His white BMW gave back the sun’s glitter. He got inside and found it full of sun. Though two years from forty, he dressed in the latest fashions, like a man half his age. White linen blazer and matching slacks. Red silk collarless shirt. Tan cowhide belt. White silk socks. Black espadrilles. After the date, he’d gotten a house cut. Hair prickly at the sides and in the back. As thick and square as a privet hedge on top. Nineteen years Peanut’s senior. Felt the need to look young for her.
The engine roared to life. His custom, he drove the white BMW with hands gripping the steering wheel, palms spreading cupfuls of sweat. At times he believed that the sun was actually drumming on the roof of the car. He turned down his blinds. Sunlight shimmered on the windshield. Fell squarely against his face. The car reached Turtle Avenue. X-rated marquees swam into focus. Love, Gestapo-Style. Studboy. DD Movie. The Plumber of Love. He’s the plumber of love, wrecking homes with a foot of pipe. Electricity ran the rails of Lee’s legs, to his groin.
Peanut and Boo lived in this neighborhood. She claimed they leased a small studio apartment. Lee had never seen it.
I can’t let you come in, cause it sort of junky and whatnot.
I’m not afraid of a little junk, Lee said.
Yeah, but I am.
Lee would always park in front of her building and honk his horn. Then she would come downstairs.
Peanut had told him that she sometimes left Boo home by himself. He can take care of himself and whatnot.
But he’s just seven.
He smart. He like a lil ole man.
But he’s just seven.
Peanut flashed him a cold look. Look, mind yo own business.
I’m just trying to—
Well, I don’t need yo advice. I don’t tell you what to do.
I could get you a babysitter.
Just mind yo own business.
I’m sorry. Lee hated being forced to apologize. He could live with it.
Peanut still hadn’t said anything.
After some time she said, Apology accepted. Just don’t do it again.
I won’t.
Yes, this was Peanut’s neighborhood. It was bad. Not real bad, but bad enough. Would he visit her if she lived in the projects? Probably. She was the right woman for him. He looked at his watch. Solid gold, with diamond strips for the markings. He still had thirty minutes. Peanut would have something nasty to say if he arrived early. He circled back, found a shady spot on a side street near an X-rated theater, and parked the car. Quiet slipped through the shut windows, along with traces of sun and heat.
Boo happened after an indiscretion and whatnot, Peanut had said.
An indiscretion? Lee asked.
Yeah. An indiscretion. I had Boo when I was twelve.
Twelve?
Yeah. Twelve. I wasn’t as smart then as I am now.
Wow. Twelve.
But he’s my baby, and I love him mo than anything in this world, even if his father is a stupid bastard and whatnot.
Lee hadn’t pursued it. He understood the maternal instinct. A bond greater than any indiscretion. Peanut was in love with him. Even if she wasn’t, she was the right woman for him.
They had met two weeks ago at the Look It Over Lounge. Lee’s daughter, Samantha, had run away from home, and he had decided to celebrate. The bar drew him like a magnet. He put on an Italian double-breasted suit. Three-hundred-dollar alligator shoes. Slipped on his two best diamond rings. Drove to the lounge. Lee rarely drank, and then, only a mild cocktail. Peanut fixed him a piña colada. The liquor’s warmth relaxed him. He detected a flicker of interest in Peanut’s face. Didn’t let the opportunity slip by. He stuck around. Made small talk. Quitting time, Peanut invited him to her hangout, the Southway Lounge. The heat of a second piña colada unfroze his tongue. He explained that he owned the Black Widow Exterminating Company. Had accounts with many of the best office buildings in this city and neighboring cities. Revealed that he owned six buildings, valued at a million dollars each.
How old are you? She squeezed one of his biceps. He had done his push-ups and pumped some iron at home. He needed to do something about his belly. Had seen an X-rated movie where a woman made her partner keep his shirt on while they had sex. She couldn’t stand the sight of his potbelly. Lee had decided to work out daily. Burn off the fat.
Old enough, baby girl. He decided not to reveal his age. Peanut smiled, leaving him to believe she enjoyed the mystery about his age. Lee had inherited his father’s height but not his good looks. Everyone always thought he was older than he was.
They stepped out onto the dance floor. Lee’s back was board stiff. His hips failed to twist. Peanut was as good as he was clumsy. Shook the devils in her hips. Lee decided to take dancing lessons.
They’d gone to the Southway Lounge every night since. Lee had applied himself, with an ever-increasing determination, to impressing Peanut. Flowers. Dinners. Cards. Exercise.
He’d also decided not to reveal anything about the only woman in his past. While giving birth to Samantha, his wife had died, on the second anniversary of his company. He hadn’t related his sixteen miserable years with Samantha. She was a fat, black, ugly, stanky, bald monster, mouth frozen in a permanent sneer—rubbery lips forever smeared with chicken grease or marzipan—a cold glitter in her eyes. She couldn’t move without dragging her food-heavy feet. God, why did I name her after my mother? he thought. He couldn’t think of another name, and his wife’s name, Loretta, was pain and loss. It was spite for him that got Samantha a cashier’s job at Hi-Lo Foods. Spite that made her give customers items for free. Fired after two weeks. You’d think a girl who did well in school would have better sense. Couldn’t do anything right, couldn’t cook or sew or wash dishes or mop a floor or wash a load of clothes without messing up. And always feeling sorry for herself. (Once he peeped through her bedroom keyhole and saw her doing a slow drag all by herself, her fat body a toy top wobbling out its last revolutions.) Yes, and the night she ran away from home, the night he found out that she was fucking the most notorious thug in the neighborhood, CC … Yes, CC, who liked to string up cats and set fire to them. Liked to snatch ladies’ purses and knock old folks upside the head.
That night Lee had a strange dream. He was a bird flying over a body of water. The sun hot and his wings heavy with sweat. He couldn’t see his own body, but the shadow of his outstretched wings moved over the water. The sky darkened. His moving shadow turned white. The water changed to blood. Lee got tangled in the new tree-thick darkness. Moved his sweaty wings. Managed to break free. He changed into a bird of fire that singed the sky and left it black.
When he awoke, his mouth was dry, his neck stiff—both stuffed with cotton. A glass of water beckoned him into the kitchen. CC rushed into his vision. CC, in Lee’s kitchen, all toothpick arms and potbelly. Sam butt naked beside him, holding his elbow. Beyond belief. How could the human body contain such fat? In one motion, CC grinned and zipped up his pants. Lee grabbed the nearest thing he could find, a jar of strawberry jelly. Hurled it at CC’s head. A red fire-quick blur spurted out the door, laughing all the while. The jar shattered against the door, leaving a red blob like in one of those fancy paintings in the ritzy office buildings.
Got to throw better than that, old motherfucker, CC said from outside the door.
Lee kept the words at arm’s distance. Spoke. Are you fucking that bastard?
Daddy, talk to me with some love. Samantha ran out—the fastest Lee had ever seen her move—after CC. Lee had not seen her since.
The night he met Peanut, he heard someone messing with the locks on the kitchen door. Samantha and CC. The following morning he had all the locks changed—though the locksmith had found no evidence of tampering—and bars put on all the windows.
That part of his past, Lee had to keep locked away. And there was more. He hadn’t told Peanut that his mother had killed his father and then herself.
That he had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Keepback, Mississippi, a sma
ll, isolated, all-black community. The nearest town more than twenty miles away. The civil rights movement a continual event sparkling in the glass-eyed television. Lynching and Klan atrocities echoed like folktales given a horrible twist. White people: gray blots on television. Cataracts. And when the old folks spoke of these blots, Lee wondered if whites were foreigners from another country or even beings from another world.
Lee, his mother, and his father lived in a small house before a field of pear trees. During slavery, Keepback had been a single plantation. Their house was the only structure that remained from those days. The old folks said it had been the main nigger’s quarters. Lee’s father had transformed it into a library with books on science, math, and business. During the day, Lee went to school. At night his father taught him to manage receipts and figure accounts. Then he studied books from the library until he retired to bed.
The townspeople were farmers. They grew squash, tomatoes, and sorghum, for molasses, and black-eyed peas, corn, collard greens, watermelons, and cantaloupes. Though the house where Lee lived was modest, it was a mansion in comparison with the farmers’ shacks. Keepback had poor irrigation; a good harvest was rare. They lived in wooden shacks with wooden floors. They pumped their water from wells. They shat in outhouses, a phone directory–thick Sears Roebuck catalog near at hand. Lee’s family enjoyed furniture, carpeting, and comfortable beds. A bathroom. Indoor plumbing that Pop had installed. Pop had converted the front part of the house into a grocery and liquor store. Pop owned one of the few automobiles in town, a blue pickup truck. Bought liquor from Canton, fifty miles away. Brought it back to his store and sold it at twice the price paid. Gave out free beer once a month. Kept a fishbowl of free gumdrops for kids. Kept all his money in a safe behind his counter.
Pop had fought in the Second World War. The only black soldier to receive seven Silver Stars. After the war, he made one fabled city in the north his new port of call. Fell from a commuter platform. Lost a leg to a train. Screwed in a wooden one in its place. Took a train back home. In Canton, purchased the ex-slave’s quarters— from a white real-estate agent—with his army savings. Lee recalled his father—the smooth pebble of his face carried forever in Lee’s pocket—nearly seven feet tall and weighing well over three hundred pounds, stomping about without a cane or crutches. One size-fifteen foot and one peg leg. Hands made for a man half his size. Dark skin as smooth as a baby’s behind. The leg and his teeth— each tooth like a rail tie across the length of Lee’s memory—were his only ugly features.
Lee’s mother was small and frail. Had been consumptive at her birth. Pop liked to say she was uglier than death. Mamma would blush. He’d add, Maybe God don’t like ugly, but I do. She spent most of her time stooped over the vegetable and flower garden in the backyard. Kept a horseshoe over every door in the house. Religious. Serious with the gravity of one who read the Bible and attended church. Took Lee to the Mount Zion Baptist Church every Sunday. After her house, the church was the most impressive structure in the town. A brass cross mounted on its facade. Carpeted floors and overhead fans.
Pop never attended church, pissed off because no one in town drank on the Sabbath. In protest, he got drunk every Sunday in the town square—where four streets fanned from where he stood— and in full view of the church. Sunday nights, Mamma would chastise Pop about his un-Christian behavior.
Lee was seven:
Gypping people out they money with yo high liquor prices. Getting drunk in front of the church.
So what?
You wrong.
Wrong?
You jus wrong.
I gives them what they want.
You stealin.
So?
You blasphemous.
So?
That ain’t Christian.
I don’t hear Christ complaining.
You blasphemous.
Who ain’t?
Heathen.
I won’t be called names in my own house.
It started.
Pop punched Mamma. She fought back. He busted her lip. She uppercut his chin. He punched her eye. She snatched his wooden leg out from under him, pushed him to the floor, and knocked him upside the head with the leg.
After Mamma had knocked Pop out, she and Lee dragged him off to bed. They sat down in the kitchen together.
Mamma started singing.
Speak, Lord.
Speak to me.
Water drained from Lee’s eyes.
Cry, baby, cry, Mamma said. She touched a ball of cotton to her lip. Wipe yo weepin eyes.
She touched the cotton to her lip.
Cry, baby, cry. Wipe yo weepin eyes.
I ain’t no crybaby, Lee said.
Then why you cryin?
Pop hit you.
So? Do you see me cryin?
Nawl. But he hit you.
But I ain’t cryin.
Why not?
Ain’t got nothin to cry bout.
But he hit you.
How come you gon cry, if I ain’t gon cry?
He hit you.
We make a deal. I won’t cry, if you won’t.
Lee is ten:
In the library, he studied his father. Avoided the man’s eyes. This way he hoped to close out his mother’s suffering. Block out the deep hurt that showed in his father’s face. Pop put one small hand over the stump where it fitted into the hinge of his wooden leg. He deserved to suffer. Lee wished that he could make the pain worse.
Silent, his father retired to bed.
Lee stole away to his mother. Rubbed wintergreen alcohol on her wounds. Massaged cocoa butter into her scars. He invented his own space, his own world. Mamma’s lumpy flesh a bag full of stones beneath his hands. The wintergreen a weak wind tickling his nose.
I should just take you and go away.
That’s right, Mamma.
He ain’t no good for you.
No good.
But he need me.
No, he don’t. The wintergreen made Lee sneeze. He concentrated harder on his world.
I need him.
No, you don’t.
He needs us.
Let’s go.
Where we going? He need me. I love him.
Lee was eighteen:
New muscle. He worked up the courage to confront Pop.
Pop.
What?
Don’t hit my mamma.
What? He gave Lee a cold glance. Lee had expected a blow.
Well, suh—he felt his courage slipping—she might kill you.
Pop looked at him. Did she tell you that? He showed his teeth.
No, suh. It’s just that people don’t like nobody hitting on them.
Pop’s lips strained over the stalactite of teeth, biting in a laugh. Lee?
Yes, suh.
Pop leaned in close. A fever reached Lee’s face. That’s the best way a man can die. At the hands of the woman he loves.
Yes, suh. Lee didn’t know what else to say. Some feeling struck him at the root of his belly.
Lee?
Yes, suh.
What is an avenue?
What did his question have to do with anything?
What is an avenue?
I never heard of that, suh.
I’ll tell you. It’s a type of street made like a U. You go down one way, and when you get to the end, it curves back around like that. He demonstrated with his small hands. It’s like that horseshoe up there. He pointed to the object over the door.
Yes, suh.
They got many avenues in Paris. Saw them during the war. They make their streets real close to a curb. This close. He used his hands. We’d drive by in a jeep and some joker be standing on the street and we drive by and slap him just like that, slap that joker right upside the head. Only time in my life that I got to hit white folks. He laughed.
Lee laughed. He saw nothing funny.
Up north, they like to call everything an avenue. When you go up there, don’t be fooled.
Yes, suh. When?
Lee thought. He had no plans.
If it don’t look like that horseshoe, it ain’t an avenue.
Yes, suh.
That night, Lee’s mother stood in the kitchen, hard at work with her fold out closet board. Her new electric iron. The only woman in town who could afford one. She sprinkled water from an empty pop bottle onto Pop’s shirt. She was singing.
Will the circle be unbroken?
Yes, Lord, bye and bye. Oh
Yes, Lord, bye and bye.
Mamma?
Baby.
He might kill you. He mean to.
No. I’m gon kill that nigger.
When?
Lord, forgive me.
When?
You know it wrong to kill.
But he gon kill you.
Let me tell you something.
What?
A person kills with the head and not the heart.
These were just words for Lee.
He tell you all that stuff bout a man needin brains and discipline. Well, I say this. Give your brains to books, but give your heart to Jesus.
Lee couldn’t confess that since the age of about seven—yes, he’d concealed the secret that long—he hadn’t believed in God. He didn’t believe in the goings-on at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Don’t let him kill you.
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