by RM Johnson
Something had gone wrong, seriously fucking wrong, she thought, pacing in a tiny circle around the bathroom floor. She heard the man repeat the question again, this time yelling, and JJ pressed herself up to the door, her heart pounding, her mind racing over just what she should do.
There was more commotion. JJ heard something against the wall the bathroom door was on and still she had no idea of what to do—until she heard the noise that had her whipping open the door, no longer thinking, just knowing that she had to react.
The sound was Sasha screaming out in pain, and when JJ came out that door, she saw a man straddled on top of her, raining down angry blows onto her face.
“No!” JJ cried out, throwing herself onto the man’s back. She was bigger than all the other girls but not big enough. The man slung back an arm, forcefully throwing her off him. JJ stumbled backward, her arms pinwheeling, ’til she fell against a wall. She looked up and saw Lisa and Ally trying to pull the man from Sasha, but having no success.
She quickly looked around the room for something to hit him with, and she saw the gun lying there on the floor near her. She stretched out for it, grabbed it, and then went at him again.
“Get off her, motherfucker!” JJ said, holding the gun outstretched in both her hands.
He continued to attack Sasha, ignoring JJ ’til he heard the click of the gun cocking. He halted in midmotion, another punch about to hammer down on the badly beaten girl.
Lisa and Ally slowly backed away from the man as JJ took a single step forward.
“Now get the fuck up off of my girl, bitch!” JJ ordered.
The man stood, turned himself to JJ, his palms raised, shoulder level.
Ally and Lisa quickly went to help Sasha, and when they stood her up, JJ saw that both her eyes had been blackened and swollen shut. The area over her cheekbones was ballooned, and colored purple. Her lower lip was split deeply down the middle, her entire face smeared and splattered with a layer of blood.
When JJ had cocked back the hammer of the gun, she had not intended on shooting this guy. She had just wanted to scare him, to stop him from beating Sasha, but she hadn’t yet seen what he had done to her face. JJ hadn’t seen the pain he had put her through, and the place he had most certainly taken Sasha back to, when she was getting the shit kicked out of her by her ex-boyfriend.
JJ hadn’t known all that when she had cocked the gun, but now she did, and she decided that he had to die. He definitely had to die.
Ally must’ve read that on her face, JJ thought, because she hurried over to JJ. “Don’t do it, girl,” she pleaded. “Don’t do it. Just let it be. Let this shit be.”
“Can’t,” JJ heard herself saying, seeing the gun ahead of her, pointed at the man, the thing shaking wildly in her sweaty grip. “See what he did to my baby,” JJ said, tears spilling from her eyes. “See what that motherfucker did.”
“I know, but she’ll heal. You kill this motherfucker, and he dead for good.”
“I know. That’s how I want him.” JJ shot a quick glance at Ally, then focused back on her target.
“And then you go to jail, and you can’t be with ya girl no more. Think about that. She needs you. Needs you now more than ever. Don’t do this shit.”
Ally was right, and JJ knew it. She couldn’t take the chance at being put away, pulled from Sasha’s side just because she wanted to see this asshole dead. No, she couldn’t do that exactly, but she could see him hurt very badly, JJ thought, as she walked toward him, lowering the gun to her side. When she came within an arm’s length of him, with all her force, in a wide arching motion, she threw her arms around, forcing the barrel of the gun, and its sharp site at the tip, to tear into the man’s face. It cut into his cheek, opening up a jagged gash across the thin cuts already there.
The man let out a high-pitched cry and fell to his knees, covering the wound with his hands, as if trying to close it somehow.
JJ rushed at him, kicked him in the chest with the flat of her foot, pushing him over. She quickly changed her grip on the gun, holding it now by the front end with both fists, exposing the butt of the weapon. She threw herself onto the man, straddled him as he had Sasha, and started pistol-whipping him. He tried throwing his arms up wildly to protect his face, but JJ was crazed, working maniacally on him, feeling his facial bones give under the pressure of the gun she sent crashing down on him. Then before she knew it, she was being dragged off him.
“C’mon. We gotta get out of here. We gotta go!” she heard Lisa and Ally’s voices say. She felt Ally grab the gun from her, and she and Lisa start to pull her away. JJ would’ve fought harder to stay there, to continue to beat that man, but she was exhausted from all she had given him already.
TWO HOURS after they had gotten home, after JJ had done her best to clean up Sasha’s face, given her some painkillers, and put her to bed, she walked out into the living room where Lisa and Ally were.
“How’s she doing?” Ally asked.
“She’s gonna live. It ain’t like she ain’t been through it before, but …” JJ stopped, looked as though she was suppressing tears, choking on sobs that were trying to come out. “She shouldn’t have had to have gone through this shit again,” JJ said, pulling herself together.
“I know,” Lisa said, resting a comforting hand on JJ’s shoulder. “But next time we’ll be safer.”
JJ looked up. “Won’t be no next time. I ain’t takin’ no chance on this happening again. We out.”
“But JJ, we ran out of there without the cash. We ain’t got shit to show for tonight, except the fact that we got beat down,” Lisa said.
“Then maybe you should’ve thought to grab the money,” JJ shot back.
“My hands was filled with you.”
“What the fuck you tryin’ to say?” JJ stood up.
Lisa stood up right along with her.
Ally stood up too and pushed herself between the two, spreading them apart with her arms. “Hey, hey. We already been through enough tonight with that crazy motherfucker back at the motel. We don’t got to start here.”
JJ and Lisa slowly sat back down.
“JJ, if you out, then you just out,” Ally said, still standing. “And I feel you. I don’t think this is worth it anymore either.”
“Good,” JJ said, standing back up. “I’m gonna check back on Sasha.” She turned to walk toward the bedroom. “Ya’ll can stay if you want to. If not, lock the door when you leave.”
Ally sat back down and felt Lisa’s eyes heavy on her.
“What?” Ally wanted to know.
“Don’t punk out on me now. One more hit, Ally, and I’ll have enough to get me and my son up out the ’hood and into somewhere decent. Just one more good one. Don’t punk, girl,” Lisa said, grabbing Ally’s hand, as if to give her strength.
“I ain’t punkin’,” Ally said, snatching her hand away. “I’m tryin’ to get my own place too. But you see what happened to Sasha in there,” Ally whispered. “I ain’t tryin’ to have that happen to me.”
“We just got to be more careful next time,” Lisa said, desperation in her voice.]
“I don’t know, Lisa,” Ally said, shaking her head.
“Just think about it, all right. Because if we don’t get that money, I’ma still be in the ’hood, and your ass gonna be sleeping on a let-out couch in your mama’s living room. So think about it, okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll think about it.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
THE NEXT day, Livvy was looking over her essay. Henny had helped her with it, as she said she would, and as Livvy read over it for the hundredth time, she felt that it was good, damn good.
She got up from her bed, went to put the pages back into her dresser drawer, but stopped after sliding it halfway open. She thought she needed a better place to put it. She didn’t know why she thought this, but something told her that if Ally got her hands on this essay, she wouldn’t have had a problem setting the thing on fire, thinking that this was the catalyst for putting her
mother on a new path. Livvy couldn’t have that, because she needed to turn the essay in in a couple of days.
Livvy turned around, looking about the room for a good hiding place, but realized that no place was safe. She walked out of her room and into the living room, her eyes still looking for a place she could hide her essay. She looked about the kitchen, thought about hiding it under the fridge, on top of a cabinet, rolled up and slid into the cardboard paper towel tube, but none seemed right to her. Ally spent too much time in the kitchen eating for Livvy to feel safe about that place.
She walked out into the living room again, glanced at the cushions of the couch where Ally spent so much time lounging. Livvy thought about folding her work into an envelope, placing it under the TV, the one thing that occupied most of Ally’s time, then smartly thought better of it.
Livvy turned in a complete circle, about ready to give up, when her eyes passed the leaning stacks of old magazines, piled up on the shelves and on the floor in front of the book shelves. That was it, she thought, stepping quickly over to them, bending over, and pulling one randomly from out of the toppled stacks.
It was an Ebony, a handsome, smiling, S-curled Billy Dee Williams on the cover.
Livvy let the pages fall open, and there between an ad for Murry’s Pomade and an ad for the new 1988 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am, Livvy gently tucked the essay. She closed the magazine and slid it back into the stack, four magazines from the top. It was perfect, she thought, a triumphant smile on her face. If there was one thing that she knew Ally never did, it was read.
Livvy then went into her closet, pulled out a jacket, threw it on, and grabbed her purse and keys, because she had something very important to do on this day off.
Every since Hennesey’s date had come by to pick her up, Livvy had been bothered by his appearance, by the way he spoke, by the way his hair was braided up, by the tattoos on his arms—everything about the man.
No, she didn’t know him, and who knew, she thought, walking out of her apartment, locking the door behind her, he may have been a good man. But he definitely wasn’t good enough for her college-bound daughter.
That night after Henny had pulled him out of the apartment before Livvy could get any info out of him, Livvy turned to look over at Ally, who had just stepped out of her room. She had a jealous look on her face, but that was nothing new for Ally. She was always jealous of her sister. What concerned Livvy was what else was in that stare. Familiarity.
“You met him before?” Livvy asked.
“Hunh?” Ally answered, snapping out of whatever trance she was in.
“I said, have you met him before?” Livvy asked the question more slowly. “What’s his deal?”
“What do you mean?” Ally answered, playing dumb.
“Am I not speaking English to you, girl? What’s up with Henny’s new boyfriend? What do you know about him?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about him, Mama,” Ally said, but she was lying, and Livvy knew that, because the girl was looking down at her toes, had been doing that since she was two years old.
“You’re lying. Does he sell drugs, has he murdered anybody, married, got any kids?” Livvy rattled off.
“I don’t know,” Ally said again, this time looking her mother in the eyes.
“Then what does he do? Where does he work?”
“Don’t know that either.”
“Where does he live then?” Livvy asked, and then Ally lowered her eyes to her toes again.
So today, Livvy would use her day off to find out what this man was really about. She got in her car, the address Ally had reluctantly given her the other night, on a scrap of paper on her dash. Livvy would’ve called information first, got his phone number and called to make sure he was there before she dropped in on him, but Ally didn’t know his last name, and she couldn’t get the number without it. She started the car, threw it in gear, and headed toward his house.
Livvy pulled up in front of a rather large brown brick house in Beverly. She checked the address twice, then a third time, thinking that a boy who looked like the character Henny had dragged out of her place couldn’t have come from somewhere this nice.
Livvy grabbed her purse, climbed out of the little car, and walked toward the house. Standing in front of the door, after she had rung the doorbell, she wondered if she was making a mistake. Was she wrong to come here with the intention of telling this man what she knew he wouldn’t want to hear without Henny knowing? She wondered, but it was only for a moment, because she knew what would be in store for her daughter if she continued to see this guy: a life of hardship, broken promises, and then, most likely, desertion. Henny would’ve probably abandoned everything for that man, to wake up one morning to find him gone, and her left with a couple of kids, and the memory of what she could’ve been. Livvy wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
Livvy saw a figure behind the smoked glass of the big front door window, and then the door opened up to reveal a large smiling woman wearing one of the worst wigs she had ever seen. This must be the thug’s mother, Livvy thought.
“Hi. Can I help you?” Thug-mama said.
“Hi there. Is Rafe home?” Livvy said, speaking his name as though it wasn’t a part of the English language.
“I don’t know, but you’ll have to go to the side entrance,” wig—’ wearing-Thug-mama said, leaning out the door and pointing a flabby arm in that direction. “The bell has his name on it.”
“Thanks.” Livvy headed down the stairs and over toward the side door.
When she got there, she saw three bells and knew she should’ve asked what Rafe’s last name was. What the hell kind of name is Rafe, anyway? she thought.
Livvy looked at the three bells. One had no name on it at all. Under the other bell, an old, yellowed strip of paper had the name James scribbled across it in shaky, faded ink. The last bell belonged to Collins. This name was written on a fresh strip of paper in hard, dark, thick letters.
For no reason other than intuition, she pushed the last bell.
Moments later, Livvy heard bolts turning from behind the door. It opened, and there stood Rafe, his hair pulled out of the braids, all over his head, in long, crinkled strands, wearing baggy jeans and a wife-beater T-shirt.
The boy didn’t look as shocked to see Livvy as she thought he would. In fact, he looked surpassingly calm.
“How you doin’, Ms. Rodgers?” he said, pushing the door open and holding it for her. “Come in.”
LIVVY followed the thug up two flights of stairs, her eyes taking in everything around her, and she realized that this wasn’t Rafe’s house. This had to be a boarding house where he was renting a room. What a shame. A grown man living in a single room. Where the hell did he go wrong? Livvy wondered. And why would any woman, especially her own daughter, be interested in such a loser? She finally made it up the stairs, Rafe already down the hallway, sticking a key into his door. Livvy walked past a table standing in the hallway, the only piece of furniture there. It had a number of pieces of mail on it, which she quickly glanced at, and then did a double-take. She thought the name on one of those letters said—
“Ms. Rodgers,” Rafe said, standing at his open door. Livvy pulled herself away from what she was looking at and walked into Rafe’s room.
Rafe grabbed his bathrobe off a hook and threw it on over his T-shirt. It didn’t make him look any more presentable, as he probably thought it did.
“Sorry,” Rafe said, trying to smooth down the thick mane with both his hands, as if he knew she was paying particular attention to it. “It’s been one of those weeks.” He smiled sheepishly at Livvy.
“What do you do, Rafe?”
“I fix cars. I mean,” he said, catching himself. “I’m an auto technician, at Mirror Motors.”
“That’s nice. But I’m gonna get right to it,” Livvy said. “And I really don’t want you to interrupt me, because what I got to say isn’t open for discussion. Okay?”
Rafe nodded.
“My daughter is the best thing about my life. Unlike me, she’s very smart, has been since she was a baby. I always knew she would do well. When she got older, unlike her sister, she didn’t get all boy crazy, because she knew boys had nothing to do with being successful in life.
“If she continues on the path she’s on, she’s going to do very well for herself. She’s going to become a doctor, make good money, and hopefully find a good man, get married, have some children. Now I’m not saying you ain’t a good man. I’m just sayin’ you’re not the right man. Henny is going to be very educated, and something tells me that you’re not. And that doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. Because somewhere down the line, she’s gonna resent you for what you didn’t do, and haven’t accomplished, and you’re gonna resent her for what she has. It would just never work between the two of you, so I want you to stop seeing her. Just let her go on with her life, and you go on with yours. It’ll be better that way.”
Rafe stared at Livvy, then said, “Can I speak now?”
Livvy nodded.
“How do you know it’ll never work? How do you know it’ll be better if I just left her alone? You don’t know nothin’ about me.”
“You said you didn’t go to college. What were you doing from the time you left high school ’til now?”
Rafe wanted to lie, but he couldn’t to this woman. He felt doing that would shame himself for needing to hide his past, especially considering the things she had just said about him.
Rafe decided to sidestep the question. “I did some things.”
“What things, if not college? Did you just work? The military? The Peace Corps? What?”
Rafe looked sadly in Livvy’s eyes, trying his best to be strong and tell the truth.
As if she could read what was in his mind, she whispered, “Please don’t tell me you were you in prison?”
Rafe just dropped his head.
“Answer the question,” Livvy demanded. “I’m gonna find out from Hennesey anyway.”
“Yeah. I was,” Rafe said, holding his head as high as he could.