Ugly Ways

by Tina McElroy Ansa

  So instead, he pointed the car in the direction of the old downtown district of Mulberry to the comer of Broadway and Cherry. Just driving up toward The Place made him ease up a bit on the grip he had on the steering wheel. He looked over at the car clock and saw that it was only 10:10. He knew that there would have to be some of his friends in there to talk with. But even if there wasn't anyone he knew real well, at least there would be someone there to sit next to and drink a beer or two with. Even if they didn't know they were drinking with him.

  The Place was the kind of joint that folks came to when they needed something and couldn't stand to be let down one more time that day. It didn't usually disappoint them. Its real name was the Bluebird Liquor Store, Bar and Grill, but everybody called it The Place. People just felt good in The Place, always had as far as he knew and he had been coming there for twenty or thirty years. More than that, he thought.

  The Place must have been standing in the same spot for nearly fifty years, Ernest thought. Thank God that McPherson girl had refused to sell out, to buckle under, and not let them wrecking crews come down through her place the way they did with all the others.

  It looked right lonesome to Ernest sitting there in the middle of what had been downtown Mulberry at night surrounded by the flat painted lines and high-intensity lights of a parking lot on one side and the back of a rambling hardware store on the other. At one time, The Place was surrounded by a thriving all-black business district nestled against the general white downtown stores. Three decades earlier on Broadway and Cherry streets, there had been a candy and peanut store, a movie house ("The Burghart Theatre shoulda been put on the National Register, not torn down," Mudear had said, but she hadn't seen the place in nearly thirty years), restaurants, a barbershop, a beauty shop, a grocery store, a fish market, and a record store with a big shiny black forty-five hanging in the window.

  He had heard how the town fathers and the developers, who were one and the same, had tried to wear the original owner's daughter down and bully her and bribe her and scare her into selling and moving out. But that was one black woman who could not be moved.

  "It helped to have all that money on her side, too," Ernest said aloud to himself as he turned the corner of Cherry and looked for a parking space close by. He found one right across from The Place and slipped into it with ease. When he opened the dark painted glass door to The Place, he was surprised at the size of the crowd inside the L-shaped juke joint. No matter how few cars there were in the vicinity of The Place, the joint always looked like it was happy hour. Music—old music from four and five decades earlier that the customers still preferred to hip-hop or urban—blared from an old-fashioned jukebox illuminating a dark corner of the bar.

  Folks must still come here on the city bus, he thought as he let his eyes adjust to the dark smoky interior. Or else that McPherson girl must bus in customers just to prove she had been right for not closing up and moving her business out or across town. While still standing at the entrance, he recognized the words of Etta James singing "Roll with Me, Henry."

  That song gotta be from the mid-1950s, Ernest thought as he moved along the crowded bar and found an empty stool. The song reminded him so much of how he was in the fifties—so strong, so in charge.

  He almost chuckled—that's when he realized he had all but lost his ability to laugh—remembering how after Mudear changed she used to always say real loud, "Ernest just want to get down town!"

  He would hear her through the heating vents leading to the bathroom as he waited for one of the girls to bring him the new razor blades he had just purchased on the way home from work. He would hear her say, "Don't go busting your neck to get those razor blades to your father, he just want to get down town."

  She always said it, down town, as if it were some exotic seductress trying to lure her man into its plump soft arms.

  It wasn't that she was jealous of his visits to The Place or even that she suspected that he had a woman he met down there, Mudear didn't give a damn about his fidelity or lack of it. She just hated the idea that he had a place where he could be happy for a litde while. He knew that.

  But, as with everything Mudear did and said, there also seemed to be some other hidden evil message in saying down town the way she did for him to hear. He knew she was also trying to imply that he was a stupid country boy dazzled by the bright lights and sidewalks of a city. Down town.

  Mudear had been born up north in Harlem Hospital while her family was visiting relatives in New York City. Even though she stayed there in the city all of three days, the first three days of her life, she never let him forget that she was a city-born woman and he an ignorant country boy.

  Of course, at first, when he was courting her and she him, you woulda thought that his big country hands and big country feet, his arms used to field work, too muscular for his cheap shirts, were Spanish fly to her. But after the change, she looked on him with actual disdain. He could see her now turning up her nose at him as if she were smelling something, like dog shit stuck to his boots.

  Just as he was finishing his first drink, the liquor in the pit of his stomach beginning to warm his cold dead-feeling body, he spied a familiar figure in the corner of the bar over by the jukebox. He almost didn't recognize the woman. She looked so bad in the face. But even after two or three years, there was no mistaking that tight black and white polka-dot dress and the tall dark thin figure inside it. He just wasn't ready for the lined throat and the ashen face he saw above the dress's scooped neckline.

  He had just tried to arrange his own face to cover his surprise when she spied Poppa watching her.

  "Ernest!" she yelled and put her bottle of beer down on the top of the jukebox and ran over to his stool at the bar. "Ernest, you old devil! I was hoping I'd see you."

  She grabbed him and hugged him good and hard. He slipped his arms around her thin waist and hugged her back.

  "Man, it's good to see you," she said, standing back and taking him by his broad shoulders to look in his face. He managed a smile when he saw that although she looked like she'd been beaten around the face, puffy and bloated, her jet-black eyes still held the light of joy just as he had remembered.

  "Patrice, where you been?" Poppa asked, taking her by the shoulder and leading her back to the bar.

  "Oh, I been scouting around different cities. Went down to New Orleans for a while, rode with some folks to Dallas, but I didn't like Texas so I came back east and stayed with some people I knew in St. Louis. But ain't no place like home, and no home like Mulberry, and here I am!"

  He went next door to the liquor store and bought a pint of Tanqueray—Patrice liked gin—and came back and ordered a setup of orange juice and ice.

  He started to tell Patrice that his wife had just passed. But somehow it didn't seem right. He knew that Patrice would be understanding and comforting. He could just imagine her saying, "Well, if a woman can't have a drink with a man when his wife is just dead, then what kind of friend is she?" Patrice was that kind of woman. But he knew that Mudear would not have wanted him announcing her death to his old girlfriend before he told anybody else. So, he just let her do all the talking about where she had been and what she'd been doing. After the quiet of Mudear's hospital room, Patrice's gay chatter was balm to his soul.

  He knew she could see something was upsetting him, but she didn't intrude. She just gave him an extra-hard hug when he said he had to get going and told him, "See me real soon, okay?" and headed back toward the jukebox.

  He had felt like a fool then for trying to be loyal to Mudear.

  Then again, he thought as he swung his long legs out of the bed, got up, and walked over to the window overlooking the garden in back of his house, Mudear didn't give a damn about him at all one way or the other.

  He turned from the window and looked at the wide bed across the room. He could easily imagine Mudear stretched out on her usual side, dressed in a pink or tangerine bed jacket or dressing gown, a pile of magazines strewn next to her
on the thick quilted satin comforter, a dripping half-empty carton of Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate chip on the tray on the bedside table.

  He could hear Annie Ruth in the bathroom next door. Had heard her running water in Mudear's tub, then heard her splashing in the water. He couldn't hardly stand to listen to the bathroom noises. They reminded him of Mudear and the hours she had spent in there entertaining herself.

  Even now with her dead, he couldn't give in to hating her completely. It would make it seem as if she had won finally.

  He felt that was what she must have wanted all the time, all the time they knew each other. If she got him to really hate her, the way he knew she despised him, then she would have been satisfied. All Mudear wanted was to be in control. Lord knows she controlled her own small insulated world. But that wasn't enough for her, he thought as he turned down the grape-strewn sheets that Annie Ruth had sent as one of her Christmas gifts the year before. Now that the girls had jobs, good jobs, the big brown UPS truck seemed to pull up to their parents' front door every other day.

  But then again, Esther had also discovered catalogs as well as the home shopping networks since cable had come to the town of Mulberry. She had said many times how those two conveniences had been tailor-made for a person like her. Like there were other Mudears scattered all over the country, as if she weren't one of a kind.

  Then, he shuddered at the idea of more than one Mudear running around the world.

  CHAPTER 19

  In Mudear's house, there were no doors on the two entranceways to the kitchen. She had had Poppa remove them. She liked to sit in other parts of the house—the dining room or the rec room—and oversee what was going on in there. From her favorite recliner chair in the rec room she had had a clear view of the sink and the kitchen table. From her seat at the head of the dining room table she had been able to see the stove and the sink. She didn't have to say it, but she did: "Ya'll girls can't do nothing without me checking behind you."

  The girls would stand at their kitchen stations, Emily at the sink, Betty at the stove, and Annie Ruth at the table, and try their best to ignore Mudear's orders and comments issued from her current throne.

  "Betty, don't fry that chicken so fast. It'll be bloody at the bone. And I can smell the grease burning in here.

  "Daughter, be sure to run that dishwater good and hot. Don't nobody want to catch all those germs and viruses ya'll pick up out in the street. Let's see some steam coming out of that sink.

  "Annie Ruth, if you ain't doing nothing but sitting there reading, you can change the paper in those drawers in there. Don't be so trifling."

  Annie Ruth was in high school before she noticed that there were two head chairs pulled up to their dining room table, two chairs with arms. Mudear had insisted on it. "I don't care if you have you a nice comfortable chair or not," she had told Poppa. "But I sure as shooting want one where I can rest my arms during a meal."

  Just walking past the table and chairs made Annie Ruth's stomach hurt.

  The delicious food that Betty had learned to cook for the family was served with as much criticism as seasoning meat and as much pressure to perform as salt if Mudear decided to sit at the table with the rest of the family for dinner. The girls had learned early that it was always better to get a small plate of food later in the evening when Mudear took her nap before going outside. By then, their stomachs—upset and soured by Mudear's questions and comments, asking about their teachers and friends, about people at the electric company and grocery store just to get enough information to tear them and their lives apart—would have had enough time to settle down.

  It was usually at the dinner table that Mudear went after anyone outside who tried to show an active, positive interest in one of the girls. If a teacher ignored her colleagues' warnings to stay away from members of the Lovejoy family, the ones with the crazy mama, and tried to encourage their love for literature or their quickness in debate or their big-legged majorette march, Mudear talked about them so badly, going into their family history and failed romances and business endeavors, that the girls eventually shied away from the teachers just to shield them from Mudear.

  At the table, Mudear would say as she heaped piles of mashed potatoes on her plate and sprinkled chopped onions on top, "Miss Matherling so concerned 'bout you, she ought to be more interested in her own family with her no-working husband. Her half-crippled ma out there wasting away in that nursing home. And the brother who has served hard time for stealing. I hate a thief. I hear he even stole from her. Miss Schoolteacher."

  Mudear left nothing unexplored as she dissected people's lives while she sucked on the marrow of a chicken bone. The girls even realized too late that they had probably provided some of the ammunition for Mudear's attacks. Then, they had felt stupid and on edge as if they had pointed out the best place to chop off their own legs.

  As Annie Ruth came slowly through the dining room, she didn't see anyone in the kitchen but noticed that the overhead light was still burning in there.

  Well, she thought, I know that cats can't turn on lights. And she walked bravely into the bright yellow room and she saw her father sitting at the kitchen table dressed in his pajamas, faded washed-out striped pajamas that she had sent him for one of his birthdays years before, with a cup of coffee in front of him. Now, Poppa know he got better-looking pajamas than those old things, she thought.

  "Couldn't sleep, Poppa?" she asked as she stood in the doorway. She didn't wait for him to answer. She really didn't expect him to. She just came over and pulled out a chair to join him at the tiny round kitchen table.

  "No, I guess not," he said.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Then, Poppa asked, "You want some coffee?"

  "I'll never get to sleep if I drink coffee now, Poppa," Annie Ruth said.

  "It's decaffeinated."

  "Alright. I'll have a cup with you."

  He got up and turned on the flame under the kettle.

  Annie Ruth turned up her nose slightly when she saw her father take the orange jar of instant coffee from the cabinet. She hated the watery taste of Sanka, but she didn't stop him. At least while he made the coffee, it filled the room with noise and movement, and she didn't have to try to think of anything to say to her father.

  But watching him, she asked herself with something akin to shock, "Who is this old man shuffling around the kitchen?" She wanted to say, "Pick up your feet! Pick up your feet!" But she could just hear Mudear's exasperated voice saying the same thing and she censured herself for the thought.

  "Annie Ruth?" he said as he put the steaming coffee in front of her and took his seat next to her.

  "Yeah, Poppa," she answered.

  "Do you know what I do at my job?"

  "Of course, Poppa," she said, puzzled that he would ask that. "You work at the kaolin mines, the chalk mines. If you haven't taken a new job." She smiled at him because Poppa had worked at the same place all her life. She reached for the can of Pet evaporated milk and poured a splash into the cup—the tall thin gray china mug she always used—of coffee. Um, my cup, Annie Ruth thought as she stirred in the cream. She wondered if Poppa knew it was her cup or if it was just by accident that he picked it.

  "Yeah, but do you know what I do?" He was going on about his job.

  "Sure, you're the foreman of the grading division there."

  He looked at his little redheaded daughter and gave a wistful smile. He could see some of Mudear in all the girls. And just then she looked like his wife when she felt she was being patient with her stupid husband.

  "And what that mean?"

  "It means ... it means you head up that division at the mine. You're the supervisor of that section." Annie Ruth wondered where this conversation was coming from and where it was going. The only thing that stood out in her mind about her father and his job was the ruckus Mudear had put up when she found out Poppa was bringing home chunks of kaolin for the girls because they liked the taste of it. Annie Ruth had only b
een about eight when she heard Mudear telling Poppa what an ignorant country Negro he was for passing those stupid country dirt-eating customs along to his children.

  "Actually bringing that filthy white dirt home from your job for your own daughters to eat! Damn, a man ain't got no sense!"

  Talking with her father this way about his job felt as if they were both negotiating strange and dangerous new territory without a map, feeling their way along without knowing where any of the pitfalls were, the quicksand traps, the slippery spots, the unmarked caverns. She couldn't remember a conversation with him that was not about money or business that had gone on this long.

  Discussing his work at the chalk mines reminded Annie Ruth of her flight earlier that evening into Mulberry. Right outside of town, while she was trying to keep her mind off of the cat she had seen on the first leg of the trip, she had looked out the window and noticed for the first time, she thought, the very plant where her father worked.

  Against the gray overcast day, the mining site with its plumes of ghostly chalky smoke spewing from a number of stacks and vast white pits chiseled in the earth surrounded by huge pools of aqua water shaped like triangles, squares, and diamonds rimmed in the powdery white clay looked like a movie set. White dust covered the cars in the parking lot, the company's sign, the buildings' roofs, everything.

  "You know, at the mines I got one of the best records for showing up for work. The least absenteeism, they call it. I get a award every year for that, not missing any days."

  "Really?"

  "Annie Ruth, I worked like a dog out there."

  She was taken aback by his bluntness. "I can imagine it was hard work, Poppa."

  "Naw, girl, I'm not just talking about how hard the labor was, I'm talking about how hard I worked."

  "I'm sorry. I don't think I'm following you." Annie Ruth was beginning to feel as if she were back at work conducting an interview, a difficult one.