by Gayl Jones
For Michael S. Harper
PART ONE
1
The police came and found arsenic in the glass, but I was gone by then. The landlady in the hotel found him. She went in bringing him the Sunday’s paper, and wanting the bill paid. They say she screamed and screamed and woke up the whole house. It’s got a bad name now, especially that room. They tell me a lot of people like to go and look at it, and see where the crime happened. They even wrote an article about it in one of these police magazines. That’s the way they do, though. I never did see the article. It bothered me at first when I found out they’d used his picture in there, one showing what I did. It didn’t bother me so much having mine in there. Elvira said they had my picture in there and my hair was all uncombed and they had me looking like a wild woman.
Elvira’s the woman in the same cell with me down at the psychiatric prison. They let her go out more than they do me because they say she’s got more control than I have. It ain’t nothing I’ve done since I’ve been in here. It’s what I did before I came, the nature of my crime that makes them keep me in here. The way they look at me. They don’t let me out with the other women. When Elvira goes out, she reads the papers and comes back and tells me what’s in them. She wanted to bring me that article but they wouldn’t let her bring it to me. I wanted to see it at first, but then when she sneaked it in with her down in her underwear, I wouldn’t look at it. I made her tear it up and flush it down the toilet.
“You know, they thought you was going to give that hotel a bad name,” she said. “I mean, a bad name where wouldn’t nobody wont to come and stay in it. But now it turns out that they’s some queer people in this world.”
“What do you mean?” I was frowning.
“I mean, they’s people that go there just so they can sleep in the same place where it happened, bring their whores up there and all. Sleep in the same bed where you killed him at. Some peoples think that’s what you was. A whore.”
I kept frowning.
“It ain’t me saying it.”
I lay on my cot and stared up at the ceiling. There were also people saying I did it because I found out about his wife. That’s what they tried to say at the trial because that was the easiest answer they could get. I’ve seen his wife, though. I didn’t want to see her because I didn’t know how I was going to feel. She came in to see me only one time during the trial. She was a skinny, run-down-looking woman in a black hat. For some reason, I had expected her to be a big, handsome-looking woman. She didn’t say anything. She just stood there outside the cell and stared at me, and I stared back. The only thing I kept wondering is how did he treat her. Because it looked like he made her worse than he made me. I mean, if she was as bad-off on the inside as she looked on the outside. She must’ve stood there for close to fifteen minutes, and then left. She didn’t have anything at all in her eyes—not hate not nothing. Or whatever she did have, I couldn’t see it. When she left, I wondered what she saw in mine.
Even now people come in here and ask me how it happened. They want me to tell it over and over again. I don’t mean just the psychiatrists, but people from newspapers and things. They read about it or hear about it someplace and just want to keep it living. At first I wouldn’t talk to anybody. All during the trial I wouldn’t talk to anybody. But then, after I came in here, I started talking. I tell them so much I don’t even get it straight any more. I tell them things that don’t even have to do with what I did, but they say they want to hear that too. They want to hear about what happened between my mother and father as well as what happened between me and that man. One of them came in here and even wanted to know about my grandmother and grandfather. I know when I’m not getting things straight, and I tell them I’m not getting this straight, but they say that’s all right, to go ahead talking. Sometimes they think I’m lying to them, though. I tell them it ain’t me lying, it’s memory lying. I don’t believe that, because the past is still as hard on me as the present, but I tell them that anyway. They say they’re helping me. I’m forty-three years old, and I ain’t seen none of their help yet.
I was thirty-eight when it happened. It don’t seem like five years ago, but it was. It don’t even seem like five months ago. I can still taste that cabbage I was eating. I was sitting in this place eating cabbage and sausage, drinking beer and listening to this woman onstage singing blues. I was in Upstate new York then. I’ve lived in Kentucky. I’ve lived in new York City. I been in West Virginia, new Orleans. I just came from out in new Mexico. I just up and went down to new Mexico after I got laid off in Wheeling. They’ve got tobacco farms in Connecticut. I been there too. I didn’t travel so much until after I was married, and that went wrong, and then I said I would just stay alone. It’s easier being a woman and alone in different places than it is in the same place. It had been a long time since I’d even said anything to a man . . . the cabbage was good, kind of greasy. They cooked it right with the sausage. I was sitting in the darkest corner. I saw him before he saw me. Tall, dark-skinned, good-looking man. Remind me a little bit of the way my husband might have looked when he was young. I didn’t know him when he was young. He was old when I knew him. But it might’ve been why I wanted him over there—I mean, reminding me of a man I used to be married to. He just reminded me of him up to the point he came to the table, though, because after that he was just himself. He’d been looking for a place where to sit, and then when he saw me he came over where I was.
“You alone?” he asked.
I could tell he was from down South. I was from the South too. I’d sort of thought it before he opened his mouth.
“Not if you join me,” I said.
He pulled back the chair and sat down. I was nervous, but I tried not to show it.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Medina. Eva Medina.”
“Medina your last name?”
“Naw. It’s my middle name.”
“You ain’t scared of me, are you?”
“Naw.”
“I’m Davis. Where you from?”
“Any place the train takes me.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing right now.”
“You hard to get next to, you know that?”
“Not so hard.”
I had sweat in my hands. I put one hand under the table and held the fork with the other. I wasn’t eating.
“You on the road now?” he asked. I said, “Naw, I’m here.”
He laughed. The blues singer came out onstage again. It was a little narrow stage close to the tables. He stopped talking and we listened. She sang “The Evil Mama Blues” and “Stingaree Man”, “See See Rider” and “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues”. While she was singing, he looked over at me and said, “She’s fine, ain’t she?” I nodded. She was still singing when he started talking again. He said he was from somewhere down in Kentucky. He worked with horses. He spent all his life working with horses. It was horses that brought him this way north.
I didn’t tell him that I knew all about men that worked with horses, that I’d spent three years of my life in Kentucky. I let him go on talking.
“I seen this ad in the paper, these people wanted you to bring some horses up to new Hampshire, so I did. And now I ain’t been home in almost a year. Do you follow the races?”
“Naw.”
“I don’t bet on the horses myself,” he went on. “The last time I bet on a horse, I didn’t make nothing but a hundred and eighty dollars. Now that ain’t no kind of money. You know what I wanted to do was send some money home, but then all I had to send was that paycheck and a hundred and eighty dollars, but you know that ain’t no kind of money. When you send money home, you don’t wont to send just a little taste, you know what I mean? You wont to wait till you ge
t some real money.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“They call it the devil blues,” the woman was singing, low now. Davis looked back. “She real fine,” he said, then he looked at me. “I can tell you something about you,” he said. “You ain’t been getting it, have you?”
I didn’t think he’d said that, but he had. I didn’t know what to answer.
He looked at me. “I don’t expect you to say nothing. I can read your eyes.”
“Can you?”
“Yeah, that’s why I came over.”
“You couldn’t see my eyes then.” He nodded. “Yes I could.”
The waitress came over and asked him if he wanted something.
“I’ll have the same,” he said, pointing to my plate. “But don’t put any mustard on the sausage.”
When the waitress left, he told me mustard always looked like turd to him, baby’s turd, and then he smiled and said he hoped he hadn’t spoiled my stomach.
“No, my stomach’s hard.”
“I’ll bet it is,” he said. He looked at me carefully. “A woman like you. What do you do to yourself?” he asked.
I said nothing, then I said, “Nothing you wouldn’t know about.”
He laughed. “A mean, tight mama, ain’t you? A old woman got me started. Old to me then. She was thirty-nine and I was fourteen and she lived next door and she got me started.”
I was silent. “I’d’ve thought you got yourself started,” I said finally.
“You a hard woman, too, ain’t you? I know you got yourself started.”
I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of a boy with a dirty popsicle stick digging up in my pussy, and then he let me feel his dick, and it was like squeezing a soft milkweed.
“I got started like everyone else does,” I told him. “I opened my legs. My mother said after you’ve done it the first time, you won’t be satisfied till you’ve done it again.”
“Have you ever been satisfied?”
“What do you think?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Where do we go?”
“Come home with me.”
“I won’t be good tonight. I’m bleeding.”
“Then we’ll wait.”
His hand scraped my hair and he ate his food, then paid the bill and we left.
What Elvira said those people think I am, Davis probably thought so too. It’s funny how somebody can remind you of somebody you didn’t like, or ended up not liking and fearing—fearing is a better word—but . . . I hadn’t said anything to any man in a long time. And I’d never said Join me before. He probably thought I was in the habit of sitting there in that dark corner just so men would . . . Yeah, they’d come where I was. “Shit, bitch. Why don’t you stay in the house if you don’t wont a man to say nothing to you.”
“Where you from, sweetheart?”
“Shit, I know you got a tongue. I ain’t never met a bitch that didn’t have a tongue.” And then when I was standing at the corner that time that man drove his car real close to the curb and opened the door. I just stood there looking at him, and then he slammed the door and went around the curb real quick. “Shit, you the coldest-ass bitch I ever seen in my life.”
“If you don’t wont a man to talk to you you ought to . . .”
“Are you lonely?”
“Naw.”
“You wont a ride?”
“Naw.”
“You think I’m gon bother you. I ain’t gon bother you. I was just askin if you wont a ride. Shit.”
That was when the buses were on strike.
“Shit, you the coldest-ass bitch I ever seen in my life.”
“Are you lonely?”
“Naw.”
“Why you so cold?”
“You a evil ole bitch. Your name ain’t Eva it’s Evil. I wasn’t doing nothing but trying to . . .”
Before Elvira went to flush the article down the toilet, she wanted to show me the picture they had of me. She folded it so that I could see the top of my wild head. Then she stuffed it in her bloomers and called them to let her be excused. He wouldn’t let me comb my hair. I don’t know why, but he kept me in that room and wouldn’t let me comb my hair. Took my comb and kept it in his pocket.
“What the shit you wont to comb your hair for. Ain’t nobody see you but me.”
“I don’t wont you to see me like this all the time.”
“Shit.”
I looked at him. I remember just looking at him. I said nothing.
I tell the psychiatrist what I remember. He tells me I do not know how to separate the imagined memories from the real ones.
“You know what I told you,” Elvira says from her cot now. I keep staring at the ceiling.
“The first man after you get out. The first man who does you wrong.”
“Maybe I won’t let no other man get close enough to do me wrong.”
She laughed hard. I looked over at her ankles.
My mother and Miss Billie came in the apartment. That’s when we was living in new York. Miss Billie worked with my mother at a restaurant. She and my mama worked in the morning, and got home around one. She would go get me from the woman who kept me. I was five and wasn’t in school yet. Miss Billie would come over and visit for a while and then go on home. She was almost twice my mama’s age. She didn’t live in the same building we did, but one down the street. Every time she came and Mr. Logan was sitting out in the hall she would start talking about him, saying the same things she’d said before. Mama was listening like she’d heard it before. Mr. Logan was the old man who lived in the apartment next to ours. He didn’t have a wife or anything and liked to sit out in the hall.
“I never could stand that man,” she said when she got in the house. “He ain’t nothing but a shit. He ain’t nothing but a ole shit.”
I know Mr. Logan could hear, the way the building was made. Mama took her back in the living room. The way the apartment was you came into a little anteroom Mama had fixed up like a sitting room. To the right was the kitchen, and to the left was the bedroom, and then the living room. So we’d always say “back in the living room”. I slept in the living room on a couch that let out for a bed.
Miss Billie was talking all the way back to the living room. She wore a scarf sometimes that made her look like a gypsy. She had on the scarf now.
“Yeah,” she was saying. “He used to be a carpenter. Every day I used to go over there to that building he worked on and watch him. And me no more than five or six then. No older than this little girl here. I don’t even know if he remember me now, cause every time I pass him in the hall he nod but he don’t look like he know me. Ain’t nothing but a shit. You know, I used to watch him work on this building, and he would show me these things he used, things for measuring, you know. He had this stick with this little bubble in it, he showed me, said it was so you could tell if things was level. Well, you know, he showed this to me, and gave it to me in my hand, so I could move it around and see how the bubble in it moved. Then he said, ‘I got another kind of stick you can see.’ He was the only one working on this building, and we was standing where nobody couldn’t see us, and he got up real close to me and took his thing out. I swear it was right up in my face. He told me I could touch that one too. I backed away from him, but you know, still stayed there looking, like I was hypnotized or something. He had it in his own hand, and he was rubbing on it. He kept rubbing on it till all this white stuff—I didn’t know what it was then—came out. That was when I cut out and run. I still had his stick too. He ain’t never got it back . . . He retired, though, now ain’t he?”
Mama nodded. Miss Billie had told that so often and I’d heard bits and pieces of it till Mama got so she didn’t even tell me to go in the other room, cause I could’ve heard it from the other room. They were sitting in the living room and I was standing up against Mama’s knees, looking at Miss Billie. She looked down at me, smiling every now and then.
“Miss Billie, would yo
u like a rum cola?” Mama asked.
Miss Billie said yes and Mama got up and went in the kitchen. Miss Billie took me around the waist and sat me up on the couch beside her. “Don’t let that old man mess with you, now, cause he ain’t nothing but a shit.”
“He ain’t messed with me,” I said.
The one in the building who had was a little boy with a dirty popsicle stick. We were playing in this empty apartment the landlady had left open. He said he wanted to do me first and then I could do him. I couldn’t feel him doing anything, just moving the stick around, and then he let me squeeze him like a milkweed.
“Do me now.”
“What y’all childrens doin’ in here? I’ma tell y’all’s mama,” the landlady said.
She never did tell anybody, though. I got blood on the toilet paper.
I was sitting up on the bed watching him. We were in his hotel room now. I had my shoes off and my feet up on the bed. I was hugging my legs.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’ll be okay after tonight. It’s the first couple of days I get the cramps, and then I’m okay.”
“Ain’t you got nothing to take?”
“Naw.”
He reached in his pocket and threw me a little tin of aspirins. He kept a jar of water on the night table. It had little bubbles in it. I poured a little in a glass. I handed him back the aspirins, but he said to put them on the table, I might need them again.
He was looking at me and then he came and rubbed his hand across my forehead. “Your forehead is like butter,” he said.
I said nothing. I’d never liked for anyone to touch me around the head, but I let him. I reached up and touched his wrist.
“How long?” he asked. “Three days,” I said.
The boy’s name was Freddy Smoot. After he had that popsicle up in me I wouldn’t play with him any more. Sometimes when I went down the steps and he saw me he’d corner me, or he’d corner me downstairs inside the door. He was eight, but I was big for my age and almost as tall as he was.