the intensity on her brow, and the faraway
look her face took on when she was concentrating. Looking at her, he would not imagine that she was writing about killing white people, but about fields of daffodils and rainbows. Why was it, he wondered, that she was so angry or seemed to be. She had had advantages that he hadn’t, as far as he could tell. She was better educated, had come from a richer family. Perhaps, she sensed in him his long, nagging feeling that he had done something to cause the murders in Talmaedge County. He remembered how angry his mother had been with him in the days after the murder, as if he had insulted her. She often said that she didn’t care that Jacks stole her house from her, having paid her half its value, but that no amount of money could restore her reputation. When she talked about this, she often mentioned Maribelle Crookshank, cursing her or stamping her foot instead of cursing. At first, not understanding, Lonnie asked, but when his questions were met with his mother’s retreat to her bedroom or to church, he learned not to say anything or even to speculate.
“Can you ever forgive white people?” he asked Aza. He mumbled the question and she, looking annoyed that he had interrupted her, asked him to repeat it.
“For what?” she asked, impatiently.
“For …” he couldn’t think for what exactly. “For all we have done to colored—I mean black—people.
“Can I? Can I personally?” She put the pad and pen on the floor and looked past him out of the window. After a moment, she said, “Yes. Yes, I think I can. I mean, it would be hard—to forgive all white people. But if you mean to forgive certain white people, like you, for instance, well then, I think I could. But all white people? It’s just too many different circumstances.”
He swallowed hard. There seemed to be an enormity in the moment. “Then, can you forgive me?”
She cocked her head and snorted. “For what? You haven’t done anything. Not to me.” She scooted on her knees closer to him. “Loverboy, you are as innocent as the day is long, as far as I’m concerned. I can easily forgive you, baby, if there is anything to forgive. But white people in general? I mean white people as a race? That’s a different question.”
“But I am white.”
“Yeah right. My po-assed white nigger. I forgive you, baby. I forgive you because you want to be forgiven. But white people as a race?” Suddenly, she grabbed him, her palm against the back of his neck. “I shouldn’t trust your ass, though. You probably will find a way to backstab me, motherfucker.” She pulled his head toward her breasts. “But if you backstab me, if you hurt me, if you even dare to disappoint me … I will kill you.” She stretched out the sound of “you.”
He breathed in the smell of her breasts, perfumed with talc but slightly sweaty. Then, his mouth pressed against her and his tongue licked in her cleavage. Just then she slapped the back of his head.
“What did you do that for?” he asked.
“Because you didn’t have permission. Remember, I’m boss here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be.” She stood and pushed him with her foot. “You want to be forgiven? You want me to forgive you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you will have to do more than ask. You’ll have to show it.”
“How?”
“If you don’t know, how the hell can I explain it to you?”
“I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“Beg.”
“What?”
“Beg for it. Like a little yellow cur that wants a bone. Beg. Roll over. Play dead.”
He had worn the dog collar she had strapped on him that night for nearly two weeks, until just an hour before he had come into the club in the cellar of the Mona Lisa to hear her performance. It had been a token of their relationship, like a wedding band, and she had often introduced him to their acquaintances as her love slave. But, that night, as he watched her perform many of the poems they had written together, the slave was contemplating his escape. While she worked at the diner he had visited the Haight district, invaded by hippies. Twice he had dropped LSD with a colony that had taken residence under the trees at the end of Waller Street in Buena Vista Park. Two teenage girls, Klara and Katrina, cousins they said, were a part of the colony. He had enjoyed making love to them when he was high. They became like a four breasted Aphrodite, each breast covered with an aureole half its size, and with nipples that sparkled the colors of prisms in sunlight. From head to toe, his body had felt like one gigantic glans, responding with excruciating pleasure no matter where they kissed or stroked him. When he came, he seemed to have blanked out, first growing so tight he thought his head would explode, and then falling into a deep, soft blackness. Was he dead? He didn’t care. When he opened his eyes, he was looking up at a leafy canopy, and he had thought at once of the woods in Talmaedege County, but it occurred to him that Talmaedge County was a part of another world, one that overlaid the one he had now entered but could never touch him. In the early hours of the morning, as the influence of the acid wore off, he decided that he had enough of being Aza’s slave and would join Klara and Katrina in a union of free love. He enjoyed sex with Aza, but the relationship was arduous. Always there was some friction, some strain about skin or murder. With the cousins, everything was easy. They giggled at everything he said or did. And they were white.
The club was windowless and smoky, lit by a row of ornate sconces loosely attached to its plaster walls. It seated no more than twenty people at its five café tables, so the patronage squeezed around a small stage, balancing their drinks and cigarettes as if they were walking on see-saws. Lonnie had arrived early and settled at a table just in front of the stage, a low platform hardly bigger than a milk crate. He had a bottle of grappa and had sipped away for an hour, when finally Aza, having been upstairs preparing for her performance, pushed her way through the crowd. There was a spattering of applause from some of the patrons who recognized her. The goateed, bereted proprietor stood on top of the platform and yelled for quiet. He welcomed the audience, and then shifting into an intonation, recited a poem about universal love. When he was finished, he acknowledged the clapping and finger snapping. “Aza” he announced, without intonation, “means ‘power’ in the African language. Our next poet is a powerful sister, a powerful poet, a powerful and beautiful black spirit of universal force.”
Aza stepped up onto the stage, seeming to ignore the hoots and clapping around her. She raised her arms above her head and looked up at the low ceiling. She called this portion of her performance inviting the ancestors. Slowly she brought her hands down on the top of her hair, cropped in a short natural style after the singer Odetta. Then she moved her hands down in front of her face, eyes closed. She began to hum, and brought her hands across her breasts, and down by her side. She wore a blue oxford shirt, Lonnie’s in fact, tucked inside a pair of black pedal pushers. Her hips swayed back and forth now, and she began to chant. “I’m a killa; I’m a killa.” She opened her eyes, and it seemed to Lonnie, that she stared straight at him. Though she seemed entranced by the rhythm of her chant, Lonnie thought he saw a trace of an amused smile pass her lips. He placed his hand on his neck, where the wide, leather dog collar had been. She didn’t seem to notice the absence of the collar.
“I got my gun, my A-K 47, got my shot gun, double-barrel,
Gone ride through Alabama, side-saddled like a belle,
Gone give them crackers a piece of my homegrown hell
I’m a killa, a killa, a natural born killa.”
The audience hooted and clapped. Lonnie didn’t hoot, but sipped his grappa, rolling the burning liquor across his tongue. He always enjoyed Aza’s performance of this poem, the way she swayed her big hips, and mimicked shooting pistols with her fingers.
At the end of her set, Aza reprised “I’m a Killa,” raised her arms to thank the ancestral spirits, and ignoring the mostly white audience, exited the stage to many hoots, and claps, and finger snapping. In a few minutes, she joined Lonnie at the table. His stomach churned. He wondered how he might bro
ach the subject of their splitting up. She drank down a glass of grappa that he had poured for himself. Then suddenly, she grabbed onto his ear and twisted. “Motherfucker,” she said. “I told you I would kill you if you backstabbed me.” For a moment it seemed she would twist the ear right off of his head. Tears came to his eyes. Then she let go, stood and smiled. “I see you have freed yourself at last.”
“I—”
“I don’t need to hear your explanation. Did you leave the rent money?” He had. “Well, that’s all I ever needed from you. Now you are free to go. Watch out for the dog catcher, though. Remember they exterminate little pups like you.” Then she leaned on the table, her face in his, and spoke slowly, “And if I ever see your po’ honkey ass around here again, I will kill you.”
TWENTY-TWO
Coming home after the night in the park, Lonnie found that Aileen had taken a turn for the worse. She refused to eat, waving away the spoonful of broth he held to her lips. “Just let me rest,” she said with difficulty. Periodically, her breath seemed to fall into the well of her stomach. The stomach sometimes rose and fell, but Lonnie could not discern any movement in her chest. Often, he called softly to her, and after a few moments, she would open her eyes. Once or twice, she even smiled. Then, as if vultures, the church women appeared, one at a time, letting themselves in and with few words to Lonnie, taking the chair near the foot of the bed, their bibles in their laps. The vigil continued all the day and into the night. In the morning, when he tried again to feed his mother, a woman, older and gaunter than the rest, admonished him. “Give her rest.” The woman was prune-like but she emanated the beatific aura of a long suffering saint.
“Momma,” Lonnie said quietly, his face near Aileen’s mouth. “Won’t you talk to me?”
Aileen turned away from him. He could see her jaw quiver. Turning back to him after a minute, she whispered slowly between her labored breaths, “In Him …”
The Vain Conversation Page 26